Colors exploded in his skull. He was helpless for the instant, the breath driven out of him; he saw Vanye leap to the saddle, saw the white mare shy over in quiet, mincing paces and move back again as Vanye carefully, quietly, drew his sword and lifted the fallen blanket from the dust.
Vanye flung it at him off the sword-tip, and he caught it, dazed as he was; flung himself over and scrambled for the brush and safety, hugging the blanket to him as he sprawled belly down.
The white and the gray horse had moved too, like ghosts over amongst the trees, a wisp of illusion, a pallor which did not belong and which a searching eye must see.
Chei wrapped the blanket about his own white shirt and made himself part of the ground, next a deadfall, next the smell of decaying leaves and rotting wood and the pungent, herbal stink of centurel that he had bruised in lying there.
Such a small accident could kill a man. A waft of wind. A breeze. A silence when no silence should be—as there was now; or the smell of crushed leaves reaching an enemy. He held himself from shivering, pressed as tight to the cold earth as if he could by willing himself, sink into it.
Chapter Four
The sound grew in the night—riders on the road, a goodly number of them, Vanye reckoned, knee to knee with Morgaine there in the dark; and a tremor went through his muscles, the chill that was no chill but a desire to move. He felt the heavy press of Siptah's shoulder against his right leg, heard the small sounds as the warhorse pulled at the reins and worked at the bit.
Arrhan stood—arrhend-foaled and trained to stand silent at a pass of a hand over her neck and a careful hand on the reins. So the Baien gray was trained to stand and hold silent; but that was not all his training, and Morgaine's little distractions with the bit only availed so far with him. It was oil and metal, was the presence of a mare and the smell of strangers and strange horses the warhorse would have in his sensitive nostrils, and it was only a skilled and familiar hand could hold him as still as he was, frothing the bit and sweating.
It would happen, Vanye thought; horseman that he was, he felt it in the air—sensed it in the number of the horses coming, the agitation at his right, which infected the mare under him and made her shiver and work the bit—it was in the way the road lay and the startlement likely when the riders turned that bend and the shifting and fickle breeze carried sound and scent to the horses, was in the growing sound of hooves and metal, not the sound of peaceful folk, but of riders in armor, in the night and moving together.
A horse whinnied, on the road before the turning. Siptah snorted and gave half an answer before he answered to the rein, rising on his hind legs and breaking brush on his descent; Arrhan shied over and fidgeted, complaining.
There was quiet again, both their horses and the ones down the road, deathly quiet in the woods.
"That has it," Morgaine hissed, hardly above a breath. "They have stopped. They will sit there till daylight if we are lucky—and send a messenger back to their lord if we are not."
Vanye slid his sword into sheath. "My bow," he said, and made a sign in that direction.
She leaned and loosed it from her gear, along with the capped quiver, and quietly passed it over to him. The horses bided quiet, the damage done. Siptah ducked his head and worked to free more rein, but Arrhan stood steady as Vanye stepped carefully down from the saddle and felt for footing among the undergrowth. He cleared Arrhan's reins and lapped them round a sapling that might hold when Siptah moved, Heaven knew.
He took off his helm with its betraying sheen and passed it to Morgaine before he slipped past Siptah's head with a reassuring touch on a sweaty neck and insinuated his way into the brush.
It was not alone Myya deer he had hunted when he had been an outlaw. The instincts came back, with the memory of Myya arrows and hunger: a desperate Nhi-Chya boy had learned of the only tutors he had, his enemies, and was still alive, when some of his Myya kinsmen were not.
He heard them, as quiet as half a score of riders could be, all drawn aside into brushy cover—no one of them so quiet as a single Kurshin hunter could stalk them. He saw them, himself motionless and themselves as still as they could hold their horses, vague shadows in the starlight. He moved carefully beyond them. The horses knew he was there. They jerked at the reins and fretted. The men cast about them anxiously, beginning to look back the way they had come, at the woods about them.
In moves soft and still he set his bow against his instep and strung it; he uncapped his quiver and took out three arrows, brushing the protected fletchings to be sure of them in the dark. There was not an arrow he had he did not know as sound. There was not a crooked shaft or a marred feather in the lot.
He nocked the first and chose the clearest and the nearest target, rising from the thicket: there was no mail forged might stand against an arrhendur longbow full-bent at that range. His bruised shoulder held sound. The arrow flew, thumped in a solid hit and the man fell.
The others turned to look. He had another arrow nocked while they were amazed, and a second man went down with an outcry as a horse broke free and went shying off into the road.
Third arrow: the men scrambled to mount and ride, and one of them cried out and fell even as he made the saddle.
Vanye snatched another arrow from the quiver braced against his leg. He took a fourth man in the back as the troop bolted away from his fire, toward Morgaine.
Then he snatched up his quiver and ran past the fallen, caring nothing for concealment as he raced down the road after them, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He heard the outcries and the crash of brush before he reached the turning; and beyond it as he rounded the bend was Siptah and his rider in the moonlight and horses still shying off from the calamity that had spilled their masters lifeless in the dust. He saw Chei scramble from cover, bent on seizing one of the loose horses, saw Morgaine with deadly aim wheel instead toward himself and knew a moment of stark terror.
"Liyo," he called out, holding the bow wide.
Then she knew him, and spun the stallion about to ride after Chei as he swung up onto the captured horse with more strength than a sick man ought to show.
He thought then that she would kill Chei outright or shoot the horse under him, and he ran with a dread like ice in his gut—he could not cry out, not stay her from what had to be: he was afoot, and Chei escaping on horseback, and she had no strength to grapple with him hand to hand—there was no way that Morgaine could stop him, else. He ran, breathless and armor-weighted, down the middle of the roadway.
But Chei was reining hard about, the panicked horse going wide on the turn and fighting the bit; and Morgaine reined back, bringing Siptah to a stop facing him.
Chei rode back to join them, of his own will. Vanye reached Morgaine's side with a stitch in his side and a roaring in his ears, sweat running beneath his armor. He saw the terror on Chei's face, the terror of a man who had just seen the deaths he had seen—and knew what might have overtaken him an instant ago and what might befall him now. But Chei had made his decision. By riding back—he had declared something, at least.
And there were eight dead back there, four dark lumps in the roadway, others where he had left them beyond the turning. There were seven horses headed wherever those horses thought to go—home and stable, eventually, with empty saddles and trodden reins.
"Did any escape?" Morgaine asked, not taking her eyes from Chei.
"No," Vanye said, "if none passed you."
"None," she said in that hard, clipped tone, "but we have horses loose and dead men lying here with marks on them that will raise questions in Morund—Chei! Whose are they? Are they Gault's?"