Chapter Five
The roan horse shied back from the fire and the rider applied the quirt, driving it through the smoke, where human servants labored with axe and wet sacking and mattocks to keep it from passing the Road. Others rode behind him, both qhal and the levies from the villages.
Gault ep Mesyrun was not his name: it was Qhiverin; but at times he forgot that fact, as he did now, that the rebels assailed the land itself. In this unprecedented attack on the forest, Gault's will and the self that had been Qhiverin's were of one accord.
The land burned. They had seen the plume from Morund, long before the first of the riderless horses came wandering into the pastures. There was no reasonable cause of fire on a clear night, but one; and Gault had roused the levies, rung the bell to turn out the villagers, and sent out his couriers breakneck for the east, where his fellow lords held an older and firmer control over the land. Southward to the gate, to take a shorter route to the north, he sent his lieutenant Kereys—for the change in tactics that set human folk to war against the land itself was a considerable one, and the high lord in Mante preferred too fervent a zeal for reports rather than too much complacency.
It was a humiliation of a kind Gault did not intend to let pass, more, it was an embarrassment before Skarrin, with whom he had little favor; and nothing but justice on the rebels would redeem him. He had broken the back of the rebellion at Gyllin-brook, eliminated his former ally Ichandren as a trouble-maker and made examples; and since that time the man who rode beside him, on the piebald gelding, was not the human he looked to be.
His name had been Jestryn ep Desiny, but that was not the mind which lived behind that handsome, sword-marred face. It was Gault-Qhiverin's old friend Pyverrn, who had taken too grievous a wound at Gyllin-brook; and who had chosen a human shape, gate-given—one of Ichandren's own, his cousin.
There was a certain irony in it, Gault-Qhiverin thought—that two old friends rode side by side bent on vengeance, Jestryn being Gault's ally and guide in this foray to the highlands as they had once, when they were human, ridden against qhalur enemies at Ichandren's side.
Their friendship thus had, as Gault counted it, a certain double poesy.
It was onto the road at dusk, and the road which began in the lowlands as a track carts used, became a narrow trail cut through the pines, a pale line eroded and slotted by horse or foot, grown up in wispy grass along the margin so that it was easy to mistake some thinning of the trees for a spur off it.
There was no room, where it crossed difficult places, to have two riders abreast; and it was all too easy a place for ambush.
Ambush crossed Vanye's mind—constantly. He little liked these close spaces, little as he had liked the prospect of the open road, knowing what Chei had warned them. It was Chei in the lead now, Morgaine bringing up the rear, in this dark, pine-spiked shadow, and Chei did not have the look of a man contemplating a run for freedom: Chei had declined to wear the armor Morgaine had returned to him—the scabbed sores were still too painful, Chei had said: it was hard enough to bear the riding.
But Chei was armed again, after a fashion: he had the harness-knife, small as it was, a gesture Morgaine had made to him at their setting-out; for peace, Vanye reckoned. Or it was another test of him.
Certainly Chei had looked confused, and then: "My lady," he had said, in a respectful, astonished tone, the while Vanye's gut had knotted up and his hand clenched tight on his own blade-hilt, considering how close Morgaine stood to Chei, with the knife in his hand.
But Chei had put it away in its sheath on his saddle-skirt, and tied his armor up behind his horse with his blanket and his saddlebags; and rode now to the fore of them, conscious, surely of his sword and of Morgaine's weapon at his back, if treachery ever crossed his mind.
It was a wooded track, Chei had assured them. It was a way they would stand less chance of being seen.
It was also a track in which they could not see the turns ahead in the nightbound forest, in which they did not know the way and were utterly dependent on their guide, the same one who had twice mistaken his way—he swore.
Vanye himself had argued for this. Morgaine would have walked brazenly into Morund and demanded hospitality, and thrust Chei into Gault's very hold and hall and forced Gault to take him for a guest . . . backed by power enough to deal with any qhalur hedge-lord.
He had persuaded her otherwise, into this, with the land afire and men dead, half a score of them, and a twice-mistaken guide holding their lives in his hand—
Lady, Chei called her now, not witch. If Chei thought of sorcery it was surely tempered, living near qhal as he did, by the knowledge that what qhal did came not entirely from empty air and ill intent; it was not a thoroughly superstitious belief, and Chei surely knew by now that there was a qhalur weapon involved. When it came to fine distinctions beyond that—
—When it came to that, Vanye himself was not well sure whether it was witchcraft, or what it was he carried against his heart, or what that blade was that Morgaine carried, and both guarded and hated with all that was in her.
If they had met some innocent folk family on the valley road, if some children—
God help them, he thought; God help us.
And tried to forget the face which lingered behind his eyes, the sixteen year old boy, open-eyed and startled and dead in the starlight of the road.
It stood for everything that had gone amiss.
He rubbed his eyes that stung with weariness—short sleep, trading watches, with the smell of smoke still hanging about the hills and the surety that by now there was commotion behind them, deadly as a river in spate—Heaven send it was not in front of them as well.
At a point where the road reached the turning and the climbing was steep to the shoulder of the hill, Chei drew rein and hesitated, drawing his horse back about in the starlight, coming even with them.
Then he gave his horse his heels and took the ascent with the impetus it needed.
I am not eluding you, that gesture was to say. Follow me.
Morgaine sent Siptah after; Vanye allowed the big gray the room he needed on the narrow track, then gave Arrhan the touch of his heel.
For a moment they were in starlight, climbing that slot among the rocks; then they came among the pines again, and into thicker brush, where boughs whispered in a ghostly voice above the creak of harness and the sound of the horses, a climb for a long, long distance until the way began to wind down again, through deep shadow, such as it was in this land where the stars shone in such numbers and so bright, and white Arrhan and even the Baien gray and his gray-cloaked rider seemed to glow by night.
Then they broke out upon a broader track, and Chei's gelding struck a faster pace, along a streamside and across shallow water that kicked up white in the night-glow.
Morgaine suddenly put Siptah to a run, so that Vanye's heart skipped a beat and he kicked Arrhan in the same moment that Arrhan leapt forward on her own: the mare cleared the water in a few reckless strides to bring him up on Morgaine's flank as she overtook Chei and cut him off with Siptah's shoulder. The gelding shied off, scrambling up against a steep bank and recovering its balance at disadvantage. Chei drew in, his eyes and hair shirting pale in the starlight.
"Slower," Morgaine said. "Where do you think to go, so surely and so fast? A trail you know? To what?"
"It is a way I know," Chei said, and restrained his horse as it backed against the bank and shied and threw its head. "Where should I lead you? I swear I know this place."
"That also I wonder. We are making far too much noise for my liking."
"Vanye," Chei appealed to him, "for God's sake—"