Well enough, she agreed, and slid down. I know the road, although this land was tamer then.
I must tell you, he continued hoarsely, I think Chya Liell will follow when he can gather the forces. I think he lied to us in much, liyo.
What was it happened back there, Vanye?
He sought to tell her. He gathered the words, still could not. He is a strange man, he said, and he was anxious that I desert you. He attempted twice to persuade methis last time in plain words.
She frowned at him. Indeed. What form did this proposal take?
That I should forget my oath and go with him.
To what?
I do not know. The remembering made his voice shake; he thought that she might detect the tremor, and quickly gathered up the blacks reins and flung himself into the saddle. The first timeI almost went. The secondsomehow I preferred your company.
Her odd pale face stared up at him in the starlight. Many of the house of Leth have drowned in that lake. Or have at least vanished there. I did not know that you were in difficulty. I would not gladly have left you. I did judge that there was some connivance between you and Lielclass="underline" so when you did not followI dared not delay there between two who might be enemies.
I was reared Nhi, he said. We do not oath-break. We do not oath-break, liyo.
I beg pardon, she said, which liyo was never obliged to say to ilin, no matter how aggrieved. I failed to understand.
And of that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light. Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicher brush. It had been large and pale, leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.
Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.
Idiocy, Morgaine exclaimed softly. Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?
The woods are full of beasts of his making, Vanye said. Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill.
They are not made, she said, but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beastssome will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing thingshe knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating.
Where do they come from, such things as that?
From places where such things are natural. From other tonights, and other Gates, and places where that was fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man that such an attack wars onit is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come.
But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and kept the reins in his own hand. He closed his eyes as Morgaine set them on their way again, still saw the pale lizard form, large as a man, running across the open space. That was one of the witless nonsensities in Koriswood, more ugly than dangerous.
Report told of worse. Sometimes, legend said, carcasses were found near Irien, things impossible, abortions of Thiyes art, some almost formless and baneful to the touch, and others of forms so fantastical that none would imagine what aspect the living beast had had.
His only comfort in this place was that Morgaine herself was horrified; she had that much at least of human senses in her. Then he remembered her coming to him, out of the place she called between, Washed up, she said, on this shore.
He began to have dim suspicion what she was, although he could not say it in words: that Morgaine and the pale horror had reached Andur-Kursh in the same way, only she had come by no accident, had come with purpose.
Aimed at Gates, at Thiyes power.
Aimed at dislocating all that lay on this shore, as these unnatural things had come. Standing where the Hjemur-lord stood, she would be no less perilous. She shared nothing with Andur-Kursh, not even birth, if his fears were true, and owed them nothing. This he served.
And Liell had said she lied. One of the twain lied: that was certain. He wondered in an agony of mind how it should be if he learned of a certainty that it was Morgaine.
Something else fluttered in the darkhonest owl, or something sinister; it passed close overhead. He tautened his grip upon his nerves and patted the nervous blacks neck.
It was long until the morning, until in a clear place upon the trail they dared stop and let sleep take them by turns. Morgaines was the first sleep, and he paced to keep himself awake, or chose an uncomfortable place to sit, when he must sit, and at last fell to meddling with the black horses gear, that the horse still bore, for in such place they dared not unsaddle, only loosened the girths. It shamed him, to have stolen a second time; and he felt the keeping of more than he needed of the theft was not honorable, but all the same it was not sense to cast things away. He searched the saddlebags and kit to learn what he had possessed and, it was in the back of his thoughts, to learn something of the man Liell.
He found an object which answered the question, such that set his stomach over.
It was a medal, gold, set in the hilt of a saddle knife, the sort many a man bore beneath the skirt of his saddle; and on it was a symbol of the blockish, ugly look he had seen graven on the Stones. It was qujalin. Whenever any strange and long-ago things were found, folk called them qujalin and avoided them, or burned them, or cast them into deeps and tried to lose them. Most such were likely only forgotten oddities, Kurshin and harmless. Somehow he did not think this was such as that
He showed it to Morgaine when she wakened to take her turn at watch.
It is an irrhn, she said to him. A luck-piece. It has no other significance. But she turned it over and over in her hands, examining it.
It is no luck, said Vanye, to a human man.
There is qujalin blood mixed in Leth, she said, and Liell is its tutor. Tutors have ruled there nigh a hundred years. Each of the heirs of Leth has produced a son and drowned within the year. If Kasedre is capable of siring a son, he will most probably join his ancestors, and Liell will still be tutor to the son. I wonder, she added irrelevantly, looking at the blade, who sired Hshi and Tlin.
And on what, Vanye muttered sourly. Keep the blade, liyo. I do not want to carry it, and perhaps it may bring luck to you.
I am not qujal, she said.
That assertion, he reflected, might have filled him with either doubt or relief some days ago, at their meeting; now it fitted uncomfortably well with the thing he had begun to suspect of her.
Whatever you are, he said, spare me the knowing of it.
She nodded, accepting his attitude without apparent offense. She slipped the knife within her belt and rose.
A green-feathered arrow hit the ground between her feet
She reached to her back, hand to weapon, quick as the arrow itself. And as quick, Vanye seized her and pushed her, heedless of hurting: Chya warning, that arrow. If she fired, they would both be green-feathered in an instant.