The fire grew higher as Morgaine fed it. “Is that not enough?” he asked, forcing that silence that the alien ruins held, full of age and evil. He felt naked because of that light, exposed to every enemy that might be abroad this night; but Morgaine simply shrugged and tossed a final and larger stick onto the blaze. She had weapons enough. Perhaps she reckoned it was her enemies’ lives she risked by that bright fire. She was arrogant in her power, madly arrogant at times—though there were moments when he suspected she did such things not to tempt her enemies, but in some darker contest, to tempt fate.
The heat touched him painfully as a slight breeze stirred, the first hint they had had of any wind that might disperse the mist; but the breeze died and the warmth flowed away again. Vanye shivered and stretched out his hand to the fire until the heat grew unbearable, then clasped that hand to his ribs and warmed the other.
There was a hill beyond the flood, and a Gate among Standing Stones, and this was the way that they had ridden, a dark, unnatural path. Vanye did not like to remember it, that moment of dark dreaming in which he had passed from there to here, like the fall at the edge of sleep: he steadied himself even in thinking of it.
Likewise Morgaine had come, and Chya Roh before them, into a land that lay at the side of a vast river, under a sky that never appeared over Andur-Kursh.
Morgaine unwrapped their supplies, and they shared food in silence. It was almost the last they had, after which they must somehow live off this bleak land. Vanye ate sparingly, wondering whether he should offer to Jhirun, or whether it was not kinder to let her rest. Most of all he doubted Morgaine would favor it, and at last he decided to let matters be. He washed down the last mouthful with a meager sip of the good wine of Baien, saving some back; and sat staring into the fire, turning over and over in his mind what they were to do with the girl Jhirun. He dreaded knowing. No good name had Morgaine among men; and some of it was deserved.
“Vanye. Is thee regretting?”
He looked up, saw that Morgaine had been staring at him in the ruddy light, eyes that were in daylight sea-gray, world-gray, qujal–gray. That gentle, ancient accent had power more than the wind to chill him, reminding him that she had known more Gates than one, that she had learned his tongue of men long dead; she forgot, sometimes, what age she lived in.
He shrugged.
“Roh,” she said, “is no longer kin to you. Do not brood on it.”
“When I find him,” he said, “I will kill him. I have sworn that.”
“Was it for that,” she asked him finally, “that you came?”
He gazed into the fire, unable to speak aloud the unease that rose in him when she began to encircle him with such questions. She was not of his blood. He had left his own land, abandoned everything to follow her. There were some things that he did not let himself reason to their logical end.
She left the silence on him, a stifling weight; and he opened his hand, twice scarred across the palm with the Claiming by blood and ash. By that, he was kin to her, bound in service, without conscience, honorless save for her honor, which he served. This parting-gift his clan had bestowed on him, like the shorn hair that marked him felon and outlaw, a man fit only for hanging. Brother-slayer, bastard-born: no other liege would have wanted such a man, only Morgaine, whose name was a curse wherever she was known. It was irony that ilin–service, penance for murder, had left him far more blood-guilty than ever he had come to her.
And Roh remained yet to deal with.
“I came,” he said, “because I swore it to you.”
She thrust at the fire with a stick, sending sparks aloft like stars on the wind. “Mad,” she judged bitterly. “I set thee free, told thee plainly thee had no possible place outside Kursh, outside the law and the folk thee knows. I wish thee had believed it.”
He acknowledged this truth with a shrug. He knew the workings of Morgaine’s mind better than any living; and he knew the Claim she had set on him, that had nothing to do with his scarred hand; and the Claim that someone else had set on her, crueller than any oath. Her necessity lay sheathed at her side, that dragon-hilted sword that was no true sword, but a weapon all the same. It was the only bond that had ever truly claimed her, and she hated it above all other evils, qujal or human.
I have no honor, she had warned him once. It is unconscionable that I should take risks with the burden I carry. I have no luxury left for virtues.
Another thing she had told him that he had never doubted: I would kill you too if it were necessary.
She hunted qujal, she and the named-blade Changeling. The qujal she hunted now wore the shape of Chya Roh. She sought Gates, and followed therein a compulsion more than half madness, that gave her neither peace nor happiness. He could understand this in some part: he had held Changeling in his own hands, had wielded its alien evil, and there had come such a weight on his soul afterward that no penance of ilin–service could ever cleanse him of remembering.
“The law is,” he said, “that you may bid me leave your service, but you cannot order it. If I stay, I remain ilin, but that is my choice and not yours.”
“No one ever refused to leave service.”
“Surely,” he said, “there have been ilin before me that found no choice. A man is maimed in service, for instance; he might starve elsewhere, but while he stays ilin, his liyo must at least feed him and his horse, however foul the treatment he may receive in other matters. You cannot make me leave you, and your charity was always more generous than my brother’s.”
“You are neither halt nor blind,” Morgaine retorted; she was not accustomed to being answered with levities.
He made a gesture of dismissal, knowing for once he had touched through her guard. He caught something bewildered in her expression in that instant, something terrified. It destroyed his satisfaction. He would have said something further, but she glanced aside from him with a sudden scowl, removing his opportunity.
“There was at least a time you chose for yourself,” she said at last. “I gave you that, Nhi Vanye. Remember it someday.”
“Aye,” he said carefully. “Only so you give me the same grace, liyo, and remember that I chose what I wanted.”
She frowned the more deeply. “As you will,” she said. “Well enough.” And for a time she gazed into the fire, and then the frown grew pensive, and she was gazing toward their prisoner, a look that betrayed some inner war. Vanye began to suspect something ugly in her mind, that was somehow entangled with her questions to him; he wished that he knew what it was.
“ Liyo,” he said, “likely the girl is harmless.”
“Thee knows so?”
She mocked him in his ignorance. He shrugged, made a helpless gesture. “I do not think,” he said, “that Roh would have had time to prepare any ambush.”
“The time of Gates is not world-time.” She hurled a bit of bark into the flames, dusted her hands. “Go, go, we have time now that one of us could be sleeping, and we are wasting it. Go to sleep.”
“She?” he asked, with a nod toward Jhirun.
“I will speak with her.”
“You rest,” he urged her after a moment, inwardly braced against some irrational anger. Morgaine was distraught this night, exhausted—they both were. Her slim hands were tightly laced about her knee, clenched until the strain was evident. Tired as he was, he sensed something greatly amiss. “ Liyo, let me have first watch.”
She sighed, as if at that offer all the weariness came over her at once, the weight of mail that could make a strong man’s bones ache, days of riding that wore even upon him, Kurshin and born to the saddle. She bowed her head upon her knee, then flung it back and straightened her shoulders. “Aye,” she said hoarsely, “aye, that I will agree to gladly enough.”
She gathered herself to her feet, Changeling in her hand; but to his amazement she offered it to him, sheathed and crosswise.
It never left her, never. By night she slept with that evil thing; she never walked from where it lay, not more than a room’s width before she turned and took it up again. When she rode, it was either under her knee on the gray horse’s saddle, or across her shoulders on her sword belt.
He did not want even to touch it, but he took it and gathered it to him carefully; and she left him so, beside the fire. Perhaps, he thought, she was concerned that the warrior who guarded her sleep not do so unarmed; perhaps she had some subtler purpose, reminding him what governed her own choices. He considered this, watching her settle to sleep in that corner of the ruin where the stones still made an arch. She had their saddles for pillow and windbreak, the coarse saddle-blankets, unfolded, for a covering: he had lost his own cloak the same way he had lost his sword, else it would have been his cloak that was lent their injured prisoner, not hers. The consciousness of this vexed him. He had come to her with nothing that would have made their way easier, and borrowed upon what she had.
Yet Morgaine trusted him. He knew how hard it was for her to allow another hand on Changeling, which was obsession with her; she need not have lent it, and did; and he did not know why. He was all too aware, in the long silence after she seemed to have fallen asleep, how clear a target the fire made him.
Roh, if his hands retained any of their former skill, was a bowman of the Korish forests; and a Chya bowman was a shadow, a flitting ghost where there was cover. Likely too the girl Jhirun had kinsmen hereabouts seeking her, if Roh himself did not. And perhaps—Vanye’s shoulders prickled at the thought—Morgaine set a trap by means of that bright fire, disregarding his life and hers; she was capable of doing so, lending him her chiefest weapon to ease her conscience, knowing that this, at least, he could use.