And came one of those times that he lost awareness, and wakened still walking, with no memory of what had happened. Panic rose in him, exhaustion weakening his legs so that he knew he could as well have fallen senseless in the road. Jhirun herself was weaving in her steps.
“We shall rest,” he said in the ragged voice the cold had left him. He flung his arm about her, feeling at once her resistence to him, but he paid it no heed—drew her to the roadside where the roots of a tree provided a place less chill than earth or stone. She tried to thrust free, mistaking his intention; but he shook her, and sank down, holding her tightly against him. She shivered.
“I shall not harm you,” he said. “Be still. Rest.” And with his arm about her so that he could sense any movement, he leaned his head against a gnarled root and shut his eyes, trying to take a little sleep, still fearing he would sleep too deeply.
She remained quiet against him, the warmth of their bodies giving a welcome relief from the chill of wet garments; and in time she relaxed across him, her head on his shoulder. He slept, and wakened with a start that frightened an outcry from her.
“Quiet,” he bade her. “Be still.” He had tightened his arm by reflex, relaxed it again, feeling a lassitude that for the moment was healing, in which all things, even terrible ones, seemed distant. She shut her eyes; he did the same, and wakened a second time to find her staring at him, her head on his chest, a regard disturbing in its fixedness. Her body, touching his, was tense, her arm that lay across him stiff, fist clenched. He moved his hand upon her back, more of discomfort than of intent, and felt her shiver.
“Is there none,” he asked her, “who knows where you are or cares what becomes of you?”
She did not answer. He realized how the question had sounded.
“We should have sent you back,” he said.
“I would not have gone.”
He believed her. The determination in that small, hoarse voice was absolute. “Why?” he asked. “You say Hiuaj is drowning; but that is supposition. On this road, you may drown for certain.”
“My sister has already drowned,” she said. “I am not going to.” A tremor passed through her, her eyes focused somewhere beyond him. “Hnoth is coming, and the moons, and the tides, and I do not want to see it again. I do not want to be in Hiuaj when it comes.”
Her words disturbed him: he did not understand the sense of them, but they troubled him—this terror of the moons that he likewise shuddered to see aloft. “Is Shiuan better?” he asked. “You do not know. Perhaps it is worse.”
“No.” Her eyes met his. “Shiuan is where the gold goes, where all the grain is grown; no one starves there, or has to work, like Barrowers do.”
He doubted this, having seen Hiuaj, but he did not think it kind to reason with her delusion, when it was likely that neither of them would live to know the truth of it. “Why do not all the Hiua leave, then?” he asked. “Why do not all your folk do what you have done, and go?”
She frowned, her eyes clouded. “I do not think they believe it will come, not to them; or perhaps they do not think it matters, when it is the end. The whole world will die, and the waters will have everything. But she—” The glitter returned to her eyes, a question trembling on her lips; he stayed silent, waiting, fearing a question he could not answer. “She has power over the Wells.”
“Yes,” he admitted, for surely she had surmised that already.
“And you?”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“This land,” she said, “is strange to you.”
“Yes,” he said.
“The Barrow-kings came so. They sang that there were great mountains beyond the Wells.”
“In my land,” he said, remembering with pain, “there were such mountains.”
‘Take me to that place.” Her fist unclenched upon his heart; her eyes filled with such earnestness that it hurt to see it, and she trembled against him. He moved his hand upon her shoulders, wishing that what she asked were possible.
“I am lost myself,” he said, “without Morgaine.”
“You believe that she will come,” she said, “to Abarais, to the Well there.”
He gave no reply, only a shrug, wishing that Jhirun knew less of them.
“What has she come to do?” Jhirun asked it all in a breath, and he felt the tension in her body. “Why has she come?”
She held some hope or fear he did not comprehend: he saw it in her eyes, that rested on his in such a gaze he could not break from it. She assumed that safety lay beyond the witchfires of the Gates; and perhaps for her, for all this land, it might seem to.
“Ask Morgaine,” he said, “when we meet. As for me, I guard her back, and go where she goes; and I do not ask or answer questions of her.”
“We call her Morgen,” said Jhirun, “and Angharan. My ancestors knew her—the Barrow-kings—they waited for her.”
Cold passed through him. Witch, men called Morgaine in his own homeland. She was young, while three generations of men lived and passed to dust; and all that he knew of whence she came was that she had not been born of his kindred, in his land.
When was this? he wanted to ask, and dared not. Was she alone then? She had not come alone to Andur-Kursh, but her comrades had perished there. Qujal, men called her; she avowed she was not. Legends accounted her immortal; he chose not to believe them all, nor to believe all the evil that was laid to her account and he asked her no questions.
He had followed her, as others had, now dust. She spoke of time as an element like water or air, as if she could come and go within its flow, confounding nature.
Panic coiled about his heart. He was not wont to let his mind travel in such directions. Morgaine had not known this land; he held that thought to him for comfort. She had needed to ask Jhirun the name and nature of the land, needing a guide.
A guide, the thought ran at the depth of his mind, to this age, perhaps, as once in Andur she had been confounded by a forest that had grown since last she had ridden that path.
“Come,” he said brusquely to Jhirun, beginning to sit up. “Come.” He used the staff to pull himself to his feet and drew her up by the hand, trying to shake off the thoughts that urged upon him.
Jhirun did not let go his hand as they set out again upon the road; in time he grew weary of that and slipped his arm about her, aiding her steps, seeking by that human contact to keep his thoughts at bay.
Jhirun seemed content in that, saying nothing, holding her own mind private; but there was a difference now in the look she cast up at him—hope, he realized with a pang of guilt, hope that he had lent her. She looked up at him often, and sometimes—unconscious habit, he thought—touched the necklace that she wore, that bore a cross, and objects that he did not know; or touched the center of her bodice, where rested that golden image that he had returned to her—a peasant girl, who possessed such a thing, a bit of gold strangely at variance with her rough dress and work-worn hands.
My ancestors, she had said, the Barrow-kings.
“Have you clan?” he asked her suddenly, startling her: her eyes gazed at him, wide.
“We are Mija,” she said. “Ila died out. There is only Mija left.”
Myya. Myya and Yla. His heart seemed to stop and to begin again, painfully. His hand fell from her shoulder, as he recalled Morija, and that clan that had been his own undoing, blood-enemy to him; and lost Yla, that had ruled Morija once, before the Nhi.
“Myya Geraine Ela’s-daughter,” he murmured, giving her foreign name the accents of Erd, that lay among mountains her folk had almost forgotten.
She looked at him, speechless, with her tangled hair and bruised face, barefoot, in a dress of coarsest wool. She did not understand him. Whatever anger there was between him and Myya, it had no part with Jhirun Ela’s-daughter; the blood-feud the Myya had with him carried no force here, against a woman, in the drowning wastes of Hiuaj.
“Come,” he said again, and gathered her the more closely against his side, beginning to walk again. The clans were known for their natures: as Chya was impulsive and Nhi was stubborn, clan Myya was secretive and cold—of cruelty that had bided close to him all his life, for his half-brothers were Myya, and she who had mothered them, and not him.
Myya hated well, and waited long for revenge; but he refused to think such things of Jhirun; she was a companion, on a road that was otherwise alien, and seemed endless, in a silence that otherwise was filled with the wind and the bubbling waters.
There were things worse than an enemy. They lay about him.
In the evening, with the light fading into streamers of gold and red, they walked a place where the marsh had widened and trees were few. Reeds grew beside the road, and great flocks of white birds flew up in alarmed clouds when they drew near. Serpents traced a crooked course through the stagnant pools and stirred the reeds.
And Vanye looked at the birds that taunted them and swore in desire, for hunger was a gnawing pain in his belly.
“Give me a strip of leather,” Jhirun asked of him while they walked; and in curiosity he did so, unlacing one of the thongs the ring at his belt held for use on harness. He watched while her strong fingers knotted it this way and that, and understood as she bent to pick up a stone. He gave her a second strip to improve her handiwork, and the sling took shape.