“Aye,” Chei said, his face gone from white to flushed, and his breath unsteady.
“I shall not overburden your conscience,” Morgaine said. “I have one man with me who reminds me I have one.” She began to smother the fire with earth as if she had never noticed his discomfiture. “Have no fear I shall harm your people. You will carry your own armor when we ride out tonight—on your horse or on your person, as you choose. I have some care of your life, and, plainly put, I want the weight off my horse.”
The flush was decided. Chei made a little formal bow where he sat—a quick-witted man, Vanye thought, and shamed by that deception of him, shamed again by a woman’s kindly, arrogant manner with him. That she was qhal made it expected, perhaps—to a man attempting a new and unpalatable allegiance.
It was not a thing he could reason with, knowing Morgaine’s short patience, and knowing well enough that she had that habit especially with strangers who put demands on her patience—blunt speech and a clear warning what her desires were and what she would have and not have.
She gave him the pots to scour; she re-packed the saddlebags. “Go to sleep,” she bade Chei, who still sat opposite her. He was slow to move, but move he did, and went over where his saddle lay, and tucked down in his blanket.
“You are too harsh with him,” Vanye said to her, returning the pans wet from the spring.
“He is not a fool,” Morgaine said.
“Nor likes to be played for one.”
She gave him a moment’s flat stare, nothing of the sort she gave Chei. It was a different kind of honesty. “Nor do I. Lest he think of trying it.”
“You are qhal in his eyes. Be kinder.”
“And test his unbelief twice over?”
“You are a woman,” he said, because he had run out of lesser reasons. “It is not the same. He is young. You shamed him just then.”
She gave him a second, flatter stare. “He is a grown man. Let him manage.”
“You do not need to provoke him.”
“Nor he to provoke me. He is the one who needs worry where the limits are. Should I give him false confidence? I do not want to have to kill him, Vanye. That is where mistakes lead. Thee knows. Thee knows very well. Who of the two of us has ever laid hands on him?”
“I am a—”
“—man. Aye. Well, then explain to him that I did not shoot him when he ran and that was a great favor I did him. Explain that I will not lay hands on him if he makes a mistake. I will kill him without warning and from behind, and I will not lose sleep over it.” She tied the strings of the saddlebags and shifted Changeling’s hilt toward her, where it lay, never far from her. “In the meanwhile I shall be most mildly courteous, whatever you please. Go, rest. If we trusted this man, you and I both might get more sleep.”
“Plague take it, if you heard any—”
Across their little shoulder of rock and soil, the horses lifted their heads. Vanye caught it from the tail of his eye and his pulse quickened, all dispute stopped in mid breath. Morgaine stopped. Her gray eyes shifted from horses to the woods which shielded them from the road, as Chei lay rolled in his blanket, perhaps unaware.
Vanye got up carefully and Morgaine gathered herself at the same moment. He signed toward Chei’s horse, tethered apart: that was the one that he worried might call out, and to that one he went while Morgaine went to their own pair, to keep them quiet.
The bay gelding had its ears up, its nostrils wide. He held it, jostled the tether as he would do with their own horses, held his hand ready should it take a notion to sound an alarm. It might be some predator had attracted their notice, even some straying deer, granted no worse things prowled these pine woods.
But in moments he heard the high clear ring of harness, of riders moving at a deliberate speed—down the road, he thought, and not ascending, though the hills played tricks. He ventured a glance back at Morgaine as he held his hand on the bay’s nose and whispered to it in the Kurshin tongue. Between them Chei had lifted his head: Chei lay still and tense with his blanket up to his shoulder—facing him, his back to Morgaine, who was the one of them close enough to stop some outcry, but not in a position to see him about to make it.
Chei made no move, no sound. It was the horse that jerked its head and stamped, and Vanye clamped his hand down a moment, fighting it, sliding a worried glance Chei’s way.
It was a long, long while that the sounds lasted in the wind and the distance, the dim, light jingle of harness, the sound of horses moving, in full daylight and with, perhaps, Heaven grant, more attention on the part of the riders to what was happening in the valley and what they might meet on the road, than to the chance someone might have occupied this withdrawn, rocky fold of the hills.
Thank Heaven, he thought, the fire was out, and the pots were washed, and the wind was coming off the road to them and not the other way.
There was quiet finally. A bird began to sing again. He gingerly let go the horse he held, looking at Chei all the while.
He nodded at Chei after a moment.
And Morgaine left the horses to walk back to the streamside.
Chapter 5
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 wha
t 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 saddle-bags; 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 shining 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—”
“Liyo,” Vanye said, and eased Arrhan forward, his heart beating so the pulse seemed to make his hands shake. No man called his name. Few in his own land had cared to know it; excepting Nhi and Chya and Myya, and his Chya cousin, who was not wont to use a Kurshin name when he could help it, and called him only cousin when he was kindest. But in Chei’s mouth it was not a curse, it was like a spell cast on him, was the way Morgaine used it.
Fool, he told himself. And his heart moved in him all the same.
“Where are we going?” he asked Chei.
“Where I told you from the beginning—across the hills to the road. Before God I have not lied. Vanye, tell her so. Tell—”
What sound it had been Vanye could not identify, even in hearing it. But it had been there; and none of them moved or breathed for the instant.
The black weapon was in Morgaine’s hand, beneath the cloak. Vanye knew it, as well as he knew where sky and earth was. Changeling rode at her side tonight, since she went hooded; and there was power enough in her hand to deal with any single enemy.
Chei shook his head, faint movement. His eyes rolled toward the woods, a gleam of white in a shadowed face. “I do not know,” he whispered, ever so faintly. “I swear to God I do not know who that is, I did not plan this—Please. Let me go, let me ride to them. It may be they are human—I expect that they are. If they are not, you can deal with them. If they are, then likely I can ride in on them.”
“And tell them what?” Morgaine asked in a flat voice.
“After that—God knows. They may kill me. But likeliest they will want to know what they can find out.” His voice trembled. His teeth were chattering, and he drew in a rough breath. “Lady, if we go on we will ride into ambush and they will raise all the hills against us. We have no choice! Let me go to them!”
“You are supposing we would ride in after you,” Morgaine said.
“I am supposing,” Chei whispered back, “nothing. Except we are too few to threaten them. That is all the safety we have. I can talk to them, I can tell them you are no friend of Gault’s—Let me try, lady. It is the only way. They are bowmen. We will not have a chance if they begin to hunt us.”
“He is brave enough,” Vanye said in his own language.
“Brave indeed,” Morgaine said. “He has courted this, curse him.”
It might well be true. Honest men, Morgaine had warned him.
“What can we do now,” Vanye asked with a sinking heart, “that costs less?”
“Try,” Morgaine said to Chei.
“Hold.” Vanye edged Arrhan up next the gelding to pull the ties free which held the heavy bundle of mail and leather atop Chei’s other gear. He pulled it free and handed it to him. “Put it on.”
In the case, he thought, that Chei was on their side.
Chei did not argue. He took the offered help, and took the mail on his arms, ducked his head and slid it on, leaving it unbelted.
Then he took up the reins and urged the gelding quietly ahead, up the bank and into the woods.
In a moment more there was a whistle from that direction, low and strange. Siptah threw his head and Morgaine held him steady.
It was not a safe vantage they had. Vanye interposed himself and his horse between her and the woods, on the side the bank did not shelter; but their backs he could not defend.
There was nothing then but the dark and the bubbling of the stream behind them, the sighing of the leaves.
Another sound, from their side: Morgaine unfastened the hook which held Changeling at her side, and brought it sheath and all, to rest crosswise on her saddle.
Doomsday. His hand went on reflex to that pyx he had beneath his armor, and he felt it like a coal against his heart.
Destruction.
Once that sword was drawn there was no peace in the world. Once that was drawn there would be deaths heaped up and uncountable.
He sat his horse still, thinking of archers beyond the trees; and that by now Chei had either fallen to some silent killer, or found the allies he had led them to, for whatever purpose.
• • •
The movements were virtually silent, the rustle of a branch, the brush of a body against leaves. The gelding shifted and snorted and stamped, breaking twigs and working at the bit; and Chei held him in place.
“Who are you?” came a voice hardly above the wind.
“A human man,” Chei answered in a normal voice, and did not turn in his saddle. “Ep Kantory. Chei ep Kantory, asking passage. There are three of us, no more, two at the streamside. One of us is qhal.”
There was long silence, very long. He heard a whisper, and another, but he could not hear the words. He did not turn his head.
“Get off your horse,” the whisper came.
He did that, and drew a whole breath, though his legs wanted to shake under him. One qhal, he had told them. It was enigma enough to confuse them and make them ask further. He had made himself defenseless. He had ridden without true stealth. Therefore he was still alive. He stepped down in the little clear space and held his horse close to the bit, forestalling its nervous shifting as branches stirred and a shadow afoot came out of the brush into filtered starlight only slightly better than the forest dark.
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