So he did, and curried them both till their coats shone, did a bit of work with Siptah’s left hind shoe, and afterward lay in the sun and slept, while Morgaine worked at the horses’ trail-worn gear. Then it was turn about while she slept, and after that a leisurely supper of cold sausage and cheese and waybread.
It was the last of the cordial they shared, the last sweet taste of arrhendur honey.
They watched the sun go down over the hill in a film of cloud and silken colors, and they sat a while under a golden twilight, leaned shoulder against shoulder and watched the horses drink from the rill and eat the forage he had gotten for them in places he did not think cutting would be evident.
He was content. Morgaine leaned back against the hill and smiled at him in her turn, one of her rare, kindly smiles. The quiet, and the brief, fond glance of her eyes set his heart to racing as if they were both be-spelled. Twilight touched her slanted cheekbones, touched her gray eyes and silver hair and the edges of the mail of her over-sleeves, the black leather, the buckles of her armor, and—like a watchful familiar, the dragon-sword lying beside her against a stone. Its ruby eyes winked red and wicked.
I am here, it said. I never sleep.
But it was familiar to him too. Like Morgaine—her silences, the little shifts of her expression which he could read or thought he read—as now he read something in her level, continual stare which had the silence of the night about it, and the dying light dancing in gray, qhalur eyes and a face every line of which he knew in his sweetest and most terrible dreams.
“How long,” she said at last, “does thee think to camp here?”
He frowned as he found himself suddenly back in an argument he had thought he had just won. “Liyo, do not think of it. Do not think of when. Stay camped, do nothing. Do not move or stir: let the enemy do that, that is my counsel in the matter.”
“Until winter sets in?” A frown leapt to her eyes. “It—”
“A few days, for Heaven’s own sake. A few days. Five. I do not know.”
He had not wanted debate with her. He found his muscles gone tense, his breathing quickened; and she dejectedly flung a pebble into the little rill that ran at their feet.
Fret and fret, she would; she could not stay still, could not delay, could not rest, as if no other thought would stay in her head.
“We cannot wait here for the snows.”
“God in Heaven, listen to me. Let them move. Let us find out what they will do. That is the purpose of this.”
“In the meanwhile—”
“God help us. Tomorrow—tomorrow I will scout out and around.”
“We will,” she said.
“You can stay in—”
“We can gain a few leagues north. That is all. If the next camp is not so comfortable, then the one after—”
He rested his brow against his joined hands. “Aye.”
“Vanye, I take your advice—we go slowly. We let the horses build back their strength. But we dare not be further from that gate than we can reach—whatever the lord in Mante decides to do.”
“Let him! Whatever he will do, let him! He will come after us. He will try us. He will not bolt.”
“We are risking everything on that. Thee knows.”
“Why?” he asked. “Tell me why this lord should leave his people?”
“It is possible that they are not his people.”
He had thought that he had the shape of things, in this strange war that stretched from land to land, with curving horizons and stars too few or too many and moons that came and went. He tried to make a wise answer to that, so she should not think all her teaching wasted.
“You mean that he might be a human man, in qhalur shape.”
“It is the name,” she said.
“Skarrin?” It had no qhalur sound. But there were qhal who had uncommon names.
“It is a name in a very old language. I do not know where he should have heard it. Perhaps it is all chance. Languages have coincidence. But this, on a qhal—this name: there are among the gate worlds, a kind older than the qhal. And such of them as survive—are very dangerous.”
“What are you saying—older than the qhal? Who is older?”
“Older than the calamity the qhal know. Did I ever say it had only happened but the once?”
He said nothing. He scarcely understood the first calamity, how the qhal had made the gates and made time flow amiss, till Heaven set matters straight again, or as straight as matters could be, where gates remained live and potent, pouring their magics (their power, Morgaine insisted, do not be superstitious) into worlds where qhal survived.
“Thee does not understand.”
He shook his head ruefully. “No.”
“I do not know,” she said. “Only the name troubles me. A name and not a name. In that language Skarrin means an outsider. A foreigner.”
The dark was gathering. The first stars were out. He crossed himself against the omen, whatever it should mean.
“My father,” Morgaine said, “was one such.”
He looked at her as if some chasm had opened at his feet, and all of it dark. She had named comrades from before his time—from before he or his father before him was ever born.
Of kin she had never spoken. She might have risen out of the elements, out of moonbeams, out of the tales of his people.
I am not qhal, she had said time and again. And at one time: I am halfling.
“Are you saying this Skarrin—then—is kin of yours?”
“None, that I know.”
“Who was your father?”
“An enemy.” She cast another pebble into the darkening water, and did not look at him. “In a land before yours. He is dead. Let it rest.”
He would not have trod on that ground for any urging.
“He was qhal, to your way of thinking,” Morgaine said. “Give it peace. It has no significance here. Anjhurin was his name. You have heard it. Now forget ever you heard it. This Skarrin is no one I know, but my name might warn him, changed as it is.”
He took in his breath and let it go again, stripping a bit of grass in his fingers, looking only at that. And for a long time neither of them spoke.
He shrugged. “I will scout out tomorrow,” he said, to have the peace back, to ease her mind, however he could. “When I go for forage. There might be something over the hills.”
“Aye,” she said, and shifted round to lean her shoulder against his back. He sighed at the relief that gave the center of his back, against the armor-weight. “But two of us would—”
“I. Do we need start every bird and rabbit ’twixt us and Mante?” He felt a sense of impending calamity, such that his breath came in with a shiver, and he let it go again. “I will go.”
“Afoot?”
“No. I can ride the stream-course. There will be no difficulty.” He sighed against her weight on his shoulders, and looked at the sky in which the stars had begun to appear. “We should rest,” he said sullenly.
“Is thee angry?”
He drew in his breath, and shifted about to face her. Aye, he was about to say. But the sober, gentle look she gave him was rare enough he hesitated to offend it.
She was always and always the same, always devil-driven, always restless, incapable even of reason.
And she had brought them through, always, somehow—was always beforehand, always quicker than her enemies expected, and not where they expected.
She might drive a sane man mad.
“Vanye?” she asked.
“What more?” he said shortly.
She was silent then, and sat back with a wounded look that shot through him and muddled all the anger he could muster.
It was not, not, Heaven knew, the face she turned to the world. Only to him. Only to him, in all the world.
He got to his feet and
snatched up a wildflower at his other side, knelt and solemnly offered the poor thing to her, all closed up for the night as it was. Bruised, it had a strong grass smell, the smell of spring lilies, that reminded him suddenly of rides on a brown pony, of—Heaven knew—his boyhood.
Her eyes sought up to his. Her mouth curved at the edges, and solemnly she took it, her fingers brushing his hand. “Is this all thee offers?”
“Aye,” he said, off his balance in his foolishness: she always had the better of him with words—was not, he suddenly thought, taking it for a jest; or was; he did not know, suddenly; it was like everything between them. He gestured desperately beyond his shoulder. “Or,” he said briskly, deliberately perverse, “I might find others, if I walked along the stream there. I might bring you a handful.”
Her eyes lightened, went solemn then, and slowly she rose up to her knees and put her arms about his neck, whereat the world went giddy as the smell of flowers.
“Do it tomorrow,” she said, a long moment later; and gently she began the buckles of his armor, that she had helped him with a hundred times to different purpose.
Changeling slipped from its place and fell with a rattle as they made themselves a nest there of their cloaks and blankets. She reached out and laid the dragon sword down beside them, the hilt toward her hand, and loosed his hair from the ivory pin.
So he laid his own sword, close by the other side. They never quite forgot. There had been too many ambushes, that they could ever quite forget.
• • •
It was up and prepare to move at sunrise, in the dewy chill and the damp; and Vanye shut his eyes, wrapped in his blanket, leaning his back against Morgaine’s knee and letting her comb and braid his hair this morning, carefully and at leisure, which a lady might do for her man. He sighed in that quiet, and that contentment.
There was no blight could touch the hour, nothing at all wrong with the world or with anyone in it, and the quick deft touch of Morgaine’s fingers near lulled him to sleep again. He shut his eyes till she pushed his head forward to plait the braid, and rested so, head bowed, till she tied it off and brought it through and pinned it in its simple knot at the back of his neck.
So she was done with him. So it was time to think about the day. He leaned his head back against her knees and sighed to a touch of her fingers pulling at a lock by his temple. “Does thee intend to tie this someday? Or go blind by degrees?”
“Do what you like.” No blade came on an uyo’s hair, except for judicious barbering, at his own hand. But his hair was twice hacked and hewn and grown out again, and truth, some of it was often in his eyes. “Cut it,” he said, nerving himself. His Kurshin half was aghast. But it was Chya clan which had taken him from his outlawry, it was a Chya he served, it had been a Chya who had proved his true kinsman; and a Chya was what he became, less and less careful of proprieties. He faced about and leaned on one hand, while she took her Honor-blade and cut the straying lock; and cut it again, and cut another.
At that he opened his mouth to protest, then shut his eyes to keep the hair out and bit his lip.
“It was another one.”
“Aye,” he said. He was determined not to be superstitious; he prepared himself to see her cast the locks away, he would not play the fool with her, not make her think him simple.
But she played him that kind of turn she did so often, and put the locks of hair into his hand as if she had known Kurshin ways.
He scattered them on the moving water, since they had no fire; so any omen was gone, and no one could harm his soul.
And he turned on his knee and settled again on both knees, like a man who would make a request.
“Liyo—”
“I have a name.”
She had had some lover before him. He knew that now. But into that he did not ever want to ask. Folly to look back, profoundest folly, and against all her counsel—
She had so little she could part with. Least of all her purposes.
“Morgaine,” he said, whispered. Her name was ill-omen. It burned with the legends of kings and sorceries, and too much of death. Morgaine Angharan was the other face, not the one he loved. For the woman he knew, he did not have a name at all. But he tried to fit that one around her, and took both her hands in his as he knelt and she sat on a stone as it were some high queen’s throne, under the last few stars. “Listen, my liege—”
“Do not you kneel,” she said harshly, and clenched her hands on his. “How often have I told thee?”
“Well, it is my habit.” He began to get up; then sank back again, jaw set. “It still is.”
“You are a free man.”
“Well, then, I do what I please, do I not? And since you are a lord, my lady-liege, and since I am only dai-uyo at best, I still call you my liege and I still go on my knees when I see fit, for decency, my liege. And I ask you—” She started to speak and he pressed her hands, hard. “While I am gone, stay close, take no chances, and for the love of Heaven—trust me, however long. If I meet trouble I can wait it out until they leave. If I have to wonder about your riding into it, then I have to do something else. So do me the grace and wait here, and be patient. Then neither of us will have to worry, is that not reasonable?”
“Aye,” she said quietly. “But turn and turn about. The next one is mine.”
“Liyo—”
But he had already lost that argument for the time. He gathered himself up and dusted off his knees, and went to saddle Arrhan.
• • •
The land was difficult beyond the camp they had made—little wooded, flatter for a space: he had known that much when he had chosen the camp they had, a retreat from the furthermost point he had reached in his last searching.
Now it was careful riding, by every low spot he could find that could shelter them as they went, and a good deal of it east rather than north. It was the water-courses he had most hope in, and most fear of: it was water that bound a man to his course in land like this, water by which their enemies could find them, nearly as surely as they might have by the Road itself.
But he spent some time afoot, and finally flat on his belly on a hill from which he had vantage, scanning every rabbit-track in the grassland below, every flight of birds, and listening—listening finally alone, until the sounds of the land began to speak to him, the ordinary chirp of insects in the sun, the birds that ought to sing in the thicket and out on the meadows.
He was alone. There was no one out there: he was as sure of that as he dared be sure of anything with an unknown enemy.
Still—he found no sane way to cross that plain, except to go far to the east and as the stream bore: to cross it even by night, would leave a track plain enough for a child to follow the next day.
That was no good. If they did that, there was no good choice but to pick up speed again, and then they would be no better off than before.
A plague on her haste and her insistence. He lay with his chin on his hand and with the sun on his back overheating the layers of armor, and considered again what his chances were of reporting to her and gaining her agreement, after a day’s delay, that the proper course was not northward, but considerably eastward and out of the direct course she wanted to take.
Her anger when it came to her safety was a matter of indifference to him—except that his liege, having gotten a purpose in her mind, was likely to strike out on her own in what direction she chose, leaving him to follow; and that prospect left him contemplating arguments, and reason, and unreason, and the fact that he had no means but force truly to restrain her—and restrain her by that means, he could not, by ilin-oath, by uyin-oath, by the deeper things between them, not to save either of their lives, so long as she was in her right mind.
And Heaven help them both, she was oftener right even when she was not sane, or at least retrieved her mistakes with more deftness than anyone he knew; and he was still uneasy t
hat he had persuaded her against her instincts. Doubt ate at his gut, a continual moil of anxiety in all this ride out here separate of her, and the only solace in it was the knowledge that she was well-situated, in no likelihood of attracting attention, and in a way to defend herself if trouble happened on her.
It was that things had shifted between them, he told himself; it was the muddle things had gotten to that made him unreasonably anxious. They sinned before Heaven with his oath and hers, and with no priest, and with ten thousand trifling laws he had no regard of—laws it was mad to regard, when there were so many greater and bloody sins on them.
He was half-witted with thinking about her, he had done what he had sworn he would never do and let that thinking come between them in daylight, using that bond to gain his way—he had done one thing after another he had sworn he would not do with her. Decisions that she would make, he had argued to take onto his shoulders when he well knew he was not, of the two of them, the wiser—
If he were back in Myya lands, he thought, with his cousins hunting him, he would lie low for the whole day exactly where he had left Arrhan down under the hill. He would watch everything that moved by day, every hawk that flew, every start of game; and move again only at night. But Morgaine was left worrying back there; and he could never have persuaded her to wait day upon day on him—he could not bear the worry of it himself, to be truthful, if matters were reversed; or keep her still beyond half a day as matters were, unless he could demonstrate some danger to her.
It was a long effort for their enemies to search all the watercourses in the plains.
But long efforts bore fruit, if they had long enough.
And having thought that three times through, he could not rest where he was and he could not risk anything further. He edged down off the height and gathered up Arrhan where he had left her in a brushy hollow; and led her by the dry streambed which had been his route up to this hill.
It merged with yet another narrow water-cut, and took him back into sparsely wooded hills.
Then he mounted up and rode, quietly, back the way he had come, far and far through the hills to the place where the dry bed joined the water.