“Possibly that is so,” Chei said then, blinking. “I would not say that it is not. But who knows what you would bring back? No. She will come in for you. All you have to do is cry out—and you can do that with no persuasion, or with whatever persuasion it—”
He sprang, sliding in the mud, for Chei’s throat; and everyone moved, Chei scrambling backward, the men around them moving to stop him. Chei fended his first hold off and he grabbed Chei’s shirt and drove a hand toward Chei’s throat to break it, but hands dragged at him, and the blow lost force as they bore him under a tide of bodies and against the edge of the rock.
There were more blows. He protected himself as he could and the armor saved him some of it. He hoped that he had broken Chei’s neck and saved them all from the damage Chei might do—but it was a small hope, dashed when they hauled him up by the hair and Chei looked down at him from the vantage of the rock, smiling a twisted, bloodied smile.
“—with whatever persuasion it takes,” Chei said.
“She is not a fool.”
“—so she will know you are with us. If she comes in—she will have some care of that fact. Will she not?”
“She is not a fool.”
“A fool would kill his hostage. Keep thinking of that.”
He made another lunge, while he had the chance. They stopped him. They battered him to the ground and held him there while they worked at his buckles and belts, and when he fought them they put a strap around his neck and cut off his wind.
• • •
It was a man of considerable temper, Chei observed, probing with his tongue at the split in his lip: a lunatic temper, a rage that did damage as long as he could free a hand or a knee. But this was the man had wielded the gate-sword. This was the man had taken half his house guard and the most part of the levies.
Another image came to him—a chain was on his leg, and this wild man came riding down on the wolves, leaning from the white horse’s saddle to wield his sword like some avenging angel, bloody in the twilight.
This same man, bowing the head to his liege’s tempers—defending him with quiet words, glances from under the brow, measured deference like some high councillor with a queen—
They had him down, now, having finally discovered there was no way to deal with him without choking him senseless. “Do not kill him!” Chei shouted out, and rose from his seat on the rock and walked the muddy ground to better vantage over the situation.
They stripped him—he was very pale except his face and hands, a man who lived his life in armor. Armor lying beside the little stream—armor lying beside a river—the same man offering medicines and comfort to him—
“My lord,” someone said, and asked a question. Chei blinked again, feeling dizzied and strangely absent from what they did, as if he were only spectator, not participant.
“Do what you like,” he murmured to a question regarding the prisoner; he did not care to focus on it. He remembered his anger. And the dead—Jestryn, Bron. And the sight of his men vanishing into gate-spawned chaos.
It was the woman he wanted within his reach. It was the sword, against which there was no power in Mante could withstand him—the woman with her skills, and himself with a valued hostage. There was—a thought so fantastical it dizzied him—power over Mante itself, a true chance at what they had never dared aim for.
He retired to the rock, sat down, felt its weathered texture beneath his right hand. He heard commotion from his men, glanced that way with half attention. “Let him alone,” he said to the man who hovered near him. “The man will not last till Mante if you go on, and then what hostage have we against the gate-weapons? Twilight. Twilight is soon enough.”
It was as if the strength the gate had lent him had begun to dissipate. He heard voices at a distance. He saw them drag their captive up against one of two fair-sized trees at the edge of the brush, along the stream, saw him kick at one of them, and take a blow in return.
“Stubborn man,” he murmured with a pain about him that might be Jestryn and might be Bron and might be outrage that this man he had trusted had not prevented all the ill that had befallen him.
Or it was pointless melancholy. Sometimes a man newly Changed wept for no cause. Sometimes one grew irrationally angry, at others felt resentments against oneself. It was the scattered memories of the previous tenant, attempting to find place with the new, which had destroyed it.
He had fought this battle before. He knew coldly and calmly what was happening to him, and how to deal with it—how he must to deal with the memories that tried to reorganize themselves, for his heart sped and his body broke out in sweat, and he saw the wolves, the wolves that ep Kantory mustered like demons out of the dark; he heard the breaking of bones and the mutter of wolfish voices as he walked across the trampled ground, to where his men had managed finally to bind the prisoner’s hands about the tree.
“Chei—” Vanye said, looking up at him through the blood and the mud. And stirred a memory of a river-bank, and kindness done. It ached. It summoned other memories of the man, other kindnesses, gifts given, defense of him; and murder—Bron’s face. “Chei. Sit. Talk with me. I will tell you anything you ask.”
Fear touched him. He knew the trap in that. “Ah,” he said, and sank down all the same, resting his arms across his knees. “What will you tell me? What have you to trade?”
“What do you want?”
“So you will offer me—what? The lady’s fickle favor? I went hunting Gault, friend. That is what you left me. And I am so much the wiser for it. I should thank you.”
“Chei—”
“I went of my own accord. We discovered things in common. What should I, follow after you till you served me as you served Bron? I was welcome enough with your enemies.”
Vanye flinched. But: “Chei,” he said reasonably, “Chei—” As if he were talking to a child.
“I will send you to Hell, Vanye. Where you sent Bron.”
Vanye’s eyes set on his in dismay.
“I say that I was willing. Better to be a wolf, than to be the deer. That is what you taught me, friend. The boy is older, the boy cannot be cozened, the boy knows how you lied to him, and how you despised him. Never mind the face, friend: I am much, much wiser than the boy you lied to.”
“There was no lie. I swear, Chei. On my soul.—For God’s sake, fight him, Chei—Did you never mean to fight him?”
Chei snatched his knife from its sheath and jerked the man’s head back by the braid he wore, held him so, till breath came hard and the muscles that kept the neck from breaking began to weaken. The man’s eyes were shut; he made no struggle except the instinctive one, quiet now.
“No more words? No more advice? Are you finished, Man? Eh?”
There was no answer.
Chei jerked again and cut across the braid, flung it on the ground.
The man recovered his breath then in a kind of shock, threw his head back with a crack against the tree and looked at him as if he had taken some mortal wound.
It was a man’s vanity, in the hills. It was more than that, to this Man. It was a chance stroke, and a satisfaction, that put distress on that sullen face and a crack in that stubborn pride.
Chei sheathed the knife and smiled at human outrage and human frailty and walked away from it.
Afterward, he saw the man with his head bowed, his shorn hair fallen about his face. Perhaps it was the pain of his bruises reached him finally, in the long wait till dark, and his joints stiffened.
But something seemed to have gone from him, all the same.
By sundown he might well be disposed to trade a great deal—to betray his lover, among other things: the first smell of the iron would come very different to a man already shaken; and that was the beginning of payments . . . his pride, his honor, his lover, his life; and the acquisition of all the weapons the lady held.
Always, Qhiverin insisted, more than one purpose, in any undertaking: it was that sober sense restrained him, where Chei’s darkness prevailed: revenge might be better than profit; but profitable revenge was best of all.
And there were those in Mante who would join him, even yet. . . .
Unease suddenly flared in the air, like the opening of a gate. A man of his cried out, and dropped something amid the man’s scattered belongings down along the streamside, a mote that shone like a star.
“Do not touch it!” Chei sprang up and strode to the site at the same time as the captain from Mante, and was before him, gathering up that jewel which had fallen before his own man could be a fool and reach for it again—a stone not large enough to harm the bare hand, not here, this far from Mante and Tejhos: but it prickled the hairs at his nape and lit the edges of his fingers in red.
And there was raw fear in the look of the man who had found it.
“My lord,” the captain objected. There was fear there, too. Alarm. That is not for the likes of you, was what the captain would say if he dared.
But to a lord of Mante, even an exiled one, the captain dared not say that.
Chei stooped and picked up the tiny box which his startled man had dropped amid Vanye’s other belongings, and shut the jewel in it. Storm-sense left the air like the lifting of a weight. “I will deliver this,” Chei said, staring at the captain. His own voice seemed far away in his ears. He dropped the chain over his head. “Who else should handle it? I still outrank you—Captain.”
The captain said nothing, only stood there with a troubled look.
This, a Man had carried. The answering muddle of thoughts rang like discord, for part of him was human, and part of him despised the breed. That inner noise was the price of immortality. The very old became more and more dilute in humankind: many went mad.
Except the high lord condemned some qhal to bear some favorite of his—damning some rebel against his power, to host a very old and very complex mind, well able to subdue even a qhalur host and sift away all his memories.
From that damnation, at least, his friends at court had saved him, when he had given up Qhiverin’s pure blood and Qhiverin’s wholly qhalur mind for Gault’s, which memories were there too—mostly those which had loved Jestryn when Jestryn was human. And knowledge of the land, and of Gault’s allies—and Gault’s victims—when Gault was human: but those were fading, as unused memory would.
There were a few things worth saving from that mind, things like the knowledge of Morund’s halls and the chance remembrance of sun and a window, a knowledge that, for instance, Ithond’s fields produced annually five baskets of grain—some memories so crossed with his own experience at Morund that he was not sure whether they were Gault’s recollections or his own.
Gault’s war was over. He no longer asserted himself. It was the Chei-self, ironically, which had done it—human and forceful and flowing like water along well-cut channels: young, and uncertain of himself, and willing to take an older memory for the sake of the assurance it offered, whose superstition and doubts scattered and faded in the short shrift the Qhiverin-essence made of it: wrong, wrong, and wrong, the Qhiverin-thoughts said when Chei tried to be afraid of the stone he held. Let us not be a fool, boy.
This is power—and the captain has to respect it; and very much wishes he had Mante to consult. And what I can do with it and with what the lady carries, you do not imagine.
“Place your men,” he ordered the captain.
“My lord,” the man said. Typthyn was his name.
The serpent’s man. Skarrin’s personal spy.
Chei drew a long breath through his nostrils and looked at the sky, in which the sun had only then passed zenith.
• • •
The sun went down over the hill, the shadow came, and they built a fire, careless of the smoke. Vanye watched all this, these slow events within the long misery of frozen joints and swollen fingers. He had not achieved unconsciousness in the afternoon. He had wished to. He wished to now, or soon after they began with him, and he was not sure which would hurt the worse, the burning or the strain any flinching would put on his joints.
He flexed his shoulders such as he could, and moved his legs and arched his spine, slowly, once and twice, to have as much strength in his muscles as he could muster.
In the chance she might come, in the chance his liege, being both wise and clever, might accomplish a miracle, and take this camp, and somehow avoid killing him, remembering—he prayed Heaven—that there was a gate-stone loose and in the hands of an enemy.
But if that miracle happened, and if he survived, then he would have to be able to get on his feet. Then he had to go with her and not slow her down, because there was no doubt there were forces coming south out of Mante, and he must not, somehow must not, hinder her and force her to seek shelter in these too-naked hills, caring for a crippled partner.
A partner fool enough to have brought himself to this.
That was the thing that gnawed at him more than any other—which course he should take, whether he should do everything the enemy wished of him and trust his liege to stay clear-headed; or whether he should refuse for fear she would not, and then be maimed and a burden to her if she did somehow get to him.
Then there was that other thought, coldly reasonable, that love was not enough for her, against what she served. There had been some man before him. And she traveled light, and did always the sensible thing—no need ever fear that she would do something foolish.
He told himself that: he could do what he liked, cry out or remain silent, and have the qhal dice him up piecemeal, and it would do neither harm nor good. He had been on his own since she rode out of here, and would be, till the qhal dragged him as far as Mante and either killed him or, more likely, treated his wounds and kept him very gently till some qhal claimed him for his own use.
Or—it was an occasional thought, one he banished with furious insistence—she might have run straight into forces sent from Mante, and be pinned down and unable to come back—or worse; or very much worse. A harried mind conjured all sorts of nightmares, in the real and present one of the smell of smoke and the unpleasant, nervous laughter of men contemplating another man’s slow destruction.
The darkness grew to dusk. The qhal finished their supper, and talked among themselves.
When Chei came to him, to stand over him in the shadows and ask him whether he had any inclination to do what they wanted.
“I will call out to her,” Vanye said, not saying what he would call out, once he should see her. “Only I doubt she is here to listen. She is well on her way down the road, that is where she is.”
“I doubt that.” Chei dropped down to his heels, and took off the pyx that swung from its chain about his neck. “Your property.”
He said nothing to that baiting.
“So you will call out to her,” Chei said. “Do it now. Ask her to come to the edge of camp—only to talk with us.”
He looked at Chei. Of a sudden his breath seemed too little to do what Chei asked, the silence of the hills too great.
“Do it,” Chei urged him.
He shaped a cut lip as best he could and whistled, once and piercingly. “Liyo!”
And with a thought not sudden, but one that had come to him in the long afternoon: “Morgaine, Morgaine! For God’s sake hear me! They want to talk with you!”
“That is not enough,” Chei said, and opened the box, so that a light shone up on his face from the gate-jewel there. The light glared; flesh crawled. Everything about it was excessive and twisted.
“You have only to feel that thing,” Vanye said, “to know there is something wrong in the gate at Mante. Truth, man. I have felt others. I know when one is wrong.”
“You—know.”
“You have no right one to compare it against. It is wrong. It is pouring force out—” He lo
st his thought as Chei took the jewel in his fingers and laid it down again in the box, and set the open box on the ground beside him.
“So she will know where you are. Call to her again.”
“If she is there, she heard me.” He had hope of that small box and its stone. The light that made him visible in the twilight, made Chei a target, if Morgaine were there, if she could be sure enough whether the man kneeling by him was the one she wanted. She might be very accurate—unlike a bowman. Several men might be on their way to the ground before they knew they were under attack.
Or she might, instead, be far on her way to Mante.
“That is not enough,” Chei said, and called to the men at the fire in rising. “You can,” he said then, looking down, “give her far more reason.”
He was not going to put them off, then. He might shout, make a useless appeal: he spared himself that indignity and drew several quick, deep breaths before they got to him.
When the iron touched him he did not even try to hold it back.
It went on, and on. There was laughter. A human spat in his face, and some thought that amusing. Others, elegant qhal, simply watched.
She has gotten clear, he kept thinking, he insisted to think, like a litany, imagining gray horse, silver-haired rider, far and far across the hills. She is far too wise for them to catch.
And that is well. That is very well.
“O God—!”
Then: “M’lord!” someone said sharply, and a hand gripped his hair and a knife pricked his throat. It is over, he thought.
But something pale appeared and drifted like a cloud in the dark across the stream. He blinked and haze cleared momentarily on a glimmer of silver hair in the dark, black figure in the starlight, the dragon sword, sheathed, set point down in front of her.
“Liyo,” he cried from a raw throat. “Archers!”
The knife pierced his skin; Chei struck it aside.
“We have a man of yours!” Chei shouted out.
“Liyo, they know—”