He came up with sword in hand, saw Morgaine struggling up to her side, and his first thought was that she had been bitten by something. He bent by her, seized her up and held her by the arms and held her, she trembling. But she thrust him back, and walked away from him, arms folded as against a chill wind; so she stood for a time.
“Liyo?” he questioned her.
“Go back to sleep,” she said. “It was a dream, an old one.”
“Liyo—”
“Thee has a place, ilin. Go to it.”
He knew better than to be wounded by the tone: it came from some deep hurt of her own; but it stung, all the same. He returned to the fireside and wrapped himself again in his cloak. It was a long time before she had gained control of herself again, and turned and sought the place she had left. He lowered his eyes to the fire, so that he need not look at her; but she would have it otherwise: she paused by him, looking down.
“Vanye,” she said, “I am sorry.”
“I am sorry too, liyo.”
“Go to sleep. I will stay awake a while.”
“I am full awake, liyo. There is no need.”
“I said a thing to you I did not mean.”
He made a half-bow, still not looking at her. “I am ilin, and it is true I have a place, with the ashes of your fire, liyo, but usually I enjoy more honor than that, and I am content.”
“Vanye.” She sank down to sit by the fire too, shivering in the wind, without her cloak. “I need you. This road would be intolerable without you.”
He was sorry for her then. There were tears in her voice; of a sudden he did not want to see the result of them. He bowed, as low as convenience would let him, and stayed so until he thought she would have caught her breath. Then he ventured to look her in the eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I have named that,” she said. It was again the Morgaine he knew, well armored, gray eyes steady.
“You will not trust me.”
“Vanye, do not meddle with me. I would kill you too if it were necessary to set me at Ivrel.”
“I know it,” he said. “Liyo, I would that you had listened to me. I know you would kill yourself to reach Ivrel, and probably you will kill us both. I do not like this place. But there is no reasoning with you. I have known that from the beginning. I swear that if you would listen to me, if you would let me, I would take you safely out of Andur-Kursh, to—”
“You have already said it. There is no reasoning with me.”
“Why?” he asked of her. “Lady, this is madness, this war of yours. It was lost once. I do not want to die.”
“Neither did they,” she said, and her lips were a thin, hard line. “I heard the things they said of me in Baien, before I passed from that time to this. And I think that is the way I will be remembered. But I will go there, all the same, and that is my business. Your oath does not say that you have to agree with what I do.”
“No,” he acknowledged. But he did not think she heard him: she gazed off into the dark, toward Ivrel, toward Irien. A question weighed upon him. He did not want to hurt her, asking it; but he could not go nearer Irien without it growing heavier in him.
“What became of them?” he asked. “Why were there so few found after Irien?”
“It was the wind,” she said.
“Liyo?” Her answer chilled him, like sudden madness. But she pressed her lips together and then looked at him.
“It was the wind,” she said again. “There was a gate-field there—warping down from Ivrel—and the mist there was that morning whipped into it like smoke up a chimney, a wind . . . a wind the like of which you do not imagine. That was what passed Irien. Ten thousand men—sent through. Into nothing. We knew, my friends and I, we five; we knew, and I do not know whether it was more terrible for us knowing what was about to happen to us than for those that did not understand at all. There was only starry dark there. Only void in the mists . . . But I lived of course. I was the only one far back enough: it was my task to circle Irien, Lrie and the men of Leth and I—and when we were on the height, it began. I could not hold my men; they thought that they could aid those below, with their king, and they rode down; they would not listen to me, you see, because I am a woman. They thought that I was afraid, and because they were men and must not be, they went. I could not make them understand, and I could not follow them.” Her voice faltered; she steadied it. “I was too wise to go, you see. I am civilized; I knew better. And while I was being wise—it was too late. The wind came over us. For a moment one could not breathe. There was no air. And then it passed, and I coaxed poor Siptah to his feet, and I do not clearly remember what I did after, except that I rode toward Ivrel. There was a Hjemurn force in my way. I fell back and back then, and there was only the south left open. Koris held a time. Then I lost that shelter; and I retreated to Leth and sheltered there a time before I retreated again toward Aenor-Pyvvn. I meant to raise an army there; but they would not hear me. When they came to kill me, I cast myself into the Gate: I had no other refuge left. I did not know it would be so long a wait.”
“Lady,” he said, “this—this thing that was done at Irien, killing men without a blow being struck . . . when we go there, could not Thiye send this wind down on us too?”
“If he knew the moment of our coming, yes. The wind—the wind was the very air rushing into that open Gate, a field cast to the Standing Stone in Irien. It opened some gulf between the stars. To maintain it extended more than a moment as it was would have been disaster to Hjemur. Even he could not be that reckless.”
“Then, at Irien—he knew.”
“Yes, he knew.” Morgaine’s face grew hard again. “There was one man who began to go with us, who never stood with us at Irien—he that wanted Tiffwy’s power, that betrayed Tiffwy with Tiffwy’s wife—that later stood tutor of Edjnel’s son, after killing Edjnel.”
“Chya Zri.”
“Aye, Zri, and to the end of my days I will believe it, though if it was so he was sadly paid by Hjemur. He aimed at a kingdom, and the one he had of it was not the one he planned.”
“Liell.” Vanye uttered the name almost without thinking it, and felt the sudden impact of her eyes upon his.
“What makes you think of him?”
“Roh said that there was question about the man. That Liell is . . . that he is old, liyo, that he is old as Thiye is old.”
Morgaine’s look grew intensely troubled. “Zri and Liell. Singularly without originality, to have drowned all the heirs of Leth—if drowned they were.”
He remembered the Gate shimmering above the lake, and knew what she meant. Doubts assailed him. He ventured a question he fully hated to ask. “Could you—live by this means, if you wished?”
“Yes,” she answered him.
“Have you?”
“No,” she said. And, as if she read the thing in his mind: “It is by means of the Gates that it is done, and it is no light thing to take another body. I am not sure myself quite how it is done, although I think that I know. It is ugly: the body must come from someone, you see. And Liell, if that is true, is growing old.”
He shivered, remembering the touch of Liell’s fingers upon his arm, the hunger—he read it for hunger even then—within his eyes. Come with me and I will show you, he had said. She will have the soul from you before she is done. Come with me, Chya Vanye. She lies. She has lied before.
Come with me.
He breathed an oath, a prayer, something, and stumbled to his feet, to stand apart a moment, sick with horror, sensitive for the first time to his youth, his trained strength, as something that had been the object of covetousness.
He felt unclean.
“Vanye,” she said, concern in her voice.
“They say,” he managed then, turning to look at her, “that Thiye is aging too—that he has the look of an old man.”
/> “If,” she said levelly, “I am dead or lost and you go against Hjemur alone—do not consider being taken prisoner there. I would not by any means, Vanye.”
“Oh Heaven,” he murmured. Bile rose in his throat. Of a sudden he began to comprehend the stakes in these wars of qujal and men, and the prize there was for losing. He stared at her—he knew, like the veriest innocent, and met a lack of all proper horror.
“Would you do this?” he asked.
“I think that one day,” she said, “to do what I must do, I would have to consider it.”
He swore. For a very little he would have left her in that moment. She began at last to show concern of it, the smallest impulse of humanity, and it was that which held him.
“Sit down,” she said. He did so.
“Vanye,” she said then. “I have no leisure to be virtuous. I try, I try, with what of me there is left. But there is very little. What would you do, if you were dying, and you had only to reach out and kill—not for an extended old age, with pain, and sickness, but for another youth? For the qujal there is nothing after, no immortality, only to die. They have lost their gods, or lost whatever belief they ever had. That is all there is for them—to live, to enjoy pleasure—to enjoy power.”
“Did you lie to me? Are you of their blood?”
“I have not. I am not qujal. But I know them. Zri . . . if you are right, Vanye, it explains much. Not for ambition, but of desperation: to live. To save the Gates, on which he depends. I had not looked for that in him. What did he say to you, when he spoke with you?”
“Only that I should leave you and come with him.”
“Well that you had better sense. Otherwise—”
And then her eyes grew guarded, and she took the black weapon from her belt: he thought in the first heartbeat that she had perceived some intruder, and then to his shock he saw the thing directed at him. He froze, mind blank, save of the thought that she had suddenly gone mad.
“Otherwise,” she continued, “I should have had such a companion on my ride to Ivrel that would assure I did not live, such a companion as would wait until the nearness of the Gate lent him the means to deal with me—alive. I left you upon a bay mare, Chya Vanye, and you chose Liell’s horse thereafter. That was who I thought it was when first I saw you riding after me, and I was not anxious for Liell’s company alone. I was surprised to realize that it was you, instead.”
“Lady,” he exclaimed, holding forth his hands to show them empty of threat. “I have sworn to you . . . lady, I have not deceived you. Surely—it could not happen, it could not happen and I not know it. I would know, would I not?”
She arose, still watching him, constantly watching him, and drew back to the place where rested her cloak and her sword.
“Saddle my horse,” she bade him.
He went carefully, and did as she ordered him, knowing her at his back with that weapon. When he was done, he gave back for her, and she watched him carefully, even to the moment that she swung up into the saddle.
Then she reined about and toward the black horse. All at once he read her thoughts, to kill the beast and leave him afoot, since she would not kill him, ilin.
He hurled himself between, looked up with outraged horror; it was not honor to do such a thing, to abuse the ilin-oath, to kill a man’s horse and leave him stranded. And for one moment there was such a look of wildness on her face that he feared she would use the weapon on him and the beast.
Suddenly she jerked Siptah’s head about to the north and spurred off, leaving him behind.
He stared after her a moment, dazed, knowing her mad.
And himself likewise.
He cursed and heaved up his gear, flung saddle on the black, secured the girth, hauled himself into the saddle and went—the beast knowing full well he belonged with the gray by now. The horse needed no touch of the heel to extend himself, but ran, downhill and around a turning, across a stream and up again, overtaking the loping gray.
He half expected a bolt that would take him from the saddle or tumble his horse dead instead; Morgaine turned in the saddle and saw him come. But she allowed it, began to rein in.
“Thee is an idiot,” she said when he had come alongside. And she looked then as if she could give way to tears, but she did not. She thrust the black weapon into the back of her belt, under the cloak, and looked at him and shook her head. “And thee is Kurshin. Nothing else could be so honorably stupid. Zri would surely have run, unless Zri is braver than he once was. We are not brave, we that play this game with Gates; there is too much we can lose, to have the luxury to be virtuous, and to be brave. I envy you, Kurshin, I do envy anyone who can afford such gestures.”
He pressed his lips tightly. He felt simple, and shamed, realizing now she had tried to frighten him; none of it made sense with him—her moods, her distrust of him. His voice turned brittle. “I am easy to deceive, liyo, much more than you could be; any of your simplest tricks can amaze me, and no few of them frighten me.”
She had no answer for him.
At times she looked at him in a way he did not like. The air between them had gone poisonous. Go away, the look said. Go away, I will not stop you.
He would not have left her hurt and needing him; there was oath-breaking and there was oath-breaking, and to break ilin-bond when she was able to care for herself was a heavy matter, but there was that in her manner which convinced him that she was far from reasoning.
The light grew in the sky, into a cold, dreary morning, with clouds rolling in from the north.
And early in that morning the land fell away below them and the hills opened up into the slope of Irien.
It was a broad valley, pleasant to the eye. As they stopped upon the verge of that great bowl, Vanye was not sure that this was the place. But then he saw that its other side was Ivrel, and that there was a barrenness in its center, far below. They were too far to see so fine a detail as a single Standing Stone, but he reckoned that for the center of that place.
Morgaine slid down from Siptah’s back and troubled to unhook Changeling from its place, by which he knew she meant some long delay. He dismounted too; but when she turned and walked some distance away along the slope he did not estimate that she meant him to follow. He sat down upon a large rock and waited, gazing into the distances of the valley. In his mind he imagined the thousands that had ridden into it, upon one of those gray spring mornings that cloaked the valleys with mist, where men and horses moved like ghosts in the fog—of darkness swallowing up everything, the winds, as she had said, drawing the mist like smoke up a chimney.
But upon this morning there were the low-hanging clouds and a winter sun, and grass and trees below. A hundred years had repaired whatever scars there had been left, until one could not have reckoned what had happened there.
Morgaine did not return. He waited long past the time that he had begun to grow anxious about her; and at last he gathered up his resolve and rose and walked the way that she had gone, about the curve of the hill. He was relieved when he found her, only standing and gazing into the valley. For a moment he almost dared not go to her; and then he thought that he should, for she was not herself, and there were beasts and men in these hills that made Irien no place to be alone.
“Liyo,” he called to her as he came. And she turned and came to him, and walked back with him to the place where they had left the horses. There she hung the sword where it belonged, and took up the reins of Siptah, and paused again, looking over the valley. “Vanye,” she said, “Vanye, I am tired.”
“Lady?” he asked of her, thinking at first she meant that they would stop here a time, and he did not like the thought of that. Then she looked at him, and he knew then it was a different tiredness she spoke of.
“I am afraid,” she admitted to him, “and I am alone, Vanye. And I have no more honor and no more lives to spend. Here,”—she stretched out her ha
nd, pointing down the slope—“here I left them, and rode round this rim, and from over there—” She pointed far off across the valley, where there was a rock and many trees upon the rim. “From that point I watched the army lost. We were a hundred strong, my comrades and I; and over the years we have grown fewer and fewer, and now there is only myself. I begin to understand the qujal. I begin to pity them. When it is so necessary to survive, then one cannot be brave anymore.”
He began then to understand the terror in her, the same intense terror there was in Liell, he thought, who also wished something of him. He wished no more truth of her: it was the kind that wrought nightmares, that held no peace, that asked him to forgive things that were unthinkable.
Spare us this, he wanted to say to her. I have honored you. Do not make this impossible.
He held his tongue.
“I might have killed you,” she said, “in panic. I frighten easily, you see, I am not reasonable. I have ceased to take risks at all. It is unconscionable—that I should take risks with the burden I carry. I tell myself the only immorality I have committed is in trusting you after aiming at your life. Do you see, I have no luxury left, for virtues.”
“I do not understand,” he said.
“I hope that you do not.”
“What do you want of me?”
“Hold to your oath.” She swung up to Siptah’s back, waited for him to mount, then headed them not across the vale of Irien, but around the rim of the valley, that trail which she had followed the day of the battle.
She was in a mood that hovered on the brink of madness, not reasoning clearly. He became certain of it. She feared him as if he were death itself making itself friendly and comfortable with her, feared any reason that told her otherwise.
And forbore to kill, forbore to violate honor.
There was that small, precious difference between what he served and what pursued them. He clung to that, though Morgaine’s foreboding seeped into his thoughts, that it was that which would one day kill her.
The ride around the rim was long, and they must stop several times to rest. The sun went down the other part of the sky and the clouds began to gather thickly over Ivrel’s cone, portending storm, a northern storm of the sort that sometimes whirled snow down on such valleys as this, north of Chya, but more often meant tree-cracking ice, and misery of men and beasts.