She delayed her answer. The sweat stung his eyes and ran down his sides, into raw burns; the muscles of his arm began to tremble dangerously.
She touched his shoulder then. “No,” she said; and the breath went out of him and the world spun so that he braced his feet as he lowered the bow. “You are Vanye’s,” she said to Chei. “What he does short of killing you I will not prevent.” Her hand pressed hard on Vanye’s shoulder. “No,” she said in the Kurshin tongue, “thee cares too much.”
He drew a breath and lifted the bow on the draw, half-blind and choking on the desperation in him. He fired. But her hand struck his arm up and the arrow sped past Chei’s head to strike a chip from the stone wall behind him.
Everything froze in its place—Chei in front of him, white-faced; Morgaine at his side. He trembled in the aftershock of attempted murder; he felt the weakness on him with a giddiness that dimmed the light and made sounds ring in his ears.
“Aye,” he said, because something seemed incumbent on him to say then, who had disregarded her orders. If there was a part of his soul undamned, he had done it by that act, excepting her forgiveness. He drew in a breath, straining bruised ribs, vision hazing—the blows to his head, he thought; the lack of food; the exertion of the fight. He wanted only to have them moving again, himself in the saddle with the horse to carry him. Rest would mend him, a night’s sleep—
But, O Heaven, it was not in reach, and Morgaine listening to this man—
He could not think beyond her, not, in any case, with his head swimming and his thinking and his fears shrunk to the little space between these rocks, and the chance of an enemy which had been all too fortunate in its ambush—
And he must not kill this man. Morgaine forbade it. He had defied her order once. Twice was without excuse.
“Do you swear?” he asked Chei, knowing after he had asked, that oaths meant nothing with this creature.
“I have said,” Chei said, and got to his feet. There was darkness in that stare. There was profound apprehension. Then another, more agitated way of speaking: “I swear before God. Is that enough?”
That human expression, that shift of voice, sent a chill through him.
Perhaps it was meant to.
But he let the silence go on a moment, and looked Chei in the eyes, long and steadily, until the air was a good deal colder and Chei surely knew it was not fear held his hand.
Then: “Do not cross me,” he said to Chei, “and I will return you nothing of what I owe you. Where is my sword?”
Chei’s eyes shifted toward the roan horse.
“I will have it back.”
Chei nodded. “Aye.”
“Aye—my lord.”
“Aye, my lord.”
“Call your men down here. They can ride away or they can ride with us, but if one of them missteps, I will lay his head at your feet and lay yours at my lady’s. I am nothing you know, whatever you think you gained at Tejhos. I am Nhi, and my clan is not reputed to give second chances.”
Perhaps Chei believed him. Chei looked once back at him as he turned to face the cliffs, and once at Morgaine.
Then he shouted up at the height. “They have agreed,” he called up the cliffs. “Come down.”
Three of them, Vanye kept thinking, and went and gathered up the arrows that had spilled off the cliff with the dead man—twelve he found with the fletchings and points whole, and put them in his quiver, the while Morgaine kept her eye on matters. His ribs ached.
Three of them, he kept thinking in the throbbing of his hurts and the panicked beating of his heart. She has gone mad.
It is this Skarrin—this man she fears. That is what drives her. That is what she wants to know—always, always when she does not know as much as she wishes—she doubts herself—
The Devil rather than honest men, he remembered her saying. O my liege, you have found him.
• • •
The two from the cliff came riding around the shoulder of the hill as Chei had come, stopped their horses by the red roan; and came to pay their respects to their recent enemy—the bowman and the qhal, the bowman’s human face betraying intense worry, the qhal’s having no expression at all.
“Rhanin ep Eorund,” Chei named them. “And Hesiyyn Aeisyryn, both late of Mante.”
“I will give you a simple choice,” Vanye said, leaning on his bow, and this time with a quiver half full of arrows. “Ride off now, and go free. Or go with us, do my liege honest service, and I will forget what I owe you. I count that more than fair.”
Rhanin nodded, clear of eye and countenance; and had the likeness of truth about him. “Aye,” Rhanin said, and let go a long breath, as if he had taken him at his word and had worried, until then.
Hesiyyn lowered his eyes and inclined his head, and looked up with a bland, half-lidded insolence. “Anything you will, lord human.”
Vanye stared at him and thought of striking him to the ground. But then it would come to killing—not one but all of them.
The archer had fired on his liege: but in defense of his own lord. While this Hesiyyn, he judged, might do anything and everything for his own sake.
And this, this was the qhal who had intervened to save his life.
“If they ride with us,” he said to Chei, disdaining the qhal with a passing glance, “remember I hold you accountable.”
And he turned his back on Chei as well, feeling their stares like knives; his heart beat like a hammer in his temples, and his face was hot, the sky like brass. Morgaine said something to him of riding out, that they were well off this hillside. “Aye,” he said, and shouldered his bow and his quiver, and went to untangle the horses, which had wound themselves into a predicament, their two with the nervous geldings. Siptah had braced himself, flat-eared, too trail-wise to move, despite Arrhan’s lead-rope wound across his rump, and that the blaze-faced gelding had a hind leg in among the rocks, its rump against the wall, one foreleg crossing its partner’s lead.
He cut both free and straightened out the leads, darting an anxious eye to Chei and the rest, but Morgaine was watching them: he saw her. He shoved Siptah with his shoulder to gain room, held Arrhan steady to re-tie the leads, and recalled his sword on Chei’s saddle, uphill with the other horses.
He thought of climbing the rocks and making the exchange, but it was a warhorse in question, easier that Chei should deal with it, and he was out of breath and not wanting either the climb or any dealings with weapons at close quarters: bruised ribs and stiff muscles, he thought, leaning on Siptah’s side to work past him and lead him out of the confusion.
But when he unstrung his bow to tie it with his gear on Arrhan’s saddle, the weakness of his arm and his lack of wind surprised him. He had to make a second pull to slip the string. When he had gotten it tied and set his foot in the stirrup, it more than hurt to pull himself up, it sapped the strength from him and made him sweat and his head reel despite the morning chill.
It is the sun-heat on the metal, he told himself; there is no wind here. Using the bow and pushing the horses about had strained the ribs. It will pass.
He sat still, with the sweat running, leaning on the saddlebow, while Morgaine mounted up. Get us moving, he thought, feeling the sting of salt in his cuts. There was no wind in this place. He longed to be off this hill, not knowing what they might meet on that slope down there or out in the land: best hurry before they collect a defense, he thought; and everything conspired with delays.
“They will go first,” Morgaine said, starting out. “I have told them.”
“Aye,” he murmured. “Let Skarrin’s men have them for ranging-shots.”
“They might have killed us,” Morgaine said. “They could have taken the weapons. That much is true.”
He thought about that.
“But I do not forget what they did,” she said.
“Aye,” he said.
The hill seemed steeper than he recalled as they struck the open slope—a place littered with dead, thirty, forty or more.
And Chei and his men rode past them, dutifully taking the lead.
“Is thee all right?” Morgaine asked.
“A little faint. I am well enough. It is the heat.” He urged Arrhan to a faster pace, and overtook Chei’s men.
“Arrows,” he said. “All we can gather. We may need them.”
“Aye,” Rhanin said, and veered off on that chancy slope, at hazard of further attack, from men on the ground, from Heaven knew where on the rocky heights around them.
Rhanin would not, he thought at the back of his mind, come back. The man would take his chance and ride for his own life.
“The sword,” he said to Chei.
Chei took it from his saddle and reversed it, passing it over as they rode.
“A good blade,” Chei said.
He said nothing. He unhooked his own from Arrhan’s saddle and passed it by the hilt.
“Alayyis’ sword,” Chei murmured.
“My liege did not ask his name,” he said harshly, and reined back and hooked the arrhendur blade to his sword-belt, waiting for Morgaine to overtake him.
O God, he thought then, why did I say that? Why am I always a fool?
Morgaine overtook him. He murmured an explanation for the bowman’s departure, and started up again, riding after the others, a crowded trail avoiding the lumps of bodies which lay like so much refuse on the hillside. He watched carefully such dead as they did pass close at hand, wary of traps. He watched the hills about them, for any flash of armor, any flight of birds or bit of color out of place.
Far across the field, Rhanin searched, dismounted, searched again. Eventually he came riding back, carrying three quivers of arrows. “I would keep one,” Rhanin said, offering two as he rode alongside—no grudging look, only an earnest and an anxious one.
“Do that,” Vanye said; and the man gave him them, and turned off downslope, to overtake Chei and Hesiyyn.
He hung the two quivers from his saddlebow, and he stared at Rhanin’s retreating back with misgivings. They had reached the bottom of the hill, and the last body, which lay face upward. Carrion birds had gathered. He did not look down at it as they rode their slow course past. That man was incontrovertibly dead. The hour was fraught enough with nightmares, and he had had enough of such sights in his life.
But, he thanked Heaven, there were no ambushes.
The hill beyond the next rise gave out onto the flat again, a broad valley; he blinked at the sweat in his eyes and rubbed at them to make the haze go away.
“Vanye?” Morgaine asked, as Siptah’s heavy weight brushed his leg.
“Aye?” His head ached where the helm crossed his brow; the sun heated the metal, heated his shoulders beneath the armor and the pain in his ribs made his breath hard to draw.
“Is thee bearing up?”
“Well enough. Would there was more wind.”
Chei had drawn rein in front of them, and scanned the ground; and waited for them with the others.
“We should bear south a little,” Chei said. “Around the shoulder—” Chei pointed. “Off into the hills. One of them may well have us in sight. But the weapon you used up there—” He gave a small, humorless laugh. “—will have improved my reputation with Mante. At least for veracity. They will be very hesitant to come at us.”
“Why south?”
“Because—” Chei said sharply, and pointed out over the plain, below, and to their right, toward the hills. “To reach that, necessitates crossing this, else, and if you have no liking for—”
“Courtesy, man,” Vanye muttered, and Chei drew another breath.
“My lady,” Chei said quietly, “it is safer. If you will take my advice—lend me the stone a moment and I can send a message that may draw their forces off us.”
“Tell me the pattern,” Morgaine said.
Chei took up the reins on the roan, that flattened its ears toward Siptah. “Two flashes. A simple report. I can send better than that. I can tell them the enemy has gone up into the hills. In numbers. And if you provoke them to answer you, my lady, and you cannot reply rapidly, they will know what you are. I can answer them.”
“Do not give it to him,” Vanye said, and made no move to hand over the stone.
“No,” Morgaine said. “Not here and not now.”
“My lady—”
“Can it be—you have sent?”
“Aye. From Tejhos.”
“And the stone, man!”
“With that,” Chei said with a reluctant shrug. “Yes. The first night.”
“And told them it would stay unshielded. Do not evade me. I am out of patience for guesswork. What have you done, what do you suspect, what is out there?”
“They will have known something went amiss from the time you sealed off the stone,” Chei said in a low voice. “There is rumor Skarrin’s gate can tell one stone from the other, given sure position. I do not know. I only know there are two more such stones out there. I saw them, clear as I could see Tejhos.”
“In the stone.”
“In the stone, my lady. There may be more than that by now. When yours stopped sending—It is myself they will be hunting, along with you. I am well known for treason.”
“Did you think they would forgive,” Vanye asked, “the small matter of killing your lord’s deputy?”
Chei’s eyes lifted to his, hard and level. “No. But, then, if I had won, I would have done what we are doing now. With your weapons. It is not Mante I want. It is the gate. . . . With your weapons. I told you my bargain. And, lady, you have convinced me: I will not follow a lord in the field who cannot beat me. I should be a fool, else. You won. So I take your orders.”
There was a moment’s silence, only the stamp and blowing of the horses.
“Let us,” Morgaine said to Chei then, “see where your ability leads us.”
And in the Kurshin tongue, when they struck a freer pace, tending toward the south, into rougher land:
“Do not be concerned for it. I will choose any camp we make, and he will not lay hands on the stone, to be telling them anything.—Thee is white, Vanye.”
“I am well enough,” he said again.
If he confessed otherwise, he thought, she might take alarm, might seek some place to rest, where they must not—must not go to hiding now, when Mante knew the vicinity to search, and might throw company after company into the field. Even Changeling had its limits—
—had them, more and more as they drew near the aching wound that was Mante.
My fault, he kept thinking. All of this. O Heaven, what are we going to do?
And others, out of the muddle of heat and exhaustion: she has taken them because she knows I am near to falling; she needs help; she takes it where she can, against this stranger-lord in Mante—against this Skarrin—needs them in place of me—to guard her back—O God, that I leave her to these bandits—It is her own perverse way of managing them, putting them under my hand, forcing the bitter draught down their throats—lest they think they can leave me behind: it is her own stratagem, give them a captain like to spill from his horse, and let them vie for her favor, whereby she keeps Chei at bay, and in hope of succession, and he never dares strike at me, lest he lose what gratitude he might win of her later—If he has not betrayed us outright—if the ambush was not a trick, their own arrangement—
A man learned to think in circles, who companied with Morgaine kri Chya. A man learned craft, who had before thought a sword-edge the straightest way to a target.
She might manage Chei. Surely Rhanin. I should tell her to keep that man.
And: This weakness of mine may pass. It may well pass. She is winning time for me. Gaining ground.
And lastly: Why did she prevent me from Chei? Why strik
e my hand?
You care too much?
What did she mean by that?
Hills closed about them, brushy ravines and rock and scrub, steep heights on either side. He looked up and behind them, and never was there trace of any watcher.
Except in a fold between two hills, near a stand of scrub, where they came to a stream: there Hesiyyn drew up by the grassy margin and signaled Chei.
They were old tracks. It had surely been yesterday that some rider had paused to water his horse, and ridden along the hillside, in this place of tough, clumped grass which showed very little trace otherwise. The track there went out onto that ground on their own side, not, Vanye reckoned, hard to follow, if one had to wonder where that rider had gone, or if one were interested in finding him.
As it was: “What is this place?” he asked angrily. “A highway their riders use? A known trail?”
“Doubtless,” Hesiyyn said, “my lord human. We are all anxious to die.”
He sent Hesiyyn a dark look.
“We are no more anxious for a meeting than you are,” Chei said. “They are out here, that is all. I told you. Skarrin is no longer taking the matter lightly.—I ask you again, lady, in all earnestness: lend me the stone.”
Morgaine leaned her hands against the saddlebow and quickly restrained Siptah from edging toward the roan. It was warfare, now. The red roan’s ears were flat, his eyes—red-rimmed, his least lovely feature—constantly one or the other toward the gray stud.
“No,” she said shortly, and reining Siptah sharply aside to gain room, dismounted and threw her hand up to shy the roan. “Move him off! We will rest here a little. At least they have passed here. And it is at least some cover.”
“My lady,” Chei said with heavy resentment, and drew the wild-eyed roan aside, along the stream.
So the rest of them. Vanye glared a warning in their direction, threw his leg over the horn and slid down. He dropped Arrhan’s reins to let her drink, and let the two horses he led move up to the water, then sank down on his knees and bathed his face and the back of his shorn neck, discovering that insult again, where it had passed in shock when Chei had done it. For this one unjustified thing he was more and more angry, an unreasoning, killing anger, of the sort he had not felt—