Exile's Gate (25 page)

"But you go. And you are a Man. Are you not?"

Vanye shrugged. The
question went deep, troubling him. "It will not matter," he said. "I
cannot even reckon how old I am. The stars are not the same. I do not
know where I am. I do not know how long ago my cousin died. And it was
only a handful of days ago I left him. Now only my liege speaks my
language. All the rest are gone." He looked up at two bewildered,
sobered faces. "That is the plainest I know to tell you. There is
nowhere we come from. There is nowhere we are going. We only go. Come
with us if you will. Leave us, the other side of the gate. It may be
you will find peace there. It may be we will fall straight into Hell,
and die there. We have no way to know. If it is to glory you hope to
follow us—or wealth—there is none to offer you. And whether we are
right or wrong in anything we do, I do not know. I cannot offer you
that either. My liege cannot. So you would be wisest to stay here.
Truly you would."

"I do
not
understand you," Chei said.

"I know. But I am telling
you the truth. Go with us as far as Tejhos, that is all. Then ride
west. Lose yourselves in the hills, hide and wait. There will be wars.
In that time—you will find a lord worth following. That is my advice to
you."

"Are you a witch?" Chei asked.

"I suppose that I am."

"But not qhal."

"No. Not qhal."

"You are my friend," Chei said, and reached and pressed his arm.

He could not look at Chei. It hurt too much. He gave a sigh, and ripped out his braiding.

From the men beyond there
was a burst of laughter, muted; Bron turned himself about to see what
they did and looked back again, frowning, as if he were thoroughly
remiss not to forbid that.

But he was not, at present,
in any mind to fight with men who, whatever their lord was, brigands or
no, were cheerful again, after sullenness all day.

"They will sleep the better for it," Vanye said. "And if their heads ache in the morning, that is their misfortune."

They neither one said more
than that. How their thoughts ran now he could not say. They sat
together, leaned together. Bron touched his brother's hair as no man
would touch another, casually, even were they kinsmen, but he reckoned
this was only affection, and foreign ways. They understood hospitality;
their fire seemed sacred enough, and the passing of food and drink; and
there were priests to confess them; and yet a lord could claim a
wounded man who came to him for protection, and not let him go again.
He had met men far more strange to him, whose customs troubled him
less, because they were utterly strange.

Yet he reckoned they might
trust two watches tonight to these brothers, and know their throats
would stay uncut, and their backs defended, if it came to that. If
these two were not arrhendim and did not have Kurshin ways, still they
were decent men, and he felt his supper uneasy at his stomach,
somewhere between regret for having them along and the fear that they
would go, and the sorrow that he had finally found a friend staunch
enough to stay by them—

—and it was not a man he could trust.

That Chei could lie and
never know he was lying—that was a flaw he did not know how to mend.
Chei simply did not know what truth was.

And he himself was Nhi as
well as Kurshin, wherefore a man who deceived and twisted and turned
with the agility that seemed native to this land, set his teeth on
edge, in an anger at once familiar and terrifying—and he remembered
suddenly why.

It was only his brothers had evoked that peculiar ambivalence in him.

And he had killed one and
all but killed the other: clan Myya was his legitimate half-brothers'
clan—hill bandits turned noblemen, who did not know a straight way
through any door, that was Nhi's proverb for them; and again: thicker
than feuds in Myya.

He opened his eyes again.
It was only pale-haired Chei, and Bron, whose faces showed hurt and
whose eyes sought some answer of Morgaine, since he had shut them out.

"I will take first watch,"
Morgaine said, rescuing him from the chance that they would go on with
him. "Go to sleep. We will be on our way before light; best you all
take what you can."

"Aye." He reached at his
side and loosed his armor buckles, and found a place the rock fit his
shoulders. He unhooked his sword from his side and laid it across his
lap, considering Eoghar's company yonder. "Quiet," he shouted at those
three, making a small shocked silence, astonishing himself profoundly
that they looked so daunted. "Men are going to sleep here."

The trouble was in himself,
he thought in the quiet that continued, who invented worries and
conjured up calamities—you think too much, his brother Erij had told
him once upon a time, chiding him for cowardice.

It was truth. He fell into
old habits. It was fear which did that to him, fear not of enemies, but
of friends. His brothers had taught him that lesson—beaten it into him,
flesh and bone and nerve.

He clasped his sword to
him, nevertheless, in both arms, so that Eoghar and his cousins would
go on understanding their situation, if there remained any doubt.

The rain subsided to a
light patter on the ground outside, an occasional gust carrying it into
the shelter, but there was enough heat from the two fires and the
presence of seven bodies to keep the chill away. It would have been a
good night under other circumstances, Chei thought glumly, lying curled
toward the fire warmth, back to back with Bron, but a different kind of
cold had crept in among them, and Chei could not reason why, except
somehow the lady, always cold and obscure, turned kind to them; while
Vanye suddenly refused to look him in the eyes, for reasons which Chei
did not, after thinking and thinking on the matter, understand. . . .

What do you want of me? A prisoner, a slave, someone to be grateful for whatever crusts you will give me?

Why could he not say once that he was glad for me, that Bron is alive?

Could not he manage anything but that scowl for it?

The thoughts turned over
and over in him like pebbles in a current, one abrading the next; and
one atop and then the other. He ached inside. It angered him that the
man he admired turned away from him, and it mattered in a personal
way—when he ought to worry only for the consequences of being cast out
masterless, as a sane man ought.

He might, he thought,
appeal to the lady who sat there in the glow of the coals, beautiful
and terrible in her fire-stained pallor, herself embodying every fear
he had had from childhood; and every mercy he had found in extremity.
She leaned on the sword that she bore, which had a fantastical beast
for hilt and quillons. Her eyes gazed toward the glow of the coals, and
her face was pensive, even gentle—it tempted a man to think she might
listen to him.

He was mad, perhaps: a man
who began to hope against the general ebb of human fortunes in the
world, and who began to believe in miracles—was he not mad?

But he would not have
believed at all, till he looked up from the wolf-pack snarling about
him and saw first the swordsman bearing down on him and then the
silver-haired woman—demons out of Hell he had thought them first, that
the ordinary world had rent in twain and death had come for him. He
thought of that in bleak moments of terror which intervened in his
other thoughts: but he was not dead, his delirium had left him, and it
was a familiar woods he rode, with Bron back from the dead and in
company with these two who moved out of pattern with the world and
promised him humankind need not, after all, perish.

He had ridden a
knife's-edge of hope and terror thus far; and that it all should
unravel on the spite of a man he had begun to rely on in ways he had
only relied on Bron—he could not accept that. He could not believe that
Morgaine would in truth send them off to die. He could not believe, now
he thought about it, that Vanye, who had dealt kindly with him when it
had not been necessary—could turn so vindictive. He must, he thought,
have done something or said something—or it was Arunden's offense
against the lady; or things had not gone well between Vanye and the
lady when he had walked in upon them—

He built a score of
desperate structures in the blink of an eye, each more and more
fantastical, until he found his hands clenched and his heart thumping
against his ribs, and at last rose up on his elbow.

"My lady," he whispered,
very softly, not to disturb the others. His hands were sweating as she
gazed at him, a figure of shadows in the light of the coals; his arm
shook under him, which might have been the chill and the hour. He had
everything prepared to say.

Then there came a sound
from outside, the low mutter of a stallion that might be bickering with
the other horses, but it was the gray: he knew the timbre of it, and
where that horse was, just outside the woven wall.

So Morgaine's eyes shifted,
and she became still as stone. So he was, till the horse complained a
second time and one of the others, further toward the falls, made a
complaint of its own that was echoed farther away.

Of a sudden, with her the
only one waking, cipher that she was, he was afraid. "Something is out
there," he said; and by now Vanye was rising and putting the blanket
aside, and Bron had waked, all the while Morgaine sat very still, with
the ornate sword against her, her long fingers curving about the hilt
as her eyes shifted from him to Vanye.

Vanye gathered himself to
his knees and tightened the buckles of his armor. There was no sound
now but the roar of the falls and the rain-swollen waters, no light but
the afterglow of the coals. Chei trembled and cursed his own cowardice
in the uncertainty of the hour; but he was lost, he did not know what
was on them, whether it was Arunden's treachery or some hapless hunter
of the clan they would have to deal with as the lady had said, more
murder they had to commit, this time on innocent men; and his tongue
seemed paralyzed.

"I will go out there," Bron said, and moved. "If it is human they are late on the trail—or if they are Arunden's—"

But Eoghar and the others still slept, none of them stirring.

"I will go with you," Chei
said. No one prevented him. Eoghar and his cousins snored on, lost to
every sense. He walked out into the drizzling rain and stood there
blind to the dark and with himself and then Bron silhouetted against
the fire-glow, however faint.

A rock turned, click of stone on stone, and the horses close at hand snorted in alarm.

"Arunden!" a voice called out, hoarse above the roar of water. "Eoghar!"

It was sure then that
Eoghar had led them along the route where Eoghar had been told, and
Chei dived back inside. "My lady—" He found himself facing the black
weapon and froze in mid-motion. "It is Arunden's men," he said then,
against the risk of her fire and Vanye's half-drawn sword.

But outside someone was
coming, and Bron was left to meet that advance. He risked a move to
escape and joined Bron out in the drifting mist, out in the dark in
which some rider came down the streamside and toward them in haste.

"Who are you?" Bron called out sharply.

"Sagyn," the voice called back. "Ep Ardris."

"I know him," Bron said to
Chei as the rider stopped just short of the ledge that was their
shelter and slid down off his horse to lead it. "Stop there," Bron
said, but the man did not.

"Riders," the man gasped out, staggering to them over the gravel. "Gault's."

"Where?" Bron asked, and
drew his sword about the time Chei reached after his own knife,
misliking this approach. "No closer, man, take my warning!"

'Truth," ep Ardris said, a
thin and shaken voice, and stood there holding the reins of a
rain-drenched and head-drooping horse. "It was Gault came on us—Gault,
in the woods—"

Chei felt a sense of things
slipping away. He heard the movement behind him, he heard the curses of
Eoghar and his men, awakened to news like this and by now standing
outside; he knew the lady's anger, and the uncertainties in everything,
all their estimations thrown in disorder.

Except the lady had fired the lowland woods and begun a war as surely as Gault had come to answer it.

In Chei's hearing ep Ardris
was babbling other things, how their sentries had alerted them too
late, and Arunden had attempted to attack from the cover of the woods,
but Gault's men had been too many and too well armed. The clan had
scattered. Arunden himself was taken. Ep Ardris did not know where the
others were or how many had survived.

"What of my father?" Eoghar
came from the shelter with his two cousins, and laid hands on the
man—and if there was a man of the lot not dissembling, it was Eoghar,
whose grip bid fair to break the man's shoulders. "Did you see him? Do
you know?"—to which ep Ardris swore in a trembling voice that he did
not know, no more than for his own kin.

And at Chei's side, all
sound of her coming drowned in the roar of the falls, the lady walked
up and doubtless Vanye was behind her. "So Eoghar told his lord the
places we might camp."