Exile's Gate (42 page)

His
bow, his quiver, hung on Arrhan's saddle, though different men had
stolen them. There was a fine qhalur sword, that one of the lords had
worn.

He
looked around at Morgaine, at a face as qhal-pale as theirs, and a
vengefulness far colder. For a moment she seemed changed far more than
Chei.

Then
she walked past him to take the rest that she had won, the horses that
grazed oblivious to their change of politics. "Remounts," she said,
leading them back. "Can thee ride, Nhi Vanye?"

"Aye,"
he murmured. She was brusque and distant with him, giving him room to
recover himself; he inhaled the air of freedom and set his foot in his
own stirrup and flung himself up to Arrhan's back, gathering up the
sword as the mare began to move. He wanted that in its place at his
belt first; even before water, and a little food, and a cool spring to
wash in.

Even
that impossible gift Morgaine gave him, finding among the hills and the
rocks, a place where cold water spilled down between two hills and
trees shaded the beginnings of a brook. She reined in there and got
down, letting Siptah and the remounts drink; and he slid down, holding
to the saddle-ties and the stirrup-leather: he was that undone, now
that the fighting was done, and his legs were unsteady when he let go
and sank down to drink and wash.

He
looked and she was unsaddling the gray stud. "We have pushed the horses
further than we ought," she said, which was all she said on the matter.

He
lay down on the bank then, sprawled back and let his helmet roll from
his head, letting his senses go on the reeling journey they had been
trying to take. He felt his arm fall, and heard the horses moving, and
thought once in terror that it had been a dream, that in the next
moment he would find his brothers' hands on him, or his enemies' faces
over him.

But
when he slitted his eyes it was Morgaine who sat against the tree, her
arms tucked about her knees, the dragon sword close by her side. So he
was safe. And he slept.

He
waked with the sun fading. For a moment panic jolted him and he could
not remember where he was. But he turned his head and saw Morgaine
still sitting where she had been, still watching over him. He let go a
shaking breath.

She would not have slept while he slept. He saw the exhaustion in her posture, the bruised look about her eyes.
"Liyo,"
he said, and levered himself up on his arm, and up to his knees.

"We
have a little time till dark," she said. "If thee can travel at all.
Thee should tend those hurts before they go stiff. And if need be, we
will spend another day here."

There
was fever in her eyes, restraint in her bearing. It was one thing and
the other with her, a balance the present direction of which he did not
guess at, rage and anxiety in delicate equilibrium.

He
felt after the straps of his armor and unbuckled it. "No," he said when
she moved to help him. He managed it all himself, glad of the twilight
that put a haze between her and the filth and the sores, but while time
was that he would have gone out of her witness to bathe, now it seemed
a rebuff to her. He only turned his body to hide the worst of it as he
slid into the chill water.

Then
he ducked his head and shoulders under, holding fast to the rocks on
the bank, for he did not swim. Cold numbed the pain. Clean water washed
away other memory, and he held there a moment and drifted with his eyes
shut till Morgaine came to the bank with salves and a blanket and his
personal kit, and sternly bade him get out.

"Thee
will put a chill in the wounds," she said, and was right, he knew. He
heaved himself up onto the dry rock and wrapped himself quickly in the
blanket she flung around him. He made a tent of it to keep the wind off
while he shaved and brushed his teeth, careful around the cuts and the
swollen spots, and afterward sat rubbing his hair dry.

She came up behind him and laid her hands on his shoulders, and took the fold of the blanket and began to dry his hair herself.

So
he knew she forgave him his disgrace. He bowed his head on his arms and
did not flinch when she combed it with her fingers—only when she put
her arms about his shoulders and rested her head against him. Then it
was hard to get his breath.

"I did not deserve it of them," he said, in his own defense. "I swear that,
liyo.
Except my falling into their trap in the first place. For that—I have no excuse at all."

Her
arms tightened. "I tried to come round north and warn thee. But I came
too far. By the time I came back again it was too late. And thee had
come riding in. Looking for me. True?—True. Is it not?"

"Aye,"
he murmured, his face afire with shame, recollecting the well-trampled
stream, recollecting every mistaken reasoning. "It might have been you
in their hands. I thought you were, else you would have been there—"

"To
warn thee off. Aye. But I was being a fool, thinking thee was like to
rush into it for fear I had been a fool; and thee knew
something
was
wrong, well enough, that I was not somewhere about. It was as much my
fault as thine." She moved around where she could see his face. "We
cannot do a thing like this again. We cannot be lovers and fools.
Trust
me, does thee hear, and I will trust thee, and we will not give our enemies the advantage after this."

He pressed his hand over hers, drew it to his lips and then let go, his eyes shut for a moment. "Will you hear hard truth,
liyo?"

"Yes."

"You
take half my opinion and do half of yours, and whether mine is good or
ill I do not know, but half apiece of two good opinions makes one very
bad one, to my way of thinking. Hear me out! I beg you." His voice
cracked. He steadied it. "If your way is straight down the road,
straight we go and I will say no word. My way, to tell the truth, has
not fared very well in recent days."

She
sat hill-fashion, on her heels, her arms between her knees. "Why, I
thought I had done tolerably well by your way in the last few days—I
did think I had learned well enough."

"You learned nothing of me—"

"Constantly. Does thee think me that dull, that I learn nothing?"

His heart lifted a little, a very little, not that he counted himself so gullible.

"Does not believe me?" she asked.

"No,
liyo."
He even managed a smile. "But it is kind."

Her
mouth tightened and trembled, not for hurt, it seemed, only of
weariness. She put out her hand and touched his face with her
fingertips, gently, very gently. "It is true. I did not know what to
do. I only thought what thee would do, if it were the other way about."

"I would have gone in straightway like a fool."

She
shook her head. "Separately, we are rarely fools. That is what we have
to mend." She brushed a lock of hair from his eyes. "Trust
me,
that I will not be. And trust that I trust thee."

He
glanced at the dragon sword behind her shoulder, that thing she did not
part with even now, that one thing for which she would leave him.

Perhaps she understood the direction of that glance. She settled back on her heels with a bruised and weary gaze into his eyes.

"With my life," he said.

It was not enough to say. He wished he had not had that thought, or given way to it.

I
believed you might come, only because we were still far enough from the gate.

Beyond
such a point, she had no such loyalties, nor could help herself. He
believed that. With the sword, at such a time, she fought for nothing
but the geas,—and for her sanity.

At such a time,
liyo,
you would have taken me with your enemies.

And always that is true.

"Truth,
liyo,
I had no doubt."

She
looked so weary, so desperately weary. He rose up on his knees and put
his arms about her, her head against his bare shoulder, her slim,
armored body making one brief shiver, hard as it was. Her arms went
about him.

"We
have no choice but move on," she said, her voice gone hoarse. "Chei has
gone back toward Tejhos. I do not think he will go all the way south."

"Chei has done murder," he said. "He killed a captain Mante sent by way of Tejhos. The captain's men deserted."

"Was
that
the
division." Her shoulders heaved to a sigh, and for a moment her weight
rested against him. "None of them escaped. Plague take it—I should have
killed him—long since. . . ."

"Chei,"
he murmured, "went to them . . . willingly, he said. And Mante knows
everything he knows by now. I have no doubt they do. There may be more
than a few riders out from there."

She nodded against his shoulder. "Aye. I know that."

"And neither of us is fit to ride. What could you do? What could I? Sleep."

She
was limp in his arms, and moved her hand then to push away from him,
and abandoned the effort, slumping bonelessly into his arms. "Not wise,
not wise, of me. I know. We have to move. This place is not safe—'tis
not safe at all—"

It was, perhaps, the first time in recent days she had done more than close her eyes.

Chei
splashed water over his face and wiped it back over his hair, crouching
at the stream. Across from him in the dusk, the remnant the witch had
left to him—witch, he insisted to himself, against all the knowledge
qhalur rationality could muster. He grew superstitious. He knew that
his soul was lost, whatever that was, simply because he did not know
how to believe in it any longer; or in witchcraft, except that in the
workings of the world there might conceivably
be
prescience, and outsiders might know things he did not understand.

Ichandren
had believed in unnatural forces. Bron had never doubted them. The man
across the rill of water from him had known them, Rhanin ep Eorund,
before he housed a qhalur bowman, and perhaps even yet. They were
foreign only to Hesiyyn, the qhal, whose face was a long-eyed,
high-boned mask, immune to the worry that creased Rhanin's brow—human
expression, woven into the composite like so many subtle things.

Like
fear. Like the moil of hate and fear and anger that boiled inside
Chei's own self, seductive of both halves: revenge on the strangers;
revenge on Mante, which had always been his enemy no less than Chei's;
and life, life that might stretch on forever like the life that trailed
behind, life that remembered jeweled Mante, and the face of the
Overlord which young Chei had never seen, and of kin and friends
Gault-Qhiverin had both loved and killed and betrayed for greater good—

Friends and kin the strangers had taken, as they bade fair to take all the world down to dark.

"Go
back if you will," he, Chei, Gault, Qhiverin, had said to his last
followers, when they had put distance between themselves and their
enemies.

Rhanin
had only shaken his head. There was nothing for him in Morund, only in
Mante, where his kin were, and his wife, and all else Skarrin had reft
away from him. The wife he had had, the human one, in the hills—she
would run in terror from what Rhanin had become; and break Rhanin's
heart, and with it the heart of the qhal inside him. And Chei knew both
things.

Hesiyyn had said, with eyes like gray glass: "To live among pigs, my lord? And tend sheep? Or wait Skarrin's justice?"

He
did not understand Hesiyyn. Qhiverin when he was fully qhal had never
understood him, only that he was the son of two great families both of
which disowned him for his gambling, and that he had been under death
sentence in Mante, for verses he had written. He had attached himself
to Gault and gambled himself into debt even in Morund: that was Hesiyyn.

So they had ridden north again, from the place they had stopped, not having ridden far south at all.

"They
cannot outrace us," Chei said, wiping a second palmful of water over
his neck. "They will rest. They will seek some place to lie up for a
while—but not long. They know they are hunted."

Wounds
had stiffened; and Vanye bestirred himself carefully in the dark, while
Morgaine slept. He made several flinching tries at getting to his feet
then, cursing silently and miserably and discovering each time some new
pain that made this and that angle unwise. Finally he clenched his jaw,
took in his breath, and made it all in one sudden effort.

"Ah—" she murmured.

"Hush," he said, "sleep. I am only working the stiffness out."

He
dressed by starlight, struggled with breeches and bandages and shirt
and padding, and last of all the mail, which settled painfully onto
strained muscles and shortened his breath. He fastened up the buckles
of the leather that covered it, making them as loose as he dared; he
fastened on his belts.

Then
he walked by starlight to the place she had tethered the horses, and
soothed them and made the acquaintance of the two they had from Chei's
men, animals by no means to be disparaged, he thought: the Morund folk
bred good horses.