The Complete Morgaine (111 page)

She gave him a distressed look, but she stopped with only a glance toward the man on the bank, a little tightening of her jaw. “I will bring them down halfway,” she said. “
When
will he ride?”

“Two days,” he said, trying to hasten the estimate; and thought again of the sores. “Maybe.”

It was a dark thought went through Morgaine's eyes—was a thought the surface of which he knew how to read and the depth of which he did not want to know.

“It is not his planning,” he said, finding himself the prisoner's defender.

“Aye,” Morgaine said quietly, angrily and turned and walked uphill after the things he had asked.

She brought the things he asked back down to him, no happier. “Mind, we have no abundance of anything.”

“We are far from the road,” Vanye said. It was the only extenuation of their situation he could think of.

“Aye,” she said again. There was still anger. It was not at him. She had nothing to say—was in one of her silences, and it galled him in the one sense and frightened him in the other, that they were in danger, that he knew her moods, and her angers, which he had hoped she had laid aside forever. But it was a fool who hoped that of Morgaine.

He took what she gave him and walked back to the bank, and there sat down, a little distance from their prisoner—sat down, trying to smother his own frustration which, Heaven knew, he dared not let fly, dared not provoke his liege to some rashness—some outright and damnably perverse foolishness, he told himself, of which she was capable. She scowled; she was angry; she
did
nothing foolish and needed no advice from him who ought well to know she was holding her temper very well indeed, Heaven save them from her moods and her unreasonable furies.

The focus of her anger knew nothing of it—was enclosed in his own misery, shivering and trying, between great tremors of cold and shock, to dry his hair.

“Give over,” he said, and tried to help. Chei would none of it, shivering and recoiling from him.

“I am sorry,” Vanye muttered. “If I had known this, Lord in Heaven, man—”

Chei shook his head, clenching his jaw against the spasms a moment, then lay still, huddled in the blanket.

“How long,” Vanye asked, “how long had you been there?”

Chei's breath hissed between his teeth, a slow shuddering.

“Why,” Vanye pursued quietly, “did they leave you there?”

“What are you? From where? Mante?”

“Not from hereabouts,” he said. The sun shone warm in a moment when the wind fell. A bird sang, off across the little patch of meadow. It meant safety, like the horses grazing above them on the slope.

“Is it Mante?” Chei demanded of him, rolling onto his back and lifting his head, straining with the effort.

“No,” Vanye said. “It is not.” And reckoned that Mante was some enemy, for Chei seemed to take some comfort in that, for all that his jaw was still clamped tight. “Nor anywhere where they treat men as they treated you. I swear you that.”

“She—” The man lay back and shifted desperate eyes toward their camp.

“—is not your enemy,” Vanye said. “As I am not.”

“Are you
qhal
?”

That question took the warmth from the daylight.

“No,” Vanye said. “That I am not.” In Andur-Kursh the fairness of his own brown hair was enough to raise questions of halfling blood. But the one who asked was palest blond; and that puzzled him. “Do I look to be?”

“One does not need to
look
to be.”

It was, then, what he had feared. He thought before he spoke. “I have seen the like. My cousin—was such a man.”

“How does he fare?”

“Dead,” Vanye said. “A long time ago.” And frowned to warn the man away from that matter. He looked up at a motion in the edge of his vision and saw Morgaine coming down the hill toward them, carefully—a warlike figure, in her black and silver armor, the sword swinging at her side, either hand holding a cloth-wrapped cup she was trying not to spill.

Chei followed his stare, tilting his head back, watching her as she came, as she reached the place where they sat and offered the steaming cups.

“Thank you,” Vanye said, as he took his cup from her hand, and took Chei's as well.

“Against the chill,” Morgaine said. She was still frowning, but she did not show it to Chei, who lay beneath his blanket. “Do you need anything?” she asked, deliberately, doggedly gracious. “Hot water?”

“On the inside of him will serve,” Vanye said. “For the rest—the sun is warm enough when the wind falls.”

She walked off then, in leisurely fashion, up the hill, plucked a twig and stripped it like some village girl walking a country lane, the dragon sword swinging at her side.

She was, he reckoned, on the edge of a black rage.

He gave Chei his cup and sipped his own, wrinkling his nose as he discovered the taste. “'Tis safe,” he said, for Chei hesitated at the smell of his. “Tea and herbs.” He tasted his again. “Febrifuge. Against the fever. She gives us both the same, lest you think it poison. A little cordial to sweeten it. The herb is sour and bitter.”

“
Qhalur
witch,” the man said, “into the bargain.”

“Oh, aye,” Vanye said, glancing at him with some mild surprise, for that belief might have come out of Andur-Kursh. He regarded such a human, homelike belief almost with wistfulness, wondering where he had lost it. “Some say. But you will not lose your soul for a cup of tea.”

He had, he thought when he had said it, lost his for a similar matter, a bit of venison. But that was long ago, and he was damned most for the bargain, not what sustenance he had taken of a stranger in a winter storm.

Chei managed to lean over on his elbow and drink, between coughing, and spilled a good amount of it in the shaking of his hands. But sip after sip he drank, and Vanye drank his own cup, to prove it harmless.

Meanwhile too, having considered charity, and the costs of it on both sides, he delved one-handed into the saddlebags and set out a horn container, intricately carved.

And perhaps, he thought, a scrupulous Kurshin man would regard the contents of that little container as witchcraft too.

“What is that?” Chei asked warily, as he finished his cup.

“For the sores. It is the best thing I have. It will not let the wounds scab, and it takes the fire out.”

Chei took the box and opened it, taking a little on his fingers and smelling of it. He tried it on the sore on the inside of his knee, his lip caught between his teeth in the patient habit of pain; but soon enough he drew several deep breaths and his face relaxed.

“It does not hurt,” Vanye said.

Chei daubed away at himself, one wound and the other, the blanket mostly fallen about him, his drying hair uncombed and trailing water from its ends. Vanye took a bit on his own fingers and covered the patches that Chei could in no wise reach, those on his shoulders, then let Chei do the rest.

“Why?” Chei asked finally, in a phlegmy voice, after a cough. “Why did you save me?”

“Charity,” Vanye said dourly.

“Am I free? I do not seem to be.”

Vanye lifted a shoulder. “No. But what we have we will share with you. We are in a position—” He drew a breath, thinking what he should say, what loyalties he might cross, what ambush he might find, all on a word or two. “—we do not want to make any disturbance hereabouts. But then, perhaps you have no wish to be found hereabouts—”

The man said nothing for a moment. Then he reached inside the blankets to apply more of the salve. “I do not.”

“Then we do have something to talk about, do we not?”

A pale blue stare flicked toward him, mad as a hawk's eye. “Have you some feud with Gault?”

“Who is Gault?”

Perhaps it was the right bent to take. Perhaps the man in his turn thought him mad—or a liar. Carefully Chei took a fresh film of salve on his fingers and applied it, and winced, a weary flinching, premature lines of sunburn and pain around the eyes. “Who is Gault?” he echoed flatly. “Who is Gault. Ask,
what
is Gault?—How should you not know that?”

Vanye gave another shrug. “How should we? I know great lords aplenty. Not that one.”

“This is his land.”

“Is it? And are you his man?”

“No,” Chei said shortly. “Nor would I be.” He lowered his voice, spoke with a quickening of breath. “Nor, unlike you, would I serve the
qhal
.”

It was challenge, if subdued and muttered. Vanye let it fly, it being so far off the mark. “She is my liege,” he said in all mildness, “and she is halfling, by her own word. And in my own land folk called her a witch, which she is not. I should take offense, but I would have said the same, once.”

Chei occupied himself in his injuries.

“It was this Gault left you to die,” Vanye said. “You said that much. Why? What had you done to him?”

It was that hawk's stare an instant. There was outrage in it. “To Gault ep Mesyrun? He lives very well in Morund. He drains the country dry. He respects neither God nor devil, and he keeps a large guard of your kind as well as
qhal
.”

“Tell me. Do you think he would thank us for freeing you?”

That told. There was a long silence, a slow and evident consideration of that idea.

“So you may reason we are not his friends,” Vanye said, “and my lady has done you a kindness, which has so far gained us nothing but an alarm in the night and myself a few bruises. Had you rather fight us to no gain at all? Or will you ride with us a space—till we are off this lord Gault's land?”

Chei rested his head in his hands and remained so, sinking lower with his elbow against his knee.

“Or do you mislike that idea?” Vanye asked him.

“He will kill us,” Chei said, and lifted his face to look at him sidelong, head still propped against his hand. “How did you find me?”

“By chance. We heard the wolves. We saw the birds.”

“And by chance,” Chei said harshly, “you were riding Gault's land.”

The man wanted a key—best, it seemed, give him a very small one. “Not chance,” Vanye said. “The road. And if our way runs through his land, so be it.”

There was no answer.

“What did you do,” Vanye asked again, “that deserved what this Gault did? Was it murder?”

“The murder was on their side. They murdered—”

“So?” Vanye asked when the man went suddenly silent.

Chei shook his head angrily. Then his look went to one of entreaty, brow furrowed beneath the drying and tangled hair as he looked up. “You have come here from the gate,” Chei said, “if that is the way you have come. I am not a fool. Do not tell me that your lady is ignorant what land this is.”

“Beyond the gate—” Vanye considered a second time. It was a man's life in the balance. And it was too easy to kill a man with a word. Or raise war and kill a thousand men or ten thousand. There was a second silence, this one his. Then: “I think you have come to questions my lady could answer for you.”

“What do you want from me?” Chei asked.

“Simple things. Easy things. Some of which might suit you well.”

Chei's look grew wary indeed.

“Ask my lady,” Vanye said.

 • • • 

It was a quieter, saner-seeming man Vanye led, wrapped in one of their two blankets, to the fireside where Morgaine waited, Chei with his hair and beard clean and having some order about it once he had wet and combed it again. He was barefoot, limping, wincing a little on the twigs that littered the dusty ground. He had left all his gear down on the riverside—Heaven knew how they would salvage it or what scouring could clean the leather: none could save the cloth.

Chei set himself down and Vanye sat down at the fireside nearer him than Morgaine—in mistrust.

But Morgaine poured them ordinary tea from a pan, using one of their smaller few bowls for a third cup, and passed it round the bed of coals that the fire had become, to Vanye and so to Chei. The wind made a soft whisper in the leaves that moved and dappled the ground with a shifting light, the fire had become a comfortable warmth which did not smoke, but relieved what chill there was in the shade, and the horses, the dapple gray and the white, grazed a little distance away, in their little patch of grass and sunlight. There was no haste, no urgency in Morgaine.

Not to the eye, Vanye thought. She had been quiet and easy even when he had come alone up the hill bringing the cups, and told her everything he could recall, and everything he had admitted to Chei—“He knows the gates,” Vanye had said, quickly, atop it all. “He believes that is how we got here, but he insists we lie if we do not know this lord Gault and that we must know where we are.”

Morgaine sipped her tea now, and did not hasten matters. “Vanye tells me you do not know where we come from,” she said after a moment. “But you think we should know this place, and that we have somewhat to do with this lord of Morund. We do not. The road out there brought us. That is all. It branches beyond every gate. Do you not know that?”

Chei stared at her, not in defiance now, but in something like dismay.

“Like any road,” said Morgaine in that same hush of moving leaves and wind, “it leads everywhere. That is the general way of roads. Name the farthest place in the world. That road beyond this woods leads to it, one way or the other. And this Gate leads through other gates. Which lead—to many places. Vanye says you know this. Then you should know that too. And knowing that—” Morgaine took up a peeled twig to stir her tea, and carefully lifted something out of it, to flick it away. “You should know that what a lord decrees is valid only so far as his hand reaches. No further. And I have never heard of your lord Gault, nor care that I have not heard. He seems to me to be no one worth my trouble.”