“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—‘t is 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.
Then he gathered up their blankets and bridles and saddles, the latter with an effort that brought him a cold sweat, but painful as it was, it was good to stretch and move and pleasant to feel some of the stiffness work out of him.
It was even more pleasant to sink down on his heels near Morgaine and whisper: “Liyo, we are ready. I have the horses saddled.”
“Out on you,” she said muzzily, lifting herself on her elbow; and with vexation: “Thee ought not.”
“I am well enough.” In the tally of the old game, he had scored highly by that; and it was like the stretch of muscles, a homecoming of sorts.
Home, he thought, better than Morij-keep or any hall he had known—home, wherever she was.
She gathered herself up and paused by him, to lay her hand on his shoulder, and when he pressed his atop it, to bend and hug him to her, with desperate strength, while he was too stiff to stand as easily. “A little further before daybreak,” she said. “We will gain what we can. Then we will rest as we need to. With the—”
There was a disturbance among the horses, the two geldings and the mare and the stud in proximity ample reason for it, but Morgaine had stopped; and he listened, still and shivering in the strain of night-chill and stiff muscles.
He pressed her hand, hard, and hers closed on his and pushed at him: I agree. Move. I do not like this.
He got up then, silently and in one move, for all the pain it cost. He reached Arrhan and quieted her and the remounts as Morgaine took Siptah in charge.
In the starlight, downhill where the stream cut through, a solitary rider appeared, and watered his horse at the lower pool. In a little more, two more riders joined him, and watered theirs, and drank, and rode on across.
Vanye shivered. He could not help it. He bade Arrhan stand quiet with a tug at her head; the others, the remounts, he held close and kept as still as he could, while Morgaine kept Siptah quiet.
They were not Chei’s folk, whatever they were. He reckoned them for riders out of Mante, hunting reported invaders—else they would ride the road and go by daylight like honest and innocent travelers.
He moved finally, carefully, and looked at Morgaine. “There will be others,” he whispered. “They may search back again along the watercourses.”
“Only let us hope they confuse our tracks and their own.” She threw Siptah’s reins over his neck and rose into the saddle. “Or better yet—Chei’s.”
He set his own foot into Arrhan’s stirrup and heaved upward with an effort that cost pain everywhere.
If they had dared a fire, if they could have sweated the aches out with boiled cloths and herbs, if he could have lain in the sun and baked himself to warmth inside and out, instead of lying cold and rising cold and riding again—but they were too close now, to the gate, and the enemy too aware of their danger.
Turn back, he thought of pleading. Go back into the plains and the hills and let us recover our strength.
But they had come so far. And they had no friends in this land and no refuge, and he did not know whether his instincts were right any longer. He yearned, he yearned with a desperate hope for the gate and a way into some other place than this, another beginning, when this one had gone desperately amiss.
• • •
They did not try to make speed by dark, with the ground stony and uneven as it was. They rode down one long sweep of hill, passed between others, and over a brushy shoulder. They kept a pace safe for the horses and quiet as they could manage, under a sky too open for safety.
And once, that Siptah pricked up his ears and Arrhan looked the same direction, off to their left flank, his heart went cold in him. He imagined a whole ho
stile army somewhere about them—or some single archer, who might be as deadly. “Likely some animal,” Morgaine said finally.
And further on, where they stopped to breathe within a stand of scrub: “Time, I think, we gave the horses relief,” he said. “But I do not want to stop here.”
“Aye,” Morgaine said, and slid down, to tie Siptah’s tether to his halter; and to calm the stallion, who took exception to the geldings, flattening his ears and pricking them up again, and swinging between them and Arrhan as Vanye dismounted.
“Hold,” Morgaine hissed at the gray, and caught his tether-rope, which usually would stop him; but his head came up and his nostrils flared toward the wind, ears erect.
“Stay,” Vanye said quietly, calmly as he could. “There is something there.”
The horses were vulnerable. There was no guarantee of cover for them beyond this point. There was no guarantee they were not riding into worse. Siptah threw his head and protested softly, dancing sideways.
“Dawn could see us pinned here,” she said. “That is no help.”
“Then they have to come to us. Liyo, this once—”
“I thought thee had no more advice.”
He drew in a sharp breath. Pain stabbed through bruised ribs. “Liyo—”
Brush cracked, somewhere up on the slope.
“I agree with you,” he said. “Let us be out of this.”
“Go!” she hissed, and it was Siptah she chose to carry her, war-trained and sure, for all the gray was through his first wind.
He took Arrhan on the same reasoning, the horse he knew, the one that answered to heel and knee. He had both the relief mounts in his charge, that jolted the lead against the saddle as they took the next climb over ground studded with rocks, Siptah’s tail a-flash before them in the starlight, eclipsed now and again by black brush and trees, the necessary sound of hoof-falls and harness and the raking of brush sounding frighteningly loud in the night.
Down the throat of the folded hills, along the track of a minuscule stream, they kept a steady pace, until Morgaine drew in and he stopped, and panting horses bunched together, their breathing and the shift of their feet and creak of harness obscuring what small like sounds might be behind them.
The Complete Morgaine Page 109