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Chapter Fourteen

The trouble was not long in showing itself. Movement startled birds from cover in the thickets of the Narn’s other bank, and soon there were riders in sight, but the broad Narn divided them from the enemy and there was no ford to give either side access to the other.

The enemy saw them too, and halted in consternation. It was a khalur company, demon-helmed, scale armored, on the smallish Shiua horses. Their weapons were pikes; but they carried more than those . . . ugly opponents. And the leader, whose white mane flowed evident in the wind of his riding when he led them forward to the water’s edge: the arrhendim were appalled at the sight of him, one like themselves, and different . . . fantastical in his armor, the old-dream elaborations of khalur workmanship.

“Shien!” Vanye hissed, for there was no one in the Shiua host with that arrogant bearing save Hetharu himself. The khal challenged them, rode his horse to the knees in water before he was willing to heed his men-at-arms and draw back.

Their own company kept moving, opposite to the direction of the Sotharra band; but Shien and his riders wheeled about and paced them, with the broad black waters of the Narn between. Arrows flew from the Sotharra side, most falling into the water, a few rattling on the stones of the shore.

The qhal Perrin reined out to the river’s very brink and shot one swiftly aimed shaft from her bow. A demon-helmed khal screamed and pitched in the saddle, and his comrades caught him. A cry of rage went up from that side, audible across the water. And Vis raced her horse to the brink and shot another that sped true.

“Lend me your bow,” Vanye asked then of Roh. “If you will not use it, I will.”

“Shien? No. For all the grudge you bear him—he is Hetharu’s enemy, and the best of that breed.”

It was already too late. The Shiua lagged back of them, out of bowshot of the arrhendim, having learned the limits of their own shafts and the deadly accuracy of the Shathana. They followed at a distance on that other side, and there was no way to reach them and no time to stop. Perrin and Vis unstrung their bows as they rode, and the arrhendim kept tight formation about Merir, scanning apprehensively the woods on their own side of the river. It was speed they sought now, which ran them hard over the river shore, with nothing but an occasional wash of brushheap to deter them.

Then Vanye chanced to look back. Smoke rose as a white plume on the Shiua side.

Perrin and Vis saw the fix of his eyes and looked, and their faces came about rigid with anger.

“Fire!” Perrin exclaimed as it were a curse, and others looked back.

“Shiua signal,” said Roh. “They are telling their comrades downriver we are here.”

“We have no love for large fires,” Sharrn said darkly. “If they are wise, they will clear the reach of that woods before night comes on them.”

Vanye looked back again, at the course of the Narn which slashed through Shathan, a gap in the armor, a highroad for Men and fire and axes . . . and the harlim slept, helpless by day. He saw the dark shadow of distant riders, the wink of metal in the sun. Shien had done his mischief and was following again.

Again they rested, and the horses were slicked with sweat. Vanye spent his time attending this one and the other, for kindly as the arrhendim were with their mounts, and anxious as they were to care for them, they were foresters and the horses had come from elsewhere into their hands: they had not a Kurshin’s knowledge of them.

“Lord,” he said at last, casting himself down before Merir, “forest is one thing; open ground is another. We must not press the last out of the horses, not when we may need it suddenly. If the Shiua have gotten into the forest on our side and press us toward the river, the horses will not have it left in them to carry us.”

“I do not fear that.”

“You will kill the horses,” Vanye said in despair, and left off trying to advise the old lord. He departed with an absent caress of the white mare’s shoulder, a touch on the offered nose, and cast himself down by Roh, head bowed against his knees.

In a few moments more they were bidden back to the saddle, but for all Merir’s seeming indifference to advice, they went more slowly.

Like Morgaine, he thought bitterly, proud and stubborn. And then he thought of her, and it was like a knife moving in a wound. He rode slumped in the saddle, cast a look back once, where Shien and his men still paced them, out of range. He shook his head in despair and knew what that was for: that they were apt to meet a force on their side of the Narn up by the next crossing, and Shien meant to be there to seal them up.

Roh rode close to him, so that the horses jostled one another and he looked up. Roh urged one of the arrhendim’s journeycakes on him. “You did not eat at the stop.”

He had had no appetite, nor did now, but he knew the sense of Roh’s concern, and took it and washed it down with water, though it lay like lead in his stomach. Small dark Vis rode up on his other side and offered another flask to him.

“Take,” she said.

He drank, expecting fire by the smell of it, and it was, enough to make his eyes sting. He took several more swallows, and gave it back to Vis, whose dark eyes were young in her aging face, and kindly. “You grieve,” she said. “We all understand, we that are khemeis, we that are arrhen. So we would grieve too.” She pressed the flask back into his hand. “Take it. It is from my village. Perrin and I can get more.”

He could not answer her; she nodded, understanding that too, and dropped behind. He hung the flask to his saddle, and then thought to offer some to Roh, which Roh accepted, and passed it back to him.

Night-shadow began to touch the sky. The sun burned over the dark rim of Shathan across the river, and from the east there was silence, no comforting whistles out of the dark woods, nothing.

They kept moving while there was still twilight to guide them, and bent into the forest itself, for a river barred their way, flowing into the Narn.

It was not a great river; quickly it dwindled until the trees that grew on its margin almost sufficed to span it.

And suddenly about them stealthy shadows moved, and a chittering warned them of harlim.

One waited on the riverside, like some large, ungainly bird standing at the water’s shallow edge. It chirred at them as that kind would in perplexity, and backed when Merir would have approached it on horseback. Then it beckoned.

“We cannot go another such journey,” Sharra protested. “Lord, you cannot.”

“Slowly,” said Merir, and turned the white mare in the direction that the creature would have them go: breast-high she waded, but the current was very weak, and all of them followed, up the other bank, into wilder places.

The haril wanted haste: they could not. The horses stumbled on stones, faltered going up the slopes of ravines. The trees were old here, and the place beneath them much overgrown with brush. Harilim moved all about them, finding passage that the horses could not.

And suddenly there was a white shape before them in the dark, an arrhen, or like unto one, afoot and clothed in white, not forest green. His hair was loose, his whole aspect like and unlike one of the arrhendim, seeming more wraith than flesh in the starlight.

Lellin.

The youth lifted his hand. “Grandfather,” he saluted Merir, softly. He came and took Merir’s offered hand, reaching up to the saddle. Solid he was, yet there was a change on him, a sad quiet utterly unlike the youth they knew. “Ah, Grandfather, you should not have come.”

“Why should I not?” Merir answered him. The old lord looked frightened. “What madness has taken you? Why this look on you? Why did you not send the message you promised?”

“I had no means.”

“Morgaine,” Vanye said, forcing his horse past Sharrn’s to Lellin. “Lellin—what of Morgaine?”

“Not far.” Lellin turned and lifted his arm. “A stony hill, the other side—”

He used the spurs, broke free of them and bent low, caring nothing for their protest, for harilim warnings. He would not bring Merir on her without warning. His horse stumbled under him, recovered; brush opposed, branches caught at him and snapped on his armor. He clung low to the saddle and the horse stayed on its feet, upslope and down, shying from this side and that as it sensed harilim. Pursuit was on his heels: the arrhendim  . . . he heard them coming.

Suddenly there was a broad meadow in the starlight, and the low hill that Lellin had named hove up. He broke through a thin screen of young trees and rode for that place.

White figures appeared before him in the starlight, white robes, white hair flying in the wind, aglow like foxfire. He saw the shimmer, tried to rein over at the last instant and could not avoid it.

There was dark.

Khemeis.

A touch fell on his shoulder. He heard a horse near . . . sensed still the numbing oppression, of Gate-force in the air.

Khemeis.

Lellin. Coarse grass was under his hands. He strove to push himself up. Another hand reached to help him rise. He looked into Sezar’s face . . . Sezar likewise in white such as Lellin’s, neither of them armed. He cast a dazed look about him, at white-robed qhal, at the two who had once been arrhendim . . . one of the qhal held the reins of his horse, which stood with legs braced as if it were still dazed.

And others . . . Merir, who dismounted and took his place among the qhal in white robes, a taint of gray among them. Roh was there at a distance, among the arrhendim, who grouped together as if in great fear.

“You are permitted,” Lellin said, pointing toward the hill. “She sends for you. Go, now, quickly.”

A moment he looked a second circuit of him, looking on the white figures, feeling the silence. His senses still swam. Gate-force worked at his nerves. He turned suddenly and went, overwhelmed with anxiety. One of them shadowed him, pointed the way that he should take up the hill, where a trail began among the trees which marched up its side. He did not run, but he wished to.

It was not a high hill, hardly more than a rocky upthrast amid the forest. At either side of him were trees aged and warped, twisted by wind or Gate-force, strange shapes in the starlight. He climbed that path carefully, his heart frozen in dread of the thing that he might find in this smothering silence.

The path bent, and she was there, a white figure like the others, as Lellin had been, standing among the rocks. Wind tugged at her white hair and her thin garments . . . unarmored and unarmed she was, when never willingly would she part from Changeling.

Liyo,” he said in half a voice, and stopped . . . human, and feeling it mortally. He did not want to come closer and find her changed; he did not want to lose her like that.

But she came to him, and there was no difference but the clothing: the strength was there, and the recklessness. Wraith she seemed, but this wraith scrambled down from the rocks with Morgaine’s energy, a hand to this side and the other to catch herself, and a hand to him at the bottom. He seized her as if she might prove illusion after all, and they flung arms about each other with the desperation of sanity returned.

She said nothing. It was long before he thought of saying anything. But then he thought of her wound, and realized how thin she was, and that he might be hurting her. He drew her aside to the rocks and gave her a place to sit, cast himself to a lower stone beside her. “You are well,” he breathed.

“We saw the smoke . . . from here. I hoped . . . hoped that you were somehow the cause of that alarm. I sent word, such as the harilim can bear. And I saw you coming . . . from this hill. I could not prevent them. I shouted, but in the wind, they did not hear, or heed. Lellin . . . Lellin found you, did he not?”

“Down near the river.” His voice failed him and he rested his head against the stones at his side. “Oh Heaven, I did not know how I would find you.”

“Sezar found Mai dead on the riverbank. And traces of horses about her. They searched further . . . but there were Shiua aswarm in that area and they had to come. back. What happened?”

“Trouble enough.” He reached for her hand, held it tightly, to assure himself she was solid and with him. “What of you? What are these folk? What are we amid here?”

Arrha. Keepers of Nehmin, among other things. They are dangerous. But without them I would not have survived, whatever else we have to do one with the other.”

“Are you free?”

“That is a question yet to be tried. There is nowhere to go from here. Three nights ago the marshlanders tried our defenses. They are still out there. We held them then. Lellin . . . Sezar . . . the arrha. I have tried to stay back from it, to avoid having them know me . . . but then I could not. Even so it was close.”

A host of questions pressed on him. He felt her hand, how thin and fragile it had become. “Are you all right? Your wound—”

She moved her hand to her hip, where the leg joined. “Mending. The arrha are skilled healers. It was a bad one. I came close enough to dying. I do not remember the last of that ride, but that Lellin and Sezar knew where they were going . . . or thought they did. And the arrha . . . let us pass.”

“If you had not stayed ahorse . . . ” He did not finish the thought, sickened by it.

“Aye. I had the same thought for you. But you reached Merir after all. And yet you sent me no message.”

He was confused for a moment, realizing then how she had misconstrued things. “Would my course had been that direct,” he said, and a sudden fear possessed him, reluctance to admit what had happened . . . most of all to have her know he had been in the enemy’s hands. Gate-force could change men: Roh was proof enough of that; and he recalled a time when she would have killed out of hand for any such doubt of a companion. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have used allies in getting here that you will curse me for taxing. And Merir knows both what you hold and what you have come to do . . . what we came to do. Forgive me. I trust too easily.”

She was silent a moment. Fear touched her eyes. “The arrha know both by now, then.”

“There is more, liyo. One of the men out there is Roh.”

She drew back.

“I have been to the Gate and back again,” he said hoarsely, refusing to let her go. “Liyo, on my soul, I had no choice; and I would not be here but for Roh.”

“What of an oath you swore? What of that? You were not to let him live. And you have brought him to me?”

“He has helped us both. He asked only to see you; that was his condition. I warned him . . . I confess that I warned him and tried to persuade him to run. But he would come. He has run out of friends. And without him—Will you not hear him?”

She looked down. “Come with me,” she said, and rose, still with her hand in his. He rose and walked with her among the rocks, down the other slope of the hill, by yet another trail. “Our camp is here,” she said as they walked. “Extraordinary dispensation: no axe touches Nehmin . . . but the arrha brought wood from the outside, and built this for us. In some regards they have been more than kind.”

A wooden shelter was almost hidden among the tall trees; a ghostly horse grazed beside it . . . Siptah. He recognized the gray Baien stud with a pang of relief, for Morgaine loved that horse, and had she lost him, she would have grieved . . . as much, he thought, as she might for him, for the gray horse had come with her farther and longer. Two other horses grazed slightly apart: Lellin’s and Sezar’s, one conspicuous for its white stockings. All of them looked sleek and well-cared for.

“Roh,” she murmured as they descended toward the shelter. “The arrha meant to hold all of you from me at least overnight, to ask their own questions, I do not doubt. But they understand the bond of khemeis and arrhen, and when I accused them of harming you, they let you come, out of shame, I suppose. Roh’s presence . . . that concerns me. I would not have him giving witness of me.”

“We might try to break out of here.”

She shook her head. “I fear our choice is in the Shiua’s hands. They are on two sides of us at least.” She drew back the curtain of the shelter, gray gauze like the harilim’s veils, like old moss, many layered. It swung against his face as he entered, and he did not like the feel of it.

Morgaine bent and touched a reed to a brazier of coals and transferred that tiny flame to a single-wicked lamp, so that a dim light surrounded them. “The harilim do not like fire,” she said. “But we are very careful. Drop the curtain. Shed the armor. No enemies can come at us here without a great deal of trouble, and as for the arrha . . . they are of a different sort. I will find out what we have about here to eat.”

He stood motionless in the center of the small shelter as she searched through the collection of jars in the corner. There was Siptah’s harness, and that of Lellin’s and Sezar’s horses; there were three pallets, with gray gauze veils dividing one off for privacy; Morgaine’s armor, laid neatly in the corner; and Changeling . . . as if it were only another sword, leaned by it. Even to have walked up to the hilltop without that fell thing was something incredible in her . . . a dulling of cautions by which she had survived. There was after all a change about her, something alien and distant. In this place of familiar things . . . she was the difference. He watched her in the dim light, slender and delicate as the qhal in the white garments . . . and her features when she looked up at him: the tautness of pain had been there recently. So close, he thought with sudden anguish, so very close to losing her; perhaps that is the mark on her.

“Vanye?”

He reached for the straps of his armor, worked at them clumsily, managed them. She helped him pull it off, received the two-stone weight of mail into her hands and laid it aside. He unlaced the haqueton and shed it, sank down onto the mat with a sigh. Then she gave him water to drink, and bread and cheese of which he could eat only a few bites. He was more content simply to lean against the support of the shelter and rest. It was warm; she was there. It was for the moment, enough.

“Do not worry about the others,” she said. “Lellin and Sezar will give warning if anything threatens us, and the arrha refuse to lay hand on them or me. Oh, it is good to see thee, Vanye.”

“Aye,” he murmured, for his voice was too taut to say more.

She sat on the mat beside the brazier, locked her hands about one knee. A moment she gazed at him, as if taking in small details. “You have been hurt.”

“It passes.”

“Your fall out there—”

“I rode into that blind.” He grimaced. “I thought to warn you . . . of my company.”

“You succeeded.” Her face grew the more concerned, deeply distressed. “Vanye. Will thee tell me what happened?”

“Roh, you mean.”

“Roh . . . And whatever else thee thinks good for me to know.”

He glanced down, up again. “I have gone against your orders. I know that. I could not kill him. I confess to you . . . it has not been the first time. I agreed with him that I would speak to you . . . he asked nothing more, not even that much, but I told him that I would; I owed him. He is out of allies, out of hope, except to come here.”

“And you believe him.”

“Yes. In that—I do believe him.”

Her hands clenched on her knee until the knuckles were white. “And what do you expect me to do?”

“I do not know. I do not know, liyo.” He made the profound obeisance, which gesture she ordinarily hated, but the time demanded it. “I told him that I would speak with you. Will you let me do so, and hear me? I set my word on that.”

“Do not hope that it will make any difference. My choices are not governed by what I would or you would.”

“All I ask is a hearing. It is not easy to explain. In any sense, it is not easy. And I have asked few things of you, ever.”

“Aye,” she said softly, drew a long breath and let it go. “I will listen. I will at least listen.”

“For long?”

“As long as you wish. Til the sun rises, if that is what you want of me.”

He bowed his head against his hands a moment, gathering his thoughts. Nothing would make sense except from the beginning . . . and there he began, far off the matter of Roh. She looked perplexed at that . . . but she listened as she had said she would do; her gray eyes lost their anger and bore only on what he haltingly told her: things of himself, and his home, small things that she had not known of him, some of which were agony to tell . . . what it was for a half-Chya lad in Morija, what constant war Nhi and Chya had known, and how he came to be a Nhi lord’s bastard. And there were things even of times that they had travelled together, things which he had seen and she had not . . . of Liell; and Roh; of the night they had spent in Roh’s hall at Ra-koris; and another with him in the woods near Ivrel, when she had slept; or in Ohtij-in of Shiuan, unknown to her. He watched understanding flicker into sometime anger, and puzzlement return; she said nothing.

And he told her the rest: Fwar, and Hetharu’s camp; and Merir’s; and their way here. He spared nothing, least of all his pride; at the last he did not look at her, but elsewhere, close to choking on the words . . . for half of him was Nhi, and Nhi were proud, and not given to such admissions as he made.

Her hands were clenched when he had done. She loosed them after a moment, as if she had only then realized it. It was a moment before she looked up.

“Some things I would that I had known at the time.”

“Aye, and some things I would that you did not know now.”

“Nothing that you have told me troubles me, not on your account. Only Roh . . . Roh. I did not reckon on that. I swear that I did not.”

“You saw him. But—but perhaps—I do not know, liyo.

“It cannot make any difference. It changes nothing.”

Liyo.

“I warned you it could not make any difference . . . Roh or Liell; no difference.”

“But Roh—”

“Let me alone a time. Please.”

His control came close to breaking. He had said too much, too painful things, and she shrugged them off with that. “Aye,” he said thickly, and thrust his way to his feet, seeking the cold, sane air outside. But she rose and prevented him with a grip on his wrist. He would hurt her if he struck out in his anger; he stood still, and the tears broke his control. He averted his face from her.

“Think of something,” she hissed fiercely. “Think of something that I can do with this gift you have brought me.”

He could not. “His word you would never take. And that is all there is . . . his word, and my faith that it is worth something. And that is nothing to you.”

“You are unfair.”

“I make no complaint of you.”

“Keep him prisoner? He knows too much . . . more than you, more perhaps than Merir . . . in some things more than I, perhaps. I cannot trust that much knowledge . . . not with Liell’s instincts.”

“At times . . . at times, I think there is only Roh. He said the other was only in dreams; and perhaps the dreams are stronger than he is when there is nothing near him that Roh remembers. He says that he needs me. But I have no knowledge of such things. I only guess. Perhaps I am the one who forced him to come here to you, because when he is with me . . . he is my cousin. I only guess.”

“Perhaps,” she said after a moment, “your instinct in that guess is not so far amiss.”

There was a clutching pain in him. He turned and looked at her, looked into her gray eyes, the face that was utterly qhalur. “Roh has said . . . again and again . . . that you know all these things very well—and by your own experience.”

She said nothing, but stepped back from him. He did not mean to let it go this time.

“I do not know,” she whispered at last. “I do not know.”

“He says that you are what he is. I am asking you, liyo. I am only ilin; you can tell me never to ask; and the oath I took to you does not question what you are. But I want to know. I want to know.”

“I do not think you do.”

“You said that you were not qhal. But how do I go on believing that? You said that you had never done what Liell has done. But,” he added in a still voice difficult to force against the distrust in her eyes, “if you are not qhal—liyo, are you not then the other?”

“You are saying that I have lied to you.”

“How can you have told me the truth? Liyo, a little lie, even a kindly lie at the time . . . I could understand why. If you had told me you were the devil, I could not free myself of the oath I had given you. Perhaps you mean it for kindness in that hour. It was. But after so long, so many things—for my peace—”

“Would it give you peace?”

“To understand you—yes. It would. In many ways.”

The gray eyes shimmered, pained. She offered her hand to his, palm up; he closed his over it, tightly, a manner of pledge, and he marked even in doing so that her fingers were long and the hand narrow. ‘Truth,” she said faintly. “I am what Hetharu is: halfling. A place long ago and far from Andur-Kursh . . . closed now, lost, no matter. The catastrophe did not come only on the qhal; they were not the only ones swept up. There were their ancestors, who made the Gates.” She laughed, a lost and bitter laugh. “You do not understand. But as the Shiua are out of my past, I am out of theirs. It is paradox. The Gate-worlds are full of that. Can what I have told you give you peace?”

Fear was in her look . . . anxiety, he realized numbly, for his opinion, as if she needed regard it. He half understood the other things, the madness that was time within gates. That anything could be older than the qhal . . . he could not grasp such age. But he had hurt her, and he could not bear to have done that. He let go her fingers, caught her face between his hands and set a kiss beside her lips, the only affirmation of trust he knew how to give. He had believed her a liar, had accused her, assuming so, so surely that he could dimiss such a lie and forgive, understanding her.

And he did not. A pit opened at his feet, to take in all his understanding.

“Well,” she said, “at least thee is still here.”

He nodded, knowing nothing to say.

“Thee surprises me sometimes, Vanye.”

And when he still found no answer, she shook her head and turned away across the little shelter, her arms folded tightly, her head bowed. “Of course you came to that conclusion; there was nothing else you could think. Doubtless Roh himself believes it. And for whatever small damage it could do—Vanye, I beg you keep it to your knowledge, no one else’s. I am not qhal. But what I am no longer has any meaning, not in this age. Not in Shathan. It no longer matters.”

Liyo—”

“I would not have you believing that I knew Roh’s nature. I would not have you thinking I sent you against him, knowing that. I did not. I did not, Vanye.”

“Now you have me between two oaths. Oh Heaven, liyo. I was thinking of Roh’s life, and now I am afraid of winning it. I do not . . . I swear I do not try to pull against your good sense. I do not want that. Liyo, protect yourself. I should never have questioned you; this is not how I would have persuaded you. Do not listen to me.”

“I know my own mind. Do not shoulder everything.” She tossed her head back, thin-lipped, and looked at him. “This is Nehmin. You will see it as I have seen it; I am not anxious to spill blood in this place. We are far from Andur-Kursh . . . far from every grudge it had . . . and I pity him. I pity him, even as Liell—though that is harder: I knew his victims. Give me time to think. Go to sleep a while. Please. There is at least something of the night left, and you look so tired.”

“Aye,” he agreed, though it was less for weariness than that he would not dispute her, not now.

She gave him the mat by the east wall, her own. He lay down there with no real desire of sleep; but the ease it gave sent a sudden heaviness on him, so that he cared not even to move. She drew the blanket farther over him, and sat on the mat beside him, leaned there against the post, her hand over his. He shivered for no reason—if he had taken a chill he was too numb to feel it. He let his breath go, flexed his fingers against hers, enclosed them.

Then he slept, a hard, swift darkness.




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