Exiles Gate

toward Vanye.

Morgaine laid her hand on his arm again. 'Patience,' she said, and the laughter sank away a little.

'Go a pass with you?' Vanye asked in measured tones. 'Aye, my lord. Gladly. When you are sober.'

There was a moment quieter still. Then Arunden broke out in laughter, and others laughed. He pushed the young woman roughly aside, and the woman caught her balance and got up and left the circle.

'Are you human?' Arunden asked him.

'Aye, my lord.'

'Your speech is strange as hers.'

'That may be, my lord. I learned it of her. My own I muchdoubt you would understand.'

'What clan are you from?'

'Nhi. I am Kurshin. You would not know that land either, my lord. It had gates—which my liege sealed. There have been others. There have been those who attacked my liege. Many of them. She is here with you.'

That, perhaps, took some thinking for some of them. It evidently did, for Arunden, who sat frowning in a sudden quiet and perhaps wondering whether there was an affront somewhere mixed in it.

'Ha,' Arunden said then. 'Ha.' He lifted the bowl and drained it. 'So. Hospitality.'

'That is what we ask,' Morgaine repeated patiently.

'Weapons.'

'That we have, my lord.'

'Men. You need—three thousand men to storm Mante. Four thousand!'

'I need one. I have him. That is all, my lord. You will reap the benefit of it—here. You will need those three thousand men, here, in the hills, to wait till the qhal grow desperate. That is what you have to do.'

'You tell me strategy?'

'I could not possibly, my lord. No one could.'

'Ha!' Arunden said. And: 'Ha! Wise woman. Witch! Is that a witch?' He elbowed the priest with his bowl. 'That is a witch, is she not?'

'That is a qhal,' the priest muttered, 'my lord.'

'That is the way out of these hills. That is the way of winning against the whole cursed breed! Qhal against qhal! Qhalur witch—that, they send, slip into Skarrin's own bed, hey—is that how you will do it?'

'My liege is very tired,' Vanye said. 'We have been days on the road. She thanks you for your hospitality; and I thank you. I would like to find her a place to rest, by your leave, my lord.'

'Too much to drink, eh?'

'Travel and drink, my lord.' Vanye gathered himself to his feet in one smooth motion: such as the drug had done, rage had dispelled. He reached down his hand and assisted Morgaine to stand, taking matters beyond Arunden's muddled ability to manage. 'Good night to you—gracious lord.'

'See to it,' Arunden said, waving his bowl, and women leapt up and hurried as seated men edged aside, opening a path in their circle for the course they were about to take. Shouts went up. More drink splashed into bowls.

But Chei was on his feet too, and Bron. Vanye escorted Morgaine through the press, toward the horses, with Chei at his heels; and young women intercepted them, managing to come not at either of them, but at Chei: 'This way,' one said, 'come, tell them come—'

'Our horses,' Vanye said, and ignored the summons, he and Morgaine, walking back to where Siptah and Arrhan stood, while the crowd behind them muttered with drunken dismay. 'Liyo, let me tend them,' Vanye said. 'They should not see you do such a thing.'

'One of them can tend them,' Morgaine said shortly. 'But not with our belongings.'

'Aye,' he said, understanding the order to stay close by her; and caught his breath and went hurrying ahead of her, between the horses, snatched thongs loose and retrieved their saddlebags and their blankets, finding female hands all too ready to take anything he would not hold back from them, and Siptah bothered enough to be dangerous. 'Take them,' he said, and threw the reins at Chei's brother, who limped within range. 'Get someone to rub them down—both, else you call me.' This last because Siptah was on the edge of his temper, and he was not sure whether any man in camp was sober enough to trust with a twenty year old packhorse, let alone the Baien gray.

'They have vacated a shelter for the lady,' Chei said, at his elbow.

O Heaven, he thought, get us clear of this. And aloud: 'See the horses picketed near us, Chei, Bron, I trust you for that. And have our gear near us.'

'Aye,' Chei agreed.

He turned away, after Morgaine and the women, as they tended out of the firelight and toward the shadow of the woods, as the uproar around the fire grew wilder and more frivolous.

There was more to-do as they came to the ill-smelling little shelter of woven mats and bent saplings. Women offered blankets, offered water, offered bread and a skin of liquor. 'Go,' he said shortly, and pushed the ragged wool flap aside to enter the shelter where Morgaine waited. Firelight entered through the gaps in the reed walls. After a breath or two his eyes found it enough light to make out more than shadow, the glow of her pale hair, the glimmer of silver at her shoulders as she dropped the cloak, the shape of her face and her eyes as she looked at him.

'I would kill him,' he said. He had done very well up till now. He found himself shaking.

She came then and embraced him, her cheek against his for a moment, her arms about his ribs; then she took his face solemnly between her hands. 'You were marvelous,' she said, laughing somewhat; and touched her lips to his, the whole of which confounded him in that way she could do. Perhaps it was the drug which still muddled him. It seemed only courteous not merely to stand there, but to hold to her and to return that gesture, and perhaps it was she who pressed further, he was not sure—only that he did not want to let her go now she had gotten this close and she did not let him go, but held to him and returned him measure for measure till the world spun.

'Vanye,' Chei's voice came from outside the shelter, and he caught his breath and his balance and broke apart from her with a whispered curse; at which a second touch of Morgaine's hands, lightly this time, on his arm, sliding to trail over his fingers—

'What?' he asked, far too harshly, flinging back the door-flap.

Perhaps there was murder in his look; perhaps his rapid breaths said something; or perhaps the firelight struck his face amiss, for Chei's expression went from startlement to thorough dismay.

'I was about to say,' Chei said, above the uproar from about the fire, 'I have told them where to picket the horses, yonder. I am going to go back to the fire, if you—I think I should—Bron and I. . . . Your pardon,' Chei said suddenly, and backed and made a hasty retreat, not without a backward look; and a second, and a third, before he suddenly had to dodge a tree and vanished around it.

Vanye caught his breath and, muddled somewhere between outrage and embarrassment, let the door-flap fall again.

Morgaine's hands rested on his shoulders, and her head against the back of his neck. 'We had best take the sleep,' she whispered, her breath disturbing the fine hairs there.

'Aye,' he said with difficulty, thinking that sleep was not going to come easily despite the liquor and the drug and the exhaustion. 'They are fools out there. At least ninety and nine of them. I cannot credit that Chei is a fool with the lot of them—'

'I do not think he is,' she said. 'I think he has found his brother, that is all. Let him be.'

Fire and clangor of arms, one brother lying dead at his hand, the other lying under the knife in hall—and after that, after that was exile, ilin-ban, and every kinsman's hand against him. The old nightmare came tumbling back again, of bastardy and years of torment before he reacted, once, frightened—no, angry —cornered in a practice match.

Kandrys had not intended his death. He had reasoned his way to that understanding: it would have been only another baiting—except it was the wrong day, the wrong moment, Kandrys' bastard brother grown better and more desperate than Kandrys knew.

And he had always wanted most that Kandrys would forgive him his existence and his parentage.