Exiles Gate

He drew a sudden, gasping breath, as if a cold wind had blown out of that dream, and brought the grave-chill with it.

'Vanye?'

'It is that cursed drink,' he murmured. 'Likely Chei has his ear to matters out there—my mind is wandering. I am hungry, but I think I am too tired to get into the packs. Did you drink anything of it?'

'No more than I must.'

'They have left us more of the stuff. Whatkind of fools raise such a noise, living as they do? that is a priest out there—'

She leaned her head against him. 'This is not Andur-Kursh. And they are fools who have fought their war too long,' she said. 'Fools who are losing it, year by year, and see a hope. If they are not thinking how to betray us and do Gault harm. How far can we trust Chei, do you think? For a few leagues still?'

'I do not know,' he said. He slipped her grasp, turning to look at her, as laughter and shrieks rose from the gathering at the fire. 'He may. There is no honor for a man here. He is too good for this. This is a sink, liyo, a man who could not hold his folk, except he binds them with that—out there. That is the game this hedge-lord plays. Only he is gone in it himself. Heaven knows about Chei's brother.'

'Heaven knows when Chei knew about his brother,' Morgaine said. 'Curse him, he forced this, he has gotten us into this tangle; I do not say he was not taken by surprise, I do not know whether he wanted this from the beginning, but there is disaster everywhere about this place. They have left us bread yonder; and meat; likely it is safe enough; and we will take what food we can and prevail on Chei and his brother at least to see us to the Road. That is all we need of him, and there is an end of it.'

'Aye,' he said forlornly, and with a sense of anger: 'It is a waste, liyo, this whole place is a waste. Heaven knows we could do better for him.'

'Or far worse,' she said.

'Aye.'

She caught him by the arm and held him so. Perhaps her eyes could see him in the dark. She was faceless to him. 'If he ties himself too closely to us—will they ever forget? If he stays then, is he or his brother safe, when once the gates die, and powers start to topple? Or if we take them with us—where are they then? Can you promise them better? Best, I say, we let him go. The eight down in the valley are only an earnest of what we shall do here. When power falls here, it will fall hard.'

'Lord in Heaven, liyo —'

'Truth, Nhi Vanye, bitter truth. That is the ciphering I do: thee knows, thee knows I have no happier choices—except we leave him, here, near a great fool, who will vaunt his way to calamity with the power he imagines he has; and Chei, being Chei, will know when to quit this hedge-lord—or supplant him. That is the best gift we can give him. To leave him among his own kind and kin.'

He drew several large and quietening breaths, 'Aye,' he said again, reasoning his way through that. 'In my heart I know that.'

'Then be his friend. And let him go.'

'Is it that clear?'

'Vanye, Vanye—' But what else she would have said, she did not say, not for some little moment. Then: 'Did I not tell thee, thee could leave me? I warned thee. Why did thee not listen?'

He said nothing for a moment, in confusion, a sudden hurt, and deep. He traced it several times, trying to understand how she had gotten to that, or what he had said or done to bring her to that offer again.

Then he realized it for her wound, not his—a doubt she could not lose.

'There will never be a time,' he said. 'There will never be. Liyo, when will you believe it? I cannot leave you. I could never leave you. When will you trust me?'

There was long silence. He wished that he could see her. The very air ached.

'I do not know,' she said finally, in a voice hushed and faint. 'I do not know why thee should love me.'

'God in Heaven—'

But it was not a simple thing that she meant. It was all that she was. It was the whole that she was.

Chei, then, was not the one she had meant—be his friend. Let him go.

He took her face between his hands. He kissed her on the brow, and on either cheek, as a man might his kin. He kissed her a third time on the lips, not after the same fashion. It was desperate; it became passionate, and her arms came around him, while the tumult went on outside.

Then he remembered she had not wanted this, and he heard the arrival of the horses out beside the shelter; and reckoned that there was too much of ill in this place and too much chance of disturbance and too much that they risked. Perhaps she had the same sense of things. He separated himself from her in consternation, and she touched his face.

'I think they have brought the horses,' she said, foolish for the moment as he was, one heartbeat, one way of thinking, one intention between them, and all of it sliding in that way a dream might—coming apart and passing into the ordinary.

'Aye,' he said, feeling himself still breathing in time with her, and all the world having shifted in its balances, and still reeling. He drew another breath. 'Best I see where the rest of our gear is.'

And outside, with the horses, dealing with the several men who tried with little success to deal with the gray—'Let him be,' he said, and took the reins himself. 'Put the tack over there—' He gave orders while the figures at the fire moved darkly against the glare, and shouts rang out, and his mind was dangerously busier with his liege than it was with Arunden's men and with Chei and Bron, who had deserted them.

'Whoa, whoa,' he whispered to the gray stud, and to the mare, the both of which were unsettled by the place, the fire, the strangers about them. He spoke to them in his own tongue, he stroked them with his hands.

It was strange that he could suddenly be so content to stay a night in this wretched place, or that he could suddenly put the matter of Chei and Chei's betrayals out of his mind. He went back in, he shared a supper of yesterday's bread and a little honey and a sip of their own arrhendur liquor, and somehow they sat closer together than they were wont, and leaned together, armored that they were—and not, after all, fools enough to shed it, whatever the temptation.

'There is time,' she said against his cheek, when they were also fools enough to lie down together, because it was easier than to move elsewhere.

And what she had said somehow frightened him, like an ill omen.

There was a third presence by them, an unliving thing. She had laid Changeling on her other side, that fell thing without which she never slept, and with and without which she could not rest.

Against that, against the things which had begun to move in the world, he knew he had no power.

Chapter Seven

There had been quiet in the camp for some time, in Vanye's restless sleep. The tumult around the fire had sunk away. Now a milky daylight was streaming through the reed walls, and he lay with his eyes open a moment content only to breathe and to feel Morgaine's warmth against his side, and to know that it was no dream that had happened. Sleep, she had bade him finally: if there was harm here they would have done it—only sleep lightly. It had thundered in the last of the night, a little flashing of lightning, a little sifting of rain against the reed roof, no more than that.

He drifted again, in that half-sleep in which he had spent the little of the night they had had left, alternate with Morgaine, when she would shake at him and tell him it was her turn for an hour of deep rest.

It was more rest, at least, than sitting awake and battling exhaustion during a first watch: as the course of things had gone, it was rare luxury, considering the weather and the night chill.

But he came wide awake again at the simultaneous realization that there was a quiet stirring in the camp, and that Morgaine had shifted onto her elbow.