Exiles Gate

'Well enough,' Arunden said. 'See? We are friends.'

'Liyo,' Vanye said in his own language. 'There is no mending this man. You will regret any good you do him. And much more any help he gives. Do not have any part of his offer.'

Morgaine was silent a moment, in which Arunden stood looking up as solemn and sober as he had yet been.

'You will not regret it,' Arunden said. 'Time will come, you will need us, my lady—you will need someone the other clans know, a man they will listen to.'

'Then prove it, now,' Morgaine said. 'Send messengers to the clans and prevent Gault from your land and from the southern gate. Three of your men can manage our safe-conduct. But all this land will regret it if Gault learns what I am about, he or his neighbors; and if one of Gault's men reaches that gate in the south and brings help from Mante—do me that grace, lord Arunden, and I will freely own myself in your debt.'

Arunden's face darkened, suffused with a flush. He gnawed on his lip and raked a hand back through his disordered hair, where it had come loose from its braids.

'Whoever commands that position,' Morgaine said, 'will command the south. When that gate dies—you will feel it in the air. When it dies you will know that I have kept my promise; and you will sit as lord at Morund. That I offer you—that and anything you can take and hold. The south will need a strong lord. I will have those three men you offer. I will send them back to you when I have cleared your lands. My own, I keep!'

She wheeled Siptah then and rode, as Arunden stood open-mouthed and with a thousand hostile and avaricious thoughts flickering through his eyes. Vanye did not turn away from him. 'Go with her,' he said to Chei and Bron, who had moved up beside him; and the brothers turned and rode after Morgaine, leaving only himself facing Arunden and his folk.

'My lord,' Vanye said then sternly. 'Your three men.'

Arunden came free of his astonishment and called out three names, at which Vanye inclined his head in respect to Arunden. 'I trust,' Vanye said, without a trace of insolence in his tone, 'that your men can track us.'

Then he whirled about and rode after Morgaine and the ep Kantorei.

'Damned, who defies the priest of God!' the priest shouted after him. 'Cursed are ye—!'

He cast a look back. No weapons flew. Only words. Ahead of him Morgaine waited on the slope, Bron and Chei on either side of her, dim figures among the ghosts of tall trees.

'Was there trouble?' Morgaine asked him as he reined in.

'My back is unfeathered,' he said, and refrained from crossing himself. He felt more anger than distress.

'He is not much of a priest,' Bron said. 'No one regards him. It is only words.'

'Well we were out of here,' Morgaine said, 'all the same.' And motioned Bron and Chei to lead. 'Vanye?'

Vanye drew Arrhan to a walk beside Siptah as Chei and Bron led them out of the misty clearing and in among the trees.

'Do we have the escort?' Morgaine asked.

'He did not refuse it,' he said. 'I said they should find us on the trail.'

'Good,' Morgaine said. Then, in the Kurshin tongue: 'Did I not tell thee? Power. Arunden does not know what I am. He thinks he knows, and fills in the gaps himself. At least it is honest greed. And it is rarely the first rebel in any realm who ends by being king. There will far worse follow.'

He looked at her, troubled by her cynicism. 'Never better?'

'Rarely. I do not put treachery past him—or the priest.'

'The three he is sending?'

'Maybe. Or messengers he may send ahead of us and behind.'

He had reckoned that much for himself. He did not like the reckoning. He thought that he should have forced a challenge and taken off Arunden's shoulders all capacity for treachery.

He was not, he knew all too well, as wise as Morgaine, who had improvised a use for this man: but Arunden, last night, had touched on an old nightmare of hers: he had felt it in the way she had clenched his hand at the fireside.

They would not listen, she had said of that moment human lords had broken from her control; because I am a woman they would not listen.

And ten thousand strong, an army and a kingdom had perished before her eyes.

That was the beginning of that solitude of hers, which he alone had breached since that day. And what they had almost done in the night was very much for her—Heaven knew any distraction was a risk with that burden she carried, dragon-hilted and glittering wickedly against her shoulder as she rode, and trust was foreign to everything she did—trust, by her reckoning, was great wickedness.

So he was resolved, for his part, not to bring the previous night into the day, or to be anything but her liegeman under others' witness, meticulous in his proprieties.

Wet leaves shook dew down onto them as they maintained their leisurely pace and refused to give any grace to Arunden's laggard men. A fat, strange creature waddled away from the trail and into the brush in some haste, evading the horses' hooves: that was all the life they saw in the mist. Trails crossed and recrossed in the hollows, along ravines and up their sides, in this place where Men seemed to have made frequent comings and goings.

Eventually the sound came to them of riders behind them on the trail. Morgaine drew rein. The rest of them did, waiting in a wide place on the shoulder of a low hill.

'They took long enough,' Morgaine said with displeasure. She slipped Changeling to her side and adjusted and put up the hood of the two-sided cloak the arrhendim had given her; wrapping herself in gray—gray figure on gray horse in the misty morning; and in the next moment one and the next and the third rider appeared through the thicket across the ravine. They seemed unaware until the next heartbeat that they were observed; then the leader hesitated to the confusion of his men and their horses.

'Well we are no enemy,' Vanye said under his breath as the men came on ahead, down the slope and up again toward them.

'Lady,' the older of the three said as he reined in, and ducked his head in respect, a stout man with gizzled braids and scarred armor.

'My thanks,' Morgaine said grimly, leaning on the saddlehorn. 'I will have one thing: to go quickly and quietly. I want to find the road where it enters qhalur lands, and that with no harm to anyone, including yourselves. I do not need to say the other choice. Ride well ahead of us. When we come to the road, your duty is done and you will return to your lord. Do you question?'

'No, lady.'

She nodded toward the trail, and the three rode on into the lead at a brisk pace. Her glance slid Bron's way, and to Chei, as she reined the gray about; and last she looked to Vanye.

'If they do not cut our throats,' he muttered in the Kurshin tongue, and stayed close by her as they rode. The riders ahead had already hazed in the mist, and Bron and Chei were hindmost on the narrow trail. 'Bron,' he said, reining back half a length. 'Do you know those three?'

'The one is Eoghar,' Bron said, 'and the others are his cousins—Tars, they call the dark one; and Patryn is the one with the scarred face. That is all I know, m'lord—no better and no worse than the rest of them.'

'Well when we are quit of them,' Chei said for his part, 'but just as well we have them now. In that much Arunden told the truth.'

The rain began to fall again, a light, chill mist that alternately blew and clung. The noon sun had no success with the clouds, nor was the afternoon better. Streams trickled in the low places they crossed; the rounding of a hill gusted moisture into faces and down necks, and showed the wooded flanks of further hills all hazed and vague.

It was steady progress they made, but not swift, and Morgaine chafed in silence—Vanye knew that look, read the set of her mouth and the sometime impatient glances at the sky, with frowns as if she faced some living enemy.

Time, he thought. It was time and more time lost.

'How far is it?' she had asked Chei early on; and: 'Two days,' Chei had said, 'down to the road again.' Then: 'Maybe more.'