Arunden's treachery or some hapless hunter of the clan they would have to deal with as the lady had said, more murder they had to commit, this time on innocent men; and his tongue seemed paralyzed.
'I will go out there,' Bron said, and moved. 'If it is human they are late on the trail—or if they are Arunden's—'
But Eoghar and the others still slept, none of them stirring.
'I will go with you,' Chei said. No one prevented him. Eoghar and his cousins snored on, lost to every sense. He walked out into the drizzling rain and stood there blind to the dark and with himself and then Bron silhouetted against the fire-glow, however faint.
A rock turned, click of stone on stone, and the horses close at hand snorted in alarm.
'Arunden!' a voice called out, hoarse above the roar of water. 'Eoghar!'
It was sure then that Eoghar had led them along the route where Eoghar had been told, and Chei dived back inside. 'My lady—' He found himself facing the black weapon and froze in mid-motion. 'It is Arunden's men,' he said then, against the risk of her fire and Vanye's half-drawn sword.
But outside someone was coming, and Bron was left to meet that advance. He risked a move to escape and joined Bron out in the drifting mist, out in the dark in which some rider came down the streamside and toward them in haste.
'Who are you?' Bron called out sharply.
'Sagyn,' the voice called back. 'Ep Ardris.'
'I know him,' Bron said to Chei as the rider stopped just short of the ledge that was their shelter and slid down off his horse to lead it. 'Stop there,' Bron said, but the man did not.
'Riders,' the man gasped out, staggering to them over the gravel. 'Gault's.'
'Where?' Bron asked, and drew his sword about the time Chei reached after his own knife, misliking this approach. 'No closer, man, take my warning!'
'Truth,' ep Ardris said, a thin and shaken voice, and stood there holding the reins of a rain-drenched and head-drooping horse. 'It was Gault came on us—Gault, in the woods—'
Chei felt a sense of things slipping away. He heard the movement behind him, he heard the curses of Eoghar and his men, awakened to news like this and by now standing outside; he knew the lady's anger, and the uncertainties in everything, all their estimations thrown in disorder.
Except the lady had fired the lowland woods and begun a war as surely as Gault had come to answer it.
In Chei's hearing ep Ardris was babbling other things, how their sentries had alerted them too late, and Arunden had attempted to attack from the cover of the woods, but Gault's men had been too many and too well armed. The clan had scattered. Arunden himself was taken. Ep Ardris did not know where the others were or how many had survived.
'What of my father?' Eoghar came from the shelter with his two cousins, and laid hands on the man—and if there was a man of the lot not dissembling, it was Eoghar, whose grip bid fair to break the man's shoulders. 'Did you see him? Do you know?'—to which ep Ardris swore in a trembling voice that he did not know, no more than for his own kin.
And at Chei's side, all sound of her coming drowned in the roar of the falls, the lady walked up and doubtless Vanye was behind her. 'So Eoghar told his lord the places we might camp.'
'He would know,' Chei protested, 'lady, any man of his would know—'
'So, now, might our enemies,' Morgaine said darkly. 'We have no way of knowing
Chei stood frozen a moment, lost in the water-sound and the nightmare. Others moved. A hand dosed hard on his arm.
'Come on,' Vanye said harshly, as he had spoken when they had been enemies; and in his muddled sense he heard ep Ardris protesting that Gault's riders might be anywhere—Arunden was innocent, he thought, of the worst things; but if any of Arunden's folk was in Gault's hands, there was very much that they knew.
'They do not know the forest,' Chei protested, the least frail hope he could think of, but no one listened, in the haste to break camp. Gault and his men had gotten
He could not account for all of Ichandren's men. He had not thought of that for very long, since he had sat waiting for the wolves—that there were worse fates than Gault had meted out to him, and that it was Gault's spite of his own Overlord that chained healthy and fair-haired prisoners to die within reach of Morund-gate—when there might be someone in Mante with use for them. It was defiance Gault made of his master.
But he had no idea who had died on the field, who in the prison, and who might not have been taken to Morund's cellars at all.
Or who—as the lady had said—of their hunters and scouts of whatever clan might not have strayed into Gault's hands. For that reason a man never went alone to the border; for that reason they left no wounded, and carried poison among their simples and their medicines.
Someone had betrayed them, either living or dead. Someone who knew the ways in.
The roan horse picked a narrow path among the rocks, a course that others followed in the dark. They made no night camp, only took such rests as they had to have, and few of those.
There was fear in Gault ep Mesyrun, and therefore he drove them. At times thoughts surfaced in him which Gault himself would have had, and not Qhiverin—to that extent he was disturbed; and he knew that Jestryn-Pyverrn who rode near him was much more than that, to the extent that he feared for Pyverrn's self. A profound shock could affect a mind newly settled in a body, and old memories might surface, like bubbles out of dark water, from no knowing which self of the many bodies a man might have occupied, no knowing whether it might not be the latest and strongest self reorganizing itself, disastrous in a mind distracted by doubts.
Therefore Jestryn-Pyverrn himself had laughed, when first the priest had told them what they had to deal with—had looked into Gault's face with a laugh and a desperation in his eyes that quickly died, more quickly than Arunden's priest, who'd been all too willing to talk, for hate, it seemed, a genuine hatred of a qhalur woman and a man for whose sake he had suffered some slight; and thought that he had something to trade to them for his life. 'That might be,' Jestryn had said, 'except we have no need of a priest—'
At which the priest had called out Arunden's name, pleading with him as a Man—wherefore Gault asked Arunden, the quisling they had set over the borderlands: 'Dealings with Mante, now, is it?'
'They are from outside,' Arunden protested, as the Man had protested everything, disavowed the fire- setting, wept and sobbed and swore he had never betrayed them, only the woman was a witch and might read everything he did.
Therefore Arunden had been compelled to entertain them, therefore he had dealt with them and had sent men with them—this woman who proposed to attack Mante.
'From outside,' Gault had said then, beginning to believe this lunacy, though they had long thought there was no outside, and the very thought that there might be, implied a tottering of the world—challenging the power in Mante, of Skarrin himself, over whose death neither he nor the men of his company would shed tears.
But an incursion from outside—
But a threat, babbled in a human witness's confused terms, against the very gates—and a qhal counseling humans about things which humans did not well guess—
The priest went on babbling, pleading his usefulness and his sacrosanctity. 'Silence that,' Gault said, and had meant that one of the others should do it.
Quick as the drawing of a sword, Jestryn cut the priest's throat and stepped back, his face all flecked with blood: Gault had seen that moment's horror, and well knew the reason the Pyverrn-self had desired that particular execution.
Exorcism, the humans would say.
They had come in the space of an hour from anger at human attack to suspect a far greater danger. 'We cannot get a message south,' Jestryn had said, meaning one that should pass the southern gate and speed north with the speed of thought. 'There is Tejhos-gate.'
'They will know that,' Gault had said, and had dispatched one small part of his forces back toward the road to sweep north, under a man he trusted—which would have been Jestryn, had he thought Jestryn reliable at the moment.
