Exiles Gate

grass.

'Do not drink,' she said from behind him, reminding him of cautions that he knew as well as she, and he turned half about with a sudden, trapped fury in him.

He said nothing, and rose and walked back to sit down on his heels and press his wet hands to the back of his neck and to his brow.

'Sleep,' he said without looking at her. 'You are due that.'

'I should not have chided thee.'

'No, you should have let a fool drink from standing water. It is not Kursh, or Andur, liyo. I know that. I was not that much fool.'

'Thee can take the rest. Thee has more need.'

'Why, because I am short-tempered? I have killed a man. I have killed one man I held for a friend. And we have lost the other. No matter.' He wiped the hair back from his stubbled face, the wisps that had come loose from his braid and trailed about brow and ears, and he had not the will left to do more than wipe them out of his way. 'I am learning.'

Then the reach of what he had said shot through him. He glanced up at her face. My God, why did I say that?

The mask had come back over her countenance, pale as it was. She shrugged and looked aside at the ground. 'Well that we save our shafts for our enemies.'

'Forgive me.' He went to his knees and she moved so suddenly he thought she would strike him in the face, but it was his shoulder she caught, hard, with the heel of her hand, before he could even think to bow to the ground as reflex made natural. He met her angry stare and there was nothing woman-gentle in the blow that had stopped him from the obeisance. He had meant to make peace. Now he only stared at her.

She looked dismayed too, finally, the anger fading. Her hand went gentle on his shoulder and trailed down his arm. 'There is no way back,' she said. 'If you learn anything of me, learn that.'

He felt his throat tighten. He drew breaths to find an adequate one and finally shook his head, and turned aside and got up clumsily, since she gave him no room.

'I am sorry,' he said with his back to her. The arm that had wielded the sword ached again, and he rubbed at the shoulder she had struck. 'I have my wits about me, better than you see. God knows, we are going to need our rest. And I do you no service to rob you of yours. I am not the first man mistook a friend in a fight, God knows I am not—' He remembered the harper, with a wince. He could not but wound her, no matter what he did or said; no more than she with him. He could not think where they would find rest, or where he would shake the phantoms in the tail of his eye, and of a sudden panic came over him, thinking what odds mounted against their passing those mountains ahead.

It was speed they needed. And human bodies and exhausted horses could only do so much before hearts broke and flesh failed.

'They are my mistakes,' she said. He heard her move, and her shadow fell past him and merged with his on the thin grass, 'to have taken them with us, to have given thee the sword. It was thy own strength betrayed thee, that thee kept using it. Never—never bear it till it wields thee. That is what happened. That, I did not make thee understand. It has happened to me. Thee learns. And sometimes even then—'

She did not finish. He looked half around at her and nodded, and refused to regard the phantom that beckoned him from the tail of his eye, a shadow on the horizon of the road. Her hand rested on his arm and his pressed hers.

Until that phantom insisted, and this time he must look, seeing a horseman atop the ridge.

'Liyo!' he hissed. 'On the road—'

He leapt up and she did; and hurried for the horses, to tighten cinches and refit bridles: he caught Siptah first, his duty to his liege, and she left him to that for economy of motion and did the same for Arrhan, still working as he led Siptah to her.

A last buckle and she was done. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw the oncoming riders, twenty, thirty or more.

'They are Gault's or they are out of the gate,' Morgaine said, and set her foot in Siptah's stirrup. 'If the latter, we have no knowledge what weapons they have, and I do not like this ground— Ride!'

He sprang to the saddle and reined to her left as they made the road. There was no question but that they were seen by now, but the narrowing of the road left them little choice—and that in itself put a fear into him. Many things about the gates bewildered him, but crossing from here to there did not, and if Gault's men had gone from Tejhos to Mante and back, Mante itself was warned and might have riders coming south to head them off.

It was more and more of narrow passage ahead of them: the rising sun had limned rougher land stretching eastward and north, and that meant fewer and fewer choices of any sort.

They had won so many battles. The odds grew and the land shaped itself against them. 'Get off the road,' he shouted at Morgaine as he rode alongside. 'For Heaven's own sake, liyo, we cannot win straight through—we cannot outride them behind and before! Let us get into the hills, let them hunt us there, let them hunt us the winter long, if that is what it takes to let them grow careless—'

It was an outlaw's counsel. He had that to give. He looked at Morgaine and saw her face set and pale in that unreason that drove her. He despaired then.

'We make as much ground as we can,' she called across to him, 'as long as we can.'

He looked back over his shoulder, where their pursuers made a darkness on either margin of the road, running beside the sporadic white stone.

'Then stop and fight them,' he said. 'Liyo, in Heaven's name, one or the other!'

'There might be others,' she shouted back, meaning overland, through the hills; and he caught the gist of her fears and reckoned as she reckoned, on Mante, and stones, and gates.

The riders so easily seen might be a lure to delay or herd them.

Still, still, she was the elder and warier of them.

They crested a hill and for a time they were running alone, at an easier gait, for a long enough time that he looked back once and twice looking for their pursuers; and Morgaine looked, her silver hair whipping in the wind.

They were gone.

'I do not like this,' she said as they rode.

The road which had held straight so far, through so much of the land, took a bend toward the east which Chei had never mapped.

And his own instincts cried trap.

'Liyo, I beg you, let us get off this!'

Morgaine said nothing, but of a sudden turned Siptah aside into a fold of the hills, keeping a quick pace on grassy and uneven ground, down the course the hills gave them.

Deeper and deeper into land in which they no longer had a guide.

They rode more quietly at last, finding their way by the sun in a wandering course through grassy hills, brush and scrub forest.

They watched the hilltops and the edges of the thickets, and from time to time looked behind them or stopped and listened and watched the flight of birds for omens of pursuers.

Morgaine did not speak now. He rode silent as she, senses wide and listening, for any hint of other presence.

Only as the sun sank: 'The dark is their friend tonight,' Morgaine said, 'more than ours, in a land we do not know. We had best find ourselves a place and lie quiet a while.'

'Thank Heaven,' he muttered; and when they had found that place, a deep fold of the hills well-grown with brush, and when they had gotten the horses sheltered up against an overhang of the hills and rubbed them down and fed them, then he felt that he could breathe again and he had a little appetite for the fireless supper they made.