Exiles Gate

gaze into his eyes.

'With my life,' he said.

It was not enough to say. He wished he had not had that thought, or given way to it.

Ibelieved you might come, only because we were still far enough from the gate.

Beyond such a point, she had no such loyalties, nor could help herself. He believed that. With the sword, at such a time, she fought for nothing but the geas,—and for her sanity.

At such a time, liyo, you would have taken me with your enemies.

And always that is true.

'Truth, liyo, I had no doubt.'

She looked so weary, so desperately weary. He rose up on his knees and put his arms about her, her head against his bare shoulder, her slim, armored body making one brief shiver, hard as it was. Her arms went about him.

'We have no choice but move on,' she said, her voice gone hoarse. 'Chei has gone back toward Tejhos. I do not think he will go all the way south.'

'Chei has done murder,' he said. 'He killed a captain Mante sent by way of Tejhos. The captain's men deserted.'

'Was that the division.' Her shoulders heaved to a sigh, and for a moment her weight rested against him. 'None of them escaped. Plague take it—I should have killed him—long since. . . .'

'Chei,' he murmured, 'went to them . . . willingly, he said. And Mante knows everything he knows by now. I have no doubt they do. There may be more than a few riders out from there.'

She nodded against his shoulder. 'Aye. I know that.'

'And neither of us is fit to ride. What could you do? What could I? Sleep.'

She was limp in his arms, and moved her hand then to push away from him, and abandoned the effort, slumping bonelessly into his arms. 'Not wise, not wise, of me. I know. We have to move. This place is not safe—'tis not safe at all—'

It was, perhaps, the first time in recent days she had done more than close her eyes.

Chei splashed water over his face and wiped it back over his hair, crouching at the stream. Across from him in the dusk, the remnant the witch had left to him—witch, he insisted to himself, against all the knowledge qhalur rationality could muster. He grew superstitious. He knew that his soul was lost, whatever that was, simply because he did not know how to believe in it any longer; or in witchcraft, except that in the workings of the world there might conceivably be prescience, and outsiders might know things he did not understand.

Ichandren had believed in unnatural forces. Bron had never doubted them. The man across the rill of water from him had known them, Rhanin ep Eorund, before he housed a qhalur bowman, and perhaps even yet. They were foreign only to Hesiyyn, the qhal, whose face was a long-eyed, high-boned mask, immune to the worry that creased Rhanin's brow—human expression, woven into the composite like so many subtle things.

Like fear. Like the moil of hate and fear and anger that boiled inside Chei's own self, seductive of both halves: revenge on the strangers; revenge on Mante, which had always been his enemy no less than Chei's; and life, life that might stretch on forever like the life that trailed behind, life that remembered jeweled Mante, and the face of the Overlord which young Chei had never seen, and of kin and friends Gault-Qhiverin had both loved and killed and betrayed for greater good—

Friends and kin the strangers had taken, as they bade fair to take all the world down to dark.

'Go back if you will,' he, Chei, Gault, Qhiverin, had said to his last followers, when they had put distance between themselves and their enemies.

Rhanin had only shaken his head. There was nothing for him in Morund, only in Mante, where his kin were, and his wife, and all else Skarrin had reft away from him. The wife he had had, the human one, in the hills—she would run in terror from what Rhanin had become; and break Rhanin's heart, and with it the heart of the qhal inside him. And Chei knew both things.

Hesiyyn had said, with eyes like gray glass: 'To live among pigs, my lord? And tend sheep? Or wait Skarrin's justice?'

He did not understand Hesiyyn. Qhiverin when he was fully qhal had never understood him, only that he was the son of two great families both of which disowned him for his gambling, and that he had been under death sentence in Mante, for verses he had written. He had attached himself to Gault and gambled himself into debt even in Morund: that was Hesiyyn.

So they had ridden north again, from the place they had stopped, not having ridden far south at all.

'They cannot outrace us,' Chei said, wiping a second palmful of water over his neck. 'They will rest. They will seek some place to lie up for a while—but not long. They know they are hunted.'

Wounds had stiffened; and Vanye bestirred himself carefully in the dark, while Morgaine slept. He made several flinching tries at getting to his feet then, cursing silently and miserably and discovering each time some new pain that made this and that angle unwise. Finally he clenched his jaw, took in his breath, and made it all in one sudden effort.

'Ah—' she murmured.

'Hush,' he said, 'sleep. I am only working the stiffness out.'

He dressed by starlight, struggled with breeches and bandages and shirt and padding, and last of all the mail, which settled painfully onto strained muscles and shortened his breath. He fastened up the buckles of the leather that covered it, making them as loose as he dared; he fastened on his belts.

Then he walked by starlight to the place she had tethered the horses, and soothed them and made the acquaintance of the two they had from Chei's men, animals by no means to be disparaged, he thought: the Morund folk bred good horses.

Then he gathered up their blankets and bridles and saddles, the latter with an effort that brought him a cold sweat, but painful as it was, it was good to stretch and move and pleasant to feel some of the stiffness work out of him.

It was even more pleasant to sink down on his heels near Morgaine and whisper: 'Liyo, we are ready. I have the horses saddled.'

'Out on you,' she said muzzily, lifting herself on her elbow; and with vexation: 'Thee ought not.'

'I am well enough.' In the tally of the old game, he had scored highly by that; and it was like the stretch of muscles, a homecoming of sorts.

Home, he thought, better than Morij-keep or any hall he had known—home, wherever she was.

She gathered herself up and paused by him, to lay her hand on his shoulder, and when he pressed his atop it, to bend and hug him to her, with desperate strength, while he was too stiff to stand as easily. 'A little further before daybreak,' she said. 'We will gain what we can. Then we will rest as we need to. With the—'

There was a disturbance among the horses, the two geldings and the mare and the stud in proximity ample reason for it, but Morgaine had stopped; and he listened, still and shivering in the strain of night-chill and stiff muscles.

He pressed her hand, hard, and hers dosed on his and pushed at him: Iagree. Move. I do not like this.

He got up then, silently and in one move, for all the pain it cost. He reached Arrhan and quieted her and the remounts as Morgaine took Siptah in charge.

In the starlight, downhill where the stream cut through, a solitary rider appeared, and watered his horse at the lower pool. In a little more, two more riders joined him, and watered theirs, and drank, and rode on across.

Vanye shivered. He could not help it. He bade Arrhan stand quiet with a tug at her head; the others, the remounts, he held close and kept as still as he could, while Morgaine kept Siptah quiet.

They were not Chei's folk, whatever they were. He reckoned them for riders out of Mante, hunting reported invaders—else they would ride the road and go by daylight like honest and innocent travelers.