Vanye gathered himself up off the man and caught his own breath in great frightened gasps, looking up at his liege, who had caught firm hold of Siptah's halter rope. He flexed the shoulder as he rose and thanked Heaven the hoof had clipped only leather and a mail shirt.
'He could have had a knife,' Morgaine raged at him. 'He might have had any sort of weapon! Thee did not know!'
He thought the same, now it was done; more, he thought of the hoof-strike that had missed his head, and his knees went to water. The big gray had shifted balance in mid-attack and all but fallen trying to miss him; that was what had saved them.
At his feet the prisoner moaned and moved, a half-conscious stir of his limbs. Vanye set his foot in the man's back when he tried to get an arm under him and pressed him flat, not gently.
'He is not altogether lame,' Morgaine observed dryly, then, having recovered her humor.
'No,' Vanye said, still hard-breathing. The deserved reproof of his mercy stung more than the bruise did. 'Nor in any wise grateful.'
Chapter Two
Dawn light grew in the clearing, and Vanye probed the ashes of their fire with a bit of kindling, as he had fed it from time to time in the hours of his watch. Yellow threads of fire climbed and sparked in the threads of inner bark of something very like willow. He added a few other twigs, then arranged more substantial pieces, deliberate in his leisure. It was a rare moment in which nothing pressed them, in which he knew that they were not riding on, and all he needed think on was the fire, the mystery that was always homelike, no matter what the sky over him, or the number of moons in it. The horses grazed in the clearing on the riverside, where the twisted trees let in enough light for grass—faithful sentries both, dapple gray Siptah wise to war and ambushes, Arrhan forest-wise and sensible. Something might escape human ears, but the horses would give alarm—and they found nothing amiss in this morning. Catastrophe had attempted them in the night—and failed.
On the other side of the fire, the glow falling on slender hand and silver hair, Morgaine slept on, which small vision he cherished in that same quiet way as he did the fire and the dimly rising sun.
'Sleep,' he whispered when she stirred. Sometimes, in such rare leisure, she would yield him the body- warmed blankets, so he might sleep a little while she made breakfast—or he yielded them to her, whichever of them had sat the watch into dawn.
She half-opened her eyes and lifted her head, nose above the blankets. 'Thee can sleep,' she said, in the Kurshin tongue, as he had spoken—but it was an older accent, forgotten by the time he was born. It was a habit she had when she spoke to him alone, or when she was muddled with sleep.
'I am full awake,' he said, which was a lie: he felt the long hours of his watch in a slight prickling in his eyes, his bruised shoulder ached, and the blankets were tempting shelter from the morning chill. But he saved her from hardship when he could—so often that it became a contest between them, of frowns and maneuverings, each favoring the other in a perpetual rivalry which tilted one way or the other according to the day and the need.
'Sleep,' he said now. Morgaine sank back and covered her head; and he smiled with a certain satisfaction as he delved into their saddlebags and brought out a pan for mixing and cooking.
The prisoner too, lying prone in his cloak, showed signs of life, rolling onto his side. Vanye reckoned what his most pressing need likely was, and reckoned that it could wait a time: shepherding an escape-prone madman out to the woods meant waking Morgaine to put her on guard; or letting their breakfast go cold—neither of which he felt inclined to do, considering the prisoner was healthy enough to have sprinted for the horses last night, and considering he had won a stiff arm for his last attempted kindness.
Morgaine bestirred herself as the smell of cakes and bacon wafted into the air—enough to draw the hungry for leagues about, Vanye reckoned—the most of them bent on banditry, if what they had seen was any guide.
And another glance toward the prisoner showed him lying on his side, staring in their direction with such misery and desolation that Vanye felt his eyes on him even when he looked back at their breakfast.
'I should see to him,' Vanye muttered unhappily when Morgaine came back from the riverside. He poured tea into their smallest mixing bowl, wrapped a cloth about it to keep it warm, and set out a cake and a bit of bacon on the cloth that wrapped his cooking-gear, while Morgaine sat down to eat. 'Have your own,' he said, 'before it cools.'
It did not look like a madman who stared up at him as he came over to his place among the tree-roots. It looked like a very miserable, very hungry man who hoped that food truly was coming to him. 'I will free your hands,' Vanye said, dropping down on his heels beside him. He set the food down carefully on the dead leaves of the forest floor. 'But not your feet. Meddle with that and I will stop you, do you understand? For other necessities I trust you can wait like any civilized man.' It was the qhalur language he spoke, and it did not go so lightly over his tongue as it ought. He was not sure, at times, what hearers did understand of him. 'Do you agree? Or do I take the food back?'
'The food,' the man said, a faint, hoarse voice. 'Yes.'
'You agree.'
A nod of the head, a worried gnawing of the lip.
He turned the prisoner over and gently worked the knots free on his hands. The man only gave a great sigh and lay still on his face a moment, his arms at rest beside him, as a man would who had spent the night with his hands and shoulders going numb.
'He is quieter,' he reported then to Morgaine, in his own tongue, when he settled down to breakfast beside her. He took a cup of tea and considered his hands, where he had touched the man. It was death-stink, lingering: the man was that filthy; and he could not eat until he had walked down to the river and washed his hands.
It was overdone bacon then; Morgaine kept the breakfast warm for him on the coals, along with the tea which by now was bitter-edged. He drank and made a face.
'I should have gotten up,' Morgaine said.
'No,' he said. 'No, you ought not. I will take care of him. I will have him down to the river before the sun is much higher, and I swear to you he will be cleaner before you have to deal with him.'
'I want you to talk to him.'
'You can manage that.'
'Aye—but—'
'Not?'
'I will do it.' Rarely nowadays she put any hard task on him: and he took it, distasteful as it was, likely as he was to make a muddle of things. 'But—'
'But?'
'He can lie to me. How should I know? How should I know anything he told me? I have no subtlety with lies.'
'Is thee saying I do?'
'I did not say—'
She smiled, a quirk of her mouth, gray eyes flickering. 'Man and man; Man and Man. That is the fact. Between one thing and the other I am not the one of us two he will trust. No. Learn what brought him here. Promise him what thee sees fit to promise. Only—' She reached out and laid a hand on his arm. 'He will not go free. We cannot allow that. Thee knows what I will give—and what I will not.'
'I know,' he said, and thought as he said it that he had chosen the road that brought him to this pass— thought suddenly how more than one land cursed Morgaine kri Chya for the deaths she brought. He had tried in his life to be an honorable man, and not to lie.
But he had chosen to go with her.
It was far more warily the man regarded him on his return, tucked up with his back against a tree, eyes following every move he made—a filthy, desperate figure their guest was by daylight, his nose having bled into his white-blond mustache and down his unkept and patchy beard, dirt-sores and crusted lines on his face, a trickle of
