Gate of Ivrel

he cried, his voice carried away on the biting wind. But she looked up, her eyes scanning the high walls. “ Liyo!”

She lifted her hand. She saw him. She turned to those about her, and the attitude of her body was one of anger, and theirs that of embarrassment. They turned from her, all save those that must hold the horses.

Then he grew afraid for her, that she would take arms and be killed, not knowing the case of things.

“The matter of a bargain,” he shouted down at her. “You are free on his oath, but do not trust him, liyo!”

It seemed then she understood. She suddenly turned Siptah’s head and laid heels to him, putting him to a pace headed for the gate, such that he feared she would fall at the turning. The black that had been Liell’s followed, jerked along by the rein made fast to Siptah’s saddle. There was a pack on the black’s saddle—his own gear.

And one other followed, before the gate swung shut again.

Rvn the singer, harp slung to his back, spurred his pony after her. Tears sprang to Vanye’s eyes, though he could not say why; he thought afterward that it was anger, seeing her take another innocent as she had taken him to ruin.

He sank down by the fireside again, bowed his head upon his arms and tried not to think of what lay in store for him.

“Father died,” said Erij, “six months ago.” He stretched his legs out before the fire in his own clean and carpeted apartments, which had been their father’s, and looked down where Vanye sat cross-legged upon the hearthstones, unwilling guest for the evening. The air reeked of wine. Erij manipulated cup, then pitcher, upon the table at his left hand, by gesture offered more to Vanye. He refused.

“And you killed him,” Erij added then, as if they had been discussing some distant acquaintance, “in the sense that you killed Handrys: Father grew morbid over Handrys. Kept the room as you see it. Everything the same. Harness down in the stable—the same. Turned his horse out. Good animal, gone wild now. Or maybe gone to the wolves, who knows? But Father made a great mound down there by the west woods, and there he buried Handrys. Mother could not reason with him. She fell ill, what with his moods—and she died in a fall down the stairs. Or he pushed her. He was terrible when he was in one of his moods. After she died he took to sitting long hours out in the open, out on the edge of the mound. Mother was buried out there too. And that was the way he died. It rained. We rode out to bring him in perforce. And he took ill and died.”

Vanye did not look at him, only listened, finding his brother’s voice unpleasantly like that of Leth Kasedre. The manner was there, the casual cruelty. It had been terrible enough when they were children: now that a man who ruled Nhi sat playing these same games of pointless cruelty, it had a yet more unwholesome flavor.

Erij nudged him with his foot. “He never did forgive you, you know.”

“I did not expect that he would,” Vanye said without turning around.

“He never forgave me either,” said Erij after a moment, “for being the one of us two legitimate sons that lived. And for being less than perfect afterward. Father loved perfection—in women, in horses—in his sons. You disappointed him first. And scarred me. He hated leaving Nhi to a cripple.”

Vanye could bear it no longer. He turned upon his knees and made the bow he had never paid his brother, that of respect due his head-of-clan, pressing his brow to the stones. Then he straightened, looked up in desperate appeal. “Let me ride out of here, brother. I have duty to her. she was not well, and I have an oath to her that I have to keep. If I survive that, then I will come back, and we will settle matters.”

Erij only looked at him. He thought that perhaps this was what Erij was seeking after all, that he lose his pride. Erij smiled gently.

“Go to your room,” he said.

Vanye swore, angry and miserable, and rose up and did as he was bidden, back to the wretchedness of Handrys’s room, back to dust and ghosts and filth, forced to sleep in Handrys’s bed, and wear Handrys’s clothes, and pace the floor in loneliness.

It rained that night. Water splashed in through the crack in the unpainted and rotting shutters, and thunder cracked alarmingly as it always did off the side of the mountains. He squinted against the lightning flashes and stared out into the relief of hills against the clouds, wondering how Morgaine fared, whether she lived or had succumbed to her wound, and whether she had managed to find shelter. In time, the rain turned to sleet, and the thunder continued to roll.

By morning a little crust of snow lay on everything, and Ra-morij’s ancient stones were clean. But traffic back and forth in the courtyard soon began, and tracked the ground into brown. Snow never stayed long in Morija, except in Alis Kaje, or the cap of Proeth.

It would, he thought, make things easier for any that followed a trail, and that thought made him doubly uneasy.

All that day, as the day before, no one came, not even to supply him with food. And in the evening came the summons that he expected, and he must again sit with Erij at table, he at one side and Erij at the other.

This evening there was a Chya longbow in the middle of the table amid the dishes and the wine.

“Am I supposed to ask the meaning of it?” Vanye said finally.

“Chya tried our border in the night. Your prediction was true: Morgaine does have unusual followers.”

“I am sure,” said Vanye, “that she did not summon them.”

“We killed five of them,” said Erij, self-pleased.

“I met a man in Ra-leth,” said Vanye, thin-lipped, the while he poured himself wine, “whose image you have grown to be, legitimate brother, heir of Rijan. Who kept rooms as you keep them, and guests as you keep them, and honor as you keep it.”

Erij seemed amused by that, but the cover was thin. “Bastard brother, your humor is sharp this evening. You are growing over-confident in my hospitality.”

“Brother-killing will be no better for you than it was to me,” Vanye said, keeping his voice quiet and calm, far more so than he felt inside. “Even if you are able to keep your hall well filled with Myya, like those fine servants of yours the other side of the door—it is Nhi that you rule. You ought to remember that. Cut my throat and there are Nhi who will not forget it.”

“Do you think so?” Erij returned, leaning back. “You have no direct kin in Nhi, bastard brother: only me. And I do not think Chya will be able to do anything—if they cared, which I much doubt they do. And she was quick enough to leave you. I would that I knew what there was in the witch that could turn the likes of you into the faithful servant, Vanye the self-serving, Vanye the coward. And no bed-sharing, either. That is a great sorcery, that you would give that loyal a service to anyone. You were always much better at ambushes.”

Some that Erij said of him he owned for the truth: younger brother against the older, bastard against the heir-sons, he had not always stayed by the terms of honor. And they had laid ambushes of their own, the more so after his nurse died and he came to take up residence in the fortress of Ra-morij.

That was, he recalled, the time when they had ceased to be brothers: when he came to live in the fortress, and they perceived him not as poor relation, but as rival. He had not understood clearly how it was at the time. He had been nine.

Erij was twelve, Handrys thirteen: it was at that age that boys could be most mindfully, mindlessly cruel.

“We were children,” Vanye said. “Things were different.”

“When you killed Handrys,” said Erij, “you were plain enough.”

“I did not want to kill him,” Vanye protested. “Father said he never struck to kill, but I did not know that. Erij, he drove at me: you saw, you saw it. And I never would have struck for you.”

Erij stared at him, cold and void. “Except that my hand chanced to be shielding him after he had got his death-wound. He was down, bastard brother.”

“I was too pressed to think. I was wrong. I am guilty. I do penance for it.”

“Actually,” said Erij, “Handrys meant to mar you somewhat: he never liked you, not at all. He did not find it to his liking that you were given a place among the warriors: he said that he would see you own that you had no right there. Myself, it was neither here nor there with me; but that was how it was: Handrys was my brother. If he had decided to cut your throat, he was heir to the Nhi and I would have considered that too. Pity we aimed at so little. You were better with that blade than we thought you were, else Handrys would not have baited you in the casual way he did. I have to give you due credit, bastard brother: you were good.”