Suddenly he saw Morgaine’s hand seek toward her belt beneath her cloak, and he knew that she was awake.
“I will put wood upon the fire,” he said, this also for any watcher. He rolled off the log into a crouch, almost expecting a rush of something.
Brush cracked. Snow crunched, rapidly receding.
He looked at Morgaine.
“It was no wolf,” she said. “Go feed the fire, and keep an eye to the horses. If we ride out now we are perhaps no better target than we are sitting here, but I fear this trail has changed too much to chance it in the dark.”
It was an uneasy night thereafter. The clouds grew thicker. Toward morning there came the first siftings of snow.
Vanye swore, heartbreakingly, with feeling. He hated the cold like death itself; it closed in about them until all the world was white, and they drifted through the veiling wind as they rode, like wraiths, nearly losing one another upon occasion, until the lowering sky ceased to sift down on them and they had an afternoon free of misery.
The trail ceased to be a trail at all, yet Morgaine still professed to know the way: she had, she avowed, ridden it only a few days ago, when trees were still young that now were old, where others stood that now did not, and the path was fair and well-ridden. Yet she insisted she would not mistake their way.
And toward evening they did indeed come to what seemed a proper road, or the remnant of one, and made a camp in a pleasant place that was at least sheltered from the rising wind, a hollow among rocks that looked out upon an open meadow—rare in these hills. With the wind up and no dry bed for their rest, he did what he could with pine boughs, and tried beneath the snow for grass for the horses, but it was too deep, and iced. He fed the animals the last of the grain, wondering what would become of them on the morrow, and then returned to the fire that Morgaine had made, there to sit hunched in his cloak like a winter bird, miserable and dejected. He slept early, taking what rest he could until Morgaine nudged him with her foot. Thereafter she slept in the warm place he had quitted, and he sat slumped against a rock and wrapped his arms and legs about his longsword, trying against his weariness to hold himself alert.
He nodded, unintended, jerked erect again. One of the horses snorted. He thought that he himself had startled it by his sudden movement, but the uneasiness nagged at him.
Then he rose up with unsheathed sword in hand and walked out to see the horses.
A weight hit his back, snarling and spitting and sounding human. He cried out and spun, wrist shocked as the sword bit bone; and something went loping off, hunched and shadowy in the dark. There were others joining it in its retreat. He saw a light flash, spun about to see Morgaine.
For an instant he cringed, fearing what she held no less than he feared beasts out of Koris, and still trembling in every limb from the attack.
She waited for him, and he came back to her, knelt down on the mat of boughs and zealously cleaned his sword in snow and rubbed it dry. He loathed the blood of Koris-things upon the clean steel. His hurts were numb; he hoped that there had not been any to break the skin. He did not think they had pierced the mail shirt.
“These are not natural beasts,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “They are far from natural. But they can die by natural weapons.”
“Is thee hurt?”
“No,” he judged, surprised, even pleased that she had asked; he nodded his head in a half-bow, tribute to courtesy which
She settled again. “Will rest? I will wake a while.”
“No,” he said again. “I could not sleep.”
She nodded, settled, and curled herself back to sleep.
The snows had passed by morning; the sun rose clear and bright upon them, beginning even to melt a little of the snow, and they took their way down the other side of the mountain ridge, among pines and rocks and increasing openness of the road.
Upon a height they suddenly had view of lower lands, of white shading into green, where lesser altitudes had gained less snow, and forest lay as far as the eye could see into lesser Koris and into the lower lands.
Far away beyond the haze lay the ominous cone of Ivrel, but it was much too far to see. There were only the hazy white caps of Alis Kaje, mother of eagles, and of Cedur Maje, which were the mountain walls of Morija, dividing Kursh from Andur, Thiye’s realms from those of men.
They rode easily this day, found grass for the horses and stopped to rest a time, rode on farther and in lighter spirits. They came upon a fence, a low shepherd’s fence of rough stones, the first indication that they had found of human habitation.
It was the first sight of anything human that Vanye had seen since the last brush of a Myya arrow, and he was glad to see the evidence of plain herder folk, and breathed easier. In the last few days and in such company as he now rode one could forget humanity, farms and sheep and normal folk.
Then there was a little house, a homely place with rough stone walls and a garden that had gone to weeds, snow-covered in patches. The shutters hung.
Morgaine shook her head, incredulity in her eyes.
“What was this place?” he asked her.
“A farm,” said Morgaine, “a fair and pleasant one.” And then: “I spent the night here—hardly a month of my life ago. They were kindly folk who lived here.”
He thought to himself that they must also have been fearless to have sheltered Morgaine after Irien; and he saw by leaning round in his saddle when they had passed to the far side of the house, that the back portion of the roof had fallen in.
She did not see. She rode ahead without looking back, and he let his bay—he called the beast Mai, as all his horses would be Mai—overtake the gray. They rode knee to knee, morose and silent Morgaine was never joyous company. This sight made her melancholy indeed.
Then, upon a sudden winding of the trail, as the pines began to crowd close upon them and upon the little fence, there sat two ragged children.
Male and female they seemed to be, raggle-taggle, shag-haired little waifs of enormous dark eyes and pinched cheeks, sitting on the fence itself despite the snow. They scrambled up, eyes pools of distress, stretching out bony hands.
“Food, food,” they cried, “for charity.”
The gray, Siptah, reared up, lashing with his hooves; and Morgaine reined him aside, narrowly missing the boy. She had hard shift to hold the animal, who shied, wide-nostrilled and round-eyed until his haunches brought up against the wall upon the other side, and Vanye curbed his Mai with a hard hand, cursing at the reckless children. Such waifs were not an uncommon sight in Koris. They begged, stole shamelessly.
There but for Rijan, Vanye thought occasionally: lord’s bastards sometimes came to other fates than he had known before his exile. The poor were frequent in the hills of Andur, clan-less and destitute, and poor girls’ fatherless children generally came to ill ends. If they survived childhood they grew up as bandits in earnest.
And the girl perhaps would spawn more of her own kind, misery breeding misery.
They could not be more than twelve, the pair of them, and they seemed to be brother and sister—perhaps twins. They had the same wolf-look in their eyes, the same pointed leanness to their faces as they huddled together away from the dangerous hooves.
“Food,” they still pleaded, holding out each a hand.
“We have enough to spare.” Vanye directed his words to Morgaine, a request, for their saddlebags were still heavy with the frozen venison of days before. He pitied such as these children, loathsome as they were, always gave them charity when he could—for luck, remembering what he was.
And when Morgaine consented with a nod he leaned across and lifted the saddlebag from Siptah’s gray back and was about to open it when the girl, venturing close to Mai, snatched his saddleroll off the rear of the saddle, slashing one of its bindings.
