Wall of Shiuan

frightened horse. But Jhirun did not move at all, her feet braced in the preparation of a step never taken, her arms clenched about her bowed head.

“Tell me again,” Morgaine said softly, very audibly, “that you do not know this land, Jhirun Ela’s- daughter.”

Jhirun sank to her knees, her hands still clenched in her hair. “I have never been further than this down the road,” she said in a trembling voice. “I have heard, I have only heard that it leads to Shiuan, and that was before the flood. I do not know.”

“Yet you travel it without food, without a cloak, without any preparation. You hunt and you fish. Will that keep you warm of nights? Why do you ride this road at all?”

“Hiuaj is drowning,” Jhirun wept. “Since the Wells were closed and the Moon was broken, Hiuaj has been drowning, and it is coming soon. I do not want to drown.”

Her mad words hung in the air, quiet amid the rush of wind, the restless stamp and blowing of the horses. Vanye blessed himself, the weight of the very sky pressing on his soul.

“How long ago,” asked Morgaine, “did this drowning begin?”

But Jhirun wiped at the tears that spilled onto her cheeks and seemed beyond answering sanely.

“How long?” Morgaine repeated harshly.

“A thousand years,” Jhirun said.

Morgaine only stared at her a moment. “These Wells: a ring of stones, is that not your meaning? One overlooks the great river; and there will be yet another, northward, one master Well. Do you know it by name?”

Jhirun nodded, her hands clenched upon the necklace that she wore, bits of sodden feather and metal and stone. She shivered visibly. “Abarais,” she answered faintly. “Abarais, in Shiuan. Dai-khal, dai-khal, I have told you all the truth, all that I know. I have told everything.”

Morgaine frowned, and at last came near the girl, offering her hand to help her rise, but Jhirun shrank from it, weeping. “Come,” said Morgaine impatiently, “I will not harm you. Only do not trouble me; I have shown you that... and better that you see it now, than that you assume too far with us.”

Jhirun would not take her hand. She struggled to her feet unaided, braced herself, her shawl clutched about her. Morgaine turned and gathered up Siptah’s reins, rose easily into the saddle.

Vanye drew a whole breath at last, expelled softly. He left his horse standing and went to the fireside, gathered up his helmet and covered his head, lacing the leather coif at his throat. Last of all he paused to scatter the embers of their campfire.

He heard a horse moving as he turned, recoiled as Siptah plunged across his path, Morgaine taut-reining him to an instant stop. He looked up, dismayed at the rage with which she looked at him.

“Never,” she hissed softly, “never cry warning against me again.”

“ Liyo,” he said, stricken to remember what he had done, the outcry he had made. “I am sorry; I did not expect—”

“Thee does not know me, ilin. Thee does not know me half so well as thee trusts to.”

The harshness chilled. For a moment he stared up at her in shock, fixed by that cold as Jhirun had been, unable to answer her.

She spurred Siptah past him. He sought the pony’s tether, half blind with shame and anger, ripped it from its branch and tied it to his own horse’s saddle. “Come,” he bade Jhirun, struggling to keep anger from his voice, with her who had not deserved it. He rose into the saddle, cleared a stirrup for her, suddenly alarmed to see Morgaine leaving the clearing, a pale flash of Siptah’s body in the murk.

Jhirun tried for the stirrup and could not reach it; he reached down in an agony of impatience, seized her arm and pulled, dragged her up so that she could throw her leg over and settle behind him.

“Hold to me,” he ordered her, jerked her shy hands about his waist and laid spurs to the gelding, that started forward with a suddenness that must have hurt the pony. He pursued Morgaine’s path, only dimly aware of branches that raked his face in the passage. He fended them with his right hand and used the spurs a second time. One thing he saw, a pallor through the trees, fast opening a lead on him.

Soul-bound: that was ilin–oath, and he had strained the terms between them. Morgaine’s loyalty lay elsewhere, to a thing he did not understand or want to know: wars of qujal, that had ruined kingdoms and toppled kings and made the name of Morgaine kri Chya a curse in the lands of men.

She sought Gates, the witchfires that were passage between world and world, and sealed them after her, one and another and another. His world had changed, he had been born and grown to manhood between two beats of her heart, between two Gate-spanning strides of that gray horse. The day that he had given her his oath, a part of him had died, that sense of the commonplace that let ordinary men live, blind and numb to what terrible things passed about them. He belonged to Morgaine. He could not stay behind. For a stranger’s sake he had riven what peace had grown between them, and she would not bear it. It was that way with Morgaine, that he be with her entirely or be numbered among her enemies.

The trees cut off all view; for a wild moment of terror he thought that in this wilderness he had lost her. She rode against time, time that divided her from Roh; from Gates, that could become a fearful weapon in skilled hands. She would not be stayed longer than flesh must rest—not for an hour, an instant. She had forced them through flood and against storm to bring them this far—all in the obsessive fear that Roh might be before them at the Master Gate, that ruled the other Gates of this sad land—when they had not even known beyond doubt that Roh had come this way.

Now she did know.

Jhirun’s arms clenched about him as they slid on the down-slope. The pony crashed into them with bruising force, and the gelding struggled up another ridge and gained the paved road, the pony laboring to keep the pace.

And there to his relief he saw Morgaine. She had paused, a dim, pale figure on the road beneath the arch of barren trees. He raked the gelding with the spurs and rode to close the gap, reckless in their speed over the uncertain trail.

Morgaine gazed into the shadows, and when he had reined in by her, she simply turned Siptah’s head and rode, sedately, on her way down the road, giving him her shoulder. He had expected nothing else; she owed him nothing.

He rode, his face hot with anger, conscious of Jhirun’s witness. Jhirun’s arms were clenched about him, her head against his back. At last he realized how strained was her hold upon him, and he touched her tightly locked hands. “We are on safe ground now,” he said. “You can let go.”

She was shivering. He felt it. “We are going to Shiuan,” she said.

“Aye,” he said. “It seems that we are.”

Thunder rolled overhead, making the horses skittish, and rain began to patter among the sparse leaves. The road lay in low places for a time, where the horses waded gingerly in shallow water. Eventually they passed out of the shadow of the trees and the overcast sun showed them a wide expanse where the road was the highest point and only landmark. Rain-pocked pools and sickly grasses stretched to left and right. In places the water overflowed the road, a fetid sheet of stagnant green, where dead brush had stopped the cleansing current.

“Jhirun,” said Morgaine out of a long silence. “What is this land named?”

“Hiuaj,” said Jhirun. “All the south is Hiuaj.”

“Can men still live here?”

“Some do,” said Jhirun.

“Why do we not see them?”

There was long silence. “I do not know,” Jhirun said in a subdued voice. “Perhaps they are afraid. Also it is near Hnoth, and they will be moving to higher ground.”

“Hnoth.”

“It floods here,” Jhirun said, hardly audible. Vanye could not see her face. He felt the touch of her fingers on the cantle of the saddle, the shift of her grip, sensed how little she liked to be questioned by Morgaine.

“Shiuan,” Vanye said. “What of that place?”

“A wide land. They grow grain there, and there are great holds.”