something that did not need sight, and then looked back, and slowly returned to the circle of torchlight.
“We,” said Bydarra, “we are the heirs of the true
“Hope,” said Vanye, “that that is so.”
“You are human,” Bydarra said contemptuously.
“Yes.”
“Those books,” Bydarra said, “contain nothing. The Old Ones were flesh and bone, and if men will worship them, that is their choice. Priests—” The old lord made a shrug of contempt, nodding toward the wall, by implication toward the court that lay below. “Parasites. The lowest of our halfling blood. They venerate a lie, mumbling nonsense, believing that they once ruled the Wells, that they are doing some special service by tending them. Even the oldest records do not go back into the time of the Wells. The books are worthless. The Hiua kings were a plague the Wells spilled forth, and they tampered with the forces of them, they hurled sacrifices into them, but they had no more power than the Shiua priests. They never ruled the Wells. They were only brought here. Then the sea began to take Hiuaj. And lately—there is Roh; there is yourself. You claim that you have arrived by the Wells. Is that so?”
“Yes,” Vanye answered in a faint voice. The things that Bydarra said began to accord with too much. Once in Andur a man had questioned Morgaine; the words had long rested, in a corner of his mind, awaiting some reasoned explanation: The world went wide, she had answered that man, around the bending of the path. I went through. And suddenly he began to perceive the
“And the woman,” asked Bydarra, “she on the gray horse?”
He said nothing.
“Roh spoke of her,” Bydarra said. “You spoke of her; the Hiua girl confirms it. Rumor is running the courtyard: talk, careless talk, before the servants. Roh hints darkly of her intentions; the Hiua girl confounds her with Hiua legend.”
Vanye shrugged lest he seem concerned, his heart beating hard against his ribs. “The Hiua set herself on my trail; I think her folk had cast her out. Sometimes she talks wildly. She may be mad. I would put no great trust in what she says.”
“Angharan,” Bydarra said. “Morgen-Angharan. The seventh and unfavorable power: Hiua kings and Aren superstition are always tangled. The white queen. But of course if you are not Hiua, this would not be familiar to you.”
Vanye shook his head, clenched his hand over his wrist behind his back. “It is not familiar to me,” he said.
“What is her true name?”
Again he shrugged.
“Roh,” said Bydarra, “calls her a threat to all life—says that she has come to destroy the Wells and ruin the land. He offers his own skill to save us—whatever that skill may prove to be. Some,” Bydarra added, with a look that made Hetharu avoid his eyes sullenly, “some of us are willing to fall at his feet. Not all of us are gullible.”
There was silence, in which Vanye did not want to look at Hetharu, nor at Bydarra, who deliberately baited his son.
“Perhaps,” Bydarra continued softly, “there is no such woman, and you and the Hiua girl are allied with this Roh. Or perhaps you have some purposes we in Ohtij-in do not know yet. Humankind drove us from Hiuaj. The Hiua kings were never concerned with our welfare, and they never held the power that Roh claims for himself.”
Vanye stared at him, calculating, weighing matters, desperately. “Her name is Morgaine,” he said. “And you would be better advised to offer her hospitality rather than Roh.”
“Ah,” said Bydarra. “And what bid would she make us? What would she offer?”
“A warning,” he said, forcing the words, knowing they would not be favored. “And I give you one: to dismiss him and me and have nothing to do with any of us. That is your safety. That is all the safety you have.”
The mockery left Bydarra’s seamed face. He came closer, his lean countenance utterly sober, pale eyes intense: tall, the halflings, so that Vanye found himself meeting the old lord eye to eye. Light fingers touched the side of his arm, urging confidentiality, the while from the edge of his vision. Vanye saw Hetharu leaning against the table, arms folded, regarding him coldly. “Hnoth is upon us,” Bydarra said, “when the floods rise and no traveling is possible. This Chya Roh is anxious to set out for Abarais now, this day, before the road is closed. He seems likewise anxious that you be sent to him when he is there, directly as it becomes possible; and what say you to this, Nhi Vanye i Chya?”
“That you are as lost as I am if ever you let him reach Abarais,” Vanye said. The pulse roared in him as he stared into that aged
“Then he can do the things he claims,” said Hetharu suddenly.
Vanye glanced toward Hetharu, who left the table and advanced to his father’s side.
“His power would be such,” Vanye said “that the whole of Shiuan and Hiuaj would become whatever pleased him—pleased him, my lord. You do not look like a man that would relish having a master.”
Bydarra smiled grimly and looked at Hetharu. “It may be,” said Bydarra, “that you have been well answered.”
“By another with something to win,” said Hetharu, and seized Vanye’s arm with such insolent violence that anger blinded him for the moment: he thrust his arm free, one clear thread of reason still holding him from the princeling’s throat. He drew a ragged breath and looked to Bydarra, to authority.
“I would not see Roh set at Abarais,” Vanye said, “and once your own experience shows you that I was right, my lord, I fear it will be much too late to change your mind.”
“Can you master the Wells yourself?” Bydarra asked.
“Set me at Abarais, until my own liege comes. Then—ask what you will in payment, and it will go better with this land.”
“Can you,” asked Hetharu, seizing him a second time by the arm, “manage the Wells yourself?”
Vanye glared into that handsome wolf-face, the white-edged nostrils, the dark eyes smoldering with violence, the lank white hair that was not, like the lesser lords’, the work of artifice.
“Take your hands from me,” he managed to say, and cast his appeal still to Bydarra. “My lord,” he said with a desperate, deliberate calm, “my lord, in this room, there was some bargain struck—your son and Roh and other young lords together. Look to the nature of it.”
Bydarra’s face went rigid with some emotion; he thrust Hetharu aside, looked terribly on Vanye, then turned that same look toward his son, beginning a word that was not finished. A blade flashed, and Bydarra choked, turned again under Hetharu’s second blow, the bright blood starting from mouth and throat. Bydarra fell forward, and Vanye staggered back under the dying weight of him—let him fall, in horror, with the hot blood flooding his own arms.
And he stared across weapon’s edge at a son who could murder father and show nothing of remorse. There was fear in that white face: hate. Vanye met Hetharu’s eyes and knew the depth of what had been prepared for him.
“Hail me lord,” said Hetharu softly, “lord in Ohtij-in and in all Shiuan.”
Panic burst in him. “Guard!” he cried, as Hetharu lifted the bloody dagger and slashed his own arm, a second fountain of blood. The dagger flew, struck at Vanye’s feet, in the spreading dark pool from Bydarra’s body. Vanye stumbled back from the dagger as the door opened, and there were armed men there in force, pikes lowered toward him. Hetharu leaned against the fireplace in unfeigned shock, leaking blood through his fingers that clasped his wounded arm to his breast.
“He—” Vanye cried, and staggered back under the blow of a pikeshaft that sent him sprawling and drove the wind from him. He scrambled for his feet and hurled himself for the door, barred from it by others—thrown aside, seized up the dagger that lay in the pool of blood, and drove for Hetharu’s throat.
