Wall of Shiuan

while the halfling lord retreated into his dreams: he chafed at this, vexed even in their company.

“This road,” Morgaine said suddenly, addressing Kithan, “goes most directly to Abarais.”

Kithan agreed with a languorous nod of his head.

“There is none other,” said Morgaine, “unmapped in your books.”

“None horses might use,” said Kithan. “The mountains are twisted, full of stonefalls and the like; and of lakes; of chasms. There is only this way, save for men afoot, and no quicker than we go. You do not have to worry for the rabble behind us, but,” he added with a heavy-lidded smile of amusement, “you have the true lord of Ohtij-in ahead of you, with the most part of our strength, a-horse and armed, a mark less easy than I was in Ohtij-in. And they may afford you some little inconvenience.”

“To be sure,” said Morgaine.

Kithan smiled, resting his elbows on the shelf of rock at his back; his pale eyes fixed upon her with that accustomed distance, unreachable. The men that were with him were alike as brothers, pale hair drawn back at the nape, the same profile, men dark-eyed, alike in armor, alike in attitude, one to his right, one to his left.

“Why are you with us?” Vanye asked. “Misplaced trust?”

Kithan’s composure suffered the least disturbance; a frown passed over his face. His eyes fixed on Vanye’s with obscure challenge, and a languid pale hand, cuffed in delicate lace, gestured toward his heart. “On your pleasure, Barrows-lord.”

“You are mistaken,” Vanye said.

“Why,” asked Morgaine very softly, “are you with us, my lord Kithan, once of Ohtij-in?”

Kithan tossed his head back and gave a silent and mirthless laugh, moved his wrist in the direction of the Suvoj. “We have little choice, do we not?”

“And when we do meet with Roh and with Hetharu’s forces, you will be at our backs.”

Kithan frowned. “But I am your man, Morgaine-Angharan.” He extended his long legs, crossed, before him, easy as a man in his own hall. “I am your most devoted servant.”

“Indeed,” said Morgaine.

“Doubtless,” said Kithan, regarding her with that same distant smile, “you will serve me as you served those who followed you to Ohtij-in.”

“It is more than possible,” said Morgaine.

“They were your own,” Kithan exclaimed with sudden, plaintive force, as if he pleaded something; and Jhirun, flinching, edged against the rocks at Vanye’s side.

“They may have been once,” Morgaine said. “But those that I knew are long buried. Their children are not mine.”

Kithan’s face recovered its placidity; laughter returned to his half-lidded eyes. “But they followed you,” he said. “I find that ironical. They knew you, knew what you had done to their ancestors, and still they followed you, because they thought you would make an exception of them; and you served them exactly as you are. Even the Aren-folk, who hate you, and tie up white feathers at their doorways—” He smiled widely and laughed, a mere breath. “A reality. A fixed point in all this reasonless universe. I am khal. I have never found a point on which to stand or a shrine at which to worship—til now. You are Angharan; you come to destroy the Wells and all that exists. You are the only rational being in the world. So I also follow you, Morgaine-Angharan. I am your faithful worshipper.”

Vanye thrust himself to his feet, hand to his belt, loathing the qujal’s insolence, his mockery, his elaborate fancies: Morgaine should not have to suffer this, and did, for it was not her habit to avenge herself for words, or for other wrongs.

“At your pleasure,” he said to Kithan.

Kithan, weaponless, indicated so with an outward gesture, a slight hardness to his eyes.

“Let be,” Morgaine said. “Prepare the horses. Let us be moving, Vanye.”

“I might cut their reins and their girths for them,” said Vanye, scowling at the halfling lord and his two men, reckoning them, several, a moderately fair contest. “They could test their horsemanship with that, and we would not have to give them further patience.”

Morgaine hesitated, regarding Kithan. “Let him be,” she said. “His courage comes from the akil. It will pass.”

The insouciance of Kithan seemed stung by that. He frowned, and leaned against the lock staring at her, no longer capable of distance.

“Prepare the horses,” she said. “If he can hold our pace, well; and if not—the Hiua will remember that he companied with me.”

There was unease in the guards’ faces, a flicker of the same in Kithan’s; and then, with a bow, a taut smile: “ Arrhthein,” he said to her. “ Sharron a thrissn nthinn.”

“ Arrhtheis,” Morgaine echoed softly, and Kithan settled back with an estimating look in his eyes, as if something had passed between them of irony and bitter humor.

It was the language of the Stones. I am not qujal, Morgaine had insisted to him once, which he believed, which he still insisted on believing.

But when he had gone, at Morgaine’s impatient gesture, to attend the horses, he looked back at them, his pale-haired liege and the pale-haired qujal together, tall and slender, in all points similar; a chill ran through him.

Jhirun, human-dark, a wraith in brown, scrambled up and quitted that company and ran to him, as he gathered up the reins of her mare and brought it to the roadside. He threw down there the bundle she had made of their supplies and began rerolling the blankets, on his knees at the side of the stone road. She knelt down with him and began with feverish earnestness to help him, in this and when he began to tie the separate rolls to their three saddles, redistributing supplies and tightening harness.

Her mare’s girth too he attended, seeing that it was well done, on which her life depended. She waited, hovering at his side.

“Please,” she said at last, touching at his elbow. “Let me ride with you; let me stay with you.”

“I cannot promise that.” He avoided her eyes, and brushed past her to attend the matter of his own horse. “If the mare cannot hold our pace, still she is steady and she will manage to keep you ahead of the Hiua. I have other obligations. I cannot think of anything else just now.”

“These men—lord, I am afraid of them. They—”

She did not finish. It ended in tears. He looked at her and remembered her the night that Kithan had visited his cell, small and wretched as she had been in the hands of the guards, men half-masked and anonymous in their demon-helms. Her they had seized, and not him.

“Do you know these men?” he asked of her harshly.

She did not answer, only stared at him helplessly with the flush of shame staining her cheeks; and he looked askance at Kithan’s man, who was likewise caring for his lord’s horse. Privately he thought of what justice Kursh reserved for such as they: her ancestors had been, though she had forgotten it, tan-uyin, and honorable, and proud.

He was not free to take up her quarrel. He had a service.

He set his hand on hers; it was small, but rough, a peasant’s hand, that knew hard labor. “Your ancestors,” he said, “were high-born men. My father’s wife was Myya, who gave him his legitimate sons. They are a hard- minded clan, the Myya; they ‘my lord’ only those that they respect.”

Her hand, leaving his, went to her breast, where he remembered a small gold amulet that once he had returned to her. The pain her eyes had held departed, leaving something clear and far from fragile.

“The mare,” he said, “will not run that far behind, Myya Jhirun.”

She left him. He watched her, at the roadside, bend and gather a handful of smooth stones, and drop them, as she straightened, into her bodice. Then she gathered up the mare’s reins and set herself into the saddle.

And suddenly he saw something beyond her, at the bottom of the long hill, a dark mass on the road beyond the knoll that rose like a barrow-mound at the turning.

“ Liyo,” he called out, appalled at the desperate endurance of those that followed them, afoot. Not for revenge: for revenge they surely could not follow so far or so determinedly... but for hope, a last hope, that rested not with Morgaine, but with Roh.

There were Shiua and the priest, who knew what Roh had promised in Ohtij-in; and there was Fwar: for