Gate of Ivrel

CHAPTER V

THE LAKE OF Domen was ill-famed in more than the Book of Leth. The old road ran along its shore and by the bare-limbed trees that writhed against the night sky. It did not snow here: snow was rare in Korish lands, low as they were, although the forests nearest the mountains went wintry and dead. The lake reflected the stars, sluggish and mirrorlike—still, because, men said, parts of it were very deep.

They rode at a walk now. The horses’ overheated breath blew puffs of steam in the dark, and the hooves made a lonely sound on the occasional stretch of stones over which the trail ran.

And about them was the forest. It had a familiar look. Of a sudden Vanye realized it for the semblance of the vale of Aenor-Pyven.

The presence of Stones of Power: that accounted for the twisting, the unusual barrenness in a place so rife with trees as Koriswood. It was the Gate of Koris-leth that they were nearing. The air had a peculiar oppression, like the air before a storm.

And soon as they passed along the winding shore of the lake they saw a great pillar thrusting up out of the black waters. In the dim moonlight there seemed some engraving on it. Soon other stumps of pillars were visible as they rode farther, marking old and qujalin ruins sunk beneath the waters of the lake.

And two pillars greater than the others crowned a bald hill on the opposite shore.

Morgaine reined in, gazing at the strange and somber view of sunken city and pillars silhouetted against the stars. Even at night the air shimmered about the pillars and the brightest stars that the shimmer could not dim gleamed through that Gate as through a film of troubled water.

“We are safe from pursuit,” said Liell. “Kasedre’s clan fears this lakeshore.”

“They seem prone to drowning,” Morgaine observed. She dismounted, rubbed Siptah’s cheek and dried her hand on the edge of his blanket.

Vanye slid down as they did, and caught his breath, reached for Siptah’s reins and those of Liell’s black horse. The two beasts would not abide each other. Exhausted, out of patience, he walked Siptah and his own bay mare to cool them and spread his own cloak over Liell’s ill-tempered black in the meantime. The air was chill. They had ridden such a pace that the two greater horses were spent and his own little Mai had nearly burst her heart keeping up with them. Long after the two blooded horses were cooled and fit he was still tending to Mai, rubbing her to keep her from chill, until at last he dared let her drink the icy water and have a little grain from their stores. He was well content afterward to curl up on his cloak which he had recovered from the black, and try to sleep, shivering himself in what he feared was a recurrence of fever. He heard Liell’s soft voice and that of Morgaine, discussing the business of Leth, discussing old murders or old accidents that had happened on this lakeshore.

Then Morgaine disturbed his rest, for she never parted from Changeling, and wanted it from her gear. She slipped the dragon blade’s Korish-work strap over her head and hung it from her shoulder to her hip, and walked the shore a time with Liell’s black figure beside hers.

Then, in the great stillness, Vanye heard the coming of distant riders. Of that impulse he sprang up, flung saddle upon Siptah first: she was his first duty; and by this time Morgaine and Liell seemed to have heard, for they were coming back. Vanye pulled Siptah’s girth to its proper tension and secured it, then furiously began to saddle poor Mai. The mare would die. If they were harried much farther, the little beast would go down under him. He hurt for her: the Nhi blood in him loved horses too well to use them so, though Nhi could be cruel in other ways.

Liell flung saddle to the black himself. “I still much doubt,” he said, “that they will come to this shore.”

“I trust distance more than luck,” said Morgaine. “Do as you will, Chya Liell.”

And she swung up to Siptah’s back, having settled Changeling in its accustomed place at the saddle, and laid heels to the gray.

Vanye attempted to mount and follow after. Liell’s hand caught his arm, pulled him off balance, so that he staggered and looked at the man in outrage.

“Do not follow her,” hissed Liell. “Listen to me. She will have the soul from you before she is done, Chya, Listen to me.”

“I am ilin,” he protested. “I have no choice.”

“What is an oath?” Liell whispered urgently, all the while Siptah’s hooves grew faint upon the shingle. “She seeks the power to ruin the middle lands. You do not know how great an evil you are aiding. She lies, Chya Vanye. She has lied before, to the ruin of Koris, of Baien, of the best of the clans and the death of Morij-Yla. Will you help her? Will you turn on your own? The oath says betray family, betray hearth, but not the liyo; but does it say betray your own kind? Come with me, come with me, Chya Vanye.”

For an aging man, Liell had surprising power in his hand: it numbed the blood from Vanye’s hand by its grip upon his elbow. The eyes were hard and glittering, close to him in the dark. The sound of pursuit was nearer.

“No,” Vanye cried, ripping loose, and started to mount. Pain exploded across the base of his skull. The world turned in his vision and he had momentary view of Mai’s belly passing over him as the mare bolted. She jumped him, managing to avoid him with her hooves; he scrambled up against the earthen bank, half-blind, seeking to draw his sword.

Liell was upon him then, wresting his hand from the hilt, close to overpowering him, dazed as he was; but the thought of being taken by Leth animated him to frenzy. He twisted, not even trying to defend himself, only to tear free, to reach Morgaine’s side and keep his oath for his soul’s sake. Mai was out of reach; the black was at hand. He sprang for that saddle and laid heels to him before he was even sure of the reins, gathering them up and settling low in the saddle from his precarious balance. Black legs flashed long in the dark, muscles reached and gathered, bounding obstacles, splashing over inlets of the lake, surging up rises of the shore.

The black at last had run all he chose to run, beyond the shore and far upon the trail: Vanye laid heel to him again, merciless in his fear. The animal gathered himself and plunged forward again.

Morgaine’s pale form was ahead. At last she looked around, seeming to hear him; she whipped up Siptah, and he cried out to her in despair, urging the black to further effort.

And she held back, pulling up, weapon in hand until he had come closer.

“Vanye,” she exclaimed softly as he drew alongside. “Is thee thief too? What came of Liell?”

He reached behind his head, felt a tenderness at the back of his head despite the leather coif. Dizziness assailed him, whether of the blow or of the fever, he did not know.

“Liell is no friend of yours,” he said.

“Did you kill him?”

“No,” he breathed, and was content to hang over the saddlebow a moment until his sight cleared. Then he urged the black into a gentle pace, Siptah keeping with him: no horses that had run all the distance from Ra-leth could overtake them now.

“Is thee much hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“What did he? Did he lift weapon against you?”

“Tried to hold me—tried to persuade me to break oath.”

And the other thing he would not tell her, the urging and then the vile feeling he had had of the look in Liell’s eyes, a feverish anxiousness that had wanted something of him, a touch that had twice sunk cruelly into his arm, an avarice matching the hunger in his eyes.

It was not a thing he could tell anyone: he did not know what to name it, or why he had provoked it, or what it aimed at, only that he would die before he fell into the hands of Leth, and most especially those of Liell.

His back had been turned: the man could easily have cut him across the backs of the knees, quickest way to disable a man elsewhere armored, slain him out of hand; instead he had fetched him a crack across the skull, had risked greatly taking him hand to hand when he could have killed him safely: he had wanted him alive.

He could not remember it without shuddering. He wanted nothing of the man. It filled him with loathing to possess the gear and the horse that he had stolen: the black beast with its ill temper was a creature more splendid and less honest than his little Mai, and leaving his little mare in those hands grieved him.

Deep forest closed about them, straight and proper trees now, and they walked the horses until there was no sky overhead, only the interlacing branches. The horses were spent and they themselves were blind with weariness. “This is no place to stop,” he protested when Morgaine reined in. “Lady, let us sleep in the saddle tonight, walk the horses while they may. This is Koriswood, and it may have been different in your day, but this is the thick of it. Please.”

She sighed in misery, but for once she looked at him and listened, and consented with a nod of her head. He dismounted and took the reins of both horses, both too weary to contest each other, and led them.

She rested a time, then leaned down and bade him stop, offered to take the reins and walk and lead the horses; he looked at her, tired as he was, and had not wit to argue with her. He only turned his back and kept walking, to which she consented by silence.

And eventually she slept, Kurshin-wise, in the saddle.

He walked so far as he could, long hours, until he was stumbling with exhaustion. He stopped then and put his hand on Siptah’s neck.

“Lady,” he said softly, not to break the hush of the listening wood. “Lady, now you must wake because I must sleep. Things are quiet.”

“Well enough,” she agreed, and slid down. “I know the road, although this land was tamer then.”

“I must tell you,” he continued hoarsely, “I think Chya Liell will follow when he can gather the forces. I think he lied to us in much, liyo.”

“What was it happened back there, Vanye?”

He sought to tell her. He gathered the words, still could not. “He is a strange man,” he said, “and he was anxious that I desert you. He attempted twice to persuade me—this last time in plain words.”

She frowned at him. “Indeed. What form did this proposal take?”

“That I should forget my oath and go with him.”

“To what?”

“I do not know.” The remembering made his voice shake; he thought that she might detect the tremor, and quickly gathered up the black’s reins and flung himself into the saddle. “The first time—I almost went. The second—somehow I preferred your company.”

Her odd pale face stared up at him in the starlight. “Many of the house of Leth have drowned in that lake. Or have at least vanished there. I did not know that you were in difficulty. I would not gladly have left you. I did judge that there was some connivance between you and Liell: so when you did not follow—I dared not delay there between two who might be enemies.”

“I was reared Nhi,” he said. “We do not oath-break. We do not oath-break, liyo.”

“I beg pardon,” she said, which liyo was never obliged to say to ilin, no matter how aggrieved. “I failed to understand.”

And of that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light. Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicher brush. It had been large and pale, leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.

Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.

“Idiocy,” Morgaine exclaimed softly. “Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?”

“The woods are full of beasts of his making,” Vanye said. “Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before—” He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. “That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill.”

“They are not made,” she said, “but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beasts—some will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing things—he knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating.”

“Where do they come from, such things as that?”

“From places where such things are natural. From other tonights, and other Gates, and places where that was fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man that such an attack wars on—it is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come.”

But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and kept the reins in his own hand. He closed his eyes as Morgaine set them on their way again, still saw the pale lizard form, large as a man, running across the open space. That was one of the witless nonsensities in Koriswood, more ugly than dangerous.

Report told of worse. Sometimes, legend said, carcasses were found near Irien, things impossible, abortions of Thiye’s art, some almost formless and baneful to the touch, and others of forms so fantastical that none would imagine what aspect the living beast had had.

His only comfort in this place was that Morgaine herself was horrified; she had that much at least of human senses in her. Then he remembered her coming to him, out of the place she called between, Washed up, she said, on this shore.

He began to have dim suspicion what she was, although he could not say it in words: that Morgaine and the pale horror had reached Andur-Kursh in the same way, only she had come by no accident, had come with purpose.

Aimed at Gates, at Thiye’s power.

Aimed at dislocating all that lay on this shore, as these unnatural things had come. Standing where the Hjemur-lord stood, she would be no less perilous. She shared nothing with Andur-Kursh, not even birth, if his fears were true, and owed them nothing. This he served.

And Liell had said she lied. One of the twain lied: that was certain. He wondered in an agony of mind how it should be if he learned of a certainty that it was Morgaine.

Something else fluttered in the dark—honest owl, or something sinister; it passed close overhead. He tautened his grip upon his nerves and patted the nervous black’s neck.

It was long until the morning, until in a clear place upon the trail they dared stop and let sleep take them by turns. Morgaine’s was the first sleep, and he paced to keep himself awake, or chose an uncomfortable place to sit, when he must sit, and at last fell to meddling with the black horse’s gear, that the horse still bore, for in such place they dared not unsaddle, only loosened the girths. It shamed him, to have stolen a second time; and he felt the keeping of more than he needed of the theft was not honorable, but all the same it was not sense to cast things away. He searched the saddlebags and kit to learn what he had possessed and, it was in the back of his thoughts, to learn something of the man Liell.

He found an object which answered the question, such that set his stomach over.

It was a medal, gold, set in the hilt of a saddle knife, the sort many a man bore beneath the skirt of his saddle; and on it was a symbol of the blockish, ugly look he had seen graven on the Stones. It was qujalin. Whenever any strange and long-ago things were found, folk called them qujalin and avoided them, or burned them, or cast them into deeps and tried to lose them. Most such were likely only forgotten oddities, Kurshin and harmless. Somehow he did not think this was such as that

He showed it to Morgaine when she wakened to take her turn at watch.

“It is an irrhn,” she said to him. “A luck-piece. It has no other significance.” But she turned it over and over in her hands, examining it.

“It is no luck,” said Vanye, “to a human man.”

“There is qujalin blood mixed in Leth,” she said, “and Liell is its tutor. Tutors have ruled there nigh a hundred years. Each of the heirs of Leth has produced a son and drowned within the year. If Kasedre is capable of siring a son, he will most probably join his ancestors, and Liell will still be tutor to the son. I wonder,” she added irrelevantly, looking at the blade, “who sired Hshi and Tlin.”

“And on what,” Vanye muttered sourly. “Keep the blade, liyo. I do not want to carry it, and perhaps it may bring luck to you.”

“I am not qujal,” she said.

That assertion, he reflected, might have filled him with either doubt or relief some days ago, at their meeting; now it fitted uncomfortably well with the thing he had begun to suspect of her.

“Whatever you are,” he said, “spare me the knowing of it.”

She nodded, accepting his attitude without apparent offense. She slipped the knife within her belt and rose.

A green-feathered arrow hit the ground between her feet

She reached to her back, hand to weapon, quick as the arrow itself. And as quick, Vanye seized her and pushed her, heedless of hurting: Chya warning, that arrow. If she fired, they would both be green-feathered in an instant.

“Do not,” he appealed to her, and turned, both arms wide, toward their unseen observers. “Hai, Chya! Chya! Will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins.”

Brush rustled. He watched the fair, tall men of his own mother’s kindred slip out of the shadows, where surely a few more kept arrows trained upon their hearts; and he set himself deliberately between them and Morgaine’s own arrogance, which was like a Myya’s for persistence, and likely to be the death of her.

They did not even ask names of them, but stood there waiting for them to speak and identify themselves. Looking at the living person of one who had been minutely described in ballads a century ago, wondering perhaps if they were not mad—he could estimate what passed in their minds. They only stared at Morgaine, and she at them, furiously, in her hand a weapon that could deal death faster than their arrows.

They would kill her of course, if she could die; but she would have done considerable damage: and her ilin who was her shield would be quite dead. He had heard of a certain Myya who strayed the border and was found with three Chya arrows lodged in his heart, all touching. Clan Chya lived in a hard land. They were impressed by few threats. It was typical of them that they had not yielded and begged shelter from the encroaching beasts, as had other folk; or died, as had two others. They used Hjemur’s vile beasts for game, and harried the border of Hjemur and kept Thiye contained out of sheer Chya effrontery.

Vanye placed hands on thighs and made a respectful bow, which Morgaine did not: she did not move, and it was possible that the Chya did not know that they were in danger.

“I am Nhi Vanye i Chya,” he said, “Ilin to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya.”

The leader, a smallish man with the simple braid of a second– uyo, cousin-kin to the main clan, grounded his longbow and set both hands upon it, eyes upon him. “Nhi Vanye, cousin to Chya Roh. You are i Chya, that is true, but I thought it was understood that you are not clan-welcome here.”

“She is,” he said, which was the proper answer: an ilin was not held to his own law when he served his liyo: he could trespass, as safe or as threatened as she was. “She is Morgaine kri Chya, who has a clan-welcome that was never withdrawn.”

They were frightened. They had the look of men watching a dream and trying not to become enmeshed in it. But they looked from her to the gray horse Siptah and back again, and swords stayed sheathed and bows lowered.

“We will take you to Ra-koris,” said the little man. “I am Taomen, tan-uyo.”

Then Morgaine gave him a bow of courtesy, and Vanye kept his silence hereafter, as befitted a servant whose liyo had finally deigned to take matters into her own hands.

The Chya were not happy at the meeting, it was clear. Clan-welcome had not been formally withdrawn because surely it had seemed a pointless vengeance on the dead. And the young lord of Chya, Chya Roh, his own cousin, whom he had never seen, still pursued bloodfeud with him for the sake of his mother’s dishonor at the hands of Rijan. Rob would as soon put an arrow through him as would Myya Gervaine, he was sure, and probably with greater accuracy.

There was a vast clearing in the Koriswood, that the noon sun blessed with a pleasant glow; the whole of it was full of sprawling huts of brush and logs. Chya, the only clan without a hall of stone. Once there had been the old Ra-koris, a splendid hall, home of the High Kings; its ruin lay some distance from this, and it was alleged to be haunted by angry ghosts of its proud defenders, that had held last and hardest against the advance of Hjemur. The grandsons and great-grandsons of the warriors of Morgaine’s age kept only this wooden hall, their possessions few and their treasures gone, only their bows and their skill and the gain of their hunting between them and starvation. Yet none of them looked sickly, and the women and children watching them as they rode in were straight and tall, though plain: there was beauty in this people, much different from the blighted look of clan Leth.

Boys raced ahead of them, yet all was strangely silent, as though they maintained hunter’s discipline even in their home. At the great arch of the main hut the greatest number of people had gathered, and here they dismounted, escorted still by Taomen and his men. They retained their weapons, and all was courtesy, men yielding back for them in haste.

Ra-koris was a smoky, earth-floored hall of rough logs, yet it had a certain splendor: it had two levels and many halls opening off the main room. Tasseled and wrought hides were the hangings, antlers and strange horns adorned its posts. It was lit by torches even at noontime, and by a hearth larger than many halls of stone could boast, its only masonry, that great hearth and its venting.

“Here you will be lodged until Roh can be called,” said Taomen.

Morgaine chose to settle at the main hearth, and by the timorous charity of the hall women, they were served a plain meal of waybread and venison and Chya mead, which they found good indeed after the suspect fare of Leth.

But folk avoided them, and watched them from the shadows of the wooden hall, whispering together.

Morgaine ignored them all and rested. Vanye nursed his sore hand and finally, troubled by the heat in the hall, at last gave up his pride and removed helm and coif, probing the soreness of the base of his skull, where Liell had struck him. A youth of the Chya laughed: a youth who did not yet even wear the braid; and Vanye looked at him angrily, then bowed his head and ignored the matter. He was not in such a position that he could complain of their treatment of him. Morgaine must be his chief concern, and she theirs.

And late in the day, when the bit of sky visible through the little windows of the high arch had gone from sun to shadow, there was a stir at the door and hunters came, men in brown leather, armed with bows and swords.

And among them was one that Vanye knew would be close kin of his, even before the youth came forward and met them as lord of the hall: for he had seen high-clan Chya before, when he was a child, and this was the image of all of them—of himself as well. The young lord looked more like a brother than his own brothers did.

“I am Chya Roh,” he said, stepping to the center of the rhowa, the earthen platform at the head of the hall. His lean, tanned features were set with anger at their presence, boding no good for them. “Morgaine kri Chya is dead,” he said, “a hundred years ago. What proof do you bear that you are she?”

Morgaine unfolded upward from her cross-legged posture with rare grace, smooth and silken, and without a bow of courtesy offered an object into Vanye’s hand. He arose with less grace, paused to look at the object before he passed it into Roh’s hand: it was the antlered insignia of the old High Kings of Koris, and when he saw that he knew it for a great treasure, and one that might have formed part of the lost crown treasury.

“It was Tiffwy’s,” she said. “His pledge of hospitality—should I need it, he said, to command of his men what I would.”

Roh’s face was pale. He looked at the amulet, and clenched it in his fist, and his manner was suddenly subdued. “Chya gave you what you asked a hundred years ago,” he said, “and not a man of the four thousand returned. You have much blood on your hands, Morgaine kri Chya; and yet I must honor my ancestor’s word—this once. What do you seek here?”

“Brief shelter. Silence. And whatever knowledge you have of Thiye and Hjemur.”

“All three you may have,” he said.

“Did Chya’s record survive?”

“The Ra-koris you know is ruin now. Wolves and other beasts have it to themselves. If Chya’s Book survives, that is where it lies. We have no means nor leisure for books here, lady.”

She bowed in courtesy. “I have a warning to give you: Leth is roused. We left them in some little stir. Guard your borders.”

Roh’s lips were thin. “You are gifted with the raising of storms, lady. We will set men to watch your trail. It may be Leth will come this far, but only if they are desperate. We have taught Leth manners before.”

“They are mightily irritated. Vanye’s horse is Leth-bred, and we quit their hospitality suddenly, in a dispute with lord Kasedre and his counselor Chya Liell.”

“Liell,” said Roh softly. “ That black wolf. I commend the quality of your enemies, lady. How much welcome do you ask?”

“The night only.”

“Are you bound north?”

“Yes,” she said.

Roh bit his lip. “That old quarrel? They say Thiye lives. It has never been in our imagination that you could survive too. But we are through giving you men, lady. That is done. We have none left to spare you.”

“I ask none.”

“You take this?” It was Roh’s one acknowledgment that Vanye lived; his proud young eyes shifted aside and back again. “You could do better, lady.”

But then he went and bade his women make place for Morgaine in the upper levels of the hall, and separate place for Vanye by the hearth. This Morgaine allowed, for Chya was a proper hall, and they were indeed under its peace as they had not been in Leth. And after that Morgaine and Roh talked together some little time, asking and answering, until she finally took her leave and passed upstairs.

Then Vanye gratefully put off his armor, down to his shirt and his leather breeches, and prepared the blankets they had given him by the warm hearthside.

Taomen came, spoke to him softly and bade him come to Roh; it was a thing he could not refuse. Roh sat cross-legged on the rhowa, with other men about him.

Of a sudden Vanye’s feeling of ease left him. There was merry noise elsewhere in the hall, busy chatter of women and of children; it continued, masking softer words, and there were men ringed about so that no one outside the circle could see what was done there.

He did not kneel, not until they made it clear he must; then all the uyin of the Chya sank down on their haunches about him and about Roh, swords laid before them, as when clan judgment was passed.

He thought of crying aloud to Morgaine, warning her of treachery; but he did not truly fear for her, and his own pride kept him silent These were his kin: to trouble an ilin for a family matter violated honor, violated the very concepts of honor under the ilin–codes, but Roh’s offense was a powerful one. He did not know this cousin of his: his hope of Roh’s honor was scant, but it kept him from utter panic.

“Now,” said Roh, “and truthfully, Nhi Vanye, account for her and for your business with her.”

“Nothing she told you was a lie and nothing less than the truth. She is Morgaine, and I am an ilin to her.”

Roh looked him over, long and harshly. “So Rijan threw you out. You robbed him of one of his Myya wife’s precious nestlings and he banished you. But you are due no kinship from us. My aunt did not choose your begetting. I only blame her because she did not leave Morija and come back to us. She was no captive by then, great with child as she was.”

“To what should she come back—to your welcome?” Temper overcame sense, for Roh’s words stung. “I honor her, Chya. And Chya’s honor would not have taken her back as she had been, not after Rijan had had her, whether or not she were willing. She gave me life and died doing it, and I know the misery she had of Rijan better than you folk, that had not the stomach for coming into Morija to get her back, after Rijan rode into Chya lands to take her from you. Where is your honor, men of Chya?”

The stillness was absolute. Suddenly the hall was deserted but for them. The fire crackled. A log fell, showering embers.

“What became of her?” asked Roh at last, tilting the balance toward life and reason. “Was it death in childbirth, as they said?”

“Yes.”

Roh let go his breath slowly. “Better had Rijan drowned you. Perhaps he regretted that he did not. But you are here. So live, Nhi Vanye, Rijan’s bastard. Now what shall we do with you?”

“Do as she asked and let us pass from this hall tomorrow.”

“Do you serve her willingly?”

“Yes,” he said, “it was fair Claiming. I was in need. Now I am in her debt and I must pay it.”

“Where is she going?”

“She is my lady,” he said, “and it is not right for me to say anything of her business. Look to your own. You will have Leth at your borders for her sake.”

“Where is she going, Nhi Vanye?”

“Ask her, I say.”

Roh snapped his fingers. Men reached for the blades laid before them. They unsheathed them so that the points formed a ring about him. Somewhere in hall a dish fell. A woman ran cat-footed into the corridor beyond, drew the curtain and was gone.

“Ask Morgaine,” Vanye said again; and when his breathing space grew less and an edge rested familiarly on his shoulder, he maintained his composure and did not flinch, though his heart was beating fit to burst “If you continue, Chya Roh, I shall decide there is no honor at all in Chya. And I shall be ashamed for that.”

Roh considered him in silence. Vanye went sick inside: his nerves were strung, waiting, the least pressure from them likely to send from his lips a shout to raise the hall and Morgaine from sleep. He was not brave. He had long ago discovered in himself that he had no courage for enduring pain or threat. His brothers had discovered that in him before he had. It was the same feeling that churned in him now, the same that he had known when they, out of old San Romen’s protective witness, had bullied him to his knees and brought tears to his eyes. That one fatal time he had seized arms against Handrys’s tormenting of him, one time only: his hands had killed, not his mind, which was blank and terrified, and had his hands not been filled with a weapon they would have found him as always, as he was now.

But Roh snapped his fingers a second time and they let him alone. “Get to your place,” said Roh, “ ilin.”

He rose then, and bowed, and walked—it was incredible that he could walk steadily—to the place he had left at the hearth. There he lay down again, and wrapped himself in his cloak and clenched his teeth and let the fire warm the tremors from his muscles.

He wanted to kill. For every affront ever paid him, for all the terror ever set into him, he wanted to kill; and he squeezed the tears from his eyes and began to reckon that perhaps his father had been right, that his hand had been more honest than he knew. He feared a great many things: he feared death; he feared Morgaine and he feared Liell and the madness of Kasedre; but there never was fear such as there was in being alone among kinsmen, among whom he was always bastard and outcast.

Once, when he was a child, Handrys and Erji had lured him into the storage basements of Ra-morij, and there overpowered him and hung him from a beam in the deep cellars, alone in the dark and with the rats. They had only come after him after the blood had left his hands and he could not find the strength to scream any longer. Then they had come with lights, and cut him down, hovering over him white-faced and terrified for fear that they had killed him. Afterward they had threatened worse if he showed the cruel marks the ropes had made.

He had not complained to anyone. He had learned the conditions of his welcome in Nhi even then, had learned to clutch his scraps of honor to himself in silence, had practiced, had bit his lip and kept his own counsel, until he had fairly won the honor of the warrior’s braid, and until the demands of uyin honor must keep Handrys and Erij from their more petty tormentings of him.

But the looks were there, the subtle, hating looks and secret contempt that became evident when he committed any error that cost him honor.

Even the Chya tried him, in the same way—scented fear and went for it, like wolves to a deer.

Yet something there was in him that yearned to like the lord of Chya, this man so like himself, that showed kindred blood in his face and in his bearing. Roh was legitimate: Roh’s father had virtually abandoned the lady Del to her fate, captive and bearing Rijan’s bastard, that must in nowise return to confound the purity of Chya—to contest with his son Roh.

And Chya both feared him, and scented fear, and would have gone for his throat if not for their debt to Morgaine.

Late, late into the long night; his not-quite-rest was disturbed by a booted foot crunching a cinder not far from his head, and he came up on his arm as Roh dropped to his haunches looking down at him. In panic he reached for the sword beside him; Roh clamped his hand down on the hilt, preventing him.

“You came from Leth,” said Roh softly. “Where did you meet her?”

“At Aenor-Pyven.” He sat up, tucked his feet under him, tossed the loose hair from his eyes. “And I still say, ask Morgaine her business, not her servant.”

Roh nodded slowly. “I can guess some things. That she still purposes what she always did, whatever it was. She will be the death of you, Nhi Vanye i Chya. But you know that already. Take her hence as quickly as you can in the morning. We have Leth breathing at our borders this night. Reports of it have come in. Men have died. Liell will stop her if he can. And there is a limit to what service we will pay this time in Chya lives.”

Vanye stared into the brown eyes of his cousin and found there a grudging acceptance of him: for the first time the man was talking to him, as if he still had the dignity of an uyo of the high clan. It was as if he had not acquitted himself so poorly after all, as if Roh acknowledged some kinship between them. He drew a deep breath and let it go again.

“What do you know of Liell?” he asked of Roh. “Is he Chya?”

“There was a Chya Liell,” said Roh. “And our Liell was a good man, before he became counselor in Leth.” Roh looked down at the stones and up again, his face drawn in loathing. I do not know. There are rumors it is the same man. There are rumors he in Leth is qujal. That he—like Thiye of Hjemur—is old. What I can tell you is that he is the power in Leth, but if you have come from Leth, you know that. At times he is a quiet enemy, and when the worst beasts have come into Koriswood, the worst sendings of Thiye, Liell’s folk have been no less zealous than we to rid Koris of the plague: we observe hunter’s peace on occasion, for our mutual good. But our harboring Morgaine will not better relations between Leth and Chya.”

“I believe your rumors,” said Vanye at last. Coldness rested in his belly, when he thought back to the lakeshore.

“I did not,” said Roh, “until this night, that she came into hall.”

“We will go in the morning,” said Vanye.

Roh stared into his face yet a moment more. “There is Chya in you,” he said. “Cousin, I pity you your fate. How long have you to go of your service with her?”

“My year,” he said, “has only begun.”

And there passed between them the silent communication that that year would be his last, accepted with a sorrowful shake of Roh’s head.

“If so happen,” said Roh, “if so happen you find yourself free—return to Chya.”

And before Vanye could answer anything, Roh had walked off, retiring to a distant corridor of the rambling hall that led to other huts, warrenlike.

He was shaken then by the thing that he had never dreamed to believe: Chya would take him in.

In a way it was only cruelty. He would die before his year was out. Morgaine was death-prone, and he would follow; and in it he had no choice. A moment ago he had had no particular hope.

Only now there was. He looked about at the hall, surely one of the strangest of all holds in Andur-Kursh. Here was refuge, and welcome, and a life.

A woman. Children. Honor.

These were not his, and would not be. He turned and clasped his arms about his knees, staring desolately into the fire. Even should she die, which was probably the thought in Roh’s mind, he had his further bond, to ruin Hjemur.

If so happen you find yourself free.

In all the history of man, Hjemur had never fallen.