Wall of Shiuan

“Vanye. Is thee regretting?”

He looked up, saw that Morgaine had been staring at him in the ruddy light, eyes that were in daylight sea-gray, world-gray, qujal –gray. That gentle, ancient accent had power more than the wind to chill him, reminding him that she had known more Gates than one, that she had learned his tongue of men long dead; she forgot, sometimes, what age she lived in.

He shrugged.

“Roh,” she said, “is no longer kin to you. Do not brood on it.”

“When I find him,” he said, “I will kill him. I have sworn that.”

“Was it for that,” she asked him finally, “that you came?”

He gazed into the fire, unable to speak aloud the unease that rose in him when she began to encircle him with such questions. She was not of his blood. He had left his own land, abandoned everything to follow her. There were some things that he did not let himself reason to their logical end.

She left the silence on him, a stifling weight; and he opened his hand, twice scarred across the palm with the Claiming by blood and ash. By that, he was kin to her, bound in service, without conscience, honorless save for her honor, which he served. This parting-gift his clan had bestowed on him, like the shorn hair that marked him felon and outlaw, a man fit only for hanging. Brother-slayer, bastard-born: no other liege would have wanted such a man, only Morgaine, whose name was a curse wherever she was known. It was irony that ilin –service, penance for murder, had left him far more blood-guilty than ever he had come to her.

And Roh remained yet to deal with.

“I came,” he said, “because I swore it to you.”

She thrust at the fire with a stick, sending sparks aloft like stars on the wind. “Mad,” she judged bitterly. “I set thee free, told thee plainly thee had no possible place outside Kursh, outside the law and the folk thee knows. I wish thee had believed it.”

He acknowledged this truth with a shrug. He knew the workings of Morgaine’s mind better than any living; and he knew the Claim she had set on him, that had nothing to do with his scarred hand; and the Claim that someone else had set on her, crueller than any oath. Her necessity lay sheathed at her side, that dragon-hilted sword that was no true sword, but a weapon all the same. It was the only bond that had ever truly claimed her, and she hated it above all other evils, qujal or human.

I have no honor, she had warned him once. It is unconscionable that I should take risks with the burden I carry. I have no luxury left for virtues.

Another thing she had told him that he had never doubted: I would kill you too if it were necessary.

She hunted qujal , she and the named-blade Changeling. The qujal she hunted now wore the shape of Chya Roh. She sought Gates, and followed therein a compulsion more than half madness, that gave her neither peace nor happiness. He could understand this in some part: he had held Changeling in his own hands, had wielded its alien evil, and there had come such a weight on his soul afterward that no penance of ilin –service could ever cleanse him of remembering.

“The law is,” he said, “that you may bid me leave your service, but you ca

“No one ever refused to leave service.”

“Surely,” he said, “there have been ilin before me that found no choice. A man is maimed in service, for instance; he might starve elsewhere, but while he stays ilin , his liyo must at least feed him and his horse, however foul the treatment he may receive in other matters. You ca

“You are neither halt nor blind,” Morgaine retorted; she was not accustomed to being answered with levities.

He made a gesture of dismissal, knowing for once he had touched through her guard. He caught something bewildered in her expression in that instant, something terrified. It destroyed his satisfaction. He would have said something further, but she glanced aside from him with a sudden scowl, removing his opportunity.

“There was at least a time you chose for yourself,” she said at last. “I gave you that, Nhi Vanye. Remember it someday.”

“Aye,” he said carefully. “Only so you give me the same grace, liyo , and remember that I chose what I wanted.”

She frowned the more deeply. “As you will,” she said. “Well enough.” And for a time she gazed into the fire, and then the frown grew pensive, and she was gazing toward their prisoner, a look that betrayed some i

“ Liyo ,” he said, “likely the girl is harmless.”

“Thee knows so?”

She mocked him in his ignorance. He shrugged, made a helpless gesture. “I do not think,” he said, “that Roh would have had time to prepare any ambush.”

“The time of Gates is not world-time.” She hurled a bit of bark into the flames, dusted her hands. “Go, go, we have time now that one of us could be sleeping, and we are wasting it. Go to sleep.”

“She?” he asked, with a nod toward Jhirun.

“I will speak with her.”

“You rest,” he urged her after a moment, inwardly braced against some irrational anger. Morgaine was distraught this night, exhausted—they both were. Her slim hands were tightly laced about her knee, clenched until the strain was evident. Tired as he was, he sensed something greatly amiss. “Liyo , let me have first watch.”

She sighed, as if at that offer all the weariness came over her at once, the weight of mail that could make a strong man’s bones ache, days of riding that wore even upon him, Kurshin and born to the saddle. She bowed her head upon her knee, then flung it back and straightened her shoulders. “Aye,” she said hoarsely, “aye, that I will agree to gladly enough.”

She gathered herself to her feet, Changeling in her hand; but to his amazement she offered it to him, sheathed and crosswise.

It never left her, never. By night she slept with that evil thing; she never walked from where it lay, not more than a room’s width before she turned and took it up again. When she rode, it was either under her knee on the gray horse’s saddle, or across her shoulders on her sword belt.

He did not want even to touch it, but he took it and gathered it to him carefully; and she left him so, beside the fire. Perhaps, he thought, she was concerned that the warrior who guarded her sleep not do so unarmed; perhaps she had some subtler purpose, reminding him what governed her own choices. He considered this, watching her settle to sleep in that corner of the ruin where the stones still made an arch. She had their saddles for pillow and windbreak, the coarse saddle-blankets, unfolded, for a covering: he had lost his own cloak the same way he had lost his sword, else it would have been his cloak that was lent their injured prisoner, not hers. The consciousness of this vexed him. He had come to her with nothing that would have made their way easier, and borrowed upon what she had.

Yet Morgaine trusted him. He knew how hard it was for her to allow another hand on Changeling, which was obsession with her; she need not have lent it, and did; and he did not know why. He was all too aware, in the long silence after she seemed to have fallen asleep, how clear a target the fire made him.

Roh, if his hands retained any of their former skill, was a bowman of the Korish forests; and a Chya bowman was a shadow, a flitting ghost where there was cover. Likely too the girl Jhirun had kinsmen hereabouts seeking her, if Roh himself did not. And perhaps—Vanye’s shoulders prickled at the thought—Morgaine set a trap by means of that bright fire, disregarding his life and hers; she was capable of doing so, lending him her chiefest weapon to ease her conscience, knowing that this, at least, he could use.

He rested the sword between his knees, the dragon-hilt against his heart, daring not so much as to lie down to ease the torment of the mail on his shoulders, for he was unbearably tired, and his eyes were heavy. He listened to the faint sounds of the horses grazing in the dark, reassured constantly by their soft stirrings. Nightsounds had begun, sounds much like home: the creak of frogs, the occasional splash of water as some denizen of the marsh hunted.

And there was the matter of Jhirun, that Morgaine had set upon him.

He tucked a chill hand to his belt, felt the rough surface of the Honor-blade’s hilt, wondering how Roh fared, wondering whether he were equally lost, equally afraid. The crackling of the fire at his side brought back other memories, of another fireside, of Ra-koris on a winter’s evening, of a refuge once offered him, when no other refuge existed: Roh, who had been willing to acknowledge kinship with an outlawed kin.

He had been moved to love Roh once, Roh alone of all his kinsmen; an honest man and brave, Chya Roh i Chya. But the man he had known in Ra-koris was dead, and what possessed Roh’s shape now was qujal , ancient and deadly hostile.

The Honor-blade was not for enemies, but the last resort of honor; Roh would have chosen that way, if he had had the chance. He had not. Within Gates, souls could be torn from bodies and man and man confounded, the living with the dying. Such was the evil that had taken Chya Roh; Roh was truly dead, and what survived in him wanted killing, for Roh’s sake.

Vanye drew the blade partly from its sheath, touched that razor edge with gentle fingers, a tightness in his throat, wondering how, of all possessions that Roh might have lost, it had been this, that no warrior would choose to abandon.

She has found you, the girl had said, mistaking them in their kinsmen’s resemblance. Are you not afraid?

It occurred to him that Roh himself had feared Morgaine, loathed her, who had destroyed his ancestors and the power that had been Koris.

But Roh was dead. Morgaine, who had witnessed it, had said that Roh was dead.

Vanye clenched both hands about Changeling’s cold sheath, averted his eyes from the fire and saw Jhirun awake and staring at him.

She had knowledge of Roh. Morgaine had left the matter to him, and he loathed what he had asked, realized it for what it truly was—that he did not want the answers.

Suddenly the girl broke contact with his eyes, hurled herself to her feet and for the shadows.

He sprang up and crossed the intervening distance before she could take more than two steps—seized her arm and set her down again on the cloak, Changeling safely out of her reach in the bend of his other arm. She struck him, a solid blow across the temple, and he shook her, angered. A second time she hit him, and this time he did hurt her, but she did not cry out—not a sound came from her but gasps for breath, when woman might have appealed to woman—not to Morgaine. He knew whom she feared most; and when she had stopped struggling he relaxed his grip, reckoning that she would not run now. She jerked free and stayed still, breathing hard.