Wall of Shiuan

“Be still,” he whispered. “I shall not touch you. You will be wiser not to wake my lady.”

Jhirun gathered Morgaine’s white cloak up about her shoulders, up to her chin. “Give me back my pony and my belongings,” she said. Her accent and her shivering together made her very difficult to understand. “Let me go. I swear I will tell no one. No one.”

“I ca

“In my house,” he said, “that is nothing unusual.”

“He was kind to me.”

He gave a sour twist of the lips. “You are fair to look upon, and I would hardly be surprised at that.”

She flinched. The look of outrage in her eyes was like a physical rebuff, reminding him that even a peasant girl was born with honor, a distinction that he could not claim. She looked very young, frightened of him and of her circumstances. After a moment it was he that looked aside.

“I beg pardon,” he said; and when she kept a long silence, still breathing as if she had been ru

“Last night,” she said, words that filled him with relief, on many accounts. “He came to us, hurt, and my folk tried to rob and kill him. He was too quick for us. And he could have killed everyone, but he did not. And he was kind to me.” Her voice trembled on the word, insistent this time on being understood. “He went away without stealing anything, even though he was in need of everything. He only took what belonged to him, and what I gave him.”

“He is dai-uyo ,” he answered her. “A gentleman.”

“A great lord.”

“He has been that.”

Her eyes reckoned him up and down and seemed perplexed. And what are you? he imagined her thoughts in that moment, hoping that she would not ask. The shame of his shorn hair, the meaning of the white scarf of the ilin –perhaps she understood, reckoning the difference between him and Chya Roh, highborn, cousin. He could not explain. Changeling rested across his knee; he was conscious of it as if it were a living thing: Morgaine’s forbidding presence, binding him to silence.

“What will you do with him when you have found him?” Jhirun asked.

“What would you have done?”

She gathered her knees up within the fur and stared at him. She looked as if she were expecting him to strike her, as if she were prepared to bear that—for Roh’s sake.

“What were you doing,” he asked her, “riding out here with no cloak and no food? You ca

“I am going to Shiuan,” she said. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but her jaw was set. “I am from the Barrow-hills, and I can hunt and fish and I had my pony—until you took him.”

“How did you get the dagger?”

“He left it behind.”

“It is an Honor-blade,” he said harshly. “A man would not so casually leave that behind.”

“There was the fight,” she said in a low voice, “I was going to give it back when I found him. I was only going to use it until then.”

‘To gut fish.”

She flinched from the spite in his voice. “Where is he?” he asked.

“I do not know, I do not know. He said nothing. He only left.”

Vanye stared at her, weighing her answers, and she edged back from him as if she did not like his expression. “Go to sleep,” he bade her suddenly, and rose and left her there, looking back nevertheless to be sure she did not make some rash bid to escape. She did not. He settled again on his stone by the fire, so that he could watch her. For a time she continued to stare at him through the flames; abruptly she flung herself down and hid herself in the cloak.

He set his hands together on Changeling’s pommel, resting against it, all his peace destroyed by the things that she had said.

He understood her loyalty to Roh, even as a stranger; he knew his cousin’s ma

But it was illusion. Nothing of Roh’s soul or essence could survive. Morgaine had said it, and therefore it was so. Return it to him, Morgaine bade him, arming him. He thought of racing Roh at weapons’ edge, and another nightmare returned to him, a courtyard in Morija—a flash of blades, a brother’s dying. Of that he was guilty. To destroy, to plunge home that blade when it was Roh’s face and voice, for this possibly he could prepare himself... But, O Heaven, he thought, sickness turning in him, if it should be more than outward seeming—

He was kind to me, the girl had said. He went away without stealing anything, even though he was in need of everything.

There was no kindness in the qujal , who had sought his life and taken Roh’s in its place, nothing so simple or so human as kindness, only sweet persuasiveness, the power to convince with seeming logic, to play on a man’s worst fears and darkest impulses and promise what he had no intention of giving.

Nor was there honor—the ma

That was not the qujal . It was the ma

“Vanye.”

He spun toward the whisper, the tread upon leaves, heart frozen at the sight of the shadowy figure, even when he knew it was only Morgaine. He was embarrassed that he had not heard her moving, though she was herself adopted Chya, and walked silently enough when she chose; but the more he was disturbed for the thoughts in which she had come upon him—that betrayed his oath, while she trusted him.

For a moment he felt that she read him. She shrugged then, and settled beside the fire. “I am not disposed to sleep,” she said.

Distress, displeasure—with what, or whom, he could not tell; her eyes met his, disturbing him, striking fear into him. She was capable of irrationality.

Knowing this, still he stayed with her; at such times he remembered that he was not the first who had done so—that she had far more of comrades’ blood to her account than that of enemies—that she had slain far more who had shared bread with her than ever she had of those she had wished to harm.

Roh was one such that had crossed her path, and deserved pity for it; Vanye thought of Roh, and of himself, and in that instant there was a distance between himself and Morgaine. He thrust Roh from his mind.

“Do we move on?” he asked her. It was a risk and he knew it, that she might seize upon it in her present mood; he saw that it tempted her sorely—but since he had offered, she was obliged to use reason.

“We will move early,” she said. “Go rest.”

He was glad of the dismissal, knowing her present mood; and his eyes burned with fatigue. He took the sword in his hands and gave it to her, anxious to be rid of it, sensing her distress to be parted from it. Perhaps, he thought, this had disturbed her sleep. She folded it into her arms and leaned forward to the fire, as if having it comforted her. “It has been quiet,” he said.

“Good,” she answered, and before he could gather himself to his feet: “Vanye?”

“Aye?” He settled back to his place, wanting, and not wanting, to share her thoughts, the things that had robbed her of sleep.

“Did thee trust what she said?”

She had heard then, listening to all that had passed. He was at once guiltily anxious, trying to remember what things he had said aloud and what he had held in his heart; and he glanced at Jhirun, who still slept, or pretended to. “I think it was the truth,” he said. “She is ignorant—of us, of everything that concerns us. Best we leave her in the morning.”

“She will be safer in our company a time.”

“No,” he protested. Things came to mind that he dared not say aloud, hurtful things, the reminder that their company had not been fortunate for others.

“And we will be the safer for it,” she said, in a still voice that brooked no argument.

“Aye,” he said, forcing the word. He felt a hollowness, a sense of foreboding so heavy that it made breath difficult.

“Take your rest,” she said.

He departed the warmth of the fire, sought the warm nest that she had quitted. When he lay down amid their gear and drew the coarse blankets over him, every muscle was taut and trembling.

He wished that Ela’s-daughter had escaped them when she had run—or better still, that they had missed each other in the fog and never met.

He shifted to his other side, and stared into the blind dark, remembering home, and other forests, knowing that he had entered an exile from which there was no return.

The Gate behind them was sealed. The way lay forward from here, and it occurred to him with increasing unease that he did not know where he was going, that never again would he know where he was going.

Morgaine, his arms, and a stolen Andurin horse: that comprised the world that he knew.

And now there was Roh, and a child who had about her the foreboding of a world he did not want to know—his own burden, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, for it was his impulse that had laid ambush for her, when by all other chances she might have ridden on her way.

Chapter Five

“Vanye.”

He wakened to the grip of Morgaine’s hand on his arm, startled out of a sleep deeper than he was wont.

“Get the horses,” she said. The wind was whipping fiercely at the swaying branches overhead, drawing her fair hair into a stream in the darkness. “It is close to dawn. I let you sleep as long as I could, but the weather is turning on us.”

He murmured a response, arose, rubbing at his eyes. When he glanced at the sky he saw the north flashing with lightnings, beyond the restless trees. Wind sighed coldly through the leaves.

Morgaine was already snatching up their blankets and folding them. For his part he left the ring of firelight and felt his way downslope among the stones of the ruins, across the narrow cha