Exile's Gate

"We will make it," Vanye said. "Chei—"

"Aye," he said, and jerked his shoulder free, turning his face to his work again.

"Chei. Listen to me." Vanye put his hand on the other side of the horse's neck, stood close against its shoulder, close beside him. "She has one ma

Chei listened in anger, down to the last, that a tendril of cold slipped into his heart. Then he recalled that they were pacted not only with a qhal, but with a witch. He gave a twitch of his shoulders, less angry, and more afraid, and no more certain where honor was in anything.

"She never remembers her tempers," Vanye said. "Do the best you can do. When she knows what you have done she will be grateful. I thank you. She would want me to. She would want me to tell you—get us as far as the Road, and if you have changed your minds, go aside: we will see to Gault."

"Mante," Chei said. "We are going to Mante."

"Do you know what is there? Do you know what we face?"

He shook his head. He had no wish to know. "The gate," he said. "Somewhere else."

"Maybe a worse place."

"It could not be. For us it could not be." He seized Vanye by the arm and drew him well aside, over by the trees, into the dark and the wind. "Vanye, my brother—he is a great man, he is,Vanye: he willbe; Ichandren himself used to say that in his life he had never seen any man promise so much—"

"For whose sake are you doing this? For his? Then leave us at the road."

"That is not what I am saying!"

"There is nothing to be had from us. There is nothing we can give you. You mistake us. We have no place to go to. You are chasing after what does not exist."

"We will not go back to live like bandits! We will not find another clan! We will make a name for ourselves—we—Bron and I. Do not shame us like this."

Vanye was silent a moment. "I only try to warn you. You ca

"You are her lover."

An intake of breath. "What I am is my concern."

"I only mean that I know. We know you are her right hand. We do not dispute you. Only do not let her speak like that to my brother."

"My lady will speak how she chooses, to me, to Bron, or to you!—But I will talk to him."

"Do that," Chei said. The wind touched him. He shivered, having gotten less than he wanted. But he had pushed too far; he saw that.

Vanye walked away from him. Chei stood with his arms and Bron's cloak about him, waiting, while Vanye found Bron looking after the horses himself, cloakless and stubborn.

They had words together. It did not last long, but they parted with a mutual touch at shoulders, and Vanye took their own two horses in charge, while the lady stayed in shelter.

"Here," Chei said to Bron, when he had walked back to the arbor. He slung the cloak about Bron's shoulders. "Get out of the wind." And: "Did he say anything?"

Bron shrugged. "Only courtesy," Bron said. "He offered qhalur medicines. I said I was well enough. Do not trouble him, Chei."

The morning brought fog again, a general murk that made it uncertain exactly when it ceased to be night and began being daylight; but Vanye levered his aching bones up when there was light enough to see by, in a watch he judged by his own time-sense. "Stay and rest," he said to Morgaine: it was his watch last—they were the better by Chei and Bron having their turn at waking, in the small part of the night they had had left—and he left her and the brothers to drowse away the last few moments while he sought after their gear and carried it up to saddle up.

But Chei was up as quickly, moving about in the gray and the damp, seeing to his horse and his brother's.

"I meant to let you sleep," Vanye said, attempting to mend matters.

"We will manage," Chei said shortly.

So a company grew irritable, weary as they were, friends more quickly at odds than utter strangers. His face still burned when he recollected Chei's remark of last evening, and how Chei thought he knew more of their affairs than he knew.

Il inand liege—and he was not sure whose doing it was, after all this time. He tried to protect their honor; but Chei—

Chei, being Chei, trod straight in on a matter that would have gotten challenge outright and unexplained, if Chei were of his own people.

But Chei, being Chei, had not understood, no more than he himself understood more than the surface of Chei's thinking. Bron had seemed dismayed when he went to ask his pardon, had seemed embarrassed, if nothing else. "Chei ought not to have done that," Bron had said. "Forgive him."

Now Bron came out into the daylight, limping pronouncedly in the first few steps; and concealed that with a grasp after one of the support poles of the shelter.

Vanye paid it no attention and offered no help. He wanted no more misunderstandings. He flung Siptah's saddle up and tightened the girth.

"We will break our fast on the trail," he said as Chei passed him; Chei nodded and said no word to him. Perhaps it was only the reaction of a man with his jaw clamped against the chill.

Or it was the reaction of a man who felt betrayed.

Morgaine came out, wrapped in her cloak, gray side out, her pale coloring one tone with the fog.

"Tonight for the open road," she said in a quiet voice, taking Siptah's reins. "So we dare not push the horses today."

"Aye," Vanye agreed, thanking Heaven one of them at least had come back to reason.

They rode out, with breakfast in hand, a little waybread and water from their flasks, ducking water-laden branches, but with the sun bringing a little warmth through the mist, and the wind having stopped. There was that for comfort.

"Here," Jestryn said, and urged his horse down a trail hardly worthy of the name, a narrow slot of stone and dirt among pines that clung desperately to a crumbling slope. Some of the men murmured dismay, but Gault followed, nothing loath, for the Road passed near a village hereabouts, a straight bare track below the truncate hill: the ancients had carved mountains, disdaining to divert their Road for any cause; and yet bent it sharply west in open ground, for reasons that no qhal living knew.

Now the descendants of the builders rode quietly as they could, making better time than they had been able to make in the fog, reliant on Jestryn-Pyverrn's human memory and on Arunden's thoroughly human one, under the threat of Jestryn's knife.

"I swear to you," Arunden had cried, "I swear to you—I will guide you! I am your friend—"

"Impudent Man," Jestryn had said, and laughed, as Pyverrn would with his human, guttural laughter. "You are not myfriend before or afterI was human; and God knows you were never Gault's—"

Jestryn kept such human affectations, and swore and used human oaths qhal did not. But the sparkle in his eye was Pyverrn—past the sword-cut that raked one handsome cheek. It did not distract from his looks. Next to him, Arunden was a clumsy, shambling brute; and Arunden's wit matched his outward look.

"You will lose a finger," Jestryn had said, "for every a