Exile's Gate (15 page)

Chei surely knew that he
had heard a perilous thing. For a long moment he hardly seemed to
breathe; then his glance flicked desperately Vanye's way.

"It is true," Vanye said.
But it was not, O Heaven, so simple as that, it could never be. And
surely a man grown to his manhood in war—knew that much. Morgaine was
lying—by halves and portions.

"What will you do?" Chei asked of Morgaine, bewildered. "What will you do, alone?"

"I shall shut the gate. I
shall tell you the absolute truth: when I do that, Vanye and I shall
pass it, and we will destroy it behind us, with all its power and all
its harm. Serve me as you swore you would and I will give you that same
choice: pass the gate or remain behind, in this land, forever. To no
one else will I give it. I shall counsel you against accepting it. But
at some time you may desire it, desperate as your situation is; and if
you do choose it, I will not deny you that right, if you have kept your
word to us."

For a moment Chei rested
still, lips parted, eyes fixed on her. Then he broke the spell with a
desperate, humorless laugh. "Against Mante?"

"Against Mante and against
Skarrin who rules there, if that is what opposes us. Against anything
that opposes us, qhal or human. Our motives are very simple. Our
solutions are very direct. We do not argue them. We pass where we will
and best if we meet no one and share no hospitality of your folk,
however well-meant."

Chei caught up the blanket that had fallen from his shoulders, as if the wind were suddenly colder. His face was starkly sober.

"Now, Chei, I have given
you my truth. I will listen to yours, if there is anything that presses
you to tell it me, and not hold it against you, but beyond this I will
hold any omission worth your life. Does anything occur to you, Chei,
that you ought to tell me?"

"No." He shook his head vehemently. "No. Everything is the truth. I told you—I told you I had lied; but I did not mean to lie—"

"A second time I ask you."

"I have not lied!"

"Nor omitted any truth."

"I guide you the best that I know. I tell you that we cannot go back to that road, we have no choice but go through the hills."

"Nor claimed to know more than you do."

"I know these hills. I know the trails—
here,
here
I do know where I am. This is where I fought. You asked me guide you
through the other and I had only been that way the once, but here I
know my way—I am trying, lady, I am trying to bring us through to the
road beyond the passes; but if we go that road, through those passes,
they will catch one glimpse of your hair, my lady, and we are all three
dead."

"Human folk, you mean."

"Human folk. They watch the road. They pick off such as they can. They ambush qhal who come into the woods—"

"In this place where you lead us."

"But they expect qhal to
come in numbers. They expect humans serving the qhal, in bands of ten
and twenty. They do not expect three."

"It must happen," Vanye
said, "that your folk fall to the qhal; and that such as Gault—know
these selfsame trails; and that Gault's folk have guides who bring them
very well through these woods."

"So my people will assume I
am," Chei said. "That is exactly what they will think. That is why we
do not go on that road. That is why moving quietly and quickly is the
best that we can do. I am no safety to you. And you are a death
sentence for me."

"I believe him," Morgaine
said quietly, which was perhaps not the quarter from which Chei
expected affirmation. He had that look, of a man taken thoroughly off
his balance.

"So you will show us how to come on these folk," Morgaine said, "by surprise."

"I will show you how to avoid them."

"No. You will bring us at their backs."

Vanye opened his mouth in shock, to protest; and then disbelief warned him.

'To prove your good faith," Morgaine said.

Surely Chei was thinking
quickly. But every hesitation passed through his eyes, every fear for
himself, every hope sorted and discarded. "Aye," he said in two more
heartbeats. "Ah. Now you have lied to me," Morgaine said.

"No." Chei shook his head vehemently. "No. I will bring you there."

"You are quick, I give you
that; but a mortally unskilled liar, and you have scruples. Good. I
wondered. Now I know the limit of what I can ask you. Rest assured I
intend no such attack. Do you understand me?"

"Aye," Chei said, his face gone from white to flushed, and his breath unsteady.

"I shall not overburden
your conscience," Morgaine said. "I have one man with me who reminds me
I have one." She began to smother the fire with earth as if she had
never noticed his discomfiture. "Have no fear I shall harm your people.
You will carry your own armor when we ride out tonight—on your horse or
on your person, as you choose. I have some care of your life, and,
plainly put, I want the weight off my horse."

The flush was decided. Chei
made a little formal bow where he sat—a quick-witted man, Vanye
thought, and shamed by that deception of him, shamed again by a woman's
kindly, arrogant manner with him. That she was qhal made it expected,
perhaps—to a man attempting a new and unpalatable allegiance.

It was not a thing he could
reason with, knowing Morgaine's short patience, and knowing well enough
that she had that habit especially with strangers who put demands on
her patience—blunt speech and a clear warning what her desires were and
what she would have and not have.

She gave him the pots to
scour; she repacked the saddlebags. "Go to sleep," she bade Chei, who
still sat opposite her. He was slow to move, but move he did, and went
over where his saddle lay, and tucked down in his blanket.

"You are too harsh with him," Vanye said to her
,
returning the pans wet from the spring.

"He is not a fool," Morgaine said.

"Nor likes to be played for one."

She gave him a moment's
flat stare, nothing of the sort she gave Chei. It was a different kind
of honesty. "Nor do I. Lest he think of trying it."

"You are qhal in his eyes. Be kinder."

"And test his unbelief twice over?"

"You are a woman," he said,
because he had run out of lesser reasons. "It is not the same. He is
young. You shamed him just then."

She gave him a second, flatter stare. "He is a grown man. Let him manage."

"You do not need to provoke him."

"Nor he to provoke me. He
is the one who needs worry where the limits are. Should I give him
false confidence? I do not want to have to kill him, Vanye.
That
is where mistakes lead. Thee knows. Thee knows very well. Who of the two of us has ever laid hands on him?"

"I am a—"

"—man. Aye. Well, then
explain to him that I did not shoot him when he ran and that was a
great favor I did him. Explain that I will not lay hands on him if he
makes a mistake. I will kill him without warning and from behind, and I
will not lose sleep over it." She tied the strings of the saddlebags
and shifted
Changeling's
hilt toward her,
where it lay, never far from her. "In the meanwhile I shall be most
mildly courteous, whatever you please. Go, rest. If we
trusted
this man, you and I both might get more sleep."

"Plague take it,
if you heard any—"

Across their little
shoulder of rock and soil, the horses lifted their heads. Vanye caught
it from the tail of his eye and his pulse quickened, all dispute
stopped in mid breath. Morgaine stopped. Her gray eyes shifted from
horses to the woods which shielded them from the road, as Chei lay
rolled in his blanket, perhaps unaware.

Vanye got up carefully and
Morgaine gathered herself at the same moment. He signed toward Chei's
horse, tethered apart: that was the one that he worried might call out,
and to that one he went while Morgaine went to their own pair, to keep
them quiet.

The bay gelding had its
ears up, its nostrils wide. He held it, jostled the tether as he would
do with their own horses, held his hand ready should it take a notion
to sound an alarm. It might be some predator had attracted their
notice, even some straying deer, granted no worse things prowled these
pine woods.

But in moments he heard the
high clear ring of harness, of riders moving at a deliberate speed—down
the road, he thought, and not ascending, though the hills played
tricks. He ventured a glance back at Morgaine as he held his hand on
the bay's nose and whispered to it in the Kurshin tongue. Between them
Chei had lifted his head: Chei lay still and tense with his blanket up
to his shoulder—facing him, his back to Morgaine, who was the one of
them close enough to stop some outcry, but not in a position to see him
about to make it.

Chei made no move, no
sound. It was the horse that jerked its head and stamped, and Vanye
clamped his hand down a moment, fighting it, sliding a worried glance
Chei's way.

It was a long, long while
that the sounds lasted in the wind and the distance, the dim, light
jingle of harness, the sound of horses moving, in full daylight and
with, perhaps, Heaven grant, more attention on the part of the riders
to what was happening in the valley and what they might meet on the
road, than to the chance someone might have occupied this withdrawn,
rocky fold of the hills.

Thank Heaven, he thought,
the fire was out, and the pots were washed, and the wind was coming off
the road to them and not the other way.

There was quiet finally. A bird began to sing again. He gingerly let go the horse he held, looking at Chei all the while.

He nodded at Chei after a moment.

And Morgaine left the horses to walk back to the streamside.

Chapter Five

The roan horse shied back
from the fire and the rider applied the quirt, driving it through the
smoke, where human servants labored with axe and wet sacking and
mattocks to keep it from passing the Road. Others rode behind him, both
qhal and the levies from the villages.

Gault ep Mesyrun was not
his name: it was Qhiverin; but at times he forgot that fact, as he did
now, that the rebels assailed the land itself. In this unprecedented
attack on the forest, Gault's will and the self that had been
Qhiverin's were of one accord.

The land burned. They had
seen the plume from Morund, long before the first of the riderless
horses came wandering into the pastures. There was no reasonable cause
of fire on a clear night, but one; and Gault had roused the levies,
rung the bell to turn out the villagers, and sent out his couriers
breakneck for the east, where his fellow lords held an older and firmer
control over the land. Southward to the gate, to take a shorter route
to the north, he sent his lieutenant Kereys—for the change in tactics
that set human folk to war against the land itself was a considerable
one, and the high lord in Mante preferred too fervent a zeal for
reports rather than too much complacency.

It was a humiliation of a
kind Gault did not intend to let pass, more, it was an embarrassment
before Skarrin, with whom he had little favor; and nothing but justice
on the rebels would redeem him. He had broken the back of the rebellion
at Gyllin-brook, eliminated his former ally Ichandren as a
trouble-maker and made examples; and since that time the man who rode
beside him, on the piebald gelding, was not the human he looked to be.

His name had been Jestryn
ep Desiny, but that was not the mind which lived behind that handsome,
sword-marred face. It was Gault-Qhiverin's old friend Pyverrn, who had
taken too grievous a wound at Gyllin-brook; and who had chosen a human
shape, gate-given—one of Ichandren's own, his cousin.

There was a certain irony
in it, Gault-Qhiverin thought—that two old friends rode side by side
bent on vengeance, Jestryn being Gault's ally and guide in this foray
to the highlands as they had once, when they were human, ridden against
qhalur enemies at Ichandren's side.

Their friendship thus had, as Gault counted it, a certain double poesy.

It was onto the road at
dusk, and the road which began in the lowlands as a track carts used,
became a narrow trail cut through the pines, a pale line eroded and
slotted by horse or foot, grown up in wispy grass along the margin so
that it was easy to mistake some thinning of the trees for a spur off
it.

There was no room, where it crossed difficult places, to have two riders abreast; and it was all too easy a place for ambush.

Ambush crossed Vanye's
mind—constantly. He little liked these close spaces, little as he had
liked the prospect of the open road, knowing what Chei had warned them.
It was Chei in the lead now, Morgaine bringing up the rear, in this
dark, pine-spiked shadow, and Chei did not have the look of a man
contemplating a run for freedom: Chei had declined to wear the armor
Morgaine had returned to him—the scabbed sores were still too painful,
Chei had said: it was hard enough to bear the riding.