Exile's Gate (23 page)

Eventually the sound came
to them of riders behind them on the trail. Morgaine drew rein. The
rest of them did, waiting in a wide place on the shoulder of a low hill.

"They took long enough," Morgaine said with displeasure. She slipped
Changeling
to
her side and adjusted and put up the hood of the two-sided cloak the
arrhendim had given her; wrapping herself in gray—gray figure on gray
horse in the misty morning; and in the next moment one and the next and
the third rider appeared through the thicket across the ravine. They
seemed unaware until the next heartbeat that they were observed; then
the leader hesitated to the confusion of his men and their horses.

"Well we are no enemy," Vanye said under his breath as the men came on ahead, down the slope and up again toward them.

"Lady," the older of the
three said as he reined in, and ducked his head in respect, a stout man
with gizzled braids and scarred armor.

"My thanks," Morgaine said
grimly, leaning on the saddlehorn. "I will have one thing: to go
quickly and quietly. I want to find the road where it enters qhalur
lands, and that with no harm to anyone, including yourselves. I do not
need to say the other choice. Ride well ahead of us. When we come to
the road, your duty is done and you will return to your lord. Do you
question?"

"No, lady."

She nodded toward the
trail, and the three rode on into the lead at a brisk pace. Her glance
slid Bron's way, and to Chei, as she reined the gray about; and last
she looked to Vanye.

"If they do not cut our
throats," he muttered in the Kurshin tongue, and stayed close by her as
they rode. The riders ahead had already hazed in the mist, and Bron and
Chei were hindmost on the narrow trail. "Bron," he said, reining back
half a length. "Do you know those three?"

"The one is Eoghar," Bron
said, "and the others are his cousins—Tars, they call the dark one; and
Patryn is the one with the scarred face. That is all I know, m'lord—no
better and no worse than the rest of them."

"Well when we are quit of
them," Chei said for his part, "but just as well we have them now. In
that much Arunden told the truth."

The rain began to fall
again, a light, chill mist that alternately blew and clung. The noon
sun had no success with the clouds, nor was the afternoon better.
Streams trickled in the low places they crossed; the rounding of a hill
gusted moisture into faces and down necks, and showed the wooded flanks
of further hills all hazed and vague.

It was steady progress they
made, but not swift, and Morgaine chafed in silence—Vanye knew that
look, read the set of her mouth and the sometime impatient glances at
the sky, with frowns as if she faced some living enemy.

Time, he thought. It was time and more time lost.

"How far is it?" she had asked Chei early on; and: "Two days," Chei had said, "down to the road again." Then: "Maybe more."

Now their guides halted,
waiting for them on the trail, all wrapped in their cloaks and with
their horses back-eared and unhappy in the blowing mist.

"We should make camp,"
their leader said—Eoghar, Bron had named him. He had a wretched look, a
pained look, squinting against the rain that dripped off his hair, and
Vanye recalled the last night, and the campfire, and the amount of
drink that had passed even before they quit the gathering.

"No," Morgaine said, and,
"No," again when Eoghar argued the weather and the horses and the
slickness of the rocks and the slopes. "How much worse does it get?"
she asked then, looking at Chei and Bron, who had ridden up close
behind them.

"More of the same," Chei
said, himself in worse case, having only his blanket for a cloak, and
its gray fibers beginning now to soak through. "No worse, my lady.
Certainly no better."

Only looking at him and at
Bron did Morgaine's frown go from annoyance to a more complex
thing—worry, Vanye thought. But: "Move on," she said to Eoghar and his
cousins.

"Lady," Eoghar protested,
and his mustached lips shut themselves and the voice faded into
something very like fear at whatever look Morgaine then sent him. "Aye,
lady." And Vanye took his hand from the sword-hilt as three wet and
unhappy men turned their horses about and kept going down the exposed
and downsloping trail.

To Morgaine he ventured no
word, knowing her moods well enough, that a black anger was roiling in
her, and he knew well enough what kind of look had likely set the men
moving.

Yet she delayed a moment, looking back at Chei, and there was worry again. "Are you bearing up?" she asked.

"Well enough," Chei said, and drew a little breath, straightening in the saddle. "My lady."

It was not gratitude shone
in Chei's fair eyes, with rain-chill whitening his face and the water
running from his hair. It was something like adoration.

Vanye lowered his head and
kept his eyes on the trail as they rode after their guides, gazing down
on the tops of trees and the depths of a ravine that fell away beside
Arrhan's sure, careful steps.

He did not know why that
expression of Chei's should trouble him so. It was not the look of a
man with a woman he wanted. He had seen it—he recollected—in chapel,
candlelight off painted wood, face after identical face—

He did not know why that
image out of childhood and Church came back to him again and again,
stronger than the world around him, of gray mist and mist-grayed pines
and slick granite, or why he thought then of Chei when he had first
come to them, that fevered, mad glare that had nothing to do with the
clean-faced, earnest youth who spoke so fair to Morgaine and looked at
her since this morning as if she were some saint.

But he understood with a
little chill of fear—knowing that behind Morgaine's careful question,
that kindly, out of the ordinary question to Chei when she was
otherwise distracted—Morgaine was indeed disturbed.

I am not virtuous, she was wont to say, again and again to him, warning him. I cannot afford to be.

And again, in the night: How can you love me?

And this morning: I lie; thee knows I lie;
tell
him—

It was fear he felt in her,
that was what moiled in his stomach at the moment; it was a rising
sense of panic, between her acceptance of Chei for his sake and Bron
for Chei's sake; and the changes between himself and her; and this
priest and this cursed gift from a hedge-lord. It was no time to think
of such things, riding on a high trail in the company of men they could
not trust, in a land which might offer ambush: he was derelict to think
of anything but where they rode and what things the forest might tell
him and the attitudes of the men in front of them But it was not in the
forest that he felt the danger. It was beside him, in Morgaine's
silence, in the way she looked at Chei and at him.

Perhaps she mused on things the two of them had done and promised and said to each other, in the thunderous dark.

Nothing seemed now so
simple or so clean now as then. He did not know what he should have
done differently this morning or how he could have protected her or
what he ought now to do.

Persuade Chei and his brother to leave them, that was the first thing, before worse happened.

But to cast them out in
these hills, when Chei was known to have been in qhalur hands, and when
both of them were known to have ridden with Morgaine kri Chya—that
would be a death sentence for these two, for these honest, too-young
men who had neither lord nor family to protect them, and not, he
sensed, the ability to wrest power unto themselves.

Honest men, Morgaine had said.

Chapter Eight

The rain came down in
wind-borne mist by sundown, under skies flickering and glowing with
lightnings, as they rode within the shelter of a rocky retreat which
had not, perhaps, been a streambed until the rain fell, but which now
had a waterfall spilling off the heights above the cut and boiling
white along the rocks to yet another falls.

There was a sheltered camp
here, Chei and Bron supported the guides in that assertion, and Vanye
was only glad to hope for the overhanging cliff face Bron described or
anywhere out of the wind. "There is no way out of the place but one,"
Bron had admitted, "but with your weapons no one could force it from
the front or from above."

Vanye had had second
thoughts at that description, and looked at Morgaine: warfare in world
and world and world had taught him half a score of ways to attack such
a place; Morgaine surely knew as many more. But Morgaine had made no
objection except a misgiving glance, wet and miserable as the rest of
them in this storm that mixed cold mist with the breaths they took.

Now they rode in the last
of the light, into this narrow place where a waterfall thundered above
the rain, and where some previous user had left standing a woven
brush-work against the rock. He did not like the look of it; but the
horses were spent after rough going on the slick trails, they were
chilled to the bone, and the whipping of the wind up the heights and
the scattering of water off pine boughs in soaking drops, threw water
at them so many directions there was no fending it off: it ran down
necks and got under cloaks clenched in numb hands; and that brush
shelter beckoned with the promise of dry ground and rest and respite.

But: "No," Morgaine said
then, ready to refuse it after all, "no more of guesting—"—at which
Vanye's heart both sank in weariness and resolved itself she was
altogether right. But: "It is a hunter-shelter," Chei said. "I do not
expect anyone is there."

"Find out," Morgaine said
to Eoghar, and with more zeal than he had done anything in the last
hour, Eoghar spurred his horse up the bank to hail the place and then
to dismount, draw his sword, and look into it.

Eoghar turned then and
waved to them to come ahead, murky flash of his sword-blade in the
dark. Vanye gave a sigh of relief and guided Arrhan carefully after
Eoghar's cousins, to have an eye on them and keep his sword between
them and Morgaine, should they have any notions of treachery in this
dark hole.

But when they had come up and dismounted beside the shelter:

"One cannot hear in this
place," Morgaine objected, the last of them still ahorse, her voice
thinned by the roar of the water pouring down and running over rock. "I
do not like this."

Vanye looked up at her from
across Arrhan's rain-wet saddle. "Aye," he said hoarsely, knowing a
second time she was right, but he felt the weight of the mail on his
back and the cold of water down his neck and soaking his boots and
breeches. It was her second quibble with this place. He respected her
instincts; but there was in him a heart-deep vexation—Heaven save us,
liyo,
you have three men you can trust, he thought to shout at her.

But there were Arunden's
three, and those men large and strong, and if they would not mutiny in
the night, they were bound to if she bade them go on now.

And he, God help them, had
to enforce her orders, or she had to do murder on them; and he was not
sure he had a fight left in him—

"Do we ride on,
liyo?"
he asked with a deep and weary breath.

She glanced back, a
shifting of her eyes toward Chei and Bron, who were already taking gear
off their horses in the lightning-flashes and the mist, Chei trying in
vain to keep the sodden blanket from flying in the wind, his cloth
breeches wet through in places where it had blown as he rode. They were
spent, man and youth both thin and worn, both recent from wounds, both
vulnerable to chill and staggering with exhaustion.

"No," she said, then, in a
voice weary as his own. She slid down from Siptah's back, and led him
toward the shelter. "We will have a fire if we can find wood enough. At
least the rain will drown the smoke. If anyone disturbs us tonight it
will be his own misfortune."

It was dead branches broken
off the trees back along the rocks, that they had for their fire; and
the black weapon's power to set it burning, for which Vanye was
earnestly grateful, for nothing but sweat and all a woodsman's skill
could have gotten such a fire alight tonight, even considering the
heart of the wood was dry. A quick touch of that red light into a
little fibrous tinder pulled from the under-bark of the nether side of
the branches, a little encouragement with dead leaves pulled from the
inside of the woven shelter, and there was instantly a cheerful if
smoky little flame that grew with twigs and grew with kindling and
branches and quickly underlit her face and the fearful countenances of
their companions.

A man grew to rely on such comforts.

"It has other uses,"
Morgaine said to the men who watched in horror. One—Patryn, it was,
signed himself. None of the three looked reassured.

To the good, Vanye thought.
Chei was not troubled; he tucked his wet blanket about him and huddled
close to the qhal-made fire, whereat Bron relaxed and even gave a shy
grin between his own shivers as he pulled his boots off to dry them.

With Eoghar and his kin it
was another matter—but so was their situation, men passed off by their
lord into a witch's keeping, despite their priest's objections. They
huddled together a little separate, and hugged themselves against the
cold. The cousin named Tars sneezed mightily, and buried his head a
moment in his arm, and sneezed again.