The Complete Morgaine (122 page)

“No,” she said softly, “I am not. Would you guess again, my lord Arunden?”

“My lady,” Chei said, stepping between. “My lord—”

“Is she here to make threats?” Arunden asked. “Or to spy out the hills, with you for her guide?”

Morgaine glanced Chei's way with chill disdain. “You vowed this was a reasonable man.”

“I am no fool!” Arunden shouted, and stamped his stick into the coals, so that coals scattered and sparks flew up.

“I am out of patience,” Morgaine said to Chei, and turned aside.

“Stay,” Chei said. “Wait—my lord Arunden. Do not make a mistake.”

“I make no mistake. It is
your
mistake—”

“Chei!” a voice called out of the dark, and a man was coming down the slope of a sudden, limping and making his way with difficulty on the uneven ground among the trees and huts.

Vanye let his sword surreptitiously back to its sheath, as Morgaine had stopped near him, her hands shrouded in her cloak and her jaw set.

“Bron, it is not your brother,” Arunden shouted uphill as that man came on, and waved him to stand off.

But: “Bron,” Chei said, quietly. “O Bron—”

The man came resolutely forward, limping somewhat—unarmored, wearing only breeches and shirt and boots, weaponless; he came and he stopped in doubt a little the other side of the fire; as Chei for his part stood still—wisely, Vanye thought, with that prickling between his own shoulder-blades that weapons at his back set there.

“I am not Changed,” Chei said in a voice that scarcely carried, a voice which trembled. “Bron, Ichandren is dead. Everyone is dead. Gault gave the last of us to the wolves. Myself, Falwyn, ep Cnary—” His voice did break, quiet as it was. “They died. That was what happened to them. I thought you had died on the field.”

“What do you want here?” Bron asked, in a voice colder than Arunden's. “What is it you want?”

Chei turned his face away as if it he had been dealt a blow, and shook his head vehemently.

“What do you want, Chei?”

“Passage,” Chei said after a moment, looking back toward his brother. “Safety. I am sworn, Bron, my lord was dead, you were dead, the lady and this man found me, they took me away from the wolves, healed my hurts—He is not
qhal
, Bron, he is a man like I am and
she
set me free and gave me a horse and tells me things that Arunden ought to know, that all of us ought to know, Bron—I swear to you, I know there is no way to prove anything I say. But you know me, you know everything I could know—try me, whether I have forgotten anything. Bron—for the love of Heaven—”

Bron's face worked, somewhere between desperation and grief.

And suddenly he held out his open arms.

“No,” Arunden cried. “Fool!”

But Chei came to him, slowly, carefully. They embraced each other, and wept, for very long, till Bron set Chei back by the shoulders and looked at him as if he could discover the truth by firelight.

Vanye watched with a pang of his own—the which he could not comprehend, only something in him hurt, perhaps that a man could come home again; or that brothers could prove true.

Or that Chei had just deserted them for a deeper loyalty, whatever the issue of this place.

Fool, he thought. Well that there
be
some help for us here.

There was Morgaine beside him, who was all his own concern; and Chei at the moment was hers, he reckoned, their guide and the source of everything they knew in this world. She would wreak havoc to keep him safe, Chei was very right; had Arunden attempted to stop him or to strike him or his brother, Morgaine would have acted, fatally for Arunden and half the village before she was done.

But she and Arunden and all of them stood baffled by this, that Bron ep Kantory took his brother into his arms without being sure what he was embracing: he made himself a hostage to stop those who cared for either of them, and by one move held them all powerless.

Chapter 6

“Come,” Bron said, his hands on Chei's shoulders, while Chei's thoughts reeled between one side and the other of the forces gathered there at odds. There was the lady and Vanye and there was Arunden ep Corys, a sudden and hard-handed lord. Calamity was possible at any instant.

But Bron held to him as if there were no chance in all the world that he was a piece of Gault's handiwork. “Come,” Bron said gently, as if there were no lunacy at all in his arriving in camp in company with a
qhalur
witch and a man in strange armor. “Tell me; tell me what I can do; O my God, Chei—” Of a sudden Bron hugged him tight again and pressed his head against his shoulder; and Chei embraced him a second time, appalled at now thin his strong brother had become, how there was so little between his hands and Bron's ribs, and how there was a fragile, insubstantial feel about him.

“I am not theirs,” Chei insisted, over and over again. “Not theirs. I am not lying, Bron, I swear to you I am not Changed.”

“I believe you,” Bron said. “I know, I know, what shall I do, what do you want me to do?”

“Just swear for me.
Talk
to Arunden.”

“Tell him what? Who are they? What are they?”

“Friends. Friends to us.”

Bron set him back and stared at him, bewildered, desperate—at his little brother who was a fool and could not think of anything but seeing him, until now, now that he knew what he had known from birth, that Bron would do the same as he—would believe him because he wanted to believe, and become another fool for his sake, risking his life and his soul for the remotest hope Chei was alive and still his brother. That was what was in Bron's eyes, that was the
struggle to believe, while his hands trembled on Chei's arms and strayed once and twice to his face and his shoulders as if he could not believe he was flesh and blood.

“You
look
tolerably well,” Bron said.

“They have been good to me, Bron, truly—they have. You—?”

“Well enough, I am well enough.”

“You limp.”

“Ah, well, that will mend, it will mend. So do you.—My God, my God—”

“There was a brooch Mama had—it was a marsh rose. There was a place in the wall we used to hide our special things—”

“O
God
, Chei—”

“—I gave you that scar on your chin; I hit you with a harness buckle—you teased me about a girl; her name was Meltien. She died in the winter march—”

“Brother—” Bron hugged him to silence. They wept together; and when he could speak again:

“Bron, I have sworn to take them north on the Road; and I have to do that—”

“There are arrows aimed at us.” Bron took his face between his hands and looked again at him, intensely. “Who are they? You will have to tell me. I do not understand. God knows Arunden does not. What shall we do?”

“I will talk to them.
They
will talk with Arunden if he will listen—”

“He will listen,” Bron said; and hugged him close against his side, so that they shielded each other as they went to Arunden, Bron armorless as he was, himself in a mail shirt that was in no wise proof against the lady's weapons.

But a man barred their way, a man with a drawn sword and the emblem on him of Holy Church; and Bron stopped still, his hand clenched on Chei's shirt.

“If you will not kill it,” the priest said, “
I
will. Your soul is in danger, Bron ep Kantory.”

“Your
life
is,” Chei answered, and would have pushed Bron behind him, but Bron stood fast. “My lady!”

“Hold!” Arunden said.

“My lord,” the priest protested.

But Arunden walked into the matter, and waved the priest off. And Chei stood with a weakness still in his knees, uncertain which of them was supporting the other. Words froze in his throat. They always did, at the worst of times.

“There is a curse in him,” the priest said. “It is a curse has come to us in a friend's shape. It is Gault's gift. Kill them. Have no words with them.”

“Then we would know nothing Gault wants,” Arunden said. “Would we, priest?—Talk, boy. What have we here? What do you bring us, eh? More of Gault's handiwork?”

 • • • 

“The lord is talking, at least,” Vanye said in a low voice, seeing what transpired, with the brothers and Arunden and two armed men. His hand was still on his sword, from the first Chei had called out.

And he thanked Heaven that Arunden had moved to stop the man.

“Hope that this brother's word has some weight,” Morgaine said in the Kurshin tongue. “I should not have let us leave the road. That was the first mistake. Stay to my left.”

“Aye,” he murmured, feeling the sting of that, and his heart was pounding, the old, familiar fear, the nightmare of too many such choices. But Chei came toward them and fear shifted to a frail, desperate hope, seeing that Bron continued to talk to Arunden.

“He will speak to you,” Chei said, casting an anxious glance between him and Morgaine. “I swear to you—Arunden is not a treacherous man: God witness, he is not a careful one, either—he is afraid of you, lady, and he cannot admit it. Be patient with him. That is a priest of God—that one, with the sword. Be careful of him.”

Vanye looked a second time. It did not look like a priest. He drew in a quick, anxious breath. It had been long since he had found anything of the Church; and there had been so much doubtful he had had to choose on his own: so far he had come, and changed so much—and a priest—

He was starkly afraid to face anything of the Church nowadays: that was the proof that he was damned, and he did not need a priest to threaten him with Hell.

Or to threaten Morgaine, or curse her with curses she would not regard, but which would all the same bring no luck to them.

“We do not need the priest,” he muttered. “Send him away.”

“I do not know,” Chei said in evident consternation. “I do not think—I do not see how . . . my lady—”

“No matter,” Morgaine said. Gold flashed in the seam of her cloak. She rested
Changeling
's cap on the ground, her hands on the quillons of the dragon grip. “If it saves us time, let us be done with this.”

Vanye opened his mouth to protest. But it was not that Morgaine did not know the Church. There was nothing he could tell her. There was nothing he knew how to tell her.

He longed—God in Heaven, he longed for someone to tell him he had done right, and that his soul was not so stained as he thought it was, or a gentle priest like those in Baien-an or even old San Romen, who would lay hands on him and pray over him and tell him if he did thus and thus he was not damned.

But this priest did not have any gentle look. This one was damnation and hellfire, and met them with the uplifted cross of a sword.

“No further,” the priest said, and drew a line in the dirt, between them and his lord. “Talk behind that.”

Morgaine grounded
Changeling
just behind that line, the dragon hilt in her hands, and a hell between them that the priest could not in his wildest dreams, imagine.

“Do we talk to this?” she asked scornfully, looking past the priest to Arunden. “Is he lord in this camp? Or are you?”

“My lady,” Chei cautioned her, and Bron, who had come halfway between Arunden and his brother, stopped still and looked appalled.

“I will talk with whoever is lord here,” Morgaine said. “If it is this man, so be it. His word will bind you. And I will take it for yours.”

“If I say talk with the camp scullions, you talk with them!” Arunden snarled.

Vanye went stiff, but Morgaine's hand was up, preventing him, before the lord Arunden had even finished speaking.

“Well and good,” she said. “To
them
I will offer my help, and turn this camp upside down, lord Arunden, when they profit from what I have to say.
Or
you can listen, and profit yourself and yours, and not come to Ichandren's fate or have to ask advice of your servants.”

“You are in a poor place to threaten us, woman! Have you looked around you?”

“Have
you
, my lord, and have you not noticed that
qhal
are taking your land and killing your people? I might make some difference in that. Let us talk, my lord Arunden! Let us sit down like sensible folk and I will tell you why I want to pass through your land.”

“No passage!” the priest cried, and people murmured in the shadows. But:

“Sit down,” Arunden said. “
Sit
, and
lie
to us before we deal with you.”

 • • • 

More and more people appeared out of the dark and the woods, coming down into the light: a man or two at first, who stood with Arunden within the priest's line; and young women in breeches and braids, who scurried about seeing to the fire and bringing out blankets to spread by it—an appearance of decent courtesy, Vanye thought, standing by with his hand on his sword-hilt and a dart of his eye toward every move around the shadows on their own side of the line.