Well of Shiuan Read online

  And Roh remained yet to deal with.

  “I came,” he said, “because I swore it to you.”

  She thrust at the fire with a stick, sending sparks aloft like stars on the wind. “Mad,” she judged bitterly. “I set thee free, told thee plainly thee had no possible place outside Kursh, outside the law and the folk thee knows. I wish thee had believed it”

  He acknowledged this truth with a shrug. He knew the workings of Morgaine’s mind better than any living; and he knew the Claim she had set on bun, that had nothing to do with his scarred hand; and the Claim that someone else had set on her, crueller than any oath. Her necessity lay sheathed at her side, that dragon-hilted sword that was no true sword, but a weapon all the same. It was the only bond that had ever truly claimed her, and she hated it above all other evils, qujal or human.

  I have no honor, she had warned him once. It is unconscionable that I should take risks with the burden I carry. I have no luxury left for virtues.

  Another thing she had told him that he had never doubted: I would kill you too if it were necessary.

  She hunted qujal, she and the named-blade Changeling. The qujal she hunted now wore the shape of Chya Roh. She sought Gates, and followed therein a compulsion more than half madness, that gave her neither peace nor happiness. He could understand this in some part: he had held Changeling in his own hands, had wielded its alien evil, and there had come such a weight on his soul afterward that no penance of in-service could ever cleanse him of remembering.

  “The law is,” he said, “that you may bid me leave your service, but you cannot order it. If I stay, I remain ilin, but that is my choice and not yours.”

  “No one ever refused to leave service.”

  “Surely,” he said, “there have been ilin before me that found no choice. A man is maimed in service, for instance; he might starve elsewhere, but while he stays ilin, his liyo must at least feed him and his horse, however foul the treatment he may receive in other natters. You cannot make me leave you, and your charity was always more generous than my brother’s.”

  “You are neither halt nor blind,” Morgaine retorted; she was not accustomed to being answered with levities.

  He made a gesture of dismissal, knowing for once he had touched through her guard. He caught something bewildered in her expression in that instant, something terrified. It destroyed his satisfaction. He would have said something further, but she glanced aside from him with a sudden scowl, removing his opportunity.

  “There was at least a time you chose for yourself,” she said at last. “I gave you that, Nhi Vanye. Remember it someday.”

  “Aye,” he said carefully. “Only so you give me the same grace, liyo, and remember that I chose what I wanted.”

  She frowned the more deeply. “As you will,” she said. “Well enough.” And for a time she gazed into the fire, and then the frown grew pensive, and she was gazing toward their prisoner, a look that betrayed some inner war. Vanye began to suspect something ugly in her mind, that was somehow entangled with her questions to him; he wished that he knew what it was.

  “Liyo,” he said, “likely the girl is harmless.”

  “Thee knows so?”

  She mocked him in his ignorance. He shrugged, made a helpless gesture. “I do not think,” he said, “that Roh would have had time to prepare any ambush.”

  “The time of Gates is not world-time.” She hurled a bit of bark into the flames, dusted her hands. “Go, go, we have time now that one of us could be sleeping, and we are wasting it. Go to sleep.”

  “She?” he asked, with a nod toward Jhirun.

  “I will speak with her.”

  “You rest,” he urged her after a moment, inwardly braced against some irrational anger. Morgaine was distraught this night, exhausted-they both were. Her slim hands were tightly laced about her knee, clenched until the strain was evident. Tired as he was, he sensed something greatly amiss. “Liyo, let me have first watch.”

  She sighed, as if at that offer all the weariness came over her at once, the weight of mail that could make a strong man’s bones ache, days of riding that wore even upon him, Kurshin and born to the saddle. She bowed her head upon her knee, then flung it back and straightened her shoulders. “Aye,” she said hoarsely, “aye, that I will agree to gladly enough.”

  She gathered herself to her feet, Changeling in her hand; but to his amazement she offered it to him, sheathed and crosswise.

  It never left her, never. By night she slept with that evil thing; she never walked from where it lay, not more than a room’s width before she turned and took it up again. When she rode, it was either under her knee on the gray horse’s saddle, or across her shoulders on her sword belt

  He did not want even to touch it, but he took it and gathered it to him carefully; and she left him so, beside the fire. Perhaps, he thought she was concerned that the warrior who guarded her sleep not do so unarmed; perhaps she had some subtler purpose, reminding him what governed her own choices. He considered this, watching her settle to sleep in that corner of the ruin where the stones still made an arch. She had their saddles for pillow and windbreak, the coarse saddle-blankets, unfolded, for a covering: he had lost his own cloak the same way he had lost his sword, else it would have been his cloak that was lent their injured prisoner, not hers. The consciousness of this vexed him. He had come to her with nothing that would have made their way easier, and borrowed upon what she had.

  Yet Morgaine trusted him. He knew how hard it was for her to allow another hand on Changeling, which was obsession with her; she need not have lent it, and did; and he did not know why. He was all too aware, in the long silence after she seemed to have fallen asleep, how clear a target the fire made him.

  Roh, if his hands retained any of their former skill, was a bowman of the Korish forests; and a Chya bowman was a shadow, a flitting ghost where there was cover. Likely too the girl Jhirun had kinsmen hereabouts seeking her, if Roh himself did not. And perhaps-Vanye’s shoulders prickled at the thought-Morgaine set a trap by means of that bright fire, disregarding his life and hers; she was capable of doing so, lending him her chiefest weapon to ease her conscience, knowing that this, at least, he could use.

  He rested the sword between his knees, the dragon-hilt against his heart, daring not so much as to lie down to ease the torment of the mail on his shoulders, for he was unbearably tired, and his eyes were heavy. He listened to the faint sounds of the horses grazing in the dark, reassured constantly by their soft stirrings. Nightsounds had begun, sounds much like home: the creak of frogs, the occasional splash of water as some denizen of the marsh hunted.

  And there was the matter of Jhirun, that Morgaine had set upon him.

  He tucked a chill hand to his belt, felt the rough surface of the Honor-blade’s hilt, wondering how Roh fared, wondering whether he were equally lost, equally afraid. The crackling of the fire at his side brought back other memories, of another fireside, of Ra-koris on a winter’s evening, of a refuge once offered him, when no other refuge existed: Roh, who had been willing to acknowledge kinship with an outlawed kin.

  He had been moved to love Roh once, Roh alone of all his kinsmen; an honest man and brave, Chya Roh i Chya. But the man he had known in Ra-koris was dead, and what possessed Roh’s shape now was qujal, ancient and deadly hostile.

  The Honor-blade was not for enemies, but the last resort of honor; Roh would have chosen that way, if he had had the chance. He had not. Within Gates, souls could be torn from bodies and man and man confounded, the living with the dying. Such was the evil that had taken Chya Roh; Roh was truly dead, and what survived in him wanted killing, for Roh’s sake.

  Vanye drew the blade partly from its sheath, touched that razor edge with gentle fingers, a tightness in his throat, wondering how, of all possessions that

  Roh might have lost, it had been this, that no warrior would choose to abandon.

  She has found you, the girl had said, mistaking them in their kinsmen’s resemblance. Are you
not afraid?

  It occurred to him that Roh himself had feared Morgaine, loathed her, who had destroyed his ancestors and the power that had been Koris.

  But Roh was dead. Morgaine, who had witnessed it, had said that Roh was dead.

  Vanye clenched both hands about Changeling’s cold sheath, averted his eyes from the fire and saw Jhirun awake and staring at him.

  She had knowledge of Roh. Morgaine had left the matter to him, and he loathed what he had asked, realized it for what it truly was-that he did not want the answers.

  Suddenly the girl broke contact with his eyes, hurled herself to her feet and for the shadows.

  He sprang up and crossed the intervening distance before she could take more than two steps-seized her arm and set her down again on the cloak, Changeling safely out of her reach in the bend of his other arm. She struck him, a solid blow across the temple, and he shook her, angered. A second time she hit him, and this time he did hurt her, but she did not cry out-not a sound came from her but gasps for breath, when woman might have appealed to woman-not to Morgaine. He knew whom she feared most; and when she had stopped struggling he relaxed his grip, reckoning that she would not run now. She jerked free and stayed still, breathing hard.

  “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 cannot,” he said. “Not without her leave. But we are not thieves.” He searched in his belt and found the gull-ornament, offering it. She snatched it, careful not even to touch his hand, and clenched it with the other hand under her chin. She continued to stare at him, fierce dark eyes glittering. In the firelight. The bruised cheek gave the left eye a shadow. “You are his cousin?” she asked. “And his enemy?”

  “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 running: “How did you meet him, and when?”

  “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 cannot have planned to go far.”

  “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 manner, that way of reaching for the heart of any who dealt with him-as once Roh had drawn him in spite of Roh’s other failings. It was painful to know that this aspect of the man was still intact, that he had his former gentleness, his honesty-all those graces that had been Chya Roh.

  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, 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 manner of a high-clan warrior, a clan lord, who would not stoop to thievery, not even in great need: that was not the manner of the being who had lied and murdered and stolen through three generations of men, taking what he desired-even the body in which he lived. Generosity was unknown to him.

  That was not the qujal. It was the manner of Roh himself, Chya and more prideful than practical, the blood they both shared; it was Roh.

  “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.