And finally: "I do not understand you," Chei said.
Vanye jerked the braiding loose and looked up at him, frowning. "There is Hell between the gates, Chei, and we will ride through it. There is a new earth the other side, but fairer or fouler than this one, neither of us knows. Heaven knows how the worlds are ordered, but the gates bind them together in ways dangerous for all life. When we are gone it will not be the same sun that rises over us. That is all I understand of it. But that is where we will be—as if we were dead, Chei, and the other side of Hell, and you cannot go back or change your minds then, and nothing you knew will be true. That is what will become of you. This land is your home. And fair or foul, it is what you understand. Think on that. And you still will not know the extent of what will happen to you. Nothing you know will be true."
"But you go. And you are a Man. Are you not?"
Vanye shrugged. The question went deep, troubling him. "It will not matter," he said. "I cannot even reckon how old I am. The stars are not the same. I do not know where I am. I do not know how long ago my cousin died. And it was only a handful of days ago I left him. Now only my liege speaks my language. All the rest are gone." He looked up at two bewildered, sobered faces. "That is the plainest I know to tell you. There is nowhere we come from. There is nowhere we are going. We only go. Come with us if you will. Leave us, the other side of the gate. It may be you will find peace there. It may be we will fall straight into Hell, and die there. We have no way to know. If it is to glory you hope to follow us—or wealth—there is none to offer you. And whether we are right or wrong in anything we do, I do not know. I cannot offer you that either. My liege cannot. So you would be wisest to stay here. Truly you would."
"I do not understand you," Chei said.
"I know. But I am telling you the truth. Go with us as far as Tejhos, that is all. Then ride west. Lose yourselves in the hills, hide and wait. There will be wars. In that time—you will find a lord worth following. That is my advice to you."
"Are you a witch?" Chei asked.
"I suppose that I am."
"But not qhal."
"No. Not qhal."
"You are my friend," Chei said, and reached and pressed his arm.
He could not look at Chei. It hurt too much. He gave a sigh, and ripped out his braiding.
From the men beyond there was a burst of laughter, muted; Bron turned himself about to see what they did and looked back again, frowning, as if he were thoroughly remiss not to forbid that.
But he was not, at present, in any mind to fight with men who, whatever their lord was, brigands or no, were cheerful again, after sullenness all day.
"They will sleep the better for it," Vanye said. "And if their heads ache in the morning, that is their misfortune."
They neither one said more than that. How their thoughts ran now he could not say. They sat together, leaned together. Bron touched his brother's hair as no man would touch another, casually, even were they kinsmen, but he reckoned this was only affection, and foreign ways. They understood hospitality; their fire seemed sacred enough, and the passing of food and drink; and there were priests to confess them; and yet a lord could claim a wounded man who came to him for protection, and not let him go again. He had met men far more strange to him, whose customs troubled him less, because they were utterly strange.
Yet he reckoned they might trust two watches tonight to these brothers, and know their throats would stay uncut, and their backs defended, if it came to that. If these two were not arrhendim and did not have Kurshin ways, still they were decent men, and he felt his supper uneasy at his stomach, somewhere between regret for having them along and the fear that they would go, and the sorrow that he had finally found a friend staunch enough to stay by them—
—and it was not a man he could trust.
That Chei could lie and never know he was lying—that was a flaw he did not know how to mend. Chei simply did not know what truth was.
And he himself was Nhi as well as Kurshin, wherefore a man who deceived and twisted and turned with the agility that seemed native to this land, set his teeth on edge, in an anger at once familiar and terrifying—and he remembered suddenly why.
It was only his brothers had evoked that peculiar ambivalence in him.
And he had killed one and all but killed the other: clan Myya was his legitimate half-brothers' clan—hill bandits turned noblemen, who did not know a straight way through any door, that was Nhi's proverb for them; and again: thicker than feuds in Myya.
He opened his eyes again. It was only pale-haired Chei, and Bron, whose faces showed hurt and whose eyes sought some answer of Morgaine, since he had shut them out.
"I will take first watch," Morgaine said, rescuing him from the chance that they would go on with him. "Go to sleep. We will be on our way before light; best you all take what you can."
"Aye." He reached at his side and loosed his armor buckles, and found a place the rock fit his shoulders. He unhooked his sword from his side and laid it across his lap, considering Eoghar's company yonder. "Quiet," he shouted at those three, making a small shocked silence, astonishing himself profoundly that they looked so daunted. "Men are going to sleep here."
The trouble was in himself, he thought in the quiet that continued, who invented worries and conjured up calamities—you think too much, his brother Erij had told him once upon a time, chiding him for cowardice.
It was truth. He fell into old habits. It was fear which did that to him, fear not of enemies, but of friends. His brothers had taught him that lesson—beaten it into him, flesh and bone and nerve.
He clasped his sword to him, nevertheless, in both arms, so that Eoghar and his cousins would go on understanding their situation, if there remained any doubt.
The rain subsided to a light patter on the ground outside, an occasional gust carrying it into the shelter, but there was enough heat from the two fires and the presence of seven bodies to keep the chill away. It would have been a good night under other circumstances, Chei thought glumly, lying curled toward the fire warmth, back to back with Bron, but a different kind of cold had crept in among them, and Chei could not reason why, except somehow the lady, always cold and obscure, turned kind to them; while Vanye suddenly refused to look him in the eyes, for reasons which Chei did not, after thinking and thinking on the matter, understand. . . .
What do you want of me? A prisoner, a slave, someone to be grateful for whatever crusts you will give me?
Why could he not say once that he was glad for me, that Bron is alive?
Could not he manage anything but that scowl for it?
The thoughts turned over and over in him like pebbles in a current, one abrading the next; and one atop and then the other. He ached inside. It angered him that the man he admired turned away from him, and it mattered in a personal way—when he ought to worry only for the consequences of being cast out masterless, as a sane man ought.
He might, he thought, appeal to the lady who sat there in the glow of the coals, beautiful and terrible in her fire-stained pallor, herself embodying every fear he had had from childhood; and every mercy he had found in extremity. She leaned on the sword that she bore, which had a fantastical beast for hilt and quillons. Her eyes gazed toward the glow of the coals, and her face was pensive, even gentle—it tempted a man to think she might listen to him.
He was mad, perhaps: a man who began to hope against the general ebb of human fortunes in the world, and who began to believe in miracles—was he not mad?
But he would not have believed at all, till he looked up from the wolf-pack snarling about him and saw first the swordsman bearing down on him and then the silver-haired woman—demons out of Hell he had thought them first, that the ordinary world had rent in twain and death had come for him. He thought of that in bleak moments of terror which intervened in his other thoughts: but he was not dead, his delirium had left him, and it was a familiar woods he rode, with Bron back from the dead and in company with these two who moved out of pattern with the world and promised him humankind need not, after all, perish.