Ivrel loomed nearer. Its white cone shone in the moonlight like a vision.
“Lady.” Vanye leaned from his saddle at last, caught the reins of the gray. “ Liyo, forbear. Irien is no place to ride at night. Let us stop.”
She yielded then. It surprised him. She chose a place and dismounted, and took her gear from Siptah. Then she sank down and wrapped herself in her cloak, caring for nothing else. Vanye hurried about trying to make a comfortable camp for her. These things he was anxious to do: her dejection weighed upon his own soul, and he could not be comfortable with her.
It was of no avail. She warmed herself at the fire, and stared into the embers, without appetite for the meal he cooked for her, but she picked at it dutifully, and finished it.
He looked up at the mountain that hung over them, and felt its menace himself. This was cursed ground. There was no sane man of Andur-Kursh would camp where they had camped, so near to Irien and to Ivrel.
“Vanye,” she said suddenly, “do you fear this place?”
“I do not like it,” he answered. “Yes, I fear it.”
“I laid on you at Claiming to ruin Hjemur if I cannot. Have you any knowledge where Hjemur’s hold lies?”
He lifted a hand, vaguely toward the notch at Ivrel’s base. “There, through that pass.”
“There is a road there, that would lead you there. There is no other, at least there was not.”
“Do you plan,” he asked, “that I shall have to do this thing?”
“No,” she said. “But that may well be.”
Thereafter she gathered up her cloak and settled herself for the first watch, and Vanye sought his own rest
It seemed only a moment until she leaned over him, touching his shoulder, quietly bidding him take his turn: he had been tired, and had slept soundly. The stars had turned about in their nightly course.
“There have been small prowlers,” she said, “some of unpleasant aspect, but no real harm. I have let the fire die, of purpose.”
He indicated his understanding, and saw with relief that she sought her furs again like one who was glad to sleep. He put himself by the dying fire, knees drawn up and arms propped on his sheathed sword, dreaming into the embers and listening to the peaceful sounds of the horses, whose sense made them better sentinels than men.
And eventually, lulled by the steady snap of the cooling embers, the whisper of wind through the trees at their side, and the slow moving of the horses, he began to struggle against his own urge to sleep.
She screamed.
He came up with sword in hand, saw Morgaine struggling up to her side, and his first thought was that she had been bitten by something. He bent by her, seized her up and held her by the arms and held her, she trembling. But she thrust him back, and walked away from him, arms folded as against a chill wind; so she stood for a time.
“ Liyo?” he questioned her.
“Go back to sleep,” she said. “It was a dream, an old one.”
“ Liyo—”
“Thee has a place, ilin. Go to it.”
He knew better than to be wounded by the tone: it came from some deep hurt of her own; but it stung, all the same. He returned to the fireside and wrapped himself again in his cloak. It was a long time before she had gained control of herself again, and turned and sought the place she had left. He lowered his eyes to the fire, so that he need not look at her; but she would have it otherwise: she paused by him, looking down.
“Vanye,” she said, “I am sorry.”
“I am sorry too, liyo.”
“Go to sleep. I will stay awake a while.”
“I am full awake, liyo. There is no need.”
“I said a thing to you I did not mean.”
He made a half-bow, still not looking at her. “I am ilin, and it is true I have a place, with the ashes of your fire, liyo, but usually I enjoy more honor than that, and I am content.”
“Vanye.” She sank down to sit by the fire too, shivering in the wind, without her cloak. “I need you. This road would be intolerable without you.”
He was sorry for her then. There were tears in her voice; of a sudden he did not want to see the result of them. He bowed, as low as convenience would let him, and stayed so until he thought she would have caught her breath. Then he ventured to look her in the eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I have named that,” she said. It was again the Morgaine he knew, well armored, gray eyes steady.
“You will not trust me.”
“Vanye, do not meddle with me. I would kill you too if it were necessary to set me at Ivrel.”
“I know it,” he said. “ Liyo, I would that you had listened to me. I know you would kill yourself to reach Ivrel, and probably you will kill us both. I do not like this place. But there is no reasoning with you. I have known that from the beginning. I swear that if you would listen to me, if you would let me, I would take you safely out of Andur-Kursh, to—”
“You have already said it. There is no reasoning with me.”
“Why?” he asked of her. “Lady, this is madness, this war of yours. It was lost once. I do not want to die.”
“Neither did they,” she said, and her lips were a thin, hard line. “I heard the things they said of me in Baien, before I passed from that time to this. And I think that is the way I will be remembered. But I will go there, all the same, and that is my business. Your oath does not say that you have to agree with what I do.”
“No,” he acknowledged. But he did not think she heard him: she gazed off into the dark, toward Ivrel, toward Irien. A question weighed upon him. He did not want to hurt her, asking it; but he could not go nearer Irien without it growing heavier in him.
“What became of them?” he asked. “Why were there so few found after Irien?”
“It was the wind,” she said.
“ Liyo?” Her answer chilled him, like sudden madness. But she pressed her lips together and then looked at him.
“It was the wind,” she said again. “There was a gate-field there—warping down from Ivrel—and the mist there was that morning whipped into it like smoke up a chimney, a wind... a wind the like of which you do not imagine. That was what passed at Irien. Ten thousand men—sent through. Into nothing. We knew, my friends and I, we five: we knew, and I do not know whether it was more terrible for us knowing what was about to happen to us than for those that did not understand at all. There was only starry dark there. Only void in the mists... But I lived of course. I was the only one far back enough: it was my task to circle Irien, Lrie and the men of Leth and I—and when we were on the height, it began. I could not hold my men; they thought that they could aid those below, with their king, and they rode down; they would not listen to me, you see, because I am a woman. They thought that I was afraid, and because they were men and must not be, they went. I could not make them understand, and I could not follow them.” Her voice faltered; she steadied it. “I was too wise to go, you see. I am civilized; I knew better. And while I was being wise—it was too late. The wind came over us. For a moment one could not breathe. There was no air. And then it passed, and I coaxed poor Siptah to his feet, and I do not clearly remember what I did after, except that I rode toward Ivrel. There was a Hjemurn force in my way. I fell back and back then, and there was only the south left open. Koris held for a time. Then I lost that shelter; and I retreated to Leth and sheltered there a time before I retreated again toward Aenor-Pyven. I meant to raise an army there; but they would not hear me. When they came to kill me, I cast myself into the Gate: I had no other refuge left. I did not know it would be so long a wait.”
“Lady,” he said, “this—this thing that was done at Irien, killing men without a blow being struck... when we go there, could not Thiye send this wind down on us too?”
“If he knew the moment of our coming, yes. The wind—the wind was the very air rushing into that open Gate, a field cast to the Standing Stone in Irien. It opened some gulf between the stars. To maintain it extended more than a moment as it was would have been disaster to Hjemur. Even he could not be that reckless.”
“Then, at Irien—he knew.”
“Yes, he knew.” Morgaine’s face grew hard again. “There was one man who began to go with us, who never stood with us at Irien—he that wanted Tiffwy’s power, that betrayed Tiffwy with Tiffwy’s wife—that later stood tutor of Edjnel’s son, after killing Edjnel.”
“Chya Zri.”
“Aye, Zri, and to the end of my days I will believe it, though if it was so he was sadly paid by Hjemur. He aimed at a kingdom, and the one he had of it was not the one he planned.”
“Liell.” Vanye uttered the name almost without thinking it, and felt the sudden impact of her eyes upon his.
“What makes you think of him?”
“Roh said that there was question about the man. That Liell is... that he is old, liyo, that he is old as Thiye is old.”
Morgaine’s look grew intensely troubled. “Zri and Liell. Singularly without originality, to have drowned all the heirs of Leth—if drowned they were.”
He remembered the Gate shimmering above the lake, and knew what she meant. Doubts assailed him. He ventured a question he fully hated to ask. “Could you live by this means, if you wished?”
“Yes,” she answered him.
“Have you?”
“No,” she said. And, as if she read the thing in his mind: “It is by means of the Gates that it is done, and it is no light thing to take another body. I am not sure myself quite how it is done, although I think that I know. It is ugly: the body must come from someone, you see. And Liell, if that is true, is growing old.”