Wall of Shiuan

He looked up, saw that Morgaine had been staring at him in the ruddy light, eyes that were in daylight sea-gray, world-gray, qujal–gray. That gentle, ancient accent had power more than the wind to chill him, reminding him that she had known more Gates than one, that she had learned his tongue of men long dead; she forgot, sometimes, what age she lived in.

He shrugged.

“Roh,” she said, “is no longer kin to you. Do not brood on it.”

“When I find him,” he said, “I will kill him. I have sworn that.”

“Was it for that,” she asked him finally, “that you came?”

He gazed into the fire, unable to speak aloud the unease that rose in him when she began to encircle him with such questions. She was not of his blood. He had left his own land, abandoned everything to follow her. There were some things that he did not let himself reason to their logical end.

She left the silence on him, a stifling weight; and he opened his hand, twice scarred across the palm with the Claiming by blood and ash. By that, he was kin to her, bound in service, without conscience, honorless save for her honor, which he served. This parting-gift his clan had bestowed on him, like the shorn hair that marked him felon and outlaw, a man fit only for hanging. Brother-slayer, bastard-born: no other liege would have wanted such a man, only Morgaine, whose name was a curse wherever she was known. It was irony that ilin–service, penance for murder, had left him far more blood-guilty than ever he had come to her.

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 him, 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 ilin–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 matters. 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.”