Wall of Shiuan

Then he turned the horse upslope, where Morgaine awaited him on the road. He expected her to ride ahead, scorning him, but she did not. She set Siptah to walking beside the gelding, knee to knee with him, though she did not look at him.

It was tacit conciliation, he suspected. He gathered this knowledge to himself for comfort, but it was far down the road before there was a word from her, when the cold shadow of the trees began to enfold them again.

“My moods,” Morgaine said suddenly. “Forget them.”

He looked at her, found nothing easy to say. He nodded, a carefully noncommittal gesture, for the words were painfully forced from her, and he did not think she wanted to discuss the matter. In truth, she owed him nothing, neither apology nor even humane treatment; that was the nature of ilin law; but that was not the way between them. Something troubled her, something heart-deep, and he wished that he could put a name to it.

The strangeness of the land was wearing at them both, he decided; they were tired, and nerves were tautly strung. He felt in his own body the ache, the weight of mail that settled with malevolent cunning into the hollows of a man’s body, that galled flesh raw where there was the least fold in garments beneath. Therein lay reason enough of tempers; and she feared—feared Roh, feared ambush, feared things, he suspected uneasily, the like of which he did not imagine.

“Aye,” he murmured at last, settling more easily into the saddle. “We are both tired, liyo. That is all.”

She seemed content with that.

And for many long hours they passed through land that was low and all the same, alternate tracts of cheerless, unhealthy forest and barren marsh, where the road was passable and in most places well above the water. Qujal–made, this road, Vanye reckoned to himself—wrought by ancient magics– qujalin works lasted, strange, immune to the ages that ate away at the works of men, some seeming ageless, while others crumbled away suddenly as if they had become infected with mortality. There was a time not so long ago when he would have sought any other road than this, that led them so well in the direction Morgaine sought: qujalin roads surely led to qujalin places—and surely such was this called Abarais, in Shiuan, which Morgaine sought.

And better, far better, could they ride that way alone, unseen, unmarked by men. He felt Jhirun’s weight against his back, balancing his own, she seeming to sleep for brief periods. It was a warm and altogether unaccustomed sensation, the nearness of another being: ilin, outlaw, bastard motherless from birth, he could recall few moments that any had laid hands on him save in anger. He found it disturbing now, this so harmless burden against him, that weighed against him, and against his mind.

He watched Morgaine, who glanced constantly to this side and that as they rode, searching every shadow; and it came to him what kept his mind so ill at ease: that Morgaine, arrogant as she was, seemed afraid—that she, who had no sane regard for her life or his, was greatly afraid, and that somewhere in that fear rested the child that rode sleeping at his back.

The forest closed in upon the road in the late afternoon and did not yield them up again, a way that grew more and more darksome, where it seemed that evening came premature. The trees here lived, growing in interlaced confusion, thrusting roots out into the channels, reaching branches overhead, powerless against the closely fitted megaliths that were the body of the road. Brush crowded over the margins, making it impossible for two horses to go abreast.

Morgaine, her horse unencumbered, led in this narrow way, a shadow among shadows, riding a pale horse, that pale hair of hers an enemy banner for any hereabouts who did not love qujal; and they rode blindly, unable to see beyond that tangle of brush that had found root, seeds and earth piled up against the enduring stones. Cover your hair, Vanye wished to tell her, but he felt still that mood in her, that unreason that he did not want to meet yet another time. It was not a time or place for quarrels.

Clouds again began to veil the sky, and that veil grew constantly darker, and plunged the forest into a halflight that destroyed all perspective, that made of the aisles of trees deep caverns hung with moss, and of the roadway a trail without beginning or end.

“I am afraid,” Jhirun protested suddenly, the only word she had volunteered all day long. Her fingers clutched Vanye’s shoulder-belt as if pleading for his intercession. “The sky is clouding. This is a bad place to be in a storm.”

“What is your counsel?” Morgaine asked her.

“Go back. There is known road behind us. Please, lady, let us ride back to higher ground as quickly as we can.”

“High ground is too far back.”

“We do not know whether the road even goes on,” Jhirun urged, desperation in her voice. She wrenched at Vanye’s sleeve. “Please.”