Wall of Shiuan

‘Take me to that place.” Her fist unclenched upon his heart; her eyes filled with such earnestness that it hurt to see it, and she trembled against him. He moved his hand upon her shoulders, wishing that what she asked were possible.

“I am lost myself,” he said, “without Morgaine.”

“You believe that she will come,” she said, “to Abarais, to the Well there.”

He gave no reply, only a shrug, wishing that Jhirun knew less of them.

“What has she come to do?” Jhirun asked it all in a breath, and he felt the tension in her body. “Why has she come?”

She held some hope or fear he did not comprehend: he saw it in her eyes, that rested on his in such a gaze he could not break from it. She assumed that safety lay beyond the witchfires of the Gates; and perhaps for her, for all this land, it might seem to.

“Ask Morgaine,” he said, “when we meet. As for me, I guard her back, and go where she goes; and I do not ask or answer questions of her.”

“We call her Morgen,” said Jhirun, “and Angharan. My ancestors knew her—the Barrow-kings—they waited for her.”

Cold passed through him. Witch, men called Morgaine in his own homeland. She was young, while three generations of men lived and passed to dust; and all that he knew of whence she came was that she had not been born of his kindred, in his land.

When was this? he wanted to ask, and dared not. Was she alone then? She had not come alone to Andur-Kursh, but her comrades had perished there. Qujal, men called her; she avowed she was not. Legends accounted her immortal; he chose not to believe them all, nor to believe all the evil that was laid to her account and he asked her no questions.

He had followed her, as others had, now dust. She spoke of time as an element like water or air, as if she could come and go within its flow, confounding nature.

Panic coiled about his heart. He was not wont to let his mind travel in such directions. Morgaine had not known this land; he held that thought to him for comfort. She had needed to ask Jhirun the name and nature of the land, needing a guide.

A guide, the thought ran at the depth of his mind, to this age, perhaps, as once in Andur she had been confounded by a forest that had grown since last she had ridden that path.

“Come,” he said brusquely to Jhirun, beginning to sit up. “Come.” He used the staff to pull himself to his feet and drew her up by the hand, trying to shake off the thoughts that urged upon him.

Jhirun did not let go his hand as they set out again upon the road; in time he grew weary of that and slipped his arm about her, aiding her steps, seeking by that human contact to keep his thoughts at bay.

Jhirun seemed content in that, saying nothing, holding her own mind private; but there was a difference now in the look she cast up at him—hope, he realized with a pang of guilt, hope that he had lent her. She looked up at him often, and sometimes—unconscious habit, he thought—touched the necklace that she wore, that bore a cross, and objects that he did not know; or touched the center of her bodice, where rested that golden image that he had returned to her—a peasant girl, who possessed such a thing, a bit of gold strangely at variance with her rough dress and work-worn hands.

My ancestors, she had said, the Barrow-kings.

“Have you clan?” he asked her suddenly, startling her: her eyes gazed at him, wide.

“We are Mija,” she said. “Ila died out. There is only Mija left.”

Myya. Myya and Yla. His heart seemed to stop and to begin again, painfully. His hand fell from her shoulder, as he recalled Morija, and that clan that had been his own undoing, blood-enemy to him; and lost Yla, that had ruled Morija once, before the Nhi.

“Myya Geraine Ela’s-daughter,” he murmured, giving her foreign name the accents of Erd, that lay among mountains her folk had almost forgotten.

She looked at him, speechless, with her tangled hair and bruised face, barefoot, in a dress of coarsest wool. She did not understand him. Whatever anger there was between him and Myya, it had no part with Jhirun Ela’s-daughter; the blood-feud the Myya had with him carried no force here, against a woman, in the drowning wastes of Hiuaj.

“Come,” he said again, and gathered her the more closely against his side, beginning to walk again. The clans were known for their natures: as Chya was impulsive and Nhi was stubborn, clan Myya was secretive and cold—of cruelty that had bided close to him all his life, for his half-brothers were Myya, and she who had mothered them, and not him.

Myya hated well, and waited long for revenge; but he refused to think such things of Jhirun; she was a companion, on a road that was otherwise alien, and seemed endless, in a silence that otherwise was filled with the wind and the bubbling waters.

There were things worse than an enemy. They lay about him.