Wall of Shiuan

He did look at her, tried to compose his face, though all his blood seemed gathered in his belly. “Did I seem to be comfortable there? What do you think that I could have done? I had no chance at him.” The words came, and immediately he wished he had said nothing, for there was suddenly a lie between them.

And more than that: for he saw suspicion in her look, a quiet and horrid mistrust. In the long silence that followed, their horses side by side, he wished that she would rebuke him, quarrel, remind him how little caution he had used and what duty he owed her, anything against which he could argue. She said nothing.

“What would you?” he cried finally, against that silence. “That you had come later?”

“No,” she said in a voice strangely subdued.

“It was not for me,” he surmised suddenly. “It was Roh you wanted.”

“I did not,” she said very quietly, “know where you were. Only that Roh had sheltered in Ohtij-in: that I did hear. Other word did not reach me.”

She fell silent again, and in the long time that they rode in the rain he clutched her warm cloak about him and reckoned that she had only given him the truth that he had insisted on knowing—more honest with him than he had been with her. Roh had named her liar, and she did not lie, even when a small untruth would have been kinder; he held that thought for comfort, scant though it was.

“ Liyo,” he asked finally, “where were you? I tried to find you.”

“At Aren,” she replied, and he cursed himself bitterly. “They are rough folk,” she said. “Easily impressed. They feared me, and that was convenient. I waited there for you. They said that there was no sign of you.”

“Then they were blind,” he said bitterly. “I held to the road; I never left it. I thought only that you would leave me and keep going, and trust me to follow.”

“They knew it, then,” she said, a frown settling on her face. “They did know.”

“It may be,” he said, “that they feared you too much.” She swore in her own tongue, at least that was the tone of it, and shook her head, and what bided in her face then, lightning-lit, was not good to see.

“Jhirun and I together,” he said, “walked the road; and it brought us to Ohtij-in, out of food, out of any hope. I did not know what I would find; Roh was the last that I expected. Liyo, it is a qujal–ruled hold, and there are records there, in which Roh spent his time.”

The oath hissed between her teeth. She opened her lips to say something; and then, for they were rounding the turn of a hill, from the distance came a sound carried on the wind, the sound of distress, of riot; and she stopped, gazing at a sullen glow among the hills.

“Ohtij-in,” she said, and set heels to Siptah, flying down the road. The gelding dipped his head and hurled himself after; Vanye bent, ignoring the pain of his side, and rode, round the remembered bendings of the road, turn after turn as the shouting came nearer.

And suddenly the height of Ohtij-in hove into view, where the inner court blazed with light and roiling smoke through the riven gates, where black, diminutive figures struggled amid the fires.

Shadow-shapes huddled beside the road, that became women and ragged children, bundles and baggage. The gray horse thundered near them, sent the wretched folk shrieking aside, and the black plunged after.

Into the chaos of the inner court they rode, where fire had ravaged the shelters, rolling clouds of bitter smoke up into the rainy sky, where dead animals lay and many a corpse besides, among them both dark-haired and white, both men and halflings. At the keep gate, against the wall, a remnant of the guard was embattled with the peasants, and heaped up dead there thicker than anywhere else.

Men scattered from the hooves of the gray horse, shrieks and screams as the witch-sword left its sheath and flared into opal light more terrible than the fires, with that darkness howling at its tip. A weapon flew; the darkness drank it, and it vanished.

And the guard who had cast it fled, dying on the spears of the ragged attackers. It was the last resistance. The others threw down their arms and were cast to their faces by their captors, down in the mire and blood of the yard.

“Morgen!” the ragged army hailed her, raising their weapons. “Angharan! Angharan!” Vanye sat the gelding beside her as folk crowded round them with awed hysteria in their faces, he and his nervous horse touched by scores of trembling hands as they touched Siptah, rashly coming too near the unsheathed blade; shying from it, they massed the more closely about him, her companion. He endured it, realizing that he had been absorbed into the fabric of legends that surrounded Morgaine kri Chya—that he himself had become a thing to frighten children and cause honest men to shudder—that they had condemned him to all he had suffered, refusing to tell to his liege what they surely had known; and that those of Ohtij-in would lately have killed him.