Wall of Shiuan

There was long silence. She sat and stared at him while he felt the cold grow in her.

“I will have your belongings searched for,” she said, “and you may take the horse, and the Hiua girl, if she is still alive, and you may go where you will after that.”

She meant it. Outrage trembled through him. Almost, almost he spun on his heel and defied her—but there was not even anger in her voice, nothing against which he could argue later, no hope that it was unthought or unmeant. There was only utter weariness, a hollowness that was beyond reaching, and if he left, there would be none to reach her, none.

“I do not know,” he said, “to what I have taken oath. I do not recognize you.”

Her eyes remained focused somewhere past him, as if she had already dismissed him.

“You cannot send me away,” he cried at her, and his hoarse voice broke, robbing him of dignity.

“No,” she agreed without looking at him. “But while you stay, you do not dispute my orders.”

He let go a shaking breath, and came to where she sat, knelt down on the hearthstones and ripped off the cloak she had lent him, laid it aside and stared elsewhere himself until he thought that he could speak without losing his self-control.

She needed him. He convinced himself that this was still true; and her need was desperate and unfair in its extent and therefore she would not order him to stay, not on her terms. Jhirun, he thought, would be on his conscience so long as he lived; but Morgaine—Morgaine he could not leave.

“May I,” he asked finally, quietly, “send one of the servants to see if he can find her?”

“No.”

He gave a desperate breath of a laugh, hoping that it was an unthought reaction in her, that she would relent in an instant, but laugh and hope died together when he looked at her directly and saw the coldness still in her face. “I do not understand,” he said. “I do not understand.”

“When you took oath to me,” she said in a thin, hushed voice, “one grace you asked of me that I have always granted so far as I could: to remain untouched by the things I use and the things I do. Will you not grant that same grace to this girl?”

“You do not understand. Liyo, she was a prisoner; they took her elsewhere. She may be hurt. The women out there—they are a prey to the marshlanders and the mob in the court. Whatever else, you are a woman. Can you not find the means to help her?”

“She may be hurt. If you would heal her, leave my service and see to it. If not, have mercy on her and leave her alone.” She lapsed into silence for a moment, and her gray eyes roamed the room, with its torn tapestries and shattered treasures. From the courtyard there was still shouting and screaming, and her glance wandered to the windows before she looked back to him. “I have done what I had to do,” she said in an absent, deathly voice. “I have loosed the Barrows and the marshlands on Shiuan because it was a means to reach this land most expediently, with force to survive. I do not lead them. I only came among them. I take shelter here only until it is possible to move on. I do not look at what I leave behind me.”

He listened, and something inside him shuddered, not at the words, which deserved it, but at the tone of them. She was lying; he hoped with all his heart that in this one thing he understood her, or he understood nothing at all. And to rise now, to walk out that door and leave her, took something he did not possess. In this, too, he did not know whether it was courage or cowardice.

“I will stay,” he said.

She stared at him, saying nothing. He grew afraid, so strange and troubled her look was. There were shadows beneath her eyes. He reckoned that she had not slept well, had rested little in recent days, with no companion to guard her sleep among strangers, with no one to fill the silence with which she surrounded herself, implacable in her purpose and disinterested in others’ desires.

“I will make discreet inquiry,” she said at last. “It may be that I can do something to have her found without finding her... only so you know clearly what the conditions are.”

He heard the brittleness in her voice, knew what it masked, and bowed, in shaken gratitude, touched his brow to the hearthstones, sat up again.

“There is surely a bed to be had,” she said, “and an hour or more before I shall be inclined to need it.”

He looked beyond her, to the open arch of the shadowed next room, where the servants had begun stirring about, the removal of the former owners completed. There was a light somewhere within, the opening and closing of cabinets, the rustle of fabrics. A warm bed: he longed toward it, exhausted—luxury that he seldom knew, and far different from the things he had expected at the end of this ugly day.

It was far different, he thought, from what many others knew this night: Jhirun, if she still lived, Kithan, bereft of power, Roh—fled into the storm and the flood this night, in his private nightmare that centered upon Morgaine—Roh, with Abarais before him and the chance of defeating them.