Wall of Shiuan

Morgaine stared at him fixedly, and for a long, interminably long moment, said nothing. “Thee says correctly,” she breathed at last. “Thee had no right.”

“All the same,” he said, very quietly, “I ask it, because I told her that I would take her to safety.”

Morgaine turned that gaze on Jhirun. “Run away,” she said. “I give you a better gift than he gave. But on his word, stay, if you have not the sense to take it. Unlike Vanye, I bind myself to nothing. Come with us as long as you can, and for as long as it pleases me.”

“Thank you,” Jhirun said almost soundlessly, and Vanye pressed her arm, disengaging it from his. “Go aside,” he said to her. “Rest. Let matters alone now.”

Jhirun drew away from them, stood up, left the shelter for the brush, beyond the firelight. They were alone. Across the camp sounded the wail of an infant, the lowing of an animal, the sounds that had been constant all the evening.

“I am sorry,” Vanye said, bowed himself to the ground, expected even then her anger, or worse, her silence.

“I was not there,” Morgaine said quietly. “I take your word for what you did, and why. I will try. She will stay our pace or she will not; I cannot help her. That—” She gestured with a glance toward the camp. “That also has its desires, that are Jhirun’s.”

“They believe,” he said, “that there is a way out for them. That it lies through the Wells. That they will find a land on the other side.”

She said nothing to that.

“ Liyo–” he said carefully, “you could do that—you could give them what they believe—could you not?”

A tumult had arisen, as others had arisen throughout the evening, on the far side of the camp, distant shouts carrying to them: disputes, dissents, among terrified people.

Morgaine set her face and shook her head abruptly. “I could, yes, but I will not.”

“You know why they have followed you. You know that.”

“I care nothing for their beliefs. I will not.”

He thought of the falling towers of Ohtij-in: only a hand’s breadth closer to the sea, Jhirun had laughed, attempting humor. Somewhere the child was still crying. Among the rabble there were the innocent, the harmless.

“Their land,” he said, “is dying. It will come in the lifetime of some that are now alive. And to open the Gates for them—would that not—?”

“Their time is finished, that is all. It comes to all worlds.”

“In Heaven’s good name, liyo–”

“Vanye. Where should we take them?”

He shook his head helplessly. “Are we not to leave this land?”

“There are no sureties beyond any Gate.”

“But if there is no other hope for them—”

Morgaine set Changeling across her knees. The dragon eyes of the hilt winked gold in the firelight, and she traced the scales with her fingers. “Two months ago, Vanye, where were you?”

He blinked, mind thrust back across Gates, across mountains: a road to Aenor, a winter storm. “I was an outlaw,” he said, uncertain what he was bidden remember, “and the Myya were close on my trail.”

“And four?”

“The same.” He laughed uneasily. “My life was much of the same, just then.”

“I was in Koris,” she said. “Think of it.”

Laughter perished in him, in a dizzying gap of a hundred years. Irien: massacre—ancestors of his had served Morgaine’s cause in Koris, and they were dust. “But it was a hundred years, all the same,” he said. “You slept; however you remember it, it was still a hundred years, and what you remember cannot change that.”

“No. Gates are outside time. Nothing is fixed. And in this land—once—an unused Gate was flung wide open, uncontrolled, and poured men through into a land that was not theirs. That was not theirs, Vanye. And they took that land... men that speak a common tongue with Andur-Kursh; that remember me.”

He sat very still, the pulse beating in his temples until he was aware of little else. “I knew,” he said at last, “that it might be; that Jhirun and her kindred are Myya.”

“You did not tell me this.”

“I did not know how. I did not know how to put it together; I thought how things would stray the Gate into Andur-Kursh, lost—to die there; and could not men—”

“Who remember me, Vanye.”

He could not answer; he saw her fold her arms about her knees, hands locked, and bow her head, heard her murmur something in that tongue that was hers, shaking her head in despair.

“It was a thousand years,” he objected.

“There is no time between Gates,” she answered him with an angry frown; and saw his puzzlement, his shake of the head, and relented. “It makes no difference. They have had their time, both those that were born to this land and those that invaded it. It is gone. For all of them, it is gone.”

Vanye frowned, found a stick in his hands, and broke it, once, twice, a third time, measured cracks. He cast the bits into the fire. “They will starve before they drown. The mountains will give them ground whereon to stand, but the stones will not feed them. Would it be wrong, liyo, would it be wrong—once, to help them?”

“As once before it happened here? Whose land shall I give them, Vanye?”