Wall of Shiuan

He cast the bundle down where he had been sitting, to remake it properly; and he offered the flask to Morgaine, who took it gratefully, drank and passed it to Jhirun.

One of the qujal moved; Vanye turned, hand on his sword, and saw one of the house guards on his feet. The qujal came toward them, grim of face and careful in his movements; and he addressed himself to Jhirun, who had the waterflask. He held out his hand toward it, demanding, insolent.

Jhirun hesitated, looking for direction; and Vanye sullenly nodded consent, watching as the halfling took the flask and brought it back to Kithan. The halfling lord drank sparingly, then gave it to his men, who likewise drank in their turn.

Then the same man brought it back, offered it to Vanye’s hand. Vanye stood, jaw set in a scowl, and nodded toward Jhirun, from whom the man had taken it. He gave it back to her, looked again to Vanye with a guarded expression.

And inclined his head—courtesy, from a qujal. Vanye stiffly returned the gesture, with no grace in it.

The man returned to his lord. Vanye grasped the ring at his shoulder, drew it down to hook it, then settled again at Morgaine’s feet.

“Rest,” he bade her. “I will watch.”

Morgaine wrapped herself in her cloak and leaned against the rocks, closing her eyes. Quietly Jhirun curled up to sleep; and likewise Kithan and his men, the frail qujal–lord pillowing his head on his arms, and in all likelihood suffering somewhat from the wind, in his thin hall garments.

It grew still, in all the world only the occasional sound of the horses, and the wind that sighed through the leaves. Vanye gathered himself to his feet and stood with his back against a massive rock, so that he might not yield to sleep unknowing. Once he did catch himself with his eyes closed, and paced, his knees weak with exhaustion, so long as he could bear it: he was, Kurshin-fashion, able to sleep in the saddle, far better than Morgaine.

But there was a limit. “ Liyo,” he said after a time, in desperation, and she wakened. “We might move on,” he said; and she gazed at him, who was unsteady with weariness, and shook her head. “Rest,” she said, and he cast himself down on the cold earth, the world still seeming to move with the endless motion of the horse. It was not long that he needed, only a time to let the misery leave his back and arm, and the throbbing leave his skull.

Someone moved. Vanye wakened with the sun on him, found the qujal awake and the day declined to afternoon. Morgaine sat as she had been, with Changeling cradled against her shoulder. When he looked up at her, there was a clarity to her gray eyes that had been lacking before, a clear and quiet sense that comforted him.

“We will be moving,” Morgaine said, and Jhirun stirred from her sleep, holding her head in her hands. Morgaine passed him the flask; he sipped at it enough to clear his mouth, and swallowed with a grimace, gave it back to her.

“Draw breath,” she bade him, when he would have risen at once to see to the horses. Such patience was unlike her. He saw the look of concentration in her gaze, that rested elsewhere, and followed it to the halflings.

He watched Kithan, who with trembling hands had taken an embroidered handkerchief from his pocket, and extracted from it a small white object that he placed in his mouth.

For a moment Kithan leaned forward, head in hands, white hair falling to hide his face; then with a movement more graceful, he flung his head back and restored his handkerchief to its place within his garment.

“ Akil,” Morgaine murmured privately.

“ Liyo?”

“A vice evidently not confined to the marshlands. Another matter of trade, I do suppose... the marshlands’ further revenge on Ohtij-in. He should be placid and communicative for hours.”

Vanye watched the halfling lord, whose manner soon began to take on that languid abstraction he had seen in hall, that haze-eyed distance from the world. Here was Bydarra’s true, his qujalin son, the heir that surely the old lord would have preferred above Hetharu; but Kithan had arranged otherwise, a silent abdication, not alone from the defense he might have been to his father and his house, but from all else that surrounded him. Vanye regarded the man with disgust.

But neither, he thought suddenly, had Kithan resorted to it last night, when a mob had murdered his people before his eyes; not then nor, he much suspected, despite what he had seen in that cell—had Kithan taken to it the hour that Bydarra was murdered, when he had been compelled to pay homage to his brother, stumbling when he tried to rise: his recovery after Hetharu’s departure from Ohtij-in had been instant, as if it were a different man.

The akil was real enough; but it was also a convenient pose, a means of camouflage and survival: Vanye well understood the intrigues of a divided house. It might have begun in boredom, in the jaded tastes and narrow limits of Ohtij-in; or otherwise.