“It is enough,” he urged her quietly. “Liyo—put it away.”
She gave no answer, nor moved for a time. Then she lifted Changeling so that the darkness at its tip aimed toward the huddle of tents and shelters, and
that one great tree, whereon corpses dangled and twisted above a dying fire.
And then she lowered her arm, as if the weight of the sword suddenly grew too much. ‘Take it,” she said hoarsely.
He eased close to her, stretched out both his hands and gently disengaged her rigid fingers from the dragon grip, taking it into his own hand. The evil of it ran through his bones and into his brain, so that his eyes blurred and his senses wavered.
She did not offer him the sheath, which was all that might damp its fires and render it harmless. She did not speak.
“Go back,” he said. “I will watch them now.”
But she did not answer or offer to move. She sat, straight and silent, beside him—believing, he was sure, that did it come to using the sword he had less willingness than she; lives and nations were on her conscience. His crimes were on a human scale.
And they sat then- horses side by side, the two of them, until he found the sword making his arm ache, until the pain of it was hard to bear. He counted only his breaths, and watched the slow passage of Li’s descent; and the horses grew weary and restless under them.
From the camp there was no stirring.
“Give it back,” Morgaine said at last; he did so, terrified in the passing of it, the least touch of it fatal. But her hand was strong and sure as she received it.
He looked behind him, at the rift of the Suvoj, where the others waited. “The waters are lower,” he said. And after a moment: “The Hiua will not dare come. They have given up. Put it away.”
“Go,” she said; and harshly: “Go back!”
He drew his horse’s head about and rode back to the others, the qujal at one side of the roadway, Jhirun at the other, holding the mare’s reins as she sat on the stone edge.
And the girl gathered herself up as she saw him coming, staggered with exhaustion as she went forward to meet him. “Lord,” she said, holding the gelding’s reins to claim his attention, “lord, the halflings say we might perhaps cross. They are talking of trying it.” There was a wild, desperate grief in her face, like something graven there, incapable of changing. “Lord—will she let us go?”
“Go, now,” he bade her on his own, for there was no reasoning with Morgaine; and as he sat watching them mount up and begin to take their horses out onto that dangerous passage, he was dismayed at his own callousness, that he could send men and a woman ahead to probe the way for his liege—in his place, because she valued him and not them.
Such he began to be, obedient to Morgaine. He made his heart cold, though his throat was tight with shame for himself, watching those four lone figures struggling across that dangerous flooded stonework.
And when he saw that they were well past the halfway point and still able to proceed, he turned and rode back to Morgaine’s side.
“Now,” he said hoarsely. “Now, liyo. We can cross.”
CHAPTER Fifteen
Vanye set himself in the lead, riding the skittish gelding toward the rift that thundered and echoed with flood. The retreating water had left the land glittering with water under the moon. A number of uprooted trees lay about the pool-studded plain, several having rammed the causeway, creating heaps of brush that loomed up on the side where the current had been, skeletal masses festooned with strings of dead grasses and leaves.
Then the causeway arched higher above the rocky shelf, pierced by spans above the water: a bridge that extended in vast arches out across the rift.
Please Heaven, Vanye thought, contemplating what lay before them, let the earth stay still now. The horse slowed, side-stepping; he touched it with his heels gently and kept it moving.