“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.
I dreamed, Jhirun had wept, who looked further than the day, and could not bear what she saw. She had fled to Shiuan in hope; for the Shiua lord, there was nowhere to flee.
Vanye stared at him, trying to penetrate that calm that insulated him, trying to reckon how much was the man and how much the akil—and which it was
that had stood within his cell that night in Ohtij-in, coldly planning his murder only to spite Hetharu, by means doubtless lingering and painful.
And Morgaine took them, Kithan and his men, who had no reason to wish her well: she delayed for them, while the halfling lord retreated into his dreams: he chafed at this, vexed even in their company.
“This road,” Morgaine said suddenly, addressing Kithan, “goes most directly to Abarais.”
Kithan agreed with a languorous nod of his head.
“There is none other,” said Morgaine, “unmapped in your books.”
“None horses might use,” said Kithan. “The mountains are twisted, full of stonefalls and the like; and of lakes; of chasms. There is only this way, save for men afoot, and no quicker than we go. You do not have to worry for the rabble behind us, but,” he added with a heavy-lidded smile of amusement, “you have the true lord of Ohtij-in ahead of you, with the most part of our strength, a-horse and armed, a mark less easy than I was in Ohtij-in. And they may afford you some little inconvenience.”
‘To be sure,” said Morgaine.
Kithan smiled, resting his elbows on the shelf of rock at his back; his pale eyes fixed upon her with that accustomed distance, unreachable. The men that were with him were alike as brothers, pale hair drawn back at the nape, the same profile, men dark-eyed, alike in armor, alike in attitude, one to his right, one to his left
“Why are you with us?” Vanye asked. “Misplaced trust?”