Kithan’s composure suffered the least disturbance; a frown passed over his face. His eyes fixed on Vanye’s with obscure challenge, and a languid pale hand, cuffed in delicate lace, gestured toward his heart. “On your pleasure, Barrows-lord.”
“You are mistaken,” Vanye said.
“Why,” asked Morgaine very softly, “are you with us, my lord Kithan, once of Ohtij-in?”
Kithan tossed his head back and gave a silent and mirthless laugh, moved his wrist in the direction of the Suvoj. “We have little choice, do we not?”
“And when we do meet with Roh and with Hetharu’s forces, you will be at our backs.”
Kithan frowned. “But I am your man, Morgaine-Angharan.” He extended his long legs, crossed, before him, easy as a man in his own hall. “I am your most devoted servant.”
“Indeed,” said Morgaine.
“Doubtless,” said Kithan, regarding her with that same distant smile, “you will serve me as you served those who followed you to Ohtij-in.”
“It is more than possible,” said Morgaine.
“They were your own,” Kithan exclaimed with sudden, plaintive force, as if he pleaded something; and Jhirun, flinching, edged against the rocks at Vanye’s side.
“They may have been once,” Morgaine said. “But those that I knew are long buried. Their children are not mine.”
Kithan’s face recovered its placidity; laughter returned to his half-lidded eyes. “But they followed you,” he said. “I find that ironical. They knew you, knew what you had done to their ancestors, and still they followed you, because they thought you would make an exception of them; and you served them exactly as you are. Even the Aren-folk, who hate you, and tie up white feathers at their doorways—” He smiled widely and laughed, a mere breath. “A reality. A fixed point in all this reasonless universe. I am khal. I have never found a point on which to stand or a shrine at which to worship—til now. You are Angharan; you come to destroy the Wells and all that exists. You are the only rational being in the world. So I also follow you, Morgaine-Angharan. I am your faithful worshipper.”
Vanye thrust himself to his feet, hand to his belt, loathing the qujal’s insolence, his mockery, his elaborate fancies: Morgaine should not have to suffer this, and did, for it was not her habit to avenge herself for words, or for other wrongs.
“At your pleasure,” he said to Kithan.
Kithan, weaponless, indicated so with an outward gesture, a slight hardness to his eyes.
“Let be,” Morgaine said. “Prepare the horses. Let us be moving, Vanye.”
“I might cut their reins and their girths for them,” said Vanye, scowling at the halfling lord and his two men, reckoning them, several, a moderately fair contest. “They could test their horsemanship with that, and we would not have to give them further patience.”
Morgaine hesitated, regarding Kithan. “Let him be,” she said. “His courage comes from the akil. It will pass.”
The insouciance of Kithan seemed stung by that. He frowned, and leaned against the lock staring at her, no longer capable of distance.
“Prepare the horses,” she said. “If he can hold our pace, well; and if not-the Hiua will remember that he companied with me.”
There was unease in the guards’ faces, a flicker of the same in Kithan’s; and then, with a bow, a taut smile: “Arrhthein,” he said to her. “Sharron a thrissn nthinn.”
“Arrhtheis,” Morgaine echoed softly, and Kithan settled back with an estimating look in his eyes, as if something had passed between them of irony and bitter humor.
It was the language of the Stones. I am not qujal, Morgaine had insisted to him once, which he believed, which he still insisted on believing.
But when he had gone, at Morgaine’s impatient gesture, to attend the horses, he looked back at them, his pale-haired liege and the pale-haired qujal together, tall and slender, in all points similar; a chill ran through him.
Jhirun, human-dark, a wraith in brown, scrambled up and quitted that company and ran to him, as he gathered up the reins of her mare and brought it to the roadside. He threw down there the bundle she had made of their supplies and began rerolling the blankets, on his knees at the side of the stone road. She knelt down with him and began with feverish earnestness to help him, in this and when be began to tie the separate rolls to their three saddles, redistributing supplies and tightening harness.