Her mare’s girth too he attended, seeing that it was well done, on which her life depended. She waited, hovering at his side.
“Please,” she said at last, touching at his elbow. “Let me ride with you; let me stay with you.”
“I cannot promise that.” He avoided her eyes, and brushed past her to attend the matter of his own horse. “If the mare cannot hold our pace, still she is steady and she will manage to keep you ahead of the Hiua. I have other obligations. I cannot think of anything else just now.”
“These men – lord, I am afraid of them. They—”
She did not finish. It ended in tears. He looked at her and remembered her the night that Kithan had visited his cell, small and wretched as she bad been in the hands of the guards, men half-masked and anonymous in their demon-helms. Her they had seized, and not him.
“Do you know these men?” he asked of her harshly.
She did not answer, only stared at him helplessly with the flush of shame staining her cheeks; and he looked askance at Kithan’s man, who was
likewise caring for his lord’s horse. Privately he thought of what justice Kursh reserved for such as they: her ancestors had been, though she had forgotten it, tan-uyin, and honorable, and proud.
He was not free to take up her quarrel. He had a service.
He set his hand on hers; it was small, but rough, a peasant’s hand, that knew hard labor. “Your ancestors,” he said, “were high-born men. My father’s wife was Myya, who gave him his legitimate sons. They are a hard-minded clan, the Myya; they ‘my lord’ only those that they respect.”
Her hand, leaving his, went to her breast, where he remembered a small gold amulet that once he had returned to her. The pain her eyes had held departed, leaving something clear and far from fragile.
“The mare,” he said, “will not run that far behind, Myya Jhirun.”
She left him. He watched her, at the roadside, bend and gather a handful of smooth stones, and drop them, as she straightened, into her bodice. Then she gathered up the mare’s reins and set herself into the saddle.
And suddenly he saw something beyond her, at the bottom of the long hill, a dark mass on the road beyond the knoll that rose like a barrow-mound at the turning.
“Liyo,” he called out, appalled at the desperate endurance of those that followed them, afoot. Not for revenge: for revenge they surely could not follow so far or so determinedly… but for hope, a last hope, that rested not with Morgaine, but with Roh.
There were Shiua and the priest, who knew what Roh had promised in Ohtij-in; and there was Fwar: for Fwar, it would be revenge.
Morgaine stood at his side, looked down the road. “They cannot keep our pace,” she said.
“They need not,” said Kithan; and gone now was the slurring of his speech; fear glittered through the haze of his eyes. “There are forces between us and Abarais, my lady Morgaine, and one of them is my brother’s. Hetharu will have ridden over whatever opposition he meets: he is not loved by the mountain lords. But so much the more will forces be on the move in this land. Your enemy has sent couriers abroad: folk here will know you; they will be waiting for you; and being mad, they are, of course, interested in living. We may find our way quite difficult.”
Morgaine gave him a baleful loot, took Changeling from her shoulder and hooked it to her saddle before she set foot in the stirrup. Vanye mounted, and drew close to her, thinking no longer of what followed them or of Myya Jhirun i Myya; it was Morgaine he protected, and if that should entail turning on three of their companions, he would be nothing loath.
The land opened before them, rich with crops and dark earth; and closed again and opened, small pockets of cultivated earth hardly wider than a field or two between opposing heights, and occasionally a small marsh and a reed-rimmed lake.
Crags rose towering on all sides of them, a limit to the sky that in other days Vanye would have found comfortable, a view much like home; but it was not his land, and nowhere was there indication what might lie ahead. He looked into the deep places of the weathered rocks, the recesses that were often overgrown with trees and man-tall weeds, and knew that in one thing at least Kithan had told the truth: that there was no passage for a horseman off this road; and if there were trails in the hills, as surely there were, even a runner must needs be born to this land to make much speed.