He drew it and gave it to her. “Avert,” he murmured, the word almost catching in his throat; she echoed the wish, and slipped it through her belt.
“Beware your companions,” she said.
“Aye,” he answered.
“Go. Make haste.”
He would have bowed himself at her feet, an Ilin taking final, unwilling leave; but she prevented him with a hand on his arm. The touch numbed: for a moment he hesitated with a thing spilling over in him that wanted saying, and she, all unexpected, leaned forward and touched her lips to his, a light touch, quickly gone. It robbed him of speech; the moment passed, and she turned to take up the reins of her horse. What he would have said seemed suddenly a plea for himself, and she would not hear it; there would be dispute, and that was not the parting he wanted.
He hurled himself into the saddle, and she did likewise, and rode with him as far as the crossing of the road and the aisle, the arch that led through into
Abarais, where Jhirun and Kithan awaited them.
“We are going on,” he said to them, the words strange and ugly to him, “we three.”
They looked puzzled, dismayed. They said nothing, asked nothing; perhaps the look of the two of them, ilin and liyo, made a barrier against them. He turned his horse into the passage, into the dark, and they went with him. Suddenly he looked back, in dread that Morgaine would already be gone.
She was not. She was a shadow, she and Siptah, against the light behind them, waiting.
Fwar and his kind, whatever remained of them, would be coming. Suddenly he realized the set of her mind: the Barrows-folk, that she once had led—ages hence. There was a bond between them, an ill dream that was recent in her mind, a geas apart from Changeling. He remembered her at the Suvoj, sweeping man after man away into oblivion—and the thing that he had seen in her eyes.
They were your own, Kithan had protested, even a qujal appalled at what she had done. They followed her; she waited for them this time, as time after time he had feared she might turn and face them, her peculiar nightmare, that would not let her go.
She waited, while the Gate prepared to seal. Here she stopped running; and laid all her burden upon him. Tears blurred his eyes; he thought wildly of riding back, refusing what she had set him to do.
And that she would not forgive.
They exited the passage into the light of rising Li, saw the valley of Abarais before them, the jagged spires of ruins, and in the far distance—campfires scattered like stars across the mountains: the host of all Shiuan.
He looked back; he could not see Morgaine any longer.
He rammed the spurs into the gelding’s flanks and led his companions toward the fires.
CHAPTER Eighteen
The vast disc of Li inclined toward the horizon. There was a stain of cloud at that limit of the sky, and wisps of cloud drifted across the moon-track overhead.
The sinking moon yet gave them light enough for quick traveling—light enough too for their enemies. They were exposed, in constant view from the cliffs that towered on either side of the road, above the ruins. Ambush was a constant possibility: Vanye feared it with a distant fear, not for himself, but for the orders he had been given—the only thing he had left, he thought, that was worth concern. That at some moment a shaft aimed from those cliffs should come bursting leather and mail links and bone—the pain would be the less for it, and quickly done, unlike the other, that was forever.
Until you have no choice, her words echoed back to him, a persistent misery, a fact that would not be denied. Until you have no choice—as I have none.
Once Jhirun spoke to him; he did not know what she had said, nor care—only stared at her, and she fell silent; and Kithan likewise stared at him, pale eyes sober and present, purged of the akil that had clouded them.
And the watchfires grew nearer, spreading before them like a field of stars, red and angry constellations across their way, that began to dim at last like those in the heavens, with the first edge of day showing.