“No one ever refused to leave service.”
“Surely,” he said, “there have been ilin before me that found no choice. A man is maimed in service, for instance; he might starve elsewhere, but while he stays ilin, his liyo must at least feed him and his horse, however foul the treatment he may receive in other natters. You cannot make me leave you, and your charity was always more generous than my brother’s.”
“You are neither halt nor blind,” Morgaine retorted; she was not accustomed to being answered with levities.
He made a gesture of dismissal, knowing for once he had touched through her guard. He caught something bewildered in her expression in that instant, something terrified. It destroyed his satisfaction. He would have said something further, but she glanced aside from him with a sudden scowl, removing his opportunity.
“There was at least a time you chose for yourself,” she said at last. “I gave you that, Nhi Vanye. Remember it someday.”
“Aye,” he said carefully. “Only so you give me the same grace, liyo, and remember that I chose what I wanted.”
She frowned the more deeply. “As you will,” she said. “Well enough.” And for a time she gazed into the fire, and then the frown grew pensive, and she was gazing toward their prisoner, a look that betrayed some inner war. Vanye began to suspect something ugly in her mind, that was somehow entangled with her questions to him; he wished that he knew what it was.
“Liyo,” he said, “likely the girl is harmless.”
“Thee knows so?”
She mocked him in his ignorance. He shrugged, made a helpless gesture. “I do not think,” he said, “that Roh would have had time to prepare any
ambush.”
“The time of Gates is not world-time.” She hurled a bit of bark into the flames, dusted her hands. “Go, go, we have time now that one of us could be sleeping, and we are wasting it. Go to sleep.”
“She?” he asked, with a nod toward Jhirun.
“I will speak with her.”
“You rest,” he urged her after a moment, inwardly braced against some irrational anger. Morgaine was distraught this night, exhausted—they both were. Her slim hands were tightly laced about her knee, clenched until the strain was evident. Tired as he was, he sensed something greatly amiss. “Liyo, let me have first watch.”
She sighed, as if at that offer all the weariness came over her at once, the weight of mail that could make a strong man’s bones ache, days of riding that wore even upon him, Kurshin and born to the saddle. She bowed her head upon her knee, then flung it back and straightened her shoulders. “Aye,” she said hoarsely, “aye, that I will agree to gladly enough.”
She gathered herself to her feet, Changeling in her hand; but to his amazement she offered it to him, sheathed and crosswise.
It never left her, never. By night she slept with that evil thing; she never walked from where it lay, not more than a room’s width before she turned and took it up again. When she rode, it was either under her knee on the gray horse’s saddle, or across her shoulders on her sword belt
He did not want even to touch it, but he took it and gathered it to him carefully; and she left him so, beside the fire. Perhaps, he thought she was concerned that the warrior who guarded her sleep not do so unarmed; perhaps she had some subtler purpose, reminding him what governed her own choices. He considered this, watching her settle to sleep in that corner of the ruin where the stones still made an arch. She had their saddles for pillow and windbreak, the coarse saddle-blankets, unfolded, for a covering: he had lost his own cloak the same way he had lost his sword, else it would have been his cloak that was lent their injured prisoner, not hers. The consciousness of this vexed him. He had come to her with nothing that would have made their way easier, and borrowed upon what she had.
Yet Morgaine trusted him. He knew how hard it was for her to allow another hand on Changeling, which was obsession with her; she need not have lent