“Aye?” He settled back to his place, wanting, and not wanting, to share her thoughts, the things that had robbed her of sleep.
“Did thee trust what she said?”
She had heard then, listening to all that had passed. He was at once guiltily anxious, trying to remember what things he had said aloud and what he had held in his heart; and he glanced at Jhirun, who still slept, or pretended to. “I think it was the truth,” he said. “She is ignorant—of us, of everything that concerns us. Best we leave her in the morning.”
“She will be safer in our company a time.”
“No,” he protested. Things came to mind that he dared not say aloud, hurtful things, the reminder that their company had not been fortunate for others.
“And we will be the safer for it,” she said, in a still voice that brooked no argument.
“Aye,” he said, forcing the word. He felt a hollowness, a sense of foreboding so heavy that it made breath difficult.
“Take your rest,” she said.
He departed the warmth of the fire, sought the warm nest that she had quitted. When he lay down amid their gear and drew the coarse blankets over him, every muscle was taut and trembling.
He wished that Ela’s-daughter had escaped them when she had run—or better still, that they had missed each other in the fog and never met.
He shifted to his other side, and stared into the blind dark, remembering home, and other forests, knowing that he had entered an exile from which there was no return.
The Gate behind them was sealed. The way lay forward from here, and it occurred to him with increasing unease that he did not know where he was going, that never again would he know where he was going.
Morgaine, his arms, and a stolen Andurin horse: that comprised the world that he knew.
And now there was Roh, and a child who had about the foreboding of a world he did not want to know—his own burden, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, for
it was his impulse that had laid ambush for her, when by all other chances she might have ridden on her way.
CHAPTER Five
“Vanye.”
He wakened to the grip of Morgaine’s hand on his arm, startled out of a sleep deeper than he was wont.
“Get the horses,” she said. The wind was whipping fiercely at the swaying branches overhead, drawing her fair hair into a stream in the darkness. “It is close to dawn. I let you sleep as long as I could, but the weather is turning on us.”
He murmured a response, arose, rubbing at his eyes. When he glanced at the sky he saw the north flashing with lightnings, beyond the restless trees. Wind sighed coldly through the leaves.
Morgaine was already snatching up their blankets and folding them. For his part he left the ring of firelight and felt his way downslope among the stones of the ruins, across the narrow channel and up again to the rise where the horses were tethered. They snorted alarm at his coming, already uneasy at the weather; but Siptah recognized him and called softly— gray Siptah, gentler-mannered than his own Andurin gelding. He took the gray and Jhirun’s homely pony together and led them back the way he had come, up again into the ruins.
Jhirun was awake. He saw her standing as he came into the firelight, opened his mouth to speak some gentle word to her; but Morgaine intervened, taking the horses. “I will tend them,” she said brusquely. “See to your own.”
He hesitated, looking beyond her shoulder to Jhirun’s frightened face, and felt a deep unease, leaving her to Morgaine’s charge; but there was no time for disputes, and there was no privacy for argument. He turned and plunged back into the shadows, making what haste he could, not knowing against what he was racing, the storm or Morgaine’s nature.
Dawn was coming. He found the black gelding a shadow in a dark that was less than complete, although the boiling clouds held back the light He freed the horse, hauled firmly on the cheekstrap as the ungentle beast nipped at him, then in his haste swung up bareback and rode back with halter alone, down across the stream and up again among the trees and the ruins.