“She,” Morgaine said suddenly, startling him, softly though she spoke, “was surely desperate to come this road alone. For fear of drowning, says she; Vanye, does it occur to thee to wonder why out of all the years of her life, she suddenly set out, with nothing in preparation?”
“Roh can be persuasive,” he said.
“The man is not Roh.”
“Aye,” he said, disturbed in that lapse, avoiding her eyes.
“And she speaks what we can understand, albeit the accent is thick. I would I knew when she comes, Vanye. She surely did not have her birth from the earth and the fog yesterday noon.”
“I think,” he said, gazing off in the direction Jhirun stared, ahead, where the forest closed in again, great trees overshadowing the road, “I think her folk are surely in that hold we passed, and Heaven grant they stay there.”
“They may be looking for her.”
“And we,” he said, “may come into trouble on her account, or what is more likely—she will meet it on ours. Liyo, I ask you earnestly, send her away—now, while she is near enough home she can find her way back.”
“We are not taking her against her will.”
“I suppose that we are not,” he agreed, not happily. “But we are on a track they cannot mistake.”
“The horses do confine us to the roadway,” she said, “and this land has shown us one fellow-traveller, and not a breath of others. It occurs to me, Roh being ahead of us, it would be simple for folk hereabouts to choose some place of meeting to their advantage. I do think I saw a shadow move this morning, before you came down the trail.”
Cold settled about him—and self-anger; he remembered his reckless ride, how she had turned her back to him and stayed silent when he had joined her. He had taken it for rebuff. “Your sight was clearer than mine,” he said. “I was blind to it.”
“A trick of the light, perhaps. I was not sure.”
“No,” he said. “I have never known you prone to visions, liyo. I would you could have given me some sign.”
“It did not seem good then to discuss it,” she said, “nor later, with our guest at your back. Mind, she met us either by design or by chance. If by design, then she has allies—Roh himself, it may be—and if by chance, why, then, she feels herself equal to this ugly land, and she is not delicate. Mind thy back in either case; thee is too good-hearted.”
He considered this, which he knew for good sense, and he was ashamed. In all the time that they had ridden this land, he had felt himself lost, had forgotten every lesson of survival he had learned of his own land, as if any place of earth and stone could be utterly different. Blind and deaf he had ridden, like a man shaken from his senses; and little good he had been to her. She had reason for her anger.
“Back there,” he said, “this morning: I was startled, or I would not have cried out.”
“No more of it.”
“Liyo, I take oath it was not a thing I would have done; I was surprised; I did not reckon—I could not believe that you would do murder.”
“Does that matter?” she asked. “Thee will not appoint thyself my conscience, Nhi Vanye. Thee is not qualified. And thee is not entitled.”
The horses moved, quietly grazing. Water sighed under the wind. His pulse dimmed awareness of all else; even the blood seemed dammed up in him, a beating of anger in his veins. He met her pale eyes without intending to; he did not like to look at them when she had this mood on her.
“Aye,” he said after a moment
She said nothing. It was not her custom to argue; and this was the measure of her arrogance, that she disputed with no one, not even with him, who had given her more than his oath. Still one recourse he had with her: he bowed, head upon his hands, to the earth, and sat back, and gave her cold formality, the letter of the ilin-oath she had invoked. She hated to be answered back; and he did it so that she was left with nothing to say, and no argument.