He gathered her up, rising, held her to him, no longer ashamed by his own fright. He understood. He brushed mud from her scraped elbows, from her tear-stained cheek, realizing how desperately she was trying to be brave.
“Only little shakings, usually,” she said, “except when the sea wall broke and half of Hiuaj flooded; this one was like that.” She gave a desperate and bitter laugh, an attempt at humor. “We are only a hand’s breadth closer to the sea now, that is what we say.”
He could not laugh, but he pressed her close against his side in appreciation of her spirit, and shivered as the wind bore down on them, bringing heavy drops of rain.
They started walking, together. In places even the road was buckled, the vast paving-blocks pulled awry. Vanye found himself still shaken, in his mind unconvinced that the earth would stay still; and the crack of thunder that rolled from pole to pole as if the sky were tearing made them both start.
The rain began in earnest, the sky darkened to a sickly greenish cast, and the sound of it drowned all other sounds, the sheeting downpour separating them from all the world save the area of the causeway they walked. In places the surface of the road was ankle-deep in rapid water, and Vanye probed the stones with the staff lest they fall into a wash and drown.
It became evening, the rain coming with less violence, but steadily; and hills enfolded them as if by magic, as if they had materialized out of the gray-green murk and the curtains of rain. Of a sudden they were there, in the west, brought into dream-like relief by the sinking light; and quickly more took shape ahead of them, gray and vague as illusion.
“Shiuan,” breathed Jhirun; and her hand tightened on his arm. “We have come through; we have reached Shiuan.”
Vanye answered nothing, for at once he thought of Morgaine, and that destroyed any joy he had in his own survival. He thought of Morgaine, and reckoned with a last stubborn hope that the flooding had not been impassable or without warning: some little chance yet remained. But Jhirun’s happiness was good to see; he answered the pressure of her hand with a touch of his own.
The hills began to enfold them closely as they walked, while the day waned. The road clung to the side of one and then the other, and never again sank below the water. Beside it, water poured, and spilled down ridges and between hills in its haste to reach the marsh.
Vanye stopped, for something strange topped the highest hill in their sight: a hulk that itself took shape out of the rain—gray towers, a little lighter than the clouds that boiled above them in the storm-drowned twilight.
“It is Ohtij-in,” Jhirun shouted up at him through the roar of the rain. “It is Ohtij-in, the first of the holds of Shiuan.”
Joy filled her voice at the sight of that grim place; she started forward, but he stood fast, and she stopped, holding her shawl about her, beginning to shiver in the chill that came rapidly when they stopped moving.
“They are well-fortified,” he said, “and perhaps—perhaps we should pass them by in the night.”
“No,” she argued. “No.” There were tears in her voice. He would gladly have dismissed her, bidden her do as it pleased her; and almost he did so, reckoning that for her it might be safety enough.
Then he remembered how much she knew of Morgaine, and where Morgaine might be sought; of him, too, and where he was bound.
“I would not trust it,” he said to her.
“Marshlands and Ohtij-in trade,” she pleaded with him, shaking as she hugged her shawl about her, drenched as it was. ”We are safe here, we are safe; o lord, they must give us food and shelter or we will die of this cold. This is a safe place. They will give us food.”
Her light clothing clung to her skin. She was suffering cruelly, while he had the several layers of his armor, burden though it was; their bellies were empty, racked sometimes with cramps; his own legs were weak with exhaustion, and she could scarcely walk. It was reason that she offered him, she who knew this land and its people; and in his exhaustion he began to mistrust his own instincts, the beast-panic that urged him to avoid this place, all places that might hem him in. He knew outlawry, the desperate flights and sometime luck that had let him live—supplied with weapons, with a horse, with knowledge of the land equal to that of his enemies. There had been game to hunt, and customs that he knew. Here he knew not what lay down the road, was lost apart from that track, vulnerable on it; and any enemies in this land could find him easily.