“We,” said Bydarra, “we are the heirs of the true khal. Mixed-blood we all are, but we are their heirs, nonetheless. And none of us has the skill. It is not in those books. The maps are no longer valid. The land is gone. There is nothing to be had there.”
“Hope,” said Vanye, “that that is so.”
“You are human,” Bydarra said contemptuously.
“Yes.”
“Those books,” Bydarra said, “contain nothing. The Old Ones were flesh and bone, and if men will worship them, that is their choice. Priests—” The old lord made a shrug of contempt, nodding toward the wall, by implication toward the court that lay below. “Parasites. The lowest of our halfling blood. They venerate a lie, mumbling nonsense, believing that they once ruled the Wells, that they are doing some special service by tending them. Even the oldest records do not go back into the time of the Wells. The books are worthless. The Hiua kings were a plague the Wells spilled forth, and they tampered with the forces of them, they hurled sacrifices into them, but they had no more power than the Shiua priests. They never ruled the Wells. They were only brought here. Then the sea began to take Hiuaj. And lately—there is Roh; there is yourself. You claim that you have arrived by the Wells. Is that so?”
“Yes,” Vanye answered in a faint voice. The things that Bydarra said began to accord with too much. Once in Andur a man had questioned Morgaine; the words had long rested, in a corner of his mind, awaiting some reasoned explanation: The world went wide, she had answered that man, around the bending of the path. I went through. And suddenly he began to perceive the qujal-lord’s anxiety, the sense that in him, in Roh, things met that never should have met at all… that somewhere in Ohtij-in was a Myya girl, far, far from the mountains of Erd and Morija.
“And the woman,” asked Bydarra, “she on the gray horse?”
He said nothing.
“Roh spoke of her,” Bydarra said. “You spoke of her; the Hiua girl confirms it. Rumor is running the courtyard: talk, careless talk, before the servants. Roh hints darkly of her intentions; the Hiua girl confounds her with Hiua legend.”
Vanye shrugged lest he seem concerned, his heart beating hard against his ribs. “The Hiua set herself on my trail; I think her folk had cast her out
Sometimes she talks wildly. She may be mad. I would put no great trust in what she says.”
“Angharan,” Bydarra said. “Morgen-Angharan. The seventh and unfavorable power: Hiua kings and Aren superstition are always tangled. The white queen. But of course if you are not Hiua, this would not be familiar to you.”
Vanye shook his head, clenched his hand over his wrist behind his back. “It is not familiar to me,” he said.
“What is her true name?”
Again he shrugged.
“Roh,” said Bydarra, “calls her a threat to all life—says that she has come to destroy the Wells and ruin the land. He offers his own skill to save us—whatever that skill may prove to be. Some,” Bydarra added, with a look that made Hetharu avoid his eyes sullenly, “some of us are willing to fall at his feet. Not all of us are gullible.”
There was silence, in which Vanye did not want to look at Hetharu, nor at Bydarra, who deliberately baited his son.
“Perhaps,” Bydarra continued softly, “there is no such woman, and you and the Hiua girl are allied with this Roh. Or perhaps you have some purposes we in Ohtij-in do not know yet. Humankind drove us from Hiuaj. The Hiua kings were never concerned with our welfare, and they never held the power that Roh claims for himself.”
Vanye stared at him, calculating, weighing matters, desperately. “Her name is Morgaine,” he said. “And you would be better advised to offer her hospitality rather than Roh.”
“Ah,” said Bydarra. “And what bid would she make us? What would she offer?”
“A warning,” he said, forcing the words, knowing they would not be favored. “And I give you one: to dismiss him and me and have nothing to do with any of us. That is your safety. That is all the safety you have.”