She also maintained silence. She was not given to much conversation, but there was too much strangeness about them in Ohtij-in that he could find that silence comfortable.
“They do not seem to have fed you well,” she remarked, when he had disposed of a third helping, and she had only then finished her first plate.
“No,” he said, “they did not.”
“You slept more soundly than ever I have seen you.”
“You might have waked me,” he said, “when you wakened.”
“You seemed to need the rest.”
He shrugged. “I am grateful,” he said.
“I understand that your lodging here was not altogether comfortable.”
“No,” he agreed, and took up his cup, pushing the plate away. He was uneasy in this strange humor of hers, that discussed him with such persistence.
“I understand,” Morgaine said, “that you killed two men—one of them the lord of Ohtij-in.”
He set the cup down in startlement, held it in his fingers and turned it, swirling the amber liquid inside, his heart beating as if he had been running. “No,” he said. “That is not so. One man I killed, yes. But the lord Bydarra—Hetharu murdered him: his own son—murdered him, alone in that room with me; and I would have been hanged for it last night, that at the least. The other son, Kithan—he may know the truth or not; I am not sure. But it was very neatly done liyo. There is none but Hetharu and myself that know for certain what happened in that room.”
She pushed her chair back, turning it so that she faced him at the corner of the table; and she leaned back, regarding him with a frowning speculation that made him the more uncomfortable. “Then,” she said, “Hetharu left in Roh’s company, and took with him the main strength of Ohtij-in. Why? Why such a force?”
“I do not know.”
“This time must have been terrible for you.”
“Yes,” he said at last, because she left a silence to be filled.
“I did not find Jhirun Ela’s-daughter. But while I searched for her, Vanye, I heard a strange thing.”
He thought that the color must long since have fled his face. He took a drink to ease the tightness in his throat “Ask,” he said.
“It is said,” she continued, “that she, like yourself, was under Roh’s personal protection. That his orders kept you both in fair comfort and safety until Bydarra was murdered.”
He set the cup down again and looked at her, remembering that any suspicion for her was sufficient motive to kill. But she sat at breakfast with, him, sharing food and drink, while she had known these things perhaps as early as last night, before she lay down to sleep beside him.
“If you thought that you could not trust me,” he said, “you would be rid of me at once. You would not have waited.”
“Is thee going to answer, Vanye? Or is thee going to go on evading me? Thee has omitted many things in the telling. On thy oath—on thy oath, Nhi Vanye, no more of it.”
“He—Roh—found welcome here, at least with one faction of the house. He saw to it that I was safe, yes; but not so comfortable, not so comfortable as you imagine, liyo. And later—when Hetharu seized power—then, too—Roh intervened.”
“Do you know why?”
He shook his head and said nothing. Suppositions led in many directions that he did not want to explore with her.
“Did you speak with him directly?”
“Yes.” There was long silence. He felt out of place even to be sitting in a chair, staring at her eye to eye, when that was not the situation between them
and never had been.
‘Then thee has some idea.”
“He said—it was for kinship’s sake.”
She said nothing.
“He said,” he continued with difficulty, “that if you—if you were lost, then—I think he would have sought a Claiming…”
“Did you suggest it?” she asked; and perhaps the revulsion showed on his face, for her look softened at once to pity. “No,” she judged. “No, thee would not.” And for a moment she gazed on him with fearsome intentness, as if she prepared something from which she had long refrained. “Thee is ignorant,” she said, “and in that ignorance, valuable to him.”