“I thank you,” he said.
“Stay armed. I want none of these folk drawing for your naked back; and it would be the back, with them. They are wolves, allies of chance and mutual profit.”
He hooked it to his belt, pulled the ring on his shoulder belt and hooked that, settling it to a more comfortable position at his shoulder. Her words touched at something in him, a sudden, unbearable foreboding, that even she would say what she had said. He looked up at her. “Liyo,” he said in a low voice. “Let us go. Let us two, together… leave this place. Forget these men; be rid of them. Let us be out of here.”
She nodded back toward the other room. “It is still misting rain out. We will go, tonight, when there is a chance the flood will ebb.”
“Now,” he insisted, and when he saw her hesitate: “Liyo, what you asked, I gave; give me this. I will go, now, I will find us a packhorse and some manner of tent for our comfort…. Better the cold and the rain than this place over our heads tonight”
She looked tempted, urgently tempted, struggling with reason. He knew the restlessness that chafed at her, pent here, behind rock and risen water. And for once he felt that urge himself, an instinct overwhelming, a dark that pressed at their heels.
She gestured again toward the room beyond. “The books… I have only begun to make sense of them…”
“Do not trust these men.” Of a sudden all things settled together in his mind, taking form; and some were in those books; and more were pent in the shape of a priest, locked in the dark down the hall. She could be harmed by these things, these men. The human tide that lapped about the walls of Ohtij-in threatened her, no less than the qujal-lords.
“Go,” she bade him suddenly. “Go. See to it Quietly.”
He snatched up his cloak, caught up his helm, and then paused, looking back at her.
Still he was uneasy—parted from her in this place; but he forebore to warn her more of these men, of opening the door to them: it was not his place to order her. He drew up the coif and settled his helm on, and did not stay to put on the cloak. He passed the door, between the new guards, and looked at those three with sullen misgivings—looked too down the hall, where the priest Ginun was imprisoned, without drink or food yet provided.
That too wanted tending. He dared not have the guards wait on that man, a priest of their own folk, treated thus. Something had to be done with the priest; he knew not what.
In haste he slung the heavy cloak about him and fastened it as he passed the door out of the corridor, uneasy as he walked these rooms that were familiar
to him under other circumstances—as he passed marshlanders, who turned and stared at him and made a sign he did not know. He entered the spiral at the core of the keep, passed others, feeling their stares at his back as he walked that downward corridor. Even armed, he did not feel safe or free here. Torches lit the place, a bracket at every doorway, profligate waste of them; and the smallish men of Aren came and went freely up and down the ramp, no few of them drunken, decked in finery incongruous among their peasant clothes. Here and there passed other men, tall and grim of manner, who did not mix with the marshlanders: Fwar’s kindred, a hard-eyed lot; something wrathful abode in them, that touched at familiarity.
The Barrows and the marshlands, Morgaine had said, naming them that followed her; Barrow-folk, Vanye realized suddenly.
Myya.
Jhirun’s kinsmen.
He hastened his pace, descending the core, the terror that breathed thickly in the air of this place now possessing a name.
The courtyard was quieter than the keep, a dazed quiet, the misting rain glistening on the paving stones, a few folk that might be Shiua or marshlanders moving about wrapped in cloaks and shawls. There was a woman with two children at her skirts: it struck him strangely that nowhere had there been children among the qujal, none that he had seen; and he did not know why.