Jhirun’s hand crept to Vanye’s arm. “Lord,” she said faintly, plaintively.
‘There was a time,” Vanye said, hardly above a breath, “when Jhirun did not say what she might have said, when she did not say all that she knew of you, and stayed by me when it was not convenient. And I will admit to you that I gave her a promise… I know—that I had no right to give any promise, and she should not have believed me, but she did not know that. I have told her that she should not have believed me; but would it be so wrong, liyo, to let her go where we go? I do not know what other hope she has.”
Morgaine stared at him fixedly, and for a long, interminably long moment, said nothing. “Thee says correctly,” she breathed at last. “Thee had no right.”
“All the same,” he said, very quietly, “I ask it, because I told her that I would take her to safety.”
Morgaine turned that gaze on Jhirun. “Run away,” she said. “I give you a better gift than he gave. But on his word, stay, if you have not the sense to take it. Unlike Vanye, I bind myself to nothing. Come with us as long as you can, and for as long as it pleases me.”
“Thank you,” Jhirun said almost soundlessly, and Vanye pressed her arm, disengaging it from his. “Go aside,” he said to her. “Rest. Let matters alone now.”
Jhirun drew away from them, stood up, left the shelter for the brush, beyond the firelight. They were alone. Across the camp sounded the wail of an infant, the lowing of an animal, the sounds that had been constant all the evening.
“I am sorry,” Vanye said, bowed himself to the ground, expected even then her anger, or worse, her silence.
“I was not there,” Morgaine said quietly. “I take your word for what you did, and why. I will try. She will stay our pace or she will not; I cannot help her. That—” She gestured with a glance toward the camp. “That also has its desires, that are Jhirun’s.”
“They believe,” he said, “that there is a way out for them. That it lies through the Wells. That they will find a land on the other side.”
She said nothing to that.
“Liyo—” he said carefully, “you could do that—you could give them what they believe—could you not?”
A tumult had arisen, as others had arisen throughout the evening, on the far side of the camp, distant shouts carrying to them: disputes, dissents, among terrified people.
Morgaine set her face and shook her head abruptly. “I could, yes, but I will not.”
“You know why they have followed you. You know that.”
“I care nothing for their beliefs. I will not.”
He thought of the falling towers of Ohtij-in: only a hand’s breadth closer to the sea. Jhirun had laughed, attempting humor. Somewhere the child was still crying. Among the rabble there were the innocent, the harmless.
“Their land,” he said, “is dying. It will come in the lifetime of some that are now alive. And to open the Gates for them—would that not—?”
“Their time is finished, that is all. It comes to all worlds.”
“In Heaven’s good name, liyo,—”
“Vanye. Where should we take them?”
He shook his head helplessly. “Are we not to leave this land?”
“There are no sureties beyond any Gate.”
“But if there is no other hope for them—”
Morgaine set Changeling across her knees. The dragon eyes of the hilt winked gold in the firelight, and she traced the scales with her fingers. ‘Two months ago, Vanye, where were you?”
He blinked, mind thrust back across Gates, across mountains: a road to Aenor, a winter storm. “I was an outlaw,” he said, uncertain what he was bidden remember, “and the Myya were close on my trail.”
“And four?”
“The same.” He laughed uneasily. “My life was much of the same, just then.”
“I was in Koris,” she said. “Think of it.”
Laughter perished in him, in a dizzying gap of a hundred years. Irien: massacre—ancestors of his had served Morgaine’s cause in Koris, and they were dust. “But it was a hundred years, all the same,” he said. “You slept; however you remember it, it was still a hundred years, and what you remember cannot change that.”