“I have not laid any claim to Chya,” said Vanye. “I do not think I could, and I do not intend to.”
“They had rather own you than me, I do not doubt it at all,” said Erij. “And you are still the most dangerous man to me in all of Andur-Kursh, so long as you live.”
“I am not,” said Vanye, “because I regard my oath. But you do not regard your own honor enough to trust mine.”
“You did not regard your oath in Ra-hjemur.”
“You were not in danger from Morgaine. I did not have to.”
Erij gazed long at him, then reached across. “Give me your hand,” he said, and Vanye, puzzling, yielded it to his left-handed handclasp. His brother pressed it in almost friendly fashion.
“Leave,” said Erij. “If I hear of you after this I will hunt you down … or if you come to Morija, I will set Claim on you and let you work off that year you owe me. But I do not think you will come to Morija.”
And he gestured with a nod to the road ahead.
“If she will have you—go.”
Vanye stared at him, then gripped his brother’s strong, dry hand the more tightly before he broke the clasp.
Then he set heels to the horse, dismissing from his mind every thought that he was weaponless and that Morgaine would have opened a wide lead on them during the morning.
He would gain that distance back. He would find her. He realized much later to his grief that he had not even looked back once at his brother, that he had severed that tangled tie without half the pain he thought it must have cost Erij to let him go.
In that loosing, he thought, Erij had paid for everything; he wished that he had spoken some word of thanks.
Erij would have sneered at it. .
He did not find her on the road. In the second day, he cut off the track the two had used, and took the one on which Liell had come from Ivrel, the one he thought Morgaine would surely choose. Ivrel was close and there was no more time left for stopping, though he was aching from the ride and the horse’s breath came in great gasps, such that he must dismount and half pull the beast up the steeper places of the trail. The delay tormented him and he began to fear that he had lost the way, that he would lose her once for all.
And yet, finally, finally, when he came out upon the height, there stood Ivrel’s great side to be seen, and the barren shoulder of the mountain where the Gate would be. He urged the black to what speed the horse could bear and climbed, sometimes losing sight of his goal, sometimes finding it again, until he entered the forest of twisted pines and lost it altogether.
In the snow were footprints, the old ones of many men, and
some of animals, and some of those not good to imagine what had made them; but now and again he could sort out new ones.
Roh-Liell-Zri, upon the black mare, most likely, and Morgaine upon his trail.
Breath hung frozen in the sunlight, and air cut the lungs. He had at last to walk the horse, out of mercy, and scanned the black sickly pines about him, remembering all too keenly that he had no weapons at all, and a horse too weary for headlong fight.
Then through those pines he caught a glimmer of movement, a white movement amid the blaze of sun on snow, and he whipped up his horse and made what speed he could on the trail.
“Wait!” he cried.
She waited for him. He came in beside her breathless with relief, and she leaned from the saddle and reached for his hand.
“Vanye, Vanye, you ought not to have followed me.”
“Are you going through?” he asked.
She looked up at the Gate, shimmering dark again, stars and blackness above them in the daylight. “Yes,” she said, and then looked down at him. “Do not delay me further. This following me is nonsense. I do not know how the Gate is behaving, whether that will bring me through to the same place that Zri has fled or whether it will fling me out elsewhere. And you do not belong. You were useful for a time. You with your ilin-codes and your holds and your kinships . . . this is your world, and I needed a man who could maneuver things as I needed them. You have served your purpose. Now there is an end of the matter. You are free, and be glad of it.”