He hung it on his saddle, swung up to mount and waited upon Morgaine, who was hardly slower.
“Will you not listen to me?” He was willing to try reason a last time. “There is no safety for you in the north. Let us go south to Lun. There are tribes there that know nothing of you. You would be able to make your way among them. I have heard tell that there are cities far to the south. I would take you there. You could live. In the north, they will hunt you and kill you.”
She did not even answer him, but guided the gray downhill.
CHAPTER 3
The wolves had been at the deer’s carcass in the night, after the snow had ceased to fall so quickly. The area around the tattered bones was marked and patterned with the paws of wolves, and some of those tracks were wondrously large. Vanye looked down as their own trail crossed the trampled snow, and he saw the larger tracks he knew beyond doubt for beasts of Korish woods, more hound than wolf.
The carnage cast a further pall upon the morning, which was clearing to that ice-crystal brightness that blinded the senses, veiling all sins of ugliness into brilliance under a blue sky; but already the veil had been soiled for them. Death was with them, four-footed. Of natural wolves he had no great fear— they seldom bothered men, save in the most desperate Winters, But Koris-beasts were another breed. They killed. They killed and never meant to eat—a perversion in nature.
Morgaine looked down at the tracks too, and seemed unperturbed; perhaps, he thought, she had never seen the like in her time, before Thiye learned to warp the lightness of nature into shapes he chose. Perhaps magics had grown more powerful than she remembered, and she did not know the dangers toward which they rode.
Or perhaps—it was the worse thought—he himself failed to realize with what he rode, knee to knee and peaceful on this bright morning. He feared her for her reputation: that was natural. And yet, he thought, perhaps he did not hold fear enough of her presence. She could kill without touching and without wound: he could not rid his mind of the deer’s wide-eyed look, that ought by rights not to have been dead. A gnawed bone lay athwart their path. His horse shied from it. They rode back into the valley of the Stones, crossing the frozen stream, cracking the yet thin ice, and rode the winding
trail beside the great gray rocks, under the shadow of the mound called Morgaine’s Tomb. Despite the snow, the sky shimmered between the two carven pillars with the look of air above heated rocks.
Morgaine looked up at it as they rode. There was upon her face a curious loathing. He began to understand that it had been far from Morgaine’s will to have ridden into such a thing with Heln’s men behind her.
“Who freed you?” he asked suddenly. She looked back at him, puzzled.
“You said that someone must free you from this place. What. is it? How were you held there? And who freed you?”
“It is a Gate,” she said, and into his mind there flashed the nightmare image of white rider against the sun: it was hard to remember such madness. Like dreams, it tended to fade, for the sake of sanity.
“If it is a gate,” he said, “then from where did you come?” “I was between until something should disturb the field. That is the way with Gates that are not set. It is like a shallow pool of time, ever so shallow. I was washed up again, on this shore.”
He gazed up at it, could not understand, and yet it was as good an explanation of what he had seen as any other. “Who freed you?” he asked.
“I do not know,” she said. “I rode in with men at my heels; a shadow passed me; I rode out again. It was like closing my eyes. No—not that either. It was just between. Only it was thicker than any between I have ever ridden. I think that thee was—thee says, you—were—the one that did free me. But I do not know how, and I doubt that you know.”