Far away beyond the haze lay the ominous cone of Ivrel, but it was much too far to see. There were only the hazy white caps of Alis Kaje, mother of eagles, and of Cedur Maje, which were the mountain walls of Morija, dividing Kursh from Andur, Thiye’s realms from those of men.
They rode easily this day, found grass for the horses and stopped to rest a time, rode on farther and in lighter spirits. They came upon a fence, a low shepherd’s fence of rough stones, the first indication that they had found of human habitation.
It was the first sight of anything human that Vanye had seen since the last brush of a Myya arrow, and he was glad to see the evidence of plain herder folk, and breathed easier. In the last few days and in such company as he now rode one could forget humanity, farms and sheep and normal folk.
Then there was a little house, a homely place with rough stone walls and a garden that had gone to weeds, snow-covered in patches. The shutters hung.
Morgaine shook her head, incredulity in her eyes.
“What was this place?” he asked her.
“A farm,” said Morgaine, “a fair and pleasant one.” And then: “I spent the night here—hardly a month of my life ago. They were kindly folk who lived here.”
He thought to himself that they must also have been fearless to have sheltered Morgaine after Irien; and he saw by leaning round in his saddle when they had passed to the far side of the house, that the back portion of the roof had fallen in.
Fire? he wondered. It was not a surprising vengeance taken on people that had sheltered the witch. Morgaine had an uncommon history of disasters where she passed, most often to the innocent.
She did not see. She rode ahead without looking back, and he let his bay—he called the beast Mai, as all his horses would be Mai—overtake the gray. They rode knee to knee, morose and silent. Morgaine was never joyous company. This sight made her melancholy indeed.
Then, upon a sudden winding of the trail, as the pines began to crowd close upon them and upon the little fence, there sat two ragged children.
Male and female they seemed to be, raggle-taggle, shag-haired little waifs of enormous dark eyes and pinched cheeks, sitting on the fence itself despite the snow. They scrambled up, eyes pools of distress, stretching out bony hands.
“Food, food,” they cried, “for charity.”
The gray, Siptah, reared up, lashing with his hooves; and Morgaine reined him aside, narrowly missing the boy. She had hard shift to hold the animal, who shied, wide-nostrilled and round-eyed until his haunches brought up against the wall upon the other side, and Vanye curbed his Mai with a hard hand, cursing at the reckless children. Such waifs were not an uncommon sight in Koris. They begged, stole shamelessly.
There but for Rijan, Vanye thought occasionally: lord’s bastards sometimes came to other fates than he had known before his exile. The poor were frequent in the hills of Andur, clanless and destitute, and poor girls’ fatherless children generally came to ill ends. If they survived childhood they grew up as bandits in earnest.
And the girl perhaps would spawn more of her own kind, misery breeding misery.
They could not be more than twelve, the pair of them, and
they seemed to be brother and sister—perhaps twins. They had the same wolf-look in their eyes, the same pointed leanness to their faces as they huddled together away from the dangerous hooves.
“Food,” they still pleaded, holding out each a hand.
“We have enough to spare.” Vanye directed his words to Morgaine, a request, for their saddlebags were still heavy with the frozen venison of days before. He pitied such as these children, loathsome as they were, always gave them charity when he could—for luck, remembering what he was.
And when Morgaine consented with a nod he leaned across and lifted the saddlebag from Siptah’s gray back and was about to open it when the girl, venturing close to Mai, snatched his saddleroll off the rear of the saddle, slashing one of its bindings.