• “If I had put an hour’s thought into your begetting, bastard son, I would have gotten no sons on a Chya. Chya and Nhi are an unlucky mixing. I wish I had exercised more prudence.”
“I defended myself,” Vanye protested from bruised lips. “Kandrys meant to draw blood—see—” And he showed his side, where the light practice armor was rent, and blood flowed. But his father turned his face from that.
“Kandrys was my eldest,” his father said, “and you were the merest night’s amusement. I have paid dearly for that night. But I took you into the house. I owed your mother that, since she had the ill luck to die bearing you. You were death to her too. I should have realized that you are cursed that way. Kandrys dead, Erij maimed—all for the likes of you, bastard son. Did you hope to be heir to Nhi if they were both dead? Was that it?”
“Father,” Vanye wept, “they meant to kill me.”
“No. To put that arrogance of yours in its place—that, maybe. But not to kill you. No. You are the one who killed. You murdered. You turned edge on your brothers in practice, and Erij not even armed. The fact is that you are alive and my eldest son is not, and I would it were the other way around, Chya bastard. I should never have taken you in. Never.”
“Father,” he cried, and the back of Nhi Rijan’s hand smashed the word from his mouth and left him wiping blood from his lips. Vanye bowed down again and wept.
“What shall I do with you?” asked Rijan at last,
“I do not know,” said Vanye.
“A man carries his own honor. He knows.”
Vanye looked up, sick and shaking. He could not speak in answer to that. To fall upon his own blade and die—this, his • father asked of him. Love and hate were so confounded in him that he felt rent in two, and tears blinded him, making him more ashamed.
“Will you use it?” asked Rijan.
It was Nhi honor. But the Chya blood was strong in him too, and the Chya loved life too well. The silence weighed upon the air.
“Nhi cannot kill Nhi,” said Rijan at last. “You will leave us, then.”
“I had no wish to kill him.”
“You are skilled. It is clear that your hand is more honest than your mouth. You struck to kill. Your brother is dead. You meant to kill both brothers, and Erij was not even armed. You can give me no other answer. You will become ilin. This I set on you.”
“Yes, sir,” said Vanye, touching brow to the floor, and there was the taste of ashes in his mouth. There was only short prospect for a masterless ilin, and such men often became mere bandits, and ended badly.
“You are skilled,” said his father again. “It is most likely that you will find place in Aenor, since a Chya woman is wife to the Ris in Aenor-Pyvvn. But there is lord Gervaine’s land to cross, among the Myya. If Myya Gervaine kills you, your brother will be avenged, and it will be without blood on Nhi hands or Nhi steel.”
“Do you wish that?” asked Vanye.
“You have chosen to live,” said his father. And from Vanye’s own belt he took the Honor blade that was the peculiar distinction of the uyin, and he seized Vanye’s long hair that was the mark of Nhi manhood, and sheared it off roughly in irregular lengths. The hair, Chya and fairer than was thought honest human blood among most clans, fell to the stone floor in its several braids; and when it was done, Nhi Rijan set his heel on the blade and broke it, casting the pieces into Vanye’s lap. “Mend that,” said Nhi Rijan, “if you can.” The wind cold upon his shorn neck, Vanye found the strength to rise; and his numb fingers still held the halves of the shortsword. “Shall I have horse and arms?” he asked, by no means sure of that, but without them he would surely die.
“Take all that is yours,” said the Nhi. “Clan Nhi wants to • forget you. If you are caught within our borders you will die as a stranger and an enemy.” Vanye bowed, turned and left.