He understood then, numb as he was. He bowed slightly, acknowledged reality; which gesture Nhi Paren received like a
gentleman, and looked embarrassed and distressed, and bade men help him take Morgaine up so that he could carry her.
Morij-keep, Ra-morij, was alleged to be impregnable. It sat high upon a hillside, tiered into it, with all of a mountain at its back and its walls and gates made double before it. It had never fallen in war. It had been sometimes the possession of Yla and lately of Nhi, but that had been by marriages and by family intrigue and lastly by the ill-luck of Men, but never by siege against the fortress itself. Rich herds of horses and of cattle grazed the lands before it; in the valley its villages nestled in relative security, for there were no wolves nor riders, nor Koris-beasts troubling the land as they did in the outside. The keep frowned over the fair land like some great stern grandfather over a favored daughter, his head bearing a crown of crenelated walls and jagged towers.
He loved it still. Tears could still swell in his throat at the sight of this place that had been so much of misery to him. For an instant he thought of his boyhood, of spring, and of fat, white-maned Mai, the first Mai—and both his brothers racing with him on one of those days when there was such warmth in the air that not even they could find hate for each other, when blooms were on the orchards and the whole of the great valley lay studded with pink and white clouds of trees.
Before him now there was the light of a dying winter sun upon the walls, and the clatter of armed riders about him, and Morgaine’s weight in his arms. She slept now, and his arms were numb and his back a column of fire. She knew little of the ride, exceedingly weak, though the bleeding had ceased and the wound already showed signs of healing. He thought that she might have fought against the weakness, but she did not know that things were amiss, and the men of Nhi were kindly with her. They did whatever it was possible to do for her, short of touching her or her medicines; and their fear of her seemed to have much abated.
She was very fair, and young-seeming, and capable of innocence when her gray eyes were closed. Even with women of quality men of low-clan made coarse jokes, well-meant; with women of the countryside even high-clan men were far more direct. There was none of that where Morgaine was involved—because she had lord-right, perhaps, and because
there attended her an ilin who must defend her, and that, weaponless as he was, there was no honor in that; but most probably it was because she was reputed to be qujal, and men did not make light with anything qujal.
Only sometimes Nhi Paren would ask how she fared, and some of the others would ask the same, and wonder that she slept so.
And of one, Nhi Ryn, son of Paren, there were looks of awe. He was very young; his head was full of poets and of legends, ‘ and he had a skill with the harp that was beyond what most high-clan men learned. That which resided in his eyes was purely astonishment at first, and then worship, which boded ill for the welfare of his soul.
Nhi Paren had seemed to see it developing, and had sharply ordered the youth to the rear guard, far back along the line.
Now there was an end of such care of them: the horses’ hooves rang upon paving as they approached the gates. Nhi Rej had built the channeling and the paving fifty years ago, restoring the work of Yla En—no luxury, for otherwise the whole of the hill would begin to wash down with the spring rains.
The Red Gate admitted them, and red it was, bravely fluttering with the Nhi standards with their black writing. There was no sound but the snap of the flags in the wind and the clatter of hooves on stone as they entered the courtyard. One servant ran out and bowed to Nhi Paren. Orders and information passed back and forth.