The rider descended the snowy hill into the shadows across his path—substantial. A pelt of white anomen was the cloak, and the stranger’s breath and that of the gray horse made puffs on the frosty air.
He knew that he should set spurs to the mare, yet he felt curiously numb, as though he had been wakened from one dream and plunged into the midst of another.
He looked into the tanned woman’s face within the fur hood and met hair and brows like the winter sun at noon, and eyes as gray as the clouds in the east.
“Good day,” she gave him, in a quaint and gentle accent, and he saw that beneath her knee upon the gray’s saddle was a great blade with a golden hilt in the fashion of a dragon, and that it was Korish-work upon her horse’s gear. He was sure then, for such details were in the songs they sang of her and in the book of Yla.
“My way lies north,” she said in that low, accented voice.
“Thee seems to go otherwise. But the sun is setting soon. I will ride with thee a ways.”
“I know you,” he said then.
The pale brows lifted. “Has thee come hunting me?”
“No,” he said, and the ice crept downward from heart to belly so that he was no longer sure what words he answered, or why he answered at all.
“How is thee called?”
“Nhi Vanye, ep Morija.”
“Vanye—no Morij name.”
Old pride stung him. The name was Korish, mother’s-clan, reminder of his illegitimacy. Then to speak or dispute with her at all seemed madness. What he had seen happen upon the hilltop refused to take shape in his memory, and he began to insist to himself that the hunger that had made him weak had begun to twist his senses as well, and that he had encountered some strange high-clan woman upon the forsaken road, and that his weakness stole his senses and made him forget how she had come.
Yet however she had come, she was at least half-qujal, eyes and hair bore witness to that: she was qujal and soulless and well at home in this blighted place of dead trees and snow.
“I know a place,” she said, “where the wind does not reach. Come.”
She turned the gray’s head toward the south, as he had been headed, so that he did not know where else to go. He went as in a dream. Dusk was gathering, hurried on by the veil of cloud that was rolling across the sky. The wraithlike pallor of Morgaine drifted before him, but the gray’s hooves cracked substantially into the crusted snow, leaving tracks.
They rounded the turning of the hill and startled a small band of deer that fed upon howan by the streamside. It was the first game he had seen in days. Despite his circumstance, he reached for his bow.
Before he could string it, a light blazed from Morgaine’s outstretched hand and a buck fell dead. The others scattered.
Morgaine pointed to the hillside on their right. “There is a cave for shelter. I have used it before. Take what venison we need: the rest is due smaller hunters.”
She rode away upon the slope. He took his skinning-knife and prepared to do her bidding, though he liked it little. He
found no wound upon the body, only a little blood from its nostrils to spot the snow, and all at once the red on the snow brought back the dream, and made him shiver. He had no stomach for a thing killed in such a way, and the wide-eyed horned head seemed as spellbound as he—unwilling dreamer too.
He glanced over his shoulder. Morgaine stood upon the shoulder of the hill holding the gray’s reins, watching him. The first flakes of snow drifted across the wind.
He set his knife to the carcass and did not look it in the eye.
CHAPTER 2
A fire blazed in the shallow cave’s mouth, putting a wall of warmth between them and the driving snow. He did not want the meat, but he was many days weak with hunger, so that his joints ached and the least exertion put a tremor in his muscles. He must sit and smell it cooking, and when she had cooked and offered a bit to him, it looked no different than other meat, and smelled so achingly good that his empty belly ruled his other scruples. A man would not lose his soul for a little bit of venison, however the beast had been slain.