C. Cherryh - Fires of Azeroth

Then he heard shouting from the distance below, and the heart froze in him. He returned to his horse and mounted with difficulty, and the others gathered themselves up, Sharrn delaying to take a quiver of arrows from a marshlander's corpse. Lellin gathered up a bow and quiver, armed now as he preferred. But Sezar was hardly able to get to the saddle.

The sound was coming up from the foot of the road. It roared like the sea on rocks, as wild and confused.

"Let us ride higher," Morgaine said. "Beware ambush; but that rockfall may or may not have blocked off the road below us."

They rode slowly, the only strength they and the horses had left, up the winding turns, blind in the dark. Morgaine would not draw the sword, and none wished her to. Up and up they wound, and amid the slow ring of the horses' shod hooves there were sounds still drifting up at them out of the night.

A great square arch loomed suddenly before them, and a vast hold built of the very stone of the hill. Nehmin: here if anywhere there should be insistence, and there was none. The great doors were scarred and dented with blows, a discarded ram before them, but they had held.

Merir's stone flashed once, twice, reddening his hand.

Then slowly the great doors yielded inward, and they rode into a blaze of light, over polished floors, where a thin line of white-robed arrha awaited them.

"You are she," said the eldest, "about whom we were warned."

"Aye," Morgaine said.

The elder bowed, to her and to Merir, and all the others inclined themselves dutifully.

"We have one wounded," Morgaine said wearily. "The rest of us will go outside and watch. We have advantage here, if we do not let ourselves be attacked by stealth. By your leave, sir."

"I will go," said Sezar, though his face was drawn and seemed older than his years. "You shall not," Lellin said. "But I will watch with them for you."

Sezar nodded surrender then, and slipped down from his horse. If there had not been an arrha close at hand, he would have fallen.

Cold wind whipped among the rocks where they sheltered, and they wrapped in their cloaks and sat still, warmed by hot drink which the arrha brought out to them-fed, although they were so bloody and wretched that food was dry in the mouth. Arrha tended their horses, for they were hardly fit to care for themselves; Vanye interfered in that only to assure himself that at least one of them had some skill in the matter, and then he returned to Morgaine.

Sezar joined them finally, supported by two of the young arrha and wrapped in a heavy cloak; Lellin arose to rebuke him, but said nothing after all, for joy that he was able to have come. The khemeis sank down at his feet and Sharrn's and rested against their knees, perhaps as warm as he would have been inside and fretting less for being where they were.

Morgaine sat outermost of their group, and looked on them little; generally she gazed outward with a bleak concentration which made her face stark in the glare from Nehmin's open doors. Her arm was hurting her, perhaps other wounds as well. She carried it tucked against her, her knees drawn up. Vanye had moved into such a position that he blocked most of the wind, the only charity she would accept, possibly because she did not notice it. He hurt; in every muscle he hurt, and not alone with that, but with the anguish in Morgaine.

Changeling had killed, had taken lives none of them could count; and more than that-it had taken yet another friend; that was the weight on her soul now, he thought: that and worry for the morrow.

There was still the tumult on the field below… sometimes diminishing, sometimes increasing as bands surged toward the rock of Nehmin and away again.

"The road must surely be blocked with the stonefall," Vanye observed, and then realized that would remind her of the arrha and the ruin, and he did not want to do that.

"Aye," she said in Andurin. "I hope." And then with a shake of her head, still staring into the dark: "It was a fortunate accident. I do not think we should have survived otherwise. Fortunate too… there were none of us in the gap twixt Changeling and the arrha."

"You are wrong."

She looked at him.

"Not fortunate," he said. "Not chance. The little arrha knew. I bore her across the field down there. She had great courage. And I believe she thought it through and waited until it had to be tried."

Morgaine said nothing. Perhaps she took peace of it. She turned back to the view into the dark, where cries drifted up fainter and fainter. Vanye looked in that direction and then back at her, with a sudden chill, for he saw her draw her Honor-blade. But she cut one of the thongs that hung at her belt-ring and gave it to him, sheathing the blade again.

"What am I to do with this?" he asked, thoroughly puzzled.

She shrugged, looking for once unsure of herself. "Thee never told me thoroughly," she said, lapsing into that older, familiar accent, "for what thee was dishonored… why they made thee ilin, that I know; but why did they take thy honor from thee too? I would never," she added, "order thee to answer."

He looked down, clenching the thong taut between his fists, conscious of the hair that whipped about his face and neck. He knew then what she was trying to give him, and he looked up with a sudden sense of release. "It was for cowardice," he said, "because I would not die at my father's wish."

"Cowardice." She gave a breath of a laugh, dismissing such a thought. "Thee?-Braid thy hair, Nhi Vanye. Thee's been too long on this road for that."

She spoke very carefully, watching his face: in this grave matter even liyo ought not to intervene. But he looked from her to the dark about them and knew that this was so. With a sudden resolve he set the thong between his teeth and swept back his hair to braid it, but the injured arm would not bear that angle. He could not complete it, and took the thong from his mouth with a sigh of frustration. "Liyo-"

"I might," she said, "if thy arm is too sore."

He looked on her, his heart stopped for a moment and then beginning again. No one touched an uyo's hair, save his closest kin… no woman except one in intimate relation with him. "We are not kin," he said.

"No. We are far from kin."

She knew, then, what she did. For a moment he tried to make some answer, then as it were of no consequence, he turned his back to her and let her strip out his own clumsy braiding. Her fingers were deft and firm, making a new beginning.

"I do not think I can make a proper Nhi braid," she said. "I have done only my own once and long ago, Chya."

"Make it Chya, then; I am not ashamed of that."

She worked, gently, and he bowed his head in silence, feeling what defied speaking. Long-time comrades, she and he; at least in distance and time as men measured it; ilin and liyo- he thought that there might be great wrong in what had grown between them; he feared that there was-but conscience in this area grew very faint.

And that Morgaine kri Chya set affection on anything vulnerable to loss-he knew what that asked of her.

She finished, took the thong from him and tied it The warrior's knot was familiar and yet unaccustomed to him, setting his mind back to Morija in Kursh, where he had last been entitled to it. It was a strange feeling. He turned then, met her gaze without lowering his eyes as once he might That was also strange.

"There are many things," he said, "we have never reckoned with each other. Nothing is simple."

"No," she said. "Nothing is." She turned her face to the dark again, and suddenly he realized there was silence below… no clash of arms, no distant shouting, no sound of horses.