C. Cherryh - Gate of Ivrel

Then he bowed to his forehead in the burning snow, and the ice numbed the fire in his hand and made it cease throbbing. She had certain responsibilities for him now: to see that he did not starve, neither he nor his horse, though certain of the hedge-lords were scant of that obligation, and kept the miserable ilinin they claimed lean and hungry and their horses in little better state when the ilinin were in hall.

Morgaine was of poorer estate: she had no hall to shelter either of them, and the clan she signed him—his own birth-clan—would as soon kill him as not. For his part, he must simply follow orders: no other law bound him now. He could even be ordered against homeland or blood kin, though it was no credit to the lord’s honor if an ilin were so cruelly used. He must fight her enemies, tend her hearth—whatever things she required of him until a year had passed from the day of his oath.

Or she might simply name him a task to accomplish, and he would be bound to that task even beyond his year’s time, until it was done. And that also was exceedingly cruel, but it was according to the law.

“What service?” he asked of her. “Will you let me guide you from here southward?”

“We go north,” she said.

“Lady, it is suicide,” he cried. “For you and for me.”

“We go north,” she said. “Come, I will bind up the hand.”

“No,” he said. He clutched snow in his fist, stopping the bleeding, and held the injured hand against him. “I want no medicines of yours. I will keep my oath. Let me tend to myself.”

“I will not insist,” she said.

Another thought, more terrible, occurred to him. He bowed in request another time, delaying her return to the cave.

“What else?” she asked him.

“If I die you are supposed to give me honorable burial. I do not want that.”

“What—not to be buried?”

“Not by qujalin rites. No, I had rather the birds and the wolves than that.”

She shrugged, as if that did not at all offend her. “Birds and wolves will likely care for both of us before all is done,” she said. “I am glad thee sees the matter that way. I probably should have no time for amenities. Care for thyself and gather thy gear and mine. We are leaving this place.”

“Where are we bound?”

“Where I will to go.”

He bowed acceptance with a heavy heart, knowing of increasing certainty that he could not reason with her. She meant to die. It was cruel to have laid claim to an ilin under that circumstance, but that was the way of his oath. If a man survived his year, he was purged of crimes and disgrace. Heaven would have exacted due penance for his sins.

Many did not survive. It was presumed Heaven had exacted punishment. They were counted honorable suicides.

He bound up his hand with the cleanly remedies that he knew, though it hurt with dull persistence; and then he gathered up all their belongings, his and hers, and saddled both the horses. The sky was beginning to clear. The sun shone down on him as he worked, and glittered coldly off the golden hilt of the blade he hung upon the gray’s saddle. The dragon leered at him, fringed mouth agape, clenching the blade in his teeth; his spread legs made the guard; his back-winding tail guarded the fingers.

He feared even to touch it. No Korish work, that, whatever hand had made the plain sheath. It was alien and otherly, and when he ventured in curiosity to ease the awful thing even a little way from its sheath, he found strange letters on the blade itself like a shard of glass—even touching it threatened injury. No blade ever existed of such substance: and yet it seemed more perilous than fragile.

He slipped it quickly back into its sheath, guilty as he heard Morgaine’s tread behind him.

“Let it be,” she said harshly. And when he stared at her, knowing of a surety he had done wrong, she said more gently: “It is a gift of one of my companions—a vanity. It pleased him. He had great skill. But if thee dislikes things qujalin , then keep hands from it.”

He bowed, avoiding her eyes, and began working at his own gear, tying his few possessions into place at the back of the saddle.

The blade’s name was Changeling . He remembered it of the songs, and wondered could a smith have given so unlucky a name to a blade, even were he qujal . His own sword was of humbler make, honest steel, well-tempered, nameless as befitted a common soldier or a lord’s bastard son.

He hung it on his saddle, swung up to mount and waited upon Morgaine, who was hardly slower.

“Will you not listen to me?” He was willing to try reason a last time. “There is no safety for you in the north. Let us go south to Lun. There are tribes there that know nothing of you. You would be able to make your way among them. I have heard tell that there are cities far to the south. I would take you there. You could live. In the north, they will hunt you and kill you.”

She did not even answer him, but guided the gray downhill.

THE WOLVES had been at the deer’s carcass in the night, after the snow had ceased to fall so quickly. The area around the tattered bones were marked and patterned with the paws of wolves, and some of those tracks were wondrously large. Vanye looked down as their own trail crossed the trampled snow, and he saw the larger tracks he knew beyond doubt for beasts of Korish woods, more hound than wolf.

The carnage cast a further pall upon the morning, which was clearing to that ice-crystal brightness that blinded the senses, veiling all sins of ugliness into brilliance under a blue sky; but already the veil had been soiled for them, death with them, four-footed. Of natural wolves he had no great fear—they seldom bothered men, save in the most desperate winters. But Koris-beasts were another breed. They killed. They killed and never meant to eat—a perversion in nature.

Morgaine looked down at the tracks too, and seemed unperturbed; perhaps, he thought, she had never seen the like in her time, before Thiye learned to warp the rightness of nature into shapes he chose. Perhaps magics had grown more powerful than she remembered, and she did not know the dangers toward which they rode.

Or perhaps—it was the worse thought—he himself failed to realize with what he rode, knee-to-knee and peaceful on this bright morning. He feared her for her reputation: that was natural. And yet, he thought, perhaps he did not hold fear enough of her presence. She could kill without touching and without wound: he could not rid his mind of the deer’s wide-eyed look that ought by rights not to have been dead.

A gnawed bone lay athwart their path. His horse shied from it.

They rode back into the valley of the Stones, crossing the frozen stream, cracking the yet thin ice, and rode the winding trail beside the great gray rocks, under the shadow of the mound called Morgaine’s Tomb. Despite the snow, the sky shimmered between the two carven pillars with the look of air above the heated rocks.

Morgaine looked up at it as they rode. There was upon her face a curious loathing. He began to understand that it had been far from Morgaine’s will to have ridden into such a thing with Heln’s men behind her.

“Who freed you?” he asked suddenly.

She looked back at him, puzzled.

“You said that someone must free you from this place. What is it? How were you held there? And who freed you?”

“It is a Gate,” she said, and into his mind there flashed the nightmare image of white rider against the sun: it was hard to remember such madness. Like dreams, it tended to fade, for the sake of sanity.

“If it is a gate,” he said, “then from where did you come?”