Exile's Gate by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

man—"

    Chei shook his head, clenching his jaw against the spasms a moment, then lay still, huddled in the blanket.

    "How long," Vanye asked, "how long had you been there?"

    Chei's breath hissed between his teeth, a slow shuddering.

    "Why," Vanye pursued quietly, "did they leave you there?"

    "What are you? From where? Mante?"

    "Not from hereabouts," he
said. The sun shone warm in a moment when the wind fell. A bird sang,
off across the little patch of meadow. It meant safety, like the horses
grazing above them on the slope.

    "Is it Mante?" Chei demanded of him, rolling onto his back and lifting his head, straining with the effort.

    "No," Vanye said. "It is
not." And reckoned that Mante was some enemy, for Chei seemed to take
some comfort in that, for all that his jaw was still clamped tight.
"Nor anywhere where they treat men as they treated you. I swear you
that."

    "She—" The man lay back and shifted desperate eyes toward their camp.

    "—is not your enemy," Vanye said. "As I am not."

    "Are you qhal?"

    That question took the warmth from the daylight.

    "No," Vanye said. "That I
am not." In Andur-Kursh the fairness of his own brown hair was enough
to raise questions of halfling blood. But the one who asked was palest
blond; and that puzzled him. "Do I look to be?"

    "One does not need to look to be."

    It was, then, what he had feared. He thought before he spoke. "I have seen the like. My cousin—was such a man."

    "How does he fare?"

    "Dead," Vanye said. "A long
time ago." And frowned to warn the man away from that matter. He looked
up at a motion in the edge of his vision and saw Morgaine coming down
the hill toward them, carefully—a warlike figure, in her black and
silver armor, the sword swinging at her side, either hand holding a
cloth-wrapped cup she was trying not to spill.

    Chei followed his stare,
tilting his head back, watching her as she came, as she reached the
place where they sat and offered the steaming cups.

    "Thank you," Vanye said, as he took his cup from her hand, and took Chei's as well.

    "Against the chill,"
Morgaine said. She was still frowning, but she did not show it to Chei,
who lay beneath his blanket. "Do you need anything?" she asked,
deliberately, doggedly gracious. "Hot water?"

    "On the inside of him will serve," Vanye said. "For the rest—the sun is warm enough when the wind falls."

    She walked off then, in
leisurely fashion, up the hill, plucked a twig and stripped it like
some village girl walking a country lane, the dragon sword swinging at
her side.

    She was, he reckoned, on the edge of a black rage.

    He gave Chei his cup and
sipped his own, wrinkling his nose as he discovered the taste. " 'Tis
safe," he said, for Chei hesitated at the smell of his. "Tea and
herbs." He tasted his again. "Febrifuge. Against the fever. She gives
us both the same, lest you think it poison. A little cordial to sweeten
it. The herb is sour and bitter."

    "Qhalur witch," the man said, "into the bargain."

    "Oh, aye," Vanye said,
glancing at him with some mild surprise, for that belief might have
come out of Andur-Kursh. He regarded such a human, homelike belief
almost with wistfulness, wondering where he had lost it. "Some say. But
you will not lose your soul for a cup of tea."

    He had, he thought when he
had said it, lost his for a similar matter, a bit of venison. But that
was long ago, and he was damned most for the bargain, not what
sustenance he had taken of a stranger in a winter storm.

    Chei managed to lean over
on his elbow and drink, between coughing, and spilled a good amount of
it in the shaking of his hands. But sip after sip he drank, and Vanye
drank his own cup, to prove it harmless.

    Meanwhile too, having
considered charity, and the costs of it on both sides, he delved
one-handed into the saddlebags and set out a horn container,
intricately carved.

    And perhaps, he thought, a scrupulous Kurshin man would regard the contents of that little container as witchcraft