Exile's Gate Read Online Free PDF Page B

beneath
his armor, against his heart. He felt after the chain which held it and
pulled it loose for his comfort . . . careful of the case, for it was a
perilous thing within, more perilous still as near the Gate as they
were camped. The stone in it might tell him the way to another Gate. It
might find another stone of its kind which was near enough. That was
the virtue in it, which held so much else of danger.

    It had been a parting-gift,
from a man he had begun to love, one he had wished had been his father.
But in Morgaine's service there were only partings—and deaths. Only the
small stone and the white horse, these he owned, besides his gear, both
of which he knew for foolishness and dangerous vanity—a mare, and white
at that; and a stone which marked him equal to a qhal-lord—and reminded
him of the arrhend.

    That land they had traded
irrevocably for this one, where the gates themselves threw out power
enough to misshape the trees and make all their vicinity unwholesome.

    It was that lost, beautiful
forest and another, less wholesome, which haunted his sleep. He dreamed
that Morgaine had left him and he could not overtake her.

    He dreamed of a ride
wherein he had seen a dragon frozen in the snow, beyond which time
nothing had been ordinary in his life. For the most part, he thought,
folk chose to be where they were born, with familiar dangers. It might
be a terrible place or a good one, might be love or hate that came to
them, they might have their freedom merely by turning their faces from
what they knew and walking straight ahead—yet they would not go, not
though the place where they were would kill them. He might have been
such a man as that. He had hovered for two years close about the region
of his exile, when he was eighteen and an outlaw, despite his danger:
he had imagined nothing beyond that.

    Till Morgaine had found him.

    She had shown him things
which made no sense in the world he knew. And like the dragon which
perished, bewildered, in the snow—he had known he was out of his
element from the moment he had begun to follow her.

    Therefore he dreamed of
endless following. Therefore he walked with his fist clenched on the
stone; and lay bewildered, wondering where he was; and where Morgaine
was; and was terrified until he had found her, a familiar shadow,
beneath the ancient and twisted tree, in more starlight than any world
he had yet seen.

    He drifted off again. The
horses remained quiet. The wind blew and rattled the branches, and
there was no sound that did not belong.

    But—a brief darkness then;
and a snap like a burning log, that brought him out of his sleep
reaching for his sword, aware first that Morgaine was at his left and
that their guest was to his right and moving, staggering to his feet
and reeling away among the trees at no slight speed. Fire burned in the
leaf mold. That was the result of Morgaine's weapon: he knew it well
enough—knew that was the sound that had waked him; and he scrambled up
sleep-dazed as he was and overtook the man before he had gotten as far
as the horses he strove to reach—overtook him and seized him at the
shoulders, bearing him down in a crash to the leaves at the very hooves
of the gray warhorse.

    The gray reared up with a
challenge and Morgaine's whistle cut the dark. "Siptah!" she shouted,
as Vanye shielded his head with his arms, the prisoner with his body,
and the iron-shod hooves came down, flinging dirt and leaves into his
face and clipping his shoulder, thunder of hooves all about them as the
warhorse scrambled over them, missing them with every stride but one.
The prisoner beneath him did not move.

    "Is thee hurt?" Morgaine was asking. "Vanye, is thee hurt?"

    Vanye gathered himself up
off the man and caught his own breath in great frightened gasps,
looking up at his liege, who had caught firm hold of Siptah's halter
rope. He flexed the shoulder as he rose and thanked Heaven the hoof had
clipped only leather and a mail shirt.

    "He could