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misery and desolation that Vanye felt his eyes on him even
when he looked back at their breakfast.

    "I should see to him,"
Vanye muttered unhappily when Morgaine came back from the riverside. He
poured tea into their smallest mixing bowl, wrapped a cloth about it to
keep it warm, and set out a cake and a bit of bacon on the cloth that
wrapped his cooking-gear, while Morgaine sat down to eat. "Have your
own," he said, "before it cools."

    It did not look like a
madman who stared up at him as he came over to his place among the
tree-roots. It looked like a very miserable, very hungry man who hoped
that food truly was coming to him. "I will free your hands," Vanye
said, dropping down on his heels beside him. He set the food down
carefully on the dead leaves of the forest floor. "But not your feet.
Meddle with that and I will stop you, do you understand? For other
necessities I trust you can wait like any civilized man." It was the
qhalur language he spoke, and it did not go so lightly over his tongue
as it ought. He was not sure, at times, what hearers did understand of
him. "Do you agree? Or do I take the food back?"

    "The food," the man said, a faint, hoarse voice. "Yes."

    "You agree."

    A nod of the head, a worried gnawing of the lip.

    He turned the prisoner over
and gently worked the knots free on his hands. The man only gave a
great sigh and lay still on his face a moment, his arms at rest beside
him, as a man would who had spent the night with his hands and
shoulders going numb.

    "He is quieter," he
reported then to Morgaine, in his own tongue, when he settled down to
breakfast beside her. He took a cup of tea and considered his hands,
where he had touched the man. It was death-stink, lingering: the man
was that filthy; and he could not eat until he had walked down to the
river and washed his hands.

    It was overdone bacon then;
Morgaine kept the breakfast warm for him on the coals, along with the
tea which by now was bitter-edged. He drank and made a face.

    "I should have gotten up," Morgaine said.

    "No," he said. "No, you
ought not. I will take care of him. I will have him down to the river
before the sun is much higher, and I swear to you he will be cleaner
before you have to deal with him."

    "I want you to talk to him."

    "Me?"

    "You can manage that."

    "Aye—but—"

    "Not?"

    "I will do it." Rarely
nowadays she put any hard task on him: and he took it, distasteful as
it was, likely as he was to make a muddle of things. "But—"

    "But?"

    "He can lie to me. How should I know? How should I know anything he told me? I have no subtlety with lies."

    "Is thee saying I do?"

    "I did not say—"

    She smiled, a quirk of her
mouth, gray eyes flickering. "Man and man; Man and Man. That is the
fact. Between one thing and the other I am not the one of us two he
will trust. No. Learn what brought him here. Promise him what thee sees
fit to promise. Only—" She reached out and laid a hand on his arm. "He
will not go free. We cannot allow that. Thee knows what I will give—and
what I will not."

    "I know," he said, and
thought as he said it that he had chosen the road that brought him to
this pass—thought suddenly how more than one land cursed Morgaine kri
Chya for the deaths she brought. He had tried in his life to be an
honorable man, and not to lie.

    But he had chosen to go with her.

     

    It was far more warily the
man regarded him on his return, tucked up with his back against a tree,
eyes following every move he made—a filthy, desperate figure their
guest was by daylight, his nose having bled into his white-blond
mustache and down his unkept and patchy beard, dirt-sores and crusted
lines on his face, a trickle of dried blood having run from under the
matted hair at his temple—a reminder of the night previous, Vanye
thought. Likely more than the man's arms ached this morning.

    But he had not touched the
binding on his ankles. He had eaten every bit of the cake and the bacon
off the cloth, down to the