The gate was opening, greater than the gate the sword had made, louder than the howling of the winds which had taken Bron.

"Have you changed your mind?" Gault asked, and embraced him closer still. "Is it still willingly?"

Chei fought down his gorge and nodded, and his heart pounded in shock when he felt Gault seek his hand and press the hilt of a knife into his cold fingers. "Then you may do what you so much wish so much to do," Gault said, and slid his hand to the back of his neck, winding fingers into his hair, holding him tight. "Friend."

Chei rammed upward with the knife in a spasm of outrage, under Gault's jaw, toward the brain.

Someone pushed him. He felt the hands strike him, and the hill fell away under him and the man who was locked with him in a sickening fall of cold and wind and void.

Something began to go wrong then, his senses going out one by one: he saw things he could not name, and was blinded by light that was pain. He screamed and screamed as he fell, alone now, falling slower—a drifting dark, in which something else walked, and that thing was a thought that waked in him and called itself Chei, but it was not himself. It remembered dying, remembered the shock of a blade in its bowels, and one beneath its jaw, stopping breath and speech; the pain was all for a moment.

Then it ebbed, retreating to the past, safe and bearable.

He knew then what had happened to him, and that realization itself was fleeting, shredding away from him in the dark as something he dared not reconcile, except that he had died—he knew that recent memory had his death in it, and he did not want to delve into that, here, in the dark, naked to the winds and the cold.

He had use for his life. He discovered it and clung to it. He called it Bron and he called it Jestryn and Pyverrn, and he could not remember whether it had been brother or friend, or whether the man or the woman had killed him, but it was one and the same. He had a revenge to take, and that it was the one thing that had brought him north or south on that nightbound road, whichever direction he had been traveling, whichever horse he had been riding.

Then, having discovered his heart was whole, he was less afraid. He felt other things slipping away, pieces that might matter, but he was no longer in doubt where his course was and that the men waiting for him would follow him.

He knew all of Morund. He knew the hills. He knew Mante. He saw a hold set in the mountains, and the great Gate which ruled all gates, and knew the intricacies of politics which had sent the warders who waited below the hill: the Overlord Skarrin had received his first message and sent this handful of his underlings to guard the approach and to discover what they could, while Skarrin questioned at length the messengers he had sent. Skarrin's men had tried to bar him from use of the gate, until he could have permission of the high lord.

They had hoped, perhaps, that he would die.

But now, in his recollections, he had something indeed to tell them, which would stir Skarrin out of his lethargy and bring forces south.

Tell them the urgency of it he would, but he would not tell all he knew—nor stay for them or wait on Skarrin's pleasure. He had been Qhiverin Asfelles. He and Pyverrn had fought in these lands between Tejhos and Mante, against various of the high lord's enemies; he knew the secret ways into the hills, off the Road and back to it. He had utter freedom of the land, the high lord himself had cause to fear him and his connections within the warrior Societies, and he was as likely as any to profit by the present chaos—by whatever means turned up under his hand.

He drew a breath.

He felt the winds again, when a moment before had been only cold that numbed all feeling.

He heard the sounds, when a moment before had been only stillness. It was as if a ripple were sweeping through the dark, bearing him closer and closer to the shores of the world.

He moved his limbs, finding himself weaker than he remembered, lighter of limb. It was a young body. It was skilled and agile and had a long-muscled, runner's strength different than the slower, mature power of the body he recalled as Gault's—was far more like Qhiverin's; was nearly as fair as a qhal; and that pleased him.

He had a mature mind, too, that took the skittish thoughts of a younger and impulsive man and calmed them and spread wider and further into connections from which he shied back, of a sudden: there was too much memory, and it needed long meditation to reconcile it.

Witch-mind, a part of him said.

Nature, said the other, nature and knowledge.

God! part of him cried.

The other part said: Nature.

Vision cleared in a shimmer like the surface of a pond. The hill grew firm under his feet and the men who gathered anxiously to meet him were all friendly and familiar to him.

"Hesiyyn," he said, and laid his hand on a tall qhal's shoulder with easy humor, knowing how Hesiyyn loathed humankind.

"Lord Chei," Hesiyyn hailed him with deep irony. It was custom. It was the penalty of the twice-and-three-times-born.

The Men among them would be confused. They would murmur things about souls, which Chei dismissed and refused to think about. But tall, elegant qhal had no hesitation in bowing the head and offering homage to him, to Chei ep Kantory, lord of Morund—the intimates of his household, his servants, the remnant of the human levies, even the troublesome and arrogant warders from Mante, who waited below, with their captain.

He felt wounds on him. He felt bruises. His knees ached with exhaustion. That was the penalty this body brought with it. None were unbearable.

He sought weapons—the sword which the Man had given him: that was one weapon he did not intend to lose. It was qhalur-work, and foreign—from further, he was sure, than merely overseas, and he delighted in it when he tried its balance.

He took his own bow; and the red roan; the lame gelding he turned out to fend for itself: perhaps it would recover.

But he declined more weapons than that, and declined to go in more than the breeches and mended boots and light mail that came with the man.

"This is the shape they will expect," he said to Hesiyyn.

"Wake," Morgaine's voice whispered out of nowhere, and muscles jumped and body tensed all in one spasm as on the edge of a fall—But it was stone at Vanye's back, and he pressed himself against it, controlling his breaths and blinking at the shadow that stood between him and the horses. "I might have hit you," he said. "Oh, Heaven—" He caught his breath and brushed loose hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. "I dreamed—" But he did not tell those dreams, that took him back to old places, old terrors. "I did not mean to sleep."

"Best we move."

"Is there—"

"No. Only shortness of time. A little of the night left. We travel while we can."

He glanced around to see were Chei and Bron awake then, one instant's impulse, and remembered everything like a blow to the stomach; he drew a breath then and rubbed an unshaven face, and quickly gathered himself to his feet, trying not to think on anything but the road.

Fool, he thought. Do not look back. Look around you. Look around you.That is what caused this sorry business, nothing more and nothing less than losing track of things.

He wanted to weep. He adjusted Arrhan's gear and reached out to hold Siptah's bridle for Morgaine as she prepared to mount. "Do not be seeing to me,"she said sharply, taking back the reins, by which she meant do not be twice a fool.

It stung. He was not in a mood to bear her temper, and she was not in a mood for debating what she wanted. He turned and flung himself to horse, and waited on her, since she was in such haste.