"Do not you kneel," she said harshly, and clenched her hands on his. "How often have I told thee?"

"Well, it is my habit." He began to get up; then sank back again, jaw set. "It still is."

"You are a free man."

"Well, then, I do what I please, do I not? And since you are a lord, my lady-liege, and since I am only dai-uyoat best, I still call you my liege and I still go on my knees when I see fit, for decency, my liege. And I ask you—" She started to speak and he pressed her hands, hard. "While I am gone, stay close, take no chances, and for the love of Heaven—trust me, however long. If I meet trouble I can wait it out until they leave. If I have to wonder about your riding into it, then I have to do something else. So do me the grace and wait here, and be patient. Then neither of us will have to worry, is that not reasonable?"

"Aye," she said quietly. "But turn and turn about. The next one is mine."

"Liyo—"

But he had already lost that argument for the time. He gathered himself up and dusted off his knees, and went to saddle Arrhan.

The land was difficult beyond the camp they had made—little wooded, flatter for a space: he had known that much when he had chosen the camp they had, a retreat from the furthermost point he had reached in his last searching.

Now it was careful riding, by every low spot he could find that could shelter them as they went, and a good deal of it east rather than north. It was the watercourses he had most hope in, and most fear of: it was water that bound a man to his course in land like this, water by which their enemies could find them, nearly as surely as they might have by the Road itself.

But he spent some time afoot, and finally flat on his belly on a hill from which he had vantage, scanning every rabbit-track in the grassland below, every flight of birds, and listening—listening finally alone, until the sounds of the land began to speak to him, the ordinary chirp of insects in the sun, the birds that ought to sing in the thicket and out on the meadows.

He was alone. There was no one out there: he was as sure of that as he dared be sure of anything with an unknown enemy.

Still—he found no sane way to cross that plain, except to go far to the east and as the stream bore: to cross it even by night, would leave a track plain enough for a child to follow the next day.

Thatwas no good. If they did that, there was no good choice but to pick up speed again, and then they would be no better off than before.

A plague on her haste and her insistence. He lay with his chin on his hand and with the sun on his back overheating the layers of armor, and considered again what his chances were of reporting to her and gaining her agreement, after a day's delay, that the proper course was not northward, but considerably eastward and out of the direct course she wanted to take.

Her anger when it came to her safety was a matter of indifference to him—except that his liege, having gotten a purpose in her mind, was likely to strike out on her own in what direction she chose, leaving him to follow; and that prospect left him contemplating arguments, and reason, and unreason, and the fact that he had no means but force truly to restrain her—and restrain her by that means, he could not, by ilin-oath, by uyin-oath, by the deeper things between them, not to save either of their lives, so long as she was in her right mind.

And Heaven help them both, she was oftener right even when she was not sane, or at least retrieved her mistakes with more deftness than anyone he knew; and he was still uneasy that he had persuaded her against her instincts. Doubt ate at his gut, a continual moil of anxiety in all this ride out here separate of her, and the only solace in it was the knowledge that she was well-situated, in no likelihood of attracting attention, and in a way to defend herself if trouble happened on her.

It was that things had shifted between them, he told himself; it was the muddle things had gotten to that made him unreasonably anxious. They sinned before Heaven with his oath and hers, and with no priest, and with ten thousand trifling laws he had no regard of—laws it was mad to regard, when there were so many greater and bloody sins on them.

He was half-witted with thinking about her, he had done what he had sworn he would never do and let that thinking come between them in daylight, using that bond to gain his way—he had done one thing after another he had sworn he would not do with her. Decisions that she would make, he had argued to take onto his shoulders when he well knew he was not, of the two of them, the wiser—

If he were back in Myya lands, he thought, with his cousins hunting him, he would lie low for the whole day exactly where he had left Arrhan down under the hill. He would watch everything that moved by day, every hawk that flew, every start of game; and move again only at night. But Morgaine was left worrying back there; and he could never have persuaded her to wait day upon day on him—he could not bear the worry of it himself, to be truthful, if matters were reversed; or keep her still beyond half a day as matters were, unless he could demonstrate some danger to her.

It was a long effort for their enemies to search all the watercourses in the plains.

But long efforts bore fruit, if they had long enough.

And having thought that three times through, he could not rest where he was and he could not risk anything further. He edged down off the height and gathered up Arrhan where he had left her in a brushy hollow; and led her by the dry streambed which had been his route up to this hill.

It merged with yet another narrow water-cut, and took him back into sparsely wooded hills.

Then he mounted up and rode, quietly, back the way he had come, far and far through the hills to the place where the dry bed joined the water.

Beyond that he rode the stream itself for a space, the water only scarcely over Arrhan's hooves, but it served.

It served, certainly, better than the streamside had served another rider.

He saw the mark among bent reeds, the water-filled impression of a horse's hoof, and searched his mind whether Arrhan had misstepped when he had passed this bank in the morning.

No, he thought, with the blood going colder and colder in him. No. She had not. Not here. They had gone straight along as they went now, making no track at all. He remembered the reeds. He remembered the little shelf of rock where it came down from the hill.

He saw the track merge with the stream further on, a single rider.

Morgaine would not have broken her word to him without reason. He believed that implicitly. She would not have followed, except something had gone very wrong.

There were further marks, down the stream where the water became momentarily and treacherously deeper and a rider had to take to the waterside. He had done so. So had this rider; and one mark showed a shod horse, a shoe of a pattern different than Siptah's and headed the wrong direction.

There was cold dread in him now. He scanned the hills about him.

If he had been in Myya lands again, his Myya cousins looking to have his head on a pike, he would do what he had told Morgaine he would do: he would go to earth and lie close until the hunters had passed and failed to find him for a fortnight or more.

But then he had not had a woman waiting for him, in the direction the rider was going, camped right on the stream-course as if it were some roadside, now the hunters were out. She would not be sitting blind: she would have vantage from higher on the hill—he took that for granted. But there was the horse to worry for—more visible, and tracking the ground despite all they could do to keep cover. If someone rode through, looking with a skilled eye—never grant that every man in Gault's party was a fool, even granted one of them had been careless enough to let his horse misstep in this thread of a stream.