The Complete Morgaine Read Online Free

not follow it. He saw it climb—insane, as if the queerness in that valley had taken its fear-hazed wits and driven it against nature, killing itself in its exertions, driving it toward that shimmering web which even insects and growing things avoided.
    It struck between the pillars and vanished.
    So did the tracks and the blood.
    The deer grazed, on the other side of the stream.
    He gazed at the valley of the Stones, where there was no doubt that
qujalin
hands had reared such monoliths. It was Morgaine’s vale: he knew it. The sight stirred something, a sense of
déjà-vu
so strong it dazed him for a moment, and he passed the back of his hand over his eyes, rubbing things into focus. The sun was sinking quickly toward dark, with another bank of cloud rolling in off the ridge of the mountains, shadowing most of the sky at his back.
    He looked up between the pillars that crowned the conical hill called Morgaine’s Tomb, and the declining sun shimmered there like a puddle of gold just disturbed by a plunging stone.
    In that shimmer appeared the head of a horse, and its fore-quarters, and a rider, and the whole animal: white rider on a gray horse, and the whole was limned against the brilliant amber sun so that he blinked and rubbed his eyes.
    The rider descended the snowy hill into the shadows across his path—substantial. A pelt of white
anomen
was the cloak, and the stranger’s breath and that of the gray horse made puffs on the frosty air.
    He knew that he should set spurs to the mare, yet he felt curiously numb, as though he had been wakened from one dream and plunged into the midst of another.
    He looked into the tanned woman’s face within the fur hood and met hair and brows like the winter sun at noon, and eyes as gray as the clouds in the east.
    â€œGood day,” she gave him, in a quaint and gentle accent, and he saw that beneath her knee upon the gray’s saddle was a great blade with a golden hilt in the fashion of a dragon, and that it was Korish-work upon her horse’s gear. He was sure then, for such details were in the songs they sang of her and in the book of Yla.
    â€œMy way lies north,” she said in that low, accented voice. “Thee seems to go otherwise. But the sun is setting soon. I will ride with thee a ways.”
    â€œI know you,” he said then.
    The pale brows lifted. “Has thee come hunting me?”
    â€œNo,” he said, and the ice crept downward from heart to belly so that he was no longer sure what words he answered, or why he answered at all.
    â€œHow is thee called?”
    â€œNhi Vanye, ep Morija.”
    â€œVanye—no Morij name.”
    Old pride stung him. The name was Korish, mother’s-clan, reminder of his illegitimacy. Then to speak or dispute with her at all seemed madness. What he had seen happen upon the hilltop refused to take shape in his memory, and he began to insist to himself that the hunger that had made him weak had begun to twist his senses as well, and that he had encountered some strange high-clan woman upon the forsaken road, and that his weakness stole his senses and made him forget how she had come.
    Yet however she had come, she was at least half-
qujal,
eyes and hair bore witness to that: she was
qujal
and soulless and well at home in this blighted place of dead trees and snow.
    â€œI know a place,” she said, “where the wind does not reach. Come.”
    She turned the gray’s head toward the south, as he had been headed, so that he did not know where else to go. He went as in a dream. Dusk was gathering, hurried on by the veil of cloud that was rolling across the sky. The wraithlike pallor of Morgaine drifted before him, but the gray’s hooves cracked substantially into the crusted snow, leaving tracks.
    They rounded the turning of the hill and startled a small band of deer that fed upon
howan
by the streamside. It was the first game he had seen in days. Despite his circumstance,