Morgon moved then, unbound from the silence. He cast with his mind into the night, but everywhere he searched he found only its stillness. He rose. Words seemed gripped in his chest and in his clenched hands, as if he dared not let them go. The Morgol seemed as reluctant to speak. She stirred a little, stiffly, then stilled again, gazing down at a star of candlelight reflected on the table. The blood came back into her face slowly. Watching her expression change, Morgon found his voice.
“Where did he go?” he whispered. “He spoke to you.”
“He said—he said that he had just done the only foolish thing in his very long life.” Her hands moved, linked themselves; she frowned down at them, concentrating with an effort. “That he had not intended for you to know him until you had gathered enough power to fight for yourself. He left because he is a danger to you now. He said—other things.” She shook her head slightly, then spoke again. “He said that he had not realized there was a limit to his own endurance.”
“Wind Plain. He’ll be in Ymris.”
She raised her eyes then, but she did not argue. “Find him, Morgon. No matter how dangerous it is for both of you. He has been alone long enough.”
“I will.” He turned, knelt beside Raederle. She was staring into the fire; he brushed at the reflection of a flame on her face. She looked at him. There was something ancient, fierce, only half-human in her eyes, as if she had seen into the High One’s memories. He took her hand. “Come with me.”
She stood up. He linked their minds, cast far into the Herun night until he touched a stone he remembered on the far side of the marshes. As Lyra entered the hall, bringing his supper, he took one step toward her and vanished.
They stood together in the mists, seeing nothing but a shadowy whiteness, like a gathering of wraiths. Morgon sent his awareness spiralling outward, out of the mists, through the low hills, far across them, farther than he had ever loosed his mind before. His thoughts anchored in the gnarled heart of a pine. He pulled himself toward it.
Standing beside it, in the wind-whipped forests between Herun and Ymris, he felt his overtaxed powers suddenly falter. He could barely concentrate; his thoughts seemed shredded by wind. His body, to which he had been paying only sporadic attention, was making imperative demands. He was shivering; he kept remembering the smell of hot meat Lyra had brought him. Pieces of the harpist’s life kept flashing into his mind. He heard the fine, detached voice speaking to kings, to traders, to Ghisteslwchlohm, riddling always, not with his words, but with all he did not say. Then one memory seared through all Morgon’s thoughts, shaking a sound from him. He felt the north wind whittle at his bones.
“I nearly killed him.” He was almost awed at his own blundering. “I tracked the High One all the way across the realm to kill him.” Then a sharp, familiar pain bore into his heart. “He left me in Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands. He could have killed the Founder with half a word. Instead, he harped. No wonder I never recognized him.”
“Morgon, it’s cold.” Raederle put her arm around him; even her hair felt chill against his face. He tried to clear his mind, but the winds wept into it, and he saw the harpist’s face again, staring blindly at the sky.
“He was a Master...”
“Morgon.” He felt her mind grope into his. He let it come, surprised. The sense of her quieted him; her own thoughts were very clear. He drew apart from her, looked through the darkness into her face.
“You were never that angry for my sake.”
“Oh, Morgon.” She held him again. “You said it yourself: you endure, like the hard things of the realm. He needed you that way, so he left you to Ghisteslwchlohm. I’m saying it badly...” she protested, as his muscles tensed. “You learned to survive. Do you think it was easy for him? Harping for centuries in Ghisteslwchlohm’s service, waiting for the Star-Bearer?”
“No,” he said after a moment, thinking of the harpist’s broken hands. “He used himself as mercilessly as he used me. But for what?”
“Find him. Ask him.”
“I can’t even move,” he whispered. Her mind touched his again; he let his thoughts rest finally in her tentative hold. He waited patiently while she worked, exploring across distance. She touched him finally. He moved without knowing where he was going, and he began to understand the patience and trust he had demanded of her. They did not go very far, he sensed, but he waited wearily, gratefully, while she found her way step by step across the forests. By dawn, they had reached the north border of Ymris. And there, as the red sun of storms and ill winds rose in the east, they rested.
They flew over Marcher as carrion crows. The rough, hilly borderland seemed quiet; but in the late afternoon, the crows spied a band of armed men guarding a line of trade-carts lumbering toward Caerweddin. Morgon veered down toward them. He caught one of the warrior’s mind as he landed on the road, to avoid being attacked when he changed shape. He drew the sword out of its sheath of air, held the stars up as the man stared at him. They flared uneasily in the grey light.
“Morgon of Hed,” the warrior breathed. He was a grizzled, scarred veteran; his eyes, shadowed and bloodshot, had gazed across the dawn and deadly twilight of many fields. He halted the train of cars behind him and dismounted. The men behind were silent.
“I need to find Yrth,” Morgon said, “Or Aloil. Or Astrin Ymris.”
The man touched the stars on his upraised sword with a curious gesture, almost a ritual of fealty. Then he blinked as a gor-crow landed on Morgon’s shoulder. He said, “I am Lien Marcher, cousin of the High Lord of Marcher. I don’t know Yrth. Astrin Ymris is in Caerweddin; he could tell you where Aloil is. I’m taking arms and supplies to Caerweddin, for whatever good they’ll do there. If I were you, Star-Lord, I would not show an eyelash in this doomed land. Let alone three stars.”
“I’ve come to fight,” Morgon said. The land whispered to him, then, of law, legends, the ancient dead beneath his feet, and his own body seemed to yearn toward the shape of it. The man’s eyes ran over his lean face, the rich, worn tunic that seemed mildly absurd in those dangerous, wintry hills.
“Hed,” he said. A sudden, amazed smile broke through the despair in his eyes. “Well. We’ve tried everything else. I would offer to take you with me, Lord, but I think you’re safer on your own. There is only one man Astrin might want to see more than you, but I wouldn’t want to lay any bets on that.”
“Heureu. He’s still missing.”
The man nodded wearily. “Somewhere in the realm between the dead and the living. Not even the wizard can find him. I think—”
“I can find him,” Morgon said abruptly. The man was silent, the smile in his eyes wiped away by a naked, unbearable hope.
“Can you? Not even Astrin can, and his dreams are full of Heureu’s thoughts. Lord, what—what are you, that you can stand there shivering in the cold and have me believing in your power? I survived the carnage on Wind Plain. Some nights when I wake from my own dreams, I wish I had died there.” He shook his head; his hand moved to Morgon again, then dropped without touching him. “Go, now. Take your stars out of eyesight. Find your way safely to Caerweddin. Lord, hurry.”
The crows flew eastward. They passed other long convoys of supply-carts and strings of horses; they rested in the eaves of great houses, whose yards were choked with smoke and the din of forges. The brilliant colors of battle livery and the dark, sweating flanks of plow horses flickered through the smoke, as men gathered to march to Caerweddin. There were young boys among them, and the rough, weathered faces of shepherds, farmers, smiths, even traders, receiving a crude, desperate introduction to arms before they joined the forces at Caerweddin. The sight spurred the crows onward. They followed the Thul as it ran toward the sea, cutting a dark path through the dying fields.
They reached Caerweddin at sunset; the sky was shredded like a brilliant banner by the harsh winds. The whole of the city was ringed by a thousand fires, as if it were besieged by its own forces. But the harbor was clear; trade-ships from Isig and Anuin were homing toward it on the evening tide. The beautiful house of the Ymris kings, built of the shards of an Earth-Masters’ city, burned like a jewel in the last light. The crows dropped down into the shadows just outside its closed gates. They changed shape in the empty street.
They did not speak as they looked at one another. Morgon drew Raederle against him, wondering if his own eyes were as stunned with weariness. He touched her mind; then, searching into the heart of the king’s house, he found Astrin’s mind.
He appeared in front of the Ymris land-heir as he sat alone in a small council chamber. He had been working; maps, messages, supply lists were strewn all over his desk. But the room was nearly in darkness, and he had not bothered to light candles. He was staring ahead of him into the fire, his face harrowed, colorless. Morgon and Raederle, stepping out of the street into the blur of light and shadow, did not even startle him. He gazed at them a moment as if they had no more substance than his hope. Then his expression changed; he stood up, his chair falling behind him with a crash. “Where have you been?”
There was a realm of relief, compassion, and exasperation in the question. Morgon, casting a glance at his past with an eye as probing as the single, wintry eye of the Ymris prince, said simply, “Answering riddles.”
Astrin rounded his desk and eased Raederle into a chair. He gave her wine and the numbness began to wear out of her face. Astrin, half-kneeling beside her, looked up at Morgon incredulously.
“Where did you come from? I have been thinking about you and Heureu—you and Heureu. You’re thin as an awl, but in one piece. You look—if ever I’ve seen a man who looks like a weapon, you do. There is a quiet thunder of power all over this room. Where did you get it?”
“All over the realm.” He poured himself wine and sat.
“Can you save Ymris?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I need to find Yrth.”
“Yrth. I thought he was with you.”
He shook his head. “He left me. I need to find him. I need him...” His voice had sunk to a whisper; he stared into the fire, the cup a hollow of gold in his hands. Astrin’s voice startled through him, and he realized he was nearly asleep.
“I haven’t seen him, Morgon.”
“Is Aloil here? His mind is linked to Yrth’s.”
“No; he is with Mathom’s army. It’s massed in the forests near Trader’s Road. Morgon.” He leaned forward to grip Morgon, bringing him out of the sudden despair overwhelming him.
“He was there beside me, if only I had had enough sense to turn and face him, instead of pursuing his shadow all over the realm. I harped with him, I fought with him, I tried to kill him, and I loved him, and the moment I name him he vanishes, leaving me still pursuing...” Astrin’s grip was suddenly painful.
“What are you saying?”
Morgon, realizing his own words, gazed back at him mutely. He saw once again the strange, colorless face that had been over him when he had wakened, voiceless, nameless, in a strange land. The warrior before him, with a dark, tight tunic buttoned haphazardly over a shift of mail, became the half-wizard once more in his hut by the sea, riddling over the bones of the city on Wind Plain.
“Wind Plain...” he whispered. “No. He can’t have gone there without me. And I’m not ready.”
Astrin’s hand slackened. His face was expressionless, skull-white. “Exactly who is it you’re looking for?” He spoke very carefully, fitting the words together like shards. The harpist’s name shocked through Morgon then: the first dark riddle the harpist had given him long ago on a sunlit autumn day at the docks at Tol. He swallowed dryly, wondering suddenly what he was pursuing.
Raederle shifted in her chair, pillowing her face against a fur cloak drapped over it. Her eyes were closed. “You’ve answered so many riddles,” she murmured. “Where is there one last, unanswered riddle but on Wind Plain?”
She burrowed deeper into the fur as Morgon eyed her doubtfully. She did not move again; Astrin took her cup before it dropped from her fingers. Morgon rose abruptly, crossed the room. He leaned over Astrin’s desk; the map of Ymris lay between his hands.
“Wind Plain...” The shaded areas of the map focussed under his gaze. He touched an island of darkness in west Ruhn. “What is this?”
Astrin, still hunched beside the fire, got to his feet. “An ancient city,” he said. “They have taken nearly all the Earth-Masters’ cities in Meremont and Tor, parts of Ruhn.”
“Can you get through the Wind Plain?”
“Morgon, I would march there with no other army but my shadow if you want it. But can you give me a reason I can give to my war-lords for taking the entire army away from Caerweddin and leaving the city unguarded to fight over a few broken stones?”
Morgon looked at him. “Can you get through?”
“Here.” He drew a line down from Caerweddin, between Tor and the dark area in east Umber. “With some risk.” He traced the southern border of Meremont. “Mathom’s army will be here. If it were only men we were fighting, I would call them doomed, caught between two great armies. But Morgon, I can’t calculate their strength, none of us can. They take what they want in their own time. They aren’t pretending to fight us anymore; they simply overrun us whenever we happen to get in their way. The realm is their chessboard, and we are their pawns... and the game they are playing seems incomprehensible. Give me a reason to move the men south, to pick a fight in the bitter cold over land that no one has lived on for centuries.”
Morgon touched a point on Wind Plain where a lonely tower might have stood. “Danan is coming south with his miners. And Har with the vesta. And the Morgol with her guard. Yrth wanted them there at Wind Plain. Astrin, is that enough reason? To protect the land-rulers of the realm?”
“Why?” His fist slammed down on the plain, but Raederle did not even stir. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll stop them in Marcher.”
“You won’t stop them. They are drawn to Wind Plain, as I am, and if you want to see any of us alive next spring, then take your army south. I didn’t choose the season. Or the army that is following me across the realm. Or the war itself. I am—” He stopped, as Astrin’s hands closed on his shoulders. “Astrin. I have no time left to give you. I have seen too much. I have no choices left. No other seasons.”
The single eye would have searched into his thoughts, if he had let it. “Then who is making your choices?”
“Come to Wind Plain.”
The prince loosed him. “I’ll be there,” he whispered.
Morgon turned away from him after a moment, sat down again. “I have to leave,” he said tiredly.
“Tonight?”
“Yes. I’ll sleep a little and then leave. I need answers...” He gazed across at Raederle’s face, hidden in the fur; only the line of her cheek and chin, brushed by light, showed beneath her hair. He said very softly, “I’ll let her sleep. She might follow me when she wakes; tell her to be careful flying across Wind Plain.”
“Where are you going?”
Raederle’s hair blurred into fire; his eyes closed. “To find Aloil... To find a wind.”
He slept without dreaming and woke a few hours later. Astrin had covered Raederle; she was barely visible, huddled under fur-lined blankets. Astrin, lying between them on skins beside the fire, was guarding them. His sword was unsheathed; one hand rested on the bare blade. Morgon thought he had fallen asleep, but his good eye opened as Morgon stood. He said nothing. Morgon leaned down to touch his shoulder in a silent farewell. Then he caught at the night beyond the stones.
The night winds snarled in furious contention around him as he flew. He did not dare use power in the stretch between Caerweddin and Wind Plain. Dawn broke in sheets of cold, grey rain over hunched trees and lifeless fields. He flew through the day, fighting the winds. By twilight, he reached Wind Plain.
He flew low over it, a huge black carrion crow casting a bitter eye over the remains of the unburied warriors of Heureu’s army. Nothing else moved on the plain; not even birds or small animals had come to scavenge in the fierce rain. A treasure of arms gleamed in the twilight all over the plain. The rain was hammering jewelled sword hilts, pieces of armor, horse’s skulls and the bones of men alike down into the wet earth. The crow’s eye saw nothing else as it winged slowly toward the ruined city; but beyond the shield of its instincts, Morgon sensed the silent, deadly warning ringing the entire plain.
The great tower rose above the city, spiralling into night as he winged past it. He kept his mind empty of all thought, aware only of the smells of the wet earth, and the slow, weary rhythm of his flight. He did not stop until he had crossed the plain and the south border of Ymris and finally saw the midnight fires of Mathom’s army sprawled along the river near Trader’s Road. He descended then and found shelter among the thick, leafless oak. He did not move until morning.
Dawn crusted the earth with frost and a chill like the bite of a blade. He felt it as he changed shape; his breath froze in a quick, startled flash in front of him. Shivering, he followed the smell of wood smoke and hot wine to the fires beside the river. Dead warriors of An were posted as sentries. They seemed to recognize something of An in him, for they gave him white, eyeless grins and let him pass among them unchallenged.
He found Aloil talking to Talies beside the fire outside the king’s pavilion. He joined the wizards quietly, stood warming himself. Through the bare trees, he saw other fires, men rousing out of tents, stamping the blood awake in their bodies. Horses snorted the chill out of their lungs, pulling restively at their ropes. Tents, horse trappings, men’s arms, and tunics all bore the battle colors of Anuin: blue and purple edged with the black of sorrow. The wraiths bore their own ancient colors when they bothered to clothe themselves with the memories of their bodies. They moved vividly and at will among the living, but the living, inured to many things at that point, took more interest in their breakfast than in the dead.
Morgon, finally warm, caught Aloil’s attention as he began listening to their conversation. The big wizard broke off mid-sentence and turned his blue, burning gaze across the fire. The preoccupied frown in his eyes turned to amazement.
“Morgon...”
“I’m looking for Yrth,” Morgon said. “Astrin told me he was with you.” Talies, both thin brows raised, started to comment. Then he stepped to the king’s pavilion and flung the flap open. He said something; Mathom followed him back out.
“He was here a moment ago,” Talies said, and Morgon sighed. “He can’t be far. How in Hel’s name did you cross Wind Plain?”
“At night. I was a carrion crow.” He met the black, searching eyes of the King of An. Mathom, pulling his cloak off, said crustily, “It’s cold enough to freeze the bare bones of the dead.” He threw it around Morgon’s shoulders. “Where did you leave my daughter?”
“Asleep at Caerweddin. She’ll follow me when she wakes.”
“Across Wind Plain? Alone? You aren’t easy on one another.” He prodded the fire until it groped for the low boughs of the oak.
Morgon asked, pulling the cloak tight, “Was Yrth with you? Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. I thought he came out for a cup of hot wine. This is no season for old men. Why? There are two great wizards here, both at your service.” He did not wait for an answer; he cast a quizzical eye at Aloil. “You are linked to him. Where is he?”
Aloil, staring down at the fuming oak logs, shook his head. “Napping, perhaps. His mind is silent. He made a swift journey across Ymris.”
“So did Morgon, by the look of it,” Talies commented. “Why didn’t Yrth travel with you?”
Morgon, caught without an answer, ran one hand through his hair vaguely. He saw a sudden glitter in the crow’s eyes. “No doubt,” Mathom said, “Yrth had his reasons. A man with no eyes sees marvels. You stopped at Caerweddin? Are Astrin and his war-lords still at odds?”
“Possibly. But Astrin is bringing the entire army to Wind Plain.”
“When?” Aloil demanded. “He said nothing of that to me, and I was with him three nights ago.”
“Now.” He added, “I asked him to.”
There was a silence, during which one of the sentries, wearing nothing more than his bones under gold armor, rode soundlessly past the fire. Mathom’s eyes followed the wraith’s passage. “So. What does a man with one eye see?” He answered himself, with a blank shock of recognition in his voice, “Death.”
“This is hardly a time,” Aloil said restlessly, “for riddles. If the way is clear between Umber and Thor, it will take him four days to reach the plain. If it is not... you had better be prepared to march north to aid him. He could lose the entire strength of Ymris. Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked Morgon. “You have gained awesome powers. But are you ready to use them alone?”
Talies dropped a hand on his shoulder. “You have the brain of an Ymris warrior,” he said, “full of muscle and poetry. I’m no riddler, either, but living for centuries in the Three Portions taught me a little subtlety. Can you listen to what the Star-Bearer is saying? He is drawing the force of the realm to Wind Plain, and he is not intending to battle alone. Wind Plain. Astrin saw it. Yrth saw it. The final battleground...”
Aloil gazed silently at him. Something like a frail, reluctant hope struggled into his face. “The High One.” He swung his gaze again to Morgon. “You think he is on Wind Plain?”
“I think,” Morgon said softly, “that wherever he is, if I don’t find him very soon, we are all dead. I have answered one riddle too many.” He shook his head as both wizards began to speak. “Come to Wind Plain. I’ll give you whatever answers I have there. That’s where I should have gone in the first place, but I thought perhaps—” He broke off. Mathom finished his sentence.
“You thought Yrth was here. The Harpist of Lungold.” He made a harsh, dry sound, like a crow’s laugh. But he was staring into the fire as if he were watching it weave a dream to its ending. He turned away from it abruptly, but not before Morgon saw his eyes, black and expressionless as the eyes of his dead, who had been eaten to the bone by truth.
Morgon stood in the trees at the edge of Wind Plain at twilight, waiting as the night slowly drew the empty city and the long, whispering grasses into itself once again. He had been there for hours, motionless, waiting, so still he might have rooted himself to earth like a bare, twisted oak without realizing it. The sky spilled a starless black over the world, until even with his night-vision, the jewellike colors of the tower stones seemed permeated with the dark. He moved then, aware of his body again. As he took one final step toward the tower, clouds parted unexpectedly. A single star drifted through the unfathomable blackness above it.
He stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at them as he had when he first saw them one wet autumn day two years before. Then, he remembered, he had turned away, uncurious, uncompelled. The stairs were gold, and according to all legend they wound away from the earth forever.
He bowed his head as if he were walking into a hard wind and began to climb. The walls around him were of the lustrous burning black between stars. The gold stairs ringed around the core of the tower, slanting gently upward. As he rounded it once and began the second spiral, the black gave way to a rich crimson. The winds, he realized, were no longer the thin, angry winds of the day; their voices were forceful, sinewy. The stairs beneath his feet seemed carved of ivory.
He heard the voices of the winds change again at the third spiral. They held tones he had harped to in the northern wastes, and his hands yearned to match their singing. But harping would be deadly, so he kept his hands still. At the fourth level the walls seemed of solid gold and the stairs carved out of star fire. They wound endlessly upward; the plain, the broken city grew farther and farther away from him. The winds grew colder as he climbed. At the ninth level he wondered if he were climbing a mountain. The winds, the stairs, and the walls around him were clear as melted snow. The spirals were getting smaller, and he thought he must be near the top. But the next level plunged him into an eerie darkness, as if the stairs were carved out of night wind. It seemed interminable, but when he came out of it again, the moon was exactly where he had seen it last. He continued upward. The walls turned a beautiful dawn-grey; the stairs were pale rose. The winds had a cutting edge, merciless and deadly. They were prodding him out of his own shape. He kept walking, half-man, half-wind, and the colors around him changed again and again, until he realized, as others had realized before him, that he could spiral through their changing forever.
He stopped. The city was so far beneath him he could no longer see it in the dark. Looking up, he could see the elusive top of the tower very near him. But it had been that near him, it seemed, for hours. He wondered if he were walking through a piece of a dream that had stood among the abandoned stones for thousands of years. Then he realized it was not a dream, but an illusion, an ancient riddle bound to someone’s mind, and he had carried the answer to it with him all the way.
He said softly, “Death.”
The walls rose around him, circled him. Twelve windows opened through midnight blue stone to the restless, murmuring winds. He felt a touch and turned, startled back into his body.
The High One stood before him. He had the wizard’s scarred hands, and the harpist’s fine, worn face. But his eyes were neither the harpist’s nor the wizard’s. They were the falcon’s eyes, fierce, vulnerable, frighteningly powerful. They held Morgon motionless, half-regretting that he had spoken the name that had turned in his mind after all that time to show its dark side. For the first time in his life he had no courage for questions; his mouth was too dry for speaking.
He whispered into the void of the High One’s silence, “I had to find you... I have to understand.”
“You still don’t.” His voice sounded shadowy with winds. Then he bound the awesomeness of his power somewhere within him and became the harpist, quiet, familiar, whom Morgon could question. The moment’s transition bound Morgon’s voice again, for it loosed a conflict of emotion. He tried to control them. But as the High One touched the stars at his side and his back, bringing them irrevocably into shape, his own hands rose, caught the harpist’s arms and stilled him.
“Why?”
The falcon’s eyes held him again; he could not look away. He saw, as if he were reading memories within the dark eyes, the silent, age-old game the High One had played; now with Earth-Masters, now with Ghisteslwchlohm, now with Morgon himself, a ceaseless tapestry of riddles with some threads as old as time and others spun at a step across the threshold into a wizard’s chamber, at a change of expression on the Star-Bearer’s face. His fingers tightened, feeling bone. An Earth-Master moved alone out of the shadows of some great, unfinished war... hid for thousands of years, now a leaf on a rich, matted forest floor of dead leaves, now the brush of sunlight down the flank of a pine. Then, for a thousand years, he took a wizard’s face, and for another thousand, a harpist’s still, secret face, gazing back at the twisted shape of power out of its own expressionless eyes. “Why?” he whispered again, and saw himself in Hed, sitting at the dock end, picking at a harp he could not play, with the shadow of the High One’s harpist flung across him. The sea wind or the High One’s hand bared the stars at his hairline. The harpist saw them, a promise out of a past so old it had buried his name. He could not speak; he spun his silence into riddles...
“But why?” Tears or sweat were burning in his eyes. He brushed at them; his hands locked once more on the High One’s arms, as if to keep his shape. “You could have killed Ghisteslwchlohm with a thought. Instead you served him. You. You gave me to him. Were you his harpist so long you had forgotten your own name?”
The High One moved; Morgon’s own arms were caught in an inflexible grip. “Think. You’re the riddler.”
“I played the game you challenged me to. But I don’t know why—”
“Think. I found you in Hed, innocent, ignorant, oblivious of your own destiny. You couldn’t even harp. Who in this realm was there to wake you to power?”
“The wizards,” he said between his teeth. “You could have stopped the destruction of Lungold. You were there. The wizards could have survived in freedom, trained me for whatever protection you need—”
“No. If I had used power to stop that battle, I would have battled Earth-Masters long before I was ready. They would have destroyed me. Think of their faces. Remember them. The faces of the Earth-Masters you saw in Erlenstar Mountain. I am of them. The children they once loved were buried beneath Isig Mountain. How could you, with all your innocence, have understood them? Their longing and their lawlessness? In all the realm, who was there to teach you that? You wanted a choice. I gave it to you. You could have taken the shape of power you learned from Ghisteslwchlohm: lawless, destructive, loveless. Or you could have swallowed darkness until you shaped it, understood it, and still cried out for something more. When you broke free of Ghisteslwchlohm’s power, why was it me you hunted, instead of him? He took the power of land-law from you. I took your trust, your love. You pursued what you valued most...”
Morgon’s hands opened, closed again. His breath was beginning to rack through him. He caught it, stilled it long enough to shape one final question. “What is it you want of me?”
“Morgon, think.” The even, familiar voice was suddenly gentle, almost inaudible. “You can shape the wild heart of Osterland, you can shape wind. You saw my son, dead and buried in Isig Mountain. You took the stars of your own destiny from him. And in all your power and anger, you found your way here, to name me. You are my land-heir.”
Morgon was silent. He was gripping the High One as if the tower floor had suddenly vanished under him. He heard his own voice, oddly toneless, from a distance. “Your heir.”
“You are the Star-Bearer, the heir foreseen by the dead of Isig, for whom I have been waiting for centuries beyond hope. Where did you think the power you have over land-law sprang from?”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t thinking.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. He thought of Hed, then. “You are giving me—you are giving Hed back to me.”
“I am giving you the entire realm when I die. You seem to love it, even all its wraiths and thick-skulled farmers and deadly winds—” He stopped, as a sound broke out of Morgon. His face was scored with tears, as riddles wove their pattern strand by gleaming strand around the heart of the tower. His hands loosened; he slid to the High One’s feet and crouched there, his head bowed, his scarred hands closed, held against his heart. He could not speak; he did not know what language of light and darkness the falcon who had so ruthlessly fashioned his life would hear. He thought numbly of Hed; it seemed to lay where his heart lay, under his hands. Then the High One knelt in front of him, lifted Morgon’s face between his hands. His eyes were the harpist’s, night-dark, and no longer silent but full of pain.
“Morgon,” he whispered, “I wish you had not been someone I loved so.”
He put his arms around Morgon, held him as fiercely as the falcon had held him. He circled Morgon with his silence, until Morgon felt that his heart and the tower walls and the starred night sky beyond were built not of blood and stone and air, but of the harpist’s stillness. He was still crying noiselessly, afraid to touch the harpist, as if he might somehow change shape again. Something hard and angled, like grief, was pushing into his chest, into his throat, but it was not grief. He said, above its pain, feeling the High One’s pain as one thing he could comprehend, “What happened to your son?”
“He was destroyed in the war. The power was stripped from him. He could no longer live... He gave you the starred sword.”
“And you... you have been alone since then. Without an heir. With only a promise.”
“Yes. I have lived in secret for thousands of years with nothing to hope in but a promise. A dead child’s dream. And then you came. Morgon, I did anything I had to do to keep you alive. Anything. You were all my hope.”
“You are giving me even the wastelands. I loved them. I loved them. And the mists of Herun, the vesta, the backlands... I was afraid, when I realized how much I loved them. I was drawn to every shape, and I couldn’t stop myself from wanting—” The pain broke through his chest like a blade. He drew a harsh, terrible breath. “All I wanted from you was truth. I didn’t know... I didn’t know you would give me everything I have ever loved.”
He could not speak any more. Sobbing wrenched him until he did not know if he could endure his own shape. But the High One held him to it, soothing him with his hands and his voice until Morgon quieted. He still could not speak; he listened to the winds whispering through the tower, to the occasional patter of rain on the stones. His face was bowed against the High One’s shoulder. He was silent, resting in the High One’s silence, until his voice came again, hoarse, weary, calmer.
“I never guessed. You never let me see that far beyond my anger.”
“I didn’t dare let you see too much. Your life was in such danger, and you were so precious to me. I kept you alive any way I could, using myself, using your ignorance, even your hatred. I did not know if you would ever forgive me, but all the hope of the realm lay in you, and I needed you powerful, confused, always searching for me, yet never finding me, though I was always near you...”
“I told... I told Raederle if I came back out of the wastes to play a riddle-game with you that I would lose.”
“No. You startled the truth out of me in Herun. I lost to you, there. I could endure everything from you but your gentleness.” His hand smoothed Morgon’s hair, then dropped to hold him tightly again. “You and the Morgol kept my heart from turning into stone. I was forced to turn everything I had ever said to her into a lie. And you turned it back into truth. You were that generous with someone you hated.”
“All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles... When I thought Ghisteslwchlohm had killed you, I grieved without knowing why. When I was in the northern wastes, harping to the winds, too tired even to think, it was you who drew me out... You gave me a reason for living.” His hands had opened slowly. He raised one, almost tentatively, to the High One’s shoulder and shifted back a little. Something of his own weariness showed in his eyes, and the endless, terrible patience that had kept him alive so long, alone and unnamed, hunted by his own kind in the world of men. Morgon’s head bowed again after a moment.
“Even I tried to kill you.”
The harpist’s fingers touched his cheekbone, drew the hair back from his eyes. “You kept my enemies from suspecting me very effectively, but Morgon, if you had not stopped yourself that day in Anuin, I don’t know what I would have done. If I had used power to stop you, neither of us would have lived too long afterward. If I had let you kill me, out of despair, because we had brought one another to such an impasse, the power passing into you would have destroyed you. So I gave you a riddle, hoping you would consider that instead.”
“You knew me that well,” he whispered.
“No. You constantly surprised me... from the very first. I am as old as the stones on this plain. The great cities the Earth-Masters built were shattered by a war that no man could have survived. It was born out of a kind of innocence. We held so much power, and yet we did not understand the implications of power. That’s why, even if you hated me for it, I wanted you to understand Ghisteslwchlohm and how he destroyed himself. We lived so peacefully once, in these great cities. They were open to every change of wind. Our faces changed with every season; we took knowledge from all things: from the silence of the backlands to the burning ice sweeping across the northern wastes. We did not realize, until it was too late, that the power inherent in every stone, every movement of water, holds both existence and destruction.” He paused, no longer seeing Morgon, tasting a bitter word. “The woman you know as Eriel was the first of us to begin to gather power. And I was the first to see the implications of power... that paradox that tempers wizardry and compelled the study of riddlery. So, I made a choice, and began binding all earth-shapes to me by their own laws, permitting nothing to disturb that law. But I had to fight to keep the land-law, and we learned what war is then. The realm as you know it would not have lasted two days in the force of those battles. We razed our own cities. We destroyed one another. We destroyed our children, drew the power even out of them. I had already learned to master the winds, which was the only thing that saved me. I was able to bind the power of the last of the Earth-Masters so they could use little beyond the power they were born to. I swept them into the sea while the earth slowly healed itself. I buried our children, then. The Earth-Masters broke out of the sea eventually, but they could not break free of my hold over them. And they could never find me, because the winds hid me, always...
“But I am very old, and I cannot hold them much longer. They know that. I was old even when I became a wizard named Yrth so that I could fashion the harp and the sword that my heir would need. Ghisteslwchlohm learned of the Star-Bearer from the dead of Isig, and he became one more enemy lured by the promise of enormous power. He thought that if he controlled the Star-Bearer, he could assimilate the power the Star-Bearer would inherit and become the High One in more than name. It would have killed him, but I did not bother explaining that to him. When I realized he was waiting for you, I watched him—in Lungold, and later in Erlenstar Mountain. I took the shape of a harpist who had died during the destruction and entered his service. I wanted no harm to come to you without my consent. When I found you at last, sitting on the dock at Tol, oblivious of your own destiny, content to rule Hed, with a harp in your hands you could barely play and the crown of the Kings of Aum under your bed, I realized that the last thing I had been expecting after all those endless, lonely centuries was someone I might love...” He paused again, his face blurred into pale, silvery lines by Morgon’s tears. “Hed. No wonder that land shaped the Star-Bearer out of itself, a loving Prince of Hed, ruler of ignorant, stubborn farmers who believed in nothing but the High One...”
“I am hardly more than that now... ignorant and thick-skulled. Have I destroyed us both by coming here to find you?”
“No. This is the one place no one would expect us to be. But we have little time left. You crossed Ymris without touching the land-law.”
Morgon dropped his hands. “I didn’t dare,” he said. “And all I could think of was you. I had to find you before the Earth-Masters found me.”
“I know. I left you in a perilous situation. But you found me, and I hold the land-law of Ymris. You’ll need it. Ymris is a seat of great power. I want you to take the knowledge from my mind. Don’t worry,” he added, at Morgon’s expression. “I will only give you that knowledge, nothing that you cannot bear, yet. Sit down.”
Morgon slid back slowly onto the stones. The rain had begun again, blown on the wind through the openings in the chamber, but he was not cold. The harpist’s face was changing; his worn, troubled expression had eased into an ageless peace as he contemplated his realm. Morgon looked at him, drawing hungrily from his peace until he was enveloped in stillness and the High One’s touch seemed to lay upon his heart. He heard the deep, shadowy voice again, the falcon’s voice.
“Ymris... I was born here on Wind Plain. Listen to its power beneath the rain, beneath the cries of the dead. It is like you, a fierce and loving land. Be still and listen to it...”
He grew still, so still he could hear the grass bending beneath the weight of the rain and the ancient names from early centuries that had been spoken there. And then he became the grass.
He drew himself out of Ymris slowly, his heart thundering to its long and bloody history, his body shaped to its green fields, wild shores, strange, brooding forests. He felt old as the earliest stone hewn out of Erlenstar Mountain to rest on the earth, and he knew far more than he had ever cared to know of the devastation the recent war had loosed across Ruhn. He sensed great untapped power in Ymris that he had winced away from, as if a sea or a mountain had loomed before him that his mind simply could not encompass. But it held odd moments of quiet; a still, secret lake mirroring many things; strange stones that had once been made to speak; forests haunted with pure black animals so shy they died if men looked upon them; acres of oak woods on the western borders whose trees remembered the first vague passage of men into Ymris. These, he treasured. The High One had given him no more of his mind than the awareness of Ymris; the power he had feared in the falcon’s eyes was still leashed when he looked into them again.
It was dawn, of some day, and Raederle was beside him. He made a surprised noise. “How did you get up here?”
“I flew.”
The answer was so simple it seemed meaningless for a moment. “So did I.”
“You climbed the stairs. I flew to the top.”
His face looked so blank with surprise that she smiled. “Morgon, the High One let me come in. Otherwise I would have flown around the tower squawking all night.”
He grunted and linked his fingers into hers. She was very tired, he sensed, and her smile faded quickly, leaving something disturbing in her eyes. The High One was standing beside one of the windows. The blue-black stone was rimed with the first light; against the sky the harpist’s face looked weary, the skin drawn taut, colorless against the bones. But the eyes were Yrth’s, light-filled, secret. Morgon looked at him for a long time without moving, still enmeshed in his peace, until the changeless, familiar face seemed to meld with the pale silver of the morning. The High One turned then to meet his eyes.
He drew Morgon to his side without a gesture, only his simple wordless desire. Morgon loosed Raederle’s hand and rose stiffly. He crossed the room. The High One put a hand on his shoulder.
Morgon said, “I couldn’t take it all.”
“Morgon, the power you sensed is in the Earth-Masters’ dead: those who died fighting at my side on this plain. The power will be there when you need it.”
Something in Morgon, deep beneath his peace, lifted its muzzle like a blind hound in the dark, scenting at the High One’s words. “And the harp, and the sword?” He kept his voice tranquil. “I barely understand the power in them.”
“They will find uses for themselves. Look.”
There was a white mist of vesta along the plain, beneath the low, lumbering cloud. Morgon gazed down at them incredulously, then leaned his face against the cool stone. “When did they get here?”
“Last night.”
“Where is Astrin’s army?”
“Half of it was trapped between Tor and Umber, but the vanguard made it through, clearing a path for the vesta and the Morgol’s guard and Danan’s miners. They are behind the vesta.” He read Morgon’s thoughts; his hand tightened slightly. “I did not bring them here to fight.”
“Then why?” he whispered.
“You will need them. You and I must end this war quickly. That is what you were born to do.”
“How?”
The High One was silent. Behind his tranquil, indrawn gaze, Morgon sensed a weariness beyond belief, and a more familiar patience: the harpist’s waiting for Morgon’s understanding, perhaps, or for something beyond his understanding. He said finally, very gently, “The Prince of Hed and his farmers have gathered on the south border with Mathom’s army. If you need to keep them alive, you’ll find a way.”
Morgon whirled. He crossed the chamber, hung out a south window, as if he could see among the leafless oaks a grim battery of farmers with rakes and hoes and scythes. His heart swelled with sudden pain and fear that sent tears to his eyes. “He left Hed. Eliard turned his farmers into warriors and left Hed. What is it? The end of the world?”
“He came to fight for you. And for his own land.”
“No.” He turned again, his hands clenched, but not in anger. “He came because you wanted him, That’s why the Morgol came, and Har—you drew them, the way you draw me, with a touch of wind at the heart, a mystery. What is it? What is it that you aren’t telling me?”
“I have given you my name.”
Morgon was silent. It began to snow lightly, big, random flakes scattered on the wind. They caught on his hands, burned before they vanished. He shuddered suddenly and found that he had no inclination left for questions. Raederle had turned away from them both. She looked oddly isolated in the center of the small chamber. Morgon went to her side; her head lifted as he joined her, but her face turned away from him to the High One.
He came to her, as if she had drawn him, the way he drew Morgon. He smoothed a strand of her windblown hair away from her face. “Raederle, it is time for you to leave.”
She shook her head. “No.” Her voice was very quiet. “I am half Earth-Master. You will have at least one of your kind fighting for you after all these centuries. I will not leave either of you.”
“You are in the eye of danger.”
“I chose to come. To be with those I love.”
He was silent; for a moment he was only the harpist, ageless, indrawn, lonely. “You,” he said softly, “I never expected. So powerful, so beautiful, and so loving. You are like one of our children, growing into power before our war.” He lifted her hand and kissed it, then opened it to the small angular scar on her palm. “There are twelve winds,” he said to Morgon. “Bound, controlled, they are more precise and terrible than any weapon or wizard’s power in the realm. Unbound, they could destroy the realm. They are also my eyes and ears, for they shape all things, hear all words and movements, and they are everywhere... That jewel that Raederle held was cut and faceted by winds. I did that one day when I was playing with them, long before I ever used them in our war. The memory of that was mirrored in the stone.”
“Why are you telling me?” His voice jerked a little. “I can’t hold the winds.”
“No. Not yet. Don’t be concerned, yet.” He put his arm around Morgon’s shoulders, held him easily again within his stillness. “Listen. You can hear the voices of all the winds of the realm in this chamber. Listen to my mind.”
Morgon opened his mind to the High One’s silence. The vague, incoherent murmurings outside the walls were refracted through the High One’s mind into all the pure, beautiful tones on the starred harp. The harping filled Morgon’s heart with soft, light summer winds, and the deep, wild winds that he loved; the slow, rich measures matched the beat of his blood. He wanted suddenly to hold the harping and the harpist within that moment until the white winter sky broke apart once more to light.
The harping stilled. He could not speak; he did not want the High One to move. But the arm around his shoulders shifted; the High One gripped him gently, facing him.
“Now,” he said, “we have a battle on our hands. I want you to find Heureu Ymris. This time, I’ll warn you: when you touch his mind, you will spring a trap set for you. The Earth-Masters will know where you are and that the High One is with you. You will ignite war again on Wind Plain. They have little mind-power of their own—I keep that bound; but they hold Ghisteslwchlohm’s mind, and they may use his powers of wizardry to try to hurt you. I’ll break any bindings he forges.”
Morgon turned his head, looked at Raederle. Her eyes told him what he already knew: that nothing he could say or do could make her leave them. He bent his head again, in silent acquiescence to her and to the High One. Then he let his awareness venture beyond the silence into the damp earth around the tower. He touched a single blade of grass, let his mind shape it from hair roots to tip. Rooted also within the structure of land-law in Heureu’s mind, it became his link with the King of Ymris.
He sensed a constant, nagging pain, a turmoil of helpless anger and despair, and heard a distant, hollow drag and ebb of the sea. He had learned every shape of cliff and stone boring out of the shores, and he recognized the strip of Meremont coast. He smelled wet wood and ashes; the king lay in a half-burned fisher’s hut on the beach, no more than a mile or two from Wind Plain.
He started to glance up, to speak. Then the sea flooded over him, spilled through all his thoughts. He seemed to stare down a long, dark passageway into Ghisteslwchlohm’s alien, gold-flecked eyes.
He felt the startled recognition in the bound mind. Then a mind-hold raked at him, and the wizard’s eyes burned into him, searching for him. The mind-hold was broken; he reeled back away from it. The High One gripped his shoulder, holding him still. He started to speak again, but the falcon’s eyes stopped him.
He waited, shaken suddenly by the pounding of his heart. Raederle, bound to the same waiting, seemed remote again, belonging to another portion of the world. He wanted desperately to speak, to break the silence that held them all motionless as if they were carved of stone. But he seemed spellbound, choiceless, an extension of the High One’s will. A movement streaked the air, and then another. The dark, delicately beautiful Earth-Master, whom Morgon knew as Eriel, stood before them, and beside her, Ghisteslwchlohm.
For a moment, the High One checked the power gathered against him. There was astonishment and awe in the woman’s eyes as she recognized the harpist. The wizard, face to face with the High One, whom he had been searching for so long, nearly broke the hold over his mind. A faint smile touched the falcon’s eyes, icy as the heart of the northern wastes.
“Even death, Master Ohm,” he said, “is a riddle.”
A rage blackened Ghisteslwchlohm’s eyes. Something spun Morgon across the chamber. He struck the dark wall; it gave under him, and he fell into a luminous, blue-black mist of illusion. He heard Raederle’s cry, and then a crow streaked across his vision. He caught at it, but it fluttered away between his hands. A mind gripped his mind. The binding was instantly broken. A power he did not feel flashed at him and was swallowed. He saw Ghisteslwchlohm’s face again, blurred in the strange light. He felt a wrench at his side, and he cried out, though he did not know what had been taken from him. Then he turned on his back and saw the starred sword in Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands, rising endlessly upward, gathering shadow and light, until the stars burst with fire and darkness above Morgon. He could not move; the stars drew his eyes, his thoughts. He watched them reach their apex and halt, then blur into their descent toward him. Then he saw the harpist again, standing beneath their fall, as quietly as he had stood in the king’s hall at Anuin.
A cry tore through Morgon. The sword fell with a terrible speed, struck the High One. It drove into his heart, then snapped in Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands. Morgon, freed to move at last, caught him as he fell. He could not breathe; a blade of grief was thrusting into his own heart. The High One gripped his arms; his hands were the harpist’s crippled hands, the wizard’s scarred hands. He struggled to speak; his face blurred from one shape to another under Morgon’s tears. Morgon pulled him closer, feeling something build in him, like a shout of fury and agony, but the High One was already beginning to vanish. He reached up with a hand shaped of red stone or fire, touched the stars on Morgon’s face.
He whispered Morgon’s name. His hand slid down over Morgon’s heart. “Free the winds.”
A shout that was not a shout but a wind-voice came out of Morgon. The High One turned to flame in his hands, and then into a memory. The sound he had made reverberated through the tower: a low bass note that built and built until the stones around him began to shake. Winds were battering at the tower; he felt struck and struck again, like a harp string, by his grief. He did not know, out of all the wild, chaotic, beautiful voices around him, which was his own. He groped for his harp. The stars on it had turned night-black. He swept his hand, or the knife-edge of a wind, across it. The strings snapped. As the low string wailed and broke, stone and illusion of stone shocked apart around him and began to fall.
Winds the color of the stones: of fire, of gold, of night, spiralled around him, then broke away. The tower roared around him and collapsed into a gigantic cairn. Morgon was flung on his hands and knees on the grass beside it. He could sense Ghisteslwchlohm and Eriel’s power nowhere, as if the High One had bound them, in that final moment, to his death. Snow whirled around him, melting almost as soon as it touched the ground. The sky was dead-white.
His mind was reeling with land-law. He heard the silence of grass roots under his hands; he stared at the broken mass of Wind Tower out of the unblinking eyes of a wraith of An at the edge of the plain. A great tree sagged in the rain on a wet hillside in the backlands; he felt its roots shift and loosen as it fell. A trumpeter in Astrin’s army was lifting his long, golden instrument to his mouth. The thoughts of the land-rulers snarled in Morgon’s mind, full of grief and fear, though they did not understand why. The entire realm seemed to form under his hands on the grass, pulling at him, stretching him from the cold, empty wastes to the elegant court at Anuin. He was stone, water, a dying field, a bird struggling against the wind, a king wounded and despairing on the beach below Wind Plain, vesta, wraiths, and a thousand fragile mysteries, shy witches, speaking pigs, and solitary towers that he had to find room for within his mind. The trumpeter set his lips to the horn and blew. At the same moment a Great Shout from the army of An blasted over the plain. The sounds, the urgent onslaught of knowledge, the loss that was boring into Morgon’s heart overwhelmed him suddenly. He cried out again, dropping against the earth, his face buried in the wet grass.
Power ripped through his mind, blurring the bindings he had formed with the earth. He realized that the death of the High One had unbound all the power of the Earth-Masters. He felt their minds, ancient, wild, like fire and sea, beautiful and deadly, intent on destroying him. He did not know how to fight them. Without moving, he saw them in his mind’s eye, fanning across Wind Plain from the sea, flowing like a wave in the shapes of men and animals, their minds riding before them, scenting. They touched him again and again, uprooting knowledge in his mind, breaking bindings he had inherited, until his awareness of trees in the oak forest, vesta, plow horses in Hed, farmers in Ruhn, tiny pieces of the realm began to disappear from his mind.
He felt it as another kind of loss, terrible and bewildering. He tried to fight it as he watched the wave draw closer, but it was as though he tried to stop the tide from pulling sand grains out of his hands. Astrin’s army and Mathom’s were thundering across the plain from north and south, their battle colors vivid as dying leaves against the whiter sky. They would be destroyed, Morgon knew, even the dead; no living awareness or memory of the dead could survive the power that was feeding even on his own power. Mathom rode at the head of his force; in the trees, Har was preparing to loose the vesta onto the plain. Danan’s miners, flanked by the Morgol’s guard, were beginning to follow Astrin’s warriors. He did not know how to help them. Then he realized that on the edge of the plain to the southeast, Eliard and the farmers of Hed, armed with little more than hammers and knives and their bare hands, were marching doggedly to his rescue.
He lifted his head; his awareness of them faltered suddenly as a mind blurred over his mind. The whole of the realm seemed to darken; portions of his life were slipping away from him. He gripped at it, his hands tangled in the grass, feeling that all the High One’s hope in him had been for nothing. Then, in some misty corner of his mind, a door opened. He saw Tristan come out onto the porch at Akren, shivering a little in the cold wind, her eyes dark and fearful, staring toward the tumult in the mainland.
He got to his knees and then to his feet, with all the enduring stubbornness that small island had instilled in him. A wind lashed across his face; he could barely keep his balance in it. He was standing in the heart of chaos. The living and the dead and the Earth-Masters were just about to converge around him; the land-law of the realm was being torn away from him; he had freed the winds. They were belling across the realm, telling him of forests bent to the breaking point, villages picked apart, thatch and shingle whirled away into the air. The sea was rousing; it would kill Heureu Ymris, if he did not act. Eliard would die if Morgon could not stop him. He tried to reach Eliard’s mind, but as he searched the plain, he only entangled himself in a web of other minds.
They tore knowledge, power from him like a wave eating at a cliff. There seemed no escape from them, no image of peace he could form in his mind to deflect them. Then he saw something glittering in front of him: his broken harp, lying on the grass, its strings flashing silently, played by the wind.
A strong, clean fury that was not his own washed through him suddenly, burning away all the holds over his mind. It left his mind clear as fire. He found Raederle beside him, freeing him for one brief moment with her anger, and he could have gone on his knees to her, because she was still alive, because she was with him. In the one moment she had given him, he realized what he must do. Then the forces of the realm shocked together in front of him. Bones of the dead, shimmering mail and bright shields of the living, vesta white as the falling snow, the Morgol’s guard with their slender spears of silver and ash closed with the merciless, inhuman power of the Earth-Masters.
He heard, for the first time, the sorrowing cry a vesta made as it died, calling plaintively to its own. He felt the names of the dead blotted out like blown flames in his mind. Men and women fought with spears and swords, picks and battle axes against an enemy that kept to no single shape, but a constant, fluid changing that mesmerized opponents to despair and to death. Morgon felt them die, parts of himself. Danan’s miners fell like great, stolid trees; the farmers from Hed, viewing a foe beyond all their conceptions, nothing their placid history had ever suggested existed, seemed too confused even to defend themselves. Their lives were wrenched out of Morgon like rooted things. The plain was a living, snarling thing before his eyes, a piece of himself fighting for its life with no hope of survival against the dark, sinuous, sharp-toothed beast that determined the realm would die. In the few brief moments of battle, he felt the first of the land-rulers die.
He sensed the struggle in Heureu Ymris’ mind as, wounded and unaided, he tried to comprehend the turmoil in his land. His body was not strong enough for such torment. He died alone, hearing the crashing sea and the cries of the dying across Wind Plain. Morgon felt the life-force in the king drain back to Ymris. And on the battlefield, Astrin, fighting for his life, wrestled suddenly with an overwhelming grief, and the sudden wakening in him of all land-instinct.
His grief woke Morgon’s again, for the High One, for Heureu, for the realm itself, entrusted to his care and dying within him. His mind shook open on a harp note that was also a call to a south wind burning across the backlands. Note by note, all tuned to sorrow, he called the unbound winds back to Wind Plain.
They came to him out of the northern wastes, burning with cold; rain-soaked from the backlands; tasting of brine and snow from the sea; smelling of wet earth, from Hed. They were devastating. They flattened the grass from one end of the plain to the other. They wrenched his shape into air, uprooted oak at the edge of the plain. They moaned the darkness of his sorrow, tore the air with their shrill, furious keening. They flung apart the armies before them like chaff. Riderless horses ran before them; dead frayed back into memory; shields were tossed in the air like leaves; men and women sprawled on the ground, trying to crawl away from the winds. Even the Earth-Masters were checked; no shape they took could batter past the winds.
Morgon, his mind fragmented into harp notes, struggled to shape an order out of them. The bass, northern wind hummed its deep note through him; he let it fill his mind until he shuddered with sound like a harp string. It loosed him finally; he grasped at another voice, thin and fiery, out of the remote back-lands. It burned through his mind with a sweet, terrible note. He flamed with it, absorbed it. Another wind, sweeping across the sea, shook a wild song through him. He sang its wildness back at it, changed the voice in him, in the winds, to a gentleness. The waves massed against the shores of Hed began to calm. A different wind sang into his mind, of the winter silence of Isig Pass and the harping still echoing through the darkness of Erlenstar Mountain. He shaped the silence and darkness into his own song.
He was scarcely aware of the Earth-Masters’ minds as he battled for mastery over the winds. Their power was filling him, challenging him, yet defending him. No mind on the plain around him could have touched him, embroiled as it was with wind. A remote part of him watched the realm he was bound to. Warriors were fleeing into the border forests. They were forced to leave their arms; they could not even carry the wounded with them. As far as Caithnard, Caerweddin, and Hed the noises of his struggle with the winds were heard. The wizards had left the plain; he felt the passage of their power as they responded to bewilderment and fear. Twilight drifted over the plain, and then night, and he wrestled with the cold, sinewy, wolf-voiced winds of darkness.
He drew the power of the winds to a fine precision. He could have trained an east wind on the innermost point of the cairn beside him and sent the stones flying all over the plain. He could have picked a snow-flake off the ground, or turned one of the fallen guards lightly buried under snow to see her face. All along both sides of the plain hundreds of fires had been lit all night, as men and women of the realm waited sleeplessly while he wrested their fates, moment by moment, out of the passing hours. They nursed their wounded and wondered if they would survive the passage of power from the High One to his heir. At last, he gave them dawn.
It came as a single eye staring at him through white mist. He drew back into himself, his hands full of winds. He was alone on a quiet plain. The Earth-Masters had shifted their battleground eastward, moving across Ruhn. He stood quietly a moment, wondering if he had lived through a single night or a century of them. Then he turned his mind away from the night to scent the path of the Earth-Masters.
They had fled across Ruhn. Towns and farms, lords’ houses lay in ruins; fields, woods, and orchards had been harrowed and seared with power. Men, children, animals trapped in the range of their minds had been killed. As his awareness moved across the wasteland, he felt a harp song building through him. Winds in his control stirred to it, angry, dangerous, pulling him out of his shape until he was half-man, half-wind, a harpist playing a death song on a harp with no strings.
Then he roused all the power that lay buried under the great cities across Ymris. He had sensed it in the High One’s mind, and he knew at last why the Earth-Masters had warred for possession of their cities. They were all cairns, broken monuments to their dead. The power had lain dormant under the earth for thousands of years. But, as with the wraiths of An, their minds could be roused with memory, and Morgon, his mind burrowing under the stones, shocked them awake with his grief. He did not see them. But on Wind Plain and King’s Mouth Plain, in the ruins across Ruhn and east Umber, a power gathered, hung over the stones like the eerie, unbearable tension in the sky before a storm breaks. The tension was felt in Caerweddin and in towns still surviving around the ruins. No one spoke that dawn; they waited.
Morgon began to move across Wind Plain. An army of the Earth-Masters’ dead moved with him, flowed across Ymris, searching out the living Earth-Masters to finish a war. Winds hounded the Earth-Masters out of the shape of stone and leaf they hid in; the dead forced them with a silent, relentless purpose out of the land they had once loved. They scattered across the back lands, through wet, dark forests, across bare hills, across the icy surfaces of the Lungold Lakes. Morgon, the winds running before him, the dead at his back, pursued them across the threshold of winter. He drove them as inflexibly as they had once driven him toward Erlenstar Mountain.
They tried to fight him one last time before he compelled them into the mountain. But the dead rose around him like stone, and the winds raged against them. He could have destroyed them, stripped them of their power, as they had tried to do to him. But something of their beauty lingered in Raederle, showing him what they might have been once; and he could not kill them. He did not even touch their power. He forced them into Erlenstar Mountain, where they fled from him into the shape of water and jewel. He sealed the entire Mountain—all shafts and hidden springs, the surface of the earth, and ground floor of rock—with his name. Among trees and stones, light and wind, around the mountain, he bound the dead once more, to guard the mountain. Then he loosed the winds from his song, and they drew winter down from the northlands across the whole of the realm.
He returned to Wind Plain, then, drawn by memory. There was snow all over the plain and on all the jagged, piled faces of the stones. There was smoke among the trees around the plain, for no one had left it. The gathering of men, women, animals was still there, waiting for his return. They had buried their dead and sent for supplies; they were settling for the winter, bound to the plain.
Morgon took his shape out of the winds, beside the ruined tower. He heard the Morgol talking to Goh; he saw Har checking the splint on a crippled vesta. He did not know if Eliard was still alive. Looking up at the huge cairn, he stepped forward into his sorrow. He laid his face against one of the cold, beautiful stones, stretched his arms across it, wanting to encompass the entire cairn, hold it in his heart. He felt bound, suddenly, as if he were a wraith, and all his past was buried in those stones. As he mourned, men began to move across the plain. He saw them without thinking about them in his mind’s eye: tiny figures drawn across the blank, snow-covered plain. When he finally turned, he found them in a silent ring around him.
They had been drawn to him, he sensed, the way he had always been drawn to Deth: with no reason, no question, simply instinct. The land-rulers of the realm, the four wizards stood quietly with him. They did not know what to say to him as he stood there in his power and his grief; they were simply responding to something in him that had brought peace to the ancient plain.
He looked at the faces he knew so well. They were scarred with sorrow for the High One, for their own dead. Finding Eliard among them, he felt something quicken painfully in his heart. Eliard’s face was as he had never seen it: colorless and hard as winter ground. A third of the farmers of Hed had been sent back to Hed, to be buried beneath the frozen ground. The winter would be hard for the living, and Morgon did not know how to comfort him. But as he looked at Morgon mutely, something else came into his eyes that had never seen in the changeless, stolid heritage of the Princes of Hed: he had been touched by mystery.
Morgon’s eyes moved to Astrin. He seemed still dazed by Heureu’s death and the sudden, far-flung power he possessed. “I’m sorry,” Morgon said. The words sounded as light and meaningless as the snow flecking the massive stones behind him. “I felt him die. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t help him. I felt so much death...”
The single white eye seemed to gaze into him at the word. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “High One. You survived to name yourself at last, and you brought peace to this morning.”
“Peace.” He felt the stones behind him, cold as ice.
“Morgon,” Danan said softly, “when we saw that tower fall, none of us expected to see another dawn.”
“So many didn’t. So many of your miners died.”
“So many didn’t. I have a great mountain full of trees; you gave it back to us, our home to return to.”
“We have lived to see the passage of power from the High One to his heir,” Har said. “We paid a price for our seeing, but... we survived.” His eyes were oddly gentle in the pure, cold light. He shifted the cloak over his shoulders: an old, gnarled king, with the first memories of the realm in his heart. “You played a wondrous game and won. Don’t grieve for the High One. He was old and near the end of his power. He left you a realm at war, an almost impossible heritage, and all his hope. You did not fail him. Now we can return home in peace, without having to fear the stranger at our thresholds. When the door opens unexpectedly to the winter winds, and we look up from our warm hearths to find the High One in our house, it will be you. He left us that gift.”
Morgon was silent. Sorrow touched him again, lightly, like a searching flame, in spite of all their words. Then he felt from one of them an answering sorrow that no words could comfort. He sought it, something of himself, and found it in Mathom, tired and shadowed by death.
Morgon took a step toward him. “Who?”
“Duac,” the King said. He drew a dry breath, standing dark as a wraith against the snow. “He refused to stay in An... the only argument I have ever lost. My land-heir with his eyes of the sea...”
Morgon was mute again, wondering how many of his bindings had been broken, how many deaths he had not sensed. He said suddenly, remembering, “You knew the High One would die here.”
“He named himself,” Mathom said. “I did not need to dream that. Bury him here, where he chose to die. Let him rest.”
“I can’t,” he whispered, “I was his death. He knew. All that time, he knew. I was his destiny, he was mine. Our lives were one constant, twisted riddle-game... He forged the sword that would kill him, and I brought it here to him. If I had thought... if I had known—”
“What would you have done? He did not have the strength to win this war; he knew you would, if he gave you his power. That game, he won. Accept it.”
“I can’t... not yet.” He put one hand on the stones before he left them. Then he lifted his head, searching the sky for something that he could not find in his mind. But its face was pale, motionless. “Where is Raederle?”
“She was with me for a while,” the Morgol said. Her face was very quiet, like the winter morning that drew a stillness over the world. “She left, I thought, to look for you, but perhaps she needs a time to sorrow, also.” He met her eyes. She smiled, touching his heart. “Morgon, he is dead. But for a little while, you gave him something to love.”
“So did you,” he whispered. He turned away then, to find his own comfort somewhere within his realm. He became snow or air or perhaps he stayed himself; he was not certain; he only knew he left no footprints in the snow for anyone to follow.
He wandered through the land, taking many shapes, reworking broken bindings, until there was not a tree or an insect or a man in the realm he was not aware of, except for one woman. The winds that touched everything in their boundless curiosity told him of lords and warriors without homes in Ymris taking refuge in Astrin’s court, of traders battling the seas to carry grain from An and Herun and beer from Hed to the war-torn land. They told him when the vesta returned to Osterland, and how the King of An bound his dead once more into the earth of the Three Portions. They listened to the wizards at Caithnard discussing the restoration of the great school at Lungold, while the Masters quietly answered the last of the unanswered riddles on their lists. He felt Har’s waiting for him, beside his winter fire, with the wolves watching at his knees. He felt the Morgol’s eyes looking beyond her walls, beyond her hills, every now and then, watching for him, watching for Raederle, wondering.
He tried to put an end to his grieving, sitting for days on end in the wastes, like a tangle of old roots, piecing together the games the harpist had played, action by action, and understanding it. But understanding gave him no comfort. He tried harping, with a harp as vast as the night sky, its face full of stars, but even that brought him no peace. He moved restlessly from cold, barren peaks to quiet forests, and even the hearths of taverns and farmhouses, where he was greeted kindly as a stranger wandering in from the cold. He did not know what his heart wanted; why the wraith of the harpist roamed ceaselessly through his heart and would not rest.
He drew himself out from under a snowdrift in the northern wastes one day, impelled south without quite knowing why. He shifted shapes all across the realm; no shape gave him peace. He passed spring as it came northward; the restlessness in him sharpened. The winds coming out of the west and south smelled of plowed earth and sunlight. They strung his wind-harp with gentler voices. He did not feel gentle. He shambled in bear-shape through forests, flung himself in falcon-shape across the noon sun as it crossed his path. He rode the bow of a trade-ship three days as it scudded and boomed across the sea, until the sailors, wary of his sea bird’s strange, still eyes, chased him away. He followed the Ymris coast, flying, crawling, galloping with wild horses until he reached the coast of Meremont. There he followed the scent of his memories to Wind Plain.
He found on the plain the shape of a prince of Hed, with scarred hands and three stars on his face. A battle echoed around him; stones fell soundlessly, vanished. The grass quivered like the broken strings of a harp. A blade of light from the setting sun burned in his eyes. He turned away from it and saw Raederle.
She was in Hed, on the beach above Tol. She was sitting on a rock, tossing bits of shell into the sea as the waves splashed around her. Something in her face, an odd mixture of restlessness and sadness, seemed to mirror what was in his heart. It drew him like a hand. He flew across the water, nickering in and out of the sunlight, and took his own shape on the rock in front of her.
She gazed up at him speechlessly, a shell poised in her hand. He found no words either; he wondered if he had forgotten all language in the northern wastes. He sat down beside her after a moment, wanting to be near her. He took the shell from her hand and tossed it into the waves.
“You drew me all the way down from the northern wastes,” he said. “I was... I don’t know what I was. Something cold.”
She moved after a moment, drew a strand of his shaggy hair out of his eyes. “I wondered if you might come here. I thought you would come to me when you were ready.” She sounded resigned to something beyond his comprehension.
“How could I have come? I didn’t know where you were. You left Wind Plain.”
She stared at him a moment “I thought you knew everything. You are the High One. You even know what I am going to say next.”
“I don’t,” he said. He picked a shell bit from a crevice, fed it to the waves. “You aren’t bound to my mind. I would have been with you long ago, except I didn’t know where in Hel’s name to begin to look.”
She was silent, watching him. He met her eyes finally, then sighed and put his arm around her shoulders. Her hair smelled of salt; her face was getting brown under the sun. “I’m wraith-driven,” he said. “I think my heart was buried under that cairn.”
“I know.” She kissed him, then slid down until her head rested in the hollow of his shoulder. A wave rolled to their feet, withdrew. The dock at Tol was being rebuilt; pine logs brought down from the north-lands lay on the beach. She gazed across the sea to Caithnard, half in shadow, half in fading light. “The College of Riddle-Masters has been reopened.”
“I know.”
“If you know everything, what will we have to talk about?”
“I don’t know. I suppose nothing.” He saw a ship cross the sea from Tol, carrying a Prince of Hed and a harpist. The ship docked at Caithnard; they both disembarked to begin their journey... He stirred a little, wondering when it would end. He held Raederle more closely, his cheek against her hair. In that late light, he loved to harp, but the starred harp was broken, its strings snapped by grief. He touched a mussel clinging to the rock and realized he had never shaped one. The sea was still a moment, idling around the rock. And in that moment he almost heard something like a fragment of a song he had once loved.
“What did you do with the Earth-Masters?”
“I didn’t kill them,” he said softly. “I didn’t even touch their power. I bound them in Erlenstar Mountain.”
He felt the breath go out of her noiselessly. “I was afraid to ask,” she whispered.
“I couldn’t destroy them. How could I? They were a part of you, and of Deth... They’re bound until they die, or I die, whichever comes first...” He considered the next few millenniums with a weary eye. “Riddlery. Is that the end of it? Do all riddles end in a tower with no door? I feel as if I built that tower stone by stone, riddle by riddle, and the last stone fitting into place destroyed it.”
“I don’t know. When Duac died, I was so hurt; I felt a place torn out of my heart. It seemed so unjust that he should die in that war, since he was the most clear-headed and patient of us. That healed. But the harpist... I keep listening for his harping beneath the flash of water, beneath the light... I don’t know why we cannot let him rest.”
Morgon drew her hair out of the wind’s grasp and smoothed it. He tapped randomly into the continual stream of thoughts just beneath the surface of his awareness. He heard Tristan arguing placidly with Eliard as she set plates on the table at Akren. In Hel, Nun and Raith of Hel were watching a pig being born. In Lungold, Iff was salvaging books out of the burned wizards’ library. In the City of Circles, Lyra was talking to a young Herun lord, telling him things she had not told anyone else about the battle in Lungold. On Wind Plain, the broken pieces of a sword were being slowly buried under grass roots.
He smelled twilight shadowing Hed, full of new grass, broken earth, sun-warmed leaves. The odd memory of a song that was no song caught at him again; straining, he almost heard it. Raederle seemed to hear it; she stirred against him, her face growing peaceful in the last warm light.
He said, “There’s a speaking pig being born in Hel. Nun is there with the Lord of Hel.”
She smiled suddenly. “That’s the first in three centuries. I wonder what it was born to say? Morgon, while I was waiting for you, I had to do something, so I explored the sea. I found something that belongs to you. It’s at Akren.”
“What?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. Do you want me to read your mind?”
“No. Never. How could I argue with you, then?” His expression changed suddenly, and her smile deepened.
“Peven’s crown?”
“Eliard said it was. I had never seen it. It was full of seaweed and barnacles, except for one great stone like a clear eye... I loved the sea. Maybe I’ll live in it.”
“I’ll live in the wastes,” he said. “Once every hundred years, you will shine out of the sea and I’ll come to you, or I will draw you into the winds with my harping...” He heard it then, finally, between the drift of the waves, in the rock they sat on, old, warm, settled deep hi the earth, deep in the sea. His heart began to open tentatively to something he had not felt for years.
“What is it?” She was still smiling, watching him, her eyes full of the last light. He was silent for a long tune, listening. He took her hand and stood up. She walked with him to the shore road, up the cliff. The final rays of the sun poured down across the green fields; the road ahead of them seemed to run straight into light. He stood, his heart opened like a seedling, hearing all over Hed, all over the realm, a familiar stillness that came out of the heart of all things.
The silence drew deep into Morgon’s mind and rested there. Whether it was a memory or part of his heritage or a riddle without an answer, he did not know. He drew Raederle close to him, content for once with not knowing. They walked down the road toward Akren. Raederle, her voice tranquil, began telling him about pearls and luminous fish and the singing of water deep in the sea. The sun set slowly; dusk wandered across the realm, walked behind them on the road, a silver-haired stranger with night at his back, his face always toward the dawn.
Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgon’s heart.
AIA wife of Har of Osterland
AKREN home of the land-rulers of Hed
ALOIL a Lungold wizard
AN kingdom incorporating the Three Portions (An Aum, Hel) ruled by Mathom
ANUIN seaport in An; home of the Kings of An
ARYA a Herun woman subject of a riddle
ASTRIN brother of Heureu; land-heir of Ymris
AUM ancient kingdom conquered by An
BERE grandson of Danan Isig; son of Vert
CAERWEDDIN chief city of Ymris; seat of Heureu; a port city
CAITHNARD seaport and traders’ city; site of the College of Riddle-Masters
CITY OF CIRCLES home of the Morgol of Herun
CORBETT, BRI ship-master of Mathom of An
CORRIG a shape-changer; ancestor of Raederle
DANAN ISIG land-ruler and King of Isig
DETH a harpist
DHAIRRHUWYTH an early Morgol of Herun
DUAC Mathom’s son; land-heir of An
EARTH-MASTERS ancient, mysterious inhabitants of the High One’s realm
EDOLEN an Earth-Master
EL ELRHZARHODAN the land-ruler of Herun
ELIARD the Prince of Hed; Morgon’s younger brother
ERIEL a shape-changer; a kinswoman of Corrig and Raederle
ERLENSTAR MOUNTAIN ancient home of the High One
GHISTESLWCHLOHM Founder of the School of Wizards at Lungold; also impersonator of the High One
GOH a member of the Herun guard
GRIM MOUNTAIN site of Yrye, home of Har of Osterland
HAR the wolf-long; land-ruler of Osterland
HARTE mountain-home of Danan Isig
HED a small island ruled by the Princess of Hed
HEL one of the Three Portions of An
HERUN a kingdom ruled by the Morgol
HEUREU the King of Ymris
HIGH ONE sustainer of the land-law of the realm
HLURLE a small trade-port near Herun
HUGIN son of Suth the wizard
IFF a Lungold wizard
ISIG a mountain kingdom ruled by Danan Isig
ISIG PASS a mountain pass between Isig and Erlenstar Mountain
KING’S MOUTH PLAIN site of a ruined city of the Earth-Masters
KRAAL port-city at the mouth of the Winter River
KYRTH trade-city in Isig on the Ose River
LEIN kinsman of the High Lord of Marcher
LUNGOLD city founded by Ghisteslwchlohm; home of the School of Wizards
LYRA the land-heir of Herun; El’s daughter
MADIR ancient witch of An
MARCHER territory in north Ymris governed by the High Lord of Marcher
MATHOM King of An
MEREMONT coastal territory of Ymris
MORGON the Star-Bearer, at one time the Prince of Hed
NUN a Lungold wizard
OSTERLAND northern kingdom ruled by Har
PEVEN ancient lord of Aum
RAEDERLE daughter of Mathom of An
RAITH the Lord of Hel
ROOD Mathom’s younger son; brother of Duac and Raederle
RORK High Lord of Umber
SEC an Earth-Master
SUTH an ancient wizard
TALIES a Lungold wizard
TERIL Son of Rork Umber
TOL small fishing-town in Hed
TOR a territory in Ymris
TRISTAN Morgon’s sister
UMBER Midland territory of Ymris
VERT daughter of Danan Isig
WIND PLAIN the site in Ymris of Wind Tower and a ruined city of the Earth-Masters.
YLON an ancient King of An; son of a queen of An and the shape-changer Corrig
YMRIS a kingdom ruled by Heureu Ymris
YRTH a powerful, blind wizard at Lungold
PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP discovered the joys of writing when she was fourteen, endured her teen-age years in the secret life of her stories, plays and novels, and has been writing ever since—except for a brief detour when she thought she would be a concert pianist.
She was born in Salem, Oregon and has lived in Arizona, California and the England that is the setting for The House on Parchment Street. After a number of years in San Jose, where she received an MA in English from San Jose State University, she moved to San Francisco, where she now lives.
Miss McKillip has also written The Throme of the Erril of Sherill, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Night Gift, The Riddle-Master of Hed, and Heir of Sea and Fire.