CONTENTS

In spring, three things came invariably to the house of the King of An: the year’s first shipment of Herun wine, the lords of the Three Portions for the spring council, and an argument.

The spring of the year following the strange disappearance of the Prince of Hed, who had, with the High One’s harpist, vanished like a mist in Isig Pass, the great house with its seven gates and seven white towers seemed to be cracking like a seed pod out of a long, bitter winter of silence and grief. The season dusted the air with green, set patterns of light like inlay on the cold stone floors, and roused restlessness like sap in the deep heart of An, until Raederle of An, standing in Cyone’s garden, which no one had entered for the six months since her death, felt that even the dead of An, their bones plaited with grass root, must be drumming their fingers in their graves.

She stirred after a while, left the tangle of weeds and withered things that had not survived the winter, and went back into the King’s hall, whose doors were flung wide to the light. Servants under the eye of Mathom’s steward, were shaking the folds out of the lords’ banners, hanging them precariously from the high beams. The lords were due any day, and the house was in a turmoil preparing to receive them. Already their gifts had been arriving for her: a milk-white falcon bred in the wild peaks of Osterland from the Lord of Hel; a brooch like a gold wafer from Map Hwillion, who was too poor to afford such things; a flute of polished wood inlaid with silver, which bore no name, and worried Raederle, since whoever had sent it had known what she would love. She watched the banner of Hel unrolling, the ancient boar’s head with tusks like black moons on an oak-green field; it rose jerkily on its hangings to survey the broad hall out of its small fiery eyes. She gazed back at it, her arms folded, then turned suddenly and went to find her father.

She found him in his chambers arguing with his land-heir. Their voices were low, and they stopped when she entered, but she saw the faint flush on Duac’s cheekbones. In the pale slashes of his brows and his sea-colored eyes, he bore the stamp of Ylon’s wild blood, but his patience with Mathom when everyone else had exhausted theirs was considered phenomenal. She wondered what Mathom had said to upset him.

The King turned a dour crow’s eye to her; she said politely, for his mood in the mornings was unpredictable, “I would like to visit Mara Croeg m Aum for a couple of weeks, with your permission. I could pack and leave tomorrow. I’ve been in Anuin all winter, and I feel—I need to get away.”

There was not a flicker of change in his eyes. He said simply, “No,” and turned to pick up his wine cup.

She stared at his back, annoyed, and discarded courtesy like an old shoe. “Well, I’m not going to stay here and be argued over like a prize cow out of Aum. Do you know who sent me a gift? Map Hwillion. Only yesterday he was laughing at me for falling out of a pear tree, and now he’s got his first beard and an eight-hundred-year-old house with a leaky roof, and he thinks he wants to marry me. You’re the one who promised me to the Prince of Hed; can’t you put a stop to all this? I’d rather listen to the pig herds of Hel during a thunderstorm than another spring council arguing with you about what to do with me.”

“So would I,” Duac murmured. Mathom eyed them both. His hair had turned iron-grey seemingly over night; his sorrow over Cyone’s death had limned his face to the bone, but it had neither tempered nor bittered his disposition.

“What do you want me to tell them,” he asked, “other than what I have told them for nineteen years? I have made a vow, binding beyond life, to marry you to the man winning Peven’s game. If you want to run away and live with Map Hwillion under his leaky roof, I can’t stop you—they know that.”

“I don’t want to many Map Hwillion,” she said, exasperated. “I would like to marry the Prince of Hed. Except that I don’t know any more who he is, and no one else knows where he is. I am tired of waiting; I am tired of this house; I am tired of listening to the Lord of Hel tell me that I am being ignored and insulted by the Prince of Hed; I want to visit Mara Croeg in Aum, and I don’t understand how you can refuse such a simple, reasonable request.”

There was a short silence, during which Mathom considered the wine in his cup. An indefinable expression came into his face; he set the cup down and said, “If you like, you can go to Caithnard.”

Her lips parted in surprise. “I can? To visit Rood? Is there a ship—” And then Duac brought his hand down flat on the wine table, rattling cups.

“No.”

She stared at him, astonished, and he closed his hand. His eyes were narrowed slightly as he gazed back at Mathom. “He’s asked me to go, but I’ve already refused. He wants Rood home.”

“Rood? I don’t understand.”

Mathom moved away from the window suddenly with an irritated whirl of sleeve. “I might as well have the entire council in here babbling at me at once. I want Rood to take a leave from his studies, come back to Anuin for a while; he’ll take that fact best from either Duac or you.”

“You tell him,” Duac said inflexibly. Under the King’s eye he yielded, sat down, gripping the arms of his chair as though he were holding fast to his patience. “Then will you explain so I can understand? Rood has just taken the Red of Apprenticeship; if he stays he’ll take the Black at a younger age than any living Master. He’s done fine work there; he deserves the chance to stay.”

“There are more riddles in the world than those in the locked books behind the walls of that College in Caithnard.”

“Yes. I’ve never studied riddle-mastery, but I have an idea that you can’t answer them all at once. He’s doing the best he can. What do you want him to do? Go lose himself at Erlenstar Mountain like the Prince of Hed?”

“No. I want him here.”

“For what, in Hel’s name? Are you planning to die or something?”

“Duac,” Raederle breathed, but he waited stubbornly for the King to answer. She felt, like a live thing beneath the irritation and obstinacy in them both, the binding between them beyond all definition. Then Duac heaved himself to his feet at Mathom’s silence and snapped before he slammed the door behind him so hard the stones seemed to rattle, “By Madir’s bones, I wish I could see into that peatbog you call a mind!”

Raederle sighed. She looked at Mathom, who seemed in spite of the rich robe he wore, black and impervious as a wizard’s curse in the sunlight. “I’m beginning to hate spring. I won’t ask you to explain the world to me, just why I can’t go visit Mara Croeg while Cyn Croeg is here at the council.”

“Who was Thanet Ross and why did he play a harp without strings?”

She stood a moment, dredging the answer out of interminable, half-forgotten hours of riddlery. Then she turned; she heard his voice again, just before the door slammed once more, “And stay out of Hel.”

She found Duac in the library, staring out the window. She joined him, leaning against the window, looking down at the city that sloped gently away from the King’s house to spill around the rim of the harbor. Trade-ships were drifting in with the midmorning tide, their colored sails deflating in the wind like weary sighs. She saw the white and green of Danan Isig’s ships bringing the marvellous crafts from Isig Mountain; and a hope stirred in her that the northern Kingdom had sent news more valuable than all its beautiful cargo. Duac stirred beside her, as the peace of the ancient library with its smell of hide, wax and the iron of old shields returned the composure to his face. He said softly, “He is the most pig-headed, arbitrary and exasperating man in the Three Portions of An.”

“I know.”

“Something’s going on in his head; something’s bubbling behind his eyes like a bad spell... It worries me. Because if it came to a choice between a blind step into a bottomless pit with him and a walk across the apple orchards with the Lords of An at their finest, I would shut my eyes and step. But what is he thinking?”

“I don’t know.” She dropped her chin in her palms. “I don’t know why he wants us all home now. I don’t understand him. I asked him why I couldn’t leave, and he asked me why Thanet Ross played a harp with no strings.”

“Who?” Duac looked at her. “How could... Why did he play a harp with no strings?”

“For the same reason he walked backward and shaved his head instead of his beard. For no reason except that there was no reason. He was a sad man and died backward.”

“Oh.”

“He was walking backward for no reason and fell in a river. Nobody ever saw him again, but they assumed he died since there was no reason—”

“All right.” Duac protested mildly. “You could spin that one into yarn.”

She smiled. “See what education you missed, not being destined to marry a riddle-master.” Then her smile faded; she bowed her head, traced a crack in the old mortar. “I feel as though I’m waiting for a legend to come down from the north, breaking out of winter with the spring water... Then I remember the farmer’s son who used to put shells to my ears so I could hear the sea, and, Duac, that’s when I become afraid for him. He has been gone so long; there has not been one word from him for a year, and no one in the realm has heard so much as a harp-note from the High One’s harpist. Surely the High One would never keep Morgon so long from his land. I think something must have happened to them in Isig Pass.”

“As far as anyone knows, the land-rule hasn’t passed from Morgon,” Duac said comfortingly, but she only shifted restlessly.

“Then where is he? At least he could get a message to his own land. The traders say that every time they stop at Tol, Tristan and Eliard are there at the dock waiting, hoping for news. Even at Isig, with all they say happened to him, he managed to write. They say he has scars on his hands like vesta-horns, and he can take the shape of trees...”

Duac glanced down at his own hands as if he expected to see the withered moons of white horns in them. “I know... The simplest thing to do would be to go to Erlenstar Mountain and ask the High One where he is. It’s spring; the Pass should be clearing. Eliard might do it.”

“Leave Hed? He’s Morgon’s land-heir; they’d never let him leave.”

“Maybe. But they say there’s a streak of stubbornness long as a witch’s nose in the people of Hed. He might.” He leaned over the ledge suddenly; his head turned towards a distant, double-column of riders making their way across the meadows. “Here they come. In full plumage.”

“Who is it?”

“I can’t... blue. Blue and black retinue; that would be Cyn Croeg. He appears to have met someone green...”

“Hel.”

“No. Green and cream; very small following.”

She sighed. “Map Hwillion.”

She stood by the window after Duac left to tell Mathom, watching the riders veer around the nut orchards, flickering in and out of the lacework of black, bare branches. They appeared again at a comer of the old city wall, to take the main road through the city, which led twisting and curving through the market and old high houses and shops whose windows would be wide open like eyes, full of watchers. By the time they disappeared through the gates of the city, she had decided what to do.

Three days later, she sat beside the pig-woman of the Lord of Hel under an oak tree, weaving grass blades into a net. From all around her in the placid afternoon came the vast snort and grumble of the great pig herds of Hel as they stirred through the tangled roots and shadows of oak. The pig-woman, whom no one had ever bothered to name, was smoking a meditative pipe. She was a tall, bony, nervous woman, with long, dishevelled grey hair and dark grey eyes; she had tended the pigs as long as anyone could remember. They were related, she and Raederle, through the witch Madir, in some obscure way they were trying to figure out. The pig-woman’s great gift was with pigs; she was abrupt and shy with people, but the beautiful, fiery Cyone had inherited Madir’s interest in pigs and had become friends with the taciturn pig-woman. But not even Cyone had discovered what Raederle knew: the odd store of knowledge that the pig-woman had also inherited from Madir.

Raederle picked another tough stem of grass, sent it snaking in and out of the small, square weave. “Am I doing this right?”

The pig-woman touched the tight strands and nodded. “You could carry water in that,” she said, in her plain, rugged voice. “Now, then, I think King Oen had a pigherder whom Madir might have been fond of, in Anuin.”

“I thought she might have been fond of Oen.”

The pig-woman looked surprised. “After he built the tower to trap her? You told me that. Besides, he had a wife.” She waved the words and her pipe smoke away at once with her hand. “I’m not thinking.”

“No king I ever heard of married Madir,” Raederle said wryly. “Yet somehow the blood got into the king’s line. Let’s see: she lived nearly two hundred years, and there were seven kings. I believe we can forget Fenel; he was too busy fighting almost to father a land-heir, let alone a bastard. I don’t even know if he kept pigs. It is possible,” she added, struck, “that you are a descendant of a child of Madir and one of the Kings.”

The pig-woman gave a rare chuckle. “Oh, I doubt it. Me with my bare feet. Madir liked pig-herders as much as she liked kings.”

“That’s true.” She finished with the grass blade and pushed the stems close, frowning down at them absently. “It is also possible that Oen might have grown fond of Madir after he realized she wasn’t his enemy, but that seems a little scandalous, since it was through him that Ylon’s blood came into the Kings’ line. Oen was furious enough about that.”

“Ylon.”

“You know that tale.”

The pig-woman shook her head. “I know the name, but no one ever told me the tale.”

“Well.” She sat back against the tree trunk, the sun shimmering in and out of her eyes. Her own shoes were off; her hair was loose; and there was a small spider making a bewildered foray up one strand. She brushed it off without noticing. “It’s the first riddle I ever learned. Oen’s land-heir was not his own son, but the son of some strange sea-lord, who came into Oen’s bed disguised as the king. Nine months afterward, Oen’s wife bore Ylon, with skin like foam and eyes like green seaweed. So Oen in his anger built a tower by the sea for this sea-child, with orders that he should never come out of it. One night, fifteen years after his birth, Ylon heard a strange harping from the sea, and such was his love of it, and desire to find its source, that he broke the bars on his window with his hands and leaped into the sea and vanished. Ten years later Oen died, and to his other sons’ surprise, the land-rule passed to Ylon. Ylon was driven by his own nature back to claim his heritage. He reigned only long enough to marry and beget a son who was as dark and practical as Oen, and then he went back to the tower Oen had built for him and leaped to his death on the rocks below.” She touched the tiny net, squared a corner. “It’s a sad tale.” A frown strayed into her eyes, absent, puzzled, as if she had almost remembered something, but not quite. “Anyway, Ylon’s face appears once or twice a century, and sometimes his wildness, but never his terrible torment, because no one with his nature has ever again inherited the land-rule. Which is fortunate.”

“That’s true.” The pig-woman looked down at the pipe in her hand, which had gone out during her listening. She tapped it absently against the tree root. Raederle watched an enormous black sow nudge her way through the clearing in front of them to loll panting in the shade. “It’s almost Dis’s time.”

The pig-woman nodded. “They’ll all be black as pots, too, sired by Dark Noon.”

Raederle spotted the boar responsible, the great descendant of Hegdis-Noon, rooting among the old leaves. “Maybe she’ll bear one who can talk.”

“Maybe. I keep hoping, but the magic, I think, has gone out of the blood and they are born silent.”

“I wish a few of the Lords of An had been born silent.”

The pig-woman’s brows flicked up in sudden comprehension. “That’s it, then.”

“What?”

She shifted, shy again. “The spring council. It’s nothing of my business, but I didn’t think you had ridden for three days to find out if we were first or third cousins.”

Raederle smiled. “No. I ran away from home.”

“You... Does your father know where you are?”

“I always assume he knows everything.” She reached for another stem of grass. The odd, tentative frown moved again into her face; she looked up suddenly to meet the pig-woman’s eyes. For a moment, the direct, grey gaze seemed a stranger’s look, curious, measuring, with the same question in it that she had barely put words to. Then the pig-woman’s head bowed; she reached down to pick an acorn out of an angle of root and tossed it to the black sow. Raederle said softly, “Ylon...”

“He’s why you can do these small things I teach you so well. He and Madir. And your father with his mind.”

“Maybe. But—” She shook the thought away and leaned back again to breathe the tranquil air. “My father could see a shadow in a barrow, but I wish he didn’t have a mouth like a clam. It’s good to be away from that house. It grew so quiet last winter I thought whatever words we spoke would freeze solid in the air. I thought that winter would never end...”

“It was a bad one. The Lord had to send for feed from Aum and pay double because Aum itself was growing short of corn. We lost some of the herd; one of the great boars, Aloil—”

“Aloil?”

The pig-woman looked suddenly a little flustered. “Well, Rood mentioned him once, and I thought— I liked the name.”

“You named a boar after a wizard?”

“Was he? I didn’t... Rood didn’t say. Anyway, he died in spite of all I could do for him, and the Lord himself even came to help with his own hands.”

Raederle’s face softened slightly. “Yes. That’s one thing Raith is good with.”

“It’s in his blood. But he was upset about—about Aloil.” She glanced at Raederle’s handiwork. “You might want to make it a little wider, but you’ll need to leave a fringe to hold it after you throw it.”

Raederle stared down at the tiny net, watching it grow big then small again in her mind’s eye. She reached for more grass, and felt, as her hand touched the earth, the steady drum of hoofbeats. She glanced, startled, toward the trees. “Who is that? Hasn’t Raith left for Anuin yet?”

“No, he’s still here. Didn’t you—” She stopped as Raederle rose, cursing succinctly, and the Lord of Hel and his retinue came into the clearing, scattering pig.

Raith brought his mount to a halt in front of Raederle; his men, in pale green and black, drew to a surprised, disorderly stop. He stared down at her, his gold brows pulling quickly into a disapproving frown, and opened his mouth; she said, “You’re going to be late for the council.”

“I had to wait for Elieu. Why in Hel’s name are you running around in your stockinged feet in my pig herds? Where is your escort? Where—”

“Elieu!” Raederle cried to a brown-bearded stranger dismounting from his horse, and his happy smile, as she ran to hug him, made him once again familiar.

“Did you get the flute I sent to you?” he asked, as she gripped his arms; she nodded, laughing.

“You sent it? Did you make it? It was so beautiful it frightened me.”

“I wanted to surprise you, not—”

“I didn’t recognize you in that beard. You haven’t been out of Isig for three years; it’s about time you—” She checked suddenly, her hold tightening. “Elieu, did you bring any news of the Prince of Hed?”

“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “No one has seen him. I sailed down from Kraal on a trade-ship; it stopped five times along the way, and I lost count long ago of how many people I had to tell that to. There is one thing, though, that I came to tell your father.” He smiled again, touched her face. “You are always so beautiful. Like An itself. But what are you doing alone in Raith’s pig herds?”

“I came to talk to his pig-woman, who is a very wise and interesting woman.”

“She is?” Elieu looked at the pig-woman, who looked down at her feet.

Raith said grimly, “I would have thought you had outgrown such things. It was foolish of you to ride alone from Anuin; I’m amazed that your father—He does know where you are?”

“He has probably made a fairly accurate guess.”

“You mean you—”

“Oh, Raith, if I want to make a fool of myself that’s my business.”

“Well, look at you! Your hair looks as though birds have been nesting in it.”

Her hand rose impulsively to smooth it, then dropped. “That,” she said frostily, “is also my business.”

“It’s beneath your dignity to consort with my pig-woman like some—like some—”

“Well, Raith, we are related. For all I know she has as much right in the court at Anuin as I have.”

“I didn’t know you were related,” Elieu said interestedly. “How?”

“Madir. She was a busy woman.”

Raith drew a long breath through his nose. “You,” he said ponderously, “need a husband.” He jerked his reins, turning his mount; at his straight, powerful back and rigorous movements something desperate, uneasy, touched Raederle. She felt Elieu’s hand on her shoulder.

“Never mind,” he said soothingly. “Will you ride back with us? I would love to hear you play that flute.”

“All right.” Her shoulders slumped a little. “All right. If you’re there. But first tell me what news you have to tell my father that brought you all the way down from Isig.”

“Oh.” She heard the sudden awe in his voice. “It’s about the Prince—about the Star-Bearer.”

Raederle swallowed. As if the pigs themselves had recognized the name, there was a lull in their vigorous snortings. The pig-woman looked up from her feet. “Well, what?”

“It was something Bere, Danan’s grandson, told me. You must have heard the tale about Morgon, about the night he took the sword from the secret places of Isig, the night he killed three shape-changers with it, saving himself and Bere. Bere and I were working together, and Bere asked me what the Earth-Masters were. I told him as much as I knew, and asked him why. And he told me then that he had heard Morgon telling Danan and Deth that in the Cave of the Lost Ones, where no one had ever gone but Yrth, Morgon found his starred sword, and it had been given to him by the dead children of the Earth-Masters.”

The pig-woman dropped her pipe. She rose in a swift, blurred movement that startled Raederle. The vagueness dropped from her face like a mask, revealing a strength and sorrow worn into it by a knowledge of far more than Raith’s pigs. She drew a breath and shouted, “What?”

The shout cracked like lightning out of the placid sky. Raederle, flinging her arms futilely over her ears, heard above her own cry the shrill, terrified cries of rearing horses, and the breathless, gasping voices of men struggling to control them. Then came a sound as unexpected and terrible as the pig-woman’s shout: the agonized, outraged protest of the entire pig herd of Hel.

Raederle opened her eyes. The pig-woman had vanished, as though she had been blown away by her shout. The unwieldy, enormous pig herd, squealing with pain and astonishment, was heaving to its feet, turning blindly, massing like a great wave, panic rippling to the far edges of the herd in the distance. She saw the great boars wheeling, their eyes closed, the young pigs half-buried in the heave of bristled backs, the sows, huge with their unborn, swaying to their feet. The horses, appalled by the strange clamor and the pigs jostling against them, were wrenching out of control. One of them stepped back onto a small pig, and the double screech of terror from both animals sounded across the clearing like a battle horn. Hooves pounding, voices shrilling and snorting, the pride of Hel for nine centuries surged forward, dragging men and horses helplessly with them. Raederle, taking prompt, undignified shelter up the oak tree, saw Raith trying desperately to turn his horse and reach her. But he was swept away with his retinue, Elieu, whooping with laughter, bringing up the rear. The herd ebbed away and vanished into the distant trees. Raederle, straddling a bough, her head beginning to ache with the aftermath of the shout, thought of the pigs running along with the Lord of Hel all the way into the King’s council hall in Anuin, and she laughed until she cried.

She found, riding wearily back into her father’s courtyard at twilight three days later, that some of the pigs had gotten there before her. The inner walls were blazoned with the banners of the lords who had arrived; beneath the banner of Hel, limp in the evening air, were penned seven exhausted boars. She had to stop and laugh again, but the laughter was more subdued as she realized that she had to face Mathom. She wondered, as a groom ran to take her horse, why, with all the people in the house, it was so quiet. She went up the steps, into the open doors of the hall; amid the long lines of empty tables and the sprawl of chairs, there were only three people: Elieu, Duac and the King.

She said a little hesitantly as they turned at her step, “Where is everyone?”

“Out,” Mathom said succinctly. “Looking for you.”

“Your whole council?”

“My whole council. They left five days ago; they are probably scattered, like Raith’s pigs, all over the Three Portions of An. Raith himself was last seen trying to herd his pigs together in Aum.” His voice was testy, but there was no anger in his eyes, only a hiddenness, as if he were contemplating an entirely different train of thought. “Did it occur to you that anyone might be worried?”

“If you ask me,” Duac murmured into his wine cup, “it seemed more like a hunting party than a search party, to see who would bring home the prize.” Something in his face told Raederle that he and Mathom had been arguing again. He lifted his head. “You let them go like a cageful of freed birds. You can control your own lords better than that. I’ve never seen such shambles made of a council in my life, and you wanted it so. Why?”

Raederle sat down next to Elieu, who gave her a cup of wine and a smile. Mathom was standing; he made a rare, impatient gesture at Duac’s words. “Does it occur to you that I might have been worried?”

“You weren’t surprised when you heard she was gone. You didn’t tell me to go after her, did you? No. You’re more interested in sending me to Caithnard. While you do what?”

“Duac!” Mathom snapped, exasperated, and Duac shifted in his chair. The King turned a dour eye to Raederle. “And I told you to stay out of Hel. You had a remarkable effect on both Raith’s pigs and my council.”

“I’m sorry. But I told you I needed to get out of this house.”

“That badly? Riding precipitously off into Hel and back without an escort?”

“Yes.”

She heard him sigh.

“How can I command obedience from my land when I cannot even rule my own household?” The question was rhetorical, for he exacted over his land and his house what he chose.

Duac said with dogged, weary patience, “If you would try explaining yourself for once in your life, it would make a difference. Even I will obey you. Try telling me in simple language why you think it is so imperative for me to bring Rood home. Just tell me. And I’ll go.”

“Are you still arguing about that?” Raederle said. She looked curiously at their father. “Why do you want Duac to bring Rood home? Why did you want me to stay out of Hel, when you know I am as safe on Raith’s lands as in my garden?”

“Either,” Mathom said tersely, “you, Duac, bring Rood home from Caithnard, or I will send a ship and a simple command to him. Which do you think he would prefer?”

“But why—”

“Let him puzzle his own brain about it. He’s trained to answer riddles, and it will give him something to do.”

Duac brought his hands together, linked them tightly. “All right,” he said tautly. “All right. But I’m no riddler and I like things explained to me. Until you explain to me precisely why you want the one who will become my land-heir if you die back here with me, I swear by Madir’s bones that I’ll see the wraiths of Hel ride across this threshold before I call Rood back to Anuin.”

There was a chilling leap of pure anger in Mathom’s face that startled Raederle. Duac’s face lost nothing of its resolve, but she saw him swallow. Then his hands pulled apart, lowered to grip the table edge. He whispered, “You’re leaving An.”

In the silence, Raederle heard the far, faint bickering of sea gulls. She felt something hard, a word left in her from the long winter, melt away. It brought the tears for a moment into her eyes so that Mathom blurred to a shadow when she looked at him. “You’re going to Erlenstar Mountain. To ask about the Prince of Hed. Please. I would like to come with you.”

“No.” But the voice of the shadow was gentle.

Elieu’s head was moving slowly from side to side. He breathed, “Mathom, you can’t. Anyone with even half a mind to reason with must realize—”

“That what he is contemplating,” Duac interrupted. “is hardly a simple journey to Erlenstar Mountain and back.” He rose, his chair protesting against the stones. “Is it?”

“Duac, at a time when the air itself is an ear, I do not intend to babble my business to the world.”

“I am not the world. I am your land-heir. You’ve never been surprised once in your life, not when Morgon won that game with Peven, not even at Elieu’s news of the waking of the children of the Earth-Masters. Your thoughts are calculated like a play on a chessboard, but I don’t think even you know exactly who you are playing against. If all you want to do is to go to Erlenstar Mountain, you would not be sending for Rood. You don’t know where you are going, do you? Or what you will find, or when you will get back? And you knew that if the Lords of the Three Portions were here listening to this, there would be an uproar that would shake the stones loose in the ceiling. You’ll leave me to face the uproar, and you’ll sacrifice the peace of your land for something that is not your concern but the business of Hed and the High One.”

“The High One.” Something harsh, unpleasant in the King’s voice made the name almost unfamiliar. “Morgon’s own people scarcely know a world exists beyond Hed, and except for one incident, I would wonder if the High One knows that Morgon exists.”

“It’s not your concern! You are liable to the High One for the rule of An, and if you let loose of the bindings in the Three Portions—”

“I don’t need to be reminded of my responsibilities!”

“You can stand there plotting to leave An indefinitely and tell me that!”

“Is it possible that you can trust me when I weigh two things in the balance and find one looming more heavily than a momentary confusion in An?”

“Momentary confusion!” Duac breathed. “If you leave An too long, stray too far away from it, you will throw this land into chaos. If your hold on the things you bind in the Three Portions loosens, you’ll find the dead kings of Hel and Aum laying siege to Anuin, and Peven himself wandering into this hall looking for his crown. If you return at all. And if you vanish, as Morgon did, for some long, wearisome length of time, this land will find itself in a maelstrom of terror.”

“It’s possible,” Mathom said. “So far in its long history An has had nothing more challenging to fight than itself. It can survive itself.”

“What worse can happen to it than such a chaos of living and dead?” He raised his voice, battering in anger and desperation against the King’s implacability. “How can you think of doing this to your land? You don’t have the right! And if you’re not careful, you’ll no longer have the land-rule.”

Elieu leaned forward, gripped his arm. Raederle stood up, groping for words to quiet them. Then she caught sight of a stranger entering the hall, who had stopped abruptly at Duac’s shout. He was young, plainly dressed in sheepskin and rough wool. He glanced in wonder at the beautiful hall, then stared a little at Raederle without realizing it. The numb, terrible sorrow in his eyes made her heart stop. She took a step towards him, feeling as though she were stepping irrevocably out of the predictable world. Something in her face had stopped the quarrel. Mathom turned. The stranger shifted uneasily and cleared his throat.

“I’m—my name is Cannon Master. I farm the lands of the Prince of Hed. I have a message for the King of An from—from the Prince of Hed.”

“I am Mathom of An.”

Raederle took another step forward. “And I am Raederle,” she whispered, while something fluttered, trapped like a bird, in the back of her throat. “Is Morgon... Who is the Prince of Hed?”

She heard a sound from Mathom. Cannon Master looked at her mutely a moment. Then he said very gently, “Eliard.”

Into their incredulous silence, the King dropped one word like a stone. “How?”

“No one—no one knows exactly.” He stopped to swallow. “All Eliard knows is that Morgon died five days ago. We don’t know how, or where, only that it was under very strange and terrible circumstances. Eliard knows that much because he has been dreaming about Morgon the past year, feeling something—some nameless power weighing into Morgon’s mind. He couldn’t—he couldn’t seem to free himself from it. He didn’t even seem to know himself at the end. We can’t begin to guess what it was. Five days ago, the land-rule passed to Eliard. We remembered the reason why Morgon had left Hed in the first place, and we—Eliard decided...” He paused; a faint flush of color came into his weary face. He said diffidently to Raederle, “I don’t know if you would have chosen to come to Hed. You would have been—you would have been most welcome. But we thought it right that you should be told. I had been once to Caithnard, so I said I’d come.”

“I see.” She tried to clear the trembling in her throat. “Tell him—tell him I would have come. I would have come.”

His head bowed. “Thank you for that.”

“A year,” Duac whispered. “You knew what was happening to him. You knew. Why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you let us know sooner?”

Cannon Master’s hands clenched. He said painfully, “It’s what—it’s what we ask ourselves now. We—we just kept hoping. No one of Hed has ever asked outside of Hed for help.”

“Has there been any word from the High One?” Elieu asked.

“No. Nothing. But no doubt the High One’s harpist will show up eventually to express the High One’s sorrow over the death of—” He stopped, swallowing the bitterness from his voice. “I’m sorry. We can’t—we can’t even bury him in his own land. I’m ignorant as a sheep outside of Hed; I hardly know, stepping out of your house, which direction to turn to go home. So I have to ask you if, beyond Hed, such things happen to land-rulers so frequently that not even the High One is moved by it.”

Duac stirred, but Mathom spoke before he could. “Never,” he said flatly. Cannon, drawn by something smoldering in his eyes, took a step toward the King, his voice breaking.

“Then what was it? Who killed him? Where, if the High One himself doesn’t care, can we go for an answer?”

The King of An looked as though he were swallowing a shout that might have blown the windows out of the room. He said succinctly, “I swear by the bones of the unconquered Kings of An, that if I have to bring it back from the dead I will find you an answer.”

Duac dropped his face in one hand. “You’ve done it now.” Then he shouted, while Cannon stared at him, amazed, “And if you go wandering through this realm like a peddlar and that darkness that killed Morgon snatches you out of time and place, don’t bother troubling me with your dreams because I won’t look for you!”

“Then look to my land,” Mathom said softly. “Duac, there is a thing in this realm that eats the minds of land-rulers, that is heaving restlessly under the earth with more hatred in it than even in the bones of the dead of Hel. And when it rouses at last, there will not be a blade of grass in this land untouched by it.”

He vanished so quickly that Duac started. He stood staring at the air where Mathom had gone out like a dark, windblown flame. Cannon said, appalled, “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I never dreamed—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Elieu said gently. His face was bloodless. He put a hand on Raederle’s wrist; she looked at him blindly. He added to Duac, “I’ll stay in Hel. I’ll do what I can.”

Duac ran his hands up his face, up through his hair. “Thank you.” He turned to Cannon. “You can believe him. He’ll find out who killed Morgon and why, and he’ll tell you if he has to drag himself out of a grave to do it. He has sworn that, and he is bound beyond life.”

Cannon shuddered. “Things are much simpler in Hed. Things die when they’re dead.”

“I wish they did in An.”

Raederle, staring out at the darkening sky beyond the windows, touched his arm suddenly. “Duac...”

An old crow swung over the garden on a drift of wind, then flapped northward over the rooftops of Anuin. Duac’s eyes followed it as though something in him were bound to the deliberate, unhurried flight. He said wearily, “I hope he doesn’t get himself shot and cooked for dinner.”

Cannon looked at him, startled. Raederle, watching the black wings shirr the blue-grey twilight, said, “Someone should go to Caithnard to tell Rood. I’ll go.” Then she put her hands over her mouth and began to cry for a young student in the White of Beginning Mastery who had once put a shell to her ear so she could hear the sea.

2

She reached Caithnard four days later. The sea, green and white as Ylon’s memory, rolled her father’s ship into the harbor with an exuberant twist of froth, and she disembarked, after it anchored, with relief. She stood watching sailors unload sacks of seed, plowhorses, sheepskins and wool from the ship next to them; and, farther down, from a ship trimmed in orange and gold, strong, shaggy-hooved horses and gilded chests. Her own horse was brought to her; her father’s ship-master, Bri Corbett, came down finally, issuing reminders to the crew all the way down the ramp, to escort her to the College. He swivelled an eye bleak as an oyster at a sailor who was gaping at Raederle from under a grain sack, and the sailor shut his mouth. Then he took the reins of their mounts, began threading a slow path through the crowded docks.

“There’s Joss Merle, down from Osterland, I’ll wager,” he said, and pointed out to Raederle a low, wide-bellied ship with pine-colored sails. “Packed to the boom with furs. Why he doesn’t spin circles in that tub, I’ll never know. And there’s Halster Tull, there, on the other side of the orange ship. Your pardon, Lady. To a man who was once a trader, being at Caithnard in spring is like being in your father’s wine cellar with an empty cup; you don’t know where to look first.”

She smiled a little and realized, from the stiffness of her face, how long it had been since she had last done it. “I like hearing about them,” she said politely, knowing her silence during the past days had worried him. A cluster of young women were chattering at the ramp of the orange and yellow ship in front of them. Their long, elegant robes wove, glinting, with the air; they seemed to be pointing every conceivable direction, their faces bright with excitement as they talked, and her smile deepened slightly. “Whose is the orange ship?”

The ship-master opened his mouth. Then he closed it again, frowning. “I’ve never seen it before. But I would swear... No. It couldn’t be.”

“What?”

’The Morgol’s guards. She so rarely leaves Herun.”

“Who are?”

“Those young women. Pretty as flowers, but show one of them the wrong side of your hand and you’d wind up in the water halfway to Hed.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Your pardon.”

“Don’t talk about crows, either.”

“No.” Then he shook his head slowly. “A crow. And I would have sailed him with my own hands, if need be, clear up the Ose to Erlenstar Mountain.”

She stepped around a precarious stack of wine kegs. Her eyes slid suddenly to his face. “Could you? Take my father’s ship all the way up the Ose?”

“Well. No. There’s not a ship in the world that could take the Pass, with all its rapids and falls. But I would have tried, if he’d asked me.”

“How far could he have gone by ship?”

“To Kraal, by sea, then up the Winter River to join with the Ose near Isig. But it’s a slow journey upriver, especially in spring when the snow waters are making for the sea. And you’d need a shorter keel than your father’s ship has.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a broad, placid river, the Winter, to the eye, but it can shift ground so much in a year you’d swear you were sailing a different river. It’s like your father; you never quite know what it’s going to do next.” He flushed deeply, but she only nodded, watching the forest of genially bobbing masts.

“Devious.”

They mounted when they reached the street and rode through the bustling city, up the road that wound above the white beaches to the ancient College. There were a few students sprawled on the ground, reading with their chins on their fists; they did not bother to look up until the ship-master made the rare gesture of knocking. A student in the Red with a harried expression on his face swung open the door and inquired rather abruptly of his business.

“We have come to see Rood of An.”

“If I were you, I would try a tavern. The Lost Sailor, by the wharf, is a good bet, or the King’s Oyster—” He saw Raederle, then, mounted behind the ship-master, and took a step toward her. “I’m sorry, Raederle. Will you come in and wait?”

She put a name finally to the lean, red-haired riddler. “Tes. I remember. You taught me how to whistle.”

His face broke into a pleased smile. “Yes. I was in the Blue of Partial Beginning, and you were—you... Anyway,” he added at the ship-master’s expression, “the Masters’ library is empty, if you would care to wait.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I know where the Lost Sailor is, but where is the King’s Oyster?”

“On Cutters Street. You remember; it used to be the Sea-Witch’s Eye.”

“Who,” Bri Corbett barked, “in Hel’s name do you think you’re talking to? How would she know the name or whereabouts of any inn or tavern in any city anywhere in this realm?”

“I know,” Raederle said with some asperity, “because every time I come here Rood either has his nose in a book or a cup. I was hoping this time it would be a book.” She stopped, then, uneasy, crumpling the reins in her hands. “Has he—have you heard the news out of Hed?”

“Yes.” His head bowed; he repeated softly, “Yes. A trader brought the news last night. The College is in a turmoil. I haven’t seen Rood since then, and I’ve been up all night with the Masters.” She sighed, and his head came up. “I would help you look, but I’m due down at the docks to escort the Morgol to the College.”

“It’s all right. We’ll find him.”

“I’ll find him,” Bri Corbett said with emphasis. “Please, Lady, the Caithnard taverns are no place for you.”

She turned her horse. “Having a father flying around in the shape of a crow gives you a certain disregard for appearances. Besides, I know which ones are his favorites.”

They looked in them all without success. By the time they had asked a half a dozen of them, they had an eager following of young students who knew Rood, and who went through each tavern with methodical and startling thoroughness. Raederle, watching them through a window as they checked under the tables, murmured in amazement, “When does he find time to study?”

Bri Corbett took off his hat, fanned his sweating face with it. “I don’t know. Let me take you back to the ship.”

“No.”

“You’re tired. And you must be hungry. And your father will trim my sails for me if he ever hears of this. I’ll find Rood and bring him to the ship.”

“I want to find him. I want to talk to him.”

The students jostled without their quarry back out of the inn. One of them called to her, “The Heart’s Hope Inn on Fish-Market Street. We’ll try that.”

“Fish-Market Street?”

“The south horn of the harbor. You might,” he added thoughtfully, “want to wait for us here.”

“I’ll come.” she said.

The street, under the hot eye of the afternoon sun, seemed to shimmer with the smell of fish lying gutted and glassy-eyed in the market stalls. The ship-master groaned softly. Raederle, thinking of the journey they had made from the contemplative peace of the College through the maze of Caithnard to the most noisome street in the city, littered with assorted fishheads, backbones and spitting cats, began to laugh weakly.

“Heart’s Hope Inn...”

“There it is,” Bri Corbett said heavily as the students disappeared into it. He seemed almost beyond speech. The inn was small, tired, settling on its hindquarters with age, but beyond its dirty, mullioned windows there seemed to be an unwarranted, very colorful collage of activity. The ship-master put his hand on the neck of Raederle’s mount. He looked at her. “No more. I’ll take you back now.”

She stared wearily at the worn stone threshold of the inn. “I don’t know where else to look. Maybe the beaches. I want to find him, though. Sometimes there’s one thing worse than knowing precisely what Rood is thinking, and that’s not knowing what he’s thinking.”

“I’ll find him, I swear it. You—” The inn door opened abruptly, and he turned his head. One of the students who had been helping them was precipitated bodily to the cobble-stones under the nose of Bri Corbett’s horse. He staggered to his feet and panted, “He’s there.”

“Rood?” Raederle exclaimed.

“Rood.” He touched a comer of his bleeding mouth with the tip of his tongue and added, “You should see it. It’s awesome.”

He flung the door wide and plunged back into a turmoil of color, a maelstrom of blue, white and gold that whirled and collided against a flaming core of red. The ship-master stared at it almost wistfully. Raederle dropped her face in her hands. Then she slid tiredly off her horse. A robe of Intermediate Mastery, minus its wearer, shot out over her head, drifted to a gold puddle on the stones. She went to the door, the noise in the tavern drowning the ship-master’s sudden, gargled protest. Rood was surfacing in his bright, torn robe from the heaving tangle of bodies.

His face looked meditative, austere, in spite of the split on one cheekbone, as if he were quietly studying instead of dodging fists in a tavern brawl. She watched, fascinated, as a goose, plucked and headless, flapped across the air above his head and thumped into a wall. Then she called to him. He did not hear her, one of his knees occupying the small of a student’s back while he shook another, a little wiry student in the White, off his arm onto the outraged inn-keeper. A powerful student in the Gold, with a relentless expression on his face, caught Rood from behind by the neck and one wrist, and said politely, “Lord, will you stop before I take you apart and count your bones?” Rood, blinking a little at the grip on his neck, moved abruptly; the student loosed him and sat down slowly on the wet floor, bent over himself and gasping. There was a general attack then, from the small group of students who had come with Raederle. Raederle, wincing, lost sight of Rood again; he rose finally near her, breathing deeply, his hands full of a brawny fisherman who looked as massive and impervious as the great White Bull of Aum. Rood’s fist, catching him somewhere under his ribs, barely troubled him. Raederle watched while he gathered the throat of Rood’s robe in one great hand, clenched the other and drew it back, and then she lifted a wine flagon in her hand, one that she could not remember picking up, and brought it down on the head of the bull.

He let go of Rood and sat down bunking in a shower of wine and glass. She stared down at him, appalled. Then she looked at Rood, who was staring at her.

His stillness spread through the inn until only private, fierce struggles in corners still flared. He was, she saw with surprise, sober as a stone. Faces, blurred, battle-drunk, were turning towards her all over the room; the innkeeper, holding two heads he was about to bang together, was gazing at her, open-mouthed, and she thought of the dead, surprised fish in the stalls. She dropped the neck of the flagon; the clink of it breaking sounded frail in the silence. She flushed hotly and said to the statue that was Rood, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. But I’ve been looking all over Caithnard for you, and I didn’t want him to hit you before I could talk to you.”

He moved finally, to her relief. He turned, lost his balance briefly, caught it, and said to the inn-keeper, “Send the bill to my father.”

He stepped off the porch with a jar he must have felt to his teeth, reached for Raederle’s horse and clung to it, his face against the saddlecloth a moment before he spoke to her. Then he lifted his head, blinked at her. “You’re still here. I didn’t think I’d been drinking. What in Hel’s name are you doing standing in all those fishbones?”

“What in Hel’s name do you think I’m doing here?” she demanded. Her voice, strained, low, let free finally all the grief, confusion and fear she felt. “I need you.”

He straightened, slid an arm around her shoulders, held her tightly, and said to the ship-master, who had dropped his head in his hands and was shaking it, “Thank you. Will you send someone to take my things out of the College?”

Bri Corbett’s head came up. “Everything, Lord?”

“Everything. Every deaf word and dry wine stain in that room. Everything.”

He took Raederle to a quiet inn in the heart of the city. Seated with a flagon of wine in front of them, he watched her drink in silence, his hands linked over his own cup. He said finally, softly, “I don’t believe he is dead.”

“Then what do you believe? That he was simply driven mad and lost the land-rule? That’s a comforting thought. Is that why you were tearing that inn apart?”

He shifted, his eyes falling. “No.” He reached out, put his hand on her wrist, and her fingers, molding the metal of her cup, loosened and came to rest on the table. She whispered, “Rood, that’s the terrible thing I can’t get out of my mind. That while I was waiting, while we were all waiting, safe and secure, thinking he was with the High One, he was alone with someone who was picking his mind apart as you would pick apart the petals of a closed flower. And the High One did nothing.”

“I know. One of the traders brought the news up to the College yesterday. The Masters were stunned. Morgon unearthed such a vipers’ nest of riddles, and then so inconveniently died without answering them. Which put the entire problem at their door, since the College exists to answer the answerable. The Masters are set face-to-face with their own strictures. This riddle is literally deadly, and they began wondering exactly how interested they are in truth.” He took a sip of his wine, looked at her again. “Do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Eight old Masters and nine Apprentices argued all night about who would travel to Erlenstar Mountain to speak to the High One. Every one of them wanted to go.”

She touched the torn sleeve of his robe. “You’re an Apprentice.”

“No. I told Master Tel yesterday I was leaving. Then I—then I went to the beach and sat up all night, not doing anything, not even thinking. I came into Caithnard finally and stopped at that inn for something to eat, and while—while I was eating, I remembered an argument I had with Morgon before he left about not facing his own destiny, not living up to his own standards when all he wanted to do was make beer and read books. So he went and found his destiny in some remote comer of the, realm, driven, by the sound of it, mad as Peven. So. I decided to take the inn apart. Nail by nail. And then go and answer the riddles he couldn’t answer.”

She gave a little, unsurprised nod. “I thought you might. Well, that’s another piece of news I have to give you.”

He touched his cup again, said warily, “What?”

“Our father left An five days ago to do just that. He—” She winced as his hands went down sharply on the table, causing a trader at the next table to choke on his beer.

“He left An? For how long?”

“He didn’t... He swore by the ancient Kings to find what it was that killed Morgon. That long. Rood, don’t shout.”

He swallowed it, rendered himself momentarily wordless. “The old crow.”

“Yes... He left Duac at Anuin to explain to the lords. Our father was going to send for you to help Duac, but he wouldn’t say why, and Duac was furious that he wanted you to abandon your studies.”

“Did Duac send you to bring me home?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t even want me to tell you. He swore that he wouldn’t send for you until the wraiths of Hel crossed the threshold at Anuin.”

“He did that?” Rood said with disgusted wonder. “He’s getting as irrational as our father. He would have let me sit in Caithnard studying for a rank that suddenly has very little meaning while he tries to keep order among the living and dead of An. I’d rather go home and play riddle-games with the dead kings.”

“Will you?”

“What?”

“Go home? It’s a—it’s a smaller thing to ask of you than going to Erlenstar Mountain, but Duac will need you. And our father—”

“Is a very capable and subtle old crow...” He was silent, frowning, his thumbnail picking at a flaw in his cup. He leaned back in his chair finally and sighed. “All right. I can’t let Duac face that alone. At least I can be there to tell him which dead king is which, if nothing else. There’s nothing I could do in Erlenstar Mountain that our father wouldn’t do, and probably do better. I would give the Black of Mastery to see the world out of his eyes. But if he gets into trouble, I don’t promise not to look for him.”

“Good. Because that’s another thing Duac said he wouldn’t do.”

His mouth crooked. “Duac seems to have lost his temper. I can’t say that I blame him.”

“Rood... Have you ever known our father to be wrong?”

“A hundred times.”

“No. Not irritating, frustrating, annoying, incomprehensible and exasperating. Just wrong.”

“Why?”

She shrugged slightly. “When he heard about Morgon—that’s the first time in my life I can remember seeing him surprised. He—”

“What are you thinking about?” He leaned forward abruptly. “That vow he made to marry you to Morgon?”

“Yes. I always wondered a little, if it might have been foreknowledge. I thought maybe that’s why he was so surprised.”

She heard him swallow; his eyes, speculative, indrawn, reminded her of Mathom. “I don’t know. I wonder. If so—”

“Then Morgon must be alive.”

“But where? In what circumstances? And why in the name of the roots of the world won’t the High One help him? That’s the greatest riddle of them all: the miasma of silence coming out of that mountain.”

“Well, if our father goes there, it won’t be so silent.” She shook her head wearily. “I don’t know. I don’t know which to hope for. If he is alive, can you imagine what a stranger he must be even to himself? And he must—he must wonder why none of us who loved him tried to help him.”

Rood opened his mouth, but the answer he would have given her seemed to wither on his tongue. He brought the heels of his hands up to his eyes. “Yes. I’m tired. If he is alive—”

“Our father will find him. You said you would help Duac.”

“All right. But... All right.” He dropped his hands, stared into his wine. Then he pushed his chair back slowly. “We’d better go; I have books to pack.”

She followed him again into the bright, noisy street. It seemed, for a moment, to be flowing past her in a marvellous, incomprehensible pattern of color, and she stopped, blinking. Rood put a hand on her arm. She realized then that she had nearly stepped in front of a small, elegant procession. A woman led it. She sat tall and beautiful on a black mount, her dark hair braided and jewelled like a crown on her head, her light, shapeless green coat of some cloth that seemed to flow like a mist into the wind. Six young women whom Raederle had seen at the dock followed her in two lines, their robes, saddlecloths and reins of rich, vivid colors, their spears of ash inlaid with silver. One of them, riding close behind the Morgol, had the same black hair and fine, clean cast of face. Behind the guard came eight men on foot carrying two chests painted and banded with copper and gold; they were followed by eight students from the College, riding according to their ranks and the color of their robes: scarlet, gold, blue and white. The woman, riding as serenely through the press as through a meadow, glanced down suddenly as she passed the inn; at the brief, vague touch of the gold eyes, Raederle felt the odd shock, unfamiliar and deep within her, of a recognition of power.

Rood breathed beside her, “The Morgol of Herun...”

He moved so quickly after the procession passed, gripping her wrist and pulling her, that she nearly lost her balance. She protested, “Rood!” as he ran to catch up with it, tugging her past amazed spectators, but he was shouting himself.

“Tes! Tes!” He caught up finally, Raederle flushed and irritated behind him, with the red-robed scholar. Tes stared down at him.

“What did you do? Fall face first in an empty wine bottle?”

Tes, let me take your place. Please.” He caught at the reins, but Tes flicked them out of reach.

“Stop that. Do you want us to get out of pace? Rood, are you drunk?”

“No. I swear it. I’m sober as a dead man. She’s bringing If’s books; you can see them any time, but I’m going home tonight—”

“You’re what?”

“I have to leave. Please.”

“Rood,” Tes said helplessly. “I would, but do you realize what you look like?”

“Change with me. Tes. Please. Please.”

Tes sighed. He pulled up sharply, tangling the line of horsemen behind him, slid off his horse and pulled wildly at the buttons on his robe. Rood tore his own robe over his head and thrust himself into Tes’s, while the riders behind them made caustic remarks about his assertion of sobriety. He leaped onto Tes’s horse and reached down for Raederle.

“Rood, my horse—”

“Tes can ride it back up. It’s the chestnut back there at the inn; the saddlecloth has her initials on it. Come up—” She put her foot on his in the stirrup and he pulled her urgently into the saddle in front of him, urging the horse into a quick trot to catch up with the second, receding line of scholars. He shouted back, “Tes, thank you!”

Raederle, clenching her teeth against the jog of cobblestones, refrained from comment until he had brought the small line of riders behind him back into the sedately moving procession. Then she said, shifting down from the hard edge of the saddle, “Do you have any idea of how ridiculous that must have looked?”

“Do you know what we’re about to see? Private books of the wizard Iff, opened. The Morgol opened them herself. She’s donating them to the College; the Masters have been talking of nothing else for weeks. Besides, I’ve always been curious about her. They say all information passes eventually through the Morgol’s house and that the High One’s harpist loves her.”

“Deth?” She mulled over the thought curiously.

“Then I wonder if she knows where he is. No one else seems to.”

“If anyone does, she does.”

Raederle was silent, remembering the strange insight she had glimpsed in the Morgol’s eyes, and her own unexpected recognition of it. They left the noisy, crowded streets behind them gradually; the road widened, rising toward the high cliff and the dark, wind-battered college. The Morgol, glancing back, set a slower pace uphill for the men carrying the chests. Raederle, looping out over the ocean, saw Hed partly misted under a blue-grey spring storm. She wondered suddenly, intensely, as she had never wondered before, what lay at the heart of the small, simple island that it had produced out of its life and history the Star-Bearer. And then, briefly, it seemed she could see beneath the rain mists on the island to where a young man colored and thewed like an oak, was crossing the yard from a barn to a house, his yellow head bent under the rain.

She moved abruptly, murmuring; Rood put a hand up to steady her. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. Rood—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

One of the guards detached herself then from the line, rode back towards them. She turned her horse again to ride beside them in a single, flowing movement of mount and rider that seemed at once controlled and instinctive. She said politely, appraising them, “The Morgol, who was introduced to the students at the docks, is interested in knowing who joined her escort in place of Tes.”

“I am Rood of An,” Rood said. “This is my sister, Raederle. And I am—or I was until last night—an Apprentice at the College.”

“Thank you.” She paused a little, looking at Raederle; something young, oddly surprised, broke through the dark, preoccupied expression in her eyes. She added unexpectedly, “I am Lyraluthuin. The daughter of the Morgol.”

She cantered back to the head of the procession. Rood, his eyes on the tall, lithe figure, gave a soft whistle.

“I wonder if the Morgol needs an escort back to Herun.”

“You’re going to Anuin.”

“I could go to Anuin by way of Herun... She’s coming back.”

“The Morgol,” Lyra said, rejoining them, “would like very much to speak with you.”

Rood pulled out of line, following her up the hill. Raederle, sitting half-on and half-off the saddle-bow, clinging to Rood and the horse’s mane as she jounced, felt slightly silly. But the Morgol, her face lighting with a smile, seemed only pleased to see them.

“So you are Mathom’s children,” she said. “I have always wanted to meet your father. You joined my escort rather precipitously, and I did not expect at all to find in it the second most beautiful woman of An.”

“I came to Caithnard to give Rood some news,” Raederle said simply. The Morgol’s smile faded; she nodded.

“I see. We heard the news only this morning, when we docked. It was unexpected,” She looked at Rood. “Lyra tells me that you are no longer an Apprentice at the College. Have you lost faith in riddle-mastery?”

“No. Only my patience.” His voice sounded husky; Raederle, glancing at him, found that he was blushing, as far as she knew, for the first time in his life.

The Morgol said softly. “Yes. So have I. I have brought seven of Iff’s books and twenty others that have been collected in the library at the City of Circles through the centuries to give to the College, and a piece of news that, like the news from Hed, should stir even the dust in the Masters’ library.”

“Seven,” Rood breathed. “You opened seven of Iff’s books?”

“No. Only two. The wizard himself, the day that we left for Caithnard, opened the other five.”

Rood wrenched at his reins; Raederle swayed against him. The guard behind-him broke their lines abruptly to avoid bumping into him; the men bearing the chests came to a quick halt, and the students, who had not been paying attention, reined into one another, cursing. The Morgol stopped.

“Iff is alive?” He seemed oblivious of the mild chaos in his wake.

“Yes. He had hidden himself in my guard. He had been in the Herun court, in one guise or another, for seven centuries, for he said it was, even in its earlier days, a place of scholarship. He said—” Her voice caught; they heard, when she continued, the rare touch of wonder in it. “He said he had been the old scholar who helped me to open those two books. When the scholar died, he became my falconer, and then a guard. But that he didn’t care for. He took his own shape on the day they say Morgon died.”

“Who freed him?” Rood whispered.

“He didn’t know.”

Raederle put her hands to her mouth, suddenly no longer seeing the Morgol’s face, but the ancient, strong-boned face of the pig-woman of Hel, with the aftermath of a great and terrible darkness in her eyes.

“Rood.” she whispered. “Raith’s pig-woman. She heard some news Elieu brought from Isig about the Star-Bearer, and she shouted a shout that scattered the pig herds of Hel like thistledown. Then she disappeared. She named... she named one boar Aloil.”

She heard the draw of his breath. “Nun?”

“Maybe the High One freed them.”

“The High One.” Something in the Morgol’s tone, thoughtful as it was, reminded Raederle of Mathom. “I don’t know why he would have helped the wizards and not the Star-Bearer, but I am sure, if that is the case, that he had his reasons.” She glanced down the road, saw the lines in order and resumed her pace. They had nearly reached the top of the hill; the grounds, shadowed and gilded with oak leaves, stretched beyond the road’s end.

Rood glanced at the Morgol, asked with unusual hesitancy, “May I ask you something?”

“Of course, Rood.”

“Do you know where the High One’s harpist is?”

The Morgol did not answer for a moment, her eyes on the bulky, rough-hewn building whose windows and doors were brilliant with color as the students crowded to watch her arrival. Then she looked down at her hands. “No. I have had no word from him.”

The Masters came out, black as crows among the swirl of red and gold, to meet the Morgol. The chests were carried up to the library, the books examined lovingly by the Masters as they listened with wonder to the Morgol’s tale of how she had opened the two. Raederle glanced at one set on the broad stand made for it. The black writing looked pinched and ascetic, but she found unexpectedly, turning a page, precise, delicate drawings of wild flowers down the margin. It made her think again of the pig-woman, smoking her pipe with her bare feet among the oak roots, and she smiled a little, wonderingly. Then the one still figure in the room caught her eye: Lyra, standing by the door in a habitual stance, her back straight, her feet apart, as if she were keeping watch over the room. But her eyes were smudged with a blackness, and she was seeing nothing.

The room fell silent as the Morgol told the Masters of the reappearance of the wizard Iff. She asked Raederle to repeat the tale of the pig-woman, and Raederle complied, giving them also the startling news that had brought Elieu down from Isig. That, no one had heard, not even the Morgol, and there was an outburst of amazement after she finished. They asked questions in their kind voices she could not answer; they asked questions among themselves no one could answer. Then the Morgol spoke again. What she said Raederle did not hear, only the silence that was passed like a tangible tiling from Master to Master, from group to group in the room until there was not a sound in the room except one very old Master’s breathing. The Morgol’s expression had not changed; only her eyes had grown watchful.

“Master Ohm“ said a frail, gentle Master whose name was Tel, “was with us at all times until last spring, when he journeyed to Lungold for a year of peaceful study and contemplation. He could have gone anywhere he wished; he chose the ancient city of the wizards. His letters to us have been carried by the traders from Lungold.” He paused, his passionless, experienced eyes on her face. “El, you are as known and respected for your intelligence and integrity as is this College; if there is any criticism you would make of it, don’t hesitate to tell us.”

“It is the integrity of the College that I question, Master Tel,” the Morgol said softly, “in the person of Master Ohm, who I doubt you will ever see within these walls again. And I question the intelligence of us all, myself included. Shortly before I left Herun, I had a visit from the King of Osterland, who came very simply and privately. He wondered if I had news of Morgon of Hed. He said he had gone to Isig, but not to Erlenstar Mountain, for the mists and storms were terrible through the Pass, too terrible even for a vesta. While, he was with me, he told me something that reinforced suspicions that I have had since my last visit here. He said that Morgon had told him that the last word the wizard Suth had spoken as he lay dying in Morgon’s arms, was Ohm’s name. Ohm. Ghisteslwchlohm. The Founder of Lungold, Suth accused with his last breath.” She paused, her eyes moving from face to motionless face. “I asked Har if he had taken the question to the College, and he laughed and said that the Masters of Knowledge could recognize neither the Star-Bearer nor the Founder of Lungold.”

She paused again, but there was no protest, no excuse from the men listening. Her head bowed slightly. “Master Ohm has been in Lungold since spring. The High One’s harpist has not been seen since then, and from all accounts, the High One himself has been silent since then. The death of the Prince of Hed freed the wizards from the power held over them. I suggest that the Founder of Lungold freed the wizards because in killing the Star-Bearer, he no longer needed to fear their power or interference. I also suggest that if this College is to continue to justify its existence, it should examine, very carefully and very quickly, the heart of this impossible, imperative tangle of riddles.”

There was a sound like a sigh through the room; it was the sea wind, searching the walls, like a bird, to get free. Lyra turned abruptly; the door had closed behind her before anyone realized she had moved. The Morgol’s eyes flicked to the door, then back to the Masters, who had begun to speak again, their voices murmuring, hushed. They began to group themselves around the Morgol. Rood stood with his hands flat on one of the desks, leaning over a book, but his face was bloodless, his shoulders rigid, and Raederle knew he was not seeing it. Raederle took a step towards him. Then she turned, eased through the Masters to the door and went out.

She passed students in the hall waiting, eager and curious, for a glimpse of the books; she scarcely heard their voices. She barely felt the wind, grown cool and restless in the early spring dusk, pulling at her as she walked through the grounds. She saw Lyra standing beneath a tree at the cliff’s edge, her back to the College. Something in the taut set of her shoulders, her bowed head, drew Raederle towards her. As she crossed the grounds, Lyra’s spear lifted, spun a circle of light in the air, and plunged point down into the earth.

She turned at a rustle of leaf she heard under the rustle of wind-tossed trees. Raederle stopped. They looked at one another silently. Then Lyra, giving shape to the grief and anger in her eyes, said almost challengingly, “I would have gone with him. I would have protected him with my life.”

Raederle’s eyes moved away from her to the sea... the sea far below them, the half-moon of harbor it had hollowed, the jut of land to the north beyond which lay other lands, other harbors. Her hands closed. “My father’s ship is here at Caithnard. I can take it as far as Kraal. I want to go to Erlenstar Mountain. Will you help me?”

Lyra’s lips parted. Raederle saw a brief flash of surprise and uncertainty in her face. Then she gripped her spear, pulled it again out of the earth and gave a little emphatic nod. “I’ll come.”

3

When Lyra took the Morgol’s guards into Caithnard later that evening to look for lodgings, Raederle followed them. She had left, in front of Rood’s horse in the College stable, a small tangle of bright gold thread she had loosened from her cuff. Within the tangle, in her mind, she had placed her name and an image of Rood stepping on it, or his horse, and then riding without thought every curve and twist of thread through the streets of Caithnard until, reaching the end, he would blink free of the spell and find that neither the ship nor the tide had waited for him. He would suspect her, she knew, but mere would be nothing he could do but ride back to Anuin, while Bri Corbett, under the urgings of the Morgol’s guard, sailed north.

The guard had not been told. She heard fragments of their conversation, their laughter under the hollow, restless boom of the sea as she rode behind them down the hill. It was nearly dark; the wind dulled her horse’s steps, but still she kept, as Lyra had advised, a distance between her and the guard. She felt, all the way into Caithnard, the touch of the Morgol’s eyes at her back.

She caught up with the guard at a quiet side street near the docks. They were looking a little bewildered; one girl said, “Lyra, there’s nothing but warehouses here.” Lyra, without answering, turned her head and saw Raederle. Raederle met her brief, searching gaze, then Lyra looked at the guard. Something in her face quieted them. Her hand tightened and loosened on her spear. Then she lifted her chin.

“I am leaving tonight for Erlenstar Mountain with Raederle of An. I am doing this without permission from the Morgol; I am deserting the guard. I couldn’t protect the Prince of Hed while he was alive; all I can do now is find out from the High One who killed him and where that one is. We’re sailing to Kraal in her father’s ship. The ship-master has not yet been informed. I can’t... Wait a minute. I can’t ask you to help me. I can’t hope that you would do such a shameful, disgraceful thing as leaving the Morgol alone, unguarded in a strange city. I don’t know how I can do it. But what I do know is that we can’t steal a ship by ourselves.”

There was a silence when she stopped, but for a door rattling back and forth somewhere in the wind. The guards’ faces were expressionless. Then one of them, a girl with a silky blond braid and a sweet, sunburned face, said fiercely, “Lyra, are you out of your mind?” She looked at Raederle. “Are you both out of your minds?”

“No,” Raederle said. “There’s not a trader in the realm who would take us, but my father’s ship-master has already half an inclination to go. He could never be persuaded, but he could be forced. He respects you, and once he grasps the situation, I don’t think he’ll argue much.”

“But what will the Morgol say? What will your own people say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

The girl shook her head, speechless. “Lyra—”

“Imer, you have three choices. You can leave us here and go back to the College and inform the Morgol. You can take us by force back to the College, which would greatly exceed your duty and would offend the people of An, not to mention me. You can come with us. The Morgol has twenty guards waiting in Hlurle to escort her back to Crown City; all she has to do is send word to them, and they’ll join her at Caithnard. She’ll be safe. What she will say to you, however, if she finds that you have let me go off by myself to Erlenstar Mountain, I would not like to hear.”

Another girl, with a dark, plain face, and the rough timbre of the Herun hill towns in her voice, said reasonably, “She’ll think we’ve all deserted.”

“Goh, I’ll tell her it was my responsibility.”

“You can hardly tell her you coerced us all. Lyra, stop being a fool and go back to the College,” Imer said.

“No. And if you touch me, I will resign immediately from the guard. You’ll have no right to use force against the land-heir of Herun.” She paused, her eyes moving from face to face. Someone sighed.

“How far do you think you’ll get, with the Morgol’s ship half a day behind you? She’ll see you.”

“Then what have you got to worry about? You know you can’t let me go to Erlenstar Mountain by myself.”

“Lyra. We are the chosen guard of the Morgol. We are not thieves. We are not kidnappers.”

“Then go back to the College.” The contempt in her voice held them motionless. “You have the choice. Go back to Herun with the Morgol You know as much as anyone what the Star-Bearer was. You know how he died, while the world went about minding its own business. If no one demands answers from the High One about the wizard who killed him, about the shape-changers, then I think one day much too soon a hundred guards at Crown City will not be enough to protect the Morgol from disaster. If I have to walk to Erlenstar Mountain, I’ll do it. Will you help me or not?”

They were silent again, lined against her, Raederle saw, like warriors in a field, their faces shad- owed, unreadable. Then a small, black-haired girl with delicate, slanting brows said resignedly, “Well, if we can’t force you to stay, maybe the ship-master will bring you to your senses. How do you purpose to steal his ship?”

She told them. There was grumbling, argument over the method, but it lacked fire; their voices died away finally. They sat waiting resignedly. Lyra turned her horse. “All right, then.”

They fell into casual position behind her. Raederle, riding beside her, saw in a wash of inn-light, that Lyra’s hands were shaking on the reins. She frowned down at her own reins a moment, then reached across to touch Lyra. The dark head lifted; Lyra said, “This is the easy part, stealing a ship.”

“It’s hardly stealing. It’s my father’s ship, and he’s in no position to quibble. I don’t—there’s no one in An who will judge me, but you have your own kind of honor.”

“It’s all right. It’s just that I’ve trained for seven years in the Morgol’s guard, and in Herun I have thirty guards under my command. It goes against all my training to leave the Morgol like this, taking her guard with me. It’s unheard of.”

“She’ll be safe at the College.”

“I know. But what will she think of me?” She slowed her horse as they came to the end of the street and saw the King’s ship in the moonlight, pulling restlessly at its anchor. There was a light in the charthouse. They heard a thud from the deck, and someone said, panting, “That’s the last of Rood’s books. If we all don’t find ourselves, along with them, at the bottom of the sea, I’ll eat one, iron bindings and all. I’m going for a quick cup before we sail.”

Lyra glanced behind her; two of the guards dismounted, went soundlessly after him as he strode whistling down the dock. The others followed her and Raederle to the ramp of the ship. Raederle, hearing only the slough of water, the rattle of chain and her own quiet steps, glanced behind once to make sure they were still there. She felt, at their eerie silence, as though she were followed by ghosts. One slipped away at the top of the ramp to check the deck of the ship; the other two went with Lyra to the hold. Raederle waited a few moments for them to do their work beneath the deck. Then she entered the chart house, where Bri Corbett was exchanging gossip and a cup of wine with a trader. He glanced up, surprised.

“You didn’t ride down alone, did you? Did Rood bring the horses up?”

“No. He’s not coming.”

“He’s not coming? Then what does he want done with all his things?” He eyed her suspiciously. “He’s not going off somewhere on his own like his father, is he?”

“No.” She swallowed the dryness from her mouth. “I am. I’m going to Erlenstar Mountain; you will take me as far as Kraal. If you don’t, the Morgol’s ship-master, I’m sure, can be persuaded to take over the ship.”

“What?” Bri Corbett rose, his grey brows lifting to his hairline. The trader was grinning “Someone else sail your father’s ship? Over my dead and buried bones, maybe. You’re distraught, child, come and sit—” Lyra, spear in hand, slid like a wraith into the light, and he stopped. Raederle could hear his breathing. The trader stopped grinning. Lyra said, “Most of the crew was below. Imer and Goh have them under guard. They weren’t taken seriously at first, until one man got pinned to a ladder with an arrow in his sleeve and his pant leg—he’s not hurt—and Goh shot the cork out of one of the wine kegs with another. They’re pleading for someone to put the cork back in.”

“That’s their ration of wine for the journey,” Bri Corbett breathed. “Good Herun wine.” The trader had edged to his feet. Lyra’s eyes moved to him and he stilled.

Raederle said, “Two guards followed the man who left the ship; they will be finding the rest of your crew. Bri, you wanted to go to Erlenstar Mountain anyway. You said so.”

“You were—you weren’t taking me seriously!”

“You might not be serious. I am.”

“But your father! He’ll curse the teeth out of my head when he finds out I’m taking his daughter and the land-heir of Herun on some misbegotten journey. The Morgol will have Herun up in arms.”

“If you don’t want to captain the ship, well find someone who will. There are plenty of men in the taverns, on the docks, who could be paid to take your place. If you want, well leave you tied somewhere along with this trader, to assure everyone of your complete innocence.”

“Roust me from my own ship!” His voice cracked.

“Listen to me, Bri Corbett,” she said evenly. “I lost a friend I loved and a man I might have married somewhere between Isig Pass and Erlenstar Mountain. Will you tell me what I have to go home for? More endless silence and waiting at Anuin? The Lords of the Three Portions bickering over me while the world cracks apart like Morgon’s mind? Raith of Hel?”

“I know.” His hand went out to her. “I understand. But you can’t—”

“You said you would sail this ship to the High One’s doorstep if my father had asked. Did you ever think that my father might find himself in the same danger Morgon was in? Do you want to sail comfortably back to Anuin and leave him there? If you force us by some chance off this ship, we’ll go by other means. Will you want to go to Anuin and give Duac that news, on top of everything else? I have questions. I want answers to them. I am going to Erlenstar Mountain. Do you want to sail this ship for us, or shall I find someone else to do it?”

Bri Corbett brought his clenched fist down on the table. He stared at it a moment, red, wordless. Then his head lifted again slowly; he gazed at Raederle as if she had just come in the door and he had forgotten why. “You’ll need another ship at Kraal. I told you that.”

“I know.” Her voice shook slightly at the look in his eyes.

“I can find you one at Kraal. You’ll let me take it up the Winter?”

“I’d rather... I’d rather have you than anyone.”

“We don’t have supplies enough for Kraal. We’ll have to stop at Caerweddin, maybe, or Hlurle.”

“I’ve never seen Caerweddin.”

“It’s a beautiful city; Kraal at Isig—lovely places. I haven’t seen them since... We’ll need more wine. The crew’s a good one, the best I’ve ever sailed with, but they worry about essentials.”

“I have some money, and some jewels. I thought I might need them.”

“You did.” He drew a long breath. “You remind me of someone. Someone devious.” The trader made an inarticulate protest, and Bri’s eyes went, to Lyra. “What,” he inquired respectfully, “would you like to do with that one? You let him go, and he’ll be pounding at the College door before we can get out of the harbor.”

Lyra considered him. “We could tie him, leave him on the docks. They’ll find him in the morning.”

“I won’t say a word,” the trader said, and Bri laughed.

Raederle said quickly, “Bri, he is the one witness to the fact that you aren’t responsible for this; will you remember your own reputation?”

“Lady, either I’m going because half a dozen half-grown women took over my ship, or because I’m mad enough to want to take Mathom’s daughter and the Morgol’s land-heir up to the high point of the world by themselves. Either way, I’m not left with much in the way of a reputation. You’d better let me see if my crew’s all here; we should get underway.”

They found part of the crew arriving, escorted up the ramp by two of the Morgol’s guards. The men, at the sight of Bri Corbett, broke into bewildered explanations; Bri said calmly, “We’re being kidnapped. You’ll be getting extra pay for the privilege. We’re heading north. See who is missing, and ask the rest of the men in the hold if they would kindly come up and do their jobs. Tell them to cork the wine; we’ll get more in Ymris, and that they’ll get no sympathy from me if they lay a finger on the Morgol’s guards.”

The two guards looked questioningly at Lyra, who nodded. “One of you stand at the hatch; the other watch the docks. I want this ship under guard until it clears the harbor.” She added to Bri Corbett, “I trust you. But I don’t know you, and I’m trained to be careful. So I’ll watch you work. And remember: I’ve spent more nights than I can count under the open sky, and I know which stars point north.”

“And I,” Bri said, “have seen the Morgol’s guards in training. You’ll get no argument from me.”

The crew appeared, disgusted and puzzled, to be dispatched to their duties under the watchful eyes of the guard. One last sailor came up the ramp singing. He eyed the guards with aplomb, winked at Lyra, and reached down to Imer, who was kneeling and tying the trader’s wrists, lifted her chin in his hand and kissed her.

She pushed him away, losing her balance, and the trader, pulling the rope off his hands, caught her under the chin with his head as he rose. She sat down heavily on the deck. The trader, tripping a sailor in his way, dove for the ramp. Something he scarcely saw, glistening faintly, fell in front of him as he ran down the ramp. He ignored an arrow that cut into the wood a second before his foot hit it. The sailors crowded curiously to the rail beside the guards as they shot. Bri Corbett, shouldering between Lyra and Raederle, cursed.

“I suppose you shouldn’t hit him,” he said wistfully. Lyra, signalling a halt to the shooting, did not answer. There was a sudden cry and a splash; they leaned farther out over the rail. “What ails the man? Is he hurt?” They heard him cursing as he splashed in the water, then the drag of a mooring chain as he pulled himself back up. His step sounded again, quick, steady, and then there was another splash. “Madir’s bones,” Bri breathed. “He can’t even see straight. He’s coming back toward us. He must be drunk. He could tell the world I have the Morgol, the King of An and fourteen wizards aboard, for all anyone would believe his tale. Is he going in again?” There was a muffled thud. “No; he fell in a rowboat.” He glanced at Raederle, who had begun to laugh weakly. “I forgot about the water. Poor man.” Lyra’s eyes slid uncertainly to her face. “What... Did you do something? What exactly did you do?”

She showed them her frayed cuff. “Just a little thing the pig-woman taught me to do with a tangled piece of thread...”

The ship got underway finally, slipping like a dream out of the dark harbor, leaving the scattering of city lights and the beacons flaring on the black horns of the land. Lyra, relaxing her guard when the ship turned unerringly northward and the west wind hit their cheeks, joined Raederle at the side. They did not speak for a while; the handful of lights vanished as the cliffs rose under the stars to block them. The jagged rim of unknown land running like a black thread against the sky was the only thing to be seen. Then Raederle, shivering a little in the cool night wind, her hands tightening on the rail, said softly, “It’s what I’ve been wanting to do for two years, since he lost that crown somewhere around here in the bottom of the sea. But I couldn’t have done it alone. I’ve never been farther than Caithnard in my life, and the realm seems enormous.” She paused, her eyes on a moonlit swirl and dip of froth; she added with simple pain, “I only wish I had done it sooner.”

Lyra’s body made a rare, restive movement against the side. “How could any one of us have known to go? He was the Star-Bearer; he had a destiny. Men with destinies have their own protection. And he was travelling to the High One escorted by the High One’s harpist. How could we have known that not even the High One would help him? Or help even his own harpist?”

Raederle looked at her shadowed profile. “Deth? Does the Morgol think he is dead?”

“She doesn’t know. She— That was one reason she came here, to see if the Masters had any knowledge of what might have happened to him.”

“Why didn’t she go to Erlenstar Mountain?”

“I asked her. She said because the last land-ruler who had gone to see the High One was never seen nor heard of again.”

Raederle was silent. Something that was not the wind sent a chill rippling through her. “I always thought Erlenstar Mountain must be the safest, the most beautiful place in the world.”

“So did I.” Lyra turned as the small, dark-haired guard spoke her name. “What, Kia?”

“The ship-master is giving us quarters in the king’s cabin; he says it’s the only one big enough for us all. Do you want a guard during the night?”

Lyra looked at Raederle. It was too dark to see her face, but Raederle could sense the question on it. She said slowly, “I would trust him. But why even tempt him to turn back? Can you stay awake?”

“In shifts.” She turned to Kia again. “One guard at the helm in two hour shifts until dawn. I’ll take the first watch.”

“I’ll join you,” Raederle said.

She spent most of the two hours trying to teach Lyra the simple spell she had worked on the trader. They used a piece of twine the intrigued helmsman gave them. Lyra, frowning down at it for some minutes, threw it in the path of a sailor who walked over it and went serenely about his business.

The helmsman protested. “You’ll have us all overboard,” but she shook her head.

“I can’t do it. I stare and stare at it, but it’s only a piece of old twine. There’s no magic in my blood.”

“Yes, there is,” Raederle said. “I felt it. In the Morgol.”

Lyra looked at her curiously. “I’ve never felt it. One day, I’ll have her power of sight. But it’s a practical thing, nothing like this. This I don’t understand.”

“Look at it, in your mind, until it’s not twine anymore but a path, looped and wound and twisted around itself, that will bind the one who touches it to its turnings... See it. Then put your name to it.”

“How?”

“Know that you are yourself, and the thing is itself; that’s the binding between you, that knowledge.”

Lyra bent over the twine again. She was silent a long time, while Raederle and the helmsman watched, then Bri Corbett came out of the chart-house and Lyra tossed the twine under his boot.

“Where,” he demanded of the helmsman, “in Hel’s name are you taking us? Prow first into the Ymris coast?” He stepped unswervingly to the wheel and straightened their course. Lyra got to her feet with a sigh.

“I am myself, and it’s an old piece of twine. That’s as far as I can get. What else can you do?”

“Only a few things. Make a net out of grass, make a bramble stem seem like an impossible thorn patch, find my way out of Madir’s Woods, where the trees seem to shift from place to place... Little things. I inherited the powers from the wizard Madir, and someone—someone named Ylon. For some reason neither of my brothers could do such things, either. The pig-woman said magic finds its own outlet. It used to frustrate them, though, when we were children, and I could always find my way out of Madir’s Woods and they never could.”

“An must be a strange land. In Herun, there’s very little magic, except what the wizards brought, long ago.”

“In An, the land is restless with it. That’s why it’s such a grave thing that my father left his land indefinitely. Without his control, the magic works itself loose, and all the dead stir awake with their memories.”

“What do they do?” Her voice was hushed.

“They remember old feuds, ancient hatreds, battles, and get impulses to revive them. War between the Three Portions in early times was a passionate, tumultuous thing; the old kings and lords died jealous and angry, many of them, so the land-instinct in kings grew to bind even the dead, and the spell-books of those who played with sorcery, like Madir and Peven...”

“And Ylon? Who was he?”

Raederle reached down to pick up the twine. She wound it around her fingers, her brows drawn slightly as she felt the tangle run deceptively smooth and even in her hands. “A riddle.”

Imer came then to relieve Lyra, and she and Raederle went gratefully to bed. The easy roll of the ship in the peaceful sea sent Raederle quickly to sleep. She woke again at dawn, before the sun rose. She dressed and went on deck. The sea, the wind, the long line of the Ymris coast were grey under the dawn sky; the mists along the vast, empty eastern horizon were beginning to whiten under the groping sunlight. The last of the guards, looking bleary at her post, glanced at the sky and headed for bed. Raederle went to the side feeling disoriented in the colorless world. She saw a tiny fishing village, a handful of houses against the bone-colored cliffs, nameless on the strange land; its minute fleet of boats was inching out of the dock into open sea. A flock of gulls wheeled crying overhead, grey and white in the morning, then scattered away southward. She wondered if they were flying to An. She felt chilly and purposeless and wondered if she had left her name behind with all her possessions at Anuin.

The sound of someone being sick over the rail made her turn. She stared mutely at the unexpected face, afraid for a moment that she had stolen out of the harbor a ship full of shape-changers. But no shape-changer, she decided, would have changed deliberately into such a miserable young girl. She waited considerately until the girl wiped her mouth and sat down in a pallid heap on the deck. Her eyes closed. Raederle, remembering Rood’s agonies when he sailed, went to find the water bucket. She half-expected, returning with the dipper, that the apparition would have vanished, but it was still there, small and inconspicuous, like a bundle of old clothes in a corner.

She knelt down, and the girl lifted her head. She looked, opening her eyes, vaguely outraged, as though the sea and ship had conspired against her. Her hand shook as she took the dipper. It was a lean hand, Raederle saw, strong, brown and calloused, too big, yet, for her slender body. She emptied the dipper, leaned back against the side again.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. “I have never, in my entire life, felt so utterly horrible.”

“It will pass. Who are you? How did you get aboard this ship?”

“I came—I came last night. I hid in one of the rowboats, under the canvas, until—until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The ship was swaying one way, and the boat was swaying another. I thought I was going to die...” She swallowed convulsively, opened her eyes and shut them again quickly. The few freckles on her face stood out sharply. Something in the lines of her face, in the graceful determined bones of it, made Raederle’s own throat close suddenly. The girl, taking a gulp of wind, continued, “I was looking for a place to stay last night when I heard you talking by the warehouses. So I just—I just followed you on board, because you were going where I want to go.”

“Who are you?” Raederle whispered.

“Tristan of Hed.”

Raederle sat back on her heels. A memory, brief and poignant, of Morgon’s face, clearer than she had seen it for years, imposed itself over Tristan’s; she felt a sharp, familiar ache in the back of her throat. Tristan looked at her with an oddly wistful expression; then turned her face quickly, huddling a little closer into her plain, shapeless cloak. She moaned as the ship lurched and said between clenched teeth, “I think I’m going to die. I heard what the Morgol’s land-heir said. You stole the ship; you didn’t tell anyone in your own lands. I heard the sailors talking last night, about how the guards forced them to go north, and that—that they were better off pretending they wanted to go in the first place, rather than making themselves the laughing-stock of the realm by protesting. Then they talked about the High One, and their voices went softer; I couldn’t hear.”

“Tristan—”

“If you put me ashore, I’ll walk. You said that yourself, that you’d walk. I had to listen to Eliard crying in his sleep when he dreamed about Morgon; I would have to go wake him. He said one night—one night he saw Morgon’s face in his dream, and he cou... he couldn’t recognize him. He wanted to go then, to Erlenstar Mountain, but it was dead winter, the worst in Hed for seventy years, old Tor Oakland said, and they persuaded him to wait.”

“He couldn’t have gotten through the Pass.”

“That’s what Grim Oakland told him. He almost went anyway. But Cannon Master promised he would go, too, in spring. So spring came...” Her voice stopped; she sat absolutely still a moment, looking down at her hands. “Spring came and Morgon died. And all I could see in Eliard’s eyes, no matter what he was doing, was one question: Why? So I’m going to Erlenstar Mountain to find out.”

Raederle sighed. The sun had broken through the mists finally, patterning the deck through the criss-cross of stays with a web of light. Tristan, under its warm touch, seemed a shade less waxen; she even straightened a little without wincing. She added, “There’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.”

“It’s not me, it’s Bri Corbett.”

“He took you and Lyra—”

“He knows me, and it’s difficult to argue with the Morgol’s guards. But he might balk at taking the land-heir of Hed, especially if no one knows where in the world you are. He might turn the ship around and head straight for Caithnard.”

“I wrote Eliard a note. Anyway, the guards could stop him from turning.”

“No. Not in open sea, when there’s no one else we could get to sail the ship.”

Tristan glanced painfully at the rowboat slung beside her. “I could hide again. No one’s seen me.”

“No. Wait.” She paused, thinking. “My cabin. You could stay there. I’ll bring you food.”

Tristan blanched. “I don’t think I’m planning to eat for a while.”

“Can you walk?”

She nodded with an effort. Raederle helped her to her feet, with a swift glance around the deck, and led her down the steps to her own small chamber. She gave Tristan a little wine, and when Tristan reeled to the bed at a sudden welter of the ship, covered her with her cloak. She lay limp, to the eye scarcely visible or breathing, but Raederle heard her voice hollow as a voice out of a barrow as she closed the door, “Thank you...”

She found Lyra wrapped in a dark, voluminous cloak at the stem, watching the sun rise. She greeted Raederle with a rare, impulsive smile as Raederle joined her.

Raederle said softly, so that the helmsman would not hear, “We have a problem.”

“Bri?”

“No. Tristan of Hed.”

Lyra stared at her incredulously. She listened silently, her brows knit, as Raederle explained.

She gave a quick glance at Raederle’s cabin, as though she could see through the walls to the inert form on the bed, then she said decisively, “We can’t take her.”

“I know.”

“The people of Hed have already suffered so much over Morgon’s absence; she’s the land-heir of Hed, and she must be... How old is she?”

“Thirteen, maybe. She left them a note.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “If we turn back to Caithnard now, we could talk to Bri until spiders spun webs on him, and he would never agree to take us north again.”

“If we turn back,” Lyra said, “we may find ourselves face-to-face with the Morgol’s ship. But Tristan has got to go back to Hed. Did you tell her that?”

“No. I wanted time to think. Bri said we would have to stop for supplies. We could find a trade-ship to take her back.”

“Would she go?”

“She isn’t in any condition to argue at the moment. She’s never been out of Hed in her life; I doubt if she has any idea of where Erlenstar Mountain is. She’s probably never even seen a mountain in her life. But she has—she has all of Morgon’s stubbornness. If we can get her off one ship and onto another while she’s still seasick, then she might not realize what direction she’s going until she winds up back on her own doorstep. It sounds heartless, but if she—if anything happened to her on the way to Erlenstar Mountain, I don’t think anyone, in or out of Hed, could bear hearing of it. The traders will help us.”

“Should we tell Bri Corbett?”

“He would turn back.”

“We should turn back,” Lyra said objectively, her eyes on the white scrollwork of waves on the Ymris coast. She turned her head, looked at Raederle. “It would be hard for me to face the Morgol.”

“I am not going back to Anuin,” Raederle said softly. “Tristan may never forgive us, but she’ll have her answers, I swear by the bones of the dead of An. I swear by the name of the Star-Bearer.”

Lyra’s head gave a quick, pleading shake. “Don’t,” she breathed. “It sounds so final, as if that is the only thing you will do with your life.”

Tristan slept most of the day. In the evening, Raederle brought her some hot soup; she roused herself to eat a little, then vanished back under her cloak when the night winds, coming out of the west pungent with the smell of turned earth, gave the ship an energetic roll. She moaned despairingly, but Bri Corbett, in the chart house, was pleased.

“We’ll make it to Caerweddin by midmorning if this wind holds,” he told Raederle when she went to bid him good-night. “It’s a marvellous wind.

We’ll take two hours there for supplies and still outrun anyone who might be following.”

“You’d think,” Raederle commented to Lyra when she went to borrow a blanket, since Tristan was sleeping on top of hers, “all this was his idea in the first place.” She made herself an unsatisfying bed on the floor and woke, after a night of sketchy sleeping, feeling stiff and slightly sick herself. She stumbled into the sunlight, taking deep breaths of the mellow air, and found Bri Corbett talking to himself at the bow.

“They’re not out of Kraal, they’re not Ymris tradeships, too low and sleek,” he murmured, leaning out over the rail. Raederle, trying to keep her hair from being whipped to a wild froth in the wind, blinked at the half-dozen ships bearing down at them. They were low, lean, single-masted ships; their billowing sails were deep blue, edged with a thin silver scallop. Bri brought one hand down on the rail with a sharp exclamation. “Madir’s bones. I haven’t seen one of those in ten years, not since I’ve been in your father’s service. But I didn’t hear a word of it at Caithnard.”

“What?”

“War. Those are Ymris war-ships.”

Raederle, suddenly awake, stared at the light, swift fleet. “They just ended a war,” she protested softly to no one. “Hardly a year ago.”

“We must have missed trouble by a cat’s breath. It’s another coastal war; they must be watching for shiploads of arms.”

“Will they stop us?”

“Why should they? Do we look like a trade-ship?” He stopped then; they stared at one another, shaken by the same realization.

“No,” Raederle said. “We look like the private ship of the King of An, and we’re about as conspicuous as a pig in a tree. Suppose they want to give us an escort to Caerweddin? How are you going to explain the presence of the Morgol’s guards on—”

“How am I going to explain? Me? Did I hear any complaint about the color of my sails when you overran my ship and demanded I take you north?”

“How was I to know Ymris would start a war? You were the one gossiping with that trader; he didn’t mention it? You didn’t have to keep so close to the land; if you had kept more distance between us and Ymris, we wouldn’t be running into the Ymris King’s ships. Or did you know about them? Were you hoping we’d be stopped?”

“Hagis’s beard!” Bri snapped indignantly. “If I wanted to turn around, there’s not a guard trained yet who could stop me, especially not these—the only thing they would shoot to harm aboard this ship are knotholes and corks, I know that. I’m sailing north because I want to—and who in Hel’s name is that?”

He was staring, his face a deep, veined purple, at Tristan, who had staggered out to throw up over the rail. Bri, watching, swallowed words, making little, incredulous noises in his throat. He found his voice again as Tristan straightened, mist-colored and sweating.

“Who is that?”

“She’s Just a—a stowaway,” Raederle said futilely. “Bri, there’s no need to be upset. She’ll get off at Caerweddin—”

“I won’t, either,” Tristan said slowly but distinctly. “I’m Tristan of Hed, and I’m not getting off until we reach Erlenstar Mountain.”

Bri’s lips moved without sound. He seemed to billow with air like a sail; Raederle, wincing, waited to bear the brunt of it, but instead he turned and exploded across the deck to the helmsman, who jumped as if a mast had snapped behind him, “That’s enough! Turn this ship around. I want her prow in the harbor at Tol so fast she leaves her reflection in the Ymris water.”

The ship wheeled. Tristan clung with tight-lipped misery to the rail. Lyra, taking the last few steps to Raederle’s side at a slide, saw Tristan and asked resignedly, “What happened?”

Raederle shook her head helplessly. The fierce blue of the Ymris sails came between them and the sun then; she groped for her voice. “Bri.”

One of the war-ships, cutting so close she could taste the fine, sheer edge of its spray, seemed to be bearing to a single point in their path. “Bri!” She caught his attention finally as he bellowed at the sailors. “Bri! The war-ships! They think we’re running from them!”

“What?” He gave the ship that was tacking to cut them off an incredulous glare and issued an order so abruptly his voice cracked. There was another lurch; the ship lost speed, slowed, and as the Ymris ship matched its pace they could see the silver mesh and sword hilts of the men aboard. Their own ship stopped and sat wallowing. Another war-ship eased to the windward side; a third guarded the stem. Bri dropped his head in his hands. A voice floated over the water; Raederle turned her head, catching only a few crisp words from a white-haired man.

Bri, shouting back an acquiescence, said briefly, heavily, “All right. Head her north again. We’ve got a royal escort to Caerweddin.”

“Who?”

“Astrin Ymris.”

4

They entered the harbor at Caerweddin with a war-ship at either side of them. The mouth of the river itself was guarded; there were only a few trade-ships entering, and these were stopped and searched before they were allowed farther up the broad, slow river to the docks. Raederle, Tristan, Lyra and the guards stood at the rail watching the city slide past them. Houses and shops and winding cobbled streets spilled far beyond its ancient walls and towers. The King’s own house, on a rise in the center of the city, seemed a strong and forceful seat of power, with its massive blocked design and angular towers; but the carefully chosen colors in the stone made it oddly beautiful. Raederle thought of the King’s house at Anuin, built to some kind of dream after the wars had ceased, of shell-white walls and high, slender towers; it would have been fragile against the forces that contended against the Ymris King. Tristan, standing beside her, reviving on the placid waters, was staring with her mouth open, and Raederle blinked away another memory of a small, quiet, oak hall, with placid, rain-drenched fields beyond it.

Lyra, frowning at the city, said softly to Raederle, as Bri Corbett gave glum orders behind them, “This is humiliating. They had no right to take us like this.”

“They asked Bri if he were heading for Caerweddin; he had to say yes. He was spinning around in the water so much that he must have looked suspicious. They probably thought,” she added, “when he ran, that he might have stolen the ship. Now they are probably getting ready to welcome my father to Caerweddin. They are going to be surprised.”

“Where are we?” Tristan asked. It was the first word she had spoken in an hour. “Are we anywhere near Erlenstar Mountain?”

Lyra looked at her incredulously. “Haven’t you even seen a map of the realm?”

“No. I never needed to.”

“We are so far from Erlenstar Mountain we might as well be in Caithnard. Which is where we will be in two days’ time anyway—”

“No,” Raederle said abruptly. “I’m not going back.”

“I’m not either,” Tristan said. Lyra met Raederle’s eyes above her head.

“All right. But do you have any suggestions?”

“I’m thinking.”

The ship docked alongside of one of the war-ships; the other, waiting, in a gesture at once courteous and prudent, until Bri sank anchor into the deep water, then turned and made its way back toward the sea. The splash of iron, the long rattle and thump of the anchor chain sounded in the air like the final word of an argument. They saw, as the ramp slid down, a small group of men arrive on horseback, richly dressed and armed. Bri Corbett went down to meet them. A man in blue livery carried a blue and silver banner. Raederle, realizing what it was, felt the blood pound suddenly into her face.

“One of them must be the King,” she whispered, and Tristan gave her an appalled look.

“I’m not going down there. Look at my skirt.”

“Tristan, you are the land-heir of Hed, and once they learn that, we could be dressed in leaves and berries for all they’ll realize what we’re wearing.”

“Should we carry our spears down?” Imer asked puzzledly. “We would if the Morgol were with us.”

Lyra considered the matter blankly. Her mouth crooked a little. “I believe I have deserted. A spear in the hand of a dishonored guard isn’t an emblem but a challenge. However, since this is my responsibility, you’re free to make your own decision.”

Imer sighed. “You know, we could have locked you in the cabin and told Bri Corbett to turn around. We talked about it that first night, when you took the watch. That was one mistake you made. We made our own decision, then.”

“Imer, it’s different for me! The Morgol will have to forgive me eventually, but what will all of you go home to?”

“If we do get home, bringing you with us,” Imer said calmly, “the Morgol will probably be a lot more reasonable than you are. I think she would rather have us with you than not. The King,” she added a little nervously, looking over Lyra’s shoulder, “is coming on board.”

Raederle, turning to face him, felt Tristan grip her wrist. The King looked formidable at first glance, dark, powerful and grim, with body armor like the delicate, silvery scales of fish, beneath a blue-black surcoat whorled with endless silver embroidery. The white-haired man of the war-ship came with him, with his single white eye; his other eye was sealed shut against something he had seen. As they stood together, she felt the binding between them, like the binding between Duac and Mathom, and recognized, with a slight shock, the eccentric land-heir of the Ymris King. His good eye went suddenly to her face, as though he had sensed her recognition. The King surveyed them silently a moment. Then he said with simple, unexpected kindliness, “I am Heureu Ymris. This is my land-heir, my brother Astrin. Your ship-master told me who you are, and that you are travelling together under peculiar circumstances. He requested a guard for you past the Ymris coast, since we are at war, and he wanted no harm to come to such valuable passengers. I have seven war-ships preparing to leave at dawn for Meremont. They will give you an escort south. Meanwhile, you are very welcome to my land and my house.”

He paused, waiting. Lyra said abruptly, a slight flush on her face, “Did Bri Corbett tell you that we took his ship? That we—that I—that none of the Morgol’s guard are acting with her knowledge? I want you to understand who you will welcome into your house.”

There was a flick of surprise in his eyes, followed by another kind of recognition. He said gently, “Don’t you think you were trying to do exactly what many of us this past year have only thought of doing? You will honor my house.”

They followed him and his land-heir down the ramp; he introduced them to the High Lords of Marcher and Tor, the red-haired High Lord of Umber, while their horses were unloaded. They mounted, made a weary, slightly bedraggled procession behind the King. Lyra, riding abreast of Raederle, her eyes on Heureu Ymris’s back, whispered, “Seven war-ships. He’s taking no chances with us. What if you threw a piece of gold thread in the water in front of them?”

“I’m thinking,” Raederle murmured.

In the King’s house, they were given small, light, richly furnished chambers where they could wash and rest in private. Raederle, concerned for Tristan in the great, strange house, watched her ignore servants and riches, and crawl thankfully into a bed that did not move. In her own chamber, she washed the sea spray out of her hair, and, feeling clean for the first time in days, stood by the open window combing her hair dry and looking out over the unfamiliar land. Her eyes wandered down past the busy maze of streets, picked out the old city wall, broken here and there by gates and arches above the streets. The city scattered eventually into farmland and forest, orchards that were soft mists of color in the distance. Then, her eyes moving east again to the sea, she saw something that made her put her comb down, lean out the open casement.

There was a stonework, enormous and puzzling, on a cliff not far from the city. It stood like some half-forgotten memory, or the fragments on a torn page of ancient, incomplete riddles. The stones she recognized, beautiful, massive, vivid with color. The structure itself, bigger than anything any man would have needed, had been shaken to the ground seemingly with as much ease as she would have shaken ripe apples out of a tree. She swallowed drily, remembering tales her father had made her learn, remembering something Morgon had mentioned briefly in one of his letters, remembering, above all, the news Elieu had brought from Isig about the waking, in the soundless deep of the Mountain, of the children of the Earth-Masters. Then something beyond all comprehension, a longing, a loneliness, an understanding played in the dark rim of her mind, bewildering her with its sorrow and recognition, frightening her with its intensity, until she could neither bear to look at the nameless city, nor turn away from it.

A knock sounded softly at her door; she realized then that she was standing blind, with tears running down her face. The world, with a physical effort, as if two great stones locked massively, ponderously into position, shifted back into familiarity. The knock came again; she wiped her face with the back of her hand and went to open it.

The Ymris land-heir, standing in the doorway, with his alien face and single white eye startled her for some reason. Then she saw its youngness, the lines worn in it of pain and patience. He said quickly, gently, “What is it? I came to talk with you a little, about the—about Morgon. I can come back.”

She shook her head. “No. Please come in. I was just—I—” She stopped helplessly, wondering if he could understand the words she had to use. Some instinct made her reach out to him, grip him as though to keep her balance; she said, half-blind again, “People used to say you lived among the ruins of another time, that you knew unearthly things. There are things—there are things I need to ask.”

He stepped into the room, closed the door be- hind him. “Sit down,” he said, and she sat in one of the chairs by the cold hearth. He brought her a cup of wine, then took a chair beside her. He looked, still wearing mail and the King’s dark livery of war, like a warrior, but the slight perplexity in his face was of no such simple mind.

“You have power,” he said abruptly. “Did you know that?”

“I know—I have a little. But now, I think, there may be things in me I never—I never knew.” She took a swallow of wine; her voice grew calmer. “Do you know the riddle of Oen and Ylon?”

“Yes.” Something moved in his good eye. He said, “Yes,” again, softly. “Ylon was a shape-changer.”

She moved slightly, as away from a pain. “His blood runs in the family of the Kings of An. For centuries he was little more than a sad tale. But now, I want—I have to know. He came out of the sea, like the shape-changer Lyra saw, the one who nearly killed Morgon—he was of that color and wildness. Whatever—whatever power I have comes from Madir. And from Ylon.”

He was silent for a long time, contemplating the riddle she had given him while she sipped wine, the cup in her hands shaking slightly. He said finally, groping, “What made you cry?”

“That dead city. It—something in me reached out and knew... and knew what it had been.”

His good eye moved to her face; his voice caught. “What was it?”

“I was—I stood in the way. It was like someone else’s memory in me. It frightened me. I thought, when I saw you, that you might understand.”

“I don’t understand either you or Morgon. Maybe you, like him, are an integral piece in some great puzzle as old and complex as that city on King’s Mouth Plain. All I know of the cities is the broken things I find, hardly a trace of the Earth-Masters’ passage. Morgon had to grope for his own power, as you will; what he is now, after—”

“Wait.” Her voice shook again, uncontrollably. “Wait.”

He leaned forward, took the unsteady cup from her and set it on the floor. Then he took her hands in his own lean, tense hands. “Surely you don’t believe he is dead.”

“Well, what alternative do I have? What’s the dark side to that tossed coin—whether he’s alive or dead, whether he’s dead or his mind is broken under that terrible power—”

“Who broke whose power? For the first time in seven centuries the wizards are freed—”

“Because the Star-Bearer is dead! Because the one who killed him no longer needs to fear their power.”

“Do you believe that? That’s what Heureu says, and Rork Umber. The wizard Aloil had been a tree on King’s Mouth Plain for seven centuries, until I watched him turn into himself, bewildered with his freedom. He spoke only briefly to me; he didn’t know why he had been freed; he had never heard of the Star-Bearer. He had dead white hair and eyes that had watched his own destruction. I asked where he would go, and he only laughed and vanished. Then, a few days later, traders brought the terrible tale out of Hed of Morgon’s torment, of the passing of the land-rule, on the day Aloil had been freed. I have never believed that Morgon is dead.”

“What... Then what is left of him? He has lost everything he loved, he has lost his own name. When Awn—when Awn of An lost his own land-rule while he was living, he killed himself. He couldn’t—”

“I lived with Morgon when he was nameless once before. He found his name again in the stars that he bears. I will not believe he is dead.”

“Why?”

“Because that isn’t the answer he was looking for.”

She stared at him incredulously. “You don’t think he had a choice in the matter?”

“No. He is the Star-Bearer. I think he was destined to live.”

“You make that sound more like a doom,” she whispered. He loosed her hands and rose, went to stand at the window where she had been gazing out at the nameless city.

“Perhaps. But I would never underestimate that farmer from Hed.” He turned suddenly. “Will you ride with me to King’s Mouth Plain, to see the ancient city?”

“Now? I thought you had a war to fight.”

His unexpected smile warmed his lean face. “I did, until we saw your ship. You gave me a respite until dawn, when I lead you and your escort out of Caerweddin. It’s not a safe place, that plain. Heureu’s wife was killed there. No one goes there now but me, and even I am wary. But you might find something—a stone, a broken artifact—that will speak to you.”

She rode with him through Caerweddin, up the steep, rocky slope onto the plain above the sea. The sea winds sang hollowly across it, trailing between the huge, still stones that had rooted deep into the earth through countless centuries. Raederle, dismounting, laid her hand on one impulsively; it was clear, smooth under her palm, shot through with veins of emerald green.

“It’s so beautiful...” She looked at Astrin suddenly. “That’s where the stones of your house came from.”

“Yes. Whatever pattern these stones made has been hopelessly disturbed. The stones were nearly impossible to move, but the King who took them, Galil Ymris, was a persistent man.” He bent down abruptly, searched the long grass and earth in the crook of two stones and rose again with something in his hand. He brushed it off: it winked star-blue in the sunlight. She looked at it as it lay in his palm.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. A piece of cut glass, a stone... It’s hard to tell sometimes exactly what things are here,” He dropped it into her own hand, closed her fingers around it lightly. “You keep it.”

She turned it curiously, watched it sparkle. “You love these great stones, in spite of all their danger.”

“Yes. That makes me strange, in Ymris. I would rather putter among forgotten things like an old hermit-scholar than take seven war-ships into battle. But war on the south coasts is an old sore that festers constantly and never seems to heal. So Heureu needs me there, even though I try to tell him I can taste and smell and feel some vital answer in this place. And you. What do you feel from it?”

She lifted her eyes from the small stone, looked down the long scattering of stones. The plain was empty but for the stones, the silver-edged grass and a single stand of oak, gnarled and twisted by the sea wind. The cloudless sky curved away from it, building to an immensity of nothingness. She wondered what force could ever draw the stones again up into it, straining out of the ground, pulled one onto another, building to some immense, half- comprehensible purpose that would shine from a distance with power, beauty and a freedom like the wind’s freedom. But they lay still, gripped to the earth, dormant. She whispered, “Silence,” and the wind died.

She felt, in that moment, as if the world had stopped. The grass was motionless in the sunlight; the shadows of the stones seemed measured and blocked on the ground. Even the breakers booming at the cliff’s foot were still. Her own breath lay indrawn in her mouth. Then Astrin touched her, and she heard the unexpected hiss of his sword from the scabbard. He pulled her against him, holding her tightly. She felt, under the cold mesh of armor, the hard pound of his heart.

There was a sigh out of the core of the world. A wave that seemed as if it would never stop gathering shook the cliff as it broke and withdrew. Astrin’s arm dropped. She saw his face as she stepped back; the drawn, hollow look frightened her. A gull cried, hovering at the cliffs edge, then disappeared; she saw him shudder. He said briefly, “I’m terrified. I can’t think. Let’s go.”

They were both silent as they rode down the slope again towards the lower fields and the busy north road into the city. As they cut across a field full of sheep bawling with the indignity of being shorn, the white, private horror eased away from Astrin’s face. Raederle, glancing at him, felt him accessible again; she said softly, “What was it? Everything seemed to stop.”

“I don’t know. The last time—the last time I felt it, Eriel Ymris died. I was afraid for you.”

“Me?”

“For five years after she died, the King lived with a shape-changer as his wife.”

Raederle closed her eyes. She felt something build in her suddenly, like a shout she wanted to loose at him that would drown even the voices of the sheep. She clenched her hands, controlling it; she did not realize she had stopped until he spoke her name. Then she opened her eyes and said, “At least he had no land-heir to lock away in a tower by the sea. Astrin, I think there is something sleeping inside of me, and if I wake it, I will regret it until the world’s end. I have a shape-changer’s blood in me, and something of his power. That’s an awkward thing to have.”

His good eye, quiet again, seemed to probe with detachment to the heart of her riddle. ’Trust yourself,” he suggested, and she drew a deep breath.

“That’s like stepping with my eyes shut onto one of my own tangled threads. You have a comforting outlook on things.”

He gripped her wrist lightly before they started to ride again. She found, her hand easing open, the mark of the small stone she held ridged deeply into her palm.

Lyra came to talk to her when she returned to the King’s house. Raederle was sitting at the window, looking down at something that sparkled like a drop of water in her hand. “Have you thought of a plan yet?” Lyra said.

Raederle, lifting her head, sensed the restlessness and frustration in her tight, controlled movements, like the movements of some animal trapped and tempered into civility. She gathered her thoughts with an effort.

“I think Bri Corbett could be persuaded to turn us north after we leave the river, if we can get Tristan on her way home. But Lyra, I don’t know what would persuade Astrin Ymris to let us go.”

“The decision is ours; it has nothing to do with Ymris.”

“It would be hard to convince either Astrin or Heureu of that.”

Lyra turned abruptly away from the window, paced to the empty grate and back. “We could find another ship. No. They’d only search us, going out of the harbor.” She looked as close as she would ever come to throwing something that was not a weapon. Then, glancing down at Raederle, she said unexpectedly, “What’s the matter? You look troubled.”

“I am,” Raederle said, surprised. Her head bent; her hand closed again over the stone. “Astrin—Astrin told me he thinks Morgon is alive.”

She heard a word catch in Lyra’s throat. Lyra sat down suddenly next to her, gripping the stone ledge with her hands. Her face was white; she found her voice again, pleaded, “What—what makes him think so?”

“He said Morgon was looking for answers, and death wasn’t one of them. He said—”

“That would mean he lost the land-rule. That was his greatest fear. But no one—no one can take away that instinct but the High One. No one—” She stopped. Raederle heard the sudden clench of her teeth. She leaned back wearily, the stone shining like a tear in her palm. Lyra’s voice came again, unfamiliar, stripped bare of all passion, “I will kill him for that.”

“Who?”

“Ghisteslwchlohm.”

Raederle’s lips parted and closed. She waited for the chill that the strange voice had roused in her to subside, then she said carefully, “You’ll have to find him first. That may be difficult.”

“I’ll find him. Morgon will know where he is.”

“Lyra—” Lyra’s face turned toward her, and the words of prudence caught in Raederle’s throat. She looked down. “First we have to get out of Caerweddin.”

The dark, unfamiliar thing eased out of Lyra. She said anxiously, “Don’t tell Tristan what you told me. It’s too uncertain.”

“I won’t.”

“Isn’t there something you can do for us? We can’t turn back now. Not now. Make a wind blow the war-ships away, make them see an illusion of us going south—”

“What do you think I am? A wizard? I don’t think even Madir could do those things.” A bead of sunlight caught in the strange stone; she straightened suddenly. “Wait.” She held it up between forefinger and thumb, catching the sun’s rays, Lyra blinked as the light slid over her eyes.

“What? What is that?”

“It’s a stone Astrin found on King’s Mouth Plain, in the city of the Earth-Masters. He gave it to me.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Her eyes narrowed again as the bright light touched them, and Raederle lowered it.

“It flashes like a mirror... All I learned from the pig-woman is concerned with illusion, small things out of proportion: the handful of water seeming a pool, the twig a great fallen log, the single bramble stem an impassible tangle. If I could—if I could blind the war-ships with this, make it blaze like a sun in their eyes, they couldn’t see us turn north, they wouldn’t be able to outrun us.”

“With that? It’s no bigger than a thumbnail. Besides,” she added uneasily, “how do you know what it is? You know a handful of water is a handful of water. But you don’t know what this was meant for, so how will you know exactly what it might become?”

“If you don’t want me to try it, I won’t. It’s a decision that will affect us all. It’s also the only thing I can think of.”

“You’re the one who has to work with it. How do you know what name the Earth-Masters might have put to it? I’m not afraid for us or the ship, but it’s your mind—”

“Did I,” Raederle interrupted, “offer you advice?”

“No,” Lyra said reluctantly. “But I know what I’m doing.”

“Yes. You’re going to get killed by a wizard. Am I arguing?”

“No. But—” She sighed. “All right. Now all we have to do is tell Bri Corbett where he’s going so that he’ll know to get supplies. And we have to send Tristan home. Can you think of any possible way to do that?”

They both thought. An hour later, Lyra slipped unostensibly out of the King’s house, went down to the docks to inform Bri that he was heading north again, and Raederle went to the King’s hall to talk to Heureu Ymris.

She found him in the midst of his lords, discussing the situation in Meremont. When he saw her hesitating at the doorway of the great hall, he came to her. Meeting his clear, direct gaze, she knew that she and Lyra had been right: he would be less difficult to deceive than Astrin, and she was relieved that Astrin was not with him. He said, “Is there something you need? Something I can help you with?”

She nodded. “Could I talk to you a moment?”

“Of course.”

“Could you—is it possible for you to spare one of your war-ships to take Tristan home? Bri Corbett will have to stop at Caithnard to let Lyra off and pick up my brother. Tristan is unreasonably determined to get to Erlenstar Mountain, and if she can find a way to get off Bri’s ship at Caithnard, she’ll do it. She’ll head north, either on a trade-ship or on foot, and either way she is liable to find herself in the middle of your war.”

His dark brows knit. “She sounds stubborn. Like Morgon.”

“Yes. And if she—if anything happened to her, too, it would be devastating to the people of Hed. Bri could take her to Hed before he brings us to Caithnard, but in those waters he must pass over, Athol and Spring of Hed were drowned, and Morgon was nearly killed. I would feel easier if she had a little more protection than a few guards and sailors.”

He drew a quick, silent breath. “I hadn’t thought of that. Only five of the war-ships are carrying a great many arms and men; two are more lightly manned patrols watching for shiploads of arms. I can spare one to take her back. If I could, I would send those war-ships with you all the way to Caithnard. I have never seen such a valuable assortment of people on such a misguided, ill-considered journey in my life.”

She flushed a little. “I know. It was wrong of us to take Tristan even this far.”

“Tristan! What about you and the Morgol’s land-heir?”

“That’s different—”

“How, in Yrth’s name?”

“We at least know there’s a world between Hed and the High One.”

“Yes,” he said grimly. “And it’s no place for any of you, these days. I made sure your ship-master understood that, too. I don’t know what possessed him to leave the Caithnard harbor with you.”

“It wasn’t his fault. We didn’t give him any choice.”

“How much duress could you possibly have put him under? The Morgol’s guards are skilled, but hardly unreasonable. And you might as easily have met worse than my war-ships off the Ymris coast. There are times when I believe I am fighting only my own rebels, but at other times, the entire war seems to change shape under my eyes, and I realize that I am not even sure myself how far it will extend, or if I can contain it. Small as it is yet, it has terrifying potential. Bri Corbett could not have chosen a worse time to sail with you so close to Meremont.”

“He didn’t know about the war—”

“If he had been carrying your father on that ship, he would have made it his business to know. I reminded him of that, also. As for Astrin taking you today to King’s Mouth Plain—that was utter stupidity.” He stopped. She saw the light glance white off his cheekbones before he lifted his hands to his eyes, held them there a moment. She looked down, swallowing.

“I suppose you told him that.”

“Yes. He seemed to agree with me. This is no time for people of intelligence, like Astrin, you and Bri Corbett, to forget how to think.” He put a hand on her shoulder then, and his voice softened. “I understand what you were trying to do. I understand why. But leave it for those who are more capable.”

She checked an answer and bent her head, yielding him tacitly the last word. She said with real gratitude, “Thank you for the ship. Will you tell Tristan in the morning?”

“I’ll escort her personally on board.” Raederle saw Lyra again later in the hall as they were going to supper. Lyra said softly, “Bri argued, but I swore to him on what’s left of my honor that he would not have to try to outrun the war-ships. He didn’t like it, but he remembered what you did with that piece of thread. He said whatever you do tomorrow had better be effective, because he won’t dare face Heureu Ymris again if it isn’t.”

Raederle felt her face burn slightly at a memory. “Neither will I,” she murmured. Tristan came out of her room then, bewildered and a little frightened, as if she had just wakened. Her face eased at the sight of them; at the trust in her eyes, Raederle felt a pang of guilt. She said, “Are you hungry? We’re going down to the King’s hall to eat.”

“In front of people?” She brushed hopelessly at her wrinkled skirt. Then she stopped, looked around her at the beautifully patterned walls glistening with torchlight, the old shields of bronze and silver hung on them, the ancient, jeweled weapons. She whispered, “Morgon was in this house,” and her shoulders straightened as she followed them to the hall.

They were wakened before dawn the next morning. Bundled in rich, warm cloaks Heureu gave them, they rode with him, Astrin, the High Lords of Umber and Tor and three hundred armed men through the quiet streets of Caerweddin. They saw windows opening here and there, or the spill of light from a door as a face peered out at the quick, silent march of warriors. At the docks, the dark masts loomed out of a pearl-colored mist over the water; the voices, the footsteps in the dawn seemed muted, disembodied. The men broke out of their lines, began to board. Bri Corbett, coming down the ramp, gave Raederle one grim, harassed glance before he took her horse up. The Morgol’s guards followed him up with their horses.

Raederle waited a moment, to hear Heureu say to Tristan, “I’m sending you home with Astrin in one of the warships. You’ll be safe with him, well-protected by the men with him. It’s a fast ship; you’ll be home quickly.”

Raederle, watching, could not tell for a moment who looked more surprised, Tristan or Astrin. Then Tristan, her mouth opening to protest, saw Raederle listening and an indignant realization leaped into her eyes. Astrin said before she could speak, “That’s over two days there and a day back to Meremont—you’ll need that ship to watch the coast.”

“I can spare it that long. If the rebels have sent for arms, they’ll come down most likely from the north, and I can try to stop them at Caerweddin.”

“Arms,” Astrin argued, “are not all we’re watching for.” Then his eyes moved slowly from Heureu’s face to Raederle’s. “Who requested that ship?”

“I made the decision,” Heureu said crisply, and at his tone, Tristan, who had opened her mouth again, closed it abruptly.

Astrin gazed at Raederle, his brows puckered in suspicion and perplexity. He said briefly to Heureu, “All right. I’ll send you word from Meremont when I return.”

“Thank you.” His fingers closed a moment on Astrin’s arm. “Be careful.”

Raederle boarded. She went to the stern, heard Bri’s voice giving oddly colorless orders behind her. The first of the war-ships began to drift like some dark bird to the middle of the river; as it moved the mist began to swirl and fray over the quiet grey water, and the first sunlight broke on the high walls of the King’s house.

Lyra came to stand beside Raederle. Neither of them spoke. The ship bearing Tristan slid alongside them, and Raederle saw Astrin’s face, with its spare lines and ghostly coloring, as he watched the rest of the war-ships ease into position behind him. Bri Corbett, with his slower, heavier vessel, went last, in the wake of the staggered line. In their own wake came the sun.

It burned the troth behind them. Bri said softly to the helmsman, “Be ready to turn her at half a word. If those ships slow and close around us in open sea, we might as well take off our boots and wade to Kraal. And that’s what I intend to do if they give chase and stop us. Astrin Ymris would singe one ear off me with his tongue and Heureu the other, and I could carry what’s left of my reputation back to Anuin with me in a boot with a hole in it.”

“Don’t worry,” Raederle murmured. The stone flashed like a king’s jewel in her hand. “Bri, I’ll need to float this behind us or it will blind us all. Do you have a piece of wood or something?”

“I’ll find one.” The placid sigh of the morning tide caught their ears; he turned his head. The first ship was already slipping into the open sea. He said again, nervously as the salt wind teased at their sails, “I’ll find one. You do whatever it is you’re doing.”

Raederle bent her head, looked down at the stone. It dazzled like a piece of sun-shot ice, light leaping from plane to plane of its intricately cut sides. She wondered what it had been, saw it in her mind’s eye as a jewel in a ring, the center eye of a crown, the pommel of a knife, perhaps, that darkened in times of danger. But did the Earth-Masters ever use such things? Had it belonged to them or to some fine lady in the Ymris court who dropped it as she rode or to some trader who bought it in Isig, then lost it, flickering out of his pack as he crossed King’s Mouth Plain? If it could blaze like a tiny star in her hand at the sun’s touch, she knew the illusion of it would ignite the sea, and no ship would see to pass through it, even if it dared. But what was it?

The light played gently in her mind, dispersing old night-shadows, pettinesses, the little, nagging memories of dreams. Her thoughts strayed to the great plain where it had been. found, the massive stones on it like monuments to a field of ancient dead. She saw the morning sunlight sparkle in the veins of color on one stone, gather in a tiny fleck of silver in a corner of it. She watched that minute light in her mind, kindled it slowly with the sunlight caught in the stone she held. It began to glow softly in her palm. She fed the light in her mind; it spilled across the ageless stones, dispersing their shadows; she felt the warmth of the light in her hand, on her face. The light began to engulf the stones in her mind, arch across the clear sky until it dazzled white; she heard as from another time, a soft exclamation from Bri Corbett. The twin lights drew from one another: the light in her hand, the light in her mind. There was a flurry of words, cries, faint and meaningless behind her. The ship reeled, jolting her; she reached out to catch her balance, and the light at her face burned her eyes.

“All right,” Bri said breathlessly. “All right. You’ve got it. Put it down—it’ll float on this.” His own eyes were nearly shut, wincing against it.

She let him guide her hand, heard the stone clink into the small wooden bowl he held. Sailors let it over the side in a net as if they were lowering the sun into the sea. The gentle waves danced it away. She followed it with her mind, watching the white light shape into facet after facet in her mind, harden with lines and surfaces, until her whole mind seemed a single jewel, and looking into it, she began to sense its purpose.

She saw someone stand, as she stood, holding the jewel. He was in the middle of a plain in some land, in some age, and as the stone winked in his palm all movement around him, beyond the rim of her mind, began to flow towards its center. She had never seen him before, but she felt suddenly that his next gesture, a line of bone in his face if he turned, would give her his name. She waited curiously for that moment, watching him as he watched the stone, lost in the timeless moment of his existence. And then she felt a stranger’s mind in her own, waiting with her.

Its curiosity was desperate, dangerous. She tried to pull away from it, frightened, but the startling, unfamiliar awareness of someone else’s mind would not leave her. She sensed its attention on the nameless stranger whose next movement, the bend of his head, the spread of his fingers, would give her his identity. A terror, helpless and irrational, grew in her at the thought of that recognition, of yielding whatever name he held to the dark, powerful mind bent on discovering it. She struggled to disperse the image in her mind before he moved. But the strange power held her; she could neither change the image nor dispel it, as though her mind’s eye were gazing, lidless, into the core of an incomprehensible mystery. Then a hand whipped, swift, hard, across her face; she pulled back, flinching against a strong grip.

The ship, scudding in the wind, boomed across a wave, and she blinked the spray out of her eyes. Lyra, holding her tightly, whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you were screaming.” The light had gone; the King’s war-ships were circling one another bewilderedly far behind them. Bri, his face colorless as he looked at her, breathed, “Shall I take you back? Say the word, and I’ll turn back.”

“No. It’s all right.” Lyra loosed her slowly; Raederle said again, the back of her hand over her mouth, “It’s all right, now, Bri.”

“What was it?” Lyra said. “What was that stone?”

“I don’t know.” She felt the aftermath of the strange mind again, demanding, insistent; she shuddered. “I almost knew something—”

“What?”

“I don’t know! Something important to someone. But I don’t know what, I don’t know why—” She shook her head hopelessly. “It was like a dream, so important then, and now it’s—it makes no sense. All I know is that there were twelve.”

“Twelve what?”

“Twelve sides to that stone. Like a compass.” She saw Bri Corbett’s bewildered expression. “I know. It makes no sense.”

“But what in Hel’s name made you scream like that?” he demanded.

She remembered the powerful, relentless mind that had trapped her own in its curiosity, and knew that though he would turn back to face even the war-ships again if she told him of it, there would be no place in the realm where she could be truly safe from it. She said softly, “It was something of power, that stone. I should have used a simpler thing. I’m going to rest awhile.”

She did not come out of her cabin again until evening. She went to the side, then, stood watching stars bum like distant reflections of her mind-work. Something made her turn her head suddenly. She saw, swaying comfortably to the ship’s motion, Tristan of Hed, standing like a figurehead at the prow.

5

Tristan would not speak to anyone for two days. Bri Corbett, torn between taking her back and avoiding at all costs the hoodwinked escort and the one-eyed Ymris prince, spent a day cursing, then yielded to Tristan’s mute, reproachful determination and sailed north on his own indecision. They left, at the end of those two days, the Ymris coastline behind them. The unsettled forests, the long stretch of barren hills between Herun and the sea were all they saw for a while, and gradually they began to relax. The wind was brisk; Bri Corbett, his face cheerful and ruddy under the constant sun, kept the sailors jumping. The guards, unused to idleness, practiced knife throwing at a target on the wall of the chart house. When a sudden roll of the ship caused a wild throw that nearly sliced a cable in two, Bri put a halt to that. They took up fishing instead, with long lines trailing from the stem. Sailors, watching as they bent over the rail, remembered the dead thwick of knife blade into the chart house wall and approached with caution.

Raederle, after futile attempts to soothe Tristan, who stood aloof and quiet, looking northward like a dark reminder of their purpose, gave up and left her alone. She stayed quiet herself, reading Rood’s books or playing the flute she had brought from Anuin, that Elieu of Hel had made for her. One afternoon she sat on the deck with it and played songs and court dances of An and plaintive ballads that Cyone had taught her years before. She wandered into a sad, simple air she could not recall the name of and found, when she finished, that Tristan had turned away from the rail and was watching her.

“That was from Hed,” she said abruptly. Raederle rested the flute on her knees, remembering.

“Deth taught it to me.”

Tristan, wavering, moved away from the rail finally, sat down beside her on the warm deck. Her face was expressionless; she did not speak.

Raederle, her eyes on the flute, said softly, “Please try to understand. When the news of Morgon’s death came, it was not only Hed that suffered a loss, but people all over the realm who had helped him, who loved him and worried about him. Lyra and Bri and I were simply trying to spare the realm, your own people especially, more fear and worry about you. Hed seems a very special and vulnerable place these days. We didn’t mean to hurt you, but we didn’t want, if anything had happened to you, to be hurt again ourselves.”

Tristan was silent. She lifted her head slowly, leaned back against the side. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” She looked at Raederle a moment, asked a little shyly, “Would you have married Morgon?”

Raederle’s mouth crooked. “I waited two years for him to come to Anuin and ask me.”

“I wish he had. He never was very sensible.” She gathered her knees up, rested her chin on them, brooding. “I heard the traders say he could change shape into an animal. That frightened Eliard. Can you do that?”

“Change shape? No.” Her hands tightened slightly on the flute. “No.”

“And then they said—they said last spring he had found a starred sword and killed with it. That didn’t sound like him.”

“No.”

“But Grim Oakland said if someone were trying to kill him, he couldn’t just stand there and let them. I can understand that; it’s reasonable, but... after that, with someone else making a harp and a sword for him that were his because of the stars on his face, he didn’t seem to belong to Hed any more. It seemed he couldn’t come back and do the simple things he had always done—feed the pigs, argue with Eliard, make beer in the cellar. It seemed he had already left us forever, because we didn’t really know him any more.”

“I know,” Raederle whispered. “I felt that way, too.”

“So—in that way—it wasn’t so hard when he died. What was hard was knowing... was knowing what he was going through before he died and not being able to— not—” Her voice shook; she pressed her mouth tightly against one arm. Raederle tilted her head back against the side, her eyes on the shadow the boom cut across the deck.

“Tristan. In An, the passage of the land-rule is a complex and startling thing, they say, like suddenly growing an extra eye to see in the dark or an ear to hear things beneath the earth... Is it that way in Hed?”

“It didn’t seem that way.” Her voice steadied as she mulled over the question. “Eliard was out in the fields when it happened. He just said he felt that suddenly everything—the leaves and animals, the rivers, the seedlings—everything suddenly made sense. He knew what they were and why they did what they did. He tried to explain it to me. I said everything must have made sense before, most things do anyway, but he said it was different. He could see everything very clearly, and what he couldn’t see he felt. He couldn’t explain it very well.”

“Did he feel Morgon die?”

“No. He—” Her voice stopped. Her hands shifted, tightened on her knees; she went on in a whisper, “Eliard said Morgon must have forgotten even who he was when he died, because of that.”

Raederle winced. She put her hand on Tristan’s taut arm. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be cruel; I was just—”

“Curious. Like Morgon.”

“No!” The pain in her own voice made Tristan lift her head, look at her surprisedly.

She was silent again, studying Raederle almost as though she had never seen her before. She said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered, in the back of my mind, from the first time I heard about you.”

“What?”

“Who is the most beautiful woman in An?” She flushed a little at Raederle’s sudden smile, but there was a shy, answering smile in her eyes. “I was always curious.”

“The most beautiful woman in An is Map Hwillion’s sister, Mara, who married the lord Cyn Croeg of Aum. She is called the Flower of An.”

“What are you called?”

“Just the second most beautiful woman.”

“I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful than you. When Morgon first told us about you, I was frightened. I didn’t think you could live in Hed, in our house. But now... I don’t know. I wish—I wish things had turned out differently.”

“So do I,” Raederle said softly. “And now, will you tell me something? How in the world did you manage to get off that war-ship and onto this one without anyone, Astrin, Heureu, Bri or all those warriors seeing you?”

Tristan smiled. “I just followed the King onto the war-ship and then followed him off again. Nobody expected to see me where I wasn’t supposed to be, and so they didn’t. It was simple.”

They passed Hlurle at night. Bri Corbett, with thought of another cask of Herun wine, suggested a brief stop there until Lyra reminded him of the twenty guards waiting at Hlurle to escort the Morgol back to Herun. He abandoned the idea hastily and stopped instead farther up the coast, at the mouth of the turbulent Ose, where they took a quick, welcome respite from the sea. The town there was small, full of fishermen and trappers who brought their furs twice a year from the wilderness to sell to the traders. Bri bought wine, all the fresh eggs he could find and replenished their water supply. Lyra, Raederle and Tristan left letters for the traders to take south. No one recognized them, but they departed in a wake of curiosity that the letters, astonishingly addressed, did nothing to abate.

Three days later, at midmorning, they reached Kraal.

The city straddling Winter River was rough-hewn out of the stones and timber of Osterland. Beyond it, they caught their first close glimpse of the wild land, shaggy with pine, and of the distant blue-white mist of mountains. The harbor was full of trade-ships, barges with their gleaming upright lines of oars, riverboats making their slow way up the deep, green waters.

Bri, maneuvering carefully through the crowd, seemed to be calculating every shiver of wood under his feet, every wrinkle that appeared in the sails. He took the wheel from the helmsman once; Raederle heard him say, “That current must be dragging the barnacles off the hull. I’ve never seen the water so high. It must have been a terrible winter through the Pass...”

He found a berth unexpectedly in the crowded docks; the sight of the blue and purple sails of the King of An and the ship’s incongruous passengers caused brisk and audible speculation among the shrewd-eyed traders. The women were all recognized as they stood at the rails, before the ship was fully secured to the moorings. Tristan’s mouth dropped as she heard her own name, coupled with an unflattering query of the state of Bri Corbett’s mind, shouted across the water from a neighboring ship.

Bri ignored it, but the burn on his face seemed to deepen. He said to Raederle as the ramp slid down, “You’ll get no peace in this city, but at least you’ve got a good escort if you want to leave the ship. I’ll try to get a barge and oarsmen; it’ll be slow, and it will cost. But if we wait for the snow water to abate and a halfway decent wind to sail up, we may find the Morgol herself joining us. And that would really give these calk-brained, rattle-jawed gossip-peddlars, who are about to lose their teeth, something to talk about.”

He managed with an energy that came, Raederle suspected, from a dread of glimpsing among the river traffic that taut, brilliant sail of an Ymris war-ship, to secure by evening a barge, a crew and supplies. She, Lyra, Tristan and the guards returned after a hectic afternoon among curious traders, trappers and Osterland farmers, to find their horses and gear being transferred onto the barge. They boarded the flat, inelegant vessel, found room almost on top of one another to sleep. The barge, lifting to the shift of the tide at some black hour of the morning, left Kraal behind as they slept.

The trip upriver was long, tedious and grim. The waters had flooded villages and farms as they spilled down from the Ose. They were withdrawing slowly, leaving in their wake gnarled, sodden, uprooted trees, dead animals, fields of silt and mud. Bri had to stop frequently, cursing, to loosen snags of roots, branches and broken furniture that got in their way. Once, an oarsman, pushing them away from a dark, tangled mound, freed something that stared at the sun out of a dead-white, shapeless face a moment before the current whirled it away. Raederle, her throat closing, heard Tristan’s gasp. The waters themselves in the constant flickering shadows of trees, seemed lifeless, grey as they flowed down from the High One’s threshold. After a week of glimpsing, between the trees, men clearing pieces of barn and carcasses of farm animals out of their fields, and watching nameless things lift to eye level out of the deep water at the stir of an oar, even the guards began to look haggard. Lyra whispered once to Raederle, “Did it come like this down from Erlenstar Mountain? This frightens me.”

At the fork, where the Winter River broke away from the Ose, the waters cleared finally with the brisk, blue-white current. Bri anchored at the fork, for the barge could go no farther, unloaded their gear and sent the barge back down the silent, shadowed river.

Tristan, watching it disappear into the trees, murmured, “I don’t care if I have to walk home; I am not going on that river again.” Then she turned, lifting her head to see the green face of Isig Mountain rising like a sentinel before the Pass. They seemed to be surrounded by mountains, the great mountain at whose roots the Osterland King lived, and the cold, distant peaks beyond the dead northern wastes. The morning sun was blazing above the head of Erlenstar Mountain, still glittering with unmelted snow. The light seemed to fashion the shadows, valleys, granite peaks that formed the Pass into the walls of some beautiful house lying open to the world.

Bri, his tongue full of names and tales he had not spoken for years, led them on horseback up the final stretch of river before the Pass. The bright, warm winds coming out of the backlands of the realm drove to the back of their memories the grey, dragging river behind them, and the secret, unexpected things dredged from its depths.

They found lodgings for a night in a tiny town that lay under the shadow of Isig. The next afternoon, they reached Kyrth, and saw at last the granite pillars honed by the Ose that were the threshold of Isig Pass. The sunlight seemed to leap goatlike from peak to peak; the air crackled white with the smell of melting ice. They had paused at a curve of road that led on one hand to Kyrth, on the other across a bridge to Isig. Raederle lifted her head. The ancient trees about them rose endlessly, face merging into face up the mountain, until they blurred together against the sky. Nearly hidden in them was a house with dark, rough walls and towers, windows that seemed faceted like jewels with color. Ribbons of smoke were coming up from within the walls; on the road a cart wheeled in and out of the trees toward it. The arch of its gates, massive and formidable as the gateway into the Pass, opened to the heart of the mountain.

“You’ll need supplies,” Bri Corbett said, and Raederle brought her thoughts out of the trees with an effort.

“For what?” she asked a little wearily. His saddle creaked as he turned to gesture towards the Pass. Lyra nodded.

“He’s right. We can hunt and fish along the way, but we need some food, more blankets, a horse for Tristan.” Her voice sounded tired, too, oddly timbreless in the hush of the mountains, “There will be no place for us to stay until we reach Erlenstar Mountain.”

“Does the High One know we’re coming?” Tristan asked abruptly, and they all glanced involuntarily at the Pass.

“I suppose so,” Raederle said after a moment. “He must. I hadn’t thought about it.”

Bri, looking a little nervous, cleared his throat. “You’re going just like that through the Pass.”

“We can’t sail and we can’t fly; have you got any better suggestions?”

“I do. I suggest you tell someone your intentions before you ride headlong into what was a death trap for the Prince of Hed. You might inform Danan Isig you’re in his land and about to go through the Pass. If we don’t come back out, at least someone in the realm will know where we vanished.”

Raederle looked again up at the enormous house of the King, ageless and placid under the vibrant sky. “I don’t intend to vanish,” she murmured. “I can’t believe we’re here. That’s the great tomb of the Earth-Master’s children, the place where the stars were shaped and set into a destiny older than the realm itself...” She felt Tristan stir behind her; saw, in her shadow on the ground, the mute shake of her head.

“This couldn’t have anything to do with Morgon!” she burst out, startling them. “He never knew anything about land like this. You could drop Hed like a button in it and never see it. How could—how could something have reached that far, across mountains and rivers and the sea, to Hed, to put those stars on his face?”

“No one knows that,” Lyra said with unexpected gentleness. “That’s why we’re here. To ask the High One.” She looked at Raederle, her brows raised questioningly. “Should we tell Danan?”

“He might argue. I’m in no mood to argue. That’s a house with only one door, and none of us knows what Danan Isig is like. Why should we trouble him with things he can’t do anything about anyway?” She heard Bri’s sigh and added, “You could stay in Kyrth while we go through the Pass. Then, if we don’t return, at least you’ll know.” His answer was brief and pithy; she raised her brows. “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it...”

Lyra turned her horse toward Kyrth. “We’ll send a message to Danan.”

Bri tossed his objections into the air with his hands. “A message,” he said morosely. “With this town crammed to the high beams with traders, the gossip will reach him before any message does.”

Reaching the small city, they found his estimations of the traders’ skills well-founded. The city curved to one side of the Ose, its harbor full of river-boats and barges heavily laden with furs, metals, weapons, fine plate, cups, jewels from Danan’s house, straining against their moorings to follow the flood waters. Lyra dispatched three of the guards to find a horse for Tristan, and the others to buy what food and cooking pots they might need. She found in a smelly tanners’ street, hides for them to sleep on, and in a cloth shop, fur-lined blankets. Contrary to Bri’s expectations, they were rarely recognized, but in a city whose merchants, traders and craftsmen had been immobilized through a long, harsh winter into boredom, their faces caused much cheerful comment. Bri, growling ineffectually, was recognized himself, and crossed the street while Raederle paid for the blankets, to speak to a friend in a tavern doorway. They lingered a little in the clothshop examining the beautiful furs and strange, thick wools. Tristan hovered wistfully near a bolt of pale green wool until a grim, wild expression appeared suddenly on her face and she bought enough for three skirts. Then, laden to the chin with bundles, they stepped back into the street and looked for Bri Corbett.

“He must have gone in the tavern,” Raederle said, and added a little irritably, for her feet hurt and she could have used a cup of wine, “He might have waited for us.” She saw then, above the small tavern, the dark, endless rise of granite cliff and the Pass, itself, blazing with a glacial light as the last rays of the sun struck peak after icy peak. She took a breath of the lucent air, touched with a chill of fear at the awesome sight, and wondered for the first time since she had left An, if she had the courage to come face-to-face with the High One.

The light faded as they watched; shadows slipped after it, patching the Pass with purple and grey. Only one mountain, far in the distance, still burned white in some angle of light. The sun passed finally beyond the limits of the world, and the great flanks and peaks of the mountain turned to a smooth, barren whiteness, like the moon. Then Lyra moved slightly, and Raederle remembered she was there.

“Was that Erlenstar?” Lyra whispered.

“I don’t know.” She saw Bri Corbett come out of the tavern, then cross the street. His face looked oddly somber; he seemed as he reached them and stood looking at them, at a loss for words. His face was sweating a little in the cool air; he took his cap off, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced it.

Then he said for some reason to Tristan, “We’re going to Isig Mountain, now, to talk to Danan Isig.”

“Bri, what’s wrong?” Raederle asked quickly. “Is there—is it something in the Pass?”

“You’re not going through the Pass. You’re going home.”

“What?”

“I’m taking you home tomorrow; there’s a keel-boat going down the Ose—”

“Bri,” Lyra said levelly. “You are not taking anyone as far as the end of the street without an explanation.”

“You’ll get enough of one, I think, from Danan.” He bent unexpectedly, put his hands on Tristan’s shoulders, and the familiar, stubborn expression on her face wavered slightly. He lifted one hand, groped for his hat again, and knocked it into the street. He said softly, “Tristan...” and Raederle’s hand slid suddenly over her mouth.

Tristan said warily, “What?”

“I don’t... I don’t know how to tell you.”

The blood blanched out of her face. She stared back at Bri and whispered, “Just tell me. Is it Eliard?”

“No. Oh, no. It’s Morgon. He’s been seen in Isig, and, three days ago, in the King’s court in Osterland. He’s alive.”

Lyra’s fingers locked in a rigid, painful grip above Raederle’s elbow. Tristan’s head bent, her hair brushing over her face. She stood so quietly they did not realize she was crying until her breath caught with a terrible sound in her throat, and Bri put his arms around her.

Raederle whispered, “Bri?” and his face turned to her.

“Danan Isig himself gave word to the traders. He can tell you. The trader I spoke to said—other things. You should hear them from Danan.”

“All right,” she said numbly. “All right.” She took Tristan’s cloth from her as Bri led them toward the horses. But she turned to see the dark, startled expression in Lyra’s eyes and, beyond her, the darkness moving down the Pass in the wake of the silvery Ose.

They found two of the guards before they left the city. Lyra asked them briefly to find lodgings in Kyrth; they accepted the situation without comment, but their faces were puzzled. The four followed the road across the bridge up the face of the mountain, which had settled into a shadowy, inward silence that the beat of their horse’s hooves on the dead pine needles never penetrated. The road’s end ran beneath the stone archway into Danan’s courtyard. The many workshops, kilns and forges all seemed quiet, but as they rode through the darkened yard, one of the workshop doors opened suddenly. Torchlight flared out of it; a young boy, gazing at the metalwork in his hands, stepped under the nose of Bri’s horse.

Bri reined sharply as the horse startled; the boy, glancing up in surprise, put an apologetic hand on the horse’s neck and it quieted. He blinked at them, a broad-shouldered boy with black, blunt hair and placid eyes, “Everyone’s eating,” he said. “May I tell Danan who has come, and will you eat with us?”

“You wouldn’t be Rawl Ilet’s son, would you?” Bri asked a little gruffly. “With that hair?”

The boy nodded. “I’m Bere.”

“I am Bri Corbett, ship-master of Mathom of An. I used to sail with your father, when I was a trader. This is Mathom’s daughter, Raederle of An; the Morgol’s land-heir, Lyra; and this is Tristan of Hed.”

Bere’s eyes moved slowly from face to face. He made a sudden, uncharacteristic movement, as though he had quelled an impulse to run shouting for Danan. Instead he said, “He’s just in the hall. I’ll get him—” He stopped speaking abruptly, a jump of excitement in his voice, and went to Tristan’s side. He held her stirrup carefully for her; she gazed down at his bent head in amazement a moment before she dismounted. Then he yielded and ran across the dark yard, flung the hall doors open to a blare of light and noise, and they heard his voice ringing above it: “Danan! Danan!” Bri, seeing the puzzled look on Tristan’s face, explained softly, “Your brother saved his life.”

The King of Isig followed Bere out. He was a big, broad man whose ash-colored hair glinted with traces of gold. His face was brown and scarred like tree bark, touched with an imperturbable calm that seemed on the verge of being troubled as he looked at them.

“You are most welcome to Isig,” he said. “Bere, take their horses. I’m amazed that the three of you travelled so far together, and yet I’ve heard not a word of your coming.”

“We were on our way to Erlenstar Mountain,” Raederle said. “We didn’t give anyone word of our leaving. We were buying supplies in Kyrth when Bri—when Bri gave us a piece of news that we could scarcely believe. So we came here to ask you about it. About Morgon.”

She felt the King’s eyes study her face in the shadows a moment, and she remembered then that he could see in the dark. He said, “Come in.” and they followed him into the vast inner hall. A weave of fire and darkness hung like shifting tapestries on the walls of solid stone. The cheerful voices of miners and craftsmen seemed fragmented, muted in the sheer silence of stone. Water wound in flaming, curved sluices cut through the floor, trailed lightly into darkness; torchlight spattered across raw jewels thrusting out of the walls. Danan stopped only to give a murmured instruction to a servant, then led them up a side staircase that spiralled through the core of a stone tower. He stopped at a doorway, drew back hangings of pure white fur.

“Sit down,” he urged them, as they entered. They found places on the chairs and cushions covered with fur and skins. “You look worn and hungry; food will be brought up, and I’ll tell you while you eat what I can.”

Tristan, her face quiet again, bewildered with wonder, said suddenly to Danan, “You were the one who taught him how to turn into a tree.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“That sounded so strange in Hed. Eliard couldn’t understand how Morgon did it. He used to stop and stare up at the apple trees; he said he didn’t know what Morgon did with—with his hair, and how could be breathe—Eliard.” Her hands tightened on the arms of her chair; they saw the flash of joy in her eyes that was constantly tempered by a wariness. “Is he all right? Is Morgon all right?”

“He seemed so.”

“But I don’t understand,” she said almost pleadingly. “He lost the land-rule. How can he be alive? And if he’s alive, how can he be all right?”

Danan opened his mouth, closed it again as servants entered with great trays of food and wine, bowls of water. He waited while the fire was laid against the cool mountain evening, and they had washed and begun to eat a little. Then he said gently, as though he were telling a story to one of his grandchildren, “A week ago, walking across my empty yard at twilight, I found someone coming towards me, someone who seemed to shape himself, as he moved, out of the twilight, the ember smoke, the night shadows, someone I never again thought to see in this world... When I first recognized Morgon, I felt for a moment as though he had just left my house and come back, he looked that familiar. Then, when I brought him into the light, I saw how he was worn to the bone, as if be had been burned from within by some thought, and how his hair was touched, here and there, with white. He talked to me far into the night, telling me many things, and yet it seemed that there was always some dark core of memory he would not open to me. He said that he knew he had lost the land-rule and asked for news of Hed, but I could tell him almost nothing. He asked me to give word to the traders that he was alive, so that you would know.”

“Is he coming home?” Tristan asked abruptly. Danan nodded.

“Eventually, but... he told me he was using every shade of power he had learned just to stay alive—”

Lyra leaned forward. “What do you mean ’learned’? Ghisteslwchlohm taught him things?”

“Well, in a way. Inadvertently.” Then his brows pulled together. “Now, how did you know that? Who it was that had trapped Morgon?”

“My mother guessed. Ghisteslwchlohm had also been one of the Masters at Caithnard when Morgon studied there.”

“Yes. He told me that.” They saw something harden in the peaceful eyes. “You see, apparently the Founder of Lungold was looking for something in Morgon’s mind, some piece of knowledge, and in probing every memory, every thought, burning away at the deep, private places of it, he opened his own mind and Morgon saw his vast reserves of power. That’s how he broke free of Ghisteslwchlohm at last, by drawing from the wizard’s mind the knowledge of his strengths and weaknesses, using his own power against him. He said, near the end, at times he did not know which mind belonged to whom, especially after the wizard stripped out of him all instinct for the land-rule. But at the moment he attacked finally, he remembered his name, and knew that in the long, black, terrible year he had grown stronger than even the Founder of Lungold...”

“What about the High One?” Raederle said. Something had happened in the room, she felt; the solid stones circling the firelight, the mountains surrounding the tower and the house seemed oddly fragile; the light itself a whim of the darkness crouched at the rim of the world. Tristan’s head was bent, her face hidden behind her hair; Raederle knew she was crying soundlessly. She felt something beginning to break in her own throat, and she clenched her hands against it. “What... Why didn’t the High One help him?”

Danan drew a deep breath. “Morgon didn’t tell me, but from things he did say, I think I know.”

“And Deth? The High One’s harpist?” Lyra whispered. “Did Ghisteslwchlohm kill him?”

“No,” Danan said, and at the tone in his voice even Tristan lifted her head. “As far as I know he’s alive. That was one thing Morgon said he wanted to do before he went back to Hed. Deth betrayed Morgon, led him straight into Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands, and Morgon intends to kill him.”

Tristan put her hands over her mouth. Lyra broke a silence brittle as glass, rising, stumbling into her chair as she turned. She walked straight across the room until a window intruded itself in her path, and she lifted both hands, laid them flat against it. Bri Corbett breathed something inaudible. Raederle felt the tears break loose in spite of the tight grip of her hands; she said, struggling at least to control her voice, “That doesn’t sound like either one of them.”

“No,” Danan Isig said, and again she heard the hardness in his voice. “The stars on Morgon’s face were of some thought born in this mountain, the stars on his sword and his harp cut here a thousand years before he was born. We’re touching the edge of doom, and it may be that the most we can hope for is an understanding of it. I have chosen to place whatever hope I have in those stars and in that Star-Bearer from Hed. For that reason I have complied with his request that I no longer welcome the High One’s harpist into my house or allow him to set foot across the boundaries of my land. I have given this warning to my own people and to the traders to spread.”

Lyra turned. Her face was bloodless, tearless. “Where is he? Morgon?”

“He told me he was going to Yrye, to talk to Har. He is being tracked by shape-changers; he moves painstakingly from place to place, taking shape after shape out of fear. As soon as he left my doorstep at midnight he was gone—a brush of ash, a small night animal—I don’t know what he became.” He was silent a moment, then added wearily, “I told him to forget about Deth, that the wizards would kill him eventually, that he had greater powers in the world to contend with; but he told me that sometimes, as he lay sleepless in that place, his mind drained, exhausted from Ghisteslwchlohm’s probing, clinging to despair like a hard rock because that was the only thing he knew belonged to him, he could hear Deth piecing together new songs on his harp... Ghisteslwchlohm, the shape-changers, he can in some measure understand, but Deth he cannot. He has been hurt deeply, he is very bitter...”

“I thought you said he was all right,” Tristan whispered. She lifted her head. “Which way is Yrye?”

“Oh, no,” Bri Corbett said emphatically. “No. Besides, he’s left Yrye, by now, surely. Not one step farther north are any of you going. We’re sailing straight back down the Winter to the sea, and then home. All of you. Something in this smells like a hold full of rotten fish.”

There was a short silence. Tristan’s eyes were hidden, but Raederle saw the set, stubborn line of her jaw. Lyra’s back was an inflexible, unspoken argument. Bri took his own sounding of the silence and looked satisfied.

Raederle said quickly before anyone could disillusion him, “Danan, my father left An over a month ago in the shape of a crow, to find out who killed the Star-Bearer. Have you seen or heard anything of him? I think he was heading for Erlenstar Mountain; he might have passed this way.”

“A crow.”

“Well, he—he is something of a shape-changer.”

Danan’s brows pulled together. “No. I’m sorry. Did he go directly there?”

“I don’t know. It’s always been difficult to know what he’s going to do. But why? Surely Ghisteslwchlohm wouldn’t be anywhere near the Pass, now.” A memory came to her then, of the silent grey waters of the Winter coming down from the Pass, churning faceless, shapeless forms of death up from its shadows. Something caught at her voice; she whispered, “Danan, I don’t understand. If Deth has been with Ghisteslwchlohm all this year, why didn’t the High One warn us, himself, about him? If I told you that we intended to leave tomorrow, go through the Pass to Erlenstar Mountain to talk to the High One, what advice would you give us?”

She saw his hand lift in a little, quieting gesture. “Go home,” he said gently. But he would not meet her eyes. “Let Bri Corbett take you home.”

She sat late that night, thinking, after they had finished talking, and Danan’s daughter, Vert, had taken them to small, quiet rooms in the tower to sleep in. The thick stones were chilly; the mountain had not fully emerged into spring, and she had lit a small fire laid in the hearth. She gazed into the restless flames, her arms around her knees. The fire flickered like thoughts in her eyes. Out of it rose fragments of knowledge she had; she wove them back and forth into one shapelessness after another. Somewhere far beneath her, she knew, hardened forever into memory, were the dead children of the Earth-Masters; the fire shivering over her hands might have drawn their faces out of their private blackness, but never warmed them. The stars that had grown in that same darkness, that had been brought to light and given their own pattern in Danan’s house, would have burned like questions in the flame, but of their own place in a greater pattern they offered little answer. The thought of them lit her mind like the blue-white stone Astrin had given her; she saw again the strange face always on the verge of turning towards her, moving into identity. Another face shifted into her mind: the private, austere face of a harpist who had placed her uncertain fingers on her first flute, who had, with his flawless harping and vigilant mind, been the emmisary of the High One for centuries. The face had been a mask; the friend who had led Morgon out of Hed, down the last steps to near-destruction, had been for centuries a stranger.

She shifted; the flames broke apart and rejoined. Things did not match, nothing seemed logical. Ylon leaped in her mind, at the sea’s harping the sea he came out of had given her and Mathom gifts of power; it had nearly given Morgon his death. Something in her had wept with a memory at the sight of the ruined city at King’s Mouth Plain; something in her had wrenched at her mind for the dangerous knowledge in the core of the small blue stone. Morgon had ridden towards the High One’s house, and the High One’s harpist had twisted his path into horror. A wizard had ripped from his mind the right he had been born with; the land-law, which no one but the High One could alter, and the High One had done nothing. She closed her eyes, feeling the prick of sweat at her hairline. Deth had acted in the High One’s name for five centuries; he had been given nothing less, in those centuries, than absolute trust. Following some private pattern of his own, in an unprecedented, inconceivable act, he had conspired to destroy a land-ruler. The High One had occasionally, in early days, dispensed doom for the simple intention. Why had he not acted against this man who had betrayed him as well as the Star-Bearer? Why had the High One not acted against Ghisteslwchlohm? Why... She opened her eyes, the fire flaring painfully at her widened pupils, and she blinked, seeing the room washed in flame. Why had Ghisteslwchlohm, who had the whole of the backlands of the realm to hide in, and who should have felt the need to hide, kept Morgon so close to Erlenstar Mountain? Why, when Deth had harped to himself that long year while Morgon clung to the despair that was his life, had the High One never heard that harping? Or had he?

She stumbled to her feet, away from the hot flames, away from an answer, impossible, appalling, on the verge of language in her mind. The hangings moved aside so quietly in the doorway that their movement seemed almost an illusion of the fire. She thought, barely seeing a dark-haired woman in the half-light, that it was Lyra. Then, staring into the dark, quiet eyes of the woman, something settled into place deep within her, like a stone falling to a ponderous silence on the ground floor of Isig Mountain.

She whispered, scarcely realizing she spoke, “I thought so.”

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