“I’m going home,” Morgon said.
“I don’t understand you,” said Lyra. She was sitting beside him at the fire, a light, crimson coat over her guard’s tunic, her face smudged with sleeplessness. Her spear lay loosely under one hand at her side. Two other guards stood at the doorway facing opposite directions, their spearheads, in the fragile morning sunlight, forming a gleaming apex of light. “He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him. It’s that simple. There is no law in Hed that forbids you to kill in self-defense, is there?”
“No.”
“Then why?” She sighed, her eyes on his face as he stared into the flames. His shoulder was set and bound; his face was set, as accessible as a word-locked book. “Are you angry because you were not well-guarded in the Morgol’s house? Morgon, I asked the Morgol this morning to be relieved of my place in the guard because of that, but she refused.”
She had his attention, then. “There was no reason for you to do that.”
Her chin rose slightly. “There was reason. Not only did I stand there doing nothing while you were fighting for your life, when I finally did try to kill the shape-changer, I missed. I never miss.”
“He created an illusion of silence; it wasn’t your fault that you heard nothing.”
“I failed to guard you. That’s simple, too.”
“Nothing is simple.”
He leaned back against the cushions, wincing a little; his brows pinched together again. He was silent; she waited, asked tentatively, “Well, then are you angry with Deth because he was with the Morgol when you were attacked?”
“Deth?” He looked at her blankly. “Of course not.”
“Then what are you angry about?”
He looked down at the silver cup and the wine she had poured for him, touched it. Finally, the words dredged slowly, painfully from him as out of some shameful place, “You saw the sword.”
She nodded. “Yes.” The perplexed line between her brows deepened. “Morgon, I’m trying to understand.”
“It’s hardly difficult. Somewhere in this realm there is a starred sword waiting for the Star-Bearer to claim it. And I refuse to claim it. I’m going home where I belong.”
“But Morgon, it’s only a sword. You don’t even have to use it if you don’t want to. Besides, you might need it.”
“I will need it.” His fingers were rigid on the circle of silver. “That would be inevitable. The shape-changer knew. He knew. He was laughing at me when I killed him. He knew exactly what I was thinking when no one except the High One himself could have known.”
“What were you thinking?”
“That no man could accept the name the stars on that sword gave him and still keep the land-rule of Hed.”
Lyra was silent. The uneasy sunlight faded, leaving the room grey with shadows; leaves, wind-tossed, tapped like fingers against the window. She said finally, her hands clasped tightly around her knees, “You can’t just turn your back on this and go home.”
“I can.”
“But you—you’re a riddle-master, too—you can’t just stop answering riddles.”
He looked at her. “I can. I can do anything I must to keep the name I was born with.”
“If you go back to Hed, they’ll kill you there. You don’t even have guards in Hed.”
“At least I will die in my own land, be buried in my own fields.”
“How can it matter so much? How can you face death in Hed that you can’t face in Herun?”
“Because it’s not death I’m afraid of—it’s losing everything I love for a name and a sword and a destiny I did not choose and will not accept. I would rather die than lose the land-rule.”
She said wistfully, “What about us? What about Eliard?”
“Eliard?”
“If they kill you in Hed, they’ll still be there and so will Eliard. And we’ll be alive, asking questions without you to answer them.”
“The High One will protect you,” he said grimly. “That’s his business. I can’t do it. I’m not going to follow the path of some fate dreamed up for me thousands of years ago, like a sheep going to be fleeced.” He took a sip of the wine finally, saw her uncertain, anxious face. He said more gently, “You are the land-heir of Herun. Some day you will rule it, and your eyes will turn as gold as the Morgol’s. This is your home; you would die to defend it; your place is here. At what price would you give up Herun, turn your face from it forever?”
She was silent; one shoulder gave a little shrug. “Where else could I go? I don’t belong anywhere else. But it’s different for you,” she added, as he opened his mouth. “You do have another name, another place. You are the Star-Bearer.”
“I would rather be a pigherder in Hel,” he said tartly. He dropped his head back wearily, one hand massaging his shoulder. Rain began then, thin, tentative; the plants in the Morgol’s garden bowed under it. He closed his eyes, smelled, unexpectedly, the autumn rains falling over three-quarters of Hed. There was a sound of fresh wood falling on the fire, and the eager snap of flame. The voices of the flames tangled together, turned familiar after a while; he heard Tristan and Eliard arguing comfortably, pointlessly, beside the hearth at Akren, with Snog Mutt, a handful of bones and cobweb, snoring like rain in the background. He half-listened to the argument woven into the soft whispers of the fire, until the voices began to fade and he had to strain to hear them; they finally died away, and he opened his eyes to the cold, grey rain of Herun.
Deth was sitting opposite him, speaking softly to the Morgol, uncoiling broken strings from his harp. Their faces turned as Morgon straightened. El, her long hair unbound, brushing her tired face, said, “I sent Lyra to bed. I have set guards at every crack and crevice of this house, but it’s difficult to suspect the ground-mist, or the spider wandering in from the rain. How do you feel?”
“All right.” Then, his eyes on Deth’s harp, he whispered, “I remember. I heard strings break, when I struck the shape-changer. That was your harp.”
“Only five strings,” Deth said. “A small price to pay Corrig for your life. El gave me strings from Tirunedeth’s harp to match them.” He put the harp down.
“Corrig.” Morgon drew breath; the Morgol was gazing at Deth wonderingly. “Deth, how of all things do you know that shape-changer’s name.”
“I harped with him once, years ago. I met him even before I entered the High One’s service.”
“Where?” the Morgol asked.
“I was riding alone down the northern coast from Isig, in the far reaches belonging neither to Isig nor Osterland. I camped one night on the beach, sat late in the night beside my fire, harping ... and out of the darkness came an answering harping, beautiful, wild, flawless ... He came into the circle of my firelight, glistening with tide, his harp of shell and bone and mother of pearl, and demanded songs of me. I played as well for him as for the kings I had played to; I dared not do less. He gave me songs in return; he stayed with me until dawn, until the sun rose, and his song as the red northern sun flamed across the sea burned in my heart for days after I heard it. He melted like mist into the morning sea-mist, but first he gave me his name. He asked for mine. I told him, and he laughed.”
“He laughed at me last night,” Morgon whispered.
“He played for you, too, from what you told us, then.”
“He played my death. The death of Hed.” His eyes lifted from the core of the fire. “What kind of power could do that? Was it truth? Or illusion?”
“Did it matter?”
He shook his head. “No. He was a very great harpist ... Does the High One know what he was?”
“The High One said nothing to me, beyond instructing me to leave Herun with you as quickly as possible.”
Morgon was silent. He got to his feet awkwardly, went to the window. Through the glistening air, as though he had the Morgol’s vision, he could see the wide, wet plains of Caithnard where trade-ships were setting sail for An, Isig, Hed. He said softly, “Deth, tomorrow, if I can ride, I am going east to the trade-port Hlurle, to take a ship home. I should be safe; no one will expect that. But even if they find me again at sea, I would rather die a land-ruler returning home than a nameless, placeless man being forced into a life I can’t understand or control.”
There was no answer but the rain pounding with impersonal fury against the glass. Then, as the sound tapered away, he heard the harpist rise, felt a hand on his shoulder, turning him. He met the dark, dispassionate gaze silently; the harpist said softly, “It’s more than the killing of Corrig. Will you tell me what is troubling you?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to accompany you to Hed?”
“No. There’s no reason for you to risk your life again.”
“How will you reconcile turning back with what you held true at Caithnard?”
“I have made a choice,” Morgon said steadily, and the hand fell from his shoulder. He felt the tooth of an odd sorrow bite into him, the sorrow of an ending, and he added, “I’ll miss you.”
Something came into the harpist’s face, breaking through the calm agelessness of it until Morgon sensed for the first time the concern, the uncertainty, the endless experience that ran through his mind like water beneath ice. Deth did not answer; his head bent slightly as to a king or an inevitability.
Morgan left the City of Circles before dawn two days later. He wore against the thin, icy mists a heavy, richly lined coat the Morgol had given nun. A hunting bow that Lyra had made for him hung with his saddlebags. He had left the packhorse with Deth, since Hlurle lay scarcely three days away, a small port the traders used to unload goods bound for Herun. Deth had given Morgon what money he had had left in case he had to wait, for in late autumn, in the heavy seas, ships grew scarce on the northern coast.
Morgon’s harp lay at his back, encased against the damp air; his horse’s hooves made soft rhythmic whispers through the long grass of the pastures. The sky was clear before dawn; the stars, huge, cold, gave him light. In the distance tiny lights from farmhouses winked alive, golden eyes in the darkness. The fields of the city gave way to a plain where huge stones rose originless as wizards around him. He felt their shadows as he rode beneath them. Mists fell then, rolling down from the hills; following Lyra’s advice he stopped, found shelter under a rare tree, and waited.
He spent the first night at the foot of the eastern hills. That night, among the silent trees, alone for the first time in many weeks, he watched the smoke-colored dusk fade gently into night, and, in the light of his small, solitary fire, he took out the starred harp and began to play. The sound was rich and true under his fingers, made for a delicate, expert skill. After an hour his playing slowed. He sat examining the harp as he had never done before, tracing every curve of gold, marvelling at the white moons untarnished by age, sea, use. He touched the stars softly, as though he were touching flame.
The next day he spent picking a path through the low, empty hills. He found a stream lancing between them and followed it, winding through groves of pale ash and oak trees with their beautiful, endless weavings of dark, bare branches. The stream, quickening, bouncing over tree roots and green rocks, led him out of the trees to the bald, whistling eastern slopes where he could see unexpectedly, the flat no-man’s-land of the eastern coast running between Ymris and Osterland, the faint white heads of mountains rising in the farthest point of the High One’s realm, and the broad, endless eastern sea.
The stream joined a wide river that had curled around north Herun; struggling with a mental map, he realized it was the Cwill that took its roaring white waters from White Lady Lake, the enormous lake deep in the wastelands that fed also the seven Lungold Lakes. Hlurle, he remembered, lay just north of its mouth. He camped that night on the joint of land between the stream and the river, his thoughts lulled by their two voices: one deep, secret, swift; the other light, high, hospitable. He lay quietly by the fire, his head resting on his saddle, reaching out now and then to add a branch or a pinecone to the flames. Gently as small birds landing in his mind came questions he no longer had to answer; he looked at each one curiously, as though it had never occurred to him before, dispassionately, as though the answers had nothing to do with him, or with the white-haired, half-blind Ymris land-heir, or with the King of Ymris struggling with a strange war growing on his coasts, or with the Morgol, the peace of her house shattered by a hint of power that had no origins, no definition. He saw in his mind’s eye the stars on his face, the stars on the harp, the stars on the sword. He looked at himself as though he were a figure in some ancient tale: a Prince of Hed reared to harvest bare-backed in the sun, to puzzle over the varied diseases of trees and animals, to read the weather from the color of a cloud, or a tension in a breathless afternoon, to the simple, hard-headed, uncurious life of Hed. He saw that same figure in the voluminous robe of a Caithnard student pouring late at night over ancient books, his lips shaping, soundlessly, riddle, answer, stricture, riddle, answer, stricture; walking, from pure choice, one morning into a cold tower in Aum, finding himself, in the face of death, with no name, no way of life, no birthright to save him but his mind. He saw a Prince of Hed with three stars on his face leave his land, find a starred harp in Ymris, a sword, a name, and a hint of doom in Herun. And those two figures out of the ancient tale: the Prince of Hed and the Star-Bearer, stood apart from each other; he could find nothing that reconciled them.
He broke a branch, fed it to the fire; his thoughts turned to the High One whose home lay in the heart of one of the distant mountains to the north. The High One, from the beginning, had left men free to find their own destinies. His sole law was land-law, the law that passed like a breath of life from land-heir to land-heir; if the High One died, or withdrew his immense and intricate power, he could turn his realm into a wasteland. The evidences of his powers were subtle and unexpected; he was thought of, when at all, with both awe and trust; his dealings with rulers, generally through his harpist, were invariably courteous. His one concern was the land; his one law, the law instilled deeper than thought, deeper than dreaming, in his land-rulers. Morgon thought of the terrible tale of Awn of An, who, trying to discourage an army from Hel, had set fire to An, sending flames billowing over half the land, burning harvests, orchards, shearing the hillsides and riverbanks. Safe at last, he had awakened out of a sleep of exhaustion to realize he had lost the wordless, gentle awareness of things beyond eyesight that had been with him, like a hidden eye, since the death of his father. His land-heir, running grief-stricken into the room, had stopped, astonished, to find him still alive ...
The fire sank low, like a beast curling to sleep. Morgon tossed a handful of twigs and dry acorns on it, and it started awake. Awn had killed himself. The wizard Talies, methodical and sharp-tongued, who had hated Awn’s warring, recorded the incident with relish, mentioned it to a passing trader, and within three months, precarious as trading was in those years of turmoil, all battling had ceased abruptly in the High One’s realm. Peace did not last long; the battles over boundary and kingship had not ended yet, but they grew less frequent, and less devastating. Then the ports and the great cities had begun to grow: Anuin, Caithnard, Caerweddin, Kraal, Kyrth ...
And now, some strange, dark power, unsuspected by most lands, unchecked by the High One, was building along the coasts. Not since the wizards lived had there been people of such power; the wizards, themselves skilled, restless and arbitrary, would never had dreamed of trying to kill a land-ruler. There had been scarcely a hint of their existence in the tales and histories of the land until breaking a silence of centuries, they had roused to meet the Star-Bearer at Caithnard. A face floated into the fire before Morgon’s eyes: foam-white, blurred, eyes luminous like wet kelp, wet shell ... they held a smile, knowing what he was thinking, knowing ...
He touched the heart of the questioning; his lips moved, whispering it, “Why?”
A little cold breeze moved across the river; his fire shivered under it. He realized then how tiny that fire was against the enormous darkness. A fear prickled over him; he froze, straining to hear above the water the soft breaking of a twig, the stirring of leaves around him. But the chattering stream distorted sounds, and the wind rose, timeless in the bare branches. He lay back. His fire sank into itself; the stars clinging to the black oak limbs seemed to shake and sway in the winds. A few drops of rain fell, hard as acorns, to the earth. As though the wind carried an echo of the vast emptiness about him, his fear died away. He turned on his side, slept without dreaming.
The next day, following the Cwill, he reached the sea. Hlurle, little more than a dock, a scattering of warehouses, inns, and small, worn houses, lay hunched under a mist of rain beating in from the sea. There were two ships moored among the fishing boats, their furled sails were blue. There seemed to be no one around. He rode, drenched and shivering, down the wharf, hearing beneath the rain, the rattle of chain, the musing creak of timber, the occasional nudge of a boat against the dock. Ahead of him, light from a small tavern spilled into the wet air. He stopped there, dismounted under its broad eaves.
Inside, the rough tables and benches, lit by smokey torches and an enormous fire, were full of sailors, traders with jewels on their bands, in their caps, disgruntled fishermen who had come in with the rain. Morgon, enduring a brief, casual scrutiny as he walked dripping to the fire, unbuttoned his coat with numb fingers and hung it to dry. He sat down on the bench in front of the fire; the tavern keeper paused at his elbow.
“Lord?” he said questioningly, and then, with a glance at the coat, “You are far from home.”
Morgon nodded tiredly. “Beer,” he said. “And what is that I smell?”
“A fine, thick stew, with tender lamb, mushrooms, and wine—I’ll bring you a bowl.”
He ate and drank in weary silence, the smoke and heat and tangle of voices lulling as the river’s voice. He sat sipping his beer, which he realized probably came from Hed, when the smell of wet wool and a chill of rain and wind disturbed him. A trader, the fur trim on his cloak beaded with water, sat down beside him. Morgon felt eyes on his face.
The man rose after a moment, divested himself of his cloak with a sprinkle of rain, and said apologetically, “Your pardon, Lord. You’re wet enough without my help.”
He was richly dressed in black leather and velvet, his hair and his eyes in a rough, kindly face dark as blackbird’s wings. Morgon, drowsy in the warmth, stirred himself and put his mind to practical matters. There was no way of knowing whether he spoke to a man or the illusion of a man; he accepted the risk and said, “Do you know where those ships are going?”
“Yes. They are bound back to Kraal, to go into dry dock for the winter.” He paused, his shrewd eyes on Morgon’s face. “You don’t want to go north? What do you need?”
“Passage to Caithnard. I’m supposed to be at the college.”
The man shook his head, his brow wrinkling. “It’s late in the season ... Let me think. We just came from Anuin, stopping at Caithnard, Tol, and Caerweddin.”
“Tol,” Morgon said involuntarily. “For what?”
“To take Rood of An from Caithnard to Hed.” He caught the tavern maid’s attention and got wine. Morgon settled back against the bench, his brows drawn, hoping Rood had contented himself with going only as far as Hed in search of him. The trader took a long swallow of wine, sat back himself. He said moodily, “It was a depressing journey. There was a storm around Hed that blew us down the coast, and we were in living fear of losing both the ship and Rood of An ... He’s got a sharp tongue when he’s seasick,” he added thoughtfully, and Morgon almost laughed. “At Tol, there was Eliard of Hed, and the young one—Tristan—pleading for news of their brother. All I could tell them was that he’d been seen in Caerweddin, but I couldn’t tell them what he was doing there. We lost sail in that storm, but we found we couldn’t land in Meremont; there were king’s warships in the harbor there, so we limped to Caerweddin. I heard then, for the first time, that his young wife had vanished, and his brother was home again, half-blind. No one knows what to make of it” He sipped wine. Morgon, his eyes on the fire, felt his mind fill with faces: Astrin’s, white-eyed, twisted with pain; the Lady Eriel’s, shy, beautiful, merciless; Heureu’s face, realizing slowly what kind of woman he had married ... He shivered. The trader glanced at him.
“You’re wet through. That was a long ride from Herun. I wonder if I know your father.”
Morgon smiled at the hint “Probably. But he’s got a name so long even I can’t pronounce it for you.”
“Ah.” There was an answering smile in the dark eyes. “Your pardon. I wouldn’t pry for the world. But I need some idle chatter to warm my bones. I’ve got a wife waiting for me in Kraal, if we make it there, and two little sons I haven’t seen for two months. Passage to Caithnard ... The only ships would be coming down from Kraal, and I can’t remember who’s up there. Wait” He turned, shouted into the din behind them. “Joss! Who’s left in Kraal?”
“Three of Rustin Kor’s ships, waiting for a cargo of timber from Isig,” a voice boomed back in answer. “We didn’t pass them; they must be still up there. Why?”
“The Herun lordling needs to get back to the College. Will they stop here, do you think?”
“Rustin Kor has half a warehouse full of Herun wine here; he’ll pay winter storage fees if he doesn’t stop.”
“He’ll stop,” the trader said, turning back to Morgon. “I remember. It’s Mathom of An who wants the wine. Do you like riddling, then? Do you know who’s a great riddler? The wolf of Osterland. I was in his court last summer at Yrye, trying to interest him in a pair of amber cups, when a man came in from Lungold to challenge him to a game. Har has a standing wager that any man who wins a game with him can have the first thing he asks for when the game is done. It’s a tricky prize: there’s a tale of one man, long ago, who won the game after a day and a night, and he was so dry the first thing he asked for was a cup of water. I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway, this man—he was a little, wizened, arrogant one, looked as if he’d been sucked dry by riddles—kept Har at it two days, and the old wolf loved it. Everyone got drunk listening, and I sold more cloth and jewels there than I had all year. It was wonderful. Finally the wolf-king asked a riddle the little man couldn’t answer—he’d never heard of it. He got angry and challenged the riddle. Har told him to go take the riddle to the Masters at Caithnard, and then he asked ten riddles in a row the man couldn’t answer, one right after another—I thought the little one was going to burst with choler. But Har soothed him and said he hadn’t played such a great game in years.”
“What was the first riddle the man couldn’t answer?” Morgon asked curiously.
“Oh—let me think. What will one star call out of dark ... No. What will one star call out of silence, one star out of darkness, and one star out of death?”
Morgon’s breath caught sharply. He straightened, his face rigid, white, his eyes narrowed, searching the trader’s. For a moment the dark face wavered before him in the flames, elusive, expressionless as a mask; and then he realized that the trader was staring at him in utter astonishment.
“Lord, what did I say?” Then his face changed, and his hand went out abruptly toward Morgon. “Oh,” he whispered, “I think you are no Herun lordling.”
“Who are you?”
“Lord, my name is Ash Strag from Kraal; I have a wife and two children, and I would sooner cut off my hand than hurt you. But do you realize how they’ve been looking for you?”
Morgon’s hand eased open. He said after a moment, his eyes unwavering on the anxious face, “I know.”
“You’re going home, now? From Anuin to Caerweddin, I heard always the same question: Have you news of the Prince of Hed? What is it? Are you in trouble? Can I help you?” He paused. “You don’t trust me.”
“I’m sorry—“
“No. I heard. I heard a tale from Tobec Rye, the trader who found you with Lord Astrin in Ymris. He gave me some mad story that you and the High One’s harpist had been nearly drowned on a trade-ship whose crew vanished, and that one of the traders on it had been Jarl Acker. I saw Jarl Acker die, two years ago during a run from Caerweddin to Caithnard. He caught a fever, and he asked to be buried in the sea. So we—so we did that.” His voice dropped again, hushed. “Someone stole his shape back out of the sea?”
Morgon dropped against the bench back. His blood was still jumping sickly. “You didn’t—you didn’t tell that to my brother.”
“Of course not.” He was silent again, studying Morgon, his dark brows winging together. “It was true, about the vanishing traders? Someone wants to kill you? That’s why you’re afraid of me. But you weren’t afraid until I mentioned the stars. Those stars. Lord, is someone trying to kill you because of the stars on your face?”
“Yes.”
“But why? Who in the world could benefit, killing a Prince of Hed? It’s irrational.”
Morgon drew a breath. The familiar din was unchanged behind him; there was no one near enough to hear them, or who even looked curious. All knew that if anything of interest were gleaned from Morgon’s presence, it would be promptly shared in his absence. He rubbed his face with his hands. “Yes. Did Har answer the riddle about the stars?”
“No.”
“How are Eliard and Tristan?”
“Worried sick. They asked if you were on your way home from Caerweddin, and I said as tactfully as possible that perhaps you were pursuing a circuitous route because no one knew where you were. I never expected to see you as far north as Hlurle.”
“I’ve been in Herun.”
Ash Strag shook his head. “It’s unheard of.” He sipped wine, brooding. “I don’t like it. People of strange power impersonating traders—are they wizards?”
“No. I suspect they’re even more powerful.”
“And they’re pursuing you? Lord, I’d go straight to the High One.”
“They’ve tried to kill me four times,” Morgon said wearily, “and I’m only as far as Herun.”
“Four times, once at sea—“
“Twice at Ymris, and once again in Herun.”
“Caerweddin.” The sharp eyes flicked to him. “You went to Caerweddin, and now the King’s wife is vanished, and Astrin Ymris, who came with you, is blind in one eye. What happened while you were there? Where is Eriel Ymris?”
“Ask Heureu.”
The drawn breath hissed away into the sound of rain. “I don’t like it,” the trader whispered. “I’ve heard tales I wouldn’t repeat to my own brother, met men who had hearts made of the leavings of animals, but I’ve never heard anything like this. I’ve never heard of anything that could strike at the land-rulers before, so quietly, so powerfully. And it’s all because of your stars?”
Morgon winced. “I’m going home,” he said, almost to himself. The trader, holding their cups up in the air to get the tavern maid’s attention, got them filled, pushed Morgon’s back to him. He said carefully, “Lord, is it wise to go by sea?”
“I can’t go back through Ymris. I’ve got to risk it.”
“Why? You’re halfway to Isig—more than halfway. Lord, come with us to Kraal—“ He sensed Morgon’s faint withdrawal, and said gently, “I know. I know. I don’t blame your mistrust. But I know myself, and there’s not a man in this room I mistrust. It would be better for you to risk going north with us than to take a strange ship to Hed. If you wait here too long, your enemies may find you.”
“I’m going home.”
“But, Lord, they’ll kill you in Hed!” His voice had risen; he checked, glancing around him. “How do you expect your farmers to protect you? Go to the High One. How can you find answers to anything in Hed?”
Morgon, staring at him, began to laugh suddenly. He covered his eyes with his fingers; felt the trader’s hand on his shoulder. He whispered, “I’m sorry, but I’ve never had a trader hand me the heart of a maze of riddles so aptly before.”
“Lord ... ”
He dropped his hands, his face quieting. “I will not go with you. Let the High One answer a few riddles; I’m doing no good. The realm is his business; Hed is mine.”
The hand at his shoulder shook him lightly, as if to wake him. “Hed is doing well as it is, Lord,” the trader said softly. “It’s the rest of us, the world outside of Hed you’ve troubled in your passing, that I’m worried about.”
The ships sailed with the evening tide. Morgon watched them leave in an eerie, beautiful band of lavender-white twilight stretching across the sea beneath the rain clouds. He had stabled his horse, taken a room in the tavern to wait for Rustin Kor’s ships; the rain-streaked window gave him a view of the quiet docks, the wild sea, and the two ships, taking the sullen waves with the grace of sea birds. He watched them until the light faded and their sails darkened. Then he lay on the bed, something nagging at the back of his mind, something he could not touch, though he wove strand after strand of thought trying to trace it. Raederle’s face slipped unexpectedly into his mind, and he was startled at the joylessness he felt in himself at the thought of her.
He had raced her up the hill to the College once, years ago, she in a long, green dress she had hiked to her knees to run in. He had let her win, and, at the top, happy, panting, she had mocked his courtesy. Rood came behind with a handful of jewelled pins that had fallen out of her hair; he tossed them to her; they caught light like a swarm of strange, glittering insects, scarlet, green, amber, purple. Too tired to catch them, she had let them fall around her, laughing, her red hair massed like a mane in the wind. And Morgon had watched her, forgetting to laugh, forgetting even to move, until he saw Rood’s black eyes on his face, quizzical, for once almost gentle. And, remembering back, he heard Rood’s voice, harsh, stripped of pity on the last day they had met: If you offer the peace of Hed to Raederle, that will be a lie.
He sat up on the bed, knowing now what bothered him. Rood had known from the beginning. He could not go to Anuin taking honor for winning a game of riddles in a tower in Aum when all round him riddles were forming, deadly and imperative, for a game he refused to play. He could turn his back on other kingdoms, close the doors of the peace of Hed about himself, but to reach out to her would be to reach out to the strangeness, the uncertainty of his other name, for he could offer her nothing less than himself.
He rose, sat on the window ledge a long time, watching the wet world grow dark before him. An impossible web of riddles was being woven about his name; he had wrenched himself from it once; he had only to lift his hand to touch it, become ensnared in it again. He had a choice, for the moment: to return to Hed, live quietly without Raederle, asking no questions, waiting for the day when the storm brewing, growing on the coasts and the mainland would unleash its full fury at Hed—that day, he knew, would come soon. Or to set his mind to a riddle-game he had no hope of winning, and whose prize, if he did win, was a name that might cut every tie that bound him to Hed.
He moved after a while, realized the room was black. He got up, felt for a candle in the dark, lit it. The flame etched his face in the window, startling him. The flame itself was a star in his hand.
He dropped the candle to the floor, ground the flame underfoot, and lay back down on the bed. Late that night, after the rain had stopped and the wind’s voice had dropped to a murmur, he fell asleep. He woke again at dawn, went downstairs to buy food and a skin of wine from the tavern keeper. Then he saddled his horse, left Hlurle without looking back, heading north to Yrye, to ask the King of Osterland a riddle.
Two weeks after he left Hlurle, the winter snow began to fall. He had felt its coming, tasted it in the air, heard it coming in the voices of wild, restless winds. He had gone up the coast to the mouth of the Ose, the great river whose roots lay in the heart of Erlenstar Mountain. The river ran through Isig Pass, past the doorstep of Isig Mountain, to form the southern boundary of Osterland on its way to the sea. Morgon followed it upriver patiently, through unclaimed land, forgotten forests that only traders sailing down from Isig ever saw, rough, rocky country where herds of deer, elk, mountain sheep ranged, their coats thick against the winter. Once he thought he saw moving through a far stretch of forest a herd of vesta, their legendary horns thin slivers of gold among the trees. But against the white, empty sky, they could have been a drift of mist, and he was uncertain.
He moved as quickly as possible through the wild country, feeling the snow at his heels, hunting sporadically, wondering in the back of his mind if the wilderness would ever end, or if there were any men left in the High One’s realm, or if the river he followed were perhaps not the Ose but some unmapped water that wound westward into the vast, uninhabited backlands of the realm. That thought woke him more than once at night, to wonder what be was doing in the middle of nowhere, where a broken bone, a frightened animal, a sudden storm could kill him as easily as his enemies. The constant fears ran like a current in his mind. Yet there was an odd peace he sometimes felt when at night there were no colors but the fire and the black sky, and no sounds in the world but his harp. At those moments he belonged to the night; he felt nameless, bodiless, as though he could take root and become a tree, drift apart and become the night.
Finally, he began to see farms in the distance, herds of sheep, cattle grazing by the river, and knew somewhere he had crossed into Osterland. Partly from caution, partly out of a habit of silence that had grown with him the past weeks, he avoided the farms and small towns along the river. He stopped only once to buy bread, cheese and wine, and to get directions to Yrye. The curious glances made him uneasy; he realized how strange he must seem, neither trader nor trapper, coming out of the backlands of Osterland with a bright, worn, Herun coat and hair like an ancient hermit’s.
Yrye, the wolf-king’s home, lay north, in the arms of Grim Mountain, the central peak in a range of low, border mountains; there was a road leading to it out of one of the villages. Morgon, riding out of the town, camped for the night in a woods nearby. The winds whined like wolves through the pine; be woke near dawn chilled to the bone, made a fire that fluttered like a helpless bird. The winds moved about him as he rode that day, speaking to one another in some rough, deep language. At evening they quieted; the sky was a smooth fleece of cloud beyond which the sun wandered and set unnoticed. In the night the snow began to fall; he woke beneath a coat of white.
The fall was gentle, the cold winds were still; he rode through the day in a dreamlike silence of white broken only by the flick of a blackbird’s wing, a brown hare’s scuttle to shelter. He fashioned a tent, when he stopped at evening, out of the tanned skin he had been sleeping on, and found a snarled patch of dry bramble for kindling. His thoughts turned, as he ate, to the strange, ancient king who in his riddle-gatherings had chanced upon another the Masters at Caithnard had never learned. Har, the wolf-king, had been born even before most of the wizards; he had ruled Osterland since the years of Settlement. Tales of him were numerous and awesome. He could change shape. He had been tutored by the wizard Suth, during Suth’s wildest years. He bore scars on his hands the shape of vesta horns, and he riddled like a Master. Morgon leaned back against a boulder, sipped hot wine slowly, wondering where the king had got his knowledge. He felt again the faint stirrings of curiosity that had been dulled for weeks, of a longing to return to the world of men. He finished his wine, reached out to pack the cup. And then he saw, beyond the circle of his fire, eyes watching him, He froze. His bow lay on the other side of the fire; his knife was stuck upright on the wedge of cheese. He began to reach for it slowly. The eyes blinked. There was a gathering, a soft stirring; then a vesta walked into his firelight.
Something jumped in the back of Morgon’s throat. It was huge, broad as a farmhouse, with a deer’s delicate, triangular face. Its pelt was blazing white; its hooves and crescents of horn were the color of beaten gold. It eyed him fathomlessly out of eyes of liquid purple, then reached up above his head to nibble at a pine bough. Morgon, his breath still as though he were reaching toward a forbidden thing, lifted one hand to the white, glowing fur. The vesta did not seem to notice the gentle touch. After a moment Morgon reached for his bread, tore a piece. The vesta’s head lowered curiously at the scent, nuzzled at the bread. Morgon touched the narrow bone of its face; it jerked beneath his hand, and the purple eyes rose again, huge and dimensionless, to his face. Then the vesta lowered its head, continued eating, while he gently scratched the space between its horns. It finished the piece, sniffed his hand for more. He fed it the rest, piece by piece, until there was no more. It searched his empty hands, his coat a moment, then turned, faded with scarcely a sound back into the night.
Morgon drew a full breath. The vesta, he had heard, were shy as children. It was a rare pelt seen in trade-shops, for they were wary of men, and the weight of Har’s wrath lay on any man, trader or trapper, caught killing vesta. They followed snow, wandering farther and farther into the mountains during the summer. Morgon, with a sudden touch of unease, wondered what it had smelled in the air that night that had brought it so far from the mountains.
Before morning he found out. A wind, wailing like a bee swarm, wrenched the tent loose over his head and spun it into the river. Huddled beside his horse, his eyes stinging with snow, he waited for a dawn that it seemed would never come. When it did come finally, it only turned the blankness of night into a milky chaos through which Morgon could not even see the river running ten steps away from him.
A helpless terrible despair rose in him. Chilled even beneath the thick hooded coat, the winds snarling like wolves around him, he lost sense of the river’s position, felt the whole world a blind, patternless turmoil. He forced himself to remember. He rose stiffly, feeling his horse trembling with cold under the blanket he had thrown over it. He murmured something to it out of numb lips; heard it thrashing nervously to stand as he turned. Head bent against the snow, he walked almost blindly to where he thought the river was. It loomed out of the blizzard at him unexpectedly, swift, eddied with snow; he nearly stepped headlong into it. He turned back to get his horse, bent to retrace his footsteps. When he reached the end of them, he found his horse gone.
He stood still and called to it; the wind pushed the words back into his mouth. He took a step toward a shadow in the snow, and it melted away before his eyes into whiteness. When he turned again, he could not see in the drift of snow, either his pack or his harp.
He went forward blindly, dug in the snow with his hands, beneath boulders and trees that melted out of the buzzard. He tried to see; the wind spat flakes huge as coins into his eyes. He searched desperately, furiously, losing what fragile sense of direction he had gained, moving patternlessly, dazed by the incessant, whining winds.
He found the harp finally, already half-buried; as he held it in his hands, he began to think again. It lay where he had left it, beneath the boulder he had slept beside; the river, he knew, was to his left. His pack, and saddle were somewhere in the mist in front of him; he did not dare lose sense of the river again to look for them. He hung his harp over his shoulder and slowly, carefully, found his way back to the river.
His trek upriver was painfully slow. He stayed dangerously close to the water in order to see the faint, slate-grey glints of it; sometimes when everything melted before his eyes into one monotonous white blur, he would stop short, wondering if he had been threading his way along an illusion. His face and hands grew numb; the hair outside of his hood was icy. He lost all sense of time, not knowing if moments or hours had passed since he had started walking, not knowing whether it was noon or evening. He dreaded the coming of night.
He walked headlong into a tree once, instead of moving around it; he stood where he had stopped, his face resting against the cold, rough bark. He wondered absently how long he could continue, what would happen when he could not move another step, when night fell and he could no longer follow the river. The tree, swaying rhythmically in the wind, was soothing. He knew he should move, but his arms refused to loose the trunk. Unexpectedly, for his thoughts were formless as the blizzard, he saw Eliard’s face in his mind, angry, troubled, and he heard his own voice out of some long-lost past. I swear this: I will come back.
His grip on the tree loosened reluctantly. He remembered the belief in Eliard’s eyes. If Eliard had not believed him, he could root himself like a tree in the middle of the Osterland blizzard; but Eliard, stubborn, literal, would expect him to keep his vow. He opened his eyes again; the colorless world was still there, just beyond his eyelids, and he wanted to weep with the weariness of it.
Imperceptibly, the world began to darken. He did not notice at first, intent on the water, and then he realized that the river itself was melting into the wind. He stumbled frequently over roots, icy rocks, found it more and more tiring to fling an arm out to catch his balance. Once a rock slid into the water under his foot; only a wild grab at a branch saved him from following it. He found his footing again, gripped the tree, shivering uncontrollably like a dog. Looking up to keep himself awake, he was appalled at the color of the wind.
He set his face hard against the bark, tried to think. Night he could not outwit. He could find shelter—a cave, a hollow tree—try to build a fire; the chances of doing either were minute. He could not follow the river in the dark, yet if he left it, he would probably wander aimlessly for a short time, then simply stop and disappear into the snow and wind, become, in his vanishing, another curiosity of Hed, like Kern, for the Masters to put on their lists. He considered the problem stubbornly, staring at the whorls of bark to keep his eyes open. Shelter, a fire, impossible as they seemed, were his only hope. He straightened stiffly, realized that the tree, not his body, had been supporting him. An odd, moist warmth, lightening him more than anything else that day, touched his face; he startled, turning. The head of a vesta loomed over him out of the snow.
He did not know how long he stared into the purple eyes. The vesta was motionless, the wind rippling through its fur. His hands began to move of their own accord, brushing over the face, the neck; he murmured things almost to soothe himself more than it. He inched away from the tree, his hands following the arch of its neck, its back, until he stood at its side, his numb hands curled into the thick hair on its back. It moved finally, reaching for a pinecone on the tree. Poised, his lips tight between his teeth, he leaped for its back.
He was unprepared for the sudden, incredible explosion of speed that shot him like an arrow into the heart of the storm. He gripped the horns, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed, the harp crushed against his ribs; he was almost unable to breathe from the winds slamming against his face, A sound came out of him; as if in answer to it, the wild sprint of panic melted slowly into a slower, steadier pace that was effortless and faster than any horse he had ever ridden. He clung close to the creature’s warmth, not wondering where it was going, nor how long it would permit him to stay on its back, simply concentrating on the single thought of staying with it until it could run no more.
He fell into a light sleep, feeling beneath his sleep the effortless, rhythmic movement. His hands, cramped around the horns, loosened; he lost his balance and fell, hitting the earth hard. The sky was black, blazing overhead; silence lay above the light snow like an element. He got to his feet, gazing at star after star blurring together into light, curving down to meet the white horizon. He saw the vesta looking back at him, motionless, white against the snow. He went towards it. For a moment it simply watched him as though he were a curious animal. Then, its steps delicate, barely breaking the snow, it walked to meet him. He lifted himself onto its back, his arms shaking with the effort. It began to run again toward the stars.
He woke to the curious touch of snow on his face. The vesta walked sedately through the empty, snow-covered streets of a city. Beautiful, brightly painted wood houses and shops lined the streets, their doors and shutters closed in the early dawn. Morgon straightened with an effort, breaking a crust of snow on his coat. The vesta turned a corner; ahead of him Morgon saw a great unwalled house, its weathered walls patterned with wood gathered from distant corners of the realm; oak, pale birch, red-toned cedar, dark, rich timber; the eaves, window frames and double doors were traced with endless whorls of pure gold.
The vesta walked fearlessly into the yard and stopped. The dark house sat dreaming in the snow. Morgon stared at it senselessly a moment; the vesta made a little restless movement beneath him, as though it had finished a task and were anxious to leave. Morgon slid off its back. His muscles refused to hold him; he fell sharply to his knees, the harp jerked down beside him. Under the deep, curious gaze of the vesta, he tried to get up, fell back helplessly, trembling with exhaustion. The vesta nudged at him, its warm breath in his ear. He slid his arm around its neck, his face dropping against its face. It was still for a moment in his hold. Then it broke free with a sudden movement, its head jerking back; and as the circle of gold horn lifted like the rim of the sun against the white sky, the vesta faded, and a man stood in its place.
He was tall, lithe, white-haired, half-naked in the snow. His eyes in his lean, lined face were ice-blue; his hands, reaching down to Morgon, were scarred with the white imprint of vesta-horns.
Morgon whispered, “Har.” A little smile flared like a flame behind the light eyes. The wolf-king slid a powerful arm under Morgon’s arm, lifted him to his feet.
“Welcome.” He helped Morgon patiently up the steps, flung open the wide doors to a hall the size of the barn at Akren, with a firebed running almost the length of it. Har’s voice rose, shearing the silence; a couple of crows squawked, startled, on the ledge of a long window. “Is this house hibernating for the winter? I want food, wine, dry clothes, and I will not wait for them until my bones snap like ice with old age and my teeth drop out. Aia!”
Servants scurried blearily into the hall; dogs, springing up, swarmed eagerly about their legs. Half a tree trunk was thrown on the drowsing fire; sparks shot up toward the roof. A mantle of white wool was put over Har’s shoulders; Morgon’s clothes were stripped from him with unexpected thoroughness on the threshold. A long woolen tunic was pulled over his head, and a mantle of many colored furs thrown over his shoulders. Trays of food were brought in, placed by the fire; Morgon caught the smell of hot bread and hot, spiced meat. He sagged in Har’s grip; wine, cold, dry, was forced into his mouth. He swallowed it and choked, felt the blood begin to move again in him, sluggishly, painfully.
A woman came into the hall as they sat down at last and began to eat. She had a strong, lovely old face, hair the color of old ivory braided to her knees. She came to the fire, tightening a belt as she walked, her eyes moving from Har’s face to Morgon’s.
She dropped a gentle kiss on Har’s cheek and said placidly, “Welcome home. Whom did you bring this time?”
“The Prince of Hed.”
Morgon’s head turned sharply. His eyes caught Har’s, held them in an unspoken question. The little perpetual smile deepened in the wolf-king’s eyes. He said, “I have a gift for naming. I’ll teach it to you. This is my wife, Aia. I found him wondering on foot in a blizzard beside the Ose,” he added to her. “I have been shot at, in vesta form; a trapper threw a weighted net over me once in the hills behind Grim Mountain before he realized who I was; but I have never been fed a loaf of bread by a man half the traders in the realm have been trying to find.” He turned again to Morgon, who had stopped eating. He said, his voice gentle in the snapping fire, “You and I are riddle-masters; I will play no games with you. I know a little about you, but not enough. I don’t know what is driving you to Erlenstar Mountain, or who you are hiding from. I want to know. I will give you whatever you ask of me in knowledge or skills in return for one thing. If you had not come into my land I would have gone to yours eventually, in one form or another: an old crow, an old trader at your door selling buttons in exchange for knowledge. I would have come.”
Morgon put his plate down. Strength was coming back into his body and a strength, a sense of purpose was waking, at Har’s words, in his mind. He said haltingly, “If you hadn’t found me by the river, I would have died. I will give you whatever help you need.”
“That’s a dangerous thing to promise blindly in my house,” Har commented.
“I know. I’ve heard a little of you, too. I will give you what help you need.”
Har smiled. His hand came to rest a moment, lightly, on Morgon’s shoulder. “You made your way inch by inch up the Ose, against the wind in a raging blizzard, clinging to that harp like your life. I tend to believe you. The farmers of Hed are known for their stubbornness.”
“Perhaps.” He leaned back, his eyes closing in the hot drift of the fire. “But I left Deth in Herun to go back to Hed. I came here instead.”
“Why did you change your mind?”
“You sent a riddle out of Osterland to find me ... ” His voice trailed silent. He heard Har say something from the heart of the fire, he saw the blizzard again, formless, whirling, darkening, darkening ...
He woke in a small rich room, dark with evening. He lay without thought, his arm over his eyes, until a scrape of metal by the hearth made him turn his head. Someone was probing the fire; at the sudden lift of a white head, Morgon said, startled, “Deth!”
The head turned. “No. It’s me. Har said I am to serve you.” A boy rose from the fireside, lit the torch beside Morgon’s bed. He was a few years younger than Morgon, big-boned, his hair milky-white. His face was impassive, but Morgon sensed a shyness, a wildness beneath it. His eyes in the torchlight were a lustrous familiar purple. Under Morgon’s puzzled gaze, his voice went on, breaking a little now and then as though it were not frequently used. “He said ... Har said I am to give you my name. I am Hugin. Suth’s son.”
Morgon’s blood shocked through him. “Suth is dead.”
“No.”
“All the wizards are dead.”
“No. Har knows Suth. Har found ... he found me three years ago, running among the vesta. He looked into my mind and saw Suth.”
Morgon stared up at him wordlessly. He gathered the tangled, aching knot of his muscles and bones, and rolled upright. “Where are my clothes? I have got to talk to Har.”
“He knows,” Hugin said. “He is waiting for you.”
Washed, dressed, Morgon followed the boy to Har’s great hall. It was filled with people, rich men and women from the city, traders, trappers, musicians, a handful of simply dressed farmers, drinking hot wine by the fire, talking, playing chess, reading. The informality reminded Morgon of Akren. Har, Aia beside him scratching the dog at her knee, sat in his chair by the fire, listening to a harpist. As Morgon made his way through the crowd, the king’s eyes lifted, met his, smiling.
Morgon sat down on a bench beside them. The dog left Aia to scent him curiously, and he realized then with a slight shock, that it was a wolf. Other animals lay curled by the fire: a red fox, a squat badger, a grey squirrel, a pair of weasels white as snow in the rushes.
Aia said tranquilly as he scratched the wolfs ears gingerly, “They come in from the winter, Har’s friends. Sometimes they spend a season here, sometimes they come bringing news of both men and animals in Osterland. Sometimes our children send them when they can’t come to visit us—that white falcon sleeping high on the rafters, our daughter sent.”
“Can you speak to them,” Morgon asked. She shook her head, smiling.
“I can only go into Har’s mind, and then when he is in his own shape. It’s better that way; otherwise I would have worried much more about him when I was younger and he wandered away, prowling his kingdom.”
The harp song came to an end; the harpist, a lean, dark man with a dour smile, rose to get wine. The wolf moved to Har as the king reached for his own cup. The king poured Morgon wine, sent a servant for food. Then he said, his voice soft in the weave of sounds about them, “You offered me your help. If you were any other man, I would not hold you to that, but you are a Prince of Hed, that most unimaginative of lands. What I ask will be very difficult, but it will be valuable. I want you to find Suth.”
“Suth? Har, how can he be alive? How, after seven hundred years?”
“Morgon, I knew Suth.” The voice was still soft, but there was an edge to it as to a chill wind. “We were young together, so long ago. We hungered for knowledge, not caring how it was got, how we used ourselves, one another. We played riddle-games even before Caithnard existed, games that lasted years as we were forced to search for answers. He lost an eye during those wild years; he himself scarred my hands with the vesta-horns, teaching me how to change shape. When he vanished with the school of wizards, I thought he must be dead. Yet three years ago, when a young vesta changed shape to a boy in front of my eyes, and when I looked into the thoughts and memories of his mind, I saw the man he knew as his father, and I knew that face as I know my heart. Suth. He is alive. He has been running, hiding for seven hundred years. Hiding. When I asked him once how he lost his eye, he laughed and said only that there was nothing that may not be looked upon. Yet he has seen something, turned his back to it and run, vanished like a snowfall in a land of snow. He did well to hide. He knows me. I have been at his heels like a wolf for three years, and I will find him.”
Patterns were shattering, shifting in Morgon’s mind, leaving him groping, blind. “The Morgol of Herun suggested that Ghisteslwchlohm, the Founder of Lungold, is also alive. But that was pure conjecture, there is no evidence. What is he running from?”
“What is driving you to Erlenstar Mountain?”
Morgon put his cup down. He slid his fingers through his hair, drawing it back from his face so that the stars shone blood-red against his pallor. “That.”
Har’s hands shifted slightly, his rings flashing. Aia sat motionless, listening, her eyes hooded with thought. “So,” the king said, “the movement of this great game of power revolves upon Hed. When did you first realize that?”
He thought back, “In Ymris. I found a harp with three stars matching the stars on my face, which no one else could play. I met the woman married to Heureu Ymris, who tried to kill me, for no other reason than those stars, who said she was older than the first riddle ever asked—“
“How did you come to be in Ymris?”
“I was taking the crown of Aum to Anuin.”
“Ymris,” Har pointed out, “is in the opposite direction.”
“Har, you must know what happened. Even if all the traders in the realm had gone to the bottom of the sea with the crown of Aum, you would still probably know, somehow.”
“I know what happened,” Har said imperturbably. “But I do not know you. Be patient with me, an old man, and begin at the beginning.”
Morgon began. By the time he finished the tale of his travellings, the hall was empty but for the king, Aia, the harpist playing softly, listening, and Hugin, who had come in to sit at Har’s feet with his head against the king’s knees. The torches burned low; the animals were sighing, dreaming in their sleep. His voice ran dry finally. Har got up, stood looking into the fire. He was silent a long time; Morgon saw his hands close at his sides.
“Suth ... ”
Hugin’s face flashed toward him at the name. Morgon said tiredly, “Why would he know anything? The Morgol thinks that knowledge of the stars must have been stripped from the wizards’ minds.”
Har’s hands eased open. He turned to look at Morgon, weighing a thought. He said, as though he had not heard Morgon’s question, “You dislike killing. There are other methods of defense. I could teach you to look into a man’s mind, to see beyond illusion, to close the doors of your own mind against entrance. You are vulnerable as an animal without its winter pelt. I could teach you to outwit winter itself ... ”
Morgon gazed back at him. Something moved in his mind, the glint of a half-surfaced thought. He said, “I don’t understand,” though he had begun to.
“I told you,” Har said “you should never promise a thing blindly in my house. I believe Suth is running with the vesta behind Grim Mountain. I will teach you to take the vesta-shape; you will move among them freely through the winter as a vesta, yet not a vesta. Your body and instincts will be the vesta’s, but your mind will be your own; Suth may hide from the High One himself, but he will reveal himself to you.”
Morgon’s body shifted a little. “Har, I have no gift for shape-changing.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m not ... No man of Hed was ever born with gifts like that.” He shifted again, feeling himself with four powerful legs honed to speed, a head heavy with gold horn, no hands for touching, no voice for speaking.
Hugin said hesitantly, unexpectedly, “It’s a thing to love—being the vesta. Har knows.”
Morgon saw Grim Oakland’s face, Eliard’s face, staring at him uncomprehendingly, baffled: You can do what? Why would you want to do that? He felt Har watching him, and he said softly, reluctantly, “I will try, because I promised you. But I doubt if it will work; all my instincts go against it.”
“Your instincts.” The king’s eyes reflected fire suddenly like an annual’s, startling Morgon. “You are stubborn. With your face toward Erlenstar Mountain, a thousand miles farther than any Prince of Hed has ever gone beyond his land, a harp and a name in your possession, you still cling to your past like a nestling. What do you know about your instincts? What do you know about yourself? Will you doom us all with your own refusal to look at yourself and give a name to what you see?”
Morgon’s hands closed on the edge of the bench. He said evenly, struggling to keep his voice from shaking, “I am a land-ruler, a riddle-master and a star-bearer, in that order—“
“No. You are the Star-Bearer. You have no other name but that, no other future. You have gifts no land-ruler of Hed was ever born with; you have eyes that see, a mind that weaves. Your instincts took you out of Hed before you even realized why; out of Hed to Caithnard, to Aum, to Herun, to Osterland, whose king had no pity for those who run from truth.”
“I was born—“
“You were born the Star-Bearer. The wise man knows his own name. You are no fool; you can sense as well as I can what chaos is stirring beneath the surface of our existence. Loose your grip on your past; it is meaningless. You can live without the land-rule if you must; it’s not essential—“
Morgon found himself on his feet before he even realized he had moved. “No—“
“You have a very capable land-heir, who stays home and farms instead of answering obscure riddles. Your land can exist without you; but if you run from your own destiny, you are liable to destroy us all.”
He stopped. A sound had come out of Morgon, involuntarily, a harsh, indrawn sob without tears. Aia’s face, Hugin’s face, seemed etched of white stone in the light; only the king’s face moved in the shifting fire, alien, neither man’s nor animal’s. Morgon put his hands over his mouth to still the sound and whispered, “What price do you put on landlaw? What incentive will you offer me to forsake it? What price will you pay me for all the things I have ever loved?”
The light, glittering eyes were unmoved, unwavering on his face. “Five riddles,” Har said. “Coin for the man who has nothing. Who is the Star-Bearer and what will he loose that is bound? What will one star call out of silence, one star out of darkness, and one star out of death? Who will come in the time’s ending and what will he bring? Who will sound the earth’s harp, silent since the Beginning? Who will bear stars of fire and ice to the Ending of the Age?”
Morgon’s hands slid slowly away from his mouth. The hall was soundless. He felt tears run like sweat down his face. “What ending?” The wolf-king did not answer. “What ending?”
“Answering riddles is your business. Suth gave me those riddles one day, like a man giving his heart to a friend for safekeeping. I have carried them unanswered since his disappearance.”
“Where did he learn them?”
“He knows.”
“Then I will ask him.” His face was bloodless, streaked with fire; his eyes, the color of charred wood, held Har’s, seemed to draw from them, in that moment, something of their pitilessness. “I will answer those riddles for you. And I think, when I have done that, you will wish to the last breath of your life that I had never set foot beyond Hed.”
He sat the next morning in a round stone shed behind Har’s house, waiting for the fire Hugin had built to bring some relief of warmth to the icy floor. He wore a light, short linen tunic; his feet were bare. There were pitchers of watered wine in a corner, cups, but nothing else, neither food nor bedding. The door was closed; there were no windows, only the hole in the roof through which the smoke billowed out, flurries of snow burning, melting, in it. Har sat opposite him, his face shaping and reshaping in the flames. Hugin, cross-legged behind him, was motionless as though he did not breathe.
“I am going into your mind,” the face beyond the fire said. “I will see things you keep there privately. Do not try to fight my prying. If you wish to elude me, simply let the thoughts drain out of you like water, become formless, invisible as wind.”
Morgon felt a light touch sorting his thoughts. Isolated moments, past events, rose unbidden in his mind: Rood, studying with him late at night, a candle hunched between them; the Lady Eriel speaking softly to him in a dark hall as his fingers slid toward the last, low string of a harp; Tristan, her feet muddy, watering her rose bushes; Lyra, picking up a sword that came alive in her hands, changing shape. He let the strange knowledge of another mind, the sense of other untrapped thoughts stay in his mind without struggling until unexpectedly out of the darkness of his thoughts he saw a man’s body whirl away from him, the spear in his chest holding the fluid, shifting, sea-colored lines of him still until his face became clear for one moment before he fell. Morgon started, murmuring. Har’s eyes gazed at him from the flames, unblinking.
“There is nothing that may not be faced, nothing that may not be looked upon. Again.”
The memories of his life ran behind his eyes in a current of slowly changing scenes, some of which Har seemed to linger over in his curiosity. As the hours passed, unmeasured except by the ashes of dying wood; Morgon accepted the probing patiently, learned to yield without flinching to memories buried deep in him. Then, wearied, he began to ease away from the incessant searching, let his thoughts slip away from him, become shapeless, like a mist through which the groping mind moved without finding a resting place. Finally, abruptly, he found himself on his feet, pacing back and forth in the tiny room, thinking of nothing but the hunger worrying at him like an animal, the cold that burned his feet as he walked, the cry of his body, like the incessant, unbearable cry of a child for sleep. He prowled the small hut, not hearing Har when he spoke, not seeing Hugin staring up at him, not noticing the door open to deep night when Hugin left to get more wood. Then he felt something forming in his mind that Har had not touched yet, the most private moment of his life: an uneasiness, a growing terror, the beginning of a grief so terrible that any moment he might drown in it. He tried to elude the probing, pitiless mind, felt the grief welling, blooming, struggled furiously against it, against Har without success, until he saw again in the firelight the unmoved, curious eyes, and he took the only escape left to him, slipping out of his own thoughts beyond the surface of another mind.
It was as though he had stepped into another world. He saw the shed from Har’s eyes, saw himself standing, surprised in the shadows. He tapped hesitantly the continuous spring of memory deep in Har’s mind. He saw a young woman with sun-colored hair he knew was Aia, watching the soaking and bending of the wood that would pattern the walls of her new home. He saw a wizard with wild white hair and grey-gold eyes standing barefoot in snow, laughing before he melted into a lank wolf’s form. He saw the private world of Osterland: a fox’s den in the warm earth under the snow swarming with red pups, a white owl’s nest in the hollow of a high tree, a herd of starving deer in the sparse, cold backlands, a farmer’s simple house, the plain walls gleaming with tools, his children rolling like puppies in front of the fire. He followed Har’s path through his kingdom, sometimes in animal form, sometimes as a slightly wealthy, slightly foolish old man, his sharp mind gleaning knowledge beneath his sleepy eyes. He realized as he began to recognize places Har had travelled, that he had not confined his wanderings to Osterland. A familiar house rose in Har’s mind: with a shock of surprise that threw Morgon back into himself, he recognized the threshold of his own home.
He said, “When? ... ” His voice grated as though he had wakened from sleep.
“I went to Hed to meet Kern. I was curious about a tale I heard of him and a Thing without a name. I had forgotten about that. You did well.”
Morgon sat down again on the stones. The demands of his body seemed vague, impersonal, as though they came from his shadow. The fire in the hearth died, flared again, dwindled, flared. The stones grew warm. Morgon went into Hugin’s mind, discovered his wordless language, shared with him a complaint of hunger that surprised a smile into the vesta eyes. Then Har held Morgon’s mind, probing constantly, teaching him to thrust past the barriers of a locked mind, to defend his own barriers, attacking and parrying again and again until Morgon, ready to explode with a rage of weariness, cleared his mind beyond possibility to try again. Har loosed him; he felt the sweat dripping down his face, his back, felt himself trembling even in the heat.
“How long ... how long have we? ... ” His throat was parched.
“What is that to either of us? Hugin, get wine.”
Hughn knelt next to Morgon with a cup. The boy’s face was drawn, the skin beneath his eyes was dark with weariness. But his still face gave back to Morgon something of a smile. The small shed was dim with smoke. Morgon could not tell whether it was day or night beyond the smoke hole in the roof. Hugin opened the doors a moment; winds, blade-sharp, leaped in, scattering snow. The world was black beyond. The sweat froze on Morgon’s arms. He began to shiver, and Hugin closed the door.
“Again,” Har said softly, and slipped into Morgon’s mind like a cat, while Morgon groped, surprised, for the memory of his teachings. The long hours began again, Morgon struggling either to keep his mind free from Har’s probing, or to find a path through Har’s closed mind. Hugin sat shadow-still beside him. Sometimes Morgon saw him sleeping, stretched on the stones. Sometimes when he pulled away from Har, exhausted, the purple eyes turned to him, and he saw through them an image of the vesta. Then he began to see a vesta where Hugin sat, and was unsure afterward if Hugin had put the thought into his mind, or if the boy’s shape were shifting back and forth. Once he looked across the fire and saw not Har but a lean grey wolf with yellow, smiling eyes.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and Har returned saying, “Again.”
“No,” he whispered, feeling his mind and body slip away from him. “No.”
“Then leave.”
“No.”
The smoke engulfed him like a wind. He seemed to look down at himself from a distance, as though the man half-blind, too weak to move had nothing to do with him. Hugin and Har seemed formed of smoke, now king and wizard’s boy, now wolf and vesta, watching, waiting. The wolf began to move closer to him, closer, circling him, fire in its eyes, until it stood next to him. Morgon felt his hands opened, a pattern traced with ash on his palms. Then the wolf said, “Now.”
The pain brought him abruptly back to himself. He opened his eyes, blinking at the salt tears of sweat that ran into them, and the purple eyes of the vesta gazed deep into his. A blade flashed in the corner of his eye; a sound split through his dry throat. Turning, fleeing away from the smoke, the agony of his weariness, the sear of the knife, he stumbled into the world beyond the vesta-eyes.
The stone walls melted away into the single flat line of winter horizon. He stood alone in a privacy of snow and sky, listening to the winds, untangling the scents in them. Somewhere within him, behind him, he sensed a struggling, a turmoil of thought; he avoided it, groping away from it, searching more deeply into the easy silence he had discovered. The winds snapped out of the sharp blue of the sky, carrying shades and tones of smell he could suddenly give names to: water, hare, wolf, pine, vesta. He heard the high, whirling voices of the winds, knew their strength, but felt them only vaguely. The chaotic, fearful voices he fled from weakened, mingled with the wind’s meaningless wail. He drew a long, clean breath of the winter, felt the voice fade. The wind traced its passage through him, molded the sinews of his heart, flowed through his veins, honed his muscles to its unfaltering strength and speed. He felt it urge against him, challenging him; and the hard, restless muscles of his body locked suddenly for a race with the wind.
The stones rose out of the unknown. He moved bewilderedly, seeking escape, aware of strange, silent figures watching him. The fire snapped at him; he backed away from it and turned. His horns scraped against the stones. Then, with a panic exploding through him, he realized that he had horns. He found himself in his own shape, trembling, staring at Har, his hands throbbing again, sticky with blood.
Hugin opened the door. A weak midday light stained the snow on the threshold. Har rose, his own hands trembling slightly. He said nothing, and Morgon, as familiar with the mind of the King as he was with his own, felt the panic die away, a stillness take its place. He went to the door, his steps halting, and leaned on the frame, breathing the wind, his limp hands staining his tunic. He felt an odd sorrow, as though he had turned away forever from something nameless in him. Har put a hand on his shoulder.
“Rest, now. Rest. Hugin—“
“I know. I will take him.”
“Bind his hands. Stay with him. Both of you: rest.”
As Morgon’s hands healed, Har continued the training; Morgon learned to take the vesta-shape for long periods of time. Hugin guided him around Yrye; they ate pine in the forest fringing Yrye, climbed the steep crags and forests of Grim Mountain, behind Yrye. The vesta-instincts confused Morgon at first; he struggled against them as against deep water, and would find himself standing half-naked in deep winter, with Hugin nuzzling at him, his mind-voice running into Morgon’s.
Morgon, let’s run. You like vesta-running; you are not afraid of that. Morgon, come out of the cold.
And they would run for miles in the snow without tiring, their hooves barely skimming the snow, the great hearts and muscles of their bodies fine-tuned to the effortless movement. They would return to Yrye in the evenings, sometimes late at night, bringing back within them the silence of the still winter night. Har would be waiting for them in the hall, talking to Aia or listening to his harpist play softly beside the hearth. Morgon spoke little to Har during this time, as though something in his mind were healing along with his hands. Har waited, watched, silent himself. Finally one night Morgon and Hugin returned late, and the unexpected sound of their laughter, curtailed sharply as they entered, made Aia smile. Morgon went to Har unhesitantly, sat down beside him, while Hugh went to get food. He looked down at the palms of his hands, the bone-white imprint of vesta-horns on them.
Har said, “It’s not such a terrible thing to be, a vesta, is it?”
He smiled. “No. I love it. I love the silence of it. But how will I explain to Eliard?”
“That,” Har said a little drily, “is liable to be the least of your worries. Other men have come to me through the years begging me to teach them the mind-work, shape-changing; very, very few have ever left that room with the vesta-scars on their hands. You have great gifts. Hed was far too small a world for you.”
“It’s unprecedented. How will I explain that to the High One?”
“Why must you justify your abilities?”
Morgon looked at him. He said peacefully, “Har, you know, in spite of the arguments you used with me, that I am still answerable to the High One as the land-ruler of Hed, no matter how many deadly harpists out of the sea call me Star-Bearer. I would like to keep it that way, if possible.”
The smile deepened in Har’s eyes. “Then perhaps the High One will justify yourself to you. Are you ready to look for Suth?”
“Yes. I have some questions to ask him.”
“Good. I believe he may be in the lake-lands north of Grim Mountain, on the fringe of the great northern wastes. There is a large herd of vesta on the other side of the mountain; I rarely join them. I’ve searched the rest of my kingdom and have found no sign of him. Hugin will take you there.”
“Come with us.”
“I can’t. He would only run from me, as he has done for seven hundred years.” He paused. Morgon saw his thoughts drift back into some memory, his eyes narrow.
He said, “I know. That’s the blade that harrows the brain: Why? You knew Suth: what would he have run from?”
“I thought he would have died rather than run from anything. Are you sure you are ready? It may take months.”
“I’m ready.”
“Then leave at dawn, quietly, with Hugin. Look beyond Grim; if you cannot find Suth there, look along Ose—but watch for trappers. Let the vesta know you. They will sense you are also a man, and Suth will hear of you if he is in contact with them. If there is even a hint of danger, return to Yrye at once.”
“I will,” Morgon said absently. He saw suddenly, in his mind’s eye, long, quiet weeks beyond the snow-covered mountain, in the backlands of the world, where he would move to a rhythm of night and day, wind, snow and silence he had come to love. Har’s eyes, insistent on his face, brought him out of his dreaming. There was a wry edge of warning in them.
“If you die in vesta-shape on my lands, I will have that imperturbable harpist on my doorstep asking why. So be careful.”
They left at dawn, both in vesta-shape. Hugin led Morgon up the slopes of Grim Mountain, through high rocky passes where mountain goats stared at them curiously and hawks wheeled on the wind, searching for food. They slept that night among the rocks, then descended the next day into the lake-land beyond Grim, where no one but a few trappers lived, collecting skins for traders on the edge of the northern wastes. Herds of vesta passed like mist through the land, untouched, untroubled. Morgon and Hugin joined them quietly, unchallenged by the leaders of the herds who accepted them as they accepted Har, as strange but not threatening. They moved with the herds, ranging through the lake-lands, feeding on pine. They slept in the open at night, the winds scarcely penetrating their long fur. Wolves circled them occasionally, hungry yet wary; Morgon heard their distant howling in his dreams. He responded to them without fear, yet aware of their power if they came upon a young or aged vesta strayed from the herd. When he and Hugin had searched one herd for images of the one-eyed Suth, they moved to find another in the deep forests, or beside frozen, moon-colored lakes. Finally, Morgon found a pattern of images repeating itself in the minds of one herd: the image of a vesta with one eye purple, the other white as web.
He stayed with that herd, eating, sleeping with it, waiting in hope that the half-blind vesta would join it. Hugin, troubled by the same image, ranged away from the herd among the lakes and hills, searching. The moon grew round above them, dwindled and began to grow again, and Morgon grew restless himself. He began to roam in curiosity, searching the low hills of the northern boundaries. One day he went over them and looked across at the flat, empty wastes. The winds lifted snow, swept it like sand across the plains, honed into a single, unbroken line the bounds of the world. No life seemed hidden beneath the snow; the sky itself was empty, colorless. In the far west, he saw the great head of Erlenstar Mountain, and the flat, white lands behind it. He turned, oddly cold, and went back into Osterland.
Coming back down from the hills, he saw a vesta, grey-white with age, with its horns oddly trapped by something beneath the snow. Its head lowered, shoulders and haunches straining against the hold on its horns, it could not see the grey slink of wolves gathering behind it. Morgon caught a scent of them, thick, acrid in the wind. He found himself suddenly racing towards them, making a sound he had never heard from himself before.
The wolves scattered, whining, among the rocks. One of them, mad with hunger, snapped at Morgon’s face then turned to leap at the trapped vesta. An odd rage surged through Morgon. He reared, striking. His sharp hooves caught the wolfs head, crushed it, spattering blood on the snow. The cloying smell welled over him; a sudden confusion of instinct thrust him out of the vesta-shape. He found himself barefoot in the snow, struggling with a wrench of nausea.
He moved upwind, knelt before the vesta. He groped in the snow beneath its horns, feeling the hidden branch that had trapped it. He reached up to soothe the vesta with one hand, and found himself looking into a blind eye.
He sat back on his heels. The wind searched the threads of his light tunic, racking his body, but he did not notice. He let his thoughts drift curiously beyond the blind eye, and the swift, skillful withdrawal of thought told him what he wanted to know.
“Suth?” The vesta eyed him, motionless. “I’ve been looking for you.”
A darkness welled over his mind. He struggled with it desperately, not knowing how to avoid the single, insistent command that beat over and over in his mind like the single beat of water in a soundless cave. He felt his hands slip into the snow, wrench at the hidden branch. Then the impulse ceased abruptly. He felt his thoughts searched and did not move until the strange mind withdrew and he heard the command again: Free me.
He heaved the branch loose. The vesta straightened, flinging back its head. Then it vanished. A man stood before Morgon, lean, powerful, his white hair fraying in the wind, his single eye grey-gold.
His hand brushed across Morgon’s face, seeking the stars; he lifted Morgon’s hand, turned it palm-upward, traced the scar on it, and something like a smile flashed in his eye.
Then he put his hands on Morgon’s shoulders, as though feeling the humanness of him, and said incredulously, “Hed?”
“Morgon of Hed.”
“The hope I saw a thousand years ago and before is a Prince of Hed?” His voice was deep, like a wind’s voice; long-disused. “You have met Har; he left his mark on you. Good. You’ll need every bone of help you can get.”
“I need your help.”
The wizard’s thin mouth twisted. “I can give you nothing. Har should have known better than to send you for me. He has two good eyes; he should have seen.”
“I don’t understand.” He was beginning to feel the cold. “You gave Har riddles; I need answers to them. Why did you leave Lungold? Why have you hidden even from Har?”
“Why would anyone hide from the tooth of his own heart?” The lean hands shook him a little. “Can you not see? Not even you? I am trapped. I am dead, speaking to you.”
Morgon was silent, staring at him. Behind the flame of laughter like Har’s in his single eye, there was an emptiness vaster than the northern wastes. He said, “I don’t understand. You have a son; Har cares for him.”
The wizard’s eyes closed. He drew a deep breath. “So. I hoped Har might find him. I am so tired, so tired of this ... Tell Har to teach you to guard against compulsion. What are you of all people doing with three stars on your face in this game of death?”
“I don’t know,” Morgon said tautly. “I can’t escape them.”
“I want to see the end of this; I want to see it—you are so impossible, you might win this game.”
“What game? Suth, what has been happening for seven hundred years? What keeps you trapped here living like an animal? What can I do to help you?”
“Nothing. I am dead.”
“Then do something for me! I need help! The third stricture of Ghisteslwchlohm is this: The wizard hearing a cry for help turns away, the wizard who watching an evil does not speak, the wizard who searching for truth looks away from it: these are the wizards of false power. I understand running, but not when there is no place left to run to.”
Something stirred deep in the emptiness of the gold eye. Suth smiled, again with the wry twist of mouth that reminded Morgon of Har.
He said with an odd gentleness, “I place my life in your hands, Star-Bearer. Ask.”
“Why did you run from Lungold?”
“I ran from Lungold because—“ His voice stopped. He reached suddenly to Morgon, his breath coming in sharp, white flashes. Morgon caught at him, felt himself pulled down in the grip and sag of the wizard.
“Suth!”
Suth’s hands twisted the cloth at his throat, forced him closer to the open, straining mouth that gave him one final word formed with the husk of its breath.
“Ohm ... ”
He carried the dead wizard on his back to Yrye. Hugin walked beside him, sometimes in vesta shape, sometimes, for a mile or so, in his own shape, a tall, silent boy with one hand holding Suth balanced on the vesta beside him. As they travelled over the mountain, Morgon felt in some deep place an impatience with the vesta-form, as though he had worn it too long. The land stretched before them, white to the white sky under the mold of whiter. Yrye itself lay half-hidden in drifts of snow. When they reached it at last, Har was on the threshold to meet them.
He said nothing, took the body from Morgon’s back and watched him turn at last into himself, with two months’ growth of hair and the scars puckered on his hands. Morgon opened his mouth to say something; he could not speak. Har said softly, “He has been dead for seven hundred years. I’ll take him. Go in.”
“No,” Hugin said. Har, bent over Suth’s body, looked up at him.
“Then help me.”
They carried him together around the back of the house. Morgon went inside. Someone threw fur over his shoulders as he passed; he drew it around him absently, scarcely feeling it, scarcely seeing the handful of curious faces turned toward him, watching. He sat down by the fire, poured himself wine. Aia sat down on the bench beside him. She put a hand on his arm, gripped it gently.
“I’m glad you’re safe, you and Hugin, my children. Don’t grieve for Suth.”
He found his voice, “How did you know?”
“I know Har’s mind. He’ll bury his sorrow like a man burying silver in the night. Don’t let him.”
Morgon looked down into his cup. Then he put it on the table, pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I should have known,” he whispered. “I should have thought. One wizard, alive after seven centuries, and I forced him out of hiding so he could die in my arms ... ” He heard Har and Hugin come in, dropped his hands. Har sat down in his chair. Hugin sat at his feet, his white head resting against Har’s knee. His eyes closed. Har’s hand rested a moment in his hair. His eyes went to Morgon’s face.
“Tell me.”
“Take it from me,” Morgon said wearily. “You knew him. You tell me.” He sat passively while memories of the days and long white nights passed through his mind, culminated in the wolf killing, in the last few moments of the wizard’s life. Finished, Har loosed him, sat quietly, his eyes impassive.
“Who is Ohm?”
Morgon stirred. “Ghisteslwchlohm, I think—the founder of the School of Wizards of Lungold.”
‘The Founder is still alive?”
“I don’t know who else it could be.” His voice caught.
“What troubles you? What have you not told me?”
“Ohm—Har, one of the ... one of the Masters at Caithnard was named Ohm. He ... I studied with him. I respected him greatly. The Morgol of Herun suggested that he might be the Founder.” Har’s hands closed suddenly on the arms of his chair. “There was no evidence—“
“The Morgol of Herun would not say something like that without evidence.”
“It was scant—just his name, and the fact that she couldn’t ... she couldn’t see through him—“
“The Founder of Lungold is at Caithnard? Still controlling whatever wizards may be alive?”
“It’s conjecture. It’s only that. Why would he have kept his own name for all the world to guess—“
“Who would guess, after seven centuries? And who would be powerful enough to control him?”
“The High One—“
“The High One.” Har rose abruptly; Hugin started. The wolf-king moved to the fire. “His silence is almost more mysterious than Suth’s. He has never been one to meddle greatly in our affairs, but this much restraint is incredible.”
“He let Suth die.”
“Suth waited to die,” Har said impatiently, and Morgon’s voice snapped away from him furiously.
“He was alive! Until I found him!”
“Stop blaming yourself. He was dead. The man you spoke to was not Suth but a husk that had no name.”
“That’s not true—“
“What do you call life? Would you call me living if I turned in fear away from you, refused to give you something that would save your life? Would you call me Har?”
“Yes.” His voice softened. “Corn bears its name in the seed in the ground, in the green stalk, in the yellow dried stalk whose leaves whisper riddles to the wind. So Suth bore his name, giving me a riddle in the last breath of his life. So I blame myself because there is no longer anywhere in this world the man that bore his name. He took the vesta-form; he had a son among them; there were things that somewhere beneath his fear and helplessness, he remembered how to love.”
Hugin’s head dropped forward against his knees. Har’s eyes closed. He stood at the fire without speaking, without moving, while lines of weariness and pain worked themselves through the mask of his face.
Morgon twisted on the bench, dropped his face in his arms on the table behind him. He whispered, “If Master Ohm is Ghisteslwchlohm, the High One will know. I’ll ask him.”
“And then?”
“And then ... I don’t know. There are so many pieces that don’t fit ... It’s like the shards I tried to fit together once in Ymris, not having all the pieces, not even knowing if the pieces belonged together at all.”
“You can’t travel alone to the High One.”
“Yes, I can. You’ve taught me how. Har, nothing alive could stop me from finishing this journey now. If I had to, I’d drag my own bones out of a grave to the High One. I must have answers.”
He felt Har’s hands on his shoulders, unexpectedly gentle, and raised his head.
Har said softly, “Finish your journey; there’s nothing any of us can do without answers. But go no farther than that alone. There are kings from Anuin to Isig who will help you, and a harpist at Erlenstar Mountain who is skilled at more things than harping. Will you give me this promise? That if Master Ohm is Ghisteslwchlohm, you will not rush blindly back to Caithnard to tell him you know?”
Morgon shrugged a little, wearily. “I don’t believe he is. I can’t. But I promise.”
“And come back to Yrye, rather than going straight to Hed. You will be far more dangerous when you are less ignorant, and I think the forces gathering against you will move swiftly then.”
Morgon was silent; a pain touched his heart and withdrew. He whispered, “I won’t go home ... Ohm, the shape-changers, even the High One—they seem to be balanced in a false peace, waiting for some kind of signal to act ... When they finally do, I don’t want to give them any reason to be near Hed.” He stirred, his face turning to Har’s. Their eyes met a moment in an unspoken knowledge of one another. Morgon’s head bowed. “Tomorrow, I will go to Isig.”
“I’ll take you as far as Kyrth. Hugin can ride with us, carry your harp. In vesta-shape, it should take only two days.”
Morgon nodded. “All right. Thank you.” He paused, looking again at Har; his hands moved a little, helplessly, as though groping for a word.
“Thank you.”
They left Yrye at dawn. Morgon and the wolf-king were in vesta-form; Hugin rode Har, carrying the harp and some clothes Aia had packed for Morgon. They ran westward through the quiet day, across farmland buried in a crust of unbroken snow, skirting towns whose chimney smoke wove into an ash-white sky. They ran far into the night, through moonlit forests, up the low rocky foothills until they reached the Ose, winding down northward from Isig. They fed there, slept awhile, then rose before dawn to continue up the Ose, across the foothills into the shadow of Isig Mountain. The white head of the mountain, blind with snow, loomed over them as they ran, its depths secret, inexhaustible with minerals, metals, bright, precious jewels. The trade-city Kyrth sprawled at its roots; the Ose wandered through it on its long journey toward the sea. West of Kyrth, rocky peaks and hills jutted like a rough sea, parting between waves to form the winding pass that led to Erlenstar Mountain.
They stopped just before they reached the city. Morgon took his own shape, put the heavy, furred cloak Hugin had carried for him over his shoulders, slid the harp and pack straps around his neck. He stood, waiting for the great vesta beside him to take Har’s shape once again, but it only watched him out of eyes that seemed to glint in the fading afternoon, with a familiar, elusive smile. So he slid an arm around its neck, pushed his face a moment against the white, cold fur. He turned to Hugin, embraced him; the boy said softly, “Find what killed Suth. And then come back. Come back.”
“I will.”
He left them without looking back. He followed the river into Kyrth, found the main road through the city crowded even in mid-winter with traders, trappers, craftsmen, miners. The road wound up the mountain above the city, the snow on it broken and scarred by cartwheels. It grew quiet in the twilight; the trees began to blur together. In the distance, obscured sometimes by the jut of mountain, Morgon saw the dark walls of Danan Isig’s house, the jagged lines of its walls shaped as though the wind and weather and restless earth had formed them. After a while, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man who walked beside him quietly as a shadow.
Morgon stopped abruptly. The man was big, thewed like a tree, with hair and beard grey-gold against the white fur of his hood. His eyes were the color of pine. He said quickly,
“I mean no harm. I am curious. Are you a harpist?”
Morgon hesitated. The green eyes were gentle, mild on his face; he said finally, his voice still a little rough from the long months away from men, “No. I’m travelling. I wanted to ask Danan Isig for shelter for the night, but I don’t know—does he keep his house open to strangers?”
“In midwinter, any traveller is welcome. Did you come from Osterland?”
“Yes. From Yrye.”
“The wolf-king’s lair ... I’m going to Harte now myself. May I walk with you?”
Morgon nodded. They walked a little in silence, the hard, broken snow crunching underfoot. The man drew a deep breath of pine-scented air, let it mist away. He said placidly, “I met Har once. He came to Isig disguised as a trader selling furs and amber. He told me privately he was trying to find a trapper who had been selling vesta-pelts to the traders, which was true, but I think he also came out of curiosity, to see Isig Mountain.”
“Did he find the trapper?”
“I believe so. He also walked the veins and roots of Isig before he left. Is he well?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad to hear it. He must be an aged wolf now, as I am an ancient tree.” He stopped. “Listen. You can hear where we stand the waters running deep below us through Isig.”
Morgon listened. The murmur and hiss of water endlessly falling wound deep below the wind’s voice. Cliffs bare of snow reared above them, melting into grey-white mists. Kyrth looked small below them, sheltered in a single curve of mountain.
“I would like to see the inside of Isig,” he said suddenly.
“Would you? I’ll show it to you. I know that mountain better than I know my own mind.”
Morgon looked at him. The aged, broad face crinkled a little under his gaze. He said softly, “Who are you? Are you Danan Isig? Is that why I didn’t hear you? Because you had just come out of your own shape-changing?”
“Was I a tree? Sometimes I stand so long in the snow watching the trees wrapped in their private thoughts that I forget myself, become one of them. They are as old as I am, old as Isig ... ” He paused, his eyes running over Morgon’s untrimmed hair, his harp, and added, “I heard something from the traders about a Prince of Hed travelling to Erlenstar Mountain, but that may only have been rumor; you know how they gossip ... ”
Morgon smiled. The pine-colored eyes smiled back at him. They started walking again; snow began to drift down, catching in the fur on their hoods, in their hair. The road swung wide around a jut of hillside to reveal again the rough black walls and pine-shaped towers of Harte. Its windows, patterned and stained with color, were already blazing with torchlight. The road ran into its mouth.
“The doorway into Isig,” Danan Isig said. “No one goes in or out of the mountain without my knowledge. The greatest craftsmen of the realm come to train in my home, work with the metals and jewels of Isig. My son Ash teaches them, as Sol used to before he was killed. It was Sol who cut the stars that Yrth set in your harp,”
Morgon touched the harp strap. A sense of age, of roots, of beginnings was waking in him at Danan’s words. “Why did Yrth put stars on the harp?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t wonder, then ... Yrth worked months on that harp, carving it, cutting the designs for the inlay; he had my craftsmen cut the ivory and set the silver and stones in it. And then he went up into the highest room in the oldest tower of Harte to tune the harp. He stayed seven days and seven nights, while I closed the forces in the yard so that the pounding wouldn’t bother him. Finally, he came down and played it for us. There was no more beautiful harp in the world. He said he had taken its voices from the waters and winds of Isig. It held us breathless, the harping and the harpist ... When he had finished playing, he stood still a moment, looking down at it. Then he passed the flat of his hand over the strings, and they went mute. When we protested, he laughed and said the harp would choose its own harpist. The next day he left, taking it with him. When he returned to my service a year later, he never mentioned the harp. It was as though we had all dreamed the making of it.”
Morgon stopped. His hand twisted in the harp strap while he stared at the distant, darkening trees as though somehow he could shape the wizard out of the twilight. “I wonder—“
Danan said, “What is it?”
“Nothing. I would like to speak to him.”
“So would I. He was in my service almost from the Years of Settlement. He came to me from some strange place west of the realm I had never heard of; he would leave Isig for years at a time, exploring other lands, meeting other wizards, other kings ... every time he returned, he would be a little more powerful, gentler. He had a curiosity like a trader’s and a laugh that boomed down into the lower mines. It was he who discovered the cave of the Lost Ones. That was the only time I ever saw him completely serious. He told me I had built my home over a shadow, and that I would be wise to forbid the waking of that shadow. So my miners have been careful never to disturb it, especially since they found Sol dead at its doorway ... ” He was silent a little, then added, as though he had heard Morgon’s unspoken question, “Yrth took me to it once to show me. I don’t know who made the door to the cave; it was there before I came, green and black marble. The inner cave was incredibly rich and beautiful, but—there was nothing in it that I could see.”
“Nothing.”
“Just stones, silence, and a terrible sense of something lying just beyond eyesight, like a dread in the bottom of your heart. I asked Yrth what it was, but he never told me. Something happened there before the settlement of Isig, long before the coming of men to the realm of the High One.”
“Perhaps during the wars of the Earth-Masters.”
“I think there may be a connection. But what, I don’t know; and the High One, if he knows what happened, has never said.”
Morgon thought of the beautiful, ruined city on Wind Plain, of the glass shards he had uncovered like a hint of an answer in one of the empty, roofless rooms. And suddenly, thinking of it, the terrible dread of a simple answer struck him, and he stopped again in the still, icy dusk, the mountain polished smooth and white as a bone in front of him. He whispered, “Beware the unanswered riddle.”
“What?”
“No one knows what destroyed the Earth-Masters. Who could have been more powerful than they were, and what shape that power has taken ... ”
“It was thousands of years ago,” Danan said. “What could that have to do with us?”
“Nothing. Perhaps. But we’ve been assuming just that for thousands of years, and the wise man assumes nothing ... ”
The mountain-king said wonderingly, “What is it you see ahead of us in the darkness that no one else can?”
“I don’t know. Something without a name ... ”
They reached the dark arch of the gates of Harte just as the snow began to fall again. The yard, with its many forges and workshops, was nearly empty; here and there a red-gold light shown through a half-opened door; the shadow of some craftsman at his work spilled across the threshold. Danan led Morgon across the yard into a hall whose rough walls were filigreed with flickering colors of jewels still embedded in the stone. A stream cut a curved path through the floor; a great firebed suspended above it warmed the stones, fire dancing over the dark water. Miners, craftsmen dressed simply in the colors of the mountain, traders in their rich garb, trappers in fur and leather glanced up as Danan entered, and Morgon shifted instinctively to a line of shadow beyond the torch’s reach.
Danan said gently, “There’s a quiet room in the east tower where you can wash and rest; come down later when it’s not so crowded. Most of these men will return to Kyrth after supper; they only work here.” He led through a side door out of the hall, up a stairway winding through the core of a wide tower. He added, “This is the tower Yrth stayed in. Talies used to visit him here, and Suth, a couple of times. Suth was a wild one, hair white as snow even when he was young. He frightened the miners, but I saw him once changing into shape after shape to amuse my children.” He stopped on a landing, drew back heavy hangings of white fur in a doorway. “I’ll send someone to make up your fire.” He paused, said a little hesitantly, “If it isn’t asking too much of you, I would love to hear that harp again.”
Morgon smiled. “No. It’s not asking too much, Thank you. I’m grateful for your kindness.”
He went into the room, sliding the straps from his shoulder. The walls were hung with fur and tapestry, but the hearth was swept clean and the room was cold. Morgon sat down in a chair beside the hearth. The stones formed a circle of silence about him. He could hear nothing, no laughter from the hall, no wind outside. A loneliness unlike even the loneliness of his path through the unclaimed lands touched him. He closed his eyes, felt weariness deeper than sleep sucking at the core of him. He rose restlessly, pulling away from it. Men came in then, bringing wood, water, wine, food; he watched them build the fire, light torches, set water to heat. When they were gone, he stood for a long time at the fire, staring into it. The water began to hiss; he undressed slowly, washed. He ate something he could not taste, poured wine, sat without drinking it while the night locked like a fist around the tower and the strange dread eddied like a tide deep in his heart.
His eyes closed again. For a while he ran with the vesta on the surface of his dreams, until he found himself floundering in the snow in his own shape as they melted away in the distance. Then, the loneliness poignant, unbearable, he traversed space and time with a wizard’s skill, found himself at Akren. Eliard and Grim Oakland were talking in front of the fire; he went towards them eagerly, said Eliard’s name. Eliard turned, and at the blankness in his eyes Morgon saw himself suddenly, his hair lank, his face drawn, the vesta scars vivid on his hands. He said his name. Eliard, shaking his head, said bewilderedly, You must be mistaken. Morgon isn’t a vesta. Morgon turned to Tristan, who was holding some pointless, rambling discussion with Snog Nutt. She smiled at him eagerly, hopefully, but the hope died quickly and an uneasiness came into her eyes. Snog Nutt said sorrowfully, He said he would fix my leaking roof, before the rain, but he went away and he never did, and he hasn’t come. He found himself abruptly at Caithnard, pounding on a door; Rood, flinging it open with a whirl of black sleeve, said irritably, You’re too late. Anyway, she’s the second most beautiful woman in An; she can’t marry a vesta. Turning, Morgon saw one of the Masters walking down the hall. He ran to catch up. The bowed, hooded head lifted finally at his pleadings; Master Ohm’s eyes met his, grave, reproachful, and he stopped, appalled. The Master walked away from him without speaking; he said over and over without response, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
He found himself on Wind Plain. It was dark; the sea lay heaving, blue-green with unearthly lights on a moonless night; so close he could see the light from Danan’s house lay Isig Mountain. Something was gathering itself in the darkness; he could not tell whether it was the wind or the sea; he only knew that an enormity was building itself, huge, nameless, inexorable, sucking into itself all strength, all laws and patterns, all songs, riddles, histories, to explode them into chaos on Wind Plain. He began to run desperately for shelter while the winds howled and the sea half a mile away raised waves so high the spray lashed across his face. He headed for the light of Danan’s house. He realized slowly, as he ran, that Harte was broken, empty as an Earth-Masters’ city, and that the bone-white light came from deep within Isig. He stopped. A voice split through the mountain out of a cave whose green marble door had not been opened for centuries, cut through the growling, bickering of wind and sea, and said his name.
“Star-Bearer.”
He woke with a start, his heart pounding, listening for the echo of the voice that had wakened him; it seemed to linger, a strange voice, neither man’s or woman’s, among the stones. Someone was gripping him, saying his name, someone so familiar that Morgon asked unsurprised, “Did you call me?” Then his hands rose, locked on the harpist’s arms.
“Deth.”
“You were dreaming.”
“Yes.” The tower walls, the fire, the silence were forming around him again. His hands loosened slowly, dropped. The harpist, a dust of snow on his shoulders and hair, slid the harp from his shoulder, leaned it against the wall.
“I chose to wait for you quietly in Kyrth rather than at Harte; Danan wasn’t sure if I was still there, so he didn’t tell you.” The even, undisturbed voice was soothing. “You took much longer than I expected.”
“I got caught in a blizzard.” He straightened, running his hands over his face. “Then I met Har ... ” His head lifted abruptly; he stared at the harpist. “You were waiting for me? You expected—Deth, how long have you been here?”
“Two months.” He took his coat off; snow spattered into the fire. “I left Herun the day after you did, travelled up the Ose, without stopping, to Kyrth. I asked Danan to keep watch for you, told him where to reach me in Kyrth, and then—waited.” He paused a moment. “I was worried.”
Morgon watched his face. He whispered, “I had every intention of returning to Hed. You knew that. You couldn’t have known I would come here, not after two months, not in dead winter.”
“I chose to trust that you would come.”
“Why?”
“Because if you had turned your back on your name, on the riddles you must answer—if you had gone back to Hed alone, unprotected, to accept the death you knew must come—then it wouldn’t have mattered where I went, whether to Erlenstar Mountain or the bottom of the sea. I have lived for a thousand years, and I can recognize the smell of doom.”
Morgon closed his eyes. The word, hanging in the air like a harp note between them, seemed to ease something out of him; his shoulders slumped. “Doom. You see it, too. Deth, I touched the bone of it in Osterland. I killed Suth.”
He heard the harpist’s voice untuned for the first time. “You did what?”
He opened his eyes. “I’m sorry. I mean that he died because of me. Har saved my life in that blizzard, so I gave him a promise, ignoring the fact that it is unwise to promise things blindly to the wolf-king.” He turned a palm upward; the scar shone like a withered moon in the firelight. “I learned the vesta-shape. I ran with the vesta for two months with Suth’s son Hugin, who has white hair and purple eyes. I found Suth behind Grim Mountain, an old vesta with one blind eye that he had lost, riddling. He died there.”
“How?”
Morgon’s hands closed suddenly on the chair arms. “I asked him why he had run from Lungold—I quoted the third stricture of the Founder to him, demanding help when he knew—he knew ... He made a choice; he tried to answer me, but he died trying. He pulled me down with him, there at the end of the world where there was nothing but snow and wind and vesta, he died, he was killed, the only wizard seen by men for seven centuries; I was left holding him, holding the last word he ever spoke like a riddle too terrible to answer—“
“What word?”
“Ohm. Ghisteslwchlohm. The Founder of Lungold killed Suth.”
Morgon heard the soft, swift draw of the harpist’s breath. His eyes were hidden, his face oddly still. He said, “I knew Suth.”
“You knew Master Ohm. You knew Ghisteslwchlohm.” His grip was rigid on the wood. “Deth, is Master Ohm the Founder of Lungold?”
“I will take you to Erlenstar Mountain. Then, with permission from the High One, if he does not answer that question for you, I will.”
Morgon nodded. He said more calmly, “I’m wondering how many other wizards are still alive under Ghisteslwchlohm’s power. I’m also wondering why the High One has never acted.”
“Perhaps because his business is the land, not the school of wizards of Lungold. Perhaps he has already begun to act in ways you do not recognize.”
“I hope so.” He took a cup Deth poured for him, swallowed wine. He added after a moment, “Deth, Har gave me five riddles Suth had given him. He suggested I answer them since I had nothing better to do with my life. One of them is: Who will come in the time’s ending and what will he bring? I assume that the Star-Bearer is the one who will come; I have come; I don’t know what it is I will bring; but what troubles me most is not who, or what, but when. The time’s ending. Walking to Harte with Danan I remembered the ruined cities on Wind Plain, on King’s Mouth Plain, and how no one really knows what destroyed the Earth-Masters. It happened long before the Years of Settlement; we assumed because the stones had fallen, the weeds grew between them, that a great, terrible war had come and gone, and nothing more of it existed but the empty stones. We also assumed that the wizards were dead. The one thing I know that could destroy us all is the death of the High One. I’m afraid that whatever destroyed the Earth-Masters before the realm was even formed, has been waiting ever since to challenge the last of the Earth-Masters.”
“I think it’s quite probable,” Deth said quietly. He leaned forward, his face etched with fire, and roused the half-log on the hearth. A flurry of sparks burned in the air like fiery snow.
“Has the High One ever explained the destruction of the cities?”
“Not as far as I know. One of the Masters at Caithnard when I was there said he had made a journey to ask the High One that, since it was one of the unanswered riddles on their lists; the High One simply said that the cities were ancient, empty before he mastered the land-law of the realm.”
“Which is saying either that he doesn’t know, or that he doesn’t choose to tell.”
“It’s unlikely that he doesn’t know.”
“Then why—“ He stopped. “Only the High One could explain the High One. So I will have to ask him.”
Deth looked at him. “I have a question of my own,” he said slowly. “I asked it in Herun; you chose not to answer it. But now you wear vesta-scars on your hands, you have spoken your own name, and you are putting your mind to this mystery like a Master. I would like to ask it again.”
Morgon, thinking back, said, “Oh. That.”
“What was it that made you leave Herun to return home?”
“Something Corrig changed into. And the laughter in his eyes when I killed him.” He rose restlessly, went to a window, gazed out at the unrelieved blackness that enclosed Isig.
The harpist said behind him, “What shape?”
“A sword. With three stars on its hilt.” He turned abruptly at the silence. “I have thought about it, and the conclusion I have come to is that no one, not even the High One himself, can force me to claim it.”
“That’s true.” Deth’s voice was changeless, but there was a faint line between his brows. “Did it occur to you to ask yourself where Corrig might have seen it?”
“No. I’m not interested.”
“Morgon. The shape-changers know it belongs to you, that inevitably you will find it, as you found the harp, even though you may not claim it. And when you do, they will be there, waiting.”
In the silence, a pitch-laden branch wailed softly. Morgon moved a little at the sound. He said, “I’m nearly at Erlenstar Mountain—that sword could be anywhere ... ”
“Perhaps. But Danan told me once that Yrth made a sword he showed to no one, centuries before he made the harp. Where he put it, no one knows; only one thing is certain: he said he had buried it beneath the place where he forged it”
“Where did—“ He stopped. He saw the sword again, recognized the master touch in the flawless designs on its blade, the sure, purposeful shaping of the stars. He put a hand to his eyes, asked, though he already knew the answer, “Where was it forged?”
“Here. In Isig Mountain.”
Morgon went down with Deth then, the harp over his shoulder, to talk to Danan. The mountain-king, sitting beside the fire with his children and grandchildren in the quiet hall, looked up with a smile as they entered.
“Come, sit down. Deth, I wasn’t sure if you were still in Kyrth or if you had lost hope and chanced the Pass when I sent for you today. You’ve been so silent. Morgon, this is my daughter Vert, my son Ash, and these—“ he paused to lift a small girl tugging herself onto his knee, “—are their children. They all wanted to hear your harping.”
Morgon sat down, a little dazed. A tall, fair man with Danan’s eyes, a slender woman with hair the color of pine bark, and a dozen children of varying shapes were looking at him curiously.
The woman, Vert, said despairingly to him, “I’m sorry, but Bere wanted to come, so all of mine had to come, and where my children go, Ash’s go, so—I hope you don’t mind them.” She put her hand on the shoulder of a young boy with blunt, black hair and her grey eyes. “This is Bere.”
Another black head appeared suddenly at Morgon’s knee: a little girl hardly big enough to walk. She stared up at him, then, going unsteady on her feet, clutched at him drunkenly. She grinned toothlessly at him as he slid his hand down her back to steady her, and his mouth twitched. Ash said, “That one belongs to Vert: Suny. My wife is in Caithnard, and Vert’s husband, who is a trader, is making a winter run to Anuin, so we put them all together for the time being. I don’t know how we’ll ever get them sorted out again.”
Morgon, his fingers rubbing up and down between Suny’s shoulder blades as she gripped his knee, looked up suddenly. “You all came to hear me play?”
Ash nodded. “Please. If you don’t mind. That harp and the making of it are legends in Isig. When I heard you were here with it, I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to bring all the craftsmen in Kyrth with me to see it, but my father restrained me.”
Morgon untied the harp case. Suny tugged the case strings curiously out of his fingers; Bere whispered, “Suny—“ She ignored him; he stepped to Morgon’s side, lifted her up patiently and held her. Morgon, aware of the curious, expectant faces watching him, said futiley, “I haven’t played in two months.” No one answered. The stars, as he uncovered the harp, pulled it free of the case, caught fire; the white moons seemed rimmed with it as the flame’s reflection travelled a liquid path down the silver inlay. He touched a string; the note sounded in the silence, pure, sweet, hesitant as a question; he heard someone loose a breath.
Ash’s hand moved involuntarily toward the stars, dropped. He breathed, “Who did the inlay?”
“Zee of Hicon, in Herun—I can’t remember his full name,” Danan said. “He was trained by Sol. Yrth designed the patterns.”
“And Sol cut those stars. May I see them?” he pleaded, and Morgon passed the harp to him. Something small, formless had bloomed in the back of his mind at Ash’s words; he could not trace it. Bere peered over Ash’s head, his lips parted as Ash studied the harp; Suny, reaching wildly for a gleaming harp string, startled him and he straightened, shifting his hold of her.
Vert begged, “Ash, stop counting the facets on the stones; I want to hear it.”
Ash handed it reluctantly back to Morgon. Morgon took it as reluctantly, and Vert, her eyes softening with sudden understanding, said, “Play something you love; Play something from Hed.”
Morgon righted the harp on his knee. His fingers strayed over the strings aimlessly a moment, then wandered into the gentle, sad chords of a ballad. The rich, beautiful tones only he could sound reassured him; even the simple love-ballad he had heard a hundred times took on an ancient dignity. As he played, he began to smell oak burning in the fire before him, saw the light around him wash over the walls of Akren. The song woke a peace in him that he knew instinctively was in Hed that night: a stillness of land dormant under snow, of animals dreaming placidly in warm places. The peace touched his face, easing, for the moment, the tension and weariness out of it. Then two things pieced together in the back of his mind, effortlessly, inarguably, and he stopped, his fingers motionless on the harp strings.
There was a small, inarticulate protest. Then he heard Deth’s voice out of the shadows where he had seated himself, away from the children, “What is it?”
“Sol. He wasn’t killed by traders because he was too frightened to hide from them in the Cave of the Lost Ones. He was killed—as my parents were killed, as the Morgol Dhairrhuwyth was killed—by shape-changers. He had gone into the cave and come out again to die on the threshold because of what he had seen. And what he saw in there was Yrth’s starred sword.”
They were still, even the children, their faces turned to him, unblinking. Then Vert shivered as though a cold wind had touched her, and Ash, all the joy of the harp faded from his face said, “What sword?”
Morgon looked at Danan. The king’s lips were parted; he seemed struggling back toward a memory. “That sword ... I remember. Yrth forged it in secret; he said he had buried it. I never saw it; no one did. That was so long ago, before Sol was born, when we were just opening the upper mines. I never thought about it. But how could you possibly know where it is? Or what it looks like? Or that Sol was killed because of it?”
Morgon’s fingers moved from the strings to clasp the wood; his eyes fell to it as though the neat sweep of strings ordered his thoughts. “I know a sword exists with three stars on it, exactly like the stars on this harp; I know the shape-changers have seen it, too. My parents were drowned crossing from Caithnard to Hed bringing this harp to me. The Morgol Dhairrhuwyth was killed travelling through Isig Pass to answer a riddle about three stars. The wizard Suth was killed in Osterland a week ago because he knew too much about those stars and tried to tell me—“ Ash’s hand reached out to stop him.
“Suth was killed—Suth?”
“But how? Who killed him? I thought he was dead.”
Morgon’s hands shifted a little. His eyes met Deth’s briefly. “That is something I will ask the High One. I think Yrth hid that sword there in the cave of the Lost Ones because he knew it was one place no one would go. And I think Sol was killed not by traders but by either the shape-changers, or—by whoever killed Suth, because he knew too much about those stars. I don’t know your mountain, Danan, but I know that a man trying to escape death doesn’t run toward it.”
There was silence, except for the weave and rustle of flames and a sigh from one of the children asleep on the floor. It was broken unexpectedly by Vert.
“That’s what always puzzled me,” she said slowly. “Why Sol did run down that way when he knew the mountain so well he could vanish like a dream in passageways no one else could see. You remember, Ash, when we were small—“
“There’s one way to find out,” Ash said abruptly. He was on his feet; Danan’s swift, immediate, “No!” overran Morgon’s.
The mountain-king said succinctly, “That, I forbid. I will not lose another land-heir.” Ash faced him a moment without moving, his mouth set; then the stubbornness went out of his face. He sat down; Danan added wearily, “Besides, what good would that do us?”
“The sword, if it’s there, belongs to Morgon. He’ll want it—“
“I don’t want it,” Morgon said.
“But if it belongs to you ... ” Ash said, “if Yrth made it for you—“
“I don’t recall being asked if I wanted a sword. Or a destiny. All I want is to get to Erlenstar Mountain without being killed—which is another reason I’m not interested in going down to that cave. And, being, incidently, the Prince of Hed, I don’t want to go armed before the High One.”
Ash opened his mouth, and closed it. Danan whispered, “Suth ... ” A baby, began to wail, a thin, sad sound; Vert started.
“Under your chair,” Ash said. “Kes.” He glanced around at the uneasy, uncomprehending faces. “We’d better put them to bed.” He retrieved a blinking, bewildered baby from the thick fur at his feet, heaved it like a sack to his shoulder.
Danan said as he rose, “Ash.”
Their eyes met again. Ash said gently, “You have my promise. But I think it’s time that cave was opened. I didn’t know there was a deathtrap in the heart of Isig.” He added to Morgon before he turned to go, “Thank you for playing.”
Morgon watched him leave, a child in each arm. The group faded away beyond the light. He looked down at the harp; a twist of bitterness rose in his throat. He stirred, slid the harp mechanically back into the case.
A soft conversation between Deth and Danan checked as he rose; the mountain-king said, “Morgon, Sol—no matter who killed him—has been dead three hundred years. Is there any way I can help you? If you want that sword, I have a small army of miners.”
“No.” His face was taut, white in the firelight. “Let me argue with my fate a little longer. I have been protesting from Caithnard to Isig, though, and it hasn’t done much good.”
“I would drain the gold from the veins of Isig to help you.”
“I know.”
“When I walked with you this afternoon, I didn’t realize you bore the vesta-scars. That’s a rare thing to see on any man, above all a man of Hed. It must be a marvellous thing to run with the vesta.”
“It is.” His voice loosened a little at the memory of the calm, endless snow, the silence lying always beneath the wind. Then he saw Suth’s face, felt the hands pulling at him as he knelt in the snow, and his face turned sharply; the memories faded.
Danan said gently, “Is that how you plan to get through the Pass?”
“I planned it that way, thinking I would be alone. Now—“ He glanced questioningly at Deth.
The harpist said, “It will be difficult for me, but not impossible.”
“Can we leave tomorrow?”
“If you wish. But Morgon, I think you should rest here a day or two. Travelling through Isig Pass in midwinter will be tiring even for a vesta, and I suspect you ran your strength dry in Osterland.”
“No. I can’t wait. I can’t.
“Then we’ll leave. But get some sleep.”
He nodded, then said, his head bowed, to Danan, “I’m sorry.”
“For what, Morgon? For stirring my centuries-old grief?”
“That, too. But I’m sorry I couldn’t play this harp for you the way it cries out to be played.”
“You will.”
Morgon took the tower steps slowly, feeling the harp whose weight he had never noticed, dragging at his back. He wondered, as he rounded the final curve, if Yrth had walked up the stairs every night to the top of the tower, or if he had practiced the enviable art of displacement, moving from point to point in the wink of an eye. He reached the landing, drew back the hangings, and found someone standing in front of his fire.
It was Vert’s son, Bere. He said without preamble as Morgon jumped, “I’ll take you to the cave of the Lost Ones.”
Morgon eyed him without answering. The boy was young, perhaps ten or eleven, with broad shoulders and a grave, placid face. He was unembarrassed by Morgon’s scrutiny; Morgon stepped in finally, letting the hangings fall closed behind them. He shrugged the harp from his shoulder, set it down.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been there.”
“I know where it is. I got lost once, exploring. I kept going deeper and deeper into the mountain, partly because I kept taking the wrong turnings and partly because I decided as long as I really was lost I might as well see what was down there.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“No. I was hungry. I knew Danan or Ash would find me. I can see in the dark; that’s from my mother. So we could go very quietly without light—except in the cave, you’ll need one there.”
“Why are you so anxious to go there?”
The boy took a step toward him, his brows crooked slightly. “I want to see that sword. I’ve never seen anything like that harp. Elieu of Hel, the brother of Raith, Lord of Hel, came here two years ago; he is beginning to do work a little like that—the inlay, the designs—but I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the work on that harp. I want to see what kind of work Yrth did with the sword. Danan makes swords for lords and kings in An and Ymris, they’re very beautiful. I’m training with Ash and Elieu; and Ash says I will be a master craftsman some day. So I have to learn everything I can.”
Morgon sat down. He smiled suddenly at the square-shouldered, peaceful artist. “It sounds very reasonable. But you heard what I told Danan about Sol.”
“Yes. But I know everyone in this house; no one would try to kill you. And if we went very quietly, no one would even know. You wouldn’t have to take the sword—you could just wait at the door for me. Inside, I mean, because—“ His mouth set wryly. “I am a little afraid to go in there alone. And you’re the only other person I know who would go with me.”
The smile faded from Morgon’s eyes; he rose abruptly, restlessly. “No. You’re wrong. I won’t go with you. I gave my reasons to Danan, and you heard them.”
Bere was silent a moment, his eyes searching Morgon’s face. “I heard them. But, Morgon, this is—this is important. Please. We could just go, quickly, and then just come back—“
“Like Sol came back?”
Bere’s shoulders twitched a little. “That was a long time ago—“
“No.” He saw the sudden despair in the boy’s eyes. “Please. Listen. I have been half a step ahead of death since I left Hed. The people trying to kill me are shape-changers; they may be the miners or the traders who ate with you at Danan’s table tonight. They may be here waiting, thinking I will do just that: claim Yrth’s sword, and if you and I are caught in the cave by them, they will kill us both. I have too much regard for both my intelligence and my life to be trapped like that.”
Bere shook his head, as if shaking Morgon’s words away. He took another step forward; the firelight left his face shadowed, pleading. “It’s not right just leaving it there, just ignoring it. It belongs to you, it’s yours by right, and if it’s anything like the harp, no other lord in the realm will have a more beautiful sword.”
“I hate swords.”
“It’s not the sword,” Bere said patiently. “It’s the craft. It’s the art. I’ll keep it if you don’t want it.”
“Bere—“
“It’s not right that I can’t see it.” He paused. “Then I’ll have to go alone.”
Morgon reached the boy with one quick step, gripped the square, implacable shoulders. “I can’t stop you,” he said softly. “But I will ask you to wait until I’ve left Isig, because when they find you dead in that cave, I don’t want to see Danan’s face.”
Bere’s head bowed, his shoulders slumped under Morgon’s hold; he turned away. “I thought you’d understand,” he said, his back to Morgon. “I thought you’d understand what it is to have to do something.”
He left. Morgon turned after a moment, wearily. He added wood to the fire and lay down. For a long time, watching the flames, feeling the exhaustion settling into his bones, he could not sleep. Finally he drifted into a darkness where odd images began to form and break like deep slow bubbles from a cauldron.
He saw the high, dark walls of inner Isig, veined with torchlight: silver, gold, iron black; saw, in the secret parts of the mountain, uncut jewels, crystals of fire and ice, mid-night-blue, smokey-yellow cracking through their husks of stone. Arched trails, high passageways wandered through webs of shadow. Rocks thrust downward from ceilings vaulted and lost in blackness, formed by the slow sculpture of forgotten ages. He stood in a silence that had its own voice. He followed like a breath of wind the slow, imperceptible movements of dark streams, thin as glass, that deepened, then hewed through hidden chasms and spilled into vast, measureless lakes, where tiny nameless things lived in a colorless world. At the end of one river he found himself in a chamber of milk-white blue-veined stone. Three steps led upward out of a pool of water to a dais on which two long cases of beaten gold and white jewels stood glittering beneath a torch. A sadness touched him for the dead of Isig: Sol, and Crania, Danan’s wife; he stepped into the pool, reached out to a casket. It opened unexpectedly, from within. A face, blurred, unrecognizable, neither man’s nor woman’s, looked up at him and said his name: Star-Bearer.
He found himself in an abrupt shift back in his own chamber, dressing again, while a voice murmuring out of the corridors of Isig called to him, low and insistent as a child’s call in the night. He turned to go, then checked, slid the harp over his shoulder. He moved without sound down the empty tower stairs, through the hall where the vast fire had dwindled. He found without faltering the doors of the stone archway beyond the hall that opened into the mountain itself, to the wet, cool shaft that led downward into the mines. Instinctively, without question, he found his way through the main corridors, down passages and stairways, into the mine shaft below. He took a torch from the wall there. A split in the solid rock at the end of the shaft loomed before him; the call trailed out of it and he followed without question. The path beyond was unlit, worn with age. The half-formed heads of growing rock thrust upward underfoot, slippery with the endless drip of water. The ceiling loomed down at him so suddenly he was forced to bend beneath it, then shot upward into impossible heights while the walls nudged against him and he carried the torch high over his head to ease himself through. The silence hung ponderous as the swell of rock overhead; he smelled, in his dream, the faint, clean, acrid scent of liquid stone.
He had no sense of time, of weariness, of cold; only the vague drift of shadows, the endless, complex pattern of passages he followed with an odd certainty. He wound deeper and deeper into the mountain, his torch burning steadily, untouched by wind; sometimes he could see the reflection of it in a pool far beneath the thin ledge he walked. The trails began to level finally; the stones closed about him, edging down from the ceiling, together at the sides. The stones were broken around him, as from some ancient inner turmoil. He had to step over some of them that had shaken free like great teeth from the ceiling. The trail stopped abruptly at a closed door.
He stood looking at it, his shadow splayed behind him on the wall. Someone said his name; he reached out to open it. Then, as though he had reached through the surface of his dream, he shuddered and woke himself. He was standing in front of the door to the cave of the Lost Ones.
He blinked senselessly at it, recognizing the polished green stone teared with black, shot with fire from his torch. Then, as the chill he had not felt in his dream began to seep through his clothes, and he realized the enormous mass of rock, silence, darkness sitting above his head, he took a step backward, a sound beginning to build in his throat. He whirled abruptly; found a darkness that his torch, beating a minute, jagged circle of light about him, could not begin to unravel. His breath hissed out of him; he ran a few steps forward, stumbled over a broken rock and brought himself up short against the wet wall of rock. He remembered then the endless, chaotic path he had taken in his dream. He swallowed drily, his blood panicked through him, the sound still building in his throat.
Then he heard the voice of his dream, the voice that had led him out of Danan’s house, down through the maze of the mountain:
“Star-Bearer.”
It came from behind the door, a strange voice, clean, timbreless. The sound stilled the panic in him; he saw clearly as though with a third eye the implications of danger beyond the door, and the implications of a knowledge beyond hope. He stood for a long time, shivering every once in a while from the cold, his eyes on the door, weighing probability against possibility. Thousands of years old, unweathered, originless, the door yielded no answer to his waiting. Finally, he laid one hand flat on the smooth stone. The door swung at his gentle touch to a crack of darkness. He eased, forward, torchlight flaring off walls massed with undiscovered beds and veins of jewels. Someone stepped into the light, and he stopped.
He drew a soft, shaking breath. A hand, the bones of it blurred, tapered, touched him, as Suth had done, feeling the reality of him. He whispered, his eyes on the still, molded face, “You are a child.”
The pale head lifted, the eyes star-white, met his. “We are the children.” The voice was the same, a child’s clear, dreaming voice.
“The children?”
“We are all the children. The children of the Earth-Masters.”
His lips moved, forming a word without shape. Something that was no longer panic began to grow heavy, unwieldy, in his throat and chest. A vague, gleaming boy’s face moved a little under his eyes. He reached out to it suddenly, found it unyielding to his touch.
“We have become stone in the stone. Earth mastered us.”
He lifted the torch. Around him, light, vague figures of children were rising out of the shadows, gazing at him curiously, without fear, as though he were something they had dreamed. Faces the light traced were as delicate, molded stone.
“How long—how long have you been here?”
“Since the war.”
“The war?”
“Before the Settlement. We have been waiting for you. You woke us.”
“You woke me. I didn’t know ... I didn’t know—“
“You woke us, and we called. You have the stars.” The lean hand moved, touching them. “Three to life, three to the winds, and three to—“ He lifted the sword he carried, offered the starred hilt of it to Morgon, “death. That was promised us.”
He swallowed the word like a bitterness in his mouth; his fingers closed around the blade. “Who promised it to you?”
“Earth. Wind. The great war destroyed us. So we were promised a man of peace.”
“I see.” His voice shook. “I see.” He stooped, bringing himself to the boy’s level. “What is your name?”
The boy was silent a moment, as though he could not answer. The still lines of his face shifted again; he said haltingly, “I was ... I was Tirnon. My father was Tir, Master of Earth and Wind.”
“I was Hona,” a small girl said suddenly. She came to Morgon trustingly, her hair curving like a fall of ice down her shoulders. “My mother was ... my mother was ... ”
“Trist,” a boy behind her said. His eyes held Morgon’s as though he read his own name there. “I was Trist. I could take any shape of earth, bird, tree, flower—I knew them. I could shape the vesta, too.”
“I was Elore,” a slender girl said eagerly. “My mother was Rena—she could speak every language of the earth. She was teaching me the language of the crickets—“
“I was Kara—“
They crowded around him, oblivious of the fire, their voices painless, dreaming. He let them talk, watching incredulously the delicate, lifeless faces; then he said abruptly, his voice cutting into theirs, “What happened? Why are you here?”
There was a silence. Tirnon said simply, “They destroyed us.”
“Who?”
“Those from the sea. Edolen. Sec. They destroyed us so that we could not live on earth anymore; we could not master it. My father gave us protection to come here, hidden from the war. We found a dying-place.”
Morgon was still. He let the torch drop slowly; shadows eased again over the circle of children. He whispered, “I see. What can I do for you?”
“Free the winds.”
“Yes. How?”
“One star will call out of silence the Master of the Winds; one star out of darkness the Master of Darkness; one star out of death the children of the Masters of the Earth. You have called; they have answered.”
“Who is—“
“The war is not finished, only silenced for the regathering. You will bear stars of fire and ice to the Ending of the Age of the High One—“
“But we cannot live without the High One—“
“This we have been promised. This will be.” The boy seemed no longer to hear his voice, but a voice out of the memory of an age. “You are the Star-Bearer, and you will loose from their order the—“
He stopped abruptly. Morgon broke the silence. “Go on.”
Tirnon’s head bent. He gripped Morgon’s wrist suddenly, his voice taut with anguish, “No.”
Morgon lifted his torch. Beyond the fragile planes of faces, the curve of bone, the shape of slender body, the light caught at a shadow that would not yield. In the rags of darkness a dark head lifted; a woman, her face beautiful, quiet, shy, looked at him and smiled.
He rose, the stars leaping fiery about him, Tirnon’s head fell on his bent knees; Morgon saw the lines of his body begin to melt together. He turned quickly, pushing through the stone door; it flung him outward and he saw, coming toward him down the trail, carrying lights in the palms of their hands, men of the color and movement of the sea.
He had a moment of utter panic, until he saw out of the corner of his eye, an opening, a slender side path beside him. He flung the torch as far away from him as possible; it blazed like a star towards his pursuers. Then, feeling for the opening, he slipped blind into an unknown path that at every breath and movement rose against him. He felt his way, his hands sliding over wet, smooth skulls of rock, his face and shoulders beaten against the unexpected outcroppings that formed at every twist. Darkness fashioned the trail, fashioned the mold of stones beneath his hands. Behind him the blackness lay unbroken; ahead it pressed against his eyes. He stopped once, appalled at his blindness, and heard above his harsh breathing the relentless silence of Isig. He blundered on, his hands flayed from scraping across unseen rock, blood from a cut on his face catching like tears in his eyelashes, until the stone gave way beneath his feet and he fell into blackness, his cry drowned in water.
He pulled himself back on the raw slab of shore, still clinging without realizing it to the sword, and lay hearing nothing but his breathing like little whimpering sobs. Then, as he began to quiet, he heard a footstep near his face, another’s breathing. His breath stopped. Someone touched him.
He rolled to his feet abruptly, backed; a voice whispered, “Morgon, watch out. The water—“
He stopped, his lips caught hard between his teeth, straining to see the pale shadow of a face, but the dark was absolute. Then he recognized the voice.
“Morgon. It’s me, Bere. I’m coming toward you. Don’t move, or you’ll fall in the water again. I’m coming ... ”
It took, as he felt the blood pounding in the back of his throat, all the courage he possessed to stay still, let the darkness come to him. A hand touched him again. Then he felt the sword move in his grip and made a sound.
“It was there. You were right. I knew it. I knew he would have etched the blade. It’s ... I can’t see that well; I need—“ His voice stopped briefly. “What did you do? You cut your hand, carrying it like that.”
“Bere. I can’t see you. I can’t see anything. There are shape-changers trying to find me—“
“Is that what they are? I saw them. I hid in the rocks, and you ran past me. Do you want me to leave you here and get—“
“No. Can you help me find a way back?”
“I think so. I think if we follow the water it leads toward one of the lower mines. Morgon, I’m glad you came for the sword, but what made you go without telling Danan? And how did you find your way down here? Everyone is looking for you. I went up to talk to you later to see if you’d changed your mind, but you were gone. So I went to Deth’s room, to see if you were there, but you weren’t, and he heard me and woke up. I told him you were gone, and he dressed and woke Danan, and Danan woke the miners. They’re all looking for you. I came ahead. I don’t understand—“
“If we get back to Danan’s house alive, I’ll explain it to you. I’ll explain anything—“
“All right. Let me carry the sword for you.” The hand at his wrist tugged him forward. “Be careful: there’s a low overhang to your left. Bend your head.”
They moved quickly through the darkness, silent but for Bere’s murmured warnings. Morgon, his body tense against unexpected blows, strained to see one faint brush of stone or glimmer of water, but his eyes found no place to rest. He closed them finally, let his body flow after Bere’s. They began to climb; the path wound endlessly upward. The walls moved like living things under his hands, now narrowing, closing until he eased between them sideways, now flowing wide, stretching beyond his reach, then leaping back together again. Finally Bere stopped at some isolated piece of darkness.
“There are steps here. They lead to the mine shaft. Do you want to rest?”
“No. Go on.”
The steps were steep, endless. Morgon, shivering with cold, feeling the blood well and drip over his fingers, began to see shades and flares of color behind his closed eyes. He heard Bere’s sturdy, tired breathing; the boy said finally with a sigh, “All right. We’re at the top.” He stopped so suddenly that Morgon bumped into him. “There’s light in the shaft. It must be Danan! Come on—“
Morgon opened his eyes. Bere went in front of him through an arch of stones whose walls rippled unexpectedly with wavering light. Bere called softly, “Danan?” And then he pushed back, stumbling against Morgon, the breath hissing sharply out of his throat. A blade, grey-green, raked across the light, struck his head and he fell, the sword ringing beneath him.
Morgon stared down at his limp, motionless body, looking oddly small on the harsh stones. Something unwieldy, uncontrollable, shook through him, welled to an explosion of fury behind his eyes. He ducked a sword thrust that bit at him like a silver snake, pulled the harp strap over his neck and dropped it, then reached for the sword beneath Bere. He plunged through the archway, eluding by a hairsbreadth two blades that whistled through the air behind him, caught a third on its way down, brought it up, high upward to a dull ring and blaze of sparks, then loosed it abruptly and slashed sideways. Blood burst like a sun across one shell-colored face. A blaze of fire ripping down his arm, caught his attention; he whirled. A blade drove toward him; he sent it spinning almost contemptuously across the floor with a single, two-handed stroke; then reversed the ponderous circle of the blade’s sweep and the shape-changer, coughing, hunched himself over the line of blood slashing from shoulder to hip. Yet another blade descended at him like a thread of silver that would have split him; he jerked back from it. He brought his sword down like an ax against a stump in a field, and the shape-changer, catching the blade in his shoulder, pulled it out of Morgon’s hands as he fell.
The silence settled ponderously about him. He stared down at the stars, shaken slightly with the last breath of the shape-changer; the hilt was webbed with blood. One of the strange lights, fallen and still burning, lay just beyond the shape-changer’s outstretched hand. Morgon, looking at it, shuddered suddenly, violently. He turned, extinguishing the light with a step, walked forward until he could go no further and pushed his face against the solid black wall of stone.
The slash down his arm took two weeks to heal, and he had scars striped across the vesta-horns on his left hand from the sword blade. He said nothing when Danan’s miners, their torchlight flaring into the cave, found him, the dead shape-changers, and the great sword with its stars winking like blood-red eyes. He had said nothing, though something moved behind his eyes, when Bere, one hand on his head, a line of blood down his face, stumbled blinking into the light. Walking up through the mines, he had heard Danan’s questions, but did not answer them. He had not walked long when the darkness of the mountain plummetted down at him, the torches growing small, going blue, and cold, and then black.
He broke the silence finally, lying in his chamber with his arm bound from shoulder to wrist, watching Bere, his square face intent, absolutely content, making sketches of the engravings on the sword. Bere, in response to his request, got Deth and Danan. Morgon told them flatly, precisely, what they wanted to know.
“Children ... ” Danan whispered. “When Yrth took me there, I saw only stones. How did he know what they were?”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Yrth? You think he is still alive?”
“If he is alive, I’ll find him.” He paused briefly, his eyes, indrawn, inaccessible. “There is someone else involved in this game beyond the Founder, the shape-changers, the strange names I was given—Edolen, Sec; someone they called the Master of the Winds. Perhaps they meant the High One.” He looked at Deth. “The High One is also a Wind-Master?”
“Yes.”
“And there is a Master of Darkness, who will no doubt reveal himself when he’s ready. The age of the High One is drawing to an end—“
“But how can that be?” Danan protested. “Our lands will die without the High One.”
“I don’t know how it can be. But I touched the face of the son of a Wind-Master while he spoke to me, and it was of stone. I think if that is possible, anything is possible, including the destruction of the realm. This is not our war—we didn’t begin it, we can’t end it, we can’t avoid it. There is no choice.”
Danan drew a breath to speak, but said nothing. Bere’s pen had stopped, his face was turned toward them. Danan’s breath went out of him slowly. “The ending of the age ... How can anyone put an end to a mountain? Morgon, you may be wrong. Those who began this war thousands of years ago did not know they would have to reckon with men who will fight for what they love. These shape-changers can be destroyed; you have proved that.”
“Yes. I have. But they don’t have to fight us. If they destroy the High One, we are doomed.”
“Then why are they trying to kill you? Why have they been attacking you instead of the High One? It makes no sense.”
“It does. Every riddle has an answer. When I begin to piece together all the answers to the questions I must ask, then I will have the beginnings of an answer to your question.”
Danan shook his head. “How can you do it? Not even the wizards could.”
“I’ll do it. I have no choice.”
Deth said little; when they left, taking Bere with them, Morgon rose painfully, went to one of the windows. It was dusk; the flanks of the mountain were blue-white, motionless with the coming night. He stood watching the great trees weave into shadows. Nothing moved, not an animal or a snow-weighted branch, while the white head of Isig gradually blurred into the black, starless sky.
He heard steps on the stairs; the hangings slid apart, and he said without turning, “When should we leave for Erlenstar Mountain?”
“Morgon—“
He turned then. “That’s a note I rarely hear in your voice: protest. We’re on the threshold of Erlenstar Mountain, and there are a thousand questions I need answers to—“
“Erlenstar Mountain is Erlenstar Mountain,” Deth said quietly, “a place where you may or may not find the answers you want. Be patient. The winds that blow down from the northern wastes through Isig Pass are merciless in deep winter.”
“I’ve stood in those winds before and not even felt them.”
“I know. But if you step into that winter before you are strong enough to bear it, you will not live two days beyond Kyrth.”
“I’ll survive,” Morgon said savagely. “That’s what I’m best at—surviving by any means, any method. I have great gifts, unusual in a Prince of Hed. Did you see the miners’ faces when they walked into that cave and found us all? With all the traders in this house, how long will it be, do you think, before that tale reaches Hed? Not only am I adept at killing, I have a sword with my name on it to do it with, given to me by a stone-faced child, given to him by a wizard who forged it assuming that the man whose name it bore would accept his own destiny. I am trapped. If there is nothing I can do but what I am meant to do, then I will do it, now, as quickly as possible. There is not a breath of wind. If I leave tonight, I could reach Erlenstar Mountain in three days.”
“Five,” Deth said. “Even the vesta sleep.” He moved to the fire, reached for wood. His face, lit as the flames leaped up, revealed hollows and hair-thin lines that had not been there before. “How far could you run with a crippled leg?”
“Do you suggest I wait here to be killed?”
“The shape-changers moved against you here and lost. With Danan’s house guarded, the sword taken, the answers the stone-faced children gave you inaccessible, they may prefer to wait for your move.”
“And if I don’t move?”
“You will. You know that.”
“I know,” he whispered. He whirled abruptly away from the window. “How can you be so calm? You are never afraid; you are never surprised. You have lived for a thousand years, and you took the Black of Mastery—how much of all this did you come to expect? You were the one to give me my name in Herun.” He saw the startled, almost imperceptible wariness in the harpist’s eyes, and he felt his mind turn on the question awkwardly, like an old mill groaning into movement. “What did you expect from me? That having put my mind to this game, I would leave anything or anyone unquestioned? You knew Suth—did he give you the riddles he learned of those stars? You knew Yrth; you said you were in Isig when he made my harp. Did he tell you what he had seen in the cave of the Lost Ones? You were born in Lungold: were you there when the School of Wizards was abandoned? Did you study there yourself?”
Deth straightened, meeting Morgon’s eyes. “I am not a Lungold wizard. I have never served any man but the High One. I studied awhile at the School of Wizards because I found myself growing old without aging, and I thought perhaps my father had been a wizard. I had no great gifts for wizardry so I left—that is the extent of my acquaintance with the Lungold wizards. I searched for you five weeks in Ymris; I waited two months for you in Kyrth without touching my harp, in case someone realized who I was and who I must be waiting for; I searched Isig Mountain with Danan’s miners for you: I saw your face when they found you. Do you think that if there is something I could do for you, I would not do it?”
“Yes.” There was a sharp, brittle silence before either of them moved. Morgon reached methodically for the sword Bere had been sketching by the fire, swung it in a wide, blazing half-circle, smashed it in a snap of blue sparks against the stone wall. It gave a deep, flawless, bell-like protest before he dropped it, and he said bitterly, hunched over his stinging hands, “You could answer my questions.”
He broke his seclusion in the tower finally, went out into the craftsmen’s yard a few days later. His arm was nearly healed; a half-forgotten strength was returning to him. He stood in the broken snow smelling the metal-smiths’ fires. The world seemed becalmed under a still, grey-white sky. Danan spoke his name; he turned. The mountain-king, enveloped in fur, put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“I’m glad to see you better.”
He nodded. “It’s good to be out. Where is Deth?”
“He rode into Kyrth this morning with Ash. They’ll be back at sundown. Morgon, I have been thinking ... I wanted to give you something that might help you; I racked my brains trying to think what, when it occurred to me that there are times in your journey that you might simply want to disappear from enemies, from friends, from the world, to rest awhile, to think ... There’s nothing less obvious than a tree in a forest.”
“A tree.” Something in his mind quickened. “Danan, can you teach me that?”
“You have the gift for shape-changing. Shaping a tree is much easier then shaping the vesta. You must simply learn to be still. You know what kind of stillness is in a stone, or a handful of earth.”
“I knew once.”
“You know, deep in you.” Danan looked up at the sky, then glanced at the bustling, preoccupied workers around him. “It’s easy to be still on a day like this. Come. No one will miss us for a while.”
Morgon followed him out of Harte, down the winding, quiet road, then into the forests high above Kyrth. Their footprints broke deep into the powdery snow; they brushed pine branches heavy with it, shook soft snow flurries loose that bared webs of wet, dark fir. They walked silently until, turning, they could not see the road, or Kyrth below it, or Harte, only the dark, motionless trees. They stood there listening. The clouds, softly shaped by the wind, rested on the silence; trees were molded to a stillness that formed the whorls of their bark, curve of branch, the heavy, downward sweep of their needles and pinnacle of tip. A hawk floated in the silence, barely rippling it, dove deep into it and vanished. Morgon, after a long while, turned to Danan, feeling suddenly alone, and found beside him a great pine, still and dreaming above Isig.
He did not move. The chill from his motionlessness began to trouble him, then passed as the silence became a tangible thing measuring his breath, his heartbeat, seeping into his thoughts, his bones until he felt hollowed, a shell of winter stillness. The trees circling him seemed to enclose a warmth like the stone houses at Kyrth, against the winter. Listening, he heard suddenly the hum of their veins, drawing life from deep beneath the snow, beneath the hard earth, He felt himself rooted, locked into the rhythms of the mountain; his own rhythms drained away from him, lost beyond memory in the silence that shaped him. Wordless knowledge moved through him, of slow measureless age, of fierce winds borne beyond breaking point, of seasons beginning, ending, of a patient, unhurried waiting for something that lay deeper than roots, that lay sleeping in the earth deeper then the core of Isig, something on the verge of waking ...
The stillness passed. He moved, felt an odd stiffness as though his face were being formed out of bark, his fingers dwindling from fingers of twig. His breath, which he had not noticed for a while, went out of him in a quick, white flash.
Danan said, his voice measured to the unhurried rhythm of the silence, “When you have a moment, practice so you can fade in a thought from man to tree. Sometimes I forget to change back. I watch the mountains fade into twilight and the stars push through the darkness like jewels pushing through stone, and forget myself until Bere comes calling for me, or I hear the movements of Isig beneath me and remember who I am. It’s a restful, comfortable thing to be. When I’m too tired to live any longer, I will walk as far as I can up Isig, then stop and become a tree. If this path you take becomes unbearable, you can simply disappear for a while, and no wizard or shape-changer on earth will find you until you are ready.”
“Thank you.” His voice startled him as though he had forgotten he possessed one.
“You have great power. You took to that as easily as one of my own children.”
“It was simple. So simple it seems strange that I never tried it before.” He walked beside Danan, following their broken trail back to the road, still feeling the placid winter stillness. Danan’s voice, with its own inner peace, scarcely disturbed it.
“I remember once when I was young spending an entire winter as a tree, to see what it was like. I scarcely felt the time passing. Grania sent the miners looking for me; she came herself, too, but I never noticed her, any more than she noticed me. You can survive terrible storms in that shape, if you need to, on your way to Erlenstar Mountain; even the vesta tire, after a while, running against the wind.”
“I’ll survive. But what about Deth? Is he a shape-changer?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never asked him.” His face wrinkled a little in thought. “I’ve always suspected he has greater gifts than harping and tact, and yet I can’t imagine seeing him turn into a tree. It doesn’t sound like something he would do.”
Morgon looked at him. “What gifts do you suspect?”
“Nothing in particular; I just wouldn’t be very surprised by anything he could do. There is a silence in him that as often as I have talked with him, he has never broken. You probably know him better than anyone.”
“No. I know that silence ... Sometimes I think it’s simply a silence of living, then at other times, it changes into a silence of waiting.”
Danan nodded. “Yes. But waiting for what?”
“I don’t know,” Morgon said softly. “I want to know.”
They reached the road. A cart rattled over it filled with skins from trappers in Kyrth. The driver, recognizing them, slowed his horses, and they hoisted themselves onto the tail. Danan said, leaning back against the skins, “I’ve been curious about Deth since the day he walked into my court one winter, seven hundred years ago, and asked to be taught the ancient songs of Isig in exchange for his harping. He looked much the same as he does now, and his harping ... even then, it was unearthly.”
Morgon turned his head slowly. “Seven hundred years ago?”
“Yes. I remember it was just a few years after I heard about the wizards’ disappearance.”
“I thought—“ He stopped. A cartwheel jogged over a hidden stone in the dark rutted snow. “Then he wasn’t in Isig when Yrth made my harp?”
“No,” Danan said surprisedly. “How could he have been? Yrth made the harp about a hundred years before the founding of Lungold, and Lungold is where Deth was born.”
Morgon swallowed something in the back of his throat. Snow began to fall again lightly, aimlessly; he looked up at the blank sky with a sudden, desperate impatience. “It’s beginning all over again!”
“No. Couldn’t you feel it, deep in the earth? The ending ... ”
Morgon sat alone in his chamber that evening without moving, his eyes on the fire. The circle of stones, the circle of the night surrounded him with a familiar implacable silence. He held the harp in his hands but he did not play it; his fingers traced slowly, endlessly, the angles and facets of the stars. He heard Deth’s step finally; the shift of the hangings, and he lifted his head, caught the harpist’s eyes as he entered, sent the swift, tentative probe of thought past the blurring, fathomless eyes.
He felt a brief sensation of surprise, as though, opening the door of some strange, solitary tower, he had stepped into his own house. Then something snapped back into his own mind like a blaze of white fire; shocked, blinded, he stumbled to his feet, the harp clattering on the floor. He heard nothing for a moment, saw nothing, and then, as the brilliant haze receded behind his eyes, he heard Deth’s voice. “Morgon—I’m sorry. Sit down.” Morgon lifted his head from his hands finally, blinking; flecks of color swam across the room. He took a step, bumped into the wine table; Deth eased him back to his chair.
He whispered, “What was that?”
“A variation of the Great Shout. Morgon, I had forgotten the mind-work you learned from Har; you startled me.” He poured wine, held it out. Morgon, his hands closed, rigid, the vibrations of the shout moving like a tide in his head, opened one hand stiffly to take it. He stood up again unsteadily, sent the cup flying across the room, wine splashing out of it, to crack against the wall.
He faced the harpist, asked reasonably, “Why did you lie to me about being in Isig when Yrth made his harp? Danan said it was made before you were born.”
There was no surprise, just a flash of understanding in the harpist’s eyes. His head bent slightly; he poured more wine and took a sip. He sat down, cradling the cup in his hands.
“Do you think I lied to you?”
Morgon was silent. He said almost surprised, “No. Are you a wizard?”
“No. I am the High One’s harpist.”
“Then will you explain why you said you were in Isig a hundred years before you were born?”
“Do you want a half-truth or truth?”
“Truth.”
“Then you will have to trust me.” His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. “Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me.”
Morgon closed his eyes. He sat down, leaned his aching head back. “Did you learn that at Lungold?”
“It was one of the few things I could learn. I was caught accidentally in a mind-shout of the wizard Talies once, when he lost his temper. He taught it to me, in apology.”
“Will you teach it to me?”
“Now?”
“No. I can barely think now, let alone shout. Do you use it often?”
“No. It can be dangerous. I simply felt another mind entering mine and reacted. There are simpler ways to disengage; if I had realized it was you, I would never have hurt you.” He paused. “I came in to tell you that the High One has set his name into every rock and tree in Isig Pass; the lands beyond Isig are his, and he can feel every footfall like a heartbeat. He will allow no one but us through. Danan suggests we leave when the ice on the Ose begins to break. That should be soon; the weather is turning.”
“I know. I felt it. Danan taught me the tree-shape this afternoon.” He rose to pick up his wine cup from across the room. He added, pouring wine, “I trust you, with my name and my life. But my life has been torn out of my control, shaped to the answering of riddles. You have given me one tonight; I will answer it.”
“That,” the harpist said simply, “is why I gave it to you.”
A few days later, going up Isig alone to practice shape-changing, Morgon caught again the current of stillness and found in it an unexpected tap of warmth rising deep from the earth, spreading through vein and joint of branch until, himself again, he felt it still in the tips of his fingers, the roots of his hair. A wind breathed across Isig; he looked into it and smelled the earth of Hed.
He found Deth with Danan, talking to one of the craftsmen in the yard. Danan, glancing up as he came to them, smiled and reached into an inner pocket in his cloak. “Morgon, one of the traders came in from Kraal today—they start coming like birds at the beginning of spring. He brought a letter for you.”
“From Hed?”
“No. He said he’s been carrying it for four months, from Anuin.”
“Anuin ... ” Morgon whispered. He pulled his gloves off, broke the seal quickly. He read silently; the men watched him. The soft south wind that had touched him in the mountains rustled the paper in his hands. He did not look up immediately when he was finished; he was trying to remember a face that time and distance had worn into a lovely blur of colors. He raised his head finally.
“She wants to see me.” The faces in front of him were, for a moment, indistinguishable. “She told me to stay off ships, coming home. She said to come home.”
He heard the boom and crack of the Ose that night in his dreams and woke to the sound. By morning, webs of broken ice had formed on it like filigree; two days later the river, dark and swollen with melting snow, spun wedges of ice huge as carts past Kyrth, heading eastward toward the sea. The traders began packing their wares at Harte, bound for Kraal and the sea. Danan gave Morgon a packhorse and a sweet-tempered, shaggy-hooved mare bred in Herun. He gave Deth a chain of gold and emerald for his playing during the long, quiet evenings. At dawn one morning, the mountain-king, his two children, and Bere came out to bid farewell to Morgon and Deth. As the sun rose in a blaze of blue, cloudless sky above Isig, they rode through Kyrth, down the little-travelled road that led through Isig Pass to Erlenstar Mountain.
Bare granite peaks glittered around them as the rising sun pushed slabs of light inch by inch down the mountainsides. The road, kept clear three seasons of the year by men who worked for the High One, was rough with fallen stones, trees snapped by wind and snow. It wound beside a river, rose upward to the rim and edge of mountains. Great falls unlocked by the gentle, persistent south wind, murmured in hidden places among the trees, or glittered in frozen silver outpourings high between the peaks. In the silence, the sound of hoof on bare rock snapped in the air like iron.
They spent the first night camped beside the river. Above them the sky, deep flaming blue during the day, began to stain with night. Their fire flickered back at the huge stars like a reflection. The river lazed beside them, deep and slow; they were silent until Morgon, washing a pot and cups in the river, heard out of the immense darkness a blaze of harp song that ran quick and fiery as the sunlit waters of a falls. He listened, crouched by the river until he felt his hands burn with cold. He went back to the fire. Deth softened the song to match the river’s murmur, his face and the polished lines of the harp drawn clear by the fire. Morgon added wood to the fire. The harping stopped; he made a sound of protest.
“My hands are cold,” Deth said. “I’m sorry.” He reached for the harp case. Morgon, leaning back against a fallen log, gazed back at the cold, aloof faces of stars caught in the webs of pine needles.
“How long will it take us?”
“In good weather it takes ten days. If this weather holds, it shouldn’t take us much longer.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s more beautiful than any land I’ve seen in my life.” His eyes moved to the harpist’s face, half-hidden under his arm as he lay beside the fire. The quiet mystery of him began to nag at Morgon again. He put aside his questions with an effort and said instead, “You were going to teach me the mind-shout. Can you teach me the Great Shout, too?”
Deth lifted his arm, slid it beneath his head. His face looked open, for once, peaceful. “The Great Shout of the body is unteachable; you simply have to be inspired.” He paused, added thoughtfully, “The last time I heard it was at the marriage between Mathom of An and Cyone, Raederle’s mother. Cyone shouted a shout that harvested an entire crop of half-ripe nuts and snapped all the harp strings in the hall. Luckily I heard it from a mile away; I was the only harpist able to play that day.”
Morgon gave a grunt of laughter. “What was she shouting about?”
“Mathom never told anyone.”
“I wonder if Raederle could do that.”
“Probably. It was a formidable shout. The body-shout is uncontrollable and very personal; the mind-shout will be more useful to you. It’s a gathering in one quick moment all the energy in your mind, concentrated into one sound. Wizards used it to call one another in different kingdoms, if they had to. Both shouts may be used in defense, although the body-shout is unwieldy. If you are unusually moved, however, it is very effective. The mind-shout is generally the more dangerous: if you shout with full force into the mind of a man sitting close to you, he may lose consciousness. So be very careful with it. Try it. Call my name.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“I’ll stop you if it’s too strong. It takes time to learn to gather force. Concentrate.”
Morgon stilled his mind. The fire smudged before his eyes, thinning into the darkness. The face opposite him became nameless as a tree or a stone. Then he slid past the shell of the face and let his thoughts blaze suddenly with Deth’s name. His concentration shattered, he saw the face and the fire and the ghosts of trees form again before him.
Deth said patiently, “Morgon, you sounded as though you were on the other side of a mountain. Try again.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing—“
“Say my name, as you would naturally, using your mind-voice. Then shout it.”
He tried again. This time, forgetting Har’s teaching, thrown back against himself, he heard the shout futile in his own mind. He cleared his mind, tried again, and produced a full concentration of inner sound, which seemed to build and explode like a bubble in a cauldron. He winced.
“I’m sorry—did I hurt you?”
Deth smiled. “That was a little better. Try again.”
He tried again. By the time the moon rose, he had exhausted his ability to concentrate. Deth sat up, reached for wood.
“You are trying to produce an illusion of sound without sound. It’s not easy, but if you can exchange thoughts with a man, you should be able to shout at him.”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“Perhaps you’re being too cautious. Think of the Great Shouters of An: Cyone of An; Lord Col of Hel and the witch Madir, whose shouting-feud over the land-right to an oak forest their pigs fed in is legendary; Kale, first King of An, who scattered an enormous army from Aura by his shout of despair over its numbers. Forget you are Morgon of Hed and that I am a harpist named Deth. Somewhere deep in you is a wealth of power you are not using. Tap it, and you might make the beginnings of a mind-shout that doesn’t sound as if it’s coming out of the bottom of a well.”
Morgon sighed. He tried to clear his mind, but like leaves there came drifting through it the bright images of Col and Madir throwing shouts at each other that cracked in the blue sky of An like lightning; of Cyone, dressed in purple and gold on her wedding day shouting an immense, mysterious shout of legendary result; of Kale, his face lost in the shadows of faded centuries, shouting with utter despair the hopelessness of his first battle. And Morgon, moved oddly by the tale, shouted Kale’s shout and felt it snap away from him clean as an arrow into the eye of a beast.
Deth’s face drifted before him again, frozen still above the fire.
Morgon said, feeling oddly peaceful, “Was it better?”
Deth did not answer for a moment. Then he said cautiously, “Yes.”
Morgon straightened. “Did I hurt you?”
“A little.”
“You should have—why didn’t you stop me?”
“I was too surprised,” He drew a deep breath. “Yes. That was much better.”
The next day the river dropped away from them as they rode, the path rising high above it, tracing the mountainside, the white slope melting downward to halt at the blue-white water. For a while they lost sight of it, riding through the trees. Morgon, watching the slow procession of ancient trees, thought of Danan, and the mountain-king’s face seemed to look back at him out of aged, wrinkled bark. Midafternoon brought them back to the cliff edge, where they saw again the brilliant, impatient river and the mountains shrugging off their coats of winter snow.
The packhorse, straying aside, sent a rock below them, bouncing into the river; Morgon turned to tug it back. The bright sun glanced off the peak above them; fingers of light flicked along a row of icicles on the cliff. Morgon glanced up at the slope above their heads, and the bone-white blaze of mountain burned in his eyes.
He looked away, and said to Deth, “If I wanted to harvest a crop of nuts in Hed with the Great Shout, how would I do it?”
Deth, brought out of his own thoughts, said absently, “Provided that the crop of nuts is in a secluded place away from your animals, who would scatter to the twelve winds at a shout like that, you would draw on the same source of energy you used last night. The difficulty lies in producing a sound without considering physical limitations. It requires both sufficient impulse and great abandon, which is why you would do better to wait for a good wind.”
Morgon considered. The gentle, rhythmic clop of hooves and the distant voice of the river sounded frail against the silence, which seemed impervious to any shout. He thought back to the previous night, trying to find again the source of inexhaustible energy, private and undefined, that had overwhelmed him to produce the silent shout. The sun, leaping from behind a bend in the road, suddenly showered his path with stars. The unbroken blue of the sky quivered with a great, soundless note. He drew a breath of the hidden sound and loosed a shout.
There was an answering shout from the mountains. For a second he listened to it without surprise. Then he saw Deth stop ahead of him; his face turned back in surprise. He dismounted, wrenched at the pack-horse’s reins, and Morgon, suddenly placing the sound, slid off his horse and drew it to the wall of the cliff. He crouched flat beside it as the hiss and rattle of stones swept towards them, bounced onto the road and down the slope.
The rumble shook through bare peaks and hidden forests. A boulder half the size of a horse struck the cliff edge above their heads, sailed lightly over them and flung itself down the slope towards the river, crushing a tree as it passed. Then the silence, regathered and locked into place, strained at their ears in triumph.
Morgon, flat against the cliff as though he were holding it up, turned his head cautiously. Deth’s eyes met his, expressionless. Then expression came back into them.
He said, “Morgon—“
He stopped. He eased the trembling horses away from the cliff. Morgon soothed his own horse, brought it back on the road. He stood beside it, suddenly too tired to mount, sweat pricking his face in the chill air.
He said after a moment, blankly, “That was stupid.”
Deth dropped his face against his horse. Morgon, who had never heard him laugh before, stood amazed in the snow, listening. The sound flung itself back at them from the high crevices until the laughter of stone and man tangled into an unhuman sound that jarred Morgon’s ears. He took a step forward, disturbed. As Deth sensed the movement, he quieted. His hands were twisted, locked in his horse’s mane; his shoulders were rigid.
Morgon said softly, “Deth—“
The harpist’s head lifted. He reached for the reins, mounted slowly without looking at Morgon. Down the slope a great tree, half uprooted, its trunk snapped like a bone, laid its face against the snow. Morgon, staring down at it, swallowed drily. “I’m sorry. I had no business practicing the Great Shout on a mountain of melting snow. I could have killed us both.”
“Yes.” The harpist checked briefly, as though feeling for his voice. “The Pass seems to be proof against shape-changers, but not against you.”
“Is that why you were laughing like that?”
“I don’t know what else to do.” He looked at Morgon finally. “Are you ready to go on?”
Morgon drew himself on his own horse wearily. The late sun, drifting towards Erlenstar Mountain, was drawing a wake of light down the Pass.
Deth said, “The road descends down to the river in a couple of miles; we can camp then.”
Morgon nodded. He added, soothing the neck of his trembling mare, “It didn’t sound that loud.”
“No. It was a gentle shout. But it was effective. If ever you shout the Great Shout in truth, I think the world will crack.”
In eight days they tracked the river to its source: the melting slopes and high snowbound peak of the mountain that overlooked the kingdoms of the High One. They saw the end of the road on the morning of the ninth day; it crossed the Ose and ran into the mouth of Erlenstar. Morgon reined, catching his first glimpse of the threshold of the High One. Lines of huge, ancient trees marked the road, which, cleared of snow across the river, glittered like the inner walls of Harte. The outer door was a crack in the stone face of the mountain, smoothed and molded to an arch. A man walked out of the arch as he watched, came down the fiery road to wait at the bridge.
“Seric,” Deth said. “The High One’s Watcher. He was trained by the wizards at Lungold. Come.”
But he did not move himself. Morgon, a mixture of fear and excitement beginning to gnaw at him, glanced at Deth, waiting. The harpist sat still, his face quiet as always, looking at the door into Erlenstar. Then his head turned. His eyes on Morgon’s face held an odd expression, half-searching, half-questioning, as though he were weighing a riddle and an answer in his mind. Then, without resolving one to the other, he moved forward. Morgon followed him down the final length of road, across the bridge where Seric, his long, loose robe seemingly woven from all the colors under the sun, stopped them.
“This is Morgon, Prince of Hed,” Deth said, as he dismounted. Seric smiled.
“So Hed has come at last to the High One. You are welcome. He expects you. I’ll take your horses.”
Morgon walked beside Deth down the flickering path, alive with worn, uncut jewels. The mouth of Erlenstar opened to a wide sweep of inner hallway, a great fire ring in the middle of it. Seric took their horses down one side of it. Deth led Morgon towards arched double doors. They opened softly. Men in the same light, beautiful robes bent their heads to Morgon, closed the doors again behind them.
Light pricked endlessly through the shadows, drawn by the play of fire on jewelled floor, walls, arched dome of rock, as though the High One’s house were the center of a star. Deth, his hand light on Morgon’s arm, led him forward towards a dais at the other side of the round room. On the third step a high-backed throne carved of a single yellow crystal sat between two torches. Morgon stopped at the bottom of the steps. Deth left his side, went to stand beside the throne. The High One, his robe sun-gold, his white hair drawn back from his brow to free the simple, austere lines of it, lifted his hands from the arms of the throne and brought the tips of his fingers together.
“Morgon of Hed. You are very welcome,” he said softly. “How may I help you?”
Morgon’s blood shocked through him, then slowed unbearably with the dull pound of his heart The jewelled walls pulsed around him in silent, flickering beats of light. He looked at Deth. The harpist stood quietly, the midnight eyes watching him dispassionately. He looked back at the High One, but the face remained undisguised by richness: the face of a Master of Caithnard he had known for three years and never known.
His voice came heavy, ragged. “Master Ohm—“
“I am Ohm of Caithnard. I am Ghisteslwchlohm, the Founder of Lungold, and—as you have guessed—it’s destroyer. I am the High One.”
Morgon shook his head, a weight growing behind his throat, his eyes. He turned again to Deth, who blurred suddenly in his gaze, yet, blurred, stood with a silence undisturbed and insurmountable as the silence sitting heavy as ice above Isig Pass. “And you—“ he whispered.
“I am his harpist.”
“No,” he whispered. “Oh, no.” Then he felt the word well up from some terrible source, tear out of him, and the barred doors of the High One’s house split from top to bottom with the force of that shout.
THE RIDDLE-MASTER OF HED is the first of three books about Morgan, Raederle, the world they live in and the end of an age.
People and Places
AIA wife of Har of Osterland.
AKER, JARL dead trader of Osterland.
AKREN home of the land-rulers of Hed.
ALOIL ancient wizard in the service of the kings of Ymris, preceded the school of wizards of Lungold.
AMORY, WYNDON farmer of Hed; Arin, his daughter.
AN large kingdom; chief city, Anuin; ruler, Mathom.
ANOTH physician at the court of Heureu of Ymris.
ANUIN chief city of An; seat of Mathom.
ASH son and land-heir of Danan Isig.
ASTRIN land-heir of Ymris; brother of Heureu.
ATHOL dead father of Morgon, Eliard and Tristan; a prince of Hed.
AUBER OF AUM descendant of Peven of Aum.
AUM ancient kingdom now one of the three portions of An.
AWN OF AN ancient land-ruler of An; died because he deliberately destroyed part of An to keep it from an enemy.
BERE grandson of Danan Isig: son of Vert.
CAERWEDDIN chief city of Ymris; seat of Heureu; a port city.
CAITHNARD a free-port city between Ymris and An; site of the college maintained by the Riddle-Masters.
COL ancient lord of Hel.
CORRIG shape-changer.
CRON ancient Morgol of Herun; full name Ylcorcronlth. His harper was Tirunedeth.
CROWN CITY chief city of Herun; ringed by seven circular walls; seat of the Morgol El of Herun.
CYONE wife of Mathom of An; mother of Raederle and Rood.
DANAN ISIG Land-ruler and king of Isig.
DETH harpist of the High One.
DUAC son of Mathom and land-heir of An.
EARTH-MASTERS ancient inhabitants of the land; builders of two now-ruined cities, both in Ymris, one on Wind Plain, one on King’s Mouth Plain.
EL morgol (land-ruler) of Herun, full name Elrhiarhodan.
ELIARD brother of Morgon and land-heir of Hed.
ERIEL MEREMONT wife of Heureu, land-ruler of Ymris.
ERLENSTAR MOUNTAIN site of the home of the High One.
GALIL ancient king of Ymris in the time of Aloil.
GHISTESLWCHLOHM founder of the school of wizards at Lungold.
GRANIA dead wife of Danan Isig, mother of Sol.
GRIM MOUNTAIN site of Yrye, home of Har of Osterland.
HAGIS dead king of An, grandfather of Mathom.
HAR land-ruler and king of Osterland, sometimes called the wolf-king.
HARTE home of Danan Isig, on Isig Mountain.
HED small farming principality on an island.
HEL ancient kingdom, now a part of An.
HERUN kingdom; chief city, Crown City; ruled by the Morgol.
HEUREU king and land-ruler of Ymris.
HIGH ONE law-giver and sustainer of life since the passing of the Earth-Masters.
HLURLE trade-port town near Herun.
HUGIN son of Suth the wizard.
IFF OF THE UNPRONOUNCEABLE NAME wizard in service to Herun at the time of Morgol Rhu.
INGRIS OF OSTERLAND refused to take in the disguised Har of Osterland and died as a result.
ILON ancient harper of Har of Osterland.
ISIG kingdom ruled by Danan from his home at Harte; known for its fine metal and jewel work.
ISIG PASS the route from Harte to Erlenstar Mountain.
KALE first King of An, who won a desperate battle with a Great Shout.
KERN OF HED ancient prince of Hed, subject of the only riddle to come from Hed.
KING’S MOUTH PLAIN site of ruined city of the Earth-Masters; name is of a later date.
KOR, RUSTIN trader.
KRAAL trade-city of the far north, located at the spot where the River Ose flows into the sea.
KYRTH trade-city near Harte, home of Danan Isig; on the Ose.
LAERN Riddle-Master at Caithnard; lost his life in a riddle game with Pevin of Aum.
LUNGOLD ancient city founded by Ghisteslwcholm as the site for the school for wizards.
LOOR fishing village in Ymris.
LYRA daughter of the Morgol El of Herun; land-heir of Herun; full name Lyraluthuin.
MADIR ancient witch of An.
MARCHER territory in north Ymris governed in the king’s name by the high lord of Marcher.
MASTER, CANNON farmer of Hed.
MATHOM land-ruler and king of An; father of Rood, Raederle and Duac.
MEREMONT coastal territory of Ymris governed by the high lord of Meremont.
MEROC TOR high lord and ruler of Tor; subject of Heureu of Ymris.
MORGON land-ruler and prince of Hed.
NUN ancient wizardess of Lungold, in service to the lords of Hel.
NUTT, SNOG pigherder of Hed.
OAKLAND, GRIM overseer for Morgon of Hed.
OEN OF AN conqueror of Aum; king of An; built a tower to trap the witch Madir.
OHM a Riddle-Master of Caithnard.
OSTERLAND kingdom ruled by Har from Yrye.
PEVEN OF AUM ancient lord of Aum held captive for five hundred years in a tower by the rulers of An, guarding the ancient crown of Aum.
RAEDERLE daughter of Mathom of An, promised to the winner of the crown of Peven of Aum.
RAITH current lord of Hel, under Mathom.
RE OF AUM offended an ancient lord of Hel, and in trying to insure his safety, allowed the lord of Hel to trap him on his own estate.
RHU fourth morgol of Herun; built the seven walls surrounding Crown City; died seeking the answer to a riddle; full name Dhairrhuwyth.
ROOD land-heir of An; son of Mathom; friend of Morgon of Hed.
RORK high lord of Umber, under Heureu.
RYE, TOBEC trader.
SERIC the High One’s watcher; trained by the wizards at Lungold.
SOL OF ISIG dead son of Danan of Isig; died at the door of the cave of the Lost Ones at the bottom of Isig Mountain; cut the stones for the stars on the harp Yrth made.
SPRING OAKLAND dead mother of Morgon of Hed; wife of Athol.
STONE, HARL farmer of Hed.
STRAG, ASH trader of Kraal.
SUTH ancient wizard, friend of Har of Osterland.
TALIES ancient wizard.
TEL one of the Riddle-Masters of the college at Caithnard.
THISTIN OF AUM current lord of Aum, under Mathom.
TIRUNEDETH harper to the Morgol Cron, ancient ruler of Herun.
TOL small fishing-town in Hed; a seaport.
TRISTAN sister of Morgon of Hed.
UMBER midland territory governed by Rork, under Heureu.
UON harpmaker of Hel, three centuries before.
USTIN OF AUM ancient king of Aum who died of sorrow over the conquering of Aum by An.
VERT daughter of Danan Isig.
WIND PLAIN plain in Ymris, site of Wind Tower and a ruined city of the Earth-Masters.
WIND TOWER only complete structure in the ruined city on Wind Plain; top of tower cannot be reached.
WOLD, LATHE great-grandfather of Morgon of Hed.
WOLD, SIL farmer of Hed.
XEL wild cat belonging to Astrin, gift of Danan Isig.
YLON ancient shape-changer.
YMRIS kingdom ruled by Heureu from the chief city Caerweddin.
YRTH most powerful wizard in Lungold after the Founder, sometimes known as the Harpist of Lungold.
YRYE home of Har of Osterland.
ZEC OF HICON craftsman who did the inlay work on the harp with three stars.
PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP discovered the joys of writing when she was fourteen, endured her teenage years in the secret life of her stories, plays and novels, and has been writing ever since—except for a brief detour when she thought she would be a concert pianist.
She was born in Salem, Oregon and has lived in Arizona, California and the England that is the setting for The House on Parchment Street. After a number of years in San Jose, where she received an MA in English from San Jose State University, she moved to San Francisco, where she now lives.
Miss McKillip has also written The Throme of the Erril of Sherill, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Night Gift, and Heir of Sea and Fire.