Harrowing the Dragon

Patricia A. McKillip

 

Copyright © 2005 by Patricia A. McKillip.

 

 

for Dave

 

 

contents

The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath

A Matter of Music

A Troll and Two Roses

Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer’s Son

The Fellowship of the Dragon

Lady of the Skulls

The Snow Queen

Ash, Wood, Fire

The Stranger

Transmutations

The Lion and the Lark

The Witches of Junket

Star-Crossed

Voyage into the Heart

Toad

 

 

 

 

The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath

 

 

Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named Hoarsbreath, made out of gold and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briny, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world’s cap, the snow melted from the peak of Hoarsbreath. The hardy trees shrugged the snow off their boughs and sucked in light and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners’ village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mine shaft sagged to the ground; the dead white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the deep mountain and took it downriver, across the sea to the mainland, to trade for food and furs, tools and a liquid fire called wormspoor because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs, kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they weren’t buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to Hoarsbreath. But the gold waiting in the dark secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.

For two hundred years after the naming of Hoarsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived their rich, isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised children who were sent to the mainland when they were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of gold in the dark.

Then two miners’ children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.

They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to Hoarsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she was good-natured and sturdy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of Hoarsbreath, even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny; she seemed to sense it through her fingertips touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it aged into a rich, smoky gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles and inspired marvelous tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.

She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross section of tunnel between her mother’s house and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn’t handle with a soft word or her own right arm. So when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-light, she wasn’t afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with something that puzzled its senses.

His hair was dead white, with strands bright as worm-spoor running through it; his eyes were the light, hard blue of dawn during suns-crossing. Rich colors flashed out of him everywhere in her light: from a gold knife hilt and a brass pack buckle; from the red ties of his cloak that were weighted with ivory, and the blue-and-silver threads in his gloves. His heavy fur cloak was closed, but she felt that if he shifted, other colors would escape from it into the cold, dark air. At first she thought he must be ancient: the taper-fire showed her a face that was shadowed and scarred, remote with strange experience, but no more than a dozen years older than hers. “Who are you?” she breathed. Nothing on Hoarsbreath glittered like that in midwinter; its colors were few and simple: snow, damp fur and leather, fire, gold.

“I can’t find my father,” he said. “Lule Yarrow.”

She stared at him, amazed that his colors had their beginnings on Hoarsbreath. “He’s dead.” His eyes widened slightly, losing some of their hardness. “He tell in a crevice. They chipped him out of the ice at suns-crossing, and buried him six years ago.”

He looked away from her a moment, down at the icy ridges of tramped snow. “Winter.” He broke the word in two, like an icicle. Then he shifted his pack, sighing. “Do they still have wormspoor on this ice-tooth?”

“Of course. Who are you?”

“Ryd Yarrow. Who are you? ”

“Peka Krao.”

“Peka. I remember. You were squalling in somebody’s arms when I left.”

“You look a hundred years older than that,” she commented, still puzzling, holding him in her light, though she was beginning to feel the cold. “Seventeen years you’ve been gone. How could you stand it, being away from Hoarsbreath so long? I couldn’t stand five years of it. There are so many people whose names you don’t know, trying to tell you about things that don’t matter, and the flat earth and the blank sky are everywhere. Did you come back to mine?”

He glanced up at the gray-white ceiling ot the snow-tunnel, barely an inch above his head. “The sky is full of stars, and the gold wake of dragon-flights,” he said softly. “I am a Dragon-Harrower. I am trained and hired to trouble dragons out of their lairs. That’s why I came back here. ”

“Here. There are no dragons on Hoarsbreath.”

His smile touched his eyes like a reflection of fire across ice. “Hoarsbreath is a dragon’s heart.”

She shifted, her own heart suddenly chilled. She said tolerantly, “That sounds like a marvelous tale to me.”

“It’s no tale. I know. I followed this dragon through centuries, through ancient writings, through legends, through rumors of terror and deaths. It is here, sleeping, coiled around the treasures of Hoarsbreath. If you on Hoarsbreath rouse it, you are dead. If I rouse it, I will end your endless winter.”

“I like winter. ” Her protest sounded very small, muted within the thick snow-walls, but he heard it. He lifted his hand, held it lightly against the low ceiling above his head.

“You might like the sky beyond this. At night it is a mine of lights and hidden knowledge.”

She shook her head. “I like close places, full of fire and darkness. And faces I know. And tales spun out of worm-spoor. If you come with me to the tavern, they’ll tell you where your father is buried and give you lodgings, and then you can leave.”

“I’ll come to the tavern. With a tale.”

Her taper was nearly burned down, and she was beginning to shiver. “A dragon.” She turned away from him. “No one will believe you anyway. ”

“You do.”

She listened to him silently, warming herself with worm-spoor, as he spoke to the circle of rough, fire-washed faces in the tavern. Even in the light, he bore little resemblance to his father, except for his broad cheekbones and the threads of gold in his hair. Under his bulky cloak, he was dressed as plainly as any miner, but stray bits of color still glinted from him, suggesting wealth and distant places.

“A dragon,” he told them, “is creating your winter. Have you ever asked yourselves why winter on this island is nearly twice as long as winter on the mainland twenty miles away? You live in dragon’s breath, in the icy mist of its bowels, hoarfrost cold, that grips your land in winter the way another dragon’s breath might burn it to flinders. One month out of the year, in the warmth of suns-crossing, it looses its ring-grip on your island, slides into the sea, and goes to mate. Its ice-kingdom begins to melt. It returns, loops its length around its mountain of ice and gold. Its breath freezes the air once more, locks the river into its bed, you into your houses, the gold into its mountain, and you curse the cold and drink until the next dragon-mating.” He paused. There was not a sound around him. “I’ve been to strange places in this world, places even colder than this, where the suns never cross, and I have seen such monsters. They are ancient as rock, white as old ice, and their skin is like iron. They breed winter and they cannot be killed. But they can be driven away, into far corners of the world where they are dangerous to no one. I’m trained for this. I can rid you of your winter. Harrowing is dangerous work and usually I am highly paid. But I’ve been looking for this ice-dragon for many years, through its spoor of legend and destruction. I tracked it here, one of the oldest of its kind, to the place where I was born. All I ask from you is a guide.”

He stopped, waiting. Peka, her hands frozen around her glass, heard someone swallow. A voice rose and faded from the tavern kitchen; sap hissed in the fire. A couple of the miners were smiling; the others looked satisfied and vaguely expectant, wanting the tale to continue. When it didn’t, Kor Flynt, who had mined Hoarsbreath for Fifty years, spat wormspoor into the fire. The flame turned a baleful gold, and then subsided. “Suns-crossing,” he said politely, reminding a scholar of a scrap of knowledge children acquired with their first set of teeth, “causes the seasons.”

“Not here,” Ryd said. “Not on Hoarsbreath. I’ve seen. I know.”

Peka’s mother Ambris leaned forward. “Why,” she asked curiously, “would a miner’s son become a Dragon-Harrower?” She had a pleasant, craggy face; her dark hair and her slow, musing voice were like Peka’s. Peka saw the Dragon-Harrower ride between two answers in his mind. Meeting Ambris’s eyes, he made a choice, and his own eyes strayed to the fire.

“I left Hoarsbreath when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I saw a dragon in the mountains east of the city. Until then, I had intended to come back and mine. I began to learn about dragons. The first one I saw burned red and gold under the suns’ fire; it swallowed small hills with its shadow. I wanted to call it, like a hawk. I wanted to fly with it. I kept studying, meeting other people who studied them, seeing other dragons. I saw a night-black dragon in the northern deserts; its scales were dusted with silver, and the flame that came out of it was silver. I saw people die in that flame, and I watched the harrowing of that dragon. It lives now on the underside of the world, in shadow. We keep watch on all known dragons. In the green midworld belt, rich with rivers and mines, forests and farmland, I saw a whole mining town burned to the ground by a dragon so bright I thought at first it was sun-fire arching down to the ground. Someone I loved had the task of tracking that one to its cave, deep beneath the mine shafts. I watched her die, there. I nearly died. The dragon is sealed into the bottom of the mountain, by stone and by words. That is the dragon which harrowed me.” He paused to sip wormspoor. His eyes lifted, not to Ambris, but to Peka. “Now do you understand what danger you live in? What if one year the dragon sleeps through its mating time, with the soft heat of the suns making it sluggish from dreaming? You don’t know it’s there, wrapped around your world. It doesn’t know you’re there, stealing its gold. What if you sail your boats full of gold downriver and find the great white bulk of it sprawled like a wall across your passage? Or worse, you find its eye opening like a third, dead sun to see your hands full of its gold? It would slide its length around the mountain, coil upward, and crush you all, then breathe over the whole of the island and turn it dead-white as its heart, and it would never sleep again. ”

There was another silence. Peka felt something play along her spine like the thin, quavering, arthritic fingers of wind. “It’s getting better, ” she said, “your tale.” She took a deep swallow of wormspoor and added, “I love sitting in a warm, friendly place listening to tales I don’t have to believe. ”

Kor Flynt shrugged. “It rings true, lass. ”

“It is true,” Ryd said.

“Maybe so,” she said. “And it may be better if you just let the dragon sleep.”

“And if it wakes unexpectedly? The winter killed my father. The dragon at the heart of winter could destroy you all. ”

“There are other dangers. Rockfalls, sudden floods, freezing winds. A dragon is simply one more danger to live with.”

He studied her. “I saw a dragon once with wings as softly blue as a spring sky. Have you ever felt spring on Hoarsbreath? It could come.”

She drank again. “You love them,” she said. “Your voice loves them and hates them, Dragon-Harrower.”

“I hate them,” he said flatly. “Will you guide me down the mountain?”

“No. I have work to do.”

He shifted, and the colors rippled from him again, red, gold, silver, spring-blue. She finished the wormspoor, felt it burn in her like liquid gold. “It’s only a tale. All your dragons are just colors in our heads. Let the dragon sleep. If you wake it, you’ll destroy the night.”

“No,” he said. “You will see the night. That’s what you’re afraid of.”

Kor Flynt shrugged. “There probably is no dragon, anyway.”

“Spring, though,” Ambris said; her face had softened. “Sometimes I can smell it from the mainland, and I always wonder . . . Still, after a hard day’s work, sitting beside a roaring fire sipping dragon-spit, you can believe anything. Especially this. She looked into her glass at the glowering liquid. Is this some of yours, Peka? What did you put into it?”

“Gold.” The expression in Ryd’s eyes made her swallow sudden tears of frustration. She refilled her glass. “Fire, stone, dark, wood smoke, night air smelling like cold tree bark. You don’t care, Ryd Yarrow.”

“I do care,” he said imperturbably. “It’s the best worm-spoor I’ve ever tasted.”

“And I put a dragon’s heart into it.” She saw him start slightly; ice and hoarfrost shimmered from him. “If that’s what Hoarsbreath is.” A dragon beat into her mind, its wings of rime, its breath smoldering with ice, the guardian of winter. She drew breath, feeling the vast bulk of it looped around them all, dreaming its private dreams. Her bones seemed suddenly fragile as kindling, and the gold wormspoor in her hands a guilty secret. “It’s a tale.”

“Oh, go with him, lass, her mother said tolerantly. ”There may be no dragon, but we can’t have him swallowed up in the ice like his father. Besides, it may be a chance for spring.“

“Spring is for flatlanders. There are things that shouldn’t be wakened. I know.”

“How?” Ryd asked.

She groped, wishing for the first time for a flatlanders skill with words. She said finally, “I feel it,” and he smiled. She sat back in her chair, irritated and vaguely frightened. “Oh, all right, Ryd Yarrow, since you’ll go with or without me. I’ll lead you down to the shores in the morning. Maybe by then you’ll listen to me.”

“You can’t see beyond your snow-world,” he said implacably. “It is morning.”

 

 

They followed one of the deepest mine shafts and clambered out of it to stand in the snow halfway down the mountain. The sky was lead gray; across the mists ringing the island’s shores, they could see the ocean, a swirl of white, motionless ice. The mainland harbor was locked. Peka wondered if the ships were stuck like birds in the ice. The world looked empty and somber.

“At least in the dark mountain there is fire and gold. Here, there isn’t even a sun.” She took out a skin of wormspoor, sipped it to warm her bones. She held it out to Ryd, but he shook his head.

“I need all my wits. So do you, or we’ll both end up preserved in ice at the bottom of a crevice.”

“I know. I’ll keep you safe.” She corked the skin and added, “In case you were wondering.”

But he looked at her, startled out of his remoteness. “I wasn’t. Do you feel that strongly?”

“Yes.”

“So did I, when I was your age. Now I feel very little.” He moved again. She stared after him, wondering how he kept her smoldering and on edge.

She said abruptly, catching up with him, “Ryd Yarrow.”

“Yes.”

“You have two names. Ryd Yarrow and Dragon-Harrower. One is a plain name this mountain gave you. The other you got from the world, the name that gives you color. One name I can talk to, the other is the tale at the bottom of a bottle of worm-spoor. Maybe you could understand me if you hadn t brought your past back to Hoarsbreath.”

“I do understand you,” he said absently. “You want to sit in the dark all your life and drink wormspoor.”

She drew breath and held it. “You talk but you don’t listen,” she said finally. “Just like all the other flatlanders.” He didn’t answer. They walked in silence a while, following the empty bed of an old river. The world looked dead, but she could tell by the air, which was not even freezing spangles of breath on her hood fur, that the winter was drawing to an end. “Suns-crossing must be only two months away, ” she commented surpnsedly.

“Besides, I’m not a flatlander,” he said abruptly, surprising her again. “I do care about the miners, about Hoarsbreath. It’s because I care that I want to challenge that ice-dragon with all the skill I possess. Is it better to let you live surrounded by danger, in bitter cold, carving half-lives out of snow and stone, so that you can come fully alive for one month of the year? ”

“You could have asked us.”

“I did ask you.”

She sighed. “Where will it live, if you drive it away from Hoarsbreath?”

He didn’t answer for a few paces. In the still day, he loosed no colors, though Peka thought she saw shadows of them around his pack. His head was bowed; his eyes were burning back at a memory. “It will find some strange, remote place where there is no gold, only rock; it can ring itself around emptiness and dream of its past. I came across an ice-dragon unexpectedly once, in a land of ice. The bones of its wings seemed almost translucent. I could have sworn it cast a white shadow.”

“Did you want to kill it?”

“No. I loved it.”

“Then why do you —”

But he turned at her suddenly, almost angrily, waking out of a dream. “I came here because you’ve built your lives on top of a terrible danger, and I asked for a guide, not a gadfly.”

“You wanted me,” she said flatly. “And you don’t care about Hoarsbreath. All you want is that dragon. Your voice is full of it. What’s a gadfly?”

“Go ask a cow. Or a horse. Or anything else that can’t live on this forsaken, frostbitten lump of ice.”

“Why should you care, anyway? You’ve got the whole great world to roam in. Why do you care about one dragon wrapped around the tiny island on the top of nowhere?”

“Because it’s beautiful and deadly and wrapped around my heartland. And I don’t know —I don’t know at the end of things which of us will be left on Hoarsbreath.” She stared at him. He met her eyes fully. “I’m very skilled. But that is one very powerful dragon.”

She whirled, fanning snow. “I’m going back. Find your own way to your harrowing. I hope it swallows you. ”

His voice stopped her. “You’ll always wonder. You’ll sit in the dark, drinking wormspoor twelve months out of thirteen, wondering what happened to me. What an ice-dragon looks like, on a winter’s day, in full flight.”

She hovered between two steps. Then, furiously, she followed him.

They climbed deeper into mist, and then into darkness. They camped at night, ate dried meat and drank wormspoor beside a fire in the snow. The night sky was sullen and starless as the day. They woke to gray mists and traveled on. The cold breathed up around them; walls of ice, yellow as old ivory, loomed over them. They smelled the chill, sweaty smell of the sea. The dead riverbed came to an end over an impassable cliff. They shifted ground, followed a frozen stream downward. The ice walls broke up into great jewels of ice, blue, green, gold, massed about them like a giant’s treasure hoard. Peka stopped to stare at them.

Ryd said with soft, bitter satisfaction, “Wormspoor.”

She drew breath. “Wormspoor.” Her voice sounded small, absorbed by cold. “Ice jewels, fallen stars. Down here you could tell me anything and I might believe it. I feel very strange.” She uncorked the wormspoor and took a healthy swig. Ryd reached for it, but he only rinsed his mouth and spat. His face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, tired.

“How far down do you think we are?”

“Close. There’s no dragon. Just mist.” She shuddered suddenly at the soundlessness. “The air is dead. Like stone. We should reach the ocean soon.”

“We’ll reach the dragon first.”

They descended hillocks of frozen jewels. The stream they followed fanned into a wide, skeletal filigree of ice and rock. The mist poured around them, so painfully cold it burned their lungs. Peka pushed fur over her mouth, breathed through it. The mist of wormspoor she had drunk was forming shadows around her, flickerings of faces and enormous wings. Her heart felt heavy; her feet dragged like boulders when she lifted them. Ryd was coughing mist; he moved doggedly, as if into a hard wind. The stream fanned again, going very wide before it met the sea. They stumbled down into a bone-searing flow of mist. Ryd disappeared; Peka found him again, bumping into him, for he had stopped. The threads of mist untangled above them, and she saw a strange black sun, hooded with a silvery web. As she blinked at it, puzzled, the web rolled up. The dark sun gazed back at her. She became aware then of her own heartbeat, of a rhythm in the mists, of a faint, echoing pulse all around her: the icy heartbeat of Hoarsbreath.

She drew a hiccup of a breath, stunned. There was a mountain cave ahead of them, from which the mists breathed and eddied. Icicles dropped like bars between its grainy white surfaces. Within it rose stones or teeth as milky white as quartz. A wall of white stretched beyond the mists, vast, earthworm round, solid as stone. She couldn’t tell, in the blur and welter of mist, where winter ended and the dragon began.

She made a sound. The vast, silvery eyelid drooped like a parchment unrolled, then lifted again. From the depths of the cave came a faint rumbling, a vague, drowsy waking question: Who?

She heard Ryd’s breath finally. “Look at the scar under its eye,” he said softly. She saw a jagged track beneath the black sun. “I can name the Harrower who put that there three hundred years ago. And the broken eyetooth. It razed a marble fortress with its wings and jaws; I know the word that shattered that tooth, then. Look at its wing scales. Rimed with silver. It’s old. Old as the world.” He turned, finally, to look at her. His white hair, slick with mists, made him seem old as winter. “You can go back now. You won’t be safe here.”

“I won’t be safe up there, either,” she whispered. “Let’s both go back. Listen to its heart.”

“Its blood is gold. Only one Harrower ever saw that and lived.”

“Please. ” She tugged at him, at his pack. Colors shivered into the air: sulfur, malachite, opal. The deep rumble came again; a shadow quickened in the dragon’s eye. Ryd moved quickly, caught her hands. “Let it sleep. It belongs here on Hoarsbreath. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you see? It’s a thing made of gold, snow, darkness—” But he wasn’t seeing her; his eyes, remote and alien as the black sun, were full of memories and calculations. Behind him, a single curved claw lay like a crescent moon half-buried in the snow.

Peka stepped back from the Harrower, envisioning a bloody moon through his heart, and the dragon roused to fury, coiling upward around Hoarsbreath, crushing the life out of it. “Ryd Yarrow,” she whispered. “Ryd Yarrow. Please.” But he did not hear his name.

He began to speak, startling echoes against the solid ice around them. “Dragon of Hoarsbreath, whose wings are of hoarfrost, whose blood is gold — ” The backbone of the hoar-dragon rippled slightly, shaking away snow. “I have followed your path of destruction from your beginnings in a land without time and without seasons. You have slept one night too long on this island. Hoarsbreath is not your dragon’s dream; it belongs to the living, and I, trained and titled Dragon-Harrower, challenge you for its freedom.” More snow shook away from the dragon, baring a rippling of scale and the glistening of its nostrils. The rhythm of its mist was changing. “I know you,” Ryd continued, his voice growing husky, strained against the silence. “You were the white death of the fishing island Klonos, of ten Harrowers in Ynyme, of the winter palace of the ancient lord of Zuirsh. I have harried nine ice-dragons —perhaps your children —out of the known world. I have been searching for you for many years, and I came back to the place where I was born to find you here. I stand before you armed with knowledge, experience, and the dark wisdom of necessity. Leave Hoarsbreath, go back to your birthplace forever, or I will harry you down to the frozen shadow of the world.”

The dragon gazed at him motionlessly, an immeasurable ring of ice looped about him. The mist out of its mouth was for a moment suspended. Then its jaws crashed together, spitting splinters of ice. It shuddered, wrenched itself loose from the ice. Its white head reared high, higher, ice booming and cracking around it. Twin black suns stared down at Ryd from the gray mist of the sky. Before it roared, Peka moved.

She found herself on a ledge above Ryd’s head without remembering how she got there. Ryd vanished in a flood of mist. The mist turned fiery; Ryd loomed out of it like a red shadow, dispersing it. Seven crescents lifted out of the snow, slashed down at him, scarring the air. A strange voice shouted Ryd’s name. He flung back his head and cried a word. Somehow the claw missed him, wedged deep into the ice.

Peka sat back. She was clutching the skin of wormspoor against her heart; she could feel her heartbeat shaking it. Her throat felt raw; the strange voice had been hers. She uncorked the skin, took a deep swallow, and another. Fire licked down her veins. A cloud of ice billowed at Ryd. He said something else, and suddenly he was ten feet away from it, watching a rock where he had stood freeze and snap into pieces.

Peka crouched closer to the wall of ice behind her. From her high point she could see the briny, frozen snarl of the sea. It flickered green, then an eerie orange. Bands of color pinioned the dragon briefly like a rainbow, arching across its wings. A scale caught fire; a small bone the size of Ryd’s forearm snapped. Then the cold wind of the dragon’s breath froze and shattered the rainbow. A claw slapped at Ryd; he moved a fraction of a moment too slowly. The tip of a talon caught his pack. It burst open with an explosion of glittering colors. The dragon hooded its eyes; Peka hid hers under her hands. She heard Ryd cry out in pain. Then he was beside her instead of in several pieces, prying the wormspoor out of her hands.

He uncorked it, his hands shaking. One of them was seared silver.

“What are they?” she breathed. He poured wormspoor on his burned hand, then thrust it into the snow. The colors were beginning to die down.

“Flame,” he panted. “Dragon-flame. I wasn’t prepared to handle it.”

“You carry it in your pack?”

“Caught in crystals, in fire-leaves. It will be more difficult than I anticipated.”

Peka felt language she had never used before clamor in her throat. “It’s all right,” she said dourly. “I’ll wait. ”

For a moment, as he looked at her, there was a memory of fear in his eyes. “You can walk across the ice to the mainland from here.”

“You can walk to the mainland, ” she retorted. “This is my home. I have to live with or without that dragon. Right now there’s no living with it. You woke it out of its sleep. You burnt its wing. You broke its bone. You told it there are people on its island. You are going to destroy Hoarsbreath.”

“No. This will be my greatest harrowing.” He left her suddenly and appeared flaming like a torch on the dragon’s skull, just between its eyes. His hair and his hands spattered silver. Word after word came out of him, smoldering, flashing, melting in the air. The dragon’s voice thundered; its skin rippled and shook. Its claw ripped at ice, dug chasms out of it. The air clapped nearby, as if its invisible tail had lifted and slapped at the ground. Then it heaved its head, flung Ryd at the wall of mountain. Peka shut her eyes. But he fell lightly, caught up a crystal as he rose, and sent a shaft of piercing light at the upraised scales of its underside, burrowing toward its heart.

Peka got unsteadily to her feet, her throat closing with a sudden whimper. But the dragon’s tail, flickering out of the mist behind Ryd, slapped him into a snowdrift twenty feet away. It gave a cold, terrible hiss; mist bubbled over everything; so that for a few minutes Peka could see nothing beyond the lip of the ledge. She drank to stop her shivering. Finally, a green fire blazed within the white swirl. She sat down again slowly, waited.

Night rolled in from the sea. But Ryd’s fires shot in raw, dazzling streaks across the darkness, illuminating the hoary, scarred bulk of dragon in front of him. Once, he shouted endless poetry at the dragon, lulling it until its mist-breath was faint and slow from its maw. It nearly put Peka to sleep, but Ryd’s imperceptible steps closer and closer to the dragon kept her watching. The tale was evidently an old one to the dragon; it didn’t wait for an ending. Its head lunged and snapped unexpectedly, but a moment too soon. Ryd leaped for shelter in the dark, while the dragon’s teeth ground painfully on nothingness. Later, Ryd sang to it, a whining, eerie song that showered icicles around Peka’s head. One of the dragon’s teeth cracked, and it made an odd, high-pitched noise. A vast webbed wing shifted free to fly, unfolding endlessly over the sea. But the dragon stayed, sending mist at Ryd to set him coughing. A foul, ashy-gray miasma followed blurring over them. Peka hid her face in her arms. Sounds like the heaving of boulders and the spattering of fire came from beneath her. She heard the dragon’s dry roar, like ones dragged against one another. There was a smack, a musical shower of breaking icicles, and a sharp, anguished curse. Ryd appeared out of the turmoil of light and air, sprawled on the ledge beside Peka.

His face was cut, with ice, she supposed, and there was blood in his white hair. He looked at her with vague amazement.

“You’re still here.”

“Where else would I be? Are you winning or losing?”

He scooped up snow, held it against his face. “I feel as if I’ve been fighting for a thousand years . . . Sometimes, I think I tangle in its memories, as it thinks of other Harrowers, old dragon-battles, distant places. It doesn’t remember what I am, only that I will not let it sleep . . . Did you see its wingspan? I fought a red dragon once with such a span. Its wings turned to flame in the sunlight. You’ll see this one in flight by dawn.”

She stared at him numbly, huddled against herself. “Are you so sure?”

“It’s old and slow. And it can’t bear the gold fire.” He paused, then dropped the snow in his hand with a sigh and leaned his face against the ice-wall. “I’m tired, too. I have one empty crystal, to capture the essence of its mist, its heart’s breath. After that’s done, the battle will be short.” He lifted his head at her silence, as if he could hear her thoughts. “What?”

“You’ll go on to other dragons. But all I’ve ever had is this one.”

“You never knew — ”

“It doesn’t matter that I never knew it. I know now. It was coiled all around us in the winter, while we lived in warm darkness and firelight. It kept out the world. Is that such a terrible thing? Is there so much wisdom in the flatlands that we can’t live without?”

He was silent again, frowning a little, either in pain or faint confusion. “It’s a dangerous thing, a destroyer.”

“So is winter. So is the mountain, sometimes. But they’re so beautiful. You are full of so much knowledge and experience that you forgot how to see simple things. Ryd Yarrow, miner’s son. You must have loved Hoarsbreath once.”

“I was a child, then.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry I brought you down here. I wish I were up there with the miners, in the last peaceful night.”

“There will be peace again,” he said, but she shook her head wearily.

“I don’t feel it.” She expected him to smile, but his frown deepened. He touched her face suddenly with his burned hand.

“Sometimes I almost hear what you’re trying to tell me. And then it fades against all my knowledge and experience. I’m glad you stayed. If I die, I’ll leave you facing one maddened dragon. But still, I’m glad.”

A black moon rose high over his shoulder and she jumped. Ryd rolled off the ledge into the mists. Peka hid her face from the peering black flare. Blue light smoldered through the mist, the moon rolled suddenly out of the sky, and she could breathe again.

Streaks of dispersing gold lit the dawn sky like the sunrises she saw one month out of the year. Peka, in a cold daze on the ledge, saw Ryd for the first time in an hour. He was facing the dragon, his silver hand outstretched. In his palm lay a crystal so cold and deathly white that Peka, blinking at it, felt its icy stare into her heart.

She shuddered. Her bones turned to ice; mist seemed to claw into her veins. She breathed bitter, frozen air as heavy as water. She reached for the wormspoor; her arm moved sluggishly, and her fingers unfolded with brittle movements. The dragon was breathing in short, harsh spurts. The silver hoods were over its eyes. Its unfolded wing lay across the ice like a limp sail. Its jaws were open, hissing faintly, but its head was reared back, away from Ryd’s hand. Its heartbeat, in the silence, was slow, slow.

Peka dragged herself up, icicle by icicle. In the clear wintry dawn, she saw the beginning and the end of the enormous ring around Hoarsbreath. The dragon’s tail lifted wearily behind Ryd, then fell again, barely making a sound. Ryd stood still; his eyes, relentless, spring-blue, were his only color. As Peka watched, swaying on the edge, the world fragmented into simple things: the edges of silver on the dragon’s scales, Ryd’s silver fingers, his old-man’s hair, the pure white of the dragon’s hide. They faced one another, two powerful creatures born out of the same winter, harrowing one another. The dragon rippled along its bulk; its head reared farther back, giving Peka a dizzying glimpse of its open jaws. She saw the cracked tooth, crumbled like a jewel she might have battered inadvertently with her pick, and winced. Seeing her, it hissed, a tired, angry sigh.

She stared down at it; her eyes seemed numb, incapable of sorrow. The wing on the ice was beginning to stir. Ryd’s head lifted. He looked bone-pale, his face expressionless with exhaustion. But the faint, icy smile of triumph in his eyes struck her as deeply as the stare from the death-eye in his palm.

She drew in mist like the dragon, knowing that Ryd was not harrowing an old, tired ice-dragon, but one out of his memories who never seemed to yield. “You bone-brained dragon,” she shouted, “how can you give up Hoarsbreath so easily? And to a Dragon-Harrower whose winter is colder and more terrible than yours.” Her heart seemed trapped in the weary, sluggish pace of its heart. She knelt down, wondering if it could understand her words or only feel them. “Think of Hoarsbreath,” she pleaded, and searched for words to warm them both. “Fire. Gold. Night. Warm dreams, winter tales, silence — ” Mist billowed at her and she coughed until tears froze on her cheeks. She heard Ryd call her name on a curious, inflexible note that panicked her. She uncorked the wormspoor with trembling fingers, took a great gulp, and coughed again as the blood shocked through her. “Don’t you have any fire at all in you? Any winter flame?” Then a vision of gold shook her: the gold within the dragon’s heart, the warm gold of wormspoor, the bitter gold of dragon’s blood. Ryd said her name again, his voice clear as breaking ice. She shut her eyes against him, her hands rising through a chill, dark dream. As he called the third time, she dropped the wormspoor down the dragon’s throat.

The hoods over its eyes rose; they grew wide, white-rimmed. She heard a convulsive swallow. Its head snapped down; it made a sound between a bellow and a whimper. Then its jaws opened again and it raked the air with gold flame.

Ryd, his hair and eyebrows scored suddenly with gold, dove into the snow. The dragon hissed at him again. The stream beyond him turned fiery, ran toward the sea. The great tail pounded furiously; dark cracks tore through the ice. The frozen cliffs began to sweat under the fire; pillars of ice sagged down, broke against the ground. The ledge Peka stood on crumbled at a wave of gold. She fell with it in a small avalanche of ice-rubble. The enormous white ring of dragon began to move, blurring endlessly past her eyes as the dragon gathered itself. A wing arched up toward the sky, then another. The dragon hissed at the mountain, then roared desperately, but only flame came out of its bowels, where once it had secreted winter. The chasms and walls of ice began breaking apart. Peka, struggling out of the snow, felt a lurch under her feet. A wind sucked at her hair, pulled at her heavy coat. Then it drove down at her, thundering, and she sat in the snow. The dragon, aloft, its wingspan the span of half the island, breathed fire at the ocean, and its husk of ice began to melt.

Ryd pulled her out of the snow. The ground was breaking up under their feet. He said nothing; she thought he was scowling, though he looked strange with singed eyebrows. He pushed at her, flung her toward the sea. Fire sputtered around them. Ice slid under her; she slipped and clutched at the jagged rim of it. Brine splashed in her face. The ice whirled, as chunks of the mountain fell into the sea around them. The dragon was circling the mountain, melting huge peaks and cliffs. They struck the water hard, heaving the icefloes farther from the island. The mountain itself began to break up, as ice tore away from it, leaving only a bare peak riddled with mine shafts.

Peka began to cry. “Look what I’ve done. Look at it.” Ryd only grunted. She thought she could see figures high on the top of the peak, staring down at the vanishing island. The ocean, churning, spun the ice-floe toward the mainland. The river was flowing again, a blue-white streak spiraling down from the peak. The dragon was over the mainland now, billowing fire at the harbor, and ships without crews or cargo were floating free.

“Wormspoor,” Ryd muttered. A wave ten feet high caught up with them, spilled, and shoved them into the middle of the channel. Peka saw the first of the boats taking the swift, swollen current down from the top of the island. Ryd spat out seawater, and took a firmer grip of the ice. “I lost every crystal, every dragon’s fire I possessed. They’re at the bottom of the sea. Thanks to you. Do you realize how much work, how many years —”

“Look at the sky.” It spun above her, a pale, impossible mass of nothing. “How can I live under that? Where will I ever find dark, quiet places full of gold?”

“I held that dragon. It was just about to leave quietly, without taking half of Hoarsbreath with it.”

“How will we live on the island again? All its secrets are gone.”

“For fourteen years I studied dragons, their lore, their flights, their fires, the patterns of their lives and their destructions. I had all the knowledge I thought possible for me to acquire. No one — ”

“Look at all that dreary flatland.”

“No one,” he said, his voice rising,“ ever told me you could harrow a dragon by pouring wormspoor down its throat!”

“Well, no one told me, either!” She slumped beside him, too despondent for anger. She watched more boats carrying miners, young children, her mother, down to the mainland. Then the dragon caught her eye, pale against the winter sky, somehow fragile, beautifully crafted, flying into the wake of its own flame.

It touched her mourning heart with the fire she had given it. Beside her, she felt Ryd grow quiet. His face, tired and battered, held a young, forgotten wonder, as he watched the dragon blaze across the world’s cap like a star, searching for its winter. He drew a soft, incredulous breath.

“What did you put into that wormspoor?”

“Everything.”

He looked at her, then turned his face toward Hoarsbreath. The sight made him wince. “I don’t think we left even my father’s bones at peace,” he said hollowly, looking for a moment less a Dragon-Harrower than a harrowed miner’s son.

“I know,” she whispered.

“No, you don’t,” he sighed. “You feel. The dragon’s heart. My heart. It’s not a lack of knowledge or experiences that destroyed Hoarsbreath, but something else I lost sight of: you told me that. The dark necessity of wisdom.”

She gazed at him, suddenly uneasy, for he was seeing her. “I’m not wise. Just lucky —or unlucky.”

“Wisdom is a flatlander’s word for your kind of feeling. You put your heart into everything—wormspoor, dragons, gold —and they become a kind of magic.”

“I do not. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Ryd Yarrow. I’m a miner; I’m going to find another mine — ”

“You have a gold mine in your heart. There are other things you can do with yourself. Not harrow dragons, but become a Watcher. You love the same things they love.”

“Yes. Peace and quiet and private places — ”

“I could show you dragons in their beautiful, private places all over the world. You could speak their language.”

“I can’t even speak my own. And I hate the flatland.” She gripped the ice, watching it come.

“The world is only another tiny island, ringed with a great dragon of stars and night.”

She shook her head, not daring to meet his eyes. “No. I’m not listening to you anymore. Look what happened the last time I listened to your tales. ”

“It’s always yourself you are listening to,” he said. The gray ocean swirled the ice under them, casting her back to the bewildering shores of the world. She was still trying to argue when the ice moored itself against the scorched pilings of the harbor.

 

 

 

 

A Matter of Music

 

 

Oresce Dami was the daughter of Yrida Dami, teacher for thirty-nine years at the great Bardic School at Onon. When she was three, Cresce began learning simple, ancient rhymes. When she was five, she was given eight different instruments and seven years to learn how to play them. By the time she was fifteen, she could sing the hundred and one Songs of Changing Fortune of the reclusive hill-people of Jazi. She could tune the strings of her cyrillaya to any of the nine changes passed through centuries from the first Bard of Onon. She knew to play the trihorne for the salute to anyone below the rank of a king; the flute for the funeral of a king’s child; the cyrillaya for fanfares of death and victory at the hunt for anyone attached to the king’s court at Hekar; the lovely, reedy cothone that looked like a cow’s bag with eight teats only when she was asked. Then she was told that the difficult part of her studies was just beginning. When she was twenty-one she was given a new set of instruments made by each of her teachers, and the information that the Lords of Daghian had requested a bard. And that night the heavy rafters of the dark, smoky tavern the students frequented rocked with laughter, songs, and glasses emptied and broken with high-pitched trihorne notes in her honor.

“I am going to become a Bard of Daghian,” she said for the fortieth time. Ruld Egemi, who had been her friend since she was eight and her lover since she was nineteen, nodded and laughed. A trihorne note, a wail out of the long brass throats tuned to battle, shattered the glass in his hand, spilling spiced wine over them both. He laughed again, and she stared, swallowing, at the curve of his mouth and the conjunction of bones at his throat. “I’m going to leave you.”

He looked too drunk and happy to realize it. “I’ll come to Daghian. Maybe in a year,” he said. “Maybe they’ll hire me to play the trihorne fanfares for death at private hunts, if nothing else.”

“If you play the trihorne for that in Daghian,” someone said, pulling up a chair with a screech, “you’ll wind up in Jazi playing for corn-dances until you’re ninety. The Lords of Daghian claim equal rank with the king.”

“You play the cyrillaya for no one but the king or his relatives, or anyone acting in his name, at a hunt,” Ruld said stubbornly. “Isn’t that right, Cresce?”

“The Lords of Daghian are of the king’s bloodline; if you use the trihorne that would be a mortal insult. That’s right, isn’t it, Cresce?”

“They’re of a bastard line — ”

“They are of an ancient, powerful line, and you sing one version of the Battle of Hekar Pass to them, and another to the king— ”

The tavern keeper mopped up the wine on the table and set steaming glasses down with a flourish. People even from beyond the city came to his small, ancient tavern to hear the students sing and play to one another as they drank. The rare nights of the rampant trihorne and shattered wineglasses were a ritual amply paid for. Cresce smiled at him without seeing him; she heard the argument without listening. She leaned back in Ruld’s shadow, her mind running over things she had packed. The case of resin, soft cloth, oils, and spare reeds Ruld had given her. Clothes. Blankets and skins, for Daghian was beyond the mountains, and she might not always find lodgings as she traveled. The set of tiny pipes her father had carved for her when she was a child. His cothone, which was the only instrument of his she had not burned when he died. The cothone, with its many haunting voices, was her instrument, tuned to the deepest voices within herself, as the trihorne in Ruld’s hands became his own voice. The love of the cothone she had inherited from her father, and his strong, skilled fingers. Her small bones, her straight black hair, her face with its wide-set eyes and wide cheekbones, she had inherited from her mother’s hill-blood, the streak of Jazi in her that made their songs throb in her blood as she sang them.

“Cresce — ”

The argument was beginning to heat. Slapping her hand down on the table, she said, “Hear me! ” Then she whispered, tuned to their silence, “Oh, hear. To the courts of the King at Hekar nine hundred years ago came the riches and glory of the kingdom. To the vanquished court at Daghian came the first Bard of Onon, possessing nothing but the cyrillaya. To him, not to the king, the Lords of Daghian gave honor. In his memory, the ritual music of the royal instrument, the cyrillaya, honors the Lords of Daghian.” She lifted her hand, closed it, gripping their attention. “And if you dare remind the Lords of Daghian with a trihorne that the king outranks them, they will tie you in a knot around it.”

Ruld, hovering in her spell with his chair balanced on one leg, brought it upright with a crash. “Play,” he said. “Play the cothone.” His eyes were suddenly as she loved to see them, dark, intense with desire. Then she heard an echo of her own words in her head, and a chill shot through her, turning her hands icy.

“I am going to Daghian. Bards have left Hekar itself to go to Daghian. Oh, Ruld, how do I dare? They’ll laugh at the cothone. I’m so small they won’t see me when I stand up to play. My reeds will squeak. ”

“The Lords of Daghian expect from Onon the best the school has to offer. The musicians chose you, ” Ruld said. “Play the cothone.”

She slid the strap from her shoulder and stood up. She put the pipe to her mouth, drew from the soft, tanned skin full of air deep, haunting phrases, the wordless voices half-heard at twilight, from dark forests, from the far side of still lakes. Then, leaving one soft, low note weaving through the air, she added voices to it from the fourth and seventh pipes, the pipes longing and of passion. She played her longing; the full, humming notes of the cothone called it out of her bones, out her heart’s marrow. There was not a sound or movement in the tavern. Faces were blurred beyond her, torch fire shivering over them. Their silence played to her song. Then, beside her, Ruld’s trihorne began to weave its pure, fiery voice into the voices of the cothone. The long horn slid in her slow rhythm through its changes. It was a stroke of pure gold under the smoky torchlight. Her throat swelled; she played simple, ancient Jazi music while the tears of sorrow and happiness burned down her face.

She rode out of Onon the next morning before sunrise. It was midautumn; she wore a long, heavy coat split down the back for riding, and high boots lined with sheepskin. Her instruments were encased in furs and skins; they made odd, bulky shapes on her shadow as the sun rose. She sang to keep her voice warm. Her song broke in puffs of mist in front of her. The fear in her was gone. She was the daughter of Yrida Dami, who had played at Hekar five years for the king; and the teachers of Onon had chosen her above all the musicians to send to the proud, critical court at Daghian. She got out one of her tiny pipes as the morning warmed and answered back to the birds flying around her.

It took her twelve days to reach Daghian. She sang some nights at wayside inns, earning money for lodgings and supplies. She watched the weary faces of travelers ease as they listened to her. They were simple folk, who knew and loved the cothone, and she felt well paid by their silence. As she neared the mountains, even farmhouses became scarce. The pass through the mountains whistled with wild, empty autumn winds. She camped at night then, sitting close to her fire, singing ballads back at the winds in her deep, sweet voices. She saw the last leaves ripped from the trees as she rode. River water shimmered white with the wind’s white breath. The mountains at morning were ghostly with mist. But the loneliness of the pass did not reach her heart. She was Cresce Dami, going to Daghian, and even the winds knew it was bad luck to harm a bard.

On the twelfth day, she reached the other side of the mountains and saw the flatlands veined with rivers, and the courts and cities built among them. Each river had a name; each was the name of a battle site, and each battle had spawned ballads of a dozen variations: one to be sung on a street corner, one at the market square under a mayor’s window, one at Hekar, one at Daghian . . . Before she was fourteen, Cresce had learned them all. She headed her horse down the hillside toward a main road.

The court of the Lords of Daghian lay in wild country. Dark pine moaned of winter as she traveled down the winding road to Daghian. But she heard, shimmering across hard, empty fields, the timbreless, haunting notes of the cyrillaya, tuned to the victory of the hunt withm the forests. Riders swept across the fields, their rich cloaks of deep green, blood-red, gold, and brown whirling behind them like leaves in the wind. They would feast, Cresce knew, on the kill, and she would be there, silent and anonymous, until the bones were picked, and servants brought washing bowls of scented water, and more wine. Then she would stand, interrupting their hunting stories, drawing their wine-flushed faces toward her, like the faces in the tavern, with a sweep of a hunting phrase across the cyrillaya.

I am Cresce Dami, Bard of Onon. Lords, hear me! I will tell you a tale of the hunt stranger than any hunt you have ever ridden to the cyrillaya of victory . ..

Then she saw the court of the Lords of Daghian.

It was a small city within vast double walls of black stone. She counted eight towers and the great Keep, old as any song out of Daghian. Within, a massive, soaring building, half castle, half fortress, sprawled on a rise of land. The flame of Daghian snapped above it in the wind: a blood-red pennant a dozen feet long, bordered with gold. The hunters were riding through the broad gates. They swung shut again ponderously, but Cresce knew that no door in the kingdom would refuse to admit a Bard of Onon.

Twilight was falling when she reached the gates. The guards recognized her odd bundles of instruments, the cothone in its case about her neck. The gates had begun to open even before she spoke. She heard a sound that thrilled her to the marrow: notes of a trihorne splashing across the evening, raised in the ancient salute to a Bard of Onon. The passage between the walls was torchlit. When she rode out of it into the yard, men were waiting to take her horse.

She slung her instrument cases about her and walked into the great hall of the Lords of Daghian.

Firelight, the smell of hot meat, and the voices of close to a thousand people talking and laughing rolled at her as she crossed the threshold. She stopped, her heart thudding at the sheer immensity of the place. There were nine open fire beds scattered through the hall; on each the carcasses of deer and boar turned slowly on their spits. Long tables surrounded them in rough disorder; red light caught at the faces of richly dressed men, women, and children, plates of silver and gold, cups and ewers of dyed glass. Groups of musicians played near each fire bed. They used flutes and harps, pipes and small drums. They were sweating; pitchers of water and wine stood near them, and trays of sliced fruits. Their listeners, at first glance, seemed oblivious to them. But Cresce saw young boys running too close to one group called sharply to order. She watched the great gathering of the court of Daghian. Beneath their laughter and conversation, the men and women seemed sensitive to every change in rhythm and song, and sometimes broke off mid-sentence to applaud an intricate passage of music.

Cresce smiled a little. Then a servant spoke to her, led her to a place at one of the outer tables. She put her instruments down and took off her coat. Relief musicians sat at the table; their own instruments were scattered along the benches. Their eyes flicked to her instruments, her face, in sudden comprehension. She saw the respect in their faces, but they did not speak to her. She would break her silence at the court of Daghian only one way. She sat down, her fingers trembling slightly. She ate the food brought to her without tasting it, her mind tuned to all the nuances of sound around her.

Finally, the intensity of voices seemed to slacken. Charred bones were removed from the fire-beds; servants began to dispense towers of finger bowls, trays full of pitchers of scented water, pitchers of wine, and great platters of sweetmeats and nuts. Musicians around the fire-beds drew their playing to a close. The relief musicians, their eyes on Cresce, began reaching for their instruments. Her throat swelled suddenly, as if she had swallowed air from a cothone. She stood up, drew the cyrillaya from its case. The musicians dropped back into their seats, watching her with a combination of wonder and excitement, as if she had walked out of a legend in front of them.

Their table was half in shadow, and she was hardly taller than the boys who had been scolded for running. So she climbed on top of the table, stood under the flare of torchlight. The cyrillaya flared silver as she lifted it. She plucked the taut strings softly, tuned a couple. Then she pulled the mute out of the silver throat that amplified the taut, pure notes until not even a trihorne’s brilliance could overwhelm it. She swept her hand across the strings; even the boys wrestling in the shadows and the servants with piles of dirty plates stopped moving.

Standing on the table, she could see the three Lords of Dahgian, their wives, and an assortment of relatives. The older men were smiling, but there was not a flicker of expression on the faces of the Lords. One, the youngest, turned to another suddenly, opened his mouth. She stopped him with a single phrase: the first notes of the battle cry of Daghian. Then his face blurred into all the others as she drew breath, and said, “I am Cresce Dami, Bard of Onon. Lords of Daghian, the winds of autumn batter your walls; the flame of Daghian burns bright against the cold. Let me tell you a tale . . .” Her fingers skimmed over rhythms of the chase. “A long time ago . . .” Then because somebody was coughing, and a pair of lovers in the far corner had begun to whisper, and because the cyrillaya held pride and beauty, but the cothone held all her soul, she let the bright instrument drop to her side and swung the cothone into her hands. A low, plaintive call, the wind soughing among bog-reeds where stags drank, filled the hall.

She had startled the Lords. She had also startled the musicians, whose mouths dropped with astonishment. The cothone was a herdsman’s instrument, an instrument for rough songs and long nights in the open, during battles or hunts. She wondered when it had been last played at an open feast in the hall.

Some of the guests were glancing at the Lords, wondering whether or not they had been insulted. But the Lords had not made up their minds. Cresce, her voice clear, steady in spite of her sudden nervousness, built out of words and sounds the cold winter’s day, the crows’ crying in the frozen sky, the slow pace of the young Lord Sere as he tracked a great stag who was not a stag through the marshes of Daghian.

Something was pulling at the hem of her skirt. The first faint tug had stopped her throat, but the cothone had droned on without her. The pulling persisted, but all her training forbade moving. She realized that one of the young children, attracted by her forbidden stance on the table, was mutely demanding to be lifted up. She tried to ignore it, hoping one of the musicians would see it. But the hall was shadowy behind her, and the musicians were caught up in her tale. She drew out of the second pipe the quick staccato flash of distant hunting horns, as the hunters that Sere had become separated from called to him. Her long, full skirt began flapping to the rhythm like a sail.

One of the musicians gasped; she heard a ripple of laughter from the closer tables. She stepped forward on two beats, pulling her skirt out of the child’s grip. Her foot struck one of the musicians’ drums with a hollow thump, knocked it off the table. It thumped again on the bench, and once more on the ground. The musician grabbed at it, but the child pounced on it first and sat on it.

A servant swept the child off the floor, and returned the drum to the musician, but Cresce’s throat had dried in the sudden laughter. Some of the women were talking. They quieted quickly as Cresce continued, but the words scratched in her throat. Then the thing too terrible to consider happened: the reed in the eighth pipe, dry with cold, split as she played a stag’s bellow. The deep bellow ran up into a strangled squeal, and dogs napping all over the hall started up howling at the sound.

They were slapped into silence almost instantly. But all through the room, men and women were weeping with laughter. Even one of the Lords had turned his face away, shaking. The older Lord beside him stared carefully down at his hands. The third Lord did not move. His eyes were narrowed slightly and he was not smiling. The musicians seemed transfixed. Cresce dropped the cothone mechanically, shifted the cyrillaya back into her hands almost without losing a beat. But her heart was pounding raggedly, and the cyrillaya sounded too pure, almost colorless, after the rich, plaintive voices of the cothone. She swept the sound of Sere’s last arrow soaring above the marshes to strike at the heart of the stag.

She heard a low murmuring from the men. Wine sloshed over the rims of their cups as they turned to one another. Cresce, her voice wavering a little, realized that muted arguments were flaring all over the room. She cast back desperately, wondering what she had done wrong. The cyrillaya was in tune; her voice was still strong and in key. She wondered if there was some ancient custom forbidding the playing of the cyrillaya to follow the cothone. But she would have remembered. Then she saw the agonized faces of the musicians, and the blood swept completely out of her face.

In her nervousness, she had skipped an entire section of the tale. Men who knew it vaguely were trying to remember what was wrong. Old hunters who knew it well were telling them. Some were even singing it softly. Sere’s first glimpse of the legendary stag, and his arduous, exhausting chase that lasted for three days and three nights through the marshes — she had limped over it entirely when she switched instruments.

A whole table of scarred hunters was beginning to take up the passage. Their cups were waving to the melody; as one forgot the lines, another took them up. Cresce, her fingers shaking, picked up their melody on the cyrillaya. She sang with them, trying to coax the song away from them. But their beat was ragged, their lines jumbled, and they were content with their wine and their voices.

The children had begun to talk again. Some of the people were still listening, but Cresce knew it was out of pity, because they could hardly hear her. She had lost their attention. Her hands were trembling badly; she did not dare look at the musicians. Her voice was beginning to stick in her throat; her face was burning, and her lips were dry. A servant collecting wine pitchers let them clatter together on his tray. She knew, even without looking toward the Lords, that the sound was the judgment of Daghian.

She almost stopped. The men singing, holding out their cups for more wine, would scarcely have noticed. The Lords of Daghian would send her back to Onon anyway in the morning. She thought of Ruld, the wine cup shattering between them, signaling the end of her life at Onon, and knew suddenly that she could never go back. Nor would she stay at Daghian, even for a night. She would finish her song and then leave. In the darkness of the autumn night, she would decide what to do.

So she lifted her trihorne, blew a great, discordant blast on it. Singers and servants stopped short; one of the Lords choked on his wine. She said gravely into the sudden silence blasting back at her,

“And so, Lords, in the frail, ice-colored twilight melting across the marshes of Daghian, the Lord Sere first glimpsed the great animal he tracked.”

They were outraged. She saw it in their faces. But she gave them no time to tell her what they thought. Pitching the cyrillaya to vibrate the stone walls, she sent the enormous stag running through the hall to vanish again into the winter dusk. Then she used every instrument she possessed as Sere followed it. Her drum beat his horse’s hooves; the haunting sixth pipe of the cothone, the pipe of warning, tracked his passage through the dangerous, moonlit marshes. Her small pipes brought the sun up, as marsh birds called to one another across the wastes. Her twelve-stringed harp, unexpectedly gentle after the cyrillaya, played again and again the brief, wondrous glimpses of the stag that lured Sere deeper and deeper into the marshlands. The death of his exhausted horse as it struggled vainly in the deep mud it had stumbled into, she played on the cothone; the drum beat its dirge. The red sun flared to the trihorne’s salute across the morning of the third day. The hoarfrost on every tree limb, on every blade of grass, burned in Sere’s eyes; the winds ringing in the ice-world she struck on tiny tubular bells. The cothone played Sere’s exhaustion, his hunger, his obsession as he broke a path on foot through the lonely, fiery world. Finally, he saw the great stag clearly. The trihorne rang its turning as it stopped and faced him.

His last arrow soared with the cyrillaya, burned into nothingness before it reached the stag. In Sere’s world of ice and silence, only the drum beat the slow steps of the white stag as it came toward him. Sere, weaponless, strengthless, lay where he had fallen, watching it come. He looked into its eyes. For two beats, there was no sound in the great hall of Daghian. Then the brass stag’s bell of the trihorne faded into the slow, pure voice of the flute as the stag faded into a woman whose eyes were the color of winter nights. She turned again, moved slowly away from Sere into the glittering winds. Flute notes ascended, shaped a great, dark bird, whirled to its flight as it vanished into the light. The cothone brought twilight once again over the world. Horses’ hooves snapped over the bog-ice. The hunters found Sere, half-dead of cold and hunger. The spare, comfortless voices of the fourth pipe, the pipe of longing, wept with his weeping as he rode with them back to Daghian.

The cothone stilled in Cresce’s hands. She let it fall, stood looking out over the motionless hall. The faces were shadowed by the dying fires. She bowed her head to the Lords of Daghian. But before she could turn to leave, a musician beside one of the fire-beds leaped to his feet. He threw back his head, raised the trihorne to his mouth. The single high, piercing note set wineglasses ringing like ice all over the hall before they shattered.

The youngest Lord of Daghian rose. There was a sudden clamor from the men at the tables. Cresce, her heart thudding in her throat, realized suddenly that they were shouting requests to her for other ballads. Her hands, so steady as she played, began to shake badly. The Lord of Daghian overtook a servant bringing a wine cup to her. He brought it himself, held it up to her as she stood frozen on the tabletop.

“Welcome. I am Sere of Daghian.” He had wild, dark hair burnished with red and a lean, proud face like a bird of prey. out his eyes were smiling. He added, “The hunter was my grandfather. Drink.”

She took the cup of chilled, spiced wine and drained it. He signaled to the relief musicians; they rose, took their places, while logs thrown on the fire-beds illumined the hall once more. Servants were dispensing cups, sweeping up glass. They were smiling, Cresce noticed, in spite of the extra work. She found herself able to move again, and she sat down abruptly on the edge of the table.

“I was about to leave,” she whispered.

“I know.” He sat on the table beside her. “I would have followed you. This is Daghian, not Hekar, where you would have been tossed into the autumn winds for playing the cothone at an open feast. I handle matters of music at Daghian, and I have never in my life heard the cothone played like that.” He paused a moment, studying her. “You are Jazi.”

“My mother was a hill-woman. My father met her when he went to Jazi for a year to learn the Songs of Changing Fortune.”

“Have you been there?”

“To Jazi? No. I was born at Onon. My father taught there. I’ve never been anywhere except Onon.”

“Taught? Is he dead?”

She nodded. “They’re both dead.” She added after a moment, “I burned all his instruments except his cothone when he died.”

“I have a cothone,” he said, almost abruptly. He was silent a little, frowning at some memory. Then the smile slid back into his eyes. “That was my son, pulling on your skirt. He’s three. I’ll teach him to show more respect for a Bard of Daghian. But you won’t be standing on tabletops after this.”

Her hands slid to the table edge, gripped it. “Lord. Do you want me to stay?”

“Do I want you to stay?” He ran both his hands through his hair, and the shadow in his eyes lifted, giving her a glimpse of his wonder. “Look at the high table. The big, dark-haired Lord with the face carved by a blunt knife is my brother Breaugh. The fair-haired, hot-tempered man beside him is my brother Hulme. They have heard that tale of Sere and the stag hunt a hundred times. And yet from the time you blew that sour note on the trihorne, until the musician spilled all our wine with his trihorne, I could have sworn neither one of them breathed. You will honor Daghian. Besides,” he added, standing up again, “I want you to teach me to play the cothone.”

She played again before the feast was ended. Men sang hunting ballads with her; musicians added their own rich, soft accompaniment. Finally, past midnight, the hall began to empty, and the musicians put away their instruments. They introduced themselves to her, left her head spinning with half a hundred names. Then she met the two older Lords of Daghian.

“Breaugh handles matters of estate,” Sere explained, “and Hulme matters of peace and war. I handle matters of music, which is the pride of Daghian.” He introduced their wives to her. But of his own wife, he said nothing, and she wondered. As he was leaving the hall with her, to show her where she would live in the great house, he stopped suddenly, as if to tell her something. But he changed his mind. Later, before she tell asleep, she found herself wondering again. Then the appalling memory of her near-disaster washed over her. She flung the bedcovers over her head and curled up in the darkness, listening to her heart pound until she fell asleep.

She sang and played nearly every evening then, either in the great hall or in the Lords’ chambers if they dined privately. She played for the hunt, if there were guests from the king’s court. She taught new musicians the ritual music for such occasions as weddings, namings, funerals, and welcoming salutes to various officials and guests. She taught Lord Sere the cothone; she taught Hulme’s wife the harp, and Breaugh s oldest daughter the flute. Some nights she was so tired that she played through her dreams and woke exhausted. But there was a happiness in her that flashed out in her music, even on the most sullen autumn evenings.

Sere learned the cothone very quickly. He already played the trihorne and the cyrillaya, but Cresce sensed something in him that woke to the haunting voices of the cothone. He used a very old instrument. Its pipes were pitched differently from Cresce’s instrument; they were scrolled all over with delicate carving and bound to the kidskin with gold. The deep pipe, the pipe of mourning, was so low it seemed to breathe through Cresce’s bones whenever she played it. She wondered often where he had gotten it. One day he told her.

“It was my wife’s. ”

They were in a room in one of the oldest wings of the house. It was full of instruments: ancient pipes, flutes, drums of painted tree bark that were from Jazi, harps of varying sizes, from a five-stringed harp fashioned to a rough triangle of oak, to a thirty-stringed harp of pure gold that had been played only once, on someone’s wedding day. There were trihornes of a hundred battles; there was the cyrillaya that the first Bard had carried into Daghian. There were instruments so old that Cresce had only seen drawings of them. She had been given keys to the various cases, and she loved the room. Sere practiced there because the old walls were three feet thick and his brothers could not hear the squeals and nasal drones he startled out of the cothone before he began to master it. He sat down on one of the window ledges, letting the cothone rest on his knee. The thick glass behind his head warped the cloudy landscape into a formless mist. When he did not continue, Cresce asked softly, “Is she dead?”

He shook his head. “I don t know. Like you, she is half-Jazi.” He was silent again, frowning down at the cothone. He said abruptly, harshly, to the cothone, “She was so beautiful. Her eyes were true Jazi gray, gray as marsh mist at dusk. Her hair was so black it blinded me sometimes. We had known each other always. But one day she left me and didn’t come back. She took only a horse I had raised for her. She left me our son and her cothone.”

“It’s — ” Cresce had to stop to clear her throat. “It’s older than anyone living. That cothone.”

“I know. It belonged to her great-grandmother. She had been taken forcibly from Jazi by a Lord of Daghian, as the army of Daghian marched through the hills to attack Hekar from the north.”

She drew breath suddenly. “Hekar Pass. You sing one version in Daghian, and another to the king. The army of Daghian was massacred in the hills by the king’s army. Only nine men and one hill-woman survived to come back to Daghian. Men of Jazi betrayed Daghian’s position to the king. With some justice.” He touched the rings of gold on the cothone. “I think we had stolen their Bard. That was seventy years ago. Since then, no man of Daghian has been permitted in Jazi.”

“So you couldn’t look for your wife.”

“No. The last man of Daghian who went to Jazi was found at our gates wrapped in corn husks. There wasn’t a mark on him, but he was dead. I think the hills called her until she went back to them.”

Cresce sat down beside him on the window ledge. She said softly, “Bards of Onon are permitted in Jazi, even during their most private rituals. I could take a message to her.”

He looked at her. Then he dropped his arm around her shoulders. “Thank you.” She realized suddenly how rarely he smiled. “But I think that, like the woman my grandfather followed through the marshes, she doesn’t want to be found.”

A few days later, men from Hekar on the king’s business came to speak to the Lords of Daghian. Cresce sang for them, playing at Sere’s request both the cyrillaya and the cothone. Later one of the men spoke privately to her, suggesting that Hekar would be a more suitable place for her great gift, since the king would never ask her to play a herdsman’s instrument at his court. She told that to Sere, and he laughed. But he was annoyed. When the Lords took the visitors from Hekar hunting in the waning days of autumn, Cresce rode with them to sound the fanfares of death. But Sere, with a ghost of malice in his eyes, had insisted she bring only her cothone. Breaugh and Hulme had grown so used to hearing the cothone that they scarcely noticed. But the visitors, after she played the fanfare for a stag’s death, were insulted. They said little, for they were in the middle of the Daghian marshes and could not have left the hunt without getting lost. But Cresce wished she had disregarded Sere and brought the cyrillaya instead. Its silvery voice would have broken through shreds of mists hanging over the marshes. The cothone seemed to gather mist, to bring it closer around them until the riders that she followed seemed shadowy, and Sere’s cloak, striped gold and red, was the one clear point in the world.

She sounded fanfares for a deer, a brace of hare, a wild boar that charged unexpectedly out at them from some trees. The mists deepened in the early afternoon, until she had no idea which direction Daghian lay. She heard Breaugh suggest calmly that in another hour they should start back. The visitors agreed quickly. Someone sighted another deer; there was a short chase, and then Cresce heard Sere ahead of her, calling for a fanfare. She raised the cothone; the deep pipe of mourning sent the announcement of its death across the marshes.

Then the mists closed about her completely. Softly, from the other side of the mists, a cothone began to play.

How long she listened, she never knew. Its voices were deep, melding layer upon layer of fanfares across the marshes. Sitting breathless, motionless on her horse, she heard fanfares for the deaths of men and animals mingling with phrases from the winter rituals of Jazi. Slowly the salutes to death came to an end. Only the seventh pipe, with a rich, husky timbre she had never heard before, still sang through the mists. It troubled her, stirring things in her she felt she should have remembered but could not. She did not remember lifting her own cothone. But suddenly she was playing it in answer to the wild, unfamiliar music, while she guided her horse deeper into the marshes trying to find the other side of the mists.

Something swirled out of the mist; a shadow pulled at her reins. She realized for the first time that she had been moving. She let her cothone fall. At the same time the strange music stopped. She heard only the lonely cry of a marsh bird and the faint trickle of water. She shuddered suddenly. Then she recognized the rider beside her.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Sere, whose face was expressionless, colorless in the mist, said only, “Sometimes the marshes pull you deeper into them when you’re trying to get out. Sound the battle-call of Daghian, so that Breaugh and Hulme know I’ve found you. We’ll have to smell our way home through this mist.”

Not long afterward, on the first day of winter, the long silence between Daghian and Jazi was broken. One of the porters at the main gates interrupted the Lords as they sat after supper listening to their ancient steward giving his seasonal account of their household, lands, and finances. Hulme was stifling a yawn when the porter murmured to him, and dropped something that looked vaguely like a bird’s nest onto the table. Cresce, playing the muted cyrillaya, strained a little to see what the odd jumble was. Her thumb slipped off a string, struck a sour note, and Sere looked at her. She colored hotly. Then she saw the expression in his eyes.

“Please, ” he said. “Come here.”

“Someone nailed this clutter with an arrow to the gate? ” Hulme said incredulously. He fingered a dried corn husk. It rustled secretly under his touch. Then he eyed Sere. “What’s the matter with you? ” he said roughly. Some of the blood came back into Sere’s face at his tone. The steward tossed his pen down with a sigh.

Breaugh said, “Lets see the arrow.” The porter gave it to him. He touched its tip, then looked at Sere, and then at Hulme. “Bone. It’s a hill-arrow. Look at the holes in its tip.”

“It whistled,” the porter said.

“It’s a matter of peace and war,” Breaugh said shortly, and turned back to the account book. But his brows were drawn. “Have we offended Jazi lately?”

“How would I know?” Hulme demanded. “We offend Jazi by breathing.” He shoved his chair back suddenly, stood up. He added to the porter, “All right. Let us know if you get shot.” He stood behind Sere, laid his hands on his brothers shoulders. “Corn husks. Thats all I understand of it. Remember the man they left at our doorstep bound from hair to heel in corn husks.” He touched a flat, thin tongue of wood. “What is that?”

“A reed.” Sere’s eyes had not moved from Cresce’s face as she gazed down at the odd bundle of items. “A cothone reed. The arrow sings. Hulme, it’s a matter of music. A reed like that fits into one of the mouthpieces of the cothone. Which pipe?”

Cresce picked it up. Her voice slid suddenly deep, husky. “The fourth. The pipe of longing.”

There was silence. Sere’s face was expressionless. Breaugh picked up a strip of leather studded with tiny jewels. “It looks like a piece of bridle. And nine dead leaves . . . But what—”

Sere moved abruptly. He stood up, went to one of the windows to stare out at the night. When no one spoke, he said to Cresce, “Is the singing arrow a part of their rituals?”

She nodded a little jerkily. “In winter and spring.” She picked up the hollow arrow, blew into the shaft. The pitch was deep. “In winter, for the rituals of Changing Fortune, they pitch them low, to sing with the pipe of mourning.”

“Winter.” he turned. Thoughts were breaking into his eyes. “The ritual. When is it?”

“The ninth day of winter.”

“And the leaves?”

No one moved. He stepped back to the table. Hulme, breathing something, caught his arm as he reached for them.

“Think,” he said flatly. “Ifyou go into Jazi, it is no longer a matter of music. If they kill you, it’s a matter of war. If Daghian goes to war against Jazi, the king will be at our throats faster than a mad bog-wolf.”

“Take the issue to Hekar,” Sere said shortly. “Demand justice from the king.”

The blood flared into Hulme’s face; he looked for a moment as if Sere had struck him. “If I find you wrapped in corn husks on our doorstep, I’m supposed to crawl to Hekar to beg for justice? For that?”

“Hulme — ”

“What kind of justice did Hekar show Daghian at Hekar Pass?”

“That was seventy years ago. ”

“Jazi went to Hekar for justice then—an entire army slaughtered over one woman. That’s the worthless bone of justice Hekar would toss to us. If she wants to see you, why can’t she come here? Tell me that. You send her a message: a leaf of black hellebore for every year she’s been away, wrapped in bark from the scarred birch trees in Hekar Pass. In nine centuries Daghian hasn’t begged so much as a rat-dropping from Hekar. And you expect us to go begging for justice as if — as if we were subject — ”

Sere turned. His fists rose and slammed down on the table, spilling ink across the account book. “Will you be reasonable! I’m not even dead, yet!”

The three men glared at one another, while the steward stared in horror at the mess. Then Breaugh growled, “Oh, sit down.” He righted the inkstand. “Oak leaves.” He looked at Sere. “There is no oak in Daghian until you reach the far side of the marshes. The border hills are covered with it.”

“Breaugh—” Hulme said.

“If he wants to go looking for his wife among ten thousand oak trees, it’s his business. If he gets killed, then it’s our business. Until then, it’s not a matter of war or estate or music — it’s a private affair.” He reached across the table suddenly, stirred the corn husks with one finger. “What’s that?”

“Birch bark,” said the steward wearily. Sere unrolled the dry fragment of yellowish bark gently. He gazed down at it a moment, then looked at Cresce. “I can’t read music.”

“Read it,” Breaugh grunted. “You don’t read it, you listen to it.”

“At Onon, they wrote changeless ritual music — salutes, hunting fanfares, wedding and funeral music — so that we could memorize it quickly.” She studied the square notes pricked into the bark with red dye. Then the notes came together in her mind and she started. Sere said, “What is it?”

“The trihorne salute to the Bard of Daghian.” There was another silence. Then Sere crumpled the bark in one hand, and Cresce said, astonished, “It’s an invitation.”

“An invitation to what?” Hulme asked sourly. She looked at him without seeing him, envisioning a land beyond ten thousand oak, the land whose heart-voice was the cothone.

“To their winter ritual. The Bard of Daghian is welcome ...” She turned to Sere, her brows slanting upward perplexedly. “And you, also?”

“Invited,” he said. He touched one of the minute blue jewels on the bridle, his face harsh with conflicting memories.

“Not necessarily welcome.” She watched him a moment, uneasy, glimpsing his emotions like a complex instrument she had not been trained to play.

Breaugh said softly, “It is a matter of music.”

The cothone sang to her deeply, distantly, out of the mists. “May I go?” she asked, drawing Sere abruptly back from his past. She saw herself then as he saw her: small and dark-haired, a Jazi woman in spite of her background and rigorous training, who might vanish forever among the hills she had never seen.

“No.” Then he touched her shoulder, his voice gentler. “No. Not when the invitation is pinned to the gate with an arrow. Not this time.” And, oddly, she was relieved at his reply.

But he went, quietly and alone, at dawn. He returned twelve days later, with one of the watch parties Hulme had sent after him. He looked weary and bad-tempered; his replies to questions his brothers asked were brief. But, alone with Cresce after supper, he showed her a second bundle of corn husks.

“I found it pinned to an oak on the other side of the mountain.”

She drew out the arrow and opened the message carefully. Three reeds dropped out, a ring of white horsehair, a gold ring, and some dried oak leaves. “You didn’t see her?”

“She wasn’t there.” He added, as she fingered the reeds, “The horse I gave her was white.”

“But why—”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. The invitation was for you. I didn’t bring you.” She stared at him, bewildered, and he added, “Will you come with me?”

“But, Lord, I don’t understand. Why does she want me.”

“She.” He drew breath, closing his eyes. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I only know someone is reaching out of Jazi, luring me with memories, you with music.”

“I am Bard of Daghian,” Cresce said a little stiffly. She blew into the arrow. Its pitch was high, light. “Spring. Seven oak leaves. The seventh day of spring.” Something caught at her throat. “Lord, at one point in the spring rituals, the cothone is played from sunrise to sunrise. At that time, all visiting Bards are permitted to play.”

He held up the ring. “Look. It took me an entire morning to recognize that.”

She took it, circled it with her thumb and finger. “It’s from a cothone ... a very old one, like the cothone your wife left you . . .”

“I think they want you to bring that cothone.”

She closed her fingers over the ring, uneasy again at the tale being spun out of the darkness, within the unknown land, herself being moved skillfully within the tale.

Sere said, “Look at the reeds.”

She picked them up. “The fourth again. The pipe of longing. The eighth ...”

“The pipe of mourning. That one I recognized.” She turned the third reed in her hand. When she did not speak, he looked at her. “What is it?”

“The sixth. The pipe of warning.”

 

 

On the first day of spring, they left Daghian together. At Breaugh’s suggestion, Sere wore plain, rough-woven clothes, cloak and boots of sheepskin, as if he were some herdsman the bard of Daghian had hired to guide her across the marshes. Hulme suggested only that if Sere found himself dead and buried in corn husks, he should not bother coming home; the men of Daghian would come to Jazi to get him. The frozen marshes were still furrowed with ice. But the wild, violent spring winds, humming every voice of the cothone, had swept the sky clear, and the hills bordering Jazi looked very close. They crossed the marshes in five days. Cresce listened for the strange cothone, but the only sound she heard was the discordant babble of marsh birds returning after winter. She wondered: Did I dream it? and knew she had not. Sere was lost in his own dreams. He had spoken very little as they traveled together. At evenings, she pitched her music to ease into the mist of his memories, draw him back into the quiet night, the dark, rich smell of the marshes, the tiny circle of light that enclosed them. Sometimes she would lead him so far out of his mists that he would lift his head to meet her eyes across the fire. Then he would smile, acknowledging her skill, and she would wish they were back in Daghian, where life was complex and exact, and the language of the heart was not spoken in corn husks.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, they rode out of the thinning marsh trees into the ancient, rolling hills of Jazi.

They were covered, as far as Cresce could see, with bare, tangled oak. Nothing, human or animal, seemed to live among the trees. The voice of the wind had changed as they came out of the marshes. It piped with a spare, hollow timbre through the empty curves and shadows of the hills. Cresce wondered what instruments the musicians of Jazi, hearing that wind, had fashioned to match its voice.

“There,” said Sere. He was pointing to one gnarled tree. “That’s where I found the last message.”

The trunk was bare. Cresce glanced vaguely at the endless forests. “My mother lived among these hills,” she said surprisedly, as if she had just realized it. “Lord, we have two days to find the place where they hold their rituals.”

“I know.” But neither of them moved. The oak shadows strained down the faces of the hills, flung back by the westering sun. The air smelled of emptiness.

“Well, what should we do?”

He shook his head a little. Then he said, “You’re a bard. They’re expecting you. Let them know you’re here.”

She thought a moment. Then she lifted her cothone and blew on the first pipe, the pipe of joy, the opening phrases of the first Song of Fortune for the spring ritual.

There was a silence. The lovely fragment of song faded away. Sere turned to her, half-smiling, the tenseness wearing away from his face. Before he could speak, the empty oaks themselves sang an answer: every voice of the cothone echoing and overlapping one another in the salute to the Bard of Daghian.

Men on beautiful, long-legged hill horses rode out of the trees. Sere caught at Cresce’s reins, but they came too fast. They surrounded Cresce and Sere, their horses weaving in and out of one another in a complex circle. The men carried hawks with fierce golden eyes on their shoulders; around their wrists small pipes dangled from leather thongs. The men were wiry and dark, with wide, high cheekbones and eyes that had taken their color from the winter mists. Only one of them, half a head taller than the others, had hair bright as copper, and eyes as golden as the hawks‘. It was he who reached out finally, without speaking, caught Sere by the neck of his cloak, and wrenched him from his horse to the ground.

The men slid off their horses then; the ring of horses melted away. The hawks stirred, crying harshly as the men grappled with Sere. Their arms locked around him so tightly he could not struggle. One of the men gripped his hair, jerked his head back. His mouth opened; hands full of corn-husks pushed down over his face.

Cresce, frozen on her horse, saw his body begin to convulse. She snatched air and her trihorne at the same time. The note she blasted down at the men loosened their hold of both Sere and the corn husks. They looked up at her, pained, incredulous, while Sere, half-conscious, dragged at the wind. She said to the red-haired man, whose eyes were as furious as the hawks’ eyes at the sound, “If you kill him, I will play the winter Songs of Fortune at your spring rituals. Every note backwards.”

He straightened, gripped her reins lightly. His head gave a little, frightened shake. But there was no fear either in his face or his voice when he spoke. “No.” Behind him, the men shifted, easing their grip on Sere. “You are the Bard of Daghian?”

“Yes.”

“You’re part Jazi.”

She nodded, her throat dry. She realized he was younger than Sere, even younger than she, and Sere’s own hair held the same touch of burnished copper. Her eyes widened. “You’re part Daghian.”

The muscles in his face knotted. “True. Bard. In ancient hill language, the words were interchangeable.” He turned, bent over Sere. Cresce could not see what he did, but Sere’s body jerked, then sagged in the hill-men’s hands. The men lifted him, threw him facedown across Cresce’s saddlebow.

She put her hand beneath his throat, but she could not tell, with her own racing pulse, if he were still alive. She stared at the empty hills, the silent men with their eyes of mist, and suddenly she began to cry.

“All he came to do was find his wife!”

Their faces changed. They surrounded her, speaking quickly, worriedly, all at the same time so that she could hardly understand them. She gathered, wiping the tears angrily off her face, that nothing but respect was ever shown to a bard in Jazi, that she should not be afraid, that the people of Jazi showed peace and courtesy toward all strangers except those of Daghian, who were scarcely human anyway, and that a bard’s tears would salt the cornfields, and they would be grateful if she would stop crying. At that point Sere’s head lifted; he muttered something thickly. The hilt of a knife caught him behind the ear, silencing him again. The red-haired man took Cresce’s reins in his hand, flicked the pipes at his wrist to his mouth, and called his horse with three quick notes. The other men were gathering their horses. For a moment the air flurried with light, tangled music. Someone caught Sere’s horse, which was headed back toward the marshes. Then, in a long single file, they escorted Cresce into Jazi.

The hills parted on the other side, to join other hills ringing a plain where the people of Jazi farmed. A river, slow and green, wandered through it, sending a veinwork of streams through rougher pastureland where flocks of sheep grazed. Out of the center of the plain something shaped like an enormous black arch rose over a circle of barren ground. Scattered around the arch, among the threads of streams, were houses of oak and stone, sheds, barns, and walled fields, at the edge of the fallow field, in front of the arch, stood gigantic oak. Its boughs seemed to have stretched out to gather years and centuries. In the oval of earth its vast shadow swept, nothing stood except a great dwelling of black stone.

Its outer walls were open to all light, wind, and weather. The harsh, twisted shadow of the oak probed through the dark archways in its walls. Light from the setting sun rimmed one wall of arches with fire. Cresce remembered something that her father had told her, long ago, about the black house at the edge of Forever where the Bards of Jazi lived.

She broke her long silence, asked the young, red-haired man beside her, who rode his horse and wore the hawk on his shoulder as if they were extensions of him, “Who played the cothone to welcome me?”

He was silent so long she thought he had not heard. But finally he said, “The Bard of Jazi.”

“The Bard played a Daghian salute? But how did she know I was from Daghian? How —” The question snagged suddenly in her throat. “Who — What is your name?”

He looked at her with the odd mixture of bitterness and courtesy in his eyes. “Hroi Tuel. And yours, Bard?”

“Cresce Dami. Who is the Bard of Jazi?”

He held her eyes a moment longer. Then he lifted Seres head by the hair, let it drop again. “His wife.”

They reached the black house under the ancient oak at twilight. Someone had sounded a salute at the edge of the village. Women with torches, trays of food and wine, met Cresce as she dismounted, welcomed her, smiling. They wore her face. Some of them had grown up with her mother. They asked questions about her mother’s life in Onon, if she had been happy, how she had died. They were oblivious to Sere, as if he were a saddle pack slung across Cresce’s horse. But he saw a couple of men bring him into the house. The women took her inside, into one of the inner rooms. A brazier warmed it; oil lamps lit the rough, colorful tapestries on the black walls, the oak chairs and chests covered with sheepskins. The men had left Sere lying among Cresce’s possessions on the rugs. The women, assured by Cresce repeatedly that they could do nothing more for her, left finally.

She knelt beside Sere, turned his head gently. Blood had dried in his hair, crusted on the side of his face. She washed it away as well as she could and covered him with sheepskins. Then she sat watching him, her arms tight around her knees. She heard steps in another part of the house, the voices of the women again. Then something that sounded like a horn moaned the salute to the Bard of Hekar across the village, and she closed her eyes, hid her face against her knees.

A quarter of an hour later, the Bard of Hekar himself appeared at her door.

He was twice her age, a richly dressed, fair-haired man with a thin, lined face and a sour expression in his eyes. He said nothing to Cresce; his lean, sensitive musician’s hands searched the crusted wound in Sere’s hair and the dark bruise on his jaw. Then he sat back on his heels, and demanded, “Why? Why did you bring him into Jazi?”

She slid her wrists over her ears. “Don’t shout at me.”

“Do you realize what will happen if he dies here? I don’t know how you managed to keep him alive this long.”

“I cried. They said it would ruin their crops.”

He was silent, gazing at her. A corner of his mouth twisted unwillingly “Cresce Dami. You played the cothone for men of the king’s court while they hunted at Daghian last autumn. What would your father have said?”

“Did you know my father?”

“I was a musician at Hekar the five years he was Bard there. I have been at Hekar since I was born.” He ran his hands through his hair, jerked his head at Sere. “Why did he come? If he dies here, Daghian will go to war against Jazi, and Hekar will be forced to war against Daghian. You and I will play battle charges on opposite fields.”

She said his name softly. “Ytir Agora. The Bard with the throat of gold.”

“There is not much chance to sing on a battlefield,” he said bitterly. He stood up. “Daghian fool,” he muttered to Sere’s unresponsive face. Then he whirled at her. “Why?”

“I don’t know why! Ask the Bard of Jazi — she sent for him! She’s his wife.” She stood up under his amazed stare. “Where is she, anyway?”

“In the hills, sounding salutes. There are other bards coming. That makes no sense! Does she want him dead? ”

She stared numbly down at Sere. “I don’t know.”

 

 

She met the Bard of Jazi at midnight. Sere had wakened finally; he seemed surprised at being alive. He drank a little wine, then drifted to sleep again. Bards from other courts and cities introduced themselves to Cresce. They seemed, like the people of Jazi, to regard Sere as an embarrassment, of possible concern only if he were dead. When they left, Cresce sat playing the cothone softly, droning slow dark notes out of the eighth pipe. Finally, she heard someone ride to the doors of the house and dismount. There were voices, murmuring, indistinct, and then quick footsteps through the quiet house.

Cresce let her cothone rest. A woman entered breathlessly, sending the still lamp flames flickering all over the room.

She was as beautiful as Sere had said. Her black hair hung in thick braids to her waist, gold thread woven through them. Her eyes were wide-set, a deep, tempestuous, autumn gray. She was taller than Cresce, almost as tall as Sere, which betrayed her mixed heritage, but gave her a grace and suppleness even in the shapeless bulky skirts and tunics the Jazi women wore. Her eyes went to Sere and then to Cresce, sitting mute with the cothone in her hands. She said nothing; she only knelt beside Cresce, held her tightly a moment. Then she turned to Sere, stroked his face until he woke.

He whispered, “Lelia.”

Her throat suddenly swollen, as with deep, unsounded cothone notes, Cresce got up quickly then and left them.

She went outside, into the night. The spring winds had blown stars like seed through the sky above the plain. The moon sat like a white bird on the black gate into Forever. The enormous oak tree murmured like a muted cynllaya under the wind’s touch. Cresce walked in its black moon-shadow toward the edge of the barren field.

She stood looking at the hard, silvery earth, the immense archway the winds were blowing through. Something her father had said teased her mind. Something about a great circle of cothone players around that field, trying to coax an answer irom the silence within that arch. In the distance, the river burned a path through the dark plain. She turned away from the field, followed the edge of a tiny stream that made a half-circle, tracing the shadow of the oak.

Outside the great wings of the oak, she saw Hroi Tuel, restless in the moonlight, flicking pebbles into the stream with a great hawk asleep on his shoulder.

She sat down beside him. He said nothing; she watched rings form and flow into one another as the pebbles dropped. She asked him the simplest question first, her voice stilling his hand.

“Would you have killed Sere?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did she call him to Jazi?”

He shrugged. “No one questions the Bard of Jazi. She changes fortune.”

“What if she leaves with him, goes back to Daghian?”

“She is not free.” He swept his arm in an arch across the stars. “She is not free. So they say. I think the Bards of Jazi bind themselves. And I don’t believe in fortune.”

She bowed her face against her knees, blocking the stars from her vision. Her hands clenched, a rare, untrained movement. She said carefully, “When the army of Daghian passed through Jazi seventy years ago, they did more than abduct one woman. True?”

“Nine men of Daghian,” he said harshly, “survived the battle of Hekar Pass. They knew the truth, but that truth was never spoken in Daghian. Even today, seventy years later, there are children born in Jazi with hair pale as cornsilk. Or red, like mine. Hekar Pass was a matter of justice.”

She lifted her head again. “I have her cothone—the woman taken by the Lord of Daghian. Was she a bard?”

“They say so. For seven years after she left, the river was burned dry by the sun, and what sheep the army left in Jazi starved because the pastures dried. She wasn’t there to change fortune.” He was silent. Then he sent a fistful of pebbles spattering into the water, and faced her. “Is it because I’m part Daghian that I don’t believe that? When you said today that you would play the winter rituals if we killed the Daghian, the other men were frightened. Maybe they are old enough and wise enough to be afraid.”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“You are half-Jazi and a bard. You should know.”

“I know the Songs of Changing Fortune. I don’t know anything about fortune.” She picked up one of his pebbles suddenly, sent it skimming down the stream. “This much is true: the Bard of Jazi controls Sere’s fortune.”

“She brought you. She brought you both.”

“Are the Bards of Jazi always women?”

“No. The Bards of Jazi are chosen by the dead.”

She felt something shiver through her bones. “How?”

He shrugged again, the hawk clinging in its sleep to his shoulder as to a swaying tree. “I don’t know.” For the first time, his voice seemed free of bitterness, dragged into wonder. “In Jazi, the dead are burned, and their ashes blow through the gates of Forever into that bare ground. You tell me how the dead can play the cothone.”

“You’ve heard it,” she whispered.

“Once. When Lelia Daghian played the cothone at the spring rituals. No one even knew her name ...” His shadowed, eyeless face turned again to Cresce as she shuddered. He reached out, gripped her shoulder with a steady hawk’s grip. “She was from Daghian. Chosen by the dead.”

She stared at the mask the moon made of his face. “It’s a matter of music. No more.”

“I try to believe that. ” His hand loosened until it lay very gently on her shoulder. “Men and women of Jazi killed by that Daghian army were burned and scattered through those gates ... I don’t know what to believe. My father is Overlord of Jazi, and I am his red-haired son. And the part of me born to hate Daghian is also drawn to the world beyond Jazi. I can’t sleep at nights; my dreams are torn in two, from not knowing . . . You are half-Jazi, Bard of Daghian, and the dead will listen to you play. What will you do? ”

She rose, splashed across the shallow stream. Facing him again, she could see his eyes, bitter, haunted, the huge hawk awake on his broad shoulder.

He said, “Where will you go, Bard? Back to Daghian? You are not free. Neither of us is free.”

In the black house again, curled under sheepskin in the darkness, she heard the words again and again, hounding her into sleeplessness.

She woke with a start at midmorning. Sere was up, washing the dried blood out of his hair in a basin of water. He turned at her question.

“She went up into the hills again to welcome the visitors.” His face was white, drawn; he looked oddly peaceless.

She said anxiously, “I thought you would be happier.”

He frowned down at her, not seeing her. “There are women here with hair as fair as Hulme’s.” He turned back to the basin, stared at his reflection in the bloody water. “Something stinks in Daghian history, and the smell is blowing out of Hekar Pass. No wonder they hate us.”

“She doesn’t.” Cresce sat up, pushing hair out of her eyes, trying to see. “She doesn’t hate you. Why did she put you in so much danger?”

“She wanted me to come to her. She can’t go back to Daghian. She is Bard of Jazi — the fortune of Jazi.”

Her lips parted on a sudden breath. “You can’t. You can’t stay here. You are a Lord of Daghian. There’s nothing here but sheep. They’ll kill you, and your brothers will come—”

“You stop them. ” He knelt at her side suddenly, raised her cold fingers and kissed them. “Bard of Daghian, sing the truth of Hekar Pass to Daghian.”

She stared at his bent head, the strokes of copper in his wet, tangled hair. She said, her voice shaking, “How do I know what the truth is?”

She rode out of the village an hour later to speak to the Bard of Jazi. The music of the Bard’s salutes guided Cresce through the plain, then high up into the hills. A horn call rolled through the valleys, bidding welcome to a group of bards traveling down a road cut between the hills. The Bard herself stood on the crest of a hill overlooking them. As Cresce drew nearer, she recognized the twisted, bone-white horn, made of pieces of ram’s horn bound together with gold. Its tone was strong, bright; only the fading cadences frayed to a hollowness, like the wind’s voice.

The Bard did not seem surprised to see Cresce. She stilled the horn and watched Cresce dismount. Facing her, Cresce saw then what she had seen in Hroi Tuel, and later, in Sere: a confusion, a peacelessness.

She said huskily, “When I came to Daghian, the first ballad I sang was of Sere, and his hunting of the stag that was not a stag. Or maybe it was a stag after all. I never wondered before this. What was Sere really following through the mists? A stag? A woman? A bird? Or something else? When I look at you, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. What are you doing? Are you trying to kill Sere? ”

“I don’t think so.” She stood for a moment under Cresce’s incredulous gaze, her hands tight on the ram’s horn. Then she took Cresce’s arm, led her to a sheepskin rug laid on the bare ground. “Sit down, Cresce Dami. Never, never could I have been Bard of Daghian. But I played my great-grandmother’s cothone since I was a child, and in Jazi, that one instrument is enough.”

“Why did you leave Daghian?”

“Look at me. Old, old men of Jazi say that I am the bard that the army of Daghian stole, returned at last to Jazi. I am their fortune.”

“Are you?”

“Perhaps.” She was silent, her thoughts indrawn. “Perhaps. Maybe their only fortune is hope, which I give them. I don’t know. I am my own misfortune.”

“Why?” she pleaded. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you.”

“I am half of Jazi, half of Daghian. If Sere had died yesterday, I would have been free of Daghian.” She shook her head again, her face twisting a little at Cresce’s expression. “All I can give you is what you asked for. Truth. That was one thought in my mind. But also, I gave Jazi the truth: I didn’t want to lie to them about Sere. So I told them what he was. They nearly killed him, and you saved him, as I hoped you could.”

“Do you love him?” Cresce whispered. “Or don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I love the people of Jazi, who demand everything of me — even my freedom. All I know is that I won’t ever leave them without a bard.”

Cresce was silent. The winds sifted dryly through the oak leaves. She said abruptly, as if the word were surprised out of her, “No.”

“In Daghian, I have a son. I have a place in the Lords’ house. I have horses, birds, great music. Here, I listen on a windy day to sheep bells. And I wonder what is happening in the great cities of the kingdom. But in Daghian, my face is the face of a woman of Jazi. And the men of Daghian are the sons and grandsons of the army that swept through Jazi seventy years ago, stealing, burning, raping, murdering. Tell me. Where do I belong?”

“Why did you leave Daghian?”

“I followed something one winter through the Daghian marshes. A cothone, played like a promise of passion and wonder beyond the mists, out of the hills of Jazi . . . All I found here were sheep bells.” She smiled a little, crooked smile.

“But you didn’t leave Jazi.”

“No. I became their Bard. How could I have left them? I am their promise of wonder. Of hope.” She studied Cresce, the uncertainty in her eyes easing a little. “You are beginning to understand me. I am not terrible. I am just — torn.”

“Like Hroi Tuel.”

Lelia nodded. “Hroi. Afraid to hope in visions. One day, he’ll leave Jazi. But I don’t know if he will ever find peace, in or out of Jazi.”

“Who played — who played the cothone I heard in the marshes last autumn? ”

Lelia was silent. She reached out suddenly, put her hand on Cresce’s wrist. “Believe me.” Her voice was low, timbre-less as a distant horn. “I didn’t.”

Cresce drew breath soundlessly. She sat with her head bowed, gazing down at the valley below. “If Sere stays with you, the Lords of Daghian will come to get him.”

“You stop them.”

“Will I be able to? If you — if you leave Jazi —”

“I can’t leave.”

“If you leave, will you be content in Daghian? ”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why did you call Sere! Why did you give him hope?”

“Sere knows me.” She curled the soft wool in her long fingers. “He was very angry with me, last night. I told him exactly what I’ve told you. The truth.”

“Do you love him?”

She sighed. “If I could turn into a bird, fly into a winter twilight ... I love Sere as I love Jazi. As much as I am able. He knows that. He sees me clearly. And I’m not a woman in a mist. I am his wife, and the mother of his son. I am Bard of Jazi, the good fortune of Jazi. All these things bind me. But only because I choose to be bound.”

Cresce was silent. The Bard’s face held, she thought suddenly, all the names of the pipes of the cothone. The longing, the mourning, the calling, the passion, the warning . . . She raised her hand suddenly, touched its beauty, and at the touch, remembered its danger.

“I’m free,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Then why,” she cried out, rising, “do I have to keep telling myself that?”

Cresce roamed through the hills all day long. At evening, she returned to the Bard’s house. Hroi Tuel, escorting the last of the visitors down from the hills, dropped from his horse to her side. She did not speak to him.

He said, “An hour before dawn, the Bard will wake. She’ll play the sun’s rising at the edge of Forever field. The villagers and guests will gather in a great circle around the field. The cothone will be played from sunrise to sunrise. The Daghian Lord will be killed if he sets one foot out of this house.”

She went into the house without looking at him. In her room, she found Sere gazing out through the thin shaft of window at the barren field. She stared helplessly at his back, wondering if he was imprisoning himself out of love for a woman or as a penance for Hekar Pass. She went to his side, stood as close to him as she could without touching him. His eyes met hers; he brushed her cheek gently.

“I’ll miss you, Bard.”

“You’ll die here. You’ll hear nothing but sheep bells, and they’ll find a reason to kill you.”

“No one ever died of listening to sheep bells.”

“I would.”

“You stop my brothers from coming.” His eyes bored into hers harshly. “You can. Make them feel the truth. Or there will be more blood shed between Daghian, Jazi, and Hekar than in all the ballads you learned at Onon. ”

“Come home.”

“No.”

She left him. She took sheepskins, crossed the stream, and went to sit at the edge of Forever, facing east, so that she would see the sun rise through the great, dark arch. When the moon set she fell asleep. She woke at the first, dazzling shaft of light sweeping the mouth of the arch, called by the Bard of Jazi on the first pipe of the cothone, the pipe of joy.

Arrows soared through the arch, tuned to the pipe. They turned into minute, hurling splinters of light before they fell earthward again. Women from the village carried great trays of food and wine to the crowd gathering around the field.

They were talking, laughing; some of them sang to the sound of the cothone. Children, herdsmen, farmers, craftsmen, the visiting bards took places around the barren ground, sitting in a great circle while bowmen, to the strains of the ram’s horn, sent another blaze of arrows through the arch. Musicians gathered to one side of Cresce. She studied their instruments: painted drums of wood and hollow gourd, copper wind chimes, rows of bells strung on leather, horns, wooden flutes, the small hand pipes the men used to call their horses. The musicians were talking, eating; children surrounded them, tapping on the drums and the bells. Only the Bard ate nothing, and spoke to no one as she brought up the sun.

When she sang the first Song of Changing Fortune, though, there was utter silence.

It was a light, almost dreamlike song, accompanied by the bird-voices of hand-pipes, the wind-stroked chimes, and high, soft bells. The sun had loosed its grip of the hills; the Bard coaxed it higher until it hovered in the center of the archway. Her voice faded into the morning wind. Birds flashed, their wings on fire, across the face of the sun. There was a murmuring from the visitors. Then the Bard lifted the cothone, began to play the second pipe, the pipe of wonder.

Cresce took wine, and some steamed, fruit-filled bread from one of the women. The swelling in her throat made it difficult to swallow at first. Lelia’s face seemed remote, peaceful, as if she had left her confusion and pain outside the barren circle. She would not sing again until noon, Cresce remembered. Noon, then twilight, midnight, and sunrise again, the first five of the hundred and one Songs of Changing Fortune. Cresce wondered if Sere could hear her voice. Then she realized someone was sitting beside her.

She turned, wondering how long Hroi Tuel had been with her. He sat as still as the great bird on his shoulder, but she saw his eyes move from face to face around the circle. Once he said, his voice inflectionless, “She has brought up the sun; she will bring up the corn.” Then, later, he touched Cresce’s wrist. “There’s my father.”

A big, black-haired man, dressed in a long, wheat-colored ceremonial robe, had seated himself on the other side of the musicians. One of the barefoot children crept up behind him, flung her arms around his neck, and he laughed. But a shadow settled into his eyes a moment later.

Hroi said, regarding him, “He said I should have killed the Daghian Lord.” He spat suddenly on the ground. “Men of Daghian are not human. That’s what I have been taught. He would have been human enough in my dreams if I had killed him. But now he will stay in Jazi, and no one is permitted to touch him or speak to him. My father says he’ll bring misfortune. My father says the Bard brought you here so she could leave Jazi.”

“I know.”

He looked at her then, angry, tormented. “She is our good fortune. Lelia Daghian.” He spat again. Then, at her silence, he asked roughly, “What will you do? ”

“I am Bard of Daghian. I have nothing to do with the fortune of Jazi.”

“There is no such thing as fortune. There is only a woman playing a cothone who hates Jazi.”

“No,” Cresce said softly. “She is like you. Listen to her music. She could have walked out of Jazi at any time. But she chose to stay.”

“She brought you.”

“I won’t play. She took that risk.”

“Then the man she loves will be a prisoner in Jazi, and the butchers of Daghian will come looking for him. There is no fortune. Only a woman playing a cothone.”

“I’ll tell the Lords of Daghian the truth. There will be no war.”

“What music will you give to Daghian that you refuse to give Jazi? Bard.”

She was silent. The Bard changed pipes, began a song on the pipe of laughter.

At noon, Lelia sang to the sun overhead as she walked around the field, her shadow flickering out of its barrenness to touch the new grass pushing toward light on the plain. After her song, the Bard of Hekar began to play. His music was very simple and a little unsure, for he was not used to playing the cothone, but there was a lightness and enthusiasm in it that the Bard had inspired. She smiled across the circle at him, then sat down for the first time in six hours. The women brought her food and wine, but they did not speak to her. Cresce saw her glance once at the black house beneath the oak. The song of the Bard of Hekar ended; another visitor began to play. Cresce realized with surprise that it was one of her teachers from Onon. At mid-afternoon, Lelia began to play again. The musicians beat a wild, raucous dance to her music. The children whirled to it, while some of the old people stretched on the grass and napped. The women serving food disappeared; a little later the smells of roast lamb and wild boar wafted across the field.

The Bard’s song at sunset was played on the fourth and fifth pipes: the pipes of longing and of love. Standing on the opposite side of the circle, she eased the brilliant sun into a bed of gold beyond the hills. Its rays touched her face again and again before it withdrew. The oak shadow flung over half the plain faded slowly; the tree loosed the light it had gathered into its boughs. Dusk left the plain in an uncertain, misty light. Then, as the first star appeared, the bowmen shot arrows of flaming pitch high, high toward the arch, trying to send them over it. Only one struck the lower edge of the arch; the others fell through it, sank, burning, into the bare earth. There was laughter, applause. Torches were lit in the grass. Lelia played the measure of a wild dance that was picked up by one of the visiting bards. The musicians shook the crowd awake with the lively beat of drums and flutes. Circles of dancers formed around the torches, whirling and laughing. The full moon began its slow arch above Jazi.

Hroi Tuel, who had appeared and disappeared unexpectedly throughout the day, brought Cresce a plate of food, then vanished again. She sat picking at spiced lamb and pickled vegetables, watching the dancers winding in and out of the torches. Someone dropped down beside her in the shadows. She glanced up expecting Hroi’s taut, brooding face. She coughed a little, on a piece of pickled cabbage.

Sere touched her briefly, then shifted back into the shadows. He waited until a woman carrying pitchers of wine had passed them. Then he said softly, “I was going mad in that house, trying to hear. I had to hear. They won’t notice me in the dark.”

“Have you eaten?” She pushed her plate to him. “They’ll kill you if they recognize you.”

“They won’t.” He wrapped lamb in hot bread, chewed it hungrily. “They forgot to feed me. Or maybe they didn’t forget. Have you played yet? ”

“No. I’m not going to.”

He stopped chewing, stared at her. He swallowed. “Why? I want to hear what comes out of you and that cothone.”

“I’m not playing. ”

He held her eyes, his own eyes narrowed, until she looked away. He put her plate down, gripped her wrist. Then a shadow rustled next to Cresce, and Sere seemed to blur into himself, shifting back into his sheepskin cloak. Hroi held out of a cup of wine to Cresce. Then he offered a piece of boar meat to the bird on his shoulder. Cresce, her mouth dry, her hands shaking, sipped wine silently, waiting for the hard, incredulous whip of his voice as he discovered Sere. But Hroi never spoke. Balanced on his haunches, his eyes unwinking, he looked like the hawk on his shoulder, its still eyes drenched with fire.

The dance music began to die. The moon’s face hardened into a clear, unbearable beauty, and the Bard of Jazi played a warning on the sixth pipe. Another bard from Onon began playing with her, weaving a restless, minor melody through hers. Other warnings drifted through theirs, the dark music never quite harmonized, never quite chaotic, as if many different voices were trying to describe the same misfortune looming out of the night. Some voices drifted to silence; others took up the warning until it seemed to Cresce that every bard in the circle had played except for her. But there seemed no music in her, as if she had already heeded the Bard’s warning.

Finally, all the cothones fell silent, except for Lelia’s. She had changed position again; she stood facing west, at the edge of the moon-shadow of the oak. Her face was in shadow; her music drifted into shadow. For a breath the night was soundless. Then, out of moonlight and shadow, came the deep, wild, passionate voice of the seventh pipe.

Cresce felt her heart torn open suddenly, aching. The Bard seemed to know all their languages. She played Hroi’s tormented doubt, Seres anger and love. She played her own confusion of love and restlessness, the pride and beauty she had learned at Daghian, the sorrow and faith of Jazi. And out of all the tangle of their thoughts, she shaped something that ran at the edge of the fiery darkness like a dream: a glimpse of unbearable beauty that existed only to be hunted, never caught. Cresce’s hands closed on her own cothone. She kept them still, though the music seemed to gather in her bones. Her silence was a hard, painful knot in her throat. Visions of the great white stag, forever pursued, forever eluded, ran through her heart. She thought of Sere tracking it on foot through the marshes of Daghian; of his grandson at her left pursuing a dream of love; of Hroi Tuel at her right, desperate for an illusion of truth. And she realized then what endless, hopeless visions the Bard herself pursued to create for them their own visions of hope.

She found herself on her feet, in silent salute to the Bard of Jazi. Tears burned in her eyes; her hands seemed frozen on her cothone. Music weltered soundlessly through her, compelled by a heritage of a barren field and a black spring night. But she stood still, forcing herself silent, until she realized slowly the barrenness of her own refusal to pursue the powerful, fleeting vision of her music.

She lifted the eighth pipe to her mouth, understanding at last what it mourned. She waited until the Bard’s music died away. Then, with her first low note, she promised Hroi and Sere and the people of Jazi their visions, and the Bard of Jazi her freedom. She accompanied Lelia through the midnight Song of Fortune. Then she drew the night into her cothone, sent it out again, note by note, across the barren field. Pitching her music deep, she sent a slow, dark song into the arch that seemed to reach out of her bones, out of the roots beneath her, out of the life beneath the barren field, to pierce the silence locked within the arch of Forever.

She stopped as abruptly as she had began, when the only sound left in her was the deep, ragged beat of her heart. She sat down, dropping the cothone. Slowly, someone else in the circle took up her song, and she closed her eyes, breathing deeply in relief, that she had tried and failed, and the silence surrounding the stars was still unbroken. Then she recognized the rich, husky, unearthly pipes of the cothone answering her.

A wind swept across the plain, carrying echoes of a thousand pipes of joy and mourning. Something seemed to enter Cresce, touch her bones. She heard Hroi’s breath catch, then catch again. She swallowed dryly longing suddenly to play again, to stand with the night to its darkness and end, then bring the first touch of sunlight into Jazi. Then a voice out of the shadows cried out harshly, shattering the weave of music beyond the arch:

“No!”

Hroi was on his feet suddenly, the hawk beating on his shoulder. He pulled a torch out of the ground, swung it at the darkness, illuminating Sere as he flung himself back from the fire.

“You,” Hroi breathed. “You.” There were tears running down his face. “You in Daghian were born listening for the voices of the dead in Jazi.”

He hurled the torch at Sere’s face. Sere rolled; the torch caught the sheepskin at his back, set it blazing. He threw himself on his back, trying to smother the flames. Hroi, the hawk fluttering off his shoulder, lunged at Sere. Sere’s boot slammed into his breastbone, spun him off his feet. Sere straightened, slapping at his cloak. A fist coming out of the darkness cracked across his face and he fell, extinguishing the last of the fire. Cresce, seeing the circle of men closing around him, felt a fury shake her like the bass voices of the cothone.

“Stop it!” Her voice cracked like a reed. “I am the Bard of Jazi! You will not touch him!” She whirled at Hroi, who was starting to rise. “Stop it!” He froze. She looked down at Sere, struggling to his knees. “And you!” His face lifted; her voice cracked again. “Lord of Daghian! Go back to Daghian!”

Lelia, shouldering past the men, went to his side. She tried to help him up; he shook her away, shouted at her, still on his knees, “What are you doing? You called Cresce Dami to take your place—You called us both — You nearly got me killed — You weren’t content in Daghian, you aren’t content here—”

“I am not made to be content!” She was crying suddenly, still trying to help him, on her knees beside him.

“Then what are you made for? ”

“To play the cothone. To know all its voices.” She put her arms around him, her voice muffled in charred sheepskin. “I have been faithful to Jazi. I will be that faithful to you. That much I know. That, I chose.”

He was silent. His eyes went to Cresce; she saw the look in them that must have been in his grandfather’s when the beautiful animal changed shape before his eyes and then changed shape again. Cresce put her hands over her mouth, whispered to Sere, “You. Love her. She will sing the truth in Daghian.”

She saw the tears in his own eyes. “I can’t let you do this. I can’t go back to Daghian leaving you here. You are the pride of Daghian. Your music will die here in the silence. Everything you learned at Onon will be lost.”

“I didn’t have to play here,” she said softly. “I chose to.” She swallowed the fire in her throat. “Go home.” She looked at the Overlord of Jazi, staring at her in wonder at the edge of the circle of men. “I am Bard of Jazi, chosen by the dead of Jazi. You will permit him to leave in peace. Or I will cry over every cornfield in Jazi.”

She turned, walked through the darkness to take Lelia’s place at the edge of Forever. Someone had continued to play the cothone through the turmoil and shouting, keeping the ancient ritual of music passed like a flame from bard to bard uninterrupted. She sent him silent gratitude as she took the melody from him. Then she realized, as he lowered his instrument, that it was the Bard of Hekar.

She played through the dark hours of morning until dawn. Then, at the first slow run of fire across the hills, she changed to the first pipe. She did not know where she found the joy to sing the fifth Song of Changing Fortune, but it was in her somehow, as she watched the light wash across the fragile green of the hills, as she looked through the arch and saw the fronds of new leaves on the ancient, twisted oak boughs.

After she sang, she sat for a long time in silence, while the crowd dispersed around her to eat and sleep. The barren field was quiet again. The wind rustled across the plain, bringing her the sound of sheep bells. She drew her knees up, rested her face in her arms, and thought of Daghian. She raised her head again finally. The monotonous, unfamiliar hills still ringed her with their silence.

Hroi Tuel was sitting motionlessly beside her. As she straightened, he put his hand on her shoulder. Then he winced. “That Daghian Lord cracked my ribs.” After a moment, he admitted, “There was some justice in that.”

Cresce did not answer. But she sensed, through the confusion of despair and faith she had committed herself to, the beginnings of his peace.

 

 

 

 

A Troll and Two Roses

 

 

Once upon a time there was an old troll who lived under a bridge. He was an ugly, sloppy old troll named Thorn, who liked to flip fish out of the river with his toes and eat them raw, and to leap out at travelers on the road above and collect whatever valuables they dropped before they ran. Like all trolls, he had a weakness for beautiful things. He kept his treasures in an iron chest hidden under tree roots along the bank. When the moon was high and full, he would open the chest and look at them: all the lovely things he had stolen. He had rings and ribbons, lace handkerchiefs, jeweled knives, delicate veils, pouches of gold, silk flowers, feathered hats, and even a stray velvet shoe that a young girl had lost in her terror. He never harmed anyone; he was too lazy, and so ugly he didn’t need to. One glimpse of his huge, warty, hairy face peering up over the side of the bridge was enough to make anybody drop whatever they had. “Troll toll!” he would bellow, and collect it, laughing, from the dust.

Almost anybody.

One night he looked over his treasure box and a restless, discontented feeling stirred through him. It was a familiar feeling: it meant that his eyes were tired of all his old things and wanted something new to delight in. He shut his box and hunkered down under the bridge to wait. He didn t expect anyone, for it was late and the gates of the city the road led to were long closed. But he heard in the distance solitary hoof-beats, and he grinned a troll grin, making fish dive out of the reflection of his teeth.

He waited until the hoofbeats thumped and echoed over the center of the bridge. Then he leaped up, all snarled and dank in the moonlight, with his eyes crossed and a frog in his beard. “Troll toll!” he boomed.

An edge of pure silver sliced out of the dark at him so fast it trimmed his hair as he ducked. He yelped. A black horse with yellow eyes bared its teeth and lunged at him. A voice snapped irritably, “Troll toll, indeed! I’ll give you troll toll, you frog-eater—” The silver whistled about Thorn’s ears again, and he dove into the water and swam away into the night. But not before he had seen what the rider was carrying, and that the moon-shadow in the white dust was crowned.

He was consumed with longing from that moment. He could not eat, he could not sleep. The fish were safe, the travelers were safe. He sat under his bridge, chewing his beard, smoldering with desire, not, as he had done in his youth, for a troll-woman, but for the rose he had glimpsed in the dark rider’s hand.

It was white as hoarfrost; it was carved out of winter. Yet it was alive, and the dew clustered on it like diamonds. He knew a little of the world: that kings and princes went on quests for such things, and that they generally gave them away to their true loves, not to untidy trolls. But this prince had been alone, in no great hurry. He had not returned in triumph; he had come back at night, riding slowly, and, even allowing for the unexpected appearance of Thorn, in no good humor. Had his true love not wanted the rose? Well, Thorn did, and finally, at dusk one evening, he dragged himself from under the bridge and went mumbling and thumping through the forest, in no good humor himself, for he hated the world. But there was no other way to possess that rose.

He reached the walls of the city before dawn. He dragged himself up over them and wound through the cobblestone streets, shambling and snorting and giving city folk bad dreams. He found another wall and went over that, and another and went over that. And another — and then he dropped onto a smooth velvety lawn that was covered with rose trees.

A hundred peacock eyes stared at him and folded; the birds went screeching away. He stood in the dawn, smelling of river water, looking, with his little muddy eyes and his clumsy bulk, like something not even a dog would bite. But his thoughts and eyes were full of roses. He walked among the trees, finding roses but never the rose he wanted. Scarlet roses, gold, pink, orange, lavender, blue-white, ivory-white, snow-white, but never crystal-white, ice-white, so white he could have buried his big nose in it and smelled the wintry peaks of his birthplace. He stood beside the last tree, scratching his head and wondering where to go next. He heard a sigh.

It was the prince, standing in the garden gate with the magic rose in his hand.

Thorn studied him a moment, wanly. He was a burly young man, unarmed and barefoot, with tousled yellow hair, a morning beard, and black, black eyes. His shirt was loose, his crown was off; he had apparently just gotten out of bed. Thorn ducked behind a row of bushes and crept silently, step by step, up to the prince’s back. It hadn’t worked the first time, but it might a second. He raised himself on his toes and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Troll toll!”

The prince dropped the rose.

He gave Thorn a furious chase through the rose garden, but Thorn batted at him once with his huge hand, and the prince tumbled among the flowers. Thorn climbed back over the walls faster than he had come. When the sun rose, he was outside the city gates; when the sun set, he was back under his bridge, gazing with utter delight at his rose.

It was whiter than the moon, it was more delicate than an elvish smile. It had no root, but it was alive, caught in some spell that kept it always perfect, with no sign on its tender petals of decay. It smelled of snow and apple blossoms. A diamond of moistness balanced on the very tip of one petal. Thorn touched it with his horny finger and it dropped, dissolving. As he berated himself for his clumsiness, another diamond formed at the heart of the flower and rolled slowly across its crystal petals like a tear.

Then Thorn heard the galloping.

The prince was not alone this time. Thorn winced at the clatter of hooves over his head. He was just wise enough to duck himself down, instead of demanding a toll, and move a little faster than he had ever moved in his life. The dusk enveloped him, blurred his swift bulky form among the river reeds and trees. The prince sighted him, but his army had hard going along the soft, tangled banks. The prince’s horse, the black, wicked-eyed mount, seemed to melt like night through brambles and thickets. Thorn, glancing back, could see its yellow eyes burning in the dark long after the shouts and splashes of the prince’s army had faded away.

Thorn was fast and tireless. His feet gobbled miles the way he gobbled fish. His leathery soles never felt a sharp stone; they could flatten a wall of brambles without hesitation. The prince’s horse followed like a bolt of black lightning. It could never quite catch up with Thorn, but it never fell behind, and all night long its baleful, sulfurous eyes smoldered into Thorn’s back. Finally, near morning, Thorn began to tire a little. He wanted to sit down quietly and contemplate the rose in his hand. He wanted breakfast. A dawn wind rose, puffed the last stars out. The sky turned gray as iron. In front of Thorn, massive gray peaks of stones began to separate themselves from the sky.

Thorn ran toward them with relief. He could find an opening, duck inside, and hide himself in the meandering veinwork of caves through which the lifeblood of the mountains flowed. Thorn had been born in a cave; he could see in the dark. He was no more afraid of a mountain than he was of a minnow. So when he bolted into one dark crevice among the boulders, he wasn’t prepared to hear the mountain speak with a roar like a thousand cannon. The dark tore away in front of him like a curtain. Light hurt his eyes. He stumbled on wet grass. He stopped, bewildered, blinking. The mountains had vanished.

He was standing on a flat plain, watching the sun rise from the wrong side of the world. There was another thunderclap. The prince and his horse leaped out of a slit in the air into the wrong morning.

The horse snorted and restrained, in its astonishment, from biting Thorn’s ear off. The prince slid off its back slowly. The three stood silently, troll, horse, and prince, all with the same expression on their faces. Then, faster than a fish sliding out of Thorn’s fingers, the prince’s sword was out of its sheath and threatening to burrow into Thorn’s troll heart.

“Give me that rose.”

There was something in the black eyes more compelling than the meager blade. Visions of an endless chase made Thorn yield the rose. His small eyes blinked; he sighed. The rose passed out of his grasp.

The deadliness faded from the prince’s eyes. He held the rose gently to his cheek and said, with a tired, angry sorrow, “It is my wife.”

Then Thorn wanted the rose back. The dream-woman entrapped within such a wondrous form made him snort with longing; he took a step toward it, his hand outstretched. The horse’s big yellow teeth snapped at his nose. The prince ignored him.

“Look, she’s crying. She never cries. ” He coaxed a tear onto his fingertip and touched it to his lips. Then he became aware of Thorn, his troll chest heaving, his eyes tiny and red with yearning. The prince’s hands enfolded the rose, held it closer to his heart.

“She loves me” he said coldly. Then he glanced around the empty, cloud-tossed sky. “Look what you did. ”

“I didn’t!” Thorn protested.

“Where are we?”

Thorn’s feet shuffled among the grass. He was hungry, he wanted the rose, he wished the prince with his bad-tempered eyes and tidy, gleaming armor would leave him alone to dangle his feet in a river and nibble toads. He was half again as tall as the prince and twice as burly, and he was bewildered by his own submission. He said pleadingly, “I have a secret treasure box of beautiful things; if you give me the rose—”

“Forget it,” the prince said brusquely. “She is a highborn lady, she is not for you. You would make her miserable, and then she would make you even more miserable.”

“She could never make me miserable.”

“She’d find a way. ” He looked around the plain again then, and added briskly, “You led us here. Lead us back.”

Thorn scowled. “If I knew how to get back to my bridge, prince, I’d be there now.” He felt cold and grumpy, for the spell of the rose was aching in his heart. Yet even as he glanced at it again, his throat swelled and his eyes softened. Then at last he thought to ask, “What turned the lady into a rose?”

The prince slid his helm back and scratched his head. “I don’t know. An evil spell, but who the sorcerer is, I can’t guess. We were up in the mountains alone; she was sitting in my lap, we were dallying among the wildflowers, counting birds, making up riddles — and suddenly she was this rose. I waited, I searched. I shouted, and pleaded, and argued with the wind. She was still a rose. I came back home. Whereupon,” he added dourly, “I was assailed by an ugly old troll.” Thorn snorted. “And now, I’m here with the troll and the weeping rose in the middle of nowhere.” He turned suddenly and mounted. “Well. You can stay here picking at grass with your toes, but I’m going to find the door back.” The great black mount whirled.

Thorn cried, “Wait! Wait for me!”

And then the entire plain rumbled. Darkness fell over it, thick and murky, until Thorn could not even see the horse’s yellow eyes. The rose began to glow. It was a piercing, ice-white light in the utter black. The plain was shrieking now. Or was it wind? Thorn couldn’t tell. He squeezed his eyes shut, put his hands over his ears, and wished with all his heart he were back under his bridge. The wish didn’t work. He heard a startled, anguished cry from the prince. Then the plain burned with daylight and Thorn opened his eyes.

He stood staring stupidly, his mind working very slowly. The white rose was now red. The prince was now a princess. The horse was still a horse. The princess was sitting on the ground with the red rose against her cheek. Her brown hair was braided, her cheeks were freckled like apples, she was still crying. It was by her tears that Thorn finally realized who she was.

He fell in love. He forgot his visions of a frosty maiden with diamonds on her smooth, pale skin. He wanted to braid and unbraid the honey-brown hair; he wanted to count all the freckles on the princess’s round cheeks. He wanted to catch her tears and carry them in his pocket. His finger moved tentatively toward her face. She noticed him finally.

She scrambled to her feet, staring at him in horror. “Troll,” she breathed. “What have you done to my husband?”

He broke grass stems between his toes. “I have a nice bridge,” he said shyly, looking hard at the end of his nose. “I can catch fat red salamanders for you to eat. I’ll give you a box of beautiful things.” He had to wait a little, then, while she shouted and wept and commanded the reluctant horse to consume various parts of Thorn. When she finally ran out of breath, Thorn continued enticingly, “I’ll bathe your feet every day myself among the water lilies. I’ll bring you little furry bats for pets— ” He stopped, for the princess was now on the back of the horse. “Wait! He’s nothing more than a rose now; I’ll bring you a vase to stick him in. You’ll like me—truly. Wait for me!”

He began to run again, only this time it was he in pursuit of the horse.

The horse led him across the plain, up low lumpy hills, into a deep and shining forest. The forest was ancient, dark; the trees were tall and hoary. Their tangled branches linked to net the sun; their trunks were knotted with burls. Occasionally, within a burl, an eye would flick. A thick root would gesture and be still. Spiderwebs gleamed in the shadows as though they were woven of white fire. The shadowy air itself seemed to glint with an eerie brightness. Thorn, preoccupied with catching the horse, didn’t notice the forest until the horse slowed. Then he leaped forward, caught the black tail, and yelled, “Ha!”

He picked himself out of a bramble bush a moment later, hearing little sniggers of derision all around him. He scowled, but there was nothing to scowl at. The princess was gazing at him expressionlessly. Her eyes, he saw then, were green as the rose stem.

“Troll, ” she said, “where are we? ”

He looked around. He sighed deeply, for he was very far from his bridge.

“I would think,” he said glumly, “in an enchanted forest. Inside a magic land. No place I’ve ever seen before. Where,” he added, “there’s enchantment, there’s always an enchanter. I don’t like them, myself. I prefer being comfortable. Now, take my bridge, that’s —” The princess told him what he could do with his bridge. “Oh. Well,” he explained, “it’s a bit big to stick in my ear.”

“Troll,” she said loftily, waving the prince like a scepter, “you will lead me to this enchanter. ”

“I don’t know where one is. ”

“You will find one.”

His eyes grew a little smaller. “What will you give me if I do? I’d rather go home and eat breakfast. What will you give me?”

“My embroidered shoes.”

“No good.”

“The twelve gold ribbons in my hair.”

“No.”

“My lace petticoat.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” she said crossly. “I’ll give you all the jewels I’m wearing. My earrings, my silver swan pin, my gold-and-sapphire chains, my six rings — ”

“I count seven.”

“All but one.”

“That, ” he said shrewdly, “is the one I want. That, and your hair, and a kiss.”

She was silent. She touched her hair, swallowing. “All of it?”

“I want your shiny braids to put into my box.”

“You can have that,” she said unhappily. “And my wedding ring. But no kiss.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she said, while the color ran like wine into her face. “Ouch!” She sucked her thumb, glowering at the rose. Thorn smiled a great yellow smile and nodded happily.

He plodded in front of the horse, tearing down giant luminous spiderwebs and mumbling to himself. “Enchanter . . . where enchanter? Who? Witch? Wizard? Fairy? First princess into rose, then prince into rose. Prince with princess-rose, then princess with prince-rose. Why not both together? Rose, rose. Then I put both in my box.” He lifted his head suddenly, scenting the wind like a horse. “Troll? No. Troll magic small, small . . . this is a complicated magic.” He stopped mumbling then and listened. Then he bent toward the great old hollow root of a tree and yelled, “Ha!”

“Shut up,” a voice hissed.

“Little troll in the tree roots, I see you. Where is the enchanter of this forest?”

“Sh!” The voice in the roots sank to a breath. “Sh ...”

“Where?” Thorn whispered. “I have a present for you.”

“I want that red rose.”

“You don’t want that. It’s an enchanted prince with a bad temper.”

“Oh. Then what present?”

“Twelve gold ribbons to weave together into a soft bright hammock for you among the roots.”

“H’m,” said the voice with interest, and the princess unbound them one by one from her hair. They slid gently through the air, striped Thorn’s hand with gold. “H’m,” said the little voice. “Bend closer.”

Thorn straightened after a few moments. He blinked; drops of cold sweat rolled into his beard. The princess said uneasily, “What?”

“Um.”

“Well, what?”

He shuffled his big feet among the leaves. The horse’s head turned very slowly; one eye regarded him evilly. Thorn stared back at it, transfixed. He forgot, suddenly, what he was going to say. He scratched his head. Was it about something to eat? The princess urged the horse forward impatiently.

“Oh, Troll.”

Deeper they went into the forest. They crossed a stream as cold and feathery white as moonlight. Ivory-pale frogs croaked on its banks, their staring eyes of various colors full of some strange pleading. Thorn shied away from them. Magic. He had no desire to eat them. A grove of trees with leaves made of pearls and diamonds made the princess stop and stare. Thorn growled deep in his throat and stretched out both hands. Trees trembled; leaves flashed down like tears.

“No, ” the princess said, as Thorn bent toward them. “No.” Her face was pale; he saw the glint of a jewel on her cheek. When she wasn’t looking at him, Thorn slipped a pearly leaf into his pocket.

They crossed the grove of weeping trees. Beyond it roared a wild blue river. They stopped on its mossy bank. On the other side of the water rose a great glassy black cliff. Their eyes lifted higher, higher . . . On top of the cliff, so high the birds could scarcely reach it, stood a rose garden.

The princess’s eyes fell from it to the rose in her hand. She looked again at the garden, again at the rose. The troll heard her breathing quicken. He was musing . . . Something? Fish in the river . . . twelve gold ribbons . . . the black horse, standing so quietly, still as the black cliff. Yellow ribbons, yellow eyes . . .

“Ah.” He remembered what he had been wanting to say. “That’s it. You might want to get off that horse.”

The princess’s face turned as white as the rose she had been. Thorn stopped sidling away from the horse, transfixed again by love. He heaved a sigh. The princess screamed. The black horse laughed, and with a mighty thrust of its haunches, soared into the sparkling, blue-white air, leaping upward toward the roses. Thorn, dangling from the horse’s tail, which in an exuberance of love he had clutched, shut his eyes and howled.

He thumped like a bad apple among the rose trees. The horse was no longer a horse, but a sorcerer with terrible yellow eyes. The prince was a prince again. Every time he moved toward the sorcerer, a bramble would snake out of the earth and catch his wrist or his boot. The princess was becoming a whole rose tree. The prince, still struggling, was becoming a bramble man, thorny with anger, with blood-red blooms here and there on his body. The sorcerer was staring into his eyes. Thorn decided it was a good time to go fishing.

He began to sneak away behind the sorcerer’s back. But diamonds were showering out of the crystal white rose tree. Scent wafted from it of distant, snowy peaks. Lovely, perfect roses, made for touching, beckoned to him, and he thought of the shiny braids the princess owed him, and the kiss. He hummed silently and waffled. Thorns were sliding through the prince’s yellow hair. The sorcerer was enthralled by his spell. Thorn thought again of the kiss.

He thrust his hairy, warty face in front of sorcerer’s nose and bellowed, “Troll toll!”

The sorcerer jumped. The spell tangled in his mind. Brambles reached toward him, tangled within his powerful confusion. The prince drew a hand loose, a foot. His sword slashed at the thorns, then at the troll, who was about to pluck a blossom from his lady-love.

“Just one! ”

The prince snarled. His sword flashed toward the sorcerer, who was two yellow eyes in a mass of brambles. The flash kindled a fire in the sky, which shouted the instant before it disappeared. The roses, the ensorcelled sorcerer, the cliff, the forest, vanished in a well of darkness. Thorn heard a slow drip of water in the night. He smelled limestone. Then he could see again.

“Where are we?” the princess said. She had a white rose petal in her hair, and rose leaves on her skirt. The prince had lost his sword, and his clothes looked as though birds had been pecking at them. “It’s so quiet. Are you here? I can’t see ...”

They were sitting on damp limestone inside a mountain. Thorn crept toward them. The princess started, and her hand went to her cheek.

“Did you do that?”

“What?”

“Never mind . . . Troll. Lead us out, and I will give you everything else I promised. ”

The troll smiled.

He led them back to his bridge. It was dusk. The quiet river smelled like a good thick stew of frogs, toads, little bulbous-eyed fish. The prince and the princess, entwined, were murmuring peacefully together.

“Is he dead? What became of your true horse? He cast so many spells. Are all the roses and diamond trees and frogs back in their proper shapes?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Where was his land?”

“Inside the mountain . . .”

“No, the mountain was inside the land. ”

“Could you see me when you were a rose?”

The troll sighed. Their voices wove together, made a private tapestry of events that no one else could see in just their way. “Ah, well,” he said, and thumped down underneath his bridge. The iron box was safe; bats circled his head; the river-voice welcomed him home.

The princess called, surprised, “Troll, you may have my hair now.”

“I don’t want it.”

“My ring?”

“Keep it.”

The princess was silent. Thorn heard her step from stone to stone. She came to him beneath the shadow of the bridge. She leaned over him as he sat glumly. When she left him, he was smiling.

Their footsteps died away. He reached into his pocket for the leaf of pearls he had stolen, to put into his chest. But he only found a thread of fiery hair.

 

 

 

 

Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer’s Son

 

 

Long ago, in a vast and faraway country, there lived a witch named Baba Yaga. She was sometimes very wise and sometimes very wicked, and she was so ugly mules fainted at the sight of her. Most of the time she dwelled in her little house in the deep woods. Occasionally, she dipped down Underearth as easily as if the earth were the sea and the sea were air: down to the World Beneath the Wood.

One morning when she was vacationing Underground, she had an argument with her house, which was turning itself around and around on its chicken legs and wouldn’t stop. Baba Yaga, who had stepped outside to find a plump morsel of something for breakfast, couldn’t get back in her door. She had given her house chicken legs to cause wonder and consternation in passersby. Nobody was around now but Baba Yaga, her temper simmering like a soup pot, and yet there it was, turning and swaying on its great bony legs in the greeny, underwater light of Underearth, looking for all the world like a demented chicken watching a beetle run circles around it.

“Stop that!” Baba Yaga shouted furiously. “Stop that at once!” Then she made her voice sweet and said the words that you are supposed to say if you come across her house unexpectedly in the forest, and are brave or foolish or desperate enough to want in: “Little house, turn your back to the trees and open your door to me.” But the house, bewildered perhaps by being surrounded by trees, continued turning and turning. Baba Yaga scolded it until her voice was hoarse and flapped her apron at it as if it really were a chicken. “You stupid house!” she raged, for she still hadn’t had her breakfast, or even her morning tea. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the roof of the world opened up at that moment and hurled something big and dark down at her that missed her by inches.

She was so startled the warts nearly jumped off her nose. She peered down at it, blinking, fumbling in her apron for her spectacles.

A young man lay at her feet. He had black hair and black eyelashes; he was dressed in a dark robe with little bits of mirrors and Stardust and cat hairs all over it. He looked dead, but, as she stared, a little color came back into his waxen face. His eyes fluttered open.

He gave a good yell, for Baba Yaga at her best caused strong windows to crack and fall out of their frames. Baba Yaga lifted her foot and kicked at a huge chicken foot that threatened to step on him, and he yelled again. By then he had air back in his lungs. He rolled and crouched, staring at the witch and trembling.

Then he took a good look at the house. “Oh, ” he sighed, “it’s you, Baba Yaga.” He felt himself: neck bone, shinbone. “Am I still alive?”

“Not for long,” Baba Yaga said grimly. “You nearly squashed me flat.”

He was silent then, huddled in his robe, eyeing her warily. Baba Yaga, mothers said to their children in the world above, will eat you if you don’t eat your supper. He, unimpressed with the warning, had always fed his peas to the dog anyway. And now look. Here she was as promised, payment for thousands of uneaten peas. Baba Yaga’s green, prismed glasses glittered at him like a fly’s eyes. He bowed his head.

“Oh, well,” he said. “If you don’t kill me, my father will. I just blew up his house.”

Baba Yaga’s spectacles slid to the end of her nose. She said grumpily, “Was it spinning?”

“No. It was just sitting there, being a house, with all its cups in the cupboard, and the potatoes growing eyes in the bin, and dust making fuzz balls under the bed, just doing what houses do — ”

“Ha!”

“And I was just . . . experimenting a little, with some magic in the cauldron. Baba Yaga, I swear I did exactly what the Book said to do, except we ran out of Dragon root, so I tossed in some Mandragora root instead — I thought It’d be a good substitute — but ...” His black eyes widened at the memory. “All of a sudden bricks and boards and I went flying, and here I ... here I ... Where am I, anyway?”

“Underground.”

“Really?” he whispered without sound. “I blew myself that far. Why,” he added a breath later, distracted, “is your house doing that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, isn’t — doesn’t that make it difficult for you to get in the door?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, why are you letting it — When you talk through your teeth like that, does that mean you’re angry?”

Baba Yaga shrieked like a hundred boiling teakettles. The young man’s head disappeared. The house continued to spin.

The witch caught her breath. She felt a little better, and there was the matter of the Sorcerer’s son’s missing head to contemplate. She waited. A wind full of pale colors and light voices sighed through the trees. She smelled roses from somewhere, maybe from a dream somebody was having about the Underwood. The head emerged slowly, like a turtle’s head, from the neck of the dark robe. The young man looked pale again, uneasy, but his eyes held a familiar, desperate glint.

“Baba Yaga. You must help me. I’ll help you. ”

She snorted. “Do what? Blow my house up? ”

“No. Please. You’re terrible and capricious, but you know things. You can help me. Down here, rules blur into each other. A dream is real; a word spoken here makes a shape in the world above. If you could just make things go backward, just for a few moments, back to the moment before I reached for the Mandragora root —before I destroyed my father’s house — if it could just be whole again—”

“Bosh,” Baba Yaga said rudely. “You would blow it up all over again.”

“Would I?”

“Besides, what do you think I am? I can’t even get my house to stop spinning, and you want me to unspin the world.”

He sighed. “Then what am I to do? Baba Yaga, I love my father, and I’m very sorry I blew up his house. Isn’t there anything I can do? I just — Everything is gone. All his sorcery books, all his lovely precious jars and bottles, potions and elixirs, his dragon tooth, his giant’s thumbnail, his narwhal tusk — even his five-hundred-year-old cauldron blew into bits. Not to mention the cups, the beds, his favorite chair, and his cats—if I landed down here, they probably flew clear to China. Baba Yaga, he loves me, I know, but if I were him I might turn me into a toad or something for a couple of months — Maybe I should just run away to sea. Please?”

Baba Yaga felt momentarily dizzy, as if all his babbling were sailing around her head. She said crossly, “What could you possibly do? I don’t want my woodstove and my tea towels blown to China.”

“I promise, I promise ...” The young man got to his feet, stood blinking at the house twirling precariously on its hen legs among the silent, blue-black trees. It was an amazing sight, one he could tell his children and his grandchildren about if he managed to stay alive that long. When I was a young man, I fell off the world, down, down to the Underneath, where I met the great witch Baba Yaga. She needed help and only I could help her....

“Little house, ” he called. “Little house, turn your back to the trees and open your door to me.”

The house turned its feet forward, nestled down like a hen over an egg, opened its door, and stopped moving.

Baba Yaga opened her mouth and closed it, opened her mouth and closed it, looking, for a moment, like the ugliest fish in the world. “How did you — how did you — ”

The young man shrugged. “It always works in the stories.”

Baba Yaga closed her mouth. She shoved her glasses back up her nose and gave the young man, and then the house, an icy, glittering-green glare. She marched into her house without a word and slammed the door.

“Baba Yaga!” the young man cried. “Please!”

A terrible noise rumbled through the trees then. It was thunder; it was an earthquake; it was a voice so loud it made the grass flatten itself and turn silvery, as under a wind. The young man, his robe puffed and tugged every direction, was blown like a leaf against the side of the house.

“Johann!” the voice said. “Johann!”

The young man squeaked.

The wind died. Baba Yaga’s head sprang out of her door like a cuckoo in a clock. “NOW WHAT?”

The young man, trembling again, his face white as tallow gave a whistle of awe. “My father.”

Baba Yaga squinted Upward from behind her prisms. She gave a sharp, decisive sniff, took her spectacles off. Then she took her apron off. She disappeared inside once more. When she came out again, she was riding her mortar and pestle.

The young man goggled. Baba Yaga’s house slowly turning on its chicken legs among the trees was an astonishing sight indeed. But Baba Yaga whisking through the air in the bowl she used to grind garlic, rapping its side briskly with the pestle as if it were a horse, made the young sorcerer so giddy he couldn’t even tell if the mortar had grown huge, or if Baba Yaga had suddenly gotten very small.

“Come!” she shouted, thrusting a broom handle over the side. He caught it; she pulled him up, dumped him on the bottom of the bowl, and yelled to the mortar, “Geeee-ha!”

Off they went.

It was a wondrous ride. The mortar was so fast it left streaks in the air, which the young man swept away, like clouds, with the broom. Each time he swept he saw a different marvel, far below, like another piece of the rich tapestry of the Underwood. He saw twelve white swans light on a stone in the middle of a darkening sea and turn into princes. He saw an old man standing on a cliff, talking to a huge flounder with a crown on its head. He saw two children, lost in a wood, staring hungrily at the sweet gingerbread house of another witch. He saw a princess in a high tower unbraid her hair and shake it loose so that it tumbled down and down the wall like a river of gold to the bottom, where her true love caught it in his hands. He saw a great, silent palace surrounded by brambles thick as a man’s wrist, sharp as daggers, and he saw the King’s son who rode slowly toward them. He saw rose gardens and deep, dark forests with red dragons lurking in them. He saw hummingbirds made of crystal among trees with leaves of silver and pearls. He saw secret, solitary towers rising out of the middle of lovely lakes, or from the tops of mountain crags. He whispered, enchanted, as every sweep of the broom filled his eyes with wonders, “There is more magic here than in all my father’s books ... I could stay here . . . Maybe I’ll stay here ... I will stay ...” He saw a small pond with a fish in it, as gold as the sun, that spoke once every hundred years. It rose up to the surface as he passed. Its eyes were blue fire; its mouth was full of delicate bubbles like a precious hoard of words. It broke the surface, leaped into the light. It said —

“Johann!”

The mortar bucked in the air like a boat on a wave. The young man sat down abruptly. Baba Yaga said irritably to the sky, “Stop shouting, he’s coming. ...”

“Baba Yaga,” the young sorcerer whispered. “Baba Yaga.” Still sprawled at the bottom of the mortar, he gripped the hem of her skirt. “Where are you taking me?”

“Home.”

“I stopped —” he whispered, for his voice was gone. “I stopped your house. I helped you.”

“Indeed,” the witch said. “Indeed you did. But I am Baba Yaga, and no one ever knows from one moment to the next what I will do.”

She said nothing more. The young man slumped over himself, not even seeing the Firebird below, with her red beak and diamond eyes, stealing golden apples from the garden of the King. He sighed. Then he sighed again. Then he said, with a magnificent effort, “Oh, well. I suppose I can stand to leave all this behind and be a toad for a few months. It’s as much as I deserve. Besides, if I ran away, he’d miss me.” He stood up then and held out his arms to the misty, pastel sky of the world within the World. “Father! It’s me! I’m coming back. I’m coming . . .”

Baba Yaga turned very quickly. She rapped the young sorcerer smartly on the head with her pestle. His eyes closed. She caught him in her arms as he swayed, and she picked him up and tossed him over the side of the mortar. But instead of falling down, he fell up, up into the gentle, opalescent sky, up until Up was Down below the feet of those who dwelled in the world Above.

“And good riddance,” Baba Yaga said rudely. But she lingered in her mortar to listen.

“Oh,” the young sorcerer groaned. “My head.”

“Johann! You’re alive! ”

“Barely. That old witch Baba Yaga hit me over the head with her pestle — ”

“Hush, don’t talk. Rest.”

“Father, is that you? Am I here?”

“Yes, yes, my son — ”

“I’m sorry I blew up your house.”

“House, shmouse, you blew up your head, you stupid boy, how many times have I told you — ”

“It was the Mandragora root.”

“I know. I’ve told you and told you —”

“Is this my bed? The house is still standing? Father, your cauldron, the cats, the pictures on the wall — ”

“Nothing is broken but your head.”

“Then I didn’t — But how did I — Father, I blew myself clear to the Underwood — I saw Baba Yaga’s house spinning and spinning, and I stopped it for her, and she took me for a ride in her mortar and pestle — I saw such wonders, such magics, such a beautiful country. . . . Someday I’ll find my way back ...”

“Stop talking. Sleep.”

“And then she hit me for no reason at all, after I had helped her, and she sent me back here . . . Did you know she wears green spectacles?”

“She does not!”

“Yes, she does.”

“You were dreaming.”

“Was I? Was I, really? Or am I dreaming now that the house is safe, and you aren’t angry. . . . Which is the true dream?”

“You’re making my head spin.”

“Mine, too.”

The voices were fading. Baba Yaga smiled, and three passing crows fell out of the sky in shock. She beat a drumroll on the mortar with her pestle and sailed back to her kitchen.

 

 

 

 

The Fellowship of the Dragon

 

 

A great cry rose throughout the land: Queen Celandine had lost her harper. She summoned north, south, east, west; we rode for days through mud and rain to meet, the five of us, at Trillium; from there we rode to Carnelaine. The world had come to her great court, for though we lived too far from her to hear her fabled harper play, we heard the rumor that at each full moon she gave him gloves of cloth of gold and filled his mouth with jewels. As we stood in the hall among her shining company, listening to her pleas for help, Justin, who is the riddler among us, whispered, “What is invisible but everywhere, swift as wind but has no feet, and has as many tongues that speak but never has a face?”

“Easy,” I breathed. “Rumor.”

“Rumor, that shy beast, says she valued his hands for more than his harping, and she filled his mouth with more than jewels.”

I was hardly surprised. Celandine is as beautiful close as she is at a distance; she has been so for years, with the aid of a streak of sorcery she inherited through a bit of murkiness, an imprecise history of the distaff side, and she is not one to waste her gifts. She had married honorably, loved faithfully, raised her heirs well. When her husband died a decade ago, she mourned him with the good-hearted efficiency she had brought to marriage and throne. Her hair showed which way the wind was blowing, and the way that silver, ash, and gold worked among the court was magical. But when we grew close enough to kneel before her, I saw that the harper was no idle indulgence, but had sung his way into her blood.

“You five,” she said softly “I trust more than all my court. I rely on you.” Her eyes, green as her name, were grim; I saw the tiny lines of fear and temper beside her mouth. “There are some in this hall who — because I have not been entirely wise or tactful—would sooner see the harper dead than rescue him.”

“Do you know where he is?”

She lowered her voice; I could scarcely hear her, though the jealous knights behind me must have stilled their hearts to catch her answer. “I looked in water, in crystal, in mirror: every image is the same. Black Tremptor has him.”

“Oh, fine.”

She bent to kiss me: we are cousins, though sometimes I have been more a wayward daughter, and more often, she a wayward mother. “Find him, Anne,” she said.

We five rose as one and left the court.

“What did she say?” Danica asked as we mounted. “Did she say Black Tremptor? ”

“Sh!”

“That’s a mountain,” Fleur said.

“It’s a bloody dragon,” Danica said sharply, and I bellowed in a whisper, “Can you refrain from announcing our destination to the entire world?”

Danica wheeled her mount crossly; peacocks, with more haste than grace, swept their fine trains out of her way. Justin looked intrigued by the problem. Christabel, who was nursing a cold, said stoically, “Could be worse.” What could be worse than being reduced to a cinder by an irritated dragon, she didn’t mention. Fleur, who loved good harping, was moved.

“Then we must hurry. Poor man.”

She pulled herself up, cantered after Danica. Riding more sedately through the crowded yard, we found them outside the gate, gazing east and west across the gray, billowing sky as if it had streamed out of a dragon’s nostrils.

“Which way?” Fleur asked. Justin, who knew such things, pointed. Christabel blew her nose. We rode.

Of course we circled back through the city and lost the knights who had been following us. We watched them through a tavern window as they galloped purposefully down the wrong crossroad. Danica, whose moods swung between sun and shadow like an autumn day, was being enchanted by Fleur’s description of our quest.

“He is a magnificent harper, and we should spare no pains to rescue him, for there is no one like him in all the world, and Queen Celandine might reward us with gold and honor, but he will reward us forever in a song.”

Christabel waved the fumes of hot spiced wine at her nose. “Does anyone know this harper’s name?”

“Kestral,” I said. “Kestral Hunt. He came to court a year ago, at old Thurlow’s death.”

“And where, ” Christabel asked sensibly, “is Black Tremptor?”

We all looked at Justin, who for once looked uncomfortable. “North,” she said. She is a slender, dark-haired, quiet-voiced woman with eyes like the storm outside. She could lay out facts like an open road, or mortar them into a brick wall. Which she was building for us now, I wasn’t sure.

“Justin?”

“Well, north,” she said vaguely, as if that alone explained itself. “It’s fey, beyond the border. Odd things happen. We must be watchful.”

We were silent. The tavern keeper came with our supper. Danica, pouring wine the same pale honey as her hair, looked thoughtful at the warning instead of cross. “What kinds of things?”

“Evidently harpers are stolen by dragons,” I said. “Dragons with some taste in music.”

“Black Tremptor is not musical,” Justin said simply. “But like that, yes. There are so many tales, who knows which of them might be true? And we barely know the harper any better than the northlands.”

“His name,” I said, “and that he plays well.”

“He plays wonderfully,” Fleur breathed. “So they say. ”

“And he caught the queen’s eye,” Christabel said, biting into a chicken leg. “So he might look passable. Though with good musicians, that hardly matters.”

“And he went north,” Justin pointed out. “For what?”

“To find a song,” Fleur suggested; it seemed, as gifted as he was, not unlikely.

“Or a harp,” I guessed. “A magical harp.”

Justin nodded. “Guarded by a powerful dragon. It’s possible. Such things happen, north.”

Fleur pushed her dish aside, sank tableward onto her fists. She is straw-thin, with a blacksmith’s appetite; love, I could tell, for this fantasy made her ignore the last of her parsnips. She has pale, curly hair like a sheep, and a wonderful, caressing voice; her eyes are small, her nose big, her teeth crooked, but her passionate, musical voice has proved Christabel right more times than was good for Fleur’s husband to know. How robust, practical Christabel, who scarcely seemed to notice men or music, understood such things, I wasn’t sure.

“So,” I said. “North. ”

And then we strayed into the country called “Remember-when, ” for we had known one another as children in the court at Carnelaine and then as members of the queen’s company, riding ideals headlong into trouble, and now, as long and trusted friends. We got to bed late, enchanted by our memories, and out of bed far too early, wondering obviously why we had left hearth and home, husband, child, cat, and goose down bed for one another’s surly company. Christabel sniffed, Danica snapped, Fleur babbled, I was terse. As always, only Justin was bearable.

We rode north.

The farther we traveled, the wilder the country grew. We moved quickly, slept under trees or in obscure inns, for five armed women riding together are easily remembered, and knights dangerous to the harper as well as solicitous of the queen would have known to track us. Slowly the great, dark crags bordering the queen’s marches came closer and closer to meet us, until we reached, one sunny afternoon, their shadow.

“Now what? ” Danica asked fretfully. “Do we fly over that? ” They were huge, barren thrusts of stone pushing high out of forests like bone out of skin. She looked at Justin; we all did. There was a peculiar expression on her face, as if she recognized something she had only seen before in dreams.

“There will be a road,” she said softly. We were in thick forest; old trees marched in front of us, beside us, flanked us. Not even they had found a way to climb the peaks.

“Where, Justin?” I asked.

“We must wait until sunset.”

We found a clearing where the road we followed abruptly turned to amble west along a stream. Christabel and Danica went hunting. Fleur checked our supplies and mended a tear in her cloak. I curried the horses. Justin, who had gone to forage, came back with mushrooms, nuts, and a few wild apples. She found another brush and helped me.

“Is it far now? ” I asked, worried about finding supplies in the wilderness, about the horses, about Christabel’s stubbornly lingering cold, even, a little, about the harper. Justin picked a burr out of her mount’s mane. A line ran across her smooth brow.

“Not far beyond those peaks,” she answered. “It’s just that — ”

“Just what?”

“We must be so careful. ”

“We’re always careful. Christabel can put an arrow into anything that moves, Danica can—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean: the world shows a different face beyond those peaks.” I looked at her puzzledly; she shook her head, gazing at the mountains, somehow wary and entranced at once. “Sometimes real, sometimes unreal — ”

“The harper is real, the dragon is real,” I said briskly. “And we are real. If I can remember that, we’ll be fine.”

She touched my shoulder, smiling. “I think you’re right, Anne. It’s your prosaic turn of mind that will bring us all home again. ”

But she was wrong.

The sun, setting behind a bank of sullen clouds, left a message: a final shaft of light hit what looked like solid stone ahead of us and parted it. We saw a faint, white road that cut out of the trees and into the base of two great crags: the light seemed to ease one wall of stone aside, like a gate. Then the light faded, and we were left staring at the solid wall, memorizing the landscape.

“It’s a woman’s profile,” Fleur said. “The road runs beneath the bridge of her nose.”

“It’s a one-eared cat, ” Christabel suggested.

“The road is west of the higher crag,” Danica said impatiently. “We should simply ride toward that.”

“The mountains will change and change again before we reach it,” I said. “The road comes out of that widow’s peak of trees. It’s the highest point of the forest. We only need to follow the edge of the trees.”

“The widow,” Danica murmured, “is upside down.”

I shrugged. “The harper found his way. It can’t be that difficult.”

“Perhaps,” Fleur suggested, “he followed a magical path.”

“He parted stone with his harping,” Christabel said stuffily. “If he’s that clever, he can play his way out of the dragon’s mouth, and we can all turn around and go sleep in our beds.”

“Oh, Christabel,” Fleur mourned, her voice like a sweet flute. “Sit down. I’ll make you herb tea with wild honey in it; you’ll sleep on clouds tonight.”

We all had herb tea, with brandy and the honey Fleur had found, but only Fleur slept through the thunderstorm. We gathered ourselves wetly at dawn, slogged through endless dripping forest, until suddenly there were no more trees, there was no more rain, only the unexpected sun illumining a bone-white road into the great upsweep of stone ahead of us.

We rode beyond the land we knew.

I don’t know where we slept that first night: wherever we fell off our horses, I think. In the morning we saw Black Tremptor’s mountain, a dragon’s palace of cliffs and jagged columns and sheer walls ascending into cloud. As we rode down the slope toward it, the cloud wrapped itself down around the mountain, hid it. The road, wanting nothing to do with dragons, turned at the edge of the forest and ran off in the wrong direction. We pushed into trees. The forest on that side was very old, the trees so high, their green boughs so thick, we could barely see the sky, let alone the dragon’s lair. But I have a strong sense of direction, of where the sun rises and sets, that kept us from straying. The place was soundless. Fleur and Christabel kept arrows ready for bird or deer, but we saw nothing on four legs or two: only spiders, looking old as the forest, weaving webs as huge and intricate as tapestry in the trees.

“It’s so still,” Fleur breathed. “As if it is waiting for music.”

Christabel turned a bleary eye at her and sniffed. But Fleur was right: the stillness did seem magical, an intention out of someone’s head. As we listened, the rain began again.

We heard it patter from bough to bough a long time before it reached us.

Night fell the same way: sliding slowly down from the invisible sky, catching us without fresh kill, in the rain without a fire. Silent, we rode until we could barely see. We stopped finally, while we could still imagine one another’s faces.

“The harper made it through, ” Danica said softly; what Celandine’s troublesome, faceless lover could do, so could we.

“There’s herbs and honey and more brandy,” Christabel said. Fleur, who suffered most from hunger, having a hummingbird’s energy, said nothing. Justin lifted her head sharply.

“I smell smoke. ”

I saw the light then: two square eyes and one round among the distant trees. I sighed with relief and felt no pity for whoever in that quiet cottage was about to find us on the doorstep.

But the lady of the cottage did not seem discomfited to see five armed, dripping, hungry travelers wanting to invade her house.

“Come in,” she said. “Come in. ” As we filed through the door, I saw all the birds and animals we had missed in the forest circle the room around us: stag and boar and owl, red deer, hare, and mourning dove. I blinked, and they were motionless: things of thread and paint and wood, embroidered onto curtains, carved into the backs of chairs, painted on the rafters. Before I could speak, smells assaulted us, and I felt Fleur stagger against me.

“You poor children. ” Old as we were, she was old enough to say that. “Wet and weary and hungry.” She was a birdlike soul herself: a bit of magpie in her curious eyes, a bit of hawk’s beak in her nose. Her hair looked fine and white as spiderweb, her knuckles like swollen tree burls. Her voice was kindly, and so was her warm hearth, and the smells coming out of her kitchen. Even her skirt was hemmed with birds. “Sit down. I’ve been baking bread, and there’s a hot meat pie almost done in the oven.” She turned, to give something simmering in a pot over the fire a stir. “Where are you from and where are you bound?”

“We are from the court of Queen Celandine,” I said. “We have come searching for her harper. Did he pass this way?”

“Ah,” she said, her face brightening. “A tall man with golden hair and a voice to match his harping?”

“Sounds like,” Christabel said.

“He played for me, such lovely songs. He said he had to find a certain harp. He ate nothing and was gone before sunrise.” She gave the pot another stir. “Is he lost?”

“Black Tremptor has him.”

“Oh, terrible.” She shook her head. “He is fortunate to have such good friends to rescue him.”

“He is the queen’s good friend,” I said, barely listening to myself as the smell from the pot curled into me, “and we are hers. What is that you are cooking? ”

“Just a little something for my bird.”

“You found a bird?” Fleur said faintly, trying to be sociable. “We saw none . . . Whatever do you feed it? It smells good enough to eat.”

“Oh, no, you must not touch it; it is only bird-fare. I have delicacies for you.”

“What kind of a bird is it?” Justin asked. The woman tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, laid it across the rim.

“Oh, just a little thing. A little, hungry thing I found. You’re right: the forest has few birds. That’s why I sew and paint my birds and animals, to give me company. There’s wine,” she added. “I’ll get it for you.”

She left. Danica paced; Christabel sat close to the fire, indifferent to the smell of the pot bubbling under her stuffy nose. Justin had picked up a small wooden boar and was examining it idly. Fleur drifted, pale as a cloud; I kept an eye on her to see she did not topple into the fire. The old woman had trouble, it seemed, finding cups.

“How strange,” Justin breathed. “This looks so real, every tiny bristle.”

Fleur had wandered to the hearth to stare down into the pot. I heard it bubble fatly. She gave one pleading glance toward the kitchen, but still there was nothing to eat but promises. She had the spoon in her hand suddenly, I thought to stir.

“It must be a very strange bird to eat mushrooms,” she commented. “And what looks like—” Justin put the boar down so sharply I jumped, but Fleur lifted the spoon to her lips. “Lamb,” she said happily. And then she vanished: there was only a frantic lark fluttering among the rafters, sending plea after lovely plea for freedom.

The woman reappeared. “My bird,” she cried. “My pretty.” I was on my feet with my sword drawn before I could even close my mouth. I swung, but the old witch didn’t linger to do battle. A hawk caught the lark in its claws; the door swung open, and both birds disappeared into the night.

We ran into the dark, stunned and horrified. The door slammed shut behind us like a mouth. The fire dwindled into two red flames that stared like eyes out of the darkened windows. They gave no light; we could see nothing.

“That bloody web-haired old spider, ” Danica said furiously. “That horrible, putrid witch.” I heard a thump as she hit a tree; she cursed painfully. Someone hammered with solid, methodical blows at the door and windows; 1 guessed Christabel was laying siege. But nothing gave. She groaned with frustration. I felt a touch and raised my sword; Justin said sharply, “It’s me.” She put her hand on my shoulder; I felt myself tremble.

“Now what?” I said tersely. I could barely speak; I only wanted action, but we were blind and bumbling in the dark.

“I think she doesn’t kill them,” Justin said. “She changes them. Listen to me. She’ll bring Fleur back into her house eventually. We’ll find someone to tell us how to free her from the spell. Someone in this wilderness of magic should know. And not everyone is cruel.”

“We’ll stay here until the witch returns.”

“I doubt she’ll return until we’re gone. And even if we find some way to kill her, we may be left with an embroidered Fleur.”

“We’ll stay.”

“Anne,” she said, and I slumped to the ground, wanting to curse, to weep, wanting at the very least to tear the clinging cobweb dark away from my eyes.

“Poor Fleur,” I whispered. “She was only hungry... Harper or no, we rescue her when we learn how. She comes first.”

“Yes, ” she agreed, and added thoughtfully, “The harper eluded the witch, it seems, though not the dragon.”

“How could he have known?” I asked bitterly. “By what magic?”

“Maybe he had met the witch first in a song.”

Morning found us littered across tree roots like the remains of some lost battle. At least we could see again. The house had flown itself away; only a couple of fiery feathers remained. We rose wordlessly, feeling the empty place where Fleur had been, listening for her morning chatter. We fed the horses, ate stone-hard bread with honey, and had a swallow of brandy apiece. Then we left Fleur behind and rode.

The great forest finally thinned, turned to golden oak, which parted now and then around broad meadows where we saw the sky again, and the high dark peak. We passed through a village, a mushroom patch of a place, neither friendly nor surly, nor overly curious. We found an inn, and some supplies, and, beyond the village, a road to the dragon’s mountain that had been cleared, we were told, before the mountain had become the dragon’s lair. Yes, we were also told, a harper had passed through . . . He seemed to have left little impression on the villagers, but they were a hardheaded lot, living under the dragon’s shadow. He, too, had asked directions, as well as questions about Black Tremptor, and certain tales of gold and magic harps and other bits of country lore. But no one else had taken that road for decades, leading, as it did, into the dragon’s mouth.

We took it. The mountain grew clearer, looming high above the trees. We watched for dragon wings, dragon fire, but if Black Tremptor flew, it was not by day. The rain had cleared; a scent like dying roses and aged sunlit wood seemed to blow across our path. We camped on one of the broad grass clearings where we watched the full moon rise, turn the meadow milky, and etch the dragon’s lair against the stars.

But for Fleur, the night seemed magical. We talked of her and then of home; we talked of her and then of court gossip; we talked of her and of the harper, and what might have lured him away from Celandine into a dragon’s claw. And as we spoke of him, it seemed his music fell around us from the stars and that the moonlight in the oak wood had turned to gold.

“Sh!” Christabel said sharply, and, drowsy, we quieted to listen. Danica yawned.

“It’s just harping.” She had an indifferent ear; Fleur was more persuasive about the harper s harping than his harping would have been. “Just a harping from the woods.”

“Someone’s singing,” Christabel said. I raised my brows, feeling that in the untroubled, sweetly scented night, anything might happen.

“Is it our missing Kestral?”

“Singing in a tree?” Danica guessed. Christabel sat straight.

“Be quiet,” she said sharply. Justin, lying on her stomach, tossing twigs into the fire, glanced at her surprisedly. Danica and I only laughed at Christabel in a temper.

“You have no hearts,” she said, blowing her nose fiercely. “It’s so beautiful, and all you can do is gabble.”

“All right,” Justin said soothingly. “We’ll listen.” But, moonstruck, Danica and I could not keep still. We told raucous tales of old loves, while Christabel strained to hear, and Justin watched her curiously. She seemed oddly moved, did Christabel; feverish, I thought, from all the rain.

A man rode out of the trees into the moonlight at the edge of the meadow. He had milky hair, broad shoulders; a gold mantle fanned across his horse s back. The crown above his shadowed face was odd: a circle of uneven gold spikes, like antlers. He was unarmed; he played the harp.

“Not our harper,” Danica commented. “Unless the dragon turned his hair white.”

“He’s a king,” I said. “Not ours.” For a moment, just a moment, I heard his playing, and knew it could have parted water, made birds speak. I caught my breath; tears swelled behind my eyes. Then Danica said something and I laughed.

Christabel stood up. Her face was unfamiliar in the moonlight. She took off her boots, unbraided her hair, let it fall loosely down her back; all this while we only watched and laughed and glanced now and then, indifferently, at the waiting woodland harper.

“You’re hopeless boors,” Christabel said, sniffing. “I’m going to speak to him, ask him to come and sit with us.”

“Go on then,” Danica said, chewing a grass blade. “Maybe we can take him home to Celandine instead.” I rolled over in helpless laughter. When I wiped my eyes, I saw Christabel walking barefoot across the meadow to the harper.

Justin stood up. A little, nagging wind blew through my thoughts. I stood beside her, still laughing a little, yet poised to hold her if she stepped out of the circle of our firelight. She watched Christabel. Danica watched the fire dreamily, smiling. Christabel stood before the harper. He took his hand from his strings and held it out to her.

In the sudden silence, Justin shouted, “Christabel!”

All the golden light in the world frayed away. A dragon’s wing of cloud brushed the moon; night washed toward Christabel, as she took his hand and mounted; I saw all her lovely, red-gold hair flowing freely in the last of the light. And then freckled, stolid, courageous, snuffling Christabel caught the harper-king’s shoulders and they rode down the fading path of light into a world beyond the night.

We searched for her until dawn.

At sunrise, we stared at one another, haggard, mute. The great oak had swallowed Christabel; she had disappeared into a harper’s song.

“We could go to the village for help,” Danica said wearily.

“Their eyes are no better than ours,” I said.

“The queen’s harper passed through here unharmed,” Justin mused. “Perhaps he knows something about the country of the woodland king.”

“I hope he is worth all this,” Danica muttered savagely.

“No man is, ” Justin said simply. “But all this will be worth nothing if Black Tremptor kills him before we find him. He may be able to lead us safely out of the northlands, if nothing else.”

“I will not leave Fleur and Christabel behind,” I said sharply. “I will not. You may take the harper back to Celandine. I stay here until I find them.”

Justin looked at me; her eyes were reddened with sleeplessness, but they saw as clearly as ever into the mess we had made. “We will not leave you, Anne,” she said. “If he cannot help us, he must find his own way back. But if he can help us, we must abandon Christabel now to rescue him.”

“Then let’s do it, ” I said shortly and turned my face away from the oak. A little wind shivered like laughter through their golden leaves.

We rode long and hard. The road plunged back into forest, up low foothills, brought us to the flank of the great dark mountain. We pulled up in its shadow. The dragon’s eyrie shifted under the eye; stone pillars opened into passages, their granite walls split and hollowed like honeycombs, like some palace of winds, open at every angle yet with every passage leading into shadow, into the hidden dragon’s heart.

“In there?” Danica asked. There was no fear in her voice, just her usual impatience to get things done. “Do we knock, or just walk in?” A wind roared through the stones then, bending trees as it blasted at us. We turned our mounts, flattened ourselves against them, while the wild wind rode over us. Recovering, Danica asked more quietly, “Do we go in together?”

“Yes, ” I said and then, “No. I’ll go first.”

“Don’t be daft, Anne,” Danica said crossly. “If we all go together, at least we’ll know where we all are. ”

“And fools we will look, too,” I said grimly, “caught along with the harper, waiting for Celandine’s knights to rescue us as well.” I turned to Justin. “Is there some secret, some riddle for surviving dragons?”

She shook her head helplessly. “It depends on the dragon. I know nothing about Black Tremptor, except that he most likely has not kept the harper for his harping.”

“Two will go, ” I said. “And one wait.”

They did not argue; there seemed no foolproof way, except for none of us to go. We tossed coins: two peacocks and one Celandine. Justin, who got the queen, did not look happy, but the coins were adamant. Danica and I left her standing with our horses, shielded within green boughs, watching us. We climbed the bald slope quietly, trying not to scatter stones. We had to watch our feet, pick a careful path to keep from sliding. Danica, staring groundward, stopped suddenly ahead of me to pick up something.

“Look,” she breathed. I did, expecting a broken harp string, or an ivory button with Celandine’s profile on it.

It was an emerald as big as my thumbnail, shaped and faceted. I stared at it a moment. Then I said, “Dragon-treasure. We came to find a harper.”

“But Anne —there’s another — ” She scrabbled across loose stone to retrieve it. “Topaz. And over there a sapphire —”

“Danica,” I pleaded. “You can carry home the entire mountain after you’ve dispatched the dragon.”

“I’m coming,” she said breathlessly, but she had scuttled crabwise across the slope toward yet another gleam. “Just one more. They’re so beautiful, and just lying here free as rain for anyone to take. ”

“Danica! They’ll be as free when we climb back down. ”

“I’m coming. ”

I turned, in resignation to her sudden magpie urge. “I’m going up.”

“Just a moment, don’t go alone. Oh, Anne, look there, it’s a diamond. I’ve never seen such fire.”

I held my breath, gave her that one moment. It had been such a long, hard journey I found it impossible to deny her an unexpected pleasure. She knelt, groping along the side of a boulder for a shining as pure as water in the sunlight. “I’m coming,” she assured me, her back to me. “I’m coming.”

And then the boulder lifted itself up off the ground. Something forked and nubbled like a tree root, whispering harshly to itself, caught her by her hand and by her honey hair and pulled her down into its hole. The boulder dropped ponderously, earth shifted close around its sides as if it had never moved.

I stared, stunned. I don’t remember crossing the slope, only beating on the boulder with my hands and then my sword hilt, crying furiously at it, until all the broken shards underfoot undulated and swept me in a dry, rattling, bruising wave back down the slope into the trees.

Justin ran to help me. I was torn, bleeding, cursing, crying;

I took a while to become coherent. “Of all the stupid, feeble tricks to fall for! A trail of jewels! They’re probably not even real, and Danica got herself trapped under a mountain for a pocketful of coal or dragon fewmets — ”

“She won’t be trapped quietly,” Justin said. Her face was waxen. “What took her?”

“A little crooked something — an imp, a mountain troll — Justin, she’s down there without us in a darkness full of whispering things — I can’t believe we were so stupid!”

“Anne, calm down, we’ll find her.”

“I can’t calm down!” I seized her shoulders, shook her. “Don’t you disappear and leave me searching for you, too—”

“I won’t, I promise. Anne, listen.” She smoothed my hair with both her hands back from my face. “Listen to me We’ll find her. We’ll find Christabel and Fleur, we will not leave this land until—”

“How?” I shouted. “How? Justin, she’s under solid rock!”

“There are ways. There are always ways. This land riddles constantly, but all the riddles have answers. Fleur will turn from a bird into a woman, we will find a path for Christabel out of the wood-king’s country, we will rescue Danica from the mountain imps. There are ways to do these things, we only have to find them.”

“How?” I cried again, for it seemed the farther we traveled in that land, the more trouble we got into. “Every time we turn around one of us disappears! You’ll go next — ”

“I will not, I promise — ”

“Or I will.”

“I know a few riddles,” someone said. “Perhaps I can help.”

We broke apart, as startled as if a tree had spoken: perhaps one had, in this exasperating land. But it was a woman. She wore a black cloak with silver edging; her ivory hair and iris eyes and her grave, calm face within the hood were very beautiful. She carried an odd staff of gnarled black wood inset with a jewel the same pale violet as her eyes. She spoke gently, unsurprised by us; perhaps nothing in this place surprised her anymore. She added, at our silence, “My name is Yrecros. You are in great danger from the dragon; you must know that.”

“We have come to rescue a harper, ” I said bitterly. “We were five, when we crossed into this land.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know this dragon?”

She did not answer immediately; beside me, Justin was oddly still. The staff shifted; the jewel glanced here and there, like an eye. The woman whose name was Yrecros said finally, “You may ask me anything.”

“I just did,” I said bewilderedly. Justin’s hand closed on my arm; I looked at her. Her face was very pale; her eyes held a strange, intense light I recognized; she had scented something intangible and was in pursuit. At such times she was impossible.

“Yrecros,” she said softly. “My name is Nitsuj.”

The woman smiled.

“What are you doing?” I said between my teeth.

“It’s a game,” Justin breathed. “Question for answer. She’ll tell us all we need to know.”

“Why must it be a game?” I protested. She and the woman were gazing at one another, improbable fighters about to engage in a delicate battle of wits. They seemed absorbed in one another, curious, stone-deaf. I raised my voice. “Justin!”

“You’ll want the harper, I suppose, ” the woman said. I worked out her name then and closed my eyes.

Justin nodded. “It’s what we came for. And if I lose?”

“I want you,” the woman said simply, “for my apprentice.” She smiled again, without malice or menace. “For seven years.‘”

My breath caught. “No.” I could barely speak. I seized Justin’s arm, shook her. “Justin. Justin, please!” For just a moment 1 had, if not her eyes, her attention.

“It’s all right, Anne,” she said softly. “We’ll get the harper without a battle, and rescue Fleur and Christabel and Danica as well.”

“Justin!” I shouted. Above us all the pillars and cornices of stone echoed her name; great, barbed-winged birds wheeled out of the trees. But unlike bird and stone, Justin did not hear.

“You are a guest in this land,” the woman said graciously. “You may ask first.”

“Where is the road to the country of the woodland king?”

“The white stag in the oak forest follows the road to the land of the harper king,” Yrecros answered, “if you follow from morning to night, without weapons and without rest. What is the Song of Ducirc, and on what instrument was it first played?”

“The Song of Ducirc was the last song of a murdered poet to his love, and it was played to his lady in her high tower on an instrument of feathers, as all the birds in the forest who heard it sang her his lament,” Justin said promptly. I breathed. a little then; she had been telling us such things all her life. “What traps the witch in the border woods in her true shape, and how can her power be taken?”

“The border witch may be trapped by a cage of iron; her staff of power is the spoon with which she stirs her magic. What begins with fire and ends with fire and is black and white between?”

“Night,” Justin said. Even I knew that one. The woman’s face held, for a moment, the waning moon’s smile. “Where is the path to the roots of this mountain, and what do those who dwell there fear most?”

“The path is fire, which will open their stones, and what they fear most is light. What is always coming yet never here, has a name but does not exist, is longer than day but shorter than day?”

Justin paused a blink. “Tomorrow,” she said, and added, “in autumn.” The woman smiled her lovely smile. I loosed breath noiselessly. “What will protect us from the dragon? ”

The woman studied Justin, as if she were answering some private riddle of her own. “Courtesy,” she said simply. “Where is Black Tremptor’s true name hidden?”

Justin was silent; I felt her thoughts flutter like a bird seeing a perch. The silence lengthened; an icy finger slid along my bones.

“I do not know,” Justin said at last, and the woman answered, “The dragon’s name is hidden within a riddle.”

Justin read my thoughts; her hand clamped on my wrist. “Don’t fight,” she breathed.

“That’s not — ”

“The answer’s fair.”

The woman’s brows knit thoughtfully. “Is there anything else you need to know? ” She put her staff lightly on Justin’s shoulder, turned the jewel toward her pale face. The jewel burned a sudden flare of amethyst, as if in recognition. “My name is Sorcery and that is the path I follow. You will come with me for seven years. After that, you may choose to stay.”

“Tell me,” I pleaded desperately, “how to rescue her. You have told me everything else. ”

The woman shook her head, smiling her brief moon-smile. Justin looked at me finally; I saw the answer in her eyes.

I stood mute, watching her walk away from me, tears pushing into my eyes, unable to plead or curse because there had been a game within a game, and only I had lost. Justin glanced back at me once, but she did not really see me, she only saw the path she had walked toward all her life.

I turned finally to face the dragon.

I climbed the slope again alone. No jewels caught my eye, no voice whispered my name. Not even the dragon greeted me. As I wandered through columns and caverns and hallways of stone, I heard only the wind moaning through the great bones of the mountain. I went deeper into stone. The passageways glowed butterfly colors with secretions from the dragon’s body. Here and there I saw a scale flaked off by stone; some flickered blue-green black, others the colors of fire. Once I saw a chip of claw, hard as horn, longer than my hand. Sometimes I smelled sulfur, sometimes smoke, mostly wind smelling of the stone it scoured endlessly.

I heard harping.

I found the harper finally, sitting ankle deep in jewels and gold, in a shadowy cavern, plucking wearily at his harp with one hand. His other hand was cuffed and chained with gold to a golden rivet in the cavern wall. He stared, speechless, when he saw me. He was, as rumored, tall and golden-haired, also unwashed, unkempt, and sour from captivity. Even so, it was plain to see why Celandine wanted him back.

“Who are you?” he breathed, as I trampled treasure to get to him.

“I am Celandine’s cousin Anne. She sent her court to rescue you.”

“It took you long enough,” he grumbled, and added, “You couldn’t have come this far alone. ”

“You did,” I said tersely, examining the chain that held him. Even Fleur would have had it out of the wall in a minute. “It’s gold, malleable. Why didn’t you — ”

“I tried,” he said, and showed me his torn hands. “It’s dragon magic.” He jerked the chain fretfully from my hold. “Don’t bother trying. The key’s over near that wall.” He looked behind me, bewilderedly, for my imaginary companions. “Are you alone? She didn’t send her knights to fight this monster?”

“She didn’t trust them to remember who they were supposed to kill,” I said succinctly. He was silent while I crossed the room to rummage among pins and cups and necklaces for the key. I added, “I didn’t ride from Carnelaine alone. I lost four companions in this land as we tracked you.”

“Lost?” For a moment, his voice held something besides his own misery. “Dead?”

“I think not. ”

“How did you lose them?”

“One was lost to the witch in the wood. ”

“Was she a witch?” he said, astonished. “I played for her, but she never offered me anything to eat, hungry as I was. I could smell food, but she only said that it was burned and unfit for company.”

“And one,” I said, sifting through coins and wondering at the witch’s taste, “to the harper-king in the wood.”

“You saw him? ” he breathed. “I played all night, hoping to hear his fabled harping, but he never answered with a note.”

“Maybe you never stopped to listen,” I said, in growing despair over the blind way he blundered through the land. “And one to the imps under the mountain.”

“What imps?”

“And last,” I said tightly, “in a riddle-game to the sorceress with the jeweled staff. You were to be the prize.”

He shifted, chain and coins rattling. “She only told me where to find what I was searching for, she didn’t warn me of the dangers. She could have helped me! She never said she was a sorceress.”

“Did she tell you her name?”

“I don’t remember—what difference does it make? Hurry with the key before the dragon smells you here. It would have been so much easier for me if your companion had not lost the riddle-game.”

I paused in my searching to gaze at him. “Yes,” I said finally, “and it would have been easier than that for all of us if you had never come here. Why did you?”

He pointed. “I came for that.”

“That” was a harp of bone. Its strings glistened with the same elusive, shimmering colors that stained the passageways. A golden key lay next to it. I am as musical as the next, no more, but when I saw those strange, glowing strings I was filled with wonder at what music they might make and I paused, before I touched the key, to pluck a note.

It seemed the mountain hummed.

“No!” the harper cried, heaving to his feet in a tide of gold. Wind sucked out of the cave, as at the draw of some gigantic wing. “You stupid, blundering — How do you think I got caught? Throw me the key! Quickly!”

I weighed the key in my hand, prickling at his rudeness.

But he was, after all, what I had promised Celandine to find, and I imagined that washed and fed and in the queen’s hands, he would assert his charms again. I tossed the key; it fell a little short of his outstretched hand.

“Fool!” he snapped. “You are as clumsy as the queen.”

Stone-still, I stared at him, as he strained, groping for the key. I turned abruptly to the harp and ran my hand down all the strings.

What traveled down the passages to find us shed smoke and fire and broken stone behind it. The harper groaned and hid behind his arms. Smoke cleared; great eyes like moons of fire gazed at us near the high ceiling. A single claw as long as my shin dropped within an inch of my foot. Courtesy, I thought frantically. Courtesy, she said. It was like offering idle chatter to the sun.

Before I could speak, the harper cried, “She played it! She came in here searching for it, too, though I tried to stop her — ”

Heat whuffed at me; I felt the gold I wore burn my neck. I said, feeling scorched within as well, “I ask your pardon if I have offended you. I came, at my queen’s request, to rescue her harper. It seems you do not care for harping. If it pleases you, I will take what must be an annoyance out of your house.” I paused. The great eyes sank a little toward me. I added, for such things seemed important in this land, “My name is Anne.”

“Anne,” the smoke whispered. I heard the harper jerk in his chain. The claw retreated slightly; the immense flat lizard’s head lowered, its fiery scales charred dark with smoke, tiny sparks of fire winking between its teeth. “What is his name?”

“Kestral,” the harper said quickly. “Kestral Hunt.”

“You are right,” the hot breath sighed. “He is an annoyance. Are you sure you want him back?”

“No,” I said, my eyes blurring in wonder and relief that I had finally found, in this dangerous land, something I did not need to fear. “He is extremely rude, ungrateful, and insensitive. I imagine that my queen loves him for his hair or for his harper’s hands; she must not listen to him speak. So I had better take him. I am sorry that he snuck into your house and tried to steal from you.”

“It is a harp made of dragon bone and sinew,” the dragon said. “It is why I dislike harpers, who make such things and then sing songs of their great cleverness. As this one would have.” Its jaws yawned; a tongue of fire shot out, melted gold beside the harper’s hand. He scuttled against the wall.

“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily. A dark curved dragon’s smile hung in the fading smoke; it snorted heat.

“Perhaps I will keep you and make a harp of your bones.”

“It would be miserably out of tune,” I commented. “Is there something I can do for you in exchange for the harper’s freedom?”

An eye dropped close, moon-round, shadows of color constantly disappearing through it. “Tell me my name,” the dragon whispered. Slowly I realized it was not a challenge but a plea. “A woman took my name from me long ago, in a riddle-game. I have been trying to remember it for years.”

“Yrecros?” I breathed. So did the dragon, nearly singeing my hair.

“You know her.”

“She took something from me: my dearest friend. Of you she said: the dragon’s name is hidden within a riddle.”

“Where is she? ”

“Walking paths of sorcery in this land.”

Claws flexed across the stones, smooth and beetle-black. “I used to know a little sorcery. Enough to walk as man. Will you help me find my name?”

“Will you help me find my friends?” I pleaded in return. “I lost four, searching for this unbearable harper. One or two may not want my help, but I will never know until I see them.”

“Let me think ...” the dragon said. Smoke billowed around me suddenly, acrid, ash-white. I swallowed smoke, coughed it out. When my stinging eyes could see again, a gold-haired harper stood in front of me. He had the dragon’s eyes.

I drew in smoke again, astonished. Through my noise, I could hear Kestral behind me, tugging at his chain and shouting.

“What of me? ” he cried furiously. “You were sent to rescue me! What will you tell Celandine? That you found her harper and brought the dragon home instead?” His own face gazed back at him, drained the voice out of him a moment. He tugged at the chain frantically, desperately. “You cannot harp! She’d know you false by that, and by your ancient eyes.”

“Perhaps,” I said, charmed by his suggestion, “she will not care.”

“Her knights will find me. You said they seek to kill me! You will murder me.”

“Those that want you dead will likely follow me,” I said wearily, “for the gold-haired harper who rides with me. It is for the dragon to free you, not me. If he chooses to, you will have to find your own way back to Celandine, or else promise not to speak except to sing.”

I turned away from him. The dragon-harper picked up his harp of bone. He said in his husky, smoky voice, “I keep my bargains. The key to your freedom lies in a song.”

We left the harper chained to his harping, listening puzzledly with his deaf ear and untuned brain, (or the one song, of all he had ever played and never heard, that would bring him back to Celandine. Outside, in the light, I led dragon-fire to the stone that had swallowed Danica, and began my backwards journey toward Yrecros.

 

 

 

 

Lady of the Skulls

 

 

The Lady saw them ride across the plain: a company of six. Putting down her watering can, which was the bronze helm of some unfortunate knight, she leaned over the parapet, chin on her hand. They were all armed, their warhorses caparisoned; they glittered under the noon sun with silver-edged shields, jeweled bridles and sword hilts. What, she wondered as always in simple astonishment, did they imagine they had come to fight? She picked up the helm, poured water into a skull containing a miniature rosebush. The water came from within the tower, the only source on the entire barren, sun-cracked plain. The knights would ride around in the hot sun for hours, looking for entry. At sunset, she would greet them, carrying water.

She sighed noiselessly, troweling around the little rosebush with a dragon’s claw. If they were too blind to find the tower door, why did they think they could see clearly within it? They, she thought in sudden impatience. They, they, they . . . they fed the plain with their bleached bones, they never learned... .

A carrion bird circled above her, counting heads. She scowled at it; it cried back at her, mocking. You, its black eye said, never saw. But you bring the dead to me.

“They never listen to me,” she said, looking over the plain again, her eyes prickling dryly. In the distance, lightning cracked apart the sky; purple clouds rumbled. But there was no rain in them, never any rain; the sky was as tearless as she. She moved from skull to skull along the parapet wall, watering things she had grown stubbornly from seeds that blew from distant, placid gardens in peaceful kingdoms. Some were grasses, weeds, or wildflowers. She did not care; she watered anything that grew.

The men below began their circling. Their mounts kicked up dust, snorting; she heard cursing, bewildered questions, then silence as they paused to rest. Sometimes they called her, pleading. But she could do nothing for them. They churned around the tower, bright, powerful, richly armed. She read the devices on their shields: three of Grenehef, one of Stoney Head, one of Dulcis Isle, one of Carnelaine. After a time, one man dropped out of the circle, stood back. His shield was simple: a red rose on white, Carnelaine, she thought, looking down at him, then realized he was looking up at her.

He would see a puff of airy sleeve, a red geranium in an upside-down skull. Lady of the Skulls, they called her, clamoring to enter. Sometimes they were more courteous, sometimes less. She watered, waiting for this one to call her. He did not; he guided his horse into the tower’s shadow and dismounted. He took his helm off, sat down to wait, burrowing idly in the ground and flicking stones as he watched her sleeve sometimes, and sometimes the distant storm.

Drawn to his calm, the others joined him finally, flinging off pieces of armor. They cursed the hard ground and sat, their voices drifting up to her in the windless air as she continued her watering.

Like others before them, they spoke of what the most precious thing of the legendary treasure might be, besides elusive. They had made a pact, she gathered: If one obtained the treasure, he would divide it among those left living. She raised a brow. The one of Dulcis Isle, a dark-haired man wearing red jewels in his ears, said, “Anything of the dragon for me. They say it was a dragon’s hoard once. They say that dragon bones are wormholed with magic, and if you move one bone the rest will follow. The bones will bring the treasure with them.”

“I heard, ” said the man from Stoney Head, “there is a well and a fountain rising from it, and when the drops of the fountain touch ground they turn to diamonds.”

“Don’t talk of water, ” one of the three thick-necked, nut-haired men of Grenelief pleaded. “I drank all mine.”

“All we must do is find the door. There’s water within.”

“What are you going to do? ” the man of Carnelaine asked. “Hoist the water on your shoulder and carry it out?”

The straw-haired man from Stoney Head tugged at his long moustaches. He had a plain, blunt, energetic voice devoid of any humor. “I’ll carry it out in my mouth. When I come back alive for the rest of it, there’ll be plenty to carry it in. Skulls, if nothing else. I heard there’s a sorceress’s cauldron, looks like a rusty old pot—”

“May be that, ” another of Grenehef said.

“May be, but I’m going for the water. What else could be most precious in this heat-blasted place? ”

“That’s a point,” the man of Dulcis Isle said. Then: “But, no, it’s dragon-bone for me. ”

“More to the point,” the third of Grenelief said, aggrieved, “how do we get in the cursed place?”

“There’s a lady up there watering plants,” the man of Carnelaine said, and there were all their faces staring upward; she could have tossed jewels into their open mouths. “She knows we’re here.”

“It’s the Lady,” they murmured, hushed.

“Lady of the Skulls.”

“Does she have hair, I wonder.”

“She’s old as the tower. She must be a skull. ”

“She’s beautiful,” the man of Stoney Head said shortly. “They always are, the ones who lure, the ones who guard, the ones who give death.”

“Is it her tower?” the one of Carnelaine asked. “Or is she trapped?”

“What’s the difference? When the spell is gone, so will she be. She’s nothing real, just a piece of the tower’s magic.”

They shifted themselves as the tower’s shadow shifted. The Lady took a sip of water out of the helm, then dipped her hand in it and ran it over her face. She wanted to lean over the edge and shout at them all: Go home, you silly, brainless fools. If you know so much, what are you doing here sitting on bare ground in front of a tower without a door waiting for a woman to kill you? They moved to one side of the tower, she to the other, as the sun climbed down the sky. She watched the sun set. Still the men refused to leave, though they had not a stick of wood to burn against the dark. She sighed her noiseless sigh and went down to greet them.

The fountain sparkled in the midst of a treasure she had long ceased to notice. She stepped around gold armor, black, gold-rimmed dragon bones, the white bones of princes. She took the plain silver goblet beside the rim of the well, and dipped it into the water, feeling the cooling mist from the little fountain. The man of Dulcis Isle was right about the dragon bones. The doorway was the dragon’s open yawning maw, and it was invisible by day.

The last ray of sunlight touched the bone, limned a black, toothed opening that welcomed the men. Mute, they entered, and she spoke.

“You may drink the water, you may wander throughout the tower. If you make no choice, you may leave freely. Having left, you may never return. If you choose, you must make your choice by sunset tomorrow. If you choose the most precious thing in the tower, you may keep all that you see. If you choose wrongly, you will die before you leave the plain.”

Their mouths were open again, their eyes stunned at what hung like vines from the old dragon’s bones, what lay heaped upon the floor. Flicking, flicking, their eyes came across her finally, as she stood patiently holding the cup. Their eyes stopped at her: a tall, broad-shouldered, barefoot woman in a coarse white linen smock, her red hair bundled untidily on top of her head, her long skirt still splashed with the wine she had spilled in the tavern so long ago. In the torchlight it looked like blood.

They chose to sleep, as they always did, tired by the long journey, dazed by too much rich, vague color in the shadows. She sat on the steps and watched them for a little. One cried in his sleep. She went to the top of the tower after a while, where she could watch the stars. Under the moon, the flowers turned odd, secret colors, as if their true colors blossomed in another land’s daylight, and they had left their pale shadows behind by night. She fell asleep naming the moon’s colors.

In the morning, she went down to see who had had sense enough to leave.

They were all still there, searching, picking, discarding among the treasures on the floor, scattered along the spiraling stairs. Shafts of light from the narrow windows sparked fiery colors that constantly caught their eyes, made them drop what they had, reach out again. Seeing her, the one from Dulcis Isle said, trembling, his eyes stuffed with riches, “May we ask questions? What is this?”

“Don’t ask her, Marlebane, ” the one from Stoney Head said brusquely. “She’ll lie. They all do.”

She stared at him. “I will only lie to you,” she promised. She took the small treasure from the hand of the man from Dulcis Isle. “This is an acorn made of gold. If you swallow it, you will speak all the languages of humans and animals.”

“And this?” one of Grenehef said eagerly, pushing next to her, holding something of silver and smoke.

“That is a bracelet made of a dragon’s nostril bone. The jewel in it is its petrified eye. It watches for danger when you wear it. ”

The man of Carnelaine was playing a flute made from a wizard’s thighbone. His eyes, the odd gray-green of the dragon’s eye, looked dream-drugged with the music. The man of Stoney Head shook him roughly.

“Is that your choice, Ran?”

“No.” He lowered the flute, smiling. “No, Corbeil.”

“Then drop it before it seizes hold of you and you choose it. Have you seen yet what you might take?”

“No. Have you changed your mind?”

“No.” He looked at the fountain, but, prudent, did not speak.

“Bram, look at this,” said one brother of Grenelief to another. “Look!”

“I am looking, Yew.”

“Look at it! Look at it, Ustor! Have you ever seen such a thing? Feel it! And watch: It vanishes, in light.”

He held a sword; its hilt was solid emerald, its blade like water falling in clear light over stone. The Lady left them, went back up the stairs, her bare feet sending gold coins and jewels spinning down through the crosshatched shafts of light. She stared at the place on the horizon where the flat dusty gold of the plain met the parched dusty sky. Go, she thought dully. Leave all this and go back to the places where things grow. Go, she willed them, go, go, go, with the beat of her heart’s blood. But no one came out the door beneath her. Someone, instead, came up the stairs.

“I have a question,” said Ran of Carnelaine.

“Ask.”

“What is your name? ”

She had all but forgotten; it came to her again, after a beat of surprise. “Amaranth.” He was holding a black rose in one hand, a silver lily in the other. If he chose one, the thorns would kill him; the other, flashing its pure light, would sear through his eyes into his brain.

“Amaranth. Another flower.”

“So it is, ” she said indifferently. He laid the magic flowers on the parapet, picked a dying geranium leaf, smelled the miniature rose. “It has no smell,” she said. He picked another dead leaf. He seemed always on the verge of smiling. It made him look sometimes wise and sometimes foolish. He drank out of the bronze watering helm; it was the color of his hair.

“This water is too cool and sweet to come out of such a barren plain, ” he commented. He seated himself on the wall, watching her. “Corbeil says you are not real. You look real enough to me.” She was silent, picking dead clover out of the clover pot. “Tell me where you came from.”

She shrugged. “A tavern.”

“And how did you come here?”

She gazed at him. “How did you come here, Ran of Carnelaine?”

He did smile then, wryly. “Carnelaine is poor; I came to replenish its coffers.”

“There must be less chancy ways.”

“Maybe I wanted to see the most precious thing there is to be found. Will the plain bloom again, if it is found? Will you have a garden instead of skull-pots?”

“Maybe,” she said levelly. “Or maybe I will disappear. Die when the magic dies. If you choose wisely, you’ll have answers to your questions.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I will not choose. There are too many precious things.”

She glanced at him. He was trifling, wanting hints from her, answers couched in riddles. Shall I take rose or lily? Or wizard’s thighbone? Tell me. Sword or water or dragons eye? Some had questioned her so before.

She said simply, “I cannot tell you what to take. I do not know myself. As far as I have seen, everything kills. ” It was as close as she could come, as plain as she could make it: Leave.

But he said only, his smile gone, “Is that why you never left?” She stared at him again. “Walked out the door, crossed the plain on some dead king’s horse and left?”

She said, “I cannot.” She moved away from him, tending some wildflowers she called wind-bells, for she imagined their music as the night air tumbled down from the mountains to race across the plain. After a while, she heard his steps again, going down.

A voice summoned her: “Lady of the Skulls!” It was the man of Stoney Head. She went down, blinking in the thick, dusty light. He stood stiffly, his face hard. They all stood still, watching.

“I will leave now,” he said. “I may take anything?”

“Anything,” she said, making her heart stone against him, a ghost’s heart, so that she would not pity him. He went to the fountain, took a mouthful of water. He looked at her, and she moved to show him the hidden lines of the dragon’s mouth. He vanished through the stones.

They heard him scream a moment later. The three of Grenelief stared toward the sound. They each wore pieces of a suit of armor that made the wearer invisible: one lacked an arm, another a thigh, the other his hands. Subtly their expressions changed, from shock and terror into something more complex. Five, she saw them thinking. Only five ways to divide it now.

“Anyone else?” she asked coldly. The man of Dulcis Isle slumped down onto the stairs, swallowing. He stared at her, his face gold-green in the light. He swallowed again. Then he shouted at her.

She had heard every name they could think of to shout before she had ever come to the tower. She walked up the stairs past him; he did not have the courage to touch her. She went to stand among her plants. Corbeil of Stoney Head lay where he had fallen, a little brown patch of wet earth beside his open mouth. As she looked, the sun dried it, and the first of the carrion birds landed.

She threw bones at the bird, cursing, though it looked unlikely that anyone would be left to take his body back. She hit the bird a couple of times, then another came. Then someone took the bone out of her hand, drew her back from the wall.

“He’s dead,” Ran said simply. “It doesn’t matter to him whether you throw bones at the birds or at him.”

“I have to watch, ” she said shortly. She added, her eyes on the jagged line the parapet made against the sky, like blunt, worn dragon’s teeth, “You keep coming, and dying. Why do you all keep coming? Is treasure worth being breakfast for the carrion crows? ”

“Its worth many different things. To the brothers of Grenelief it means adventure, challenge, adulation if they succeed. To Corbeil it was something to be won, something he could have that no one else could get. He would have sat on top of the pile and let men look up to him, hating and envying.”

“He was a cold man. Cold men feed on a cold fire. Still,” she added, sighing, “I would have preferred to see him leave on his feet. What does the treasure mean to you? ”

“Money.” He smiled his vague smile. “It’s not in me to lose my life over money. I’d sooner walk empty-handed out the door. But there’s something else.”

“What?”

“The riddle itself. That draws us all, at heart. What is the most precious thing? To see it, to hold it, above all to recognize it and choose it —that’s what keeps us coming and traps you here.” She stared at him, saw, in his eyes, the wonder that he felt might be worth his life.

She turned away; her back to him, she watered bleeding heart and columbine, stonily ignoring what the crows were doing below. “If you find the thing itself, ” she asked dryly, “what will you have left to wonder about?”

“There’s always life.”

“Not if you are killed by wonder.”

He laughed softly, an unexpected sound, she thought, in that place. “Wouldn’t you ride across the plain if you heard tales of this tower, to try to find the most precious thing in it? ”

“Nothing’s precious to me,” she said, heaving a cauldron of dandelions into shadow. “Not down there, anyway. If I took one thing away with me, it would not be sword or gold or dragon bone. It would be whatever is alive. ”

He touched the tiny rose. “You mean, like this? Corbeil would never have died for this.”

“He died for a mouthful of water.”

“He thought it was a mouthful of jewels.” He sat beside the rose, his back to the air, watching her pull pots into shadow against the noon light. “Which makes him twice a fool, I suppose. Three times a fool: for being wrong, for being deluded, and for dying. What a terrible place this is. It strips you of all delusions, and then it strips your bones.”

“It is terrible,” she said somberly. “Yet those who leave without choosing never seem to get the story straight. They must always talk of the treasure they didn’t take, not of the bones they didn’t leave.”

“It’s true. Always, they take wonder with them out of this tower and they pass it on to every passing fool.” He was silent a little, still watching her. “Amaranth,” he said slowly. “That’s the flower in poetry that never dies. It’s apt.”

“Yes.”

“And there is another kind of Amaranth, that’s fiery and beautiful and it dies. ...” Her hands stilled, her eyes widened, but she did not speak. He leaned against the hot, crumbling stones, his dragon’s eyes following her like a sunflower following the sun. “What were you, ” he asked, “when you were the Amaranth that could die?”

“I was one of those faceless women who brought you wine in a tavern. Those you shout at, and jest about, and maybe give a coin to and maybe not, depending how we smile.”

He was silent, so silent she thought he had gone, but when she turned, he was still there; only his smile had gone. “Then I’ve seen you, ” he said softly, “many times, in many places. But never in a place like this.”

“The man from Stoney Head expected someone else, too.”

“He expected a dream.”

“He saw what he expected: Lady of the Skulls.” She pulled wild mint into a shady spot under some worn tapestry. “And so he found her. That’s all I am now. You were better off when all I served was wine.”

“You didn’t build this tower.”

“How do you know? Maybe I got tired of the laughter and the coins and I made a place for myself where I could offer coins and give nothing.”

“Who built this tower?”

She was silent, crumbling a mint leaf between her fingers. “I did,” she said at last. “The Amaranth who never dies.”

“Did you?” He was oddly pale; his eyes glittered in the light as it at the shadow of danger. “You grow roses out of thin air in this blistered plain; you try to beat back death for us with our own bones. You curse our stupidity and our fate, not us. Who built this tower for you?” She turned her face away, mute. He said softly, “The other Amaranth, the one that dies, is also called Love-lies-bleeding.”

“It was the last man,” she said abruptly, her voice husky, shaken with sudden pain, “who offered me a coin for love. I was so tired of being touched and then forgotten, of hearing my name spoken and then not, as if I were only real when I was looked at and just something to forget after that, like you never remember the flowers you toss away. So I said to him: No, and no, and no. And then I saw his eyes. They were amber with thorns of dark in them: sorcerer’s eyes. He said, ‘Tell me your name.’ And I said, ‘Amaranth,’ and he laughed and laughed and I could only stand there, with the wine I had brought him overturned on my tray, spilling down my skirt. He said, ‘Then you shall make a tower of your name, for the tower is already built in your heart. ”

“Love-lies-bleeding,” he whispered.

“He recognized that Amaranth.”

“Of course he did. It was what died in his own heart.”

She turned then, wordless, to look at him. He was smiling again, though his face was still blanched under the hard, pounding light, and the sweat shone in his hair. She said, “How do you know him?”

“Because I have seen this tower before and I have seen in it the woman we all expected, the only woman some men ever know . . . And every time we come expecting her, the woman who lures us with what’s most precious to us and kills us with it, we build the tower around her again and again and again. ...”

She gazed at him. A tear slid down her cheek and then another. “I thought it was my tower,” she whispered. “The Amaranth that never dies but only lives forever to watch men die.”

“It’s all of us,” he sighed. In the distance, thunder rumbled. “We all build towers, then dare each other to enter. ...” He picked up the little rose in its skull-pot and stood abruptly; she followed him to the stairs.

“Where are you going with my rose?”

“Out.”