5

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

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

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

“Deth taught it to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Did he feel Morgon die?”

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

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

“Curious. Like Morgon.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“What are you called?”

“Just the second most beautiful woman.”

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

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

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

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

Three days later, at midmorning, they reached Kraal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was that Erlenstar?” Lyra whispered.

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

Tristan said warily, “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy nodded. “I’m Bere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smiled. “Yes.”

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

“He seemed so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A crow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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