4

	4

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I never needed to.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m thinking.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m thinking,” Raederle murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

“Ghisteslwchlohm.”

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

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

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

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

“I won’t.”

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

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

“What? What is that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s different—”

“How, in Yrth’s name?”

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

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

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

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

“He didn’t know about the war—”

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

“I suppose you told him that.”

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

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

“I’ll escort her personally on board.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Twelve what?”

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

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

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

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

5

	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 cloth shop 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 voices, “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 finders on her first flute, who had, with his flawless harping and vigilant mind, been the emissary 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 bunked, 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.”

6

	6

SHE FELT HER mind invaded, probed skillfully. This time, when the image in the stone reappeared, drawn out of memory, with the elusive, unfamiliar face, she did not struggle. She waited as the woman was waiting, for the movement, the turn of the head towards her that would name that face, put a name also to its irrevocable doom. But he seemed frozen in her last glimpse of him; the invisible rush towards him was caught, stilled in motion. The image faded finally; the woman drew out other memories, bright, random scenes from Raederle’s past. She saw herself as a child again, talking to the pigs while Cyone talked to the pig-woman; running through Madir’s woods effortlessly recognizing tree and the illusion of tree while Duac and Rood shouted in frustration behind her; arguing with Mathom over the endless riddles he had her learn while the summer sun lay on the stones at her feet like an immutable golden disc. The woman lingered long over her relationship with the pig-woman, the small magic things the pig-woman taught her; Mathom’s marriage plans for her seemed to intrigue the woman also, as well as his imperturbable stubbornness against the opposition he faced from the lords of An, from Duac, from Cyone, from Raederle herself when she understood at last what he had done. A dark, weary tower in Aum rose unbidden in her mind, an isolated shadow in an oak wood; the woman loosed her at that point, and Raederle felt that for the first time, she was surprised.

“You went there. To Peven’s tower.”

Raederle nodded. The fire had coiled down into the embers; she was trembling as much from weariness as from the chill. The woman seemed to hover, mothlike, on the edge of the faint light. She glanced at the fire, and it sprang alive, lean and white, etching the quiet, delicate face again out of the darkness.

“I had to. I had to know what price my father had set to my name before I was ever born. So I went there. I couldn’t go in, though. It was a long time ago; I was afraid…” She shook her head slightly, bringing her own thoughts back from the memory. She faced the woman again across the strange fire; the white flame twisted and burned in the depths of the still eyes. “Who are you? Something in me knows you.”

“Ylon.” The flame curved into something of a smile. “We are kinswomen, you and I.”

“I know.” Her voice sounded dry, hollow; her heart was beating its own hollow place within her. “You have had many kinsmen in the line of the Kings of An. But what are you?”

The woman sat beside the hearth; she lifted one hand to the flame in a gesture at once beautiful and childlike, then said, “I am a shape-changer. I killed Eriel Ymris and took her shape; I half-killed Astrin Ymris; I came very close to killing the Star-Bearer, although it was not his death I was interested in. Then. I am not interested in yours, if you are wondering.”

“I was,” Raederle whispered. “What—what is it you are interested in?”

“The answer to a riddle.”

“What riddle?”

“You’ll see it yourself, soon enough.” She was silent, her eyes on the fire, her hands still in her lap, until Raederle’s own eyes went to the flame, and she groped for the chair behind her. “It’s a riddle old as the crevices of old tree roots, as the silence molding the groins of inner Isig, as the stone faces of the dead children. It is essential, as wind or fire. Time means nothing to me, only the long moment between the asking of that riddle and its answer. You nearly gave it to me, on that ship, but you broke the binding between you and the stone in spite of me. That surprised me.”

“I didn’t—I couldn’t break it. I remember. Lyra hit me. You. That was you in my mind. And the riddle: You need to put a name to that face?”

“Yes.”

“And then—and then what? What will happen?”

“You are something of a riddler. Why should I play your game for you?”

“It’s not a game! You are playing with our lives!”

“Your lives mean nothing to me,” the woman said dispassionately. “The Star-Bearer and I are looking for answers to the same questions: he kills when he needs to; our methods are no different. I need to find the Star-Bearer. He has grown very powerful and very elusive. I thought of using you or Tristan as bait to trap him, but I will let him make his own path awhile. I think I can see where it’s leading him.”

“He wants to kill Deth,” Raederle said numbly.

“It won’t be the first great harpist he has killed. But he dare not turn his attention from Ghisteslwchlohm too long, either. Morgon or the wizards must kill the Founder. The wizards themselves, from the way they are secretly moving towards Lungold, have a revenge of their own to satisfy. They will no doubt destroy one another, which will not matter; they’ve scarcely been alive for seven centuries.” She caught the expression on Raederle’s face, the words she swallowed, and smiled. “Nun? I watched her at Lungold, the powerful, the beautiful. She would hardly call herding pigs and making grass nets living.”

“What would you call what you’re doing?”

“Waiting.” She was silent a moment, her unperturbed eyes on Raederle’s face. “Are you curious about yourself? Of the extent of your own powers? They are considerable.”

“No.”

“I have been honest with you.”

Raederle’s hands loosened on the arms of her chair. Her head bowed; she felt again, at the woman’s words, the odd sense of kinship, if not trust, an inescapable understanding. She said softly, the despair settling through her again, “Ylon’s blood has been in my family for generations; no one, however troubled by it, ever realized that he was anything more than the son of a sea legend, just another inexplicable shape of the magic of An. Now I know what his father was. One of you. That gives me some kinship with you. But nothing else, nothing of your compassionlessness, your destructiveness—”

“Only our power.” She shifted forward slightly. “Ylon’s father and I tried to do the same thing: to disturb the land-rule of An and Ymris by giving their kings heirs of mixed blood and twisted instinct. It was for a purpose, and it failed. The land saw to its own. Only Ylon bore the torment of land-rule; his power dissipated in his descendants, grew unused, dormant. Except in you. One day, perhaps, you could put a name to that power, and that name would surprise you. But you will not live that long. You only know of Ylon’s sadness. But have you ever wondered, if we are so terrible, what made him break out of his prison to return to us?”

“No,” Raederle whispered.

“Not compassion, but passion…” Something in her voice opened then, like a flick of light in the deep of Isig opening a vein of unexpected richness to view, and she stopped. She reached down, touched the white fire with one hand, drew it softly into a glistening spider’s web, a polished bone, a scattering of stars, a moon-white chambered shell, shape weaving into shape, falling from her hand, a handful of blazing flowers, a net knotted and glinting as with seawater, a harp with thin, glistening strings. Raederle, watching, felt a hunger stir in her, a longing to possess the knowledge of the fire, the fire itself. The woman’s face had grown oblivious of her, intent on her work; it seemed touched with wonder itself at each fiery, beautiful shape. She let the fire fall at last like drops of water or tears back into the bed. “I take my power, as you take yours, from the heart of things, in a recognition of each thing. From the inward curve of a grass blade, from the pearl troubling as a secret deed in the oyster shell, from the scent of trees. Is that so unfamiliar to you?”

“No.” Her voice seemed to come from a distance, somewhere beyond the small room, the shadowed stones.

The woman continued softly, “You can know it; the essence of fire. You have the power. To recognize it, to hold it, shape it, even to become fire, to melt into its great beauty, bound to no man’s laws. You are skilled with illusion; you have played with a dream of the sun’s fire. Now work with fire itself. See it. Understand it. Not with your eyes or your mind, but with the power in you to know and accept, without fear, without question, the thing as itself. Lift your hand. Hold it out. Touch the fire.”

Raederle’s hand moved slowly. For a moment the shifting, bone-white, lawless thing before her that she had known all her life yet never known, seemed, as it wove in and out of the darkness, a child’s riddle. She reached out to it tentatively, curiously. Then she realized that, in reaching towards it, she was turning away from her own name—the familiar heritage in An that had defined her from her birth—towards a heritage that held no peace, a name that no one knew. Her hand, curved to the flame, closed abruptly. She felt the heat, the fire’s barrier, then, and drew back from it quickly. Her voice broke from her.

“No.”

“You can, when you choose. When you lose your fear of the source of your power.”

“And then what?” She brought her eyes away from her hand with an effort. “Why are you telling me that? Why do you care?”

Something moved minutely in the planes of the face, as though far away, in the darkness, the door of a thought had closed. “For no reason. I was curious. About you, about your father’s vow binding you to the Star-Bearer. Was that foreknowledge?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Star-Bearer, I expected, but not you. Will you tell him, or will you let him guess, if you ever see him again, that you are kin to those trying to destroy him? If you ever bear him children, will you tell him whose blood they carry?”

Raederle swallowed. Her throat felt dry, her skin stretched taut and dry as parchment across her face. She had to swallow again before her voice would come. “He is a riddle-master. He won’t need to be told.” She found herself on her feet then, with the hollow in her growing deep, unbearable. She turned blindly away from the woman. “So he’ll win me with one riddle and lose me with another,” she added, hardly realizing what she was saying. “Is that any of your business?”

“Why else am I here? You are afraid to touch Ylon’s power; then remember his longing.”

The hopeless sorrow struck like a tide, welled through Raederle until she saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing but the grief and longing that had filled her at the sight of King’s Mouth Plain. But she could not escape from it; her own sorrow was woven to it. She smelled then the bitter smell of the sea, dried kelp, iron rusted with the incessant spray that Ylon must have smelled; heard the hollow boom of the tide against the foundation stones of his tower, the suck of it bearing back from the green, pointed teeth of rocks below him. She heard the lament of sea birds wheeling aimlessly to the wind. Then she heard out of a world beyond eyesight, a world beyond hope, a harping tuned to her grief, playing back, in sympathy, her own lament. It was a fragile harping, almost lost in the brush of rain over the sea, on the flow and ebb of the tide. She found herself straining to hear it, moving towards it, straining, until her hands touched cold glass, as Ylon’s hands would have touched the iron bars over his window. She blinked away the harping, the sea; it receded slowly. The woman’s voices receded with it.

“We are all tuned to that harping. Morgon killed the harpist, Ylon’s father. So where, in a world of such unexpected shape, will you put your certainty?”

The silence at her leaving was like the full, charged silence before a storm. Raederle, still standing at the window, took one step towards the doorway. But Lyra could give her no help, perhaps not even understanding. She heard a sound break out of her, shiver across the silence, and she held it back with her hands. A face slipped into her thoughts: a stranger’s face now, worn, bitter, troubled, itself. Morgon could not help her, either, but he had weathered truth, and he could face, with her, one more thing. Her hands had begun to move before she realized it, emptying the clothes from her pack, scattering the fruit, nuts and sweetmeats on the wine table into it, pushing on top of them a soft skin lying across one of the chairs, buckling the pack again. She threw her cloak over her shoulders and went silently out of the room, leaving behind her like a message the white, twisting flame.

She could not find the stables in the dark, so she walked out of the King’s yard, down the mountain road in the thin moonlight to the Ose. She remembered from Bri’s maps, how the Ose ran southward a little, curving around the foothills behind Isig; she could follow it until it began to turn east. Morgon would be heading south, down from Osterland, carrying his tale to Heron, she guessed; or was he, like the wizards, on his way to Lungold? It did not matter; he would have to go south, and with his wizard’s mind alert to danger, perhaps he would sense her travelling alone and on foot in the backlands and investigate.

She found an old cart trail, rutted and overgrown, running along the side of the river, and she followed it. At first, fleeing the King’s house, her grieving had seemed to make her invisible, impervious to weariness, cold, fear. But the swift, insistent voice of the Ose brought her out of her thoughts, shivering into the dark. The moon patched the road with shadows, the voice of the river hid other voices, sounds she was not certain she heard, rustling that may or may not have come from behind her. The ancient pines with their calm, wrinkled faces, Danan’s face, gave her comfort. She heard the crash and snarl of animals once, near her, and stopped short, then realized that she did not really care what might happen to her, and probably, neither did they. The river dragged the sound of their quarrel away. She walked on until the cart road ended abruptly in a clump of brambles, and the moon began to set. She unpacked the skin, lay down and covered herself. She slept, exhausted and heard in her dreams a harping above the constant movement of the Ose.

She woke at sunrise; her eyes burned at the touch of the sun. She splashed water from the river on her face and drank it, then ate a little food from her pack. Her bones ached; her muscles protested at every movement until she began to walk again and forgot about them. Making her own path down the river did not seem difficult; she skirted bramble patches, climbed over rocks when the banks rose steeply above it, gathered her torn skirts to wade when the bank was impassible, washed her bruised, scratched hands in the river and felt the sun beat down on her face. She ignored the time passing, intent on nothing but her own movement until it came to her, slowly and forcibly, that she was being followed.

She stopped then. All the weariness and ache of her body caught up with her, draining through her until she swayed, balanced on a rock in the river. She bent, drank water, and looked behind her again. Nothing moved through the lazy hot noon hour, and yet she sensed movement, her name in someone’s mind. She drank again, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and began to work out of it a piece of silver thread.

She left several of them in her trail, intricately wound and tangled. She drew long grass blades together and knotted them; they looked fragile to the eye, but to a man or a horse tripping over them, they would seem strong as taut rope. She poised wayward stems of brambles over her path, seeing, in her mind’s eye, the formidable prickly clumps they would seem to anyone else. In one place she dug a fist-sized hole, lined it with leaves, and then filled it with water she carried in her hands. It stared back at the blue sky like an eye, a round, unobtrusive pool that could stretch like a dream in- to a wide, impassible lake.

The nagging following began to be less urgent; she guessed that it had met with some of her traps. She slowed a little herself, then. It was late afternoon; the sun hovered above the tips of the pine. A little wind shivered through them, the cool evening wind, rousing. It carried a loneliness in its wake, the loneliness of the backlands. She glimpsed then the long succession of days and nights ahead of her, the lonely trek through the unsettled lands, nearly impossible for one weaponless, on foot. But behind her lay Isig Pass with its dark secret; in An there was no one, not even her father, to give her a measure of understanding. She could only hope that her blind need would stumble onto its own source of comfort. She shivered a little, not at the wind, but at the empty rustle of its passing, and went on. The sun set, drawing fingers of light through the trees; the twilight lay in an unearthly silence over the world. Still she moved, without thinking, without stopping to eat, without realizing that she walked on the thin line of exhaustion. The moon rose; her constant tripping over things she could not see in the dark began to slow her. She fell once, seemingly for no reason, and was surprised when she found it difficult to rise. She fell again, a few paces later, with the same surprise. She felt blood trickle down her knee and put her hand in a patch of nettles as she rose. She stood nursing her hand under one arm, wondering why her body was shaking, for the night was not very cold. Then she saw, like a dream of hope, the warm, slender dance of flame within the trees. She went towards it with one name in her mind. Reaching it finally, she found in the circle of its light the High One’s harpist.

For a moment, standing at the edge of the light, she saw only that it was not Morgon. He was sitting back against a rock beside the fire, his face bent; she saw only his silver-white hair. Then he turned his head and looked at her.

She heard his breath catch. “Raederle?”

She took a step backward, and he moved abruptly, as if to rise and stop her before she vanished again into the darkness. Then he checked himself, leaned back deliberately against the rock. There was an expression on his face she had never seen before, that kept her lingering at the light. He gestured to the fire, the hare spitted over it.

“You look tired; sit down awhile.” He turned the spit; a breath of hot meat came to her. His hair was ragged; his face looked worn, lined, oddly open. His voice, musical and edged with irony, had not changed.

She whispered, “Morgon said that you—that you harped while he lay half-dead in Ghisteslwchlohm’s power.”

She saw the muscles in his face tighten. He reached out, edged a broken branch into the fire. “It’s true. I will reap my reward for that harping. But meanwhile, will you have some supper? I am doomed; you are hungry. One has very little to do with the other, so there is no reason for you not to eat with me.”

She took another step, this time towards him. Though he watched her, his expression did not change, and she took another. He took a cup from his pack, filled it with wine from a skin. She came close finally, held out her hands to the blaze. They hurt her; she turned and saw the cuts on them from brambles, the white blisters from the nettles. His voice came again. “I have water…” It faded. She glanced down at him, watched him pour water from another skin into a bowl. His fingers shook slightly as he corked the skin; he did not speak again. She sat finally, washed the dirt and dried blood from her hands. He passed her wine, bread and meat in the same silence, sipped wine slowly while she ate.

Then he said, his voice sliding so evenly into the silence that it did not startle her, “Morgon, I expected to find in the night at my fire’s edge, or any one of five wizards, but hardly the second most beautiful woman of the Three Portions of An.”

She glanced down at herself absently. “I don’t think I’m that any more.” A pang of sorrow caught at her throat as she swallowed; she put the food down and whispered. “Even I have changed shape. Even you.”

“I have always been myself.”

She looked at the fine, elusive face, with its unfamiliar shadow of mockery. She asked then, for both the question and the answer seemed impersonal, remote, “And the High One? Whom have you harped to for so many centuries?”

He leaned forward almost abruptly to stir the lagging fire. “You know to ask the question; you know the answer. The past is the past. I have no future.”

Her throat burned. “Why? Why did you betray the Star-Bearer?”

“Is it a riddle-game? I’ll give answer for answer.”

“No. No games.”

They were silent again. She sipped her wine, felt, coming alive all through her, little aches and throbbings from cuts, pulled muscles, bruises. He filled her cup again when she finished. She broke the silence, easy in his presence for some reason, as though they sat together in the same black hollow of sorrow. “He already killed one harpist.”

“What?”

“Morgon.” She moved a little, shifting away from the longing the name gave her. “Ylon’s father. Morgon killed Ylon’s father.”

“Ylon,” he said tonelessly, and she lifted her head, met his eyes. Then he laughed, his hands linked hard around his cup. “So. That sent you into the night. And you think, in the midst of this chaos, that it matters?”

“It matters! I have inherited a shape-changer’s power—I can feel it! If I reached out and touched the fire, I could hold it in the palm of my hand. Look…” Something: the wine, his indifference, her hopelessness, made her reckless. She stretched out her hand, held it curved in a motionless caress to the heat and curve of a flame. The reflection of it flickered in Deth’s eyes; its light lay cradled in the lines and hollows of the stone he leaned against, traced the roots of ancient trees into untangling. She let the reflection ease through her thoughts, followed every shift of color and movement, every fade and mysterious renewal out of nothingness. It was of an alien fabric that ate darkness and never died. Its language was older than men. It was a shape-changer; it groped for the shape of her mind as she watched it, filled her eyes so that she saw a single leaf fall in a liquid, burning tear through the darkness to the ground. And deep within her, rousing out of a dormant, lawless heritage came the fiery, answering leap of understanding. The lucent, wordless knowledge of fire filled her; the soft rustlings became a language, the incessant weave a purpose, its color the color of the world, of her mind. She touched a flame then, let it lay in her hand like a flower. “Look,” she said breathlessly, and closed her hand over it, extinguishing it, before the wonder in her broke the binding between them, separating them, and it hurt her. The night fell around her again, as the tiny flame died. She saw Deth’s face, motionless, unreadable, his lips parted.

“Another riddle,” he whispered.

She rubbed her palm against her knee, for in spite of her care it hurt a little. A breath of reason, like the cool air off the northern peaks brushed her mind; she shivered, and said slowly, remembering, “She wanted me to hold the fire, her fire…”

“Who?”

“The woman. The dark woman who had been Eriel Ymris for five years. She came to me to tell me we were kin, which I had already guessed.”

“Mathom trained you well,” he commented, “to be a riddle-master’s wife.”

“You were a Master. You told him that once. Am I so good with riddles? What do they lead to but betrayal and sorrow? Look at you. You not only betrayed Morgon, but my father and everyone in this realm who trusted you. And look at me. What lord of An would bother to draw enough breath to ask for me, if he knew who claimed kinship with me?”

“You are running from yourself, and I am running from death. So much for the tenets of riddle-mastery. Only a man with a brain and heart implacable as the jewels in Isig could bear adhering to them. I made my decision five centuries ago about the values of riddles, when Ghisteslwchlohm asked me to Erlenstar Mountain. I thought nothing in the realm could break his power. But I was wrong. He broke himself against the rigid tenets of the Star-Bearer’s life and fled, leaving me alone unprotected, harpless—”

“Where is your harp?” she asked, surprised.

“I don’t know. Still in Erlenstar Mountain, I assume. I don’t dare harp now. That was the only other thing Morgon heard, besides Ghisteslwchlohm’s voice, for a year.”

She flinched, wanting to run from him then, but her body would not move. She cried out at him, “Your harping was a gift to Kings!” He did not answer; his cup rose, flashed again in the firelight. When he spoke finally, his voice seemed shaded, like the fire’s voice.

“I’ve played and lost to a Master; he’ll take his vengeance. But I regret the loss of my harp.”

“As Morgon must regret the loss of his land-rule?” Her own voice shook. “I’m curious about that. How could Ghisteslwchlohm rip that from him—the instinct for the land-law that is known only to Morgon and the High One? What piece of knowledge did the Founder expect to find beneath the knowledge of when the barley would begin to sprout or what trees in his orchard had a disease eating secretly at their hearts?”

“It’s done. Can you let—”

“How can I? Did you think you were betraying only Morgon? You taught me ’The Love of Hover and Bird’ on the flute when I was nine. You stood behind me and held my fingers down on the right notes while I played. But that hardly matters, compared to what the land-rulers of the realm will feel when they realize what honor they have given to the harpist of the Founder of Lungold. You hurt Lyra badly enough, but what will the Morgol, herself, think when Morgon’s tale reaches her? You—” She stopped. He had not moved; he was sitting as she had first seen him, with his head bent, one hand on his bent knee, the cup cradled in it. Something had happened to her, in her anger. She lifted her head, smelled the fine, chill, pine-scented air off Isig, felt the night that lay over her like its shadow. She sat at a tiny fire, lost in that vast blackness, her dress torn, her hair tangled and dirty, her face scratched, probably so haggard no Lord of An would recognize her. She had just put her hand in the fire and held it; something of its clarity seemed to bum in her mind. She whispered, “Say my name.”

“Raederle.”

Her own head bent. She sat quietly awhile, feeling the name in her like a heartbeat. She drew breath at last, loosed it. “Yes. That woman nearly made me forget. I ran from Isig in the middle of the night to look for Morgon somewhere in the backlands. It seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that I’ll find him that way.”

“A little.”

“And no one in Danan’s house knows if I am alive or dead. That seems inconsiderate. I forgot that, having Ylon’s power, I still have my own name. That’s a very great power, that alone. The power to see…”

“Yes.” He lifted his head finally, lifted the cup to drink again, but instead put it down with a curious care on the ground. He sat back, his face thrown clear in the light; the mockery in it had gone. She drew her knees together, huddling against herself, and he said, “You’re cold. Take my cloak.”

“No.”

His mouth crooked slightly, but he said only, “What is Lyra doing in Isig Mountain?”

“We came to ask the High One questions—Lyra, Tristan of Hed, and I—but Danan told us that Morgon was alive, and he advised against going through the Pass. It took me hours to think why. And it has taken this long—a day and two nights—to think of another question. But there’s no one to ask, except Morgon, and you.”

“You would trust me with a question?”

She nodded a little wearily. “I don’t understand you any more; your face changes shape every time I look at you, now a stranger, now the face of a memory… But whoever you are, you still know as much, if not more, as anyone else about what is happening in the realm. If Ghisteslwchlohm took the High One’s place at Erlenstar Mountain, then where is the High One? Someone still holds order in the realm.”

“True.” He was silent, an odd tautness to his mouth. “I asked Ghisteslwchlohm that five centuries ago. He couldn’t answer me. So I lost interest. Now, with my own death inevitable, I am still not very interested, any more than the High One, where he is, seems remotely interested in any problems in the realm beyond land-law.”

“Perhaps he never existed. Perhaps he’s a legend spun out of the mystery of the ruined cities, passed through the ages until Ghisteslwchlohm took the shape of it…”

“A legend like Ylon? Legends have a grim way of twisting into truth.”

“Then why did he never stop you from harping in his name? He must have known.”

“I don’t know. No doubt he has reasons. Whether he or Morgon dooms me, it makes little difference; the result will be the same.”

“There’s nowhere you can go?” she asked, surprising both herself and him. He shook his head.

“Morgon will close the realm to me. Even Herun. I will not go there, in any event. I was already driven out of Osterland, three nights ago, crossing the Ose. The wolf-king spoke to his wolves… A pack found me camping on his land, a remote comer of it. They did not touch me, but they let me know I was not welcome. When word reaches Ymris, it will be the same. And An… The Star-Bearer will drive me where he wants me. I saw the hollow he made of the High One’s house when he finally broke free—it seemed as if Erlenstar Mountain itself was too small to hold him. He paused, in passing, to wrench the strings out of my harp. His judgment of me I don’t contest, but… that was one thing in my life I did well.”

“No,” she whispered. “You did many things well. Dangerously well. There wasn’t a man, woman or child in the realm who didn’t trust you: you did that well. So well that I am still sitting beside you, talking to you, even though you hurt someone I love past bearing. I don’t know why.”

“Don’t you? It’s simply that, alone in the backlands under a sky black as the pit of a dead king’s eye, we have nothing left but our honesty. And our names. There is great richness in yours,” he added almost lightly, “but not even hope in mine.”

She fell asleep soon afterwards beside his fire, while he sat quietly drinking wine and feeding the fire. When she woke in the morning, he was gone. She heard rustlings in the brush, voices; she shifted painfully, freeing an arm to push back the covering over her. Then she checked. She sat up abruptly, staring down at her hand, in which the fire had burned like an extension of herself the night before. On her palm, scored white, were the twelve sides and delicate inner lines of the stone Astrin had given her on King’s Mouth Plain.

7

	7

LYRA, TRISTAN AND the Guards rode out of the trees, then, into the tiny clearing where Raederle sat. Lyra reined sharply at the sight of her, dismounted without a word. She looked dishevelled herself, worn and tired. She went to Raederle, knelt beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, but words failed her. She opened her hand instead, dropped between them three tangled, dirty pieces of thread.

Raederle stared down at them, touched them. “That was you behind me,” she whispered. She straightened, pushing hair out of her eyes. The guards were dismounting. Tristan, still on her horse, was staring at Raederle, wide-eyed and frightened. She slid to the ground abruptly, came to Raederle’s side.

“Are you all right?” Her voice was sharp with worry. “Are you all right?” She brushed pieces of pine needle and bark out of Raederle’s hair gently. “Did anyone hurt you?”

“Who were you running from?” Lyra asked. “Was it a shape-changer?”

“Yes.”

“What happened? I was just across the hall; I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t even hear you leave. I didn’t hear—” She stopped abruptly, as at a memory. Raederle pushed wearily at the cloak that had been covering her; it was hot, heavy in the bright morning. She drew her knees up, dropping her face against them, feeling a complaint from every bone at the simple movements.

The others were silent; she could feel their waiting, so she said haltingly after a moment, “It was—one of the shape-changers came to my room, spoke to me. After she left, I wanted—I wanted to find Morgon very badly, to talk to him. I was not thinking very clearly. I left Danan’s house, walked in the night until the moon set. Then I slept awhile and walked again, until—until I came here. I’m sorry about the traps.”

“What did she say? What could she have said to make you run like that?”

Raederle lifted her head. “Lyra, I can’t talk about it now,” she whispered. “I want to tell you, but not now.”

“All right.” She swallowed. “It’s all right. Can you get up?”

“Yes.” Lyra helped her stand; Tristan reached for the cloak, bundled it in her arms, gazing anxiously over it.

Raederle glanced around. There seemed to be no trace of Deth; he had passed in and out of the night like a dream, but one of the guards, Goh, casting about with a methodical eye, said, “There was a horseman here.” She gazed southward as if she were watching his passage. “He went that way. The horse might have been bred in An, from the size of the hoof. It’s no plow horse, or Ymris war horse.”

“Was it your father?” Lyra asked a little incredulously. Raederle shook her head. Then she seemed to see for the first time the heavy, rich, blue-black cloak in Tristan’s arms. Her teeth clenched; she took the cloak from Tristan, flung it into the ashes of the fire bed, seeing across from it as she did so, the harpist’s face changing to every shift of firelight. Her hands locked on her arms; she said, her voice steady again, “It was Deth.”

“Deth,” Lyra breathed, and Raederle saw the touch of longing in her face. “He was here? Did you speak to him?”

“Yes. He fed me. I don’t understand him. He told me that everything Morgon said about him is true. Everything. I don’t understand him. He left his cloak for me while I was sleeping.”

Lyra turned abruptly, bent to check the trail Goh had found. She stood again, looking southward. “How long ago did he leave?”

“Lyra,” Imer said quietly, and Lyra turned to face her. “If you intend to track that harpist through the backlands of the realm, you’ll go alone. It’s time for us all to return to Herun. If we leave quickly enough, we can reach it before Morgon does, and you can ask him your questions. The tale itself will reach Herun before any of us do, I think, and the Morgol will need you.”

“For what? To guard the borders of Herun against Deth?”

“It might be,” Goh said soothingly, “that he has some explanation to give only to the Morgol.”

“No,” Raederle said. “He said he would not go to Herun.”

They were silent. The wind roused, sweet-smelling, empty, stalking southward like a hunter. Lyra stared down at the cloak in the ashes. She said blankly, “I can believe he betrayed the Star-Bearer if I must, but how can I believe he would betray the Morgol? He loved her.”

“Let’s go,” Kia urged softly. “Let’s go back to Herun. None of us knows any more what to do. This place is wild and dangerous; we don’t belong here.”

“I’m going to Herun,” Tristan said abruptly, startling them with her decisiveness. “Wherever that is. If that’s where Morgon is going.”

“If we sail,” Raederle said, “we might get there before he does. Is Bri—Where is Bri Corbett? He let you come after me alone?”

“We didn’t exactly stop to ask his permission,” Lyra said. The guards were beginning to mount again. “I brought your horse. The last time I saw Bri Corbett, he was searching the mines with Danan and the miners.”

Raederle took her reins, mounted stiffly. “For me? Why did they think I would have gone into the mines?”

“Because Morgon did,” Tristan said, “when he was there.” She pulled herself easily onto the small, shaggy pony the guards had brought for her. Her face was still pinched with worry; she viewed even the genial profile of Isig with a disapproving eye. “That’s what Danan said. I got up near morning to talk to you, because I had had a bad dream. And you were gone. There was only that fire, white as a turnip. It frightened me, so I woke Lyra. And she woke the King. Danan told us to stay in the house while he searched the mines. He was also afraid you had been kidnapped. But Lyra said you weren’t.”

“How did you know?” Raederle asked, surprised.

The guards had formed a loose, watchful circle around them as they rode back through the trees. Lyra said simply, “Why would you have taken your pack and all the food in the room if you had been kidnapped? It didn’t make sense. So while Danan searched his house, I went into town and found the guards. I left a message for Danan, telling him where we were going. Finding your trail wasn’t difficult; the ground is still soft, and you left pieces of cloth from your skirt on brambles beside the river. But then your horse stepped on one of the threads you dropped and pulled out of Goh’s hold; we spent an hour chasing it. And after we caught it finally, Kia rode over another thread and went off into the brush before anyone saw her. So we spent more time tracking her. After that, I watched for your threads. But it took me awhile to realize why our horses kept stumbling over things that weren’t there, and why there were mountains of brambles along the river that your footprints seemed to disappear into. And then we came to that lake…” She paused, giving the memory a moment of fulminous silence. The blood was easing back into Raederle’s face as she listened.

“I’m sorry it was you. Was—Did it work?”

“It worked. We spent half an afternoon trying to round one shore of it. It was impossible. It simply didn’t look that big. It just stretched. Finally Goh noticed that there were no signs that you had walked around it, and I realized what it might be. I was so hot and tired I got off my horse and walked straight into it; I didn’t care if I got wet or not. And it vanished. I looked behind me, and saw all the dry ground we had been skirting, making a path around nothing.”

“She stood in the middle of the water and cursed,” Imer said, with a rare grin. “It looked funny. Then, when we reached the river again, to pick up your trail, and saw that tiny pool, no bigger than a fist, we all cursed. I didn’t know anyone but a wizard could do that with water.”

Raederle’s hand closed suddenly over its secret. “I’ve never done it before.” The words sounded unconvincing to her ears. She felt oddly ashamed, as though, like Deth, she held a stranger’s face to the world. The calm, ancient face of Isig rose over them, friendly in the morning light, its raw peaks gentled. She said with sudden surprise, “I didn’t get very far, did I?”

“You came far enough,” Lyra said.

They reached Isig again at noon the next day. Bri Corbett, grim and voluble with relief, took one look at Raederle, stayed long enough to hear Lyra’s tale, then departed to find a boat at Kyrth. Raederle said very little, either to Danan or Bri; she was grateful that the mountain-king refrained from questioning her. He only said gently, with a perception that startled her, “Isig is my home; the home of my mind, and still, after so many years, it is capable of surprising me. Whatever you are gripping to yourself in secret, remember this: Isig holds great beauty and great sorrow, and I could not desire anything less for it, than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself.”

Bri returned that evening, having wheedled places for them all, their horses and gear, on two keelboats packed and readied to leave for Kraal at dawn. The thought of another journey down the Winter made them all uneasy, but it was, when they finally got underway, not so terrible as before. The floodwaters had abated; the fresh, blue waters of the upper Ose pushed down it, clearing the silt and untangling the snags. The boats ran quickly on the crest of the high water; they could see, as the banks flowed past them, the Osterland farmers pounding the walls of their barns and pens back together again. The piquant air skimmed above the water, rippling it like the touch of birds’ wings; the warm sun glinted off the metal hinges of the cargo chests, burned in flecks of spray on the ropes.

Raederle, scarcely seeing at all as she stood day after day at the rail, was unaware of her own disturbing silence. The evening before they were due to reach Kraal, she stood in the shadowy twilight under the lacework of many trees, and realized only after the leaves had blurred into darkness, that Lyra was standing beside her. She started slightly.

Lyra, the weak light from the chart house rippling over her face, said softly, “If Morgon has already passed through Crown City when we get there, what will you do?”

“I don’t know. Follow him.”

“Will you go home?”

“No.” There was a finality in her voice that surprised her. Lyra frowned down at the dark water, her proud, clean-lined face like a lovely profile on a coin. Raederle, looking at her, realized with helpless longing, the assuredness in it, the absolute certainty of place.

“How can you say that?” Lyra asked. “How can you not go home? That’s where you belong, the one place.”

“For you, maybe. You could never belong anywhere but in Herun.”

“But you are of An! You are almost a legend of An, even in Herun. Where else could you go? You are of the magic of An, of the line of its kings; where… What did that woman say to you that is terrible enough to keep you away from your own home?”

Raederle was silent, her hands tightening on the rail. Lyra waited; when Raederle did not answer, she went on, “You have scarcely spoken to anyone since we found you in the forest. You have been holding something in your left hand since then. Something—that hurts you. I probably wouldn’t understand it. I’m not good with incomprehensible things, like magic and riddling. But if there is something I can fight for you, I will fight it. If there is something I can do for you, I will do it. I swear that, on my honor—” Raederle’s face turned abruptly toward her at the word, and she stopped.

Raederle whispered, “I’ve never thought about honor in my life. Perhaps it’s because no one has ever questioned it in me, or in any of my family. But I wonder if that’s what’s bothering me. I would have little of it left to me in An.”

“Why?” Lyra breathed incredulously. Raederle’s hand slid away from the rail, turned upward, open to the light.

Lyra stared down at the small, angular pattern on her palm. “What is that?”

“It’s the mark of that stone. The one I blinded the warships with. It came out when I held the fire—”

“You—she forced you to put your hand in the fire?”

“No. No one forced me. I simply reached out and gathered it in my hand. I knew I could do it, so I did it.”

“You have that power?” Her voice was small with wonder. “It’s like a wizard’s power. But why are you so troubled? Is it something that the mark on your hand means?”

“No. I hardly know what that means. But I do know where the power has come from, and it’s not from any witch of An or any Lungold wizard. It’s from Ylon, who was once King of An, a son of a queen of An and a shape-changer. His blood runs in the family of An, I have his power. His father was the harpist who tried to kill Morgon in your house.”

Lyra gazed at her, wordless. The chart house light flicked out suddenly, leaving their faces in darkness; someone lit the lamps at the bow. Raederle, her face turning back to the water, heard Lyra start to say something and then stop. A few minutes later, still leaning against the rail at Raederle’s side, she started again and stopped. Raederle waited for her to leave, but she did not move. Half an hour later, when they were both beginning to shiver in the nightbreeze, Lyra drew another breath and found words finally.

“I don’t care,” she said softly, fiercely. “You are who you are, and I know you. What I said still stands; I have sworn it, the same promise I would have given to Morgon if he hadn’t been so stubborn. It’s your own honor, not the lack of it, that is keeping you out of An. And if I don’t care, why should Morgon? Remember who the source of half his power is. Now let’s go below before we freeze.”

They reached Kraal almost before the morning mists had lifted above the sea. The boats docked; their passengers disembarked with relief, stood watching the cargo being unloaded while Bri went to find Mathom’s ship and sailors to load their gear again. Kia murmured wearily to no one, “If I never set foot on a ship again in my life, I will be happy. If I never see a body of water larger than the Morgol’s fish pools…”

Bri came back with the sailors and led them to the long, regal ship swaying in its berth. After the barge and keelboats, it looked expansive and comfortable; they boarded gratefully. Bri, with one eye to the tide, barked orders contentedly from the bow, as the sailors secured what supplies they needed, stabled the horses, brought the gear from the keelboats and loaded it all again. Finally the long anchor chain came rattling out of the sea; the ship was loosed from its moorings, and the stately blue and purple sails of An billowed proudly above the river traffic.

Ten days later they docked at Hlurle. The Morgol’s guards were there to meet them.

Lyra, coming down the ramp with the five guards behind her, stopped at the sight of the quiet, armed gathering on the dock. One of the guards, a tall, grey-eyed girl, said softly, “Lyra—”

Lyra shook her head. She lifted her spear, held it out in her open hands, quiescent and unthreatening, like an offering. Raederle, following, heard her say simply, “Will you carry my spear through Herun for me, Trika, and give it for me to the Morgol? I will resign when I get to Crown City“

“I can’t.”

Lyra looked at her silently, at the still faces of the fourteen guards behind Trika. She shifted slightly. “Why? Did the Morgol give you other orders? What does she want of me?”

Trika’s hand rose, touched the spear briefly and fell. Behind Lyra, the five guards were lined, motionless, across the ramp, listening. “Lyra.” She paused, choosing words carefully. “You have twenty witnesses to the fact that you were willing, for the sake of the honor of the Morgol’s guards, to ride unarmed into Herun. However, I think you had better keep your spear awhile. The Morgol is not in Herun.”

“Where is she? Surely she isn’t still at Caithnard?”

“No. She came back from Caithnard over a month ago, took six of us with her back to Crown City, and told the rest of us to wait for you here. Yesterday, Feya came back with the news that she had—that she was no longer in Herun.”

“Well, if she isn’t in Herun, where did she go?”

“No one knows. She just left.”

Lyra brought her spear down to rest with a little thump at her side. She lifted her head, picked out a lithe, red-haired guard with her eyes. “Feya, what do you mean she left?”

“She left, Lyra. One night she was there having supper with us, and the next morning she was gone.”

“She must have told someone where she was going. She never does things like that. Did she take servants, baggage, any guards at all?”

“She took her horse.”

“Her horse? That’s all?”

“We spent the day questioning everyone in the house. That’s all she took. Not even a packhorse.”

“Why didn’t anyone see her leave? What were you all guarding, anyway?”

“Well, Lyra,” someone said reasonably, “she knows the changes of our watch as well as any of us, and no one would ever question her movements in her own house.”

Lyra was silent. She moved off the ramp, out of the way of the curious sailors beginning to unload their gear. Raederle, watching her, thought of the calm, beautiful face of the Morgol as she rode up the hill to the College, the gold eyes turning watchful as the Masters gathered around her. A question slid into her mind; Lyra, her brows crooking together. asked it abruptly, “Has Morgon of Hed spoken to her?”

Feya nodded. “He came so quietly no one saw him but the Morgol; he left just as quietly, except—except that—nothing was very peaceful in Herun after his leaving.”

“She gave orders?” Her voice was level. Beside Raederle, Tristan sat down heavily at the foot of the ramp, dropped her face into her hands. Feya nodded again, swallowing.

“She gave orders that the northern and western borders were to be guarded against the High One’s harpist, that no one in Herun should give him lodgings or aid of any kind, and that anyone seeing him in Herun should tell either the guards or the Morgol. And she told us why. She sent messengers to all parts of Herun to tell people. And then she left.”

Lyra’s gaze moved from her, past the worn, grey clutter of warehouse roofs lining the docks, to the border hills touched to a transient, delicate green under the late spring sun. She whispered, “Deth.”

Trika cleared her throat. “We thought she might have gone to look for him. Lyra, I don’t—none of us understand how he could have done the terrible thing the Star-Bearer accused him of; how he could have lied to the Morgol. It doesn’t seem possible. How could—how could he not love the Morgol?”

“Maybe he does,” Lyra said slowly. She caught Raederle’s quick glance and added defensively, “She judged him like Danan, like Har: without even listening to him, without giving him the right to self-defense that she would give to the simplest man from the Herun marsh towns.”

“I don’t understand him either,” Raederle said steadily. “But he admitted his guilt when I talked to him. And he offered no defense. He had none.”

“It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone, even Morgon, that perhaps Ghisteslwchlohm held Deth in his power, as he held the wizards, and forced him to bring Morgon to him instead of to the High One.”

“Lyra, Ghisteslwchlohm is—” She stopped, felt the sluice of the sea wind between them like an impossible distance. She sensed their waiting, and finished wearily, “You’re saying that the Founder is more powerful than the High One, forcing his harpist against his will. And if there is one thing I believe about Deth, it is that no one, maybe not even the High One, could force him to do something he did not choose to do.”

“Then you’ve condemned him, too,” Lyra said flatly.

“He condemned himself! Do you think I want to believe it, either? He lied to everyone, he betrayed the Star-Bearer, the Morgol and the High One. And he put his cloak over me so that I wouldn’t be cold while I slept, that night in the backlands. That’s all I know.” She met Lyra’s dark, brooding gaze helplessly. “Ask him. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Find him and ask him. You know where he is: in the backlands, heading toward Lungold. And you know that must be where the Morgol is going.”

Lyra was silent. She dropped down on the ramp beside Tristan, yielding to a weary, vulnerable uncertainty.

Goh said simply after a moment, “We have no instructions from the Morgol to stay in Herun. No one should travel in the backlands alone.”

“I wonder if she looked beyond Herun and saw him alone…” She took a breath impulsively, as though to give an order, then closed her mouth abruptly.

Trika said soberly, “Lyra, none of us knows what to do; we have no orders. It would be a relief to us all if you postponed resigning for a while.”

“All right. Saddle your horses and let’s go to Crown City. No matter how secretly she rode out of Herun, even the Morgol must have left some kind of trail.”

The guards dispersed. Raederle sat down beside Lyra. They were silent as a sailor tramped down the ramp, leading Lyra’s horse and whistling softly.

Lyra, her spear slanted on her knees, said suddenly to Raederle, “Do you think I’m right in following her?”

Raederle nodded. She remembered the worn, familiar face of the harpist, etched in the firelight with an unfamiliar mockery as he drank, the light irony in his voice that had never been there before. She whispered, “Yes. She’ll need you.”

“What will you do? Will you come?”

“No. I’ll sail back to Caithnard with Bri. If Morgon is heading south, he might go there.”

Lyra glanced at her. “He’ll go to An.”

“Maybe.”

“And then where will he go? Lungold?”

“I don’t know. Wherever Deth is, I suppose.”

On the other side of Lyra, Tristan lifted her head. “Do you think,” she said with unexpected bitterness, “that he’ll come to Hed before that? Or is he planning to kill Deth and then go home and tell everyone about it?”

They looked at her. Her eyes were heavy with unshed tears; her mouth was pinched taut. She added after a moment, staring down at the bolt heads in the planks, “If he wouldn’t move so fast, if I could just catch up with him, maybe I could persuade him to come home. But how can I do that if he won’t stay still?”

“Hell go home eventually,” Raederle said. “I can’t believe he’s changed so much he doesn’t care about Hed anymore.”

“He’s changed. Once he was the land-ruler of Hed, and he would rather have killed himself than someone else. Now—”

“Tristan, he has been hurt, probably more deeply than any of us could know…”

She nodded a little jerkily. “I can understand that with my head. People have killed other people in Hed, out of anger or jealousy, but not—not like that. Not tracking someone like a hunter, driving him to one certain place to be killed. It’s—what someone else would do. But not Morgon. And if—if it happens, and afterwards he goes back to Hed, how will we recognize each other any more?”

They were silent. A sailor carrying a keg of wine across his shoulders shook the ramp with his slow, heavy, persistent steps. Behind them, Bri Corbett shouted something, lost like a sea gull’s cry in the wind. Raederle stirred.

“He’ll know that,” she said softly. “Deep in him. That he has every justification to do this except one. That the only man who might condemn him for it would be himself. Maybe you should trust him a little. Go home and wait and trust him.”

There was another step behind them. Bri Corbett said, looking down at them, “That is the most rational thing I’ve heard this entire journey. Who’s for home?”

“Caithnard,” Raederle said, and he sighed.

“Well, it’s close enough for a start. Maybe I can look for work there, if your father decides he doesn’t want to see my face in An after this. But if I can just get you and this ship together back into the harbor at Anuin, he can curse the hair off my head and I’ll still be content.”

Lyra stood up. She hugged Bri suddenly, upsetting his hat with her spearhead. “Thank you. Tell Mathom it was my fault.”

He straightened his hat, his face flushed, smiling. “I doubt if he’d be impressed.”

“Have you heard any news of him here?” Raederle asked. “Is he back home?”

“No one seems to know. But—” He stopped, his brows tugging together, and she nodded.

“It’s been nearly two months. He doesn’t have a vow to fulfill anymore, since Morgon is alive, and he won’t have a house to return to if he doesn’t get himself back to An before it rouses.” The guards rounded the dock side, in two straight lines. Kia, holding Lyra’s horse, brought it over to her. Raederle and Tristan stood up, and Lyra gave them her quick, taut embrace.

“Good-bye. Go home.” She held Raederle’s eyes a moment before she loosed her and repeated softly, “Go home.”

She turned, mounted, and gave them a spear-bearer’s salute, her spear flaring upward like a silver torch. Then she wheeled her horse, took her place beside Trika at the head of the lines, and led the guards out of the Hlurle docks without looking back, Raederle watched her until the last guard disappeared behind the warehouses. Then she turned almost aimlessly and saw the empty ramp before her. She went up slowly, found Bri and Tristan watching the flicker of spears in the distance. Bri sighed.

“It’s going to be a quiet journey without someone using the boom for target practice. We’ll finish getting supplies here and sail a straight run past Ymris to Caithnard. Making,” he added grimly, “the widest possible detour around Ymris. I would rather see the King of An himself off my bowsprit than Astrin Ymris.”

They saw neither on the long journey to Caithnard, only an occasional trade-ship making its own prudent path around the troubled Ymris coast. Sometimes the ships drew near to exchange news, for tales of the errant ship out of An had spread from one end of the realm to the other. The news was always the same: war in Ymris had spread up into Tor and east Umber; no one knew where Morgon was; no one had heard anything of Mathom of An; and one startling piece of news from Caithnard: the ancient College of Riddle-Masters had sent away its students and closed its doors.

The long journey ended finally as the weary ship took the lolling afternoon tide into the Caithnard harbor. There were cheers and various remarks from the dockside as the dark sails wrinkled and slumped on the mast and Bri eased the ship into its berth. Bri ignored the noise with patience tempered by experience, and said to Raederle, “We’re taking in a little water; she’ll need repairs and supplies before we continue to Anuin. It will be a day or two, maybe. Do you want me to find you lodgings in the city?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She gathered her thoughts with an effort. “Yes. Please. I’ll need my horse.”

“All right.”

Tristan cleared her throat. “And I’ll need mine.”

“You will.” He eyed her. “For what? Riding across the water to Hed?”

“I’m not going to Hed, I’ve decided.” She bore up steadily under his flat gaze. “I’m going to that city—the wizards’ city. Lungold. I know where it is; I’ve looked on your maps. The road leads straight out of—”

“Hegdis-Noon’s curved eyeteeth, girl, have you got a sensible bone anywhere in you?” Bri exploded. “That’s a six-weeks journey through no-man’s land. It’s only because I have a hold weeping bilge water that I didn’t take you straight to Tol. Lungold! With Deth and Morgon headed there, the Founder and who knows how many wizards coming like wraiths out of the barrows of Hel, that city is going to fall apart like a worm-eaten hull.”

“I don’t care. I—”

“You—”

They both stopped, as Tristan, her eyes moving past Bri, took a step backward. Raederle turned. A young man with a dark, tired, vaguely familiar face had come up the ramp. Something in his plain dress, his hesitant entry onto Bri’s ship, stirred a memory in her mind. His eyes went to her face as she moved, and then, beyond her, to Tristan.

He stopped, closing his eyes, and sighed. Then he said, “Tristan, will you please come home before Eliard leaves Hed to look for you.”

Something of the mutinous, trapped expression in her eyes faded. “He wouldn’t.”

“He would. He will. A trader coming down from Kraal spotted this ship at Hlurle and said you were coming south. Eliard was ready to leave then, but we—I won a wrestling match with him, and he said if I came back without you, he’d leave Hed. He’s worn to the bone with worry, and his temper is short as a hen’s nose. There’s no living on the same island with him, drunk or sober.”

“Cannon, I want to come home, but—”

Cannon Master shifted his stance on the deck. “Let me put it this way. I have asked you politely, and I will ask you again. The third time, I won’t ask.”

Tristan gazed at him, her chin lifted. Bri Corbett allowed a slow smile of pure contentment to spread over his face. Tristan opened her mouth to retort; then, under the weight of Cannon’s implacable, harassed gaze, changed tactics visibly.

“Cannon, I know where Morgon is, or where he’s going to be. If you’ll just wait, just tell Eliard to wait—”

“Tell him. I told him it was a fine morning once and be threw a bucket of slops at me. Face one thing, Tristan: when Morgon wants to come home, he’ll come. Without help from any of us. Just as he managed to survive. I’m sure, by now, he appreciates the fact that you cared enough to try td find out what happened to him.”

“You could come with me—”

“It takes all my courage just to stand here with that bottomless water between me and Hed. If you want him to come home, then go back yourself. In the High One’s name, give him something he loves to come home to.”

Tristan was silent, while the water murmured against the hull and the lean black shadow of the mast lay like a bar at her feet. She said finally, “All right,” and took a step forward. She stopped. “I’ll go home and tell Eliard I’m all right. But I don’t promise to stay. I don’t promise that.” She took another step, then turned to Raederle and held her tightly. “Be careful,” she said softly. “And if you see Morgon, tell him… Just tell him that. And tell him to come home.”

She loosed Raederle, went slowly to Cannon’s side. He dropped a hand down her hair, drew her against him, and after a moment she slid an arm around his waist Raederle watched them go down the ramp, make their way through the hectic, disorderly docks. A longing for Anuin wrenched at her, for Duac, and Elieu of Hel, for Rood with his crow-sharp eyes, for the sounds and smells of An, sun-spiced oak and the whisper, deep in the earth, of the endless fabric of history.

Bri Corbett said gently behind her, “Don’t be sad. You’ll smell the wind of your own home in a week.”

“Will I?” She looked down and saw the white brand on her palm that had nothing to do with An. Then sensing the worry in him, she added more lightly, “I need to get off this ship, I think. Will you ask them to bring my horse up?”

“If you’ll wait, I’ll escort you.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be all right. I want to be alone for a while.”

She rode through the docks, down the busy merchants’ streets of the city, and if anyone troubled her, she did not notice. The fading afternoon drew a net of shadows across her path as she turned onto the silent road that led up to the College. She realized she had seen no students that day, with their bright robes and restless minds, anywhere in Caithnard. There were none on the road. She took the final wind to the top and saw the empty sweep of the College grounds.

She stopped. The dark, ancient stones with their blank windows seemed to house a hollowness, a betrayal of truth as bitter and terrible as the betrayal at Erlenstar Mountain. The shadow of that mountain had swept across the realm into the hearts of the Masters, until they found the greatest deceit within their own walls. They could send the students away, but she knew that though they might question themselves, they would never question the constant, essential weave and patterning of Riddle-Mastery.

She dismounted at the door and knocked. No one came, so she opened it. The narrow hall was empty, dark. She walked down it slowly, glimpsing through the long line of open doors each small chamber that had once held bed, books and endless games over guttering candles. There was no one downstairs. She took the broad stone stairs to the second floor and found more lines of open doors, the rooms holding no more in them than an expressionless block of sky. She came finally to the door of the Masters’ library. It was closed.

She opened it. Eight Masters and a King, interrupting their quiet discussion, turned to her, startled. The King’s eyes, ancient, ice-blue, burned as he looked at her with sudden curiosity.

One of the Masters rose. He said gently, “Raederle of An. Is there some way we can help you?”

“I hope so,” she whispered, “because I have no place else to go.”