8

	8

SHE TOLD THEM, sitting in their gentle, impartial silence, of the shape-changer, who had come to her in Danan’s house, and of her flight out of Isig Mountain. She told them of the stone Astrin had found on King’s Mouth Plain and showed them the mark of it on her palm. She told them how she had held fire in the empty hollow of night in the backlands, while the wine cup of the High One’s harpist flashed and fell in its light. She told them, knowing they knew it, but telling them by right of sorrow and heritage, the tale of Ylon, born out of An and the formless sea, and she saw in their eyes the gathering of the threads of riddlery. When she finished, dusk had crept in to the room, blurring the silent, dark-robed figures, old parchment and priceless, gold-hinged manuscripts. One of the Masters lit a candle. The flame gave her the patient, weary working of lines on his face, and beyond him, the spare, ungentle face of the Osterland King. The Master said simply, “We are all questioning ourselves these days.”

“I know. I know how imperatively. You have not closed your doors only because you accepted the Founder of Lungold as a Master here. I know who was there to meet Morgon when Deth brought him to Erlenstar Mountain.”

The taper the Master held dipped toward a wick and halted. “You know that, too.”

“I guessed. And later, Deth—Deth told me it was so.”

“He seems to have spared you very little,” Har said. His voice sounded dry, impersonal, but she saw in his face a hint of the anger and confusion the harpist had loosed into the realm.

“I was not asking to be spared. I wanted truth. I want it now, so I came here. It’s a place to start from. I can’t go back to An with this. If my father were there, maybe I could. But I can’t go back and pretend to Duac and Rood and the Lords of An that I belong to An as surely as the roots of trees and the old barrows of Kings. I have power, and I am afraid of it. I don’t know—I don’t know what I might loose in myself without meaning to. I don’t know, any more, where I belong. I don’t know what to do.”

“Ignorance,” the wolf-king murmured, “is deadly.”

Master Tel shifted, his worn robe rustling in the hush. “You both came for answers; we have few to give you. Sometimes, however, the turn of a question becomes an answer; and we do have many questions. Above all: one regarding the shape-changers. They appeared almost without warning at the moment the Star-Bearer began realizing his destiny. They knew his name before he did; they knew of the sword bearing his stars deep in the grave of the Earth-Masters’ children at Isig. They are old, older than the first weave of history and riddlery, originless, unnamed. They must be named. Only then will you know the origins of your own power.”

“What else do I need to know about them, except that they have tried to destroy the King’s lines in An and Ymris, that they blinded Astrin, they almost killed Morgon, they have no mercy, no pity, no love. They gave Ylon his life, then drove him to his death. They have no compassion even for their own—” She stopped, then, remembering the voice of the shape-changer striking its unexpected, puzzling timbre of richness.

One of the Masters said softly, “You have touched an incongruity?”

“Not compassion, but passion…” she whispered. “The shape-changer answered me with that. And then she wove her fire into such beauty that I hungered for her power. And she asked me what had driven Ylon back to them, if they were so terrible. She made me hear the harping Ylon heard, made me understand his longing. Then she told me Morgon had killed the harpist.” She paused in their silence, the practiced stillness of old men, the heart of patience. “She handed me that riddle.” Her voice was toneless. “That incongruity. Like Deth’s kindness, which maybe was only habit, and… maybe not. I don’t know. Nothing—the High One, this College, good or evil—seems to keep its own shape any more. That’s why I wanted Morgon, then, so badly. At least he knows his own name. And a man who can name himself can see to name other things.”

Their faces under the restless candlelight seemed molded out of shadow and memory, they sat so quietly when her voice faded.

At last Master Tel said gently, “Things are themselves. We twist the shapes of them. Your own name lies within you still, a riddle. The High One, whoever he is, is still the High One, though Ghisteslwchlohm has worn his name like a mask.”

“And the High One’s harpist is what?” Har asked. Master Tel was silent a moment, withdrawing into a memory.

“He studied here, also, centuries ago… I would not have believed a man who took the Black could have so betrayed the disciplines of riddle-mastery.”

“Morgon intends to kill him,” Har said brusquely, and the Master’s eyes lifted again, startled.

“I had not heard…”

“Is that a betrayal of riddle-mastery? The wise man does not pursue his own shadow. There are no instincts of his own land-law in him to stay his hand; there is not one land-ruler, including the Morgol, who will not comply with his wishes. We give him understanding; we bar the gates to our kingdoms as he requests. And we wait for his final betrayal: self-betrayal.” His implacable gaze moved from face to face like a challenge. “The Master is master of himself. Morgon has absolute freedom of this realm. He has no longer the restraints of land-law. The High One is nowhere in evidence except in the evidence of his existence. Morgon has bound himself, so far, to his destiny by the tenets of riddle-mastery. He also has enormous, untested power. Is there a riddle on the master lists that permits the wise man to revenge?”

“Judgment,” one of the Masters murmured, but his eyes were troubled. “Who else is permitted to judge and condemn this man who has betrayed the entire realm for centuries?”

“The High One.”

“In lieu of the High One—”

“The Star-Bearer?” He twisted their silence like a harp string, then broke it. “The man who wrested his power from Ghisteslwchlohm because no one, not even the High One, gave him any help? He is bitter, self-sufficient, and by his actions he is questioning even the elusive restraints of riddle-mastery. But I doubt if he sees even that in himself, because wherever he looks there is Deth. His destiny is to answer riddles. Not destroy them.”

Something eased in Raederle’s mind. She said softly, “Did you tell him that?”

“I tried.”

“You complied with his wishes. Deth said he was driven out of Osterland by your wolves.”

“I had no desire to find even the shape of Deth’s footprint in my land.” He paused; his voice lost its harshness. “When I saw the Star-Bearer, I would have given him the scars off my hands. He said very little about Deth or even about Ghisteslwchlohm, but he said… enough. Later, as I began to realize what he was doing, how far from himself he seemed to have grown, the implications of his actions haunted me. He was always so stubborn…”

“Is he coming to Caithnard?”

“No. He asked me to take his tale and his riddles to the Masters, who in their wisdom would decide whether or not the realm could bear the truth about the one we have called the High One for so long.”

“That’s why you shut your doors,” she said suddenly to Master Tel, and he nodded, with the first trace of weariness she had ever seen in him.

“How can we call ourselves Masters?” he asked simply. “We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, histories, tales, wars, poetry, its riddles—if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds to itself, we will find it. If the tenets of riddle-mastery themselves are invalid, we will find that, too. The Master of Hed, in his actions, will tell us that.”

“He found his way out of that dark tower in Aum…” she murmured. Har shifted.

“Do you think he can find his way out of another tower, another deadly game? This time, he has what he always wanted: choice. The power to make his own rules for the game.”

She thought of the cold, sagging tower in Aum, rising like a solitary riddle itself among the gold-green oak, and saw a young man, simply dressed, stand in front of the worm-eaten door in the sunlight a long time before he moved. Then he lifted a hand, pushed the door open, and disappeared, leaving the soft air and the sunlight behind him. She looked at Har, feeling as though he had asked her a riddle and something vital hung balanced on her simple answer. She said, “Yes,” and knew that the answer had come from someplace beyond all uncertainty and confusion, beyond logic.

He was silent a moment, studying her. Then he said, his voice gentle as the mill of snow through the still, misty air of his land, “Morgon told me once that he sat alone in an old inn at Hlurle, midway on his journey to Erlenstar Mountain, and waited for a ship to take him back to Hed. That was one point when he felt he had a choice about the matter of his destiny. But one thing stopped him from going home: the knowledge that he could never ask you to come to Hed if he could not give you the truth of his own name, of himself. So he finished his journey. When I saw him come into my house not long ago, as simply as any traveller seeking shelter in my house from the night, I did not at first see the Star-Bearer. I saw only the terrible, relentless patience in a man’s eyes: the patience born out of absolute loneliness. He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?”

Her hands closed tightly, one clenched over the pattern of angles on her palm. She felt something in her that had been knotted like a fist ease open slowly. She nodded, not trusting her voice, and her hand opened, glinting with secret knowledge in the candlelight. “Yes,” she said then. “Whatever I have of Ylon’s power, I swear by my name, I will twist it beyond possibility into something of value. Where is he?”

“Coming through Ymris, undoubtedly, on his way to Anuin, and then to Lungold, since that seems to be where he is forcing Deth to go.”

“And then where? After that, where? He will not be able to go back to Hed.”

“No. Not if he kills the harpist. There would be no peace for him in Hed. I don’t know. Where does a man go to escape from himself? I’ll ask him that when I see him in Lungold.”

“You’re going there—”

He nodded. “I thought he might need one friend in Lungold.”

“Please, I want to come with you.”

She saw the unspoken protest in the Masters’ faces. The wolf-king nicked a thin brow. “How far will you go to escape from yourself? Lungold? And then where? How far can a tree escape from its roots?”

“I’m not trying to—” She stopped then, not looking at him.

He said softly, “Go home.”

“Har,” Master Tel said somberly, “that is advice you might well give yourself. That city is no place even for you. The wizards will seek Ghisteslwchlohm there; the Star-Bearer will seek Deth; and if the shape-changers gather there also, not a living thing in that city will be safe.”

“I know,” Har said, and the smile deepened faintly in his eyes. “There were traders in Kraal when I passed through it, who asked me where I thought the wizards had gone when they vanished. They were men who used both eyes to see out of, and they could look across half the realm to wonder if they wanted to risk their lives trading in a doomed city. Traders, like animals, have an instinct for danger.”

“So do you,” Master Tel said, with some severity, “but without the instinct to avoid it.”

“Where do you suggest we go to be safe in a doomed realm? And when, in the void between a riddle and its answer, was there ever anything but danger?”

Master Tel shook his head. He yielded the argument finally when he realized it had become one-sided. They rose then for supper, cooked for them by a handful of students who had no other family but the Masters, no home but the College. They spent the rest of the evening in the library, while Raederle and the wolf-king listened, discussing the possible origins of the shape-changers, the implications of the stone found on King’s Mouth Plain, and the strange face within it.

“The High One?” Master Tel suggested at one point, and Raederle’s throat closed in a nameless fear. “Is it possible they could be so interested in finding him?”

“Why should they be any more interested in the High One than he is in them?”

“Perhaps the High One is hiding from them,” someone else suggested. Har, sitting so quietly in the shadows Raederle had almost forgotten him, lifted his head suddenly, but he said nothing. One of the other Masters picked up the weave of the thought.

“If the High One lived in fear of them, why wouldn’t Ghisteslwchlohm? The law of the High One in the realm has been untroubled; he seems oblivious of them, rather than frightened. And yet… he is an Earth-Master; Morgon’s stars are inextricably bound to the earlier doom of the Earth-Masters and their children; it seems incredible that he has made no response to this threat to his realm.”

“What precisely is the threat? What are the ex- tent of their powers? What are their origins? Who are they? What do they want? What does Ghisteslwchlohm want? Where is the High One?”

The questions spun into a haze like torch smoke in the room; massive books were drawn from the shelves, pored over, left lying with wax from the candles pooling in their margins. Raederle saw the various unlockings of wizards’ books, heard the names or phrases that opened the seamless bindings of iron or brass or gold; saw the black, hurried writing that never faded, the blank pages that revealed their writings like an eye slowly opening to the touch of water, or fire, or a line of irrelevant poetry. Finally the broad tables were hidden beneath books, dusty rolls of parchment, and guttered candles; and unanswered riddles seemed to be burning on the wicks, lying in the shadows of the chair-backs and bookshelves. The Masters fell silent. Raederle, struggling with weariness, thought she could still hear their voices or their thoughts converging and separating, questioning, discarding, beyond the silence. Then Har rose a little stiffly, went to one of the books lying open and turned a page. “There is an old tale nagging at my mind that may not be worth considering: one out of Ymris, in Aloil’s collection of legends, I think, with a suggestion of shape-changing in it…”

Raederle stood up, feeling the fraying tendrils of thought stir and eddy around her. The Masters’ faces seemed remote, vaguely surprised as she moved. She said apologetically, “I’m half-asleep.”

“I’m sorry,” Master Tel said. He put a gentle hand on her arm, led her to the door. “One of the students had the forethought and kindness to go to the docks and tell your ship-master you were here; he brought your pack back with him. There will be a room prepared somewhere; I’m not sure—”

He opened the door, and a young student lounging beside the wall, reading, straightened abruptly and closed his book. He had a lean, dark, hook-nosed face, and a shy smile, with which he greeted Raederle. He still wore the robe of his rank: Beginning Mastery; the long sleeves were stained at the hems as though he had helped cook supper in it. He ducked his head after he gave her the smile and said diffidently to the floor, “We made a bed for you near the Masters’ chambers. I brought your things.”

“Thank you.” She said good-night to Master Tel and followed the young student through the quiet halls. He said nothing more, his head still bent, the flush of shyness in his cheeks. He led her into one of the small, bare chambers. Her pack lay on the bed; pitchers of water and wine stood on a tiny table under a branch of burning candles. The windows, inset deeply in the rough stone, were open to the dark, salty air billowing up over the cliff’s edge. She said, “Thank you,” again and went to look out, though she could see nothing but the old moon with a lost star drifting between its horns. She heard the student take an uncertain step behind her.

“The sheets are rough…” Then he closed the door and said, “Raederle.”

Her blood froze in her veins.

In the soft, shifting light of the candles, his face was a blur of spare lines and shadows. He was taller than she remembered; the stained white robe that had not changed with his shape-changing was puckered and strained across his shoulders. A wind shift stirred the candlelight, pulled the flames toward him and she saw his eyes. She put her hands to her mouth.

“Morgon?” Her voice jumped uncontrollably. Neither of them moved; a solid slab of air seemed wedged like stone between them. He looked at her out of eyes that had stared endlessly into the black, inner hollows of Erlenstar Mountain, into the rifts and hollows of a wizard’s brain. Then she moved forward, through the stone, touched and held something that seemed ageless, like the wind or night, of every shape and no shape, as worn as a pebble runnelled with water, tossed for an eon at the bottom of a mountain. He moved slightly, and the knowledge of his own shape returned to her hands. She felt his hand, light as a breath, stir her hair. Then they were apart again, though she did not know which one of them had moved.

“I would have come to you at Anuin, but you were here.” His voice sounded deep, harrowed, over-used. He moved finally, sat down on the bed. She stared at him wordlessly. He met her eyes, and his face, a stranger’s face, lean, hard-boned, still, shaded into a sudden, haunting gentleness. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You didn’t.” Her own voice sounded remote in her ears, as though it were the wind beside her speaking. She sat down beside him. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I know. I heard.”

“I didn’t think… Har said you weren’t coming here.”

“I saw your father’s ship off the coasts of Ymris. I thought, since Tristan was with you, it might stop here. So I came.”

“She might still be here; Cannon Master came for her, but—”

“They’ve gone to Hed.”

The finality in his voice made her study him a moment. “You don’t want to see her.”

“Not yet.”

“She asked me, if I saw you, to tell you this: be careful.”

He was silent, still meeting her eyes. He had, she realized slowly, a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the worn silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned, stood where she had been, gazing out the window. She wondered briefly if he could see Hed in the night.

“I heard tales of your journey,” he said. “Tristan, Lyra and you together on Mathom’s ship stealing by night out of Caithnard, blinding seven Ymris war-ships with a light like a small sun, taking a slow barge up the floodwaters of the Winter to the doorstep of the High One to ask him a question… And you tell me to be careful. What was that light that blinded even Astrin? It gave rise, among the traders, to marvellous speculation. Even I was curious.”

She started to answer him, then stopped. “What conclusions did you come to?”

He turned, came back to her side again, “That it was something you did, probably. I remembered you could do small things…”

“Morgon—”

“Wait. I’ll want to tell you now that—no matter what else has happened or will happen—it mattered to me that while I was coming down from Isig, you were making that journey. I heard your name, now and then, as I moved, Lyra’s, Tristan’s, like small, distant lights, unexpectedly.”

“She wanted to see you so badly. Couldn’t you have—”

“Not yet.”

“Then when?” she said helplessly. “After you’ve killed Deth? Morgon, that will be one harpist too many.”

His face did not change, but his eyes slid away from her, towards some memory. “Corrig?” He added after a moment, “I had forgotten him.”

She swallowed, feeling as though the simple statement had set the slab of distance between them again. He assumed his stillness like a shield, impervious and impenetrable; she wondered if it hid a total stranger or someone as familiar to her as his name. He seemed, looking at her, to read her thoughts. He reached across the distance, touched her briefly. Then another memory, shapeless, terrible, welled through the stillness into his eyes; he turned his face slightly until it faded. He said softly, “I should have waited to see you, too. But I just—I wanted to look at something very beautiful. The legend of An. The great treasure of the Three Portions. To know that you still exist. I needed that.”

His fingers brushed her again, as though she were something fragile as a moth wing. She closed her eyes, brought the heels of her hands against them and whispered, “Oh, Morgon. What in Hel’s name do you think I’m doing in this College?” She let her hands fall and wondered if, behind the armor of his solitude, she had at last got his attention. “I would be that for you, if I could,” she cried. “I would be mute, beautiful, changeless as the earth of An for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King’s white house at Anuin—I would do that for you and for no other man in the realm. But it would be a lie, and I will do anything but lie to you—I swear that. A riddle is a tale so familiar you no longer see it; it’s simply there, like the air you breathe, the ancient names of Kings echoing in the comers of your house, the sunlight in the comer of your eye; until one day you look at it and something shapeless, voiceless in you opens a third eye and sees it as you have never seen it before. Then you are left with the knowledge of the nameless question in you, and the tale that is no longer meaningless but the one thing in the world that has meaning any more.” She stopped for breath; his hand had closed without gentleness, around her wrist. His face was familiar finally, questioning, uncertain.

“What riddle? You came here, to this place, with a riddle?”

“Where else could I go? My father was gone; I tried to find you and I couldn’t. You should have known there was nothing in the world that would not change—”

“What riddle?”

“You’re the Master here; do I have to tell even you?”

His hand tightened. “No,” he said, and applied himself in silence to one final game within those walls. She waited, her own mind working the riddle with him, setting her name against her life, against the history of An, following strand after strand of thought that led nowhere, until at last he touched one possibility that built evenly onto another and onto another. She felt his fingers shift. Then his head lifted slowly, until he met her eyes again and she wished that the College would dissolve into the sea.

“Ylon.” He let the word wear away into another silence. “I never saw it. It was always there…” He loosed her abruptly, rose and spat an ancient curse on a single tone into the shadows. It patterned the glass in the window with cracks like a spider’s web. “They touched even you.”

She stared numbly at the place where his hand had been. She rose to leave, not knowing where in the world she could go. He caught her in one step, turned her to face him.

“Do you think I care?” he demanded incredulously. “Do you think that? Who am I to judge you? I am so blind with hatred I can’t even see my own land or the people I loved once. I’m hunting a man who never carried weapons in his life, to kill him while he stands facing me, against the advice of every land-ruler I have spoken to. What have you ever done in your life to make me have anything but respect for you?”

“I’ve never done anything in my life.”

“You gave me truth.”

She was silent, in the hard grip of his hands, seeing his face beyond its husk of stillness—bitter, vulnerable, lawless—the brand of stars on his forehead beneath his dishevelled hair. Her own hands lifted, closed on his arms. She whispered, “Morgon, be careful.”

“Of what? For what? Do you know who was there in Erlenstar Mountain to meet me that day Deth brought me there?”

“Yes. I guessed.”

“The Founder of Lungold has been sitting at the apex of the world for centuries, dispensing justice in the name of the High One. Where can I go to demand justice? That harpist is landless, bound to no King’s law; the High One seems oblivious to both our fates. Will anyone care if I kill him? In Ymris, in An itself, no one would question it—”

“No one will ever question anything you do! You are your own law, your own justice! Danan, Har, Heureu, the Morgol—they will give you everything you ask for the sake of your name, and the truth you have borne alone; but Morgon, if you create your own law, where will any of us go, if we ever need to, to demand retribution from you?”

He gazed down at her; she saw the flick of uncertainty in his eyes. Then his head shook, slowly, stubbornly. “Just one thing. Just this one thing. Someone will kill him eventually—a wizard, perhaps Ghisteslwchlohm himself. And I have the right.”

“Morgon—”

His hands tightened painfully. He was no longer seeing her but some black, private horror in his memory. She saw the sweat bead at his hairline, the muscles jump in his rigid face. He whispered, “While Ghisteslwchlohm was in my mind, nothing else existed. But at times when he… when he left me and I found myself still alive, lying in the dark, empty caverns of Erlenstar, I could hear Deth playing. Sometimes he played songs from Hed. He gave me something to live for.”

She closed her eyes. The harpist’s elusive face rose in her mind, blurred away; she felt the hard, twisted knot of Morgon’s bewildered rage and the harpist’s deceit like an unending, unanswerable riddle that no stricture could justify, and no Master in his quiet library could unravel. His torment ached in her; his loneliness seemed a vast hollow into which words would drop and disappear like pebbles. She understood then how his briefest word had closed court after court, kingdom after kingdom as he made his difficult, secret path through the realm. She whispered Har’s words, “I would give you the scars off my hands.” His hold loosened finally. He looked down at her a long time before he spoke.

“But you will not allow me that one right.”

She shook her head; her voice came with effort. “You’ll kill him, but even dead he’ll eat at your heart until you understand him.”

His hands dropped. He turned away from her, went again to the window. He touched the glass he had cracked, then turned again abruptly. She could barely see his face in the shadows; his voice sounded rough.

“I have to leave. I don’t know when I will see you again.”

“Where are you going?”

“Anuin. To speak to Duac. I’ll be gone before you ever reach it. It’s best that way, for both of us. If Ghisteslwchlohm ever realized how he could use you, I would be helpless; I would give him my heart with both my hands if he asked.”

“And then where?”

“To find Deth. And then, I don’t—” He checked abruptly. The silence eddied about him again as he stood listening; he seemed to blur at the edge of the candlelight. She listened, heard nothing but the night wind among the shivering names, the wordless riddling of the sea. She took a step toward him.

“Is it Ghisteslwchlohm?” Her voice was muted to his stillness. He did not answer, and she could not tell if he had heard her. A fear beat suddenly in the back of her throat; she whispered, “Morgon.” His face turned towards her then. She heard the sudden, dry catch of his breath. But he did not move until she went to him. Then he gathered her slowly, wearily into his silence, his face dropping against her hair.

“I have to go. I’ll come to you at Anuin. For judgment.”

“No—”

He shook his head slightly, stilling her. She felt, as her hands slid away from him, the strange, almost formless tension of air where he might have slung a sword beneath his robe. He said something she could not hear, his voice matching the wind’s murmur. She saw a flame-streaked shadow and then a memory.

She undressed, lay awake for a long time before she finally fell into a troubled sleep. She woke hours later, stared, startled, into the darkness. Thoughts were crowding into her mind, a tumultuous cross-weave of names, longings, memories, anger, a spattering cauldron of events, urges, inarticulate voices. She sat up, wondering what shape-changer’s mind she had become embroiled in, but there was an odd recognition in her that had nothing to do with them, that turned her face unerringly towards An, as if she could see it through the blank stone walls and the night. She felt her heart begin to pound. Roots tugged at her; her heritage of grass-molded barrows, rotting towers, kings’ names, wars and legends, pulling her towards a chaos the earth, left lawless too long, was slowly unleashing. She stood up, her hands sliding over her mouth, realizing two things at once. The whole of An was rousing at last. And the Star-Bearer’s path would lead him straight into Hel.

9

	9

SHE RODE OUT of Caithnard at dawn, stood a day and a half later in the vast oak forest bordering Hel, straining, as she had never done before, to unlock all the power and awareness in her mind. She had already sensed, as she came through the forest, the almost imperceptible movement of someone ahead of her, his need like a faint, indistinguishable scent, for swiftness, for secrecy. And at night, sleepless and aware, she had glimpsed for one terrifying moment, like the shape of some enormous beast rising against the moonlight, a relentless, powerful, enraged mind focussed to a single thought of destruction.

She wondered, as she stood looking over Hallard Blackdawn’s lands, what shape Morgon was taking through them. The pastures, sloping gently towards the river that ran beside the Lord’s house, looked quiet enough, but there was not an animal on them. She could hear hounds baying in the distance, wild, hoarse keening that never seemed to stop. There were no men working in the fields behind the house, and she was not surprised. That corner of Hel had been the last battlefield in the half-forgotten wars between Hel and An; it had held its own in an endless series of fierce, desperate battles until Oen of An, sweeping through Aum six centuries earlier, had almost contemptuously smashed the last stronghold of resistance and beheaded the last of the Kings of Hel, who had taken refuge there. The land had always been uneasy with legend; the turn of a plow could still unearth an ancient sword eaten to the core with age or the shaft of a broken, spear banded with rings of gold. In so many. centuries, King Farr of Hel, bereft of his head, had had much leisure to ponder his grievances, and, loosed at last from the earth, he would have wasted little time gathering himself out of Hallard’s fields. The chaos of voices Raederle had heard two nights earlier had faded into a frightening stillness: the dead were unbound, aware, and plotting.

She saw, as she rode across Hallard’s upper pastures, a group of riders swing out of the woods into a meadow across her path. She reined, her heart pounding, then recognized the broad, black-haired figure of Hallard Blackdawn towering above his men. They were armed, but lightly; there was a suggestion of futility in their bare heads and the short swords at their sides. She sensed, unexpectedly, their exasperation and uncertainty. Hallard’s head turned as she sat watching; she could not see his eyes, but she felt the startled leap in his mind of her name.

She lifted the reins in her hands hesitantly as he galloped up to her. She had no desire to argue with him, but she needed news. So she did not move, and he pulled up in front of her, big-boned, dark, sweating in the hot, silent afternoon. He groped for words a moment, then said explosively, “Someone should flay that ship-master. After taking you to Isig and back, he let you ride unescorted from Caithnard into this? Have you had news of your father?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Is it bad?”

“Bad.” He closed his eyes. “Those hounds have been at it for two solid days. Half my livestock is missing; my wheat fields look as though they’ve been harrowed by millwheels, and the ancient barrows in the south fields have been flattened to the ground by nothing human.” He opened his eyes again; they were red-veined with lack of sleep. “I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of An. I sent a messenger to east Aum yesterday, to Cyn Croeg. He couldn’t even get across the border. He came back babbling of whispering trees. I sent another to Anuin; I don’t know if he’ll make it. And if he does, what can Duac do? What can you do against the dead?” He waited, pleading for an answer, then shook his head. “Curse your father,” he said bluntly. “He’ll have to fight Oen’s wars over again if he isn’t careful. I’d wrest kingship from the land myself, if I could think how.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s what they want. The dead kings. Have you seen any of them?”

“No. But I know they’re out there. Thinking.” He brooded at the strip of woods along the pastures. “What in Hel’s name would they want with my cattle? The teeth of these kings are scattered all over my fields. King Farr’s skull has been grinning above the hearth in the great hall for centuries; what is he going to eat with?”

Her eyes slid from the unstirred woods back to his face. “His skull?” An idea flickered in the back of her mind. Hallard nodded tiredly.

“Supposedly. Some dauntless rebel stole his head from Oen, the tale goes, after Oen crowned it and stuck it on a spearhead in his kitchen-midden. Years later it found its way back here, with the crown cut and melded again to fit bare bone. Mag Blackdawn, whose father had died in that war, was still angry enough to nail it like a battle emblem, crown and all, above his hearthfire. After so many centuries the gold has worn into the bone; you can’t keep one without the other. That’s why I don’t understand,” he added at a tangent. “Why they’re troubling my lands; they’re my ancestors.”

“There were lords of An killed here, too,” she suggested. “Maybe they were the ones in your wheat fields. Hallard, I want that skull.”

“You what?”

“Farr’s skull. I want it.”

He stared at her. She saw, gazing back at him, the faint struggle in him as he tried to shift her back to her place in his known world. “What for?”

“Just give it to me.”

“In Hel’s name, what for?” he shouted, then stopped and closed his eyes again. “I’m sorry. You’re starting to sound like your father; he has a gift for making me shout. Now. Let’s both try to be rational—”

“I was never less interested in being rational in my life. I want that skull. I want you to go into your great hall and take it off your wall without damaging it and wrap it in velvet and give it to me at your—”

“Velvet!” he exploded. “Are you mad?”

She thought about it for a split second and shouted back at him. “Maybe! But not so I would care! Yes, velvet! Would you want to look at your own skull on a piece of sacking?”

His horse jerked, as though he had pulled it in- voluntarily back from her. His lips parted; she heard his quick breathing as he struggled for words. Then he reached out slowly, put his hand on her forearm. “Raederle.” He spoke her name like a reminder to them both. “What are you going to do with it?”

She swallowed, her own mouth going dry as she contemplated her intentions. “Hallard, the Star-Bearer is crossing your land—”

His voice rose again incredulously. “Now?”

She nodded. “And behind him—behind me, following him, is something… maybe the Founder of Lungold. I can’t protect Morgon from him, but maybe I can keep the dead of An from betraying his presence—”

“With a skull?”

“Will you keep your voice down!”

He rubbed his face with his hands. “Madir’s bones. The Star-Bearer can take care of himself.”

“Even he might be a little pressed by the Founder and the unbound forces of An all at once.” Her voice steadied. “He is going to Anuin; I want to see that he gets there. If—”

“No.”

“If you don’t—”

“No.” His head was shaking slowly back and forth. “No.”

“Hallard.” She held his eyes. “If you don’t give me that skull now, I will lay a curse on your threshold that no friend will ever cross it, on the high gates and posterns and stable doors that they will never close again, on the torches in your house that they will never burn, on your hearth stones that no one standing under Farr’s hollow eyes will ever feel warm. This I swear by my name. If you don’t give me that skull I will rouse the dead of An, myself, on your land in the name of the King of An and ride with them into war on your fields against the ancient Kings of Hel. This I swear by my name. If you don’t—”

“All right!”

His cry echoed, furious and desperate, across his lands. His face was patched white under his tan; he stared at her, breathing hard, while blackbirds startled up from the trees behind them and his men shifted their mounts uneasily in the distance. “All right,” he whispered. “Why not? The whole of An is in chaos, why shouldn’t you ride around with a dead king’s skull in your hands? But, woman, I hope you know what you’re doing. Because if you are harmed, you will lay a curse of grief and guilt across my threshold, and until I die no fire in my hearth will ever be great enough to warm me.” He wheeled his horse without waiting for her to answer; she followed him down through his fields, across the river to his gates, feeling the frightened blood pounding in her ears like footsteps.

She waited, still mounted, while he went inside. She could see through the open gates the empty yard. Not even the forge fire was lit; there were no stray animals, no children shouting in the comers, only the incessant, invisible baying of hounds. Hallard reappeared shortly, a round object gathered in the folds of a length of rich, red velvet. He handed it to her wordlessly; she opened the velvet, caught a glimpse of white bone with gold melting into it and said, “There’s one more thing I want.”

“What if it’s not his head?” He watched her. “Legends are spun around so many lies—”

“It had better be,” she whispered. “I need a necklace of glass beads. Can you find one for me?”

“Glass beads.” He covered his eyes with his fingers and groaned like the hounds. Then he flung up his hands and turned again. He was gone longer this time; the expression on his face when he came back was, if possible, more harassed. He dangled a small, sparkling circle of round, clear beads in front of her; a simple necklace that a trader might have given away to a young girl or a hard-worked farmer’s wife. “They’ll look fine rattling among Farr’s bones.” Then, as she reached down to take it, he grasped her wrist again. “Please,” he whispered. “I gave you the skull. Now come into my house, out of danger. I can’t let you ride through Hel. It’s quiet now, but when night falls, there’s not a man who will stir beyond his barred doors; you’ll be alone out there in the darkness with the name you bear and all the twisted hatred of the old lords of Hel. All the small powers you have inherited will not be enough to help you. Please—”

She pulled loose of him, backed her horse. “Then I’ll have to test the powers of another heritage. If I don’t come back, it will not matter.”

“Raederle!”

She felt the sound of her own name spin out over his lands, echo in the deep woods and places of secret gatherings. She rode swiftly away from his house before he could follow her. She went downriver to his southern fields, where the young wheat lay whipped and churned and the ancient graves of Hallard’s ancestors, once smooth green swellings whose doors had sunk waist-deep in the earth, were smashed like eggs. She reined in front of them. Through the dark crumbled soil and the broken foundation stones she could see the pale glint of rich arms no living man dared touch. She lifted her head. The woods were motionless; the summer sky stretched endlessly over An, cloudless and peaceful, except toward the west where the blue gathered to a dark, intense line above the oak. She turned her horse again, looked out over the empty, whispering fields. She said softly into the wind, “Farr, I have your head. If you want it, to lie with your bones under the earth of Hel, then come and get it.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon gathering wood on the edge of the trees above the barrows. As the sun went down she lit a fire and unwrapped the skull from its velvet coverings. It was discolored with age and soot; the gold banding its wide brow was riveted to the bone. The teeth, she noted, were intact in the tightly clenched jaws; the deep eyepits and wide, jutting cheekbone gave her a hint of the king whose head had stared, furious and unsubmissive, over Oen’s midden. The firelight rippled the shadows in the eye sockets, and her mouth dried. She spread the bright cloth, laid the skull on top of it. Then she drew the necklace of glass beads out of her pocket, bound an image in her mind to them with her name. She dropped them into the fire. All around her, enclosing the skull, the firewood and her uneasy mount, rose a luminous circle of huge, fiery moons.

At moonrise, she heard the cattle in Hallard’s barn begin to bawl. Dogs in the small farms beyond the trees set up a constant chorus of shrill, startled barking. Something that was not the wind sighed through the oak, and Raederle’s shoulders hunched as it passed over her head. Her horse, lying beside her, scrambled to its feet, trembling. She tried to speak to it soothingly, but the words stuck in her throat. There was a great crashing in the distant trees; animals lying quiet until then, began to stir and flee before it. A stag running blind, reared and belled as it came suddenly upon the strange, fiery circle, wrenched itself around and shot towards the open fields. Small deer, foxes, weasels roused in the night, bounded silently, desperately past her, pursued by the rending of branches and underbrush, and a weird, unearthly bellow that shattered again and again through the trees. Raederle, shuddering, her hands icy, her thoughts scattering like blown chaff, added branch after branch to the fire until the beads swam red with flame. She stopped herself from burning all the wood at once by sheer will, and stood, her hands over her mouth to keep her heart from leaping free, waiting for the nightmare to emerge from the dark.

It came in the shape of the great White Bull of Aum. The enormous animal, whom Cyn Croeg loved as Raith of Hel loved his pig herds, loomed out of the night towards her flames, pricked and driven by riders whose mounts, yellow, rust, black, were lean, rangey, evil-eyed. Their heads snaking sideways, they nipped at the bull as they ran. The bull, flecked with blood and sweat, his flat, burly face maddened and terrified, swung past Raederle’s circle so closely she could see his rimmed eyes and smell the musk of his fear. The riders swarmed about him as he turned, ignoring her, except the last who, turning a grinning face her direction, showed her the seam of the scar across his face that ended in a white, withered eye.

All sounds around her seemed to dwindle to one point inside her head; she wondered, dimly, if she was going to faint. The groan of the bull in the distance made her open her eyes again. She saw it, gigantic and ash-colored under the moonlight, blundering with its horns lowered across Hallard’s fields. The riders, their arms flickering a bluish-silver like lightning, seemed mercilessly intent upon driving it into Hallard’s closed gates. There they would leave it, she knew in a sudden, terrible flash of insight, like a gift at Hallard’s doorway, a dead weight of bull for him to explain somehow to the Lord of Aum. She wondered, in that split second, how Raith’s pigs were faring. Then her horse screamed behind her and she whirled, gasping, to face the wraith of King Farr of Hel.

He was, as she imagined him, a big, powerful man with a wide slab of a face hard as a slammed gate. His beard and long hair were copper; he wore rings of hard metal at every knuckle, and his sword, rising above one of the glass moons, was broad at the base as the length of his hand. He wasted no time with words; the sword, cutting down into the thin air of illusion, nearly wrenched him on his horse. He straightened, tried to ride his horse through it, but the animal balked with a squeal of pain and cast a furious eye at him. He reined it back to try to leap; Raederle, reaching for the skull, held it above the flames.

“I’ll drop it,” she warned breathlessly. “And then I will take it, black with ash, to Anuin and throw it back in the midden.”

“You will not live,” he said. The voice was in her mind; she saw then the ragged, scarlet weal at his throat. He cursed her in his hoarse, hollow voice, thoroughly and methodically, from head to foot, in language she had never heard any man use.

Her face was burning when he finished; she dangled the skull by one finger in an eye socket over the flames and said tersely, “Do you want this or not? Shall I use it for kindling?”

“You’ll burn up your wood by dawn,” the implacable voice said. “I’ll take it then.”

“You’ll never take it.” Her own voice, colored with anger, sounded with a dead certainty that she almost felt. “Believe that. Your bones lie rotting in the fields of a man whose allegiance is sworn to An, and only you remember what shinbones and snapped neckbone belong to you. If you had this crown, it might give you the dignity of remembrance, but you’ll never take it from me. If I choose, I’ll give it to you. For a price.”

“I bargain with no man. I submit to no man. Least of all to a woman spawned out of the Kings of An.”

“I am spawned out of worse than that. I will give you your skull for one price only. If you refuse me once, I will destroy it. I want an escort of Kings through Hel and into Anuin for one man—”

“Anuin!” The word reverberated painfully in her own skull and she winced. “I will never—”

“I will ask only once. The man is a stranger to An, a shape-changer. He is moving in fear of his life through An, and I want him hidden and protected. Following him is the greatest wizard of the realm; he’ll try to stop you, but you will not submit. If the man is harmed on the way to Anuin by this wizard, your crowned skull is forfeit.” She paused, added temperately, “Whatever else you do on your journey through An will be your own business, as long as he is protected. I’ll give you the skull in the house of the Kings of An.”

He was silent. She realized suddenly that the night had grown very quiet; even Haggard Blackdawn’s hounds were still. She wondered if they were all dead. Then she wondered, almost idly, what Duac would say when he found the wraiths of the Kings of Hel in his house. Farr’s voice seeped into her thoughts.

“And after?”

“After?”

“After we reach Anuin? What demands, what restrictions will you place on us in your own house?”

She drew breath, and found no more courage left in her for demands. “If the man is safe, none. If you have kept him safe. But I want an escort of Kings of Hel only, not a gathering of the army of the dead.”

There was another long silence. She dragged a branch onto the fire, saw the flick of calculation in his eyes. Then he said unexpectedly, “Who is this man?”

“If you don’t know his name, no one can take it from you. You know the shapes of Hel: trees, animals, the earth; you are of them, rooted with them. Find the stranger whose outward shape is of An, whose core is of nothing of An.”

“If he is nothing of An, then what is he to you?”

“What do you think?” she asked wearily. “When I’m sitting here alone for his sake in the roused night of Hel bargaining with a dead king over his skull?”

“You’re a fool.”

“Maybe. But you’re bargaining, too.”

“I do not bargain. An deprived me of my crown, and An will give it back to me. One way or another. I’ll give you my answer at dawn. If your fire goes out before then, beware. I will show you no more mercy than Oen of An showed to me.”

He settled himself to wait, his face, baleful and unblinking, rising out of the darkness above the fiery beads. She wanted to scream at him suddenly that she had nothing to do with his feuds or his death, that he had been dead for centuries and his vengeance was a matter insignificant in the turmoil of events beyond An. But his brain was alive only in the past, and the long centuries must have seemed to him the passing of a single night over Hel. She sat down in front of the fire, her mouth papery. She wondered if, when dawn came, he intended to kill her or to barter with Duac over her as she had bartered over his skull. Hallard Blackdawn’s house, with all its windows lit at that hour, across two fields and the river, seemed as far away as a dream. As she gazed at it helplessly, the din began again in the fields, a new sound this time: the chilling clash of weapons in a night battle in Hallard’s cow pasture. The hounds bayed the danger hoarsely, imperatively, like battle horns. The eyes of the King met hers over the illusion of fire, relentless, assured. She looked down from him to the fire and saw the small, blazing circle, the core of the illusion, the glass beads cracking slowly in the tempering of the fire.

The cries faded to a comer of her mind. She heard the snap of wood, the sibilant language of the flames. She opened her hand, touched an angle of flame and watched the reflection of it in her mind. It groped for her shape as she held it in her mind and her hand; she kept her own thoughts mute, tapped a silence deeply within her mind which it slowly moved and gathered. She let it gather for a long time, sitting motionless as the ancient trees around her, her hand uplifted, open to the flame that traced constantly the twelve-sided figure on her palm. Then a shadow flowed over her mind, quenching the fire in it: another mind spanning the night, drawing into its vortex a comprehension of the living and dead of An. It passed like great, dark wings blocking the moon and brought her back, shivering and defenseless, into the night. She closed her hand quickly over the small flame and looked up to see the first hint of expression in Farr’s eyes.

“What was that?” His voice rasped jarringly in her head.

She felt his mind unexpectedly and knew that she was beginning to startle him, too. She said, “That is what you will protect the Star—the stranger from.”

“That?”

“That.” She added after a moment, “He’ll blot out your wraith like a candle if he realizes what you are doing and nothing will be left of you but your bones and a memory. Do you want your skull so badly now?”

“I want it,” he said grimly. “Either here or at Anuin, Witch. Take your choice.”

“I’m not a witch,”

“What are you, then, with your eyes full of fire?”

She thought about it. Then she said simply, “I am nameless,” while something too bitter for sorrow touched the back of her mouth. She turned again to the fire, added more wood to it, followed the wild flight of each spark to its vanishing point. She cupped the fire again, this time in both hands, and began slowly to shape it.

She was interrupted many times during the endless night: by the run of Hallard Blackdawn’s stolen cattle, bawling in terror across his wheat fields; by the gathering of armed men around Farr as he waited, and his bellow of fury in her mind when they laughed at him; by the flurry of sword play that followed. She lifted her head once and saw only his bare bones on his horse, blurred with fire; another time, she saw his head like a helm in the crook of his arm, his expression changeless while her eyes groped for shape above the stump of his neck. Near dawn, when the moon set, she had forgotten him, forgotten everything. She had drawn the flames into a hundred varied shapes, flowers that opened then melted away, fiery birds that took wing from her hand. She had forgotten even her own shape; her hands, weaving in and out of the fire, seemed one more shape of it. Something undefined, unexpected, was happening in her mind. Glimpses of power, knowledge, elusive as the fire, passed before her mind’s eye, as though she had wakened within her memories of her heritage. Faces, shadows stretching beyond her knowledge formed and vanished under her probing; strange plants, sea languages whispered just beyond her hearing. A void in the depth of the sea, or at the heart of the world, cut a hollow through her mind; she gazed into it fearlessly, curiously, too lost within her work to wonder whose black thought it was. She kindled a distant star of fire even in that barren waste. She felt then, as it stirred, that it was no void, but a tangle of memory and power on the verge of definition.

That knowledge sent her groping urgently for the simpler chaos of An. She came to rest like a weary traveller within herself. The dawn mists lay over Hallard’s fields; the ash-colored morning hung amid the trees without a sound to welcome it. All that remained of her night fire was the charred stubble of branches. She stirred stiffly, sleepily, then saw the hand out of the corner of her eye, reaching for the skull.

She set it blazing with an illusion of fire from her mind; Farr flinched back. She picked up the skull and rose, stood facing him. He whispered, “You are made of fire…”

She felt it in her fingers, running beneath the skin, in the roots of her hair. She said, her voice cracking with tiredness, “Have you made up your mind? You’ll never find Oen here; his bones lie in the Field of Kings outside of Anuin. If you can survive the journey, you can take your revenge there.”

“Do you betray your own family?”

“Will you give me an answer?” she cried, stung; and he was silent, struggling. She felt his yielding before he spoke, and she whispered, “Swear by your name. Swear by the crown of the Kings of Hel. That neither you nor anyone else will touch me or this skull until you have crossed the threshold at Anuin.”

“I swear it.”

“That you will gather the kings as you journey across Hel, to find and protect the shape of the stranger travelling to Anuin, against all living, against all dead.”

“I swear it.”

“That you will tell no one but the Kings of Hel what you are sworn to do.”

“I swear it. By my name, in the name of the Kings of Hel and by this crown.”

He looked, dismounted in the dawn light with the taste of submission in his mouth, almost alive. She drew a soundless breath and loosed it. “All right. I swear in my father’s name and in the name of the man you will escort, that when I see him in the King’s house at Anuin, I will give you your skull and ask nothing further from you. All binding between us will end. The only other thing I ask is that you let me know when you find him.”

He gave a brief nod. His eyes met the black, hollow, mocking gaze of the skull. Then he turned and mounted. He looked down at her a moment before he left, and she saw the disbelief in his eyes. Then he rode away, noiseless as a drift of leaves beneath the trees.

She met, as she herself rode out of the woods, Hallard Blackdawn and his men venturing out to count the dead cattle in the lower fields. He stared at her; his voice, when he found it finally, was strengthless.

“Oen’s right hand. Is it you or a ghost?”

“I don’t know. Is Cyn Croeg’s bull dead?”

“They ran the life out of it… Come to the house.” His eyes, the shock wearing away from them, held a strange expression: half-solicitous, half-awed. His hand rose hesitantly, touched her. “Come in. You look—you look—”

“I know. But I can’t. I’m going to Anuin.”

“Now? Wait, I’ll give you an escort.”

“I have one.” She watched his eyes fall to the skull riding the pommel of her saddle; he swallowed.

“Did he come for it?”

She smiled slightly. “He came. We did some bargaining—”

“Oen’s right—” He shuddered unashamedly. “No one ever bargained with Farr. For what? The safety of Anuin?”

She drew breath. “Well, no. Not exactly.” She took the necklace out of her pocket and gave it to him. “Thank you. I couldn’t have survived without it.”

Glancing back once, as she reached down to open a field gate, she saw him standing motionlessly beside a dead bullock, still staring at the worthless handful of cracked, fired beads.

She crossed the length of Hel as far as Raith’s lands with a growing, invisible escort of Kings. She felt them around her, groped for their minds until they gave her their names: Acor, third King of Hel, who had brought through force and persuasion the last of the bickering lords under his control; Ohroe the Cursed, who had seen seven of his nine sons fall one after another in seven consecutive battles between Hel and An; Nemir of the Pigs, who had spoken the language of both men and pigs, who had bred the boar Hegdis-Noon and had as his pig-herder the witch Madir; Evern the Falconer, who trained hawks for battle against men; and others, all Kings, as Farr had sworn, who joined him, the last of the Kings, in his journey to the stronghold of the Kings of An. She rarely saw them; she felt them range before and behind her, their minds joining in a network of thought, legend, plots, remembrances of Hel during their lives, after their deaths. They were still bound to the earth of An, more than even they realized; their minds slid easily in and out of different shapes that their bones had become entwined with: roots, leaves, insects, the small bodies of animals. It was through this deep, wordless knowledge of An, Raederle knew, that they recognized the Star-Bearer, the man whose shape would hold none of the essence of An.

They had found him swiftly. Farr broke his silence to tell her that; she did not ask what shape he had taken. The Kings surrounded him loosely as he moved: the hart, perhaps, that bounded in terror across a moonlit field at their presence; the bird startled into flight; the fieldmouse scuttling through broken shafts of hay. She guessed that he dared not keep one shape long, but she was surprised that the Kings never once lost track of him. They were a decoy to the powerful mind she glimpsed occasionally as it groped over the land. No man of An, and certainly no stranger, could have passed among them unnoticed; the wizard, she guessed, must search every man they did meet. She was surprised also that he did not threaten her as she rode alone through the troubled land; perhaps he thought, seeing the skull on her saddle, watching her sleep at nights in the woods impervious to the tumult around her, that she was mad.

She avoided people, so she had no news of the extent of the trouble, but she saw, again and again, empty fields at midday, barns and stables locked and guarded, lords travelling with armed retinues towards Anuin. Their tempers, she knew, must be worn thin by the constant harassment; they would, in time, turn their houses into small, armed fortresses, draw into themselves and soon trust no man, living or dead. The mistrust and the anger against the absent King of An would fester into open war, a great battleground of living and dead, that not even Mathom would be able to control. And she, bringing the Kings of Hel into Anuin, might precipitate it.

She thought much about that, lying sleepless at night with the skull beside her. She tried to prepare for it, exploring her powers, but she had little experience to guide her. She was dimly aware of what she might be able to do, of powers intangible as shadows in her mind, powers she could not yet quite grasp and control. She would do what she could at Anuin; Morgon, if he could risk it, would help. Perhaps Mathom would return; perhaps the Kings would retreat from Anuin without an army behind them. Perhaps she could find something else to barter with. She hoped Duac, in some small measure, would understand. But she doubted it.

She reached Anuin nine days after she had left Hallard’s land. The Kings had begun to appear before they entered the gates, riding in a grim, amazing escort about the man they guarded. The streets of the city seemed fairly untroubled; there were quite a few people out staring, uneasy and astonished, at the group of riders with their nervous, wicked mounts, their crowned heads, armbands and brooches of gold, their arms and rich clothes spanning nearly the entire history of the land. Among them, cloaked and hooded in the warm day, rode the man they had been guarding. He seemed resigned to his unearthly escort; he rode without a glance at it, slowly and steadily through the streets of Anuin, up the gentle slope to the house of the King. The gates were open; they rode unchallenged into the yard. They dismounted, to the confusion of the grooms, who had no intention, even under the weight of Farr’s hot gaze, of taking their horses. Raederle, riding alone into the gates behind them, saw them follow the cloaked figure up the steps to the hall. The expression in the grooms’ faces as they hesitated around her made her realize that they thought she, too, might be a wraith. Then one came forward uncertainly to hold her reins and stirrup as she dismounted. She took the skull from the pommel, carried it with her into the hall.

She found Duac alone in the hall, staring, speechless, at the collection of Kings. His mouth was open; as she entered, his eyes flicked to her and she heard it click closed. The blood ran out of his face, leaving it the color of Farr’s skull. She wondered, as she went towards the hooded man, why he did not turn and speak to her. He turned then, as though he had felt her thoughts, and she found her own mouth dropped open. The man the Kings had followed and guarded through Hel had not been Morgon but Deth.

10

	10

SHE STOPPED SHORT, staring at him in utter disbelief. The skin was strained taut, blanched against the bones of his face: he looked, haunted for nine days by the wraiths of Hel, as though he had not slept much. She breathed, “You.” She looked at Farr, who was running a calculating eye over the beams and comers of the house. Duac, who had begun to move, finally, was coming towards her carefully through the assortment of Kings. They were standing silently, expectantly, their strange shields scrolled with nameless animals deflecting flat, burning fields of light from the windows. Her heart began to hammer suddenly. She found her voice again, and Farr’s head turned sharply as she spoke, “What are you doing here? I left you in the backlands going to Lungold.”

The familiar, even voice sounded frayed, almost tight. “I had no desire to meet the Morgol or her guards in the backlands. I sailed down the Cwill to Hlurle, and found passage on a ship to Caithnard. There are not many places in the realm left open to me.”

“So you came here?”

“It is one last place.”

“Here.” She drew breath and shouted at him in sudden, furious despair, halting Duac mid-pace, “You came here, and because of you I have let all the Kings of Hel into this house!” She heard the hollow rasp of Farr’s question in her brain, and she turned on him. “You brought the wrong man! He isn’t even a shape-changer!”

“We found him in that shape, and he chose to keep it,” Farr answered, in his surprise momentarily defensive. “He was the only stranger moving secretly through Hel.”

“He couldn’t have been! What kind of a poor bargain was it that you kept? You would have had to search all the back streets and docksides of the realm to find a man I wanted less to see.”

“I kept the vows I swore.” She could tell by Duac’s expression that the harsh, unearthly voice was rebounding also in his mind. “The skull is mine. The binding is finished.”

“No.” She backed a step from him, her fingers locked tightly around the lidless gaze and grin of the skull. “You left the man you swore to guard somewhere in Hel, to be harried by the dead, to be discovered by—”

“There was no one else!” She saw even Deth wince slightly at his exasperated shout. He stepped towards her, his eyes dark smoldering. “Woman, you are bound by your name to your own vow, to the bargain that brought me across this threshold where Oen carried that skull and my last curse with it and throned me king of his midden. If you don’t give me that skull, I swear by—”

“You will swear nothing.” She gathered light from the shields, kindled it in her mind, and laid it like a yellow bar in front of him. “And you will not touch me.”

“Can you control us all, Witch?” he asked grimly. “Try.”

“Wait,” Duac said abruptly. He held a hand, palm outward, in the air, as Farr’s baleful gaze swung at him. “Wait.” The authority of desperation in his voice held Farr momentarily at bay. Duac stepped cautiously past the light on the floor, reached Raederle and put his hands on her shoulders. She saw, looking up at him, Ylon’s face briefly, the pale, angled brows, the eyes uneasy with color. Her shoulders flinched slightly at the sudden human touch, when she had spoken to nothing human for nine days, and she saw the anguish break into his eyes. He whispered, “What have you done to yourself? And to this house?”

She wanted, gazing back at him, to spread the whole tangled tale out for him, to make him understand why her hair hung lank and dirty to her waist, why she was arguing with a dead king over his skull and could seemingly shape pure air into flame. But in the face of Farr’s anger she dared yield nothing. She said stiffly, “We made a bargain, Fair and I—”

“Farr.” His lips shaped the word almost without sound, and she nodded, swallowing drily.

“I made Hallard Blackdawn give me his skull. I sat up all night during the rousing of Hel, circled by fire, working with fire, and by dawn I had the power to bargain. The Star-Bearer was coming through Hel to Anuin; Farr swore to gather Kings to protect him in exchange for the skull. He swore by his own name and the names of the Kings of Hel. But he didn’t keep his part of the bargain. He didn’t even try to find a shape-changer; he simply guarded the first stranger who he found travelling across Hel—”

“The stranger made no objection.” The cold voice of Evern the Falconer cut across her words. “He was being hunted. He used our protection.”

“Of course he was hunted! He—” Then the realization slapped at her, of the true extent of the danger she had brought into her house. She whispered, her fingers icy against the bone in her hands, “Duac—” But his eyes had flicked away from her face to the harpist.

“Why did you come here? The Star-Bearer has not reached Anuin yet, but you must have known the traders would bring his tale.”

“I thought your father might have returned.”

“What,” Duac inquired more in wonder than anger, “in Hel’s name would you expect my father to say to you?”

“Very little.” He stood with a haunting, familiar quiescence, but there was a preoccupation in his face, as though he were listening for something beyond their hearing. Raederle touched Duac’s arm.

“Duac.” Her voice shook. “Duac. I am bringing more than the Kings of Hel into Anuin.”

He closed his eyes, breather something. “What now? You vanished two months ago from Caithnard, took our father’s ship and left Rood to ride home alone without the faintest idea of where you were. Now you appear out of nowhere, with as much warning, accompanied by the Kings of Hel, an outlawed harpist and a crowned skull. The walls of this house could cave in on my head next and I doubt if I’d be surprised.” He paused a moment; his hold tightened. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head, still whispering. “No. Oh, no. Duac, I was trying to guard Morgon against Ghisteslwchlohm.”

“Ghisteslwchlohm?”

“He is—he followed Deth through Hel.”

The expression died on his face. His eyes went beyond her to Deth, and then he lifted his hands carefully off her shoulders as though he were lifting stones. “All right.” There was no hope in his voice. “Maybe we can—”

The harpist’s voice, sprung taut, interrupted him. “The Founder is nowhere in An.”

“I felt him!” Raederle cried. “He was behind you at the gates of Anuin. I felt his mind searching all the corners of Hel; he would break through my mind like a black wind, and I could feel his hatred, his rage—”

“That is not the Founder.”

“Then who—” She stopped. The men, living and dead, seemed motionless as figures on a chessboard around her. She shook her head slowly, mute again, while the bone strained under her grip.

The harpist said with unexpected intensity, “I would never have chosen this place. But you didn’t give me a choice.”

“Morgon?” she whispered. She remembered then his quick, silent departure from Caithnard, the lawless mind that had found her, yet never threatened her. “I brought you here so he could kill you?” His face, hopeless, exhausted, gave her his answer. Something between a shout and a sob of grief and confusion welled through her. She stared at Deth, breathing tightly, feeling the hot swell of tears behind her eyes. “There are things not worth killing. Curse us all for this: you for making him what he has become; him for not seeing what he has become; and me for bringing you nearly face-to-face. You will destroy him even with your death. There’s the door, open. Find a ship out of Anuin—”

“To where?”

“Anywhere! To the bottom of the sea, if nowhere else. Go harp with Ylon’s bones, I don’t care. Just go, so far he’ll forget your name and your memory. Go—”

“It’s too late.” His voice was almost gentle. “You have brought me into your house.”

She heard a step behind her and whirled. But it was Rood, flushed and dishevelled from riding, coming precipitously into the hall. He cast a crow-colored eye at the assembly of wraiths pulled out of their graves by a dream of revenge, armed as no King of An had armed himself for centuries. He stopped short; Raederle saw, even as his face whitened, the gleam of recognition in his eyes. Then Ohroe the Cursed, standing near him, whose face was seamed red from temple to jaw with his death wound, gripped the neck of Rood’s tunic and wrenched him backward. His arm, heavy with chain mail, locked tightly around Rood’s throat; a knife flashed in his other hand; the point of it pricked Rood’s own temple. He said succinctly, “Now. Let us bargain again.” Raederle’s terrified, furious rill of thought blazed white-hot across the knife blade and leaped into Ohroe’s eyes. He gasped, dropping the knife. Rood’s elbow slamming into the mailed ribs seemed to have no effect, but the arm around his throat loosened as Ohroe lifted his hand to his head. Rood slipped free, pausing as he crossed the hall only to pull off the wall an ancient blade that had hung there since Hagis’s death. He joined Duac who said tersely, “Will you put that sword down? The last thing I want is a pitched battle in this house.”

The Kings seemed to be shifting together without sound. Among them, the harpist, his head lowered slightly as though his attention were focussed on nothing of the movement around him, was conspicuous in his stillness, and Rood made a sound in his throat. He took a firmer grip on the sword hilt and said, “Tell them that. At least when we’re wraiths ourselves, we can fight on our own terms. Who brought them here? Deth?”

“Raederle.”

Rood’s head turned sharply. He saw Raederle, then, standing a little behind Duac. His eyes went from her worn face to the skull in her hands, and the sword tip struck the floor with a clink. She saw a shudder rack through him.

“Raederle? I saw you and I didn’t even recognize you…” He flung the sword on the stones and went to her. He reached out to her as Duac had, but his hands dropped before he touched her. He gazed at her, and she saw that, deep in him, something dormant, unfamiliar to him, was struggling with the sense of her power. He whispered, “What happened to you? What happens to people who try to make that journey to Erlenstar Mountain?”

She swallowed, lifted one hand away from the skull to touch him. “Rood—”

“Where did you get such power? It’s like nothing you ever had before.”

“I always had it—”

“From what? I look at you now, and I don’t even know who you are!”

“You know me,” she whispered, her throat burning. “I am of An…”

“Rood,” Duac said. His voice held an odd, flat tone of apprehension that pulled Rood’s eyes from Raederle’s face. Duac was staring at the doorway; he groped behind him for Rood. “Rood. That. Who is that? Tell me it’s not who I think it is—”

Rood swung around. Crossing the threshold, soundless, shadowless, on a great black mount whose eyes were the color of the eyes of Farr’s skull, rode a man with a single blood-red jewel on the circle of gold on his head. He was dark, sinewy, powerful; the hilts of his knife and sword were of braided gold; the rich coat over his mail was embroidered with the ancient emblem of An: an oak holding a bolt of black lightning in its green boughs. He left a following on the threshold that must have come out of the fields and orchards around Anuin. Beyond them, through the open doors, Raederle could see Duac’s own guards and unarmed servants struggling to get through. They might as well have struggled against a stone wall. The effect of the crowned man on the wraiths in the hall was immediate: every sword in the room was drawn. Farr moved forward, his flat, expressionless face livid above the cut on his neck, the huge blade raised in his hand. The dead King’s eyes, ignoring Farr, moving slowly over the gathering, touched Duac. The black horse stopped.

“Oen.”

Rood’s voice drew the King’s attention to him briefly, then his gaze returned to Duac. His head bent slightly, he said, his voice temperless yet inflexible, “Peace be on the living in this house, and may no dishonor come into it. To those with honor.” He paused, his eyes still on Duac’s face as he recognized the ageless instinct in him for land-law, together with something else. He gave a short laugh that held little amusement. “You have a face out of the sea. But your own father is more fortunate. You bear little more of my land-heir than his memory…”

Duac, looking harrowed, found his voice finally. “Peace—” The word shook, and he swallowed. “Will you bring peace with you into this house and leave it behind when you go.”

“I cannot. I have sworn a vow. Beyond death.” Duac’s eyes closed, his lips moving in a succinct, inaudible curse. Oen’s face turned finally to Farr; their eyes met across the room for the first time outside of their dreams in six centuries. “I swore that as long as the Kings ruled Anuin, Farr of Hel would rule the king’s midden.”

“And I have sworn,” Farr rasped, “that I would not close my eyes in my grave until those ruling Anuin were lying in theirs.”

Oen’s brow flicked upward. “You lost your head once before. I heard that a woman of Anuin carried your skull out of Hel, back to this house and to her shame opened the doors of this house to the dead of Hel. I have come to cleanse it of the smell of the midden.” He glanced at Raederle. “Give me the skull.”

She stood dumbfounded at the contempt in his voice, in his eyes, the dark, calculating eyes that had watched a tower with iron bars at its windows being built for his land-heir beside the sea. “You,” she whispered, “bringing empty words into this house, what did you ever know of peace? You small-minded man, content in your battles, you left a riddle behind you in Anuin when you died that was far more than just a sea-colored face. You want to fight with Farr over this skull like dogs over a bone. You think I betrayed my house: what do you know of betrayal? You have roused yourself for revenge: what do you know of revenge? You think you saw the last of Ylon’s strange powers when you walled him in his tower so efficiently with such little understanding, such little compassion. You should have known that you cannot bind a sorrow or an anger. You have waited six centuries for a battle with Farr.” Well, before you raise your sword in this hall, you will have to fight me.”

She stripped light from the shields, from the armbands and jewelled crowns, from the flagstones, blazed a circle on the stones around Oen. She looked for a single source of fire in the room, but there was not even a candle lit. So she contented herself with drawing it out of her memory, the shapeless, flickering element she had mastered under Farr’s ominous gaze. She laid the illusion of it around the illusions of the dead. She opened her hand and showed them how she could shape with it, drawing it high into the air, sending it spattering like waves breaking against her will. She circled them with it, as she had been forced by them to circle herself, watched them close together away from it. She burnished the shields with flame, saw them drop, soundless as flowers, to the floor. She ringed the crowns with it, watched the Kings send them spinning, wheels of flaming metal, into the air. She heard the voices, faraway, indistinct, birds’ voices, the fragmented voice of the sea. Then she heard the sea itself.

The sound of it wove in and out of her shaping. She recognized the slow break and drag of it; the hollow wind moaning through broken iron bars. The harping was ended; the tower was empty. She drew her attention back to Oen; half-blind with the thought of fire, she saw him only as a shadow, hunched a little on his horse. And a fury that did not belong to her but to his roused land-heir began gathering in her like one enormous wave that might have torn the tower out of the rocks by its roots and flung it into the sea.

The fury gave her dark insight into odd powers. It whispered to her how to crack a solid flag-stone in two, how to turn the thin, black rift into a yawning illusion of emptiness that would drain the wraith of Oen, nameless, memoryless, into it. It showed her how to bind the windows and doors of her own house, lock the living and dead in it; how to create the illusion of one door in it opening constantly to an illusion of freedom. It showed her how to separate the hopeless essence of sorrow she felt from the sea, the wind, the memory of the harping, to work it into the stones and shadows of the house so that no one in it would ever laugh. She felt her own sorrow and anger stirred, as she had kindled the light, mixed with an older agony and rage against Oen until she could barely tell them apart; she could barely remember that Oen was to her simply a memory of An, and not the living, terrible, merciless figure of Ylon’s memory.

She felt herself lost, drowning in the force of another’s hatred. She struggled against it, blind, terrified, not knowing how to break free of the determined impulse to destruction aimed against Oen. Her terror gave way to a helpless anger; she was bound, as Oen had bound Ylon, by hatred, by compassionlessness, and by misunderstanding. She realized, before she destroyed Oen, before she loosed something alien to the very land-law of An into the house of its kings, that she had to force the wraith of Ylon, roused in her, to see clearly for the first time, the heritage they both shared, and the King who had been simply a man bound to its patterns.

One by one, with impossible effort, she drew the faces of the Kings out of the firelight. She wrested out of the dark void of rage and sorrow, names for them, histories, spoke their names as, weaponless, crownless, mute, they faced her again across the hall: Acor, Ohroe, cursed with sorrow for his sons, Nemir who spoke pig-language, Farr who had done her bidding for the sake of a six-hundred-year-old skull, Evern who had died with his falcons, defending his home. The fire dwindled away around them, became sunlight on the flagstones. She saw the High One’s harpist again among the Kings. She saw Oen. He was no longer on his horse, but standing beside it. His face was bowed against its back. She saw then the black, jagged break from end to end in the flagstone at his feet.

She said his name. The naming seemed to shift him to perspective: the frightened wraith of a dead man who had once been, centuries ago, a King of An. The hatred in her roused only weakly against him, against the power of her seeing. It roused again, then drained away like a spent wave. It left her free, gazing at the broken stone, wondering what name she would bear for the rest of her life in that hall.

She found herself trembling so badly she could hardly stand. Rood, beside her, lifted his hand to hold her, but he seemed to have no strength either; he could not touch her. She saw Duac staring at the flagstone. He turned his head slowly, looked at her. A sob burned in her throat, for he had no name for her either. Her power had left her placeless, had left her nothing. Her eyes fell away from him to a strip of darkness at her feet between them. She realized slowly that the darkness was a shadow that stretched across the floor in a hall full of shadowless dead.

She turned. The Star-Bearer stood at the threshold. He was alone; Oen’s following had vanished. He was watching her; she knew from the expression in his eyes, how much he had seen. As she gazed at him helplessly, he said softly, “Raederle.” It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition in it.

He moved, finally, across the threshold. Plainly clothed, seemingly unarmed, he walked almost unobtrusively among the silent Kings, and yet one by one he drew their attention to him. The dark twisting of pain, hatred and power that had trailed them all into Anuin was no longer the awesome shadow of wizardry, but something they all recognized. Morgon’s eyes, moving from face to face, found Deth’s. He stopped; Raederle, her mind, open, vulnerable, felt the memories shock through him to his core. He began to walk again, slowly; the Kings shifted without sound, away from the harpist. Deth, his head bent, seemed to be listening to the final steps of the long journey that had begun for them both at Erlenstar Mountain. When Morgon reached him, he lifted his face, the lines on it etched mercilessly in the sunlight.

He said evenly, “What strictures of justice did you take at Erlenstar Mountain out of the brain of the High One?”

Morgon’s hand lifted, cracked across the harpist’s face in a furious, back-handed blow that made even Farr blink. The harpist recovered his balance with an effort.

Morgon said, his voice husked with pain, “I learned enough. From both of you. I am not interested in an argument over justice. I am interested in killing you. But because we are in a King’s hall, and your blood will stain his floor, it would seem courteous to explain why I am spilling it. I got tired of your harping.”

“It broke the silence.”

“Is there nothing in this world that will break your silence?” His words bounced shapelessly back and forth in the high comers. “I must have done enough screaming in that mountain to shatter any silence but yours. You were well-trained by the Founder. There’s nothing of you I can touch. Except your life. And even that I wonder if you value.”

“Yes. I value it.”

“You would never beg for it. I begged for death from Ghisteslwchlohm; he ignored me. That was his mistake. But he was wise enough to run. You should have started running that day you led me into that mountain. You aren’t a fool. You might have known the Star-Bearer could survive what the Prince of Hed could not. Yet you stayed and played me songs of Hed until I wept in my dreams. I could have broken your harp strings with a thought.”

“You did. Several times.”

“And you did not have the sense to run.”

There seemed, in the absolute silence of the hall, an odd illusion of privacy about them both. The Kings, their faces battle-weary and runnelled with bitterness, looked as engrossed as if they were watching a segment of their own lives. Duac, she could tell, was still struggling with the idea of the Founder in Erlenstar Mountain; Rood had stopped struggling. His face was drained of all expression. He watched, swallowing now and then the shout or the tears gathering in his throat.

The harpist, pausing a little before he spoke, said, “No. I am a fool. Perhaps I gambled that you might pursue the master and ignore the servant. Or that even then, you might have held, as you could not hold the land-rule, something of the tenets of riddle-mastery.”

Morgon’s hands closed, but he kept them still. “What have the sterile tenets of an empty College to do with either my life or your death?”

“Perhaps nothing. It was a passing thought. Like my harping. An abstract question that a man with a sword at his side rarely pauses to contemplate. The implications of action.”

“Words.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’re a Master—what stricture was strong enough to keep you adhering to the tenets of riddle-mastery? The first stricture of the Founder of Lungold: the language of truth is the language of power—truth of name, truth of essence. You found the essence of betrayal more to your taste. Who are you to judge me if I find the name of revenge, murder, justice—what name you want to put to it—more to my liking?”

“Who is anyone to judge you? You are the Star-Bearer. As you hounded me across Hel, Raederle mistook you for Ghisteslwchlohm.”

She saw him flinch. Rood, the breath scraping in his throat, whispered, “Morgon, I swear, tenets or no tenets, if you don’t kill him, I will.”

“It is, as I said, an abstract question. Rood’s idea of justice makes much more sense.” Deth’s voice sounded dry, tired, finished.

Morgon, an agony breaking into his face, screamed at him in a voice that must have reverberated through the black caverns of Erlenstar Mountain, “What is it you want of me?” He touched the air at his side, and the great starred sword startled into shape. It lifted, blurred in his hands. Raederle knew that she would see them locked forever that way: the harpist unarmed, unmoved, his head lifting to the rise of the sword as it cut upward through the sunlight, the powerful gathering of Morgon’s muscles as he swung the blade in a double-handed stroke that brought it to balance at the apex of its ascent. Then the harpist’s eyes fell to Morgon’s face. He whispered, “They were promised a man of peace.”

The sword, hovering oddly, knotted strands of light from the windows. The harpist stood under the raw edge of its shadow with a familiar stillness that seemed suddenly, to Raederle, in its implications, more terrible than anything she had seen either in herself or in Morgon. A sound broke out of her, a protest against the glimpse of that patience, and she felt Duac’s hand pull at her. But she could not move. Light shivered abruptly down the blade. The sword fell, crashed with a spattering of blue sparks against the floor. The hilt, rebounding, came to rest with the stars face down on the stones.

There was not a sound in the room but Morgon’s breathing, shuddering uncontrollably through him. He faced the harpist, his hands clenched at his sides; he did not move or speak. The harpist, gazing back at him, stirred a little. The blood came suddenly back into his face. His lips moved as though he were about to speak, but the word faltered against Morgon’s unrelenting silence. He took a step backward, as in question. Then his head bowed. He turned, his own hands closed, walked swiftly and quietly through the motionless Kings, out of the hall, his head, unhooded, still bent under the weight of the sun.

Morgon stared, unseeing, at the assembly of living and dead. The unresolved, explosive turmoil in him hung like a dangerous spell over the room. Raederle, standing beside Rood and Duac, unable to move in the threat of it, wondered what word would bring Morgon’s thoughts back from the black, inescapable caverns of stone, and the blind corner of truth into which the harpist had led him. He seemed, recognizing none of them, a stranger, dangerous with power; but as she waited for whatever shape that power would take, she realized slowly that it had just shaped itself, and that he had given them his name. She spoke it softly, almost hesitantly, knowing and not knowing the man to whom it belonged.

“Star-Bearer.”

His eyes went to her; the silence ebbed away between his fingers as they loosened. The expression welling back into his face drew her toward him across the hall. She heard Rood start to speak behind her; his voice broke on a harsh, dry sob and Duac murmured something. She stood before the Star-Bearer, brought him with a touch out of the grip of his memories.

She whispered, “Who were promised a man of peace?”

He shuddered then, reached out to her. She put her arms around him, resting the skull on his shoulder like a warning against any interruption. “The children…”

She felt a tremor of awe run through her. “The Earth-Masters’ children?”

“The children of stone, in that black cave…” His hold of her tightened. “He gave me that choice. And I thought he was defenseless. I should have—I should have remembered what deadly weapons he could forge out of words.”

“Who is he? That harpist?”

“I don’t know. But I do know this: I want him named.” He was silent then, for a long while, his face hidden against her. He moved finally, said something she could not hear; she drew back a little. He felt the bone against his face. He reached up, took the skull. He traced an eye socket with his thumb, then looked at her. His voice, worn raw, was calmer.

“I watched you, that night on Hallard Blackdawn’s lands. I was near you every night as you moved through An. No one, living or dead, would have touched you. But you never needed my help.”

“I felt you near,” she whispered. “But I thought—I thought you were—”

“I know.”

“Well, then—well, then, what did you think I was trying to do?” Her voice rose. “Did you think I was trying to protect Deth?”

“That’s exactly what you were doing.”

She stared at him wordlessly, thinking of all she had done during those strange, interminable days. She burst out, “But you still stayed with me, to protect me?” He nodded. “Morgon, I told you what I am; you could see what dark power I was waking in me—you knew its origins. You knew I am kin to those shape-changers who tried to kill you, you thought I was helping the man who had betrayed you—Why in Hel’s name did you trust me?”

His hands, circling the gold crown on the skull, closed on the worn metal with sudden strength, “I don’t know. Because I chose to. Then, and forever. Is that how long you intend to carry this skull around?”

She shook her head, mute again, and held out her hand for it, to give it back to Farr. The little, angular, blonde-colored pattern on her palm shone clear in the light; Morgon’s hand dropped abruptly to her wrist.

“What is that?”

She resisted the impulse to close her fingers over it. “It came—it came out the first time I held fire. I used a stone from King’s Mouth Plain to elude the Ymris war-ships, with an illusion of light. While I was bound to it, looking into it, I saw a man holding it, as though I were looking into a memory. I almost—I was always just on the verge of knowing him. Then I felt one of the shape-changers in my mind, wanting his name, and the bidding was broken. The stone is lost, but… the pattern of it burned into my hand.”

His hand loosened, lay with a curious gentleness on her wrist. She looked up at him; the fear in his face chilled her heart. He put his arms around her again with the same gentleness, as if she might drift away from him like a mist and only blind hope could keep her there.

The rasp of metal on the stones made them both turn. Duac, who had picked the starred sword up off the floor, said apprehensively to Morgon, “What is it? On her hand?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I only know that for a year Ghisteslwchlohm searched my mind for a piece of knowledge, went again and again through every moment of my life looking for one certain face, one name. That might have been it.”

“Whose name?” Duac asked. Raederle, horror shooting through her, dropped her face against Morgon’s shoulder.

“He never bothered to tell me.”

“If they want the stone, they can find it themselves,” Raederle said numbly. He had not answered Duac’s question, but he would answer her, later. “No one—the shape-changer could learn nothing from me. It’s in the sea with Peven’s crown…” She lifted her head suddenly, said to Duac, “I believe our father knew. About the High One. And about—probably about me.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Then he added wearily, “I think he was born knowing everything. Except how to find his way home.”

“Is he in trouble?” Morgon asked. Duac looked at him surprisedly a moment. Then he shook his head.

“I don’t—I don’t think so. I don’t feel it.”

“Then I know where he might have gone. I’ll find him.”

Rood crossed the hall to join them. His face was tear-stained; it held the familiar, austere expression that he carried with him into his studies and his battles. He said softly to Morgon, “I’ll help you.”

“Rood—”

“He’s my father. You are the greatest Master in this realm. And I am an Apprentice. And may I be buried next to Farr in Hel if I watch you walk out of this hall the same way you walked into it: alone.”

“He won’t,” Raederle said.

Duac protested, his voice lowering. “You can’t leave me alone with all these Kings, Rood. I don’t even know half their names. Those in this hall may have been subdued for a little while, but for how long? Aum will rise, and west Hel; there are about five people in An who might not panic, and you and I are among them.”

“I am?”

“No wraith,” Morgon said shortly, “will enter this house again.” He weighed the skull in his hand, as they watched him, then tossed it across the room to Farr. The King caught it soundlessly, vaguely startled, as if he had forgotten whose it was. Morgon surveyed the still, ghostly assembly. He said, to them, “Do you want a war? I’ll give you one. A war of desperation, for the earth itself. If you lose it, you may drift like sorrow from one end of the realm to another without finding a place to rest. What honor—if the dead are concerned with honor—can you take running Cyn Croeg’s bull to death?”

“There’s revenge,” Farr suggested pointedly.

“Yes. There’s that. But I will seal this house against you stone by stone if I must. I will do what you force me to do. And I am not concerned with honor, either.” He paused, then added slowly, “Or with the bindings and unbindings of the dead of An.”

“You have no such power over the dead of An,” Oen said abruptly. It was a question. Something hard as the ground floor of Erlenstar Mountain surfaced in Morgon’s eyes.

“I learned,” he said, “from a master. You can fight your private, meaningless battles into oblivion. Or you can fight those who gave Oen his land-heir, and who will destroy Anuin, Hel, the earth that binds you, if you let them. And that,” he added, “should appeal to you both.”

Even the Falconer asked, “How much choice do we have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe none.” His hands closed suddenly; he whispered, “I swear by my name that if I can, I will give you a choice.”

There was silence again, from the living and the dead. Morgon turned almost reluctantly to Duac, a question in his eyes that Duac, his instincts channelled to the heartbeat of An, understood.

He said brusquely, “Do what you want in this land. Ask what you need from me. I’m no Master, but I can grasp the essentials of what you have said and done in this house. I can’t begin to understand. I don’t know how you could have any power over the land-law of An. You and my father, when you find him, can argue over that later. All I know is that there is an instinct in me to trust you blindly. Beyond reason, and beyond hope.”

He lifted the sword in his hands, held it out to Morgon. The stars kindled the sunlight to an unexpected beauty. Morgon, staring at Duac, did not move. He started to speak, but no words came. He turned suddenly toward the empty threshold; Raederle, watching him, wondered what he was seeing beyond the courtyard, beyond the walls of Anuin. His hand closed finally on the stars; he took the sword from Duac.

“Thank you.” They saw then in his face the faint, troubled dawning of curiosity, and a memory that seemed to hold no pain. He lifted his other hand, touched Raederle’s face and she smiled. He said hesitantly, “I have nothing to offer you. Not even Peven’s crown. Not even peace. But can you bear waiting for me a little longer? I wish I knew how long. I need to go to Hed awhile, and then to Lungold. I’ll try to—I’ll try—”

Her smile faded. “Morgon of Hed,” she said evenly, “if you take one step across that threshold without me, I will lay a curse on your next step and your next until no matter where you go your path will lead you back to me.”

“Raederle—”

“I can do it. Do you want to watch me?”

He was silent, struggling between his longing and his fear for her. He said abruptly, “No. All right. Will you wait for me in Hed? I think I can get us both safely that far.”

“No.”

“Then will you—”

“No.”

“All right; then—”

“No.”

“Then will you come with me?” he whispered. “Because I could not bear to leave you.”

She put her arms around him, wondering, as she did so, what strange, perilous future she had bargained for. She said only, as his arms circled her, not in gentleness this time, but in a fierce and terrified determination, “That’s good. Because I swear by Ylon’s name you never will.”