9

	9

THE SHAPE-CHANGERS PURSUED him across the backlands. The first night, he bolted across the sky in hawk-shape, the fiery city behind him growing smaller and smaller in the darkness. He flew northward instinctively, away from the kingdoms, marking his path by the smell of water beneath him. By dawn he felt safe. He dropped downward toward the lake shore. Birds drifting to the gentle morning tide swarmed up at his approach. He felt strands of their minds like a network. He broke through it, arching back up in midair. They drove him across the lake into the trees, where he dropped again suddenly, plummeting through air and light like a dark fist, until he touched the ground and vanished. Miles away to the north, he appeared again, kneeling beside the channel of water between two lakes, retching with exhaustion. He sagged down on the bank beside the water. After a while he moved again, dropped his face in the current and drank.

They found him again at dusk. He had caught fish and eaten for the first time in two days. The changeless afternoon light, the river’s monotonous voice had lulled him to sleep. He woke abruptly at a squirrel’s chattering, and saw high in the blue-grey air a great flock of wheeling birds. Rolling into the water, he changed shape. The current flung him from one relentless sluice of water to another, spun him back downstream into still pools, where hungry water birds dove at him. He fought his way upstream, seeing nothing but a constant, darkening blur that shrugged him from side to side and roared whenever he broke the surface. Finally he foundered into still water. It deepened as he swam. He dove toward the bottom to rest, but the water grew dark and still, so deep he had to come up to breathe before he found the bottom. He swam slowly near the surface, watching moths flutter in the moonlight. He drifted until the lake bottom angled upward, and he found weeds to hide in. He did not move until morning.

Then a tiny fish dove into the sunlight near him, snapped at an insect. Rings of water broke above him. He rose out of the weeds; the water burned around him with the morning sun as he changed shape. He waded out of the lake, stood listening to the silence.

It seemed to roar soundlessly out of lands beyond the known world. The soft morning wind seemed alien, speaking a language he had never learned. He remembered the wild, ancient voices of Wind Plain that had echoed across Ymris with a thousand names and memories. But the voices of the backlands seemed even older, a rootwork of winds that held nothing he could comprehend except their emptiness. He stood for a long time, breathing their loneliness until he felt them begin to hollow him into something as nameless as themselves.

He whispered Raederle’s name then. He turned blindly, his thoughts tangling into a hard knot of fear. He wondered if she were still alive, if anyone were left alive in Lungold. He wondered if he should return to the city. His fists pounded rhythmically against tree bark as he thought of her. The tree shivered with his uncertainty; a crow startled out of it, squawking. He raised his head suddenly, stood still as an animal, scenting. The placid lake waters began to stir, boil shapes out of their depths. The blood hammered through him. He opened his mind to the minds of the backland. Several miles away he joined a vast herd of elk moving northward toward the Thul.

He stayed with them as they grazed. He decided to break away at the Thul, follow it eastward until the shape-changers lost him, and then double back to Lungold. Two days later, when the slow herd began gathering at the river, he roamed away from it, eastward along the banks. But part of the herd followed him. He changed shape again, desperately, began flying south in the night. But shapes rose, swirling out of the darkness, beat him northward across the Thul, northward toward White Lady Lake, northward, he began to realize, toward Erlenstar Mountain.

The realization filled him with both fury and terror. On the shores of White Lady Lake, he turned to fight. He waited for them in his own shape, the stars in his sword-hilt flaring a blood-red signal to them across the backlands. But nothing answered his challenge. The hot afternoon was motionless; the waters of the huge lake lay still as beaten silver. Groping, he could not even touch their minds. Finally, as the waning sun drew shadows after it across the lake, he began to breathe a tentative freedom. He sheathed his sword, shrugged himself into wolf-shape. And then he saw them, motionless as air, ranged across his path, shaping themselves out of the blur of light and darkness.

He sparked a flame from the dying sun in his sword hilt, let it burn down the blade. Then he frayed himself into shadow, filled his mind with darkness. He attacked to kill, yet in his exhaustion and hopelessness, he knew he was half-goading them to kill him. He killed two shape-changers before he realized that in some terrible mockery, they had permitted it. They would not fight; they would not let him go south. He changed back into wolf-shape, ran northward along the lake shore into the trees. A great herd of wolves massed behind him. He turned again, flung himself at them. They grappled with him, snarling, snapping until he realized, as he rolled over and over on the bracken with a great wolf whose teeth were locked on his forearm, that it was real. He shook it away from him with a shudder of energy, burned a circle of light around himself. They milled around him restlessly in the dusk, not sure what he was, smelling blood from his torn shoulder. Looking at them, he wanted to laugh suddenly at his mistake. But something far more bitter than laughter spilled into his throat. For a while he could not think. He could only watch a starless night flowing across the wastes and smell the musk of a hundred wolves as they circled him. Then, with a vague idea of attacking the shape-changers, he squatted, holding wolves’ eyes, drawing their minds under his control. But something broke his binding. The wolves faded away into the night, leaving him alone. He could not fly; his arm was stiffening, burning. The smell of loneliness from the cold, darkening water overwhelmed him. He let the fire around him go out. Trapped between the shape-changers and the black horror of Erlenstar Mountain, he could not move. He stood shivering in the dark wind, while the night built around him, memory by memory.

The light wing-brush of another mind touched his mind, and then his heart. He found he could move again, as though a spell had been broken. The voice of the wind changed; it filled the black night from every direction with the whisper of Raederle’s name.

His awareness of her lasted only a moment. But he felt, reaching down to touch the bracken into flame, that she might be anywhere and everywhere around him, the great tree rising beside him, the fire sparking up from dead leaves to warm his face. He ripped the sleeves off his tunic, washed his arm and bound it. He lay beside the fire, gazing into the heart of it, trying to comprehend the shape-changers and their intentions. He realized suddenly that tears were burning down his face, because Raederle was alive, because she was with him. He reached out, buried the fire under a handful of earth. He hid himself within an illusion of darkness and began to move again, northward, following the vast shore of White Lady Lake.

He did not meet the shape-changers again until he reached the raging white waters of the Cwill River, as it broke away from the northernmost tip of the lake. From there, he could see the back of Isig Pass, the distant rolling foothills and bare peaks of Isig Mountain and Erlenstar Mountain. He made another desperate bid for freedom then. He dropped into the wild current of the Cwill, let it whirl him, now as a fish, now a dead branch, through deep, churning waters, down rapids and thundering falls until he lost all sense of time, direction, light. The current jarred him over endless rapids before it loosed him finally in a slow, green pool. He spun awhile, a piece of water-soaked wood, aware of nothing but a fibrous darkness. The gentle current edged him toward the shore into a snarl of dead leaves and branches. He pulled himself onto the snag finally, a wet, bedraggled muskrat, and picked his way across the branches onto the shore.

He changed shape again in the shadows. He had not gone as far east as he had thought. Erlenstar Mountain, flanked with evening shadows, stood enormous and still in the distance. But he was closer to Isig, he knew; if he could reach it safely, he could hide himself interminably in its maze of underground passages. He waited until nightfall to move again. Then, in the shape of a bear, he lumbered off into the dark toward the pattern of stars above Isig Mountain.

He followed the stars until they faded at dawn; and then, without realizing it, he began to alter his path. Trees thickened around him, hiding his view of the mountain; thick patches of scrub and bramble forced him to veer again and again. The land sloped downward sharply; he followed a dry stream bed through a ravine, thinking he was going north, until the stream bed rose up to level ground and he found himself facing Erlenstar Mountain. He angled eastward again. The trees clustered around him, murmuring in the wind; the underbrush thickened, crossing his path, imperceptibly changing his direction until, shambling across a shallow river, he saw Erlenstar Mountain again in a break between the trees ahead of him.

He stopped in the middle of the river. The sun hung suspended far to the west, crackling in the sky like a torch. He felt hot, dusty, and hungry within the shaggy bear pelt. He heard bees droning and scented the air for honey. A fish flickered past him in the shallow water; he slapped at it and missed. Then something rumbling beneath the bear-brain sharpened into language. He reared in the water, his head weaving from side to side, his muzzle wrinkled, as if he could smell the shapes that had been forming around him, pushing him away from Isig.

He felt something build in him and loosed it: a deep, grumbling roar that shattered the silence and bellowed back at him from hills and stone peaks. Then, in hawk-shape, he burned a golden path upward high into the sky until the backlands stretched endlessly beneath him, and he shot towards Isig Mountain.

The shape-changers melted out of the trees, flew after him. For a while he raced ahead of them in a blinding surge of speed toward the distant green mountain. But as the sun set, they began to catch up with him. They were of a nameless shape. Their wings gathered gold and red from the sunset; their eyes and talons were of flame. Their sharp beaks were bone-white. They surrounded him, dove at him, snapping and tearing, until his wings grew ragged and his breast was flecked with blood. He faltered in the air; they flung themselves at him, blinding him with their wings, until he gave one piercing, despairing cry and turned away from Isig.

All night he flew among their burning eyes. At dawn, he saw the face of Erlenstar Mountain rising up before him. He took his own shape then, in midair, and simply fell, the air battering out of him, the forests whirling up to meet him. Something cracked across his mind before he reached the ground. He spun into darkness.

He woke in total darkness. It smelled of wet stone. Far away, he could hear a faint perpetual trickle of water. He recognized it suddenly, and his hands clenched. He lay on his back, on cold, bare stone. Every bone in his body ached, and his skin was scored with claw marks. The mountain’s silence sat like a nightmare on his chest. His muscles tensed; he listened, feverish, blind, expecting a voice that did not come, while memories like huge, bulky animals paced back and forth across him.

He began to breathe the darkness into his mind; his body seemed to fray into it. He sat up, panicked, his eyes wide, straining into nothing. From somewhere in the starless night of his thoughts, he pulled a memory of light and fire. He ignited it in his palm, nursed it until he could see the vast hollow of stone rising about him; the prison where he had spent the most unendurable year of his life.

His lips parted. A word stuck like a jewel in his throat. The flame glittered back at him endlessly, off walls of ice and fire, of gold, of sky-blue streaked with wind-swept silver like the night of the backlands rimed with a million stars. The inner mountain was of the stone of the Earth-Masters’ cities, and he could see the frozen wrinkles where blocks of stone had been hewn free.

He stood up slowly. His face stared back at him out of wedges and facets of jewellike color. The chamber was enormous; he nursed the flame from its reflection until it shot higher than his head, but still he could see nothing but a vaulting of darkness, flickering vaguely with a network of pure gold.

The water, whose endless, changeless voice he had heard, had wept a diamond-white groove into a sheer wall of stone as it trickled downward into water. He shifted the flame; it billowed across a lake so still it seemed carved of darkness. The shores of the immense lake were of solid stone; the far wall curving around it was pure as hoarfrost.

He knelt, touched the water. Rings melted into rings slowly across its dark face. He thought suddenly of the spiralling circles of Wind Tower. His throat contracted, fiery with thirst, and he bent over the lake, scooping water with his free hand. He swallowed a mouthful and gagged. It was acrid with minerals.

“Morgon.”

Every muscle in his body locked. He swung on his haunches, met Ghisteslwchlohm’s eyes.

They were haunted, restless with a power not his own. That much Morgon saw before the darkness swallowed the flame in his hand, leaving him blind again.

“So,” he whispered, “the Founder himself is bound.” He stood up noiselessly, trying, in the same movement, to step into the fragment of dawn beyond the splintered doors in the High One’s throne room. He stepped instead over the edge of a chasm. He lost his balance, crying out, and fell into nothingness. He landed on the lake shore, clinging to the stones at Ghisteslwchlohm’s feet.

He dropped his face against his forearm, trying to think. He caught at the mind of a bat tucked in its secret corner, but the wizard gripped him before he could change shape.

“There is no escape.” The voice had changed; it was slow, soft, as if he were listening beneath it for another voice, or a distant, uneasy rhythm of tides. “Star-Bearer, you will use no power. You will do nothing but wait.”

“Wait,” he whispered. “For what? For death?” He stopped, the word flickering back and forth between two meanings in his mind. “There is no harping this time to keep me alive.” He lifted his head, his eyes straining again at the blackness. “Or are you expecting the High One? You can wait until I turn to stone here like the Earth-Masters’ children before the High One shows any interest in me.”

“I doubt that“

“You. You hardly exist. You no longer have the ability to doubt. Even the wraiths of An have more will than you do. I can’t even tell if you’re dead or alive still, deep in you, the way the wizards lived, somehow, beneath your power.” His voice dropped a little. “I could fight for you. I would do even that for freedom.”

The hand left his arm. He groped into the strange, sea-filled mind, to find the name it held. It eluded him. He struggled through swells and heaving tides, until the wizard’s mind heaved him back on the shore of his own awareness. He was gasping, as if he had forgotten to breathe. He heard the wizard’s voice finally, withdrawing into the dark.

“For you, there is no word for freedom.”

He slept a little, then, trying to regain strength. He dreamed of water. His raging thirst woke him; he felt for the water, tried to drink it again. He spat it out before he swallowed it, knelt racked with coughing. He drifted finally back into a feverish sleep and dreamed again of water. He felt himself falling into it, drawing a cool darkness around himself, moving deeper and deeper into its stillness. He breathed in water and woke himself, panicked, drowning. Hands dragged him out of the lake, left him retching bitter water on the shore.

The water cleared his head a little. He lay quietly, staring into the darkness, wondering, if he let it fill his mind, whether it would drown him like water. He let it seep slowly into his thoughts until the memories of a long year’s night overwhelmed him and he panicked again, igniting the air with fire. He saw Ghisteslwchlohm’s face briefly; then the wizard’s hand slapped at his flame and it broke into pieces like glass.

He whispered, “For every doorless tower there is a riddle to open the door. You taught me that.”

“There is one door and one riddle here.”

“Death. You don’t believe that. Otherwise you would have let me drown. If the High One isn’t interested in my life or my death, what will you do then?”

“Wait.”

“Wait.” He shifted restlessly, his thoughts speeding feverishly towards some answer. “The shape-changers have been waiting for thousands of years. You named them, the instant before they bound you. What did you see? What could be strong enough to overpower an Earth-Master? Someone who takes the power and law of his existence from every living thing, from earth, fire, water, from wind… The High One was driven out of Erlenstar Mountain by the shape-changers. And you came then and found an empty throne where legend had placed the High One. So you became the High One, playing a game of power while you waited for someone the stone children knew only as the Star-Bearer. You kept watch on places of knowledge and power, gathering the wizards at Lungold, teaching at Caithnard. And one day the son of a Prince of Hed came to Caithnard with the smell of cowdung on his boots and a question on his face. But that wasn’t enough. You’re still waiting. The shape-changers are still waiting. For the High One. You are using me for bait, but he could have found me in here long before this, if he had been interested.”

“He will come.”

“I doubt that. He allowed you to deceive the realm for centuries. He is not interested in the welfare of men or wizards in the realm. He let you strip me of the land-rule, for which I should have killed you. He is not interested in me…” He was silent again, his eyes on the expressionless face of darkness. He said, listening to the silence that gathered and froze in every drop of liquid stone, “What could be powerful enough to destroy the Earth-Masters’ cities? To force the High One himself into hiding? What is as powerful as an Earth-Master?” He was silent again. Then an answer like a glint of fire burning itself into ash moved in the depths of his mind.

He sat up. The air seemed suddenly thin, fiery; he found it hard to breathe. “The shape-changers…” The blade of dryness was back in his throat. He raised his hands to his eyes, gathering darkness to stare into. Voices whispered out of his memory, out of the stones around him: The war is not finished, only silenced for the regathering… Those from the sea. Edolen. Sec. They destroyed us so we could not live on earth any more; we could not master it… The voices of the Earth-Masters’ dead, the children. His hands dropped heavily on the stone floor, but still the darkness pushed against his eyes. He saw the child turn from the leaf it touched in its dreaming, look across a plain, its body tense, waiting. “They could touch a leaf, a mountain, a seed, and know it, become it. That’s what Raederle saw, the power in them she loved. Yet they killed each other, buried their children beneath a mountain to die. They knew all the languages of the earth, all the laws of its shapes and movement. What happened to them? Did they stumble into the shape of something that had no law but power?” His voice was whispering away from him as if out of a dream. “What shape?”

He fell silent abruptly. He was shivering, yet sweating. The smell of water pulled at him mercilessly. He reached out to it again, his throat tormented with thirst His hands halted before they broke the surface. Raederle’s face, dreamlike in its beauty, looked back at him from the still water between his hands. Her long hair flowed away from her face like the sun’s fire. He forgot his thirst. He knelt motionlessly for a long time, gazing down at it, not knowing if it was real or if he had fashioned it out of longing, and not caring. Then a hand struck at it, shattering the image, sending rings of movement shivering to the far edges of the lake.

A murderous, uncontrollable fury swept Morgon to his feet. He wanted to kill Ghisteslwchlohm with his hands, but he could not even see the wizard. A power battered him away again and again. He scarcely felt pain; shapes were reeling faster than language in his mind. He discarded them, searching for the one shape powerful enough to contain his rage. He felt his body fray into shapelessness; a sound filled his mind, deep, harsh, wild, the voices out of the farthest reaches of the backlands. But they were no longer empty. Something shuddered through him, flinging off a light snapping through the air. He felt thoughts groping into his mind, but his own thoughts held no language except a sound like a vibrant, untuned harp string. He felt the fury in him expand, shape itself to all the hollows and forms of the stone chamber. He flung the wizard across the cavern, held him like a leaf before the wind, splayed against the stones.

Then he realized what shape he had taken.

He fell back into his own shape, the wild energy in him suddenly gone. He knelt on the stones, trembling, half-sobbing in fear and amazement. He heard the wizard stumble away from the wall, breathing haltingly, as if his ribs were cracked. As he moved across the cavern, Morgon heard voices all around him, speaking various complex languages of the earth.

He heard the whispering of fire, the shiver of leaves, the howl of a wolf in the lonely, moonlit backlands, the dry riddling of corn leaves. Then, far away, he heard a sound, as if the mountain itself had sighed. He felt the stone shift slightly under him. A sea bird cried harshly. Someone with a hand of tree bark and light flung Morgon onto his back.

He whispered bitterly, feeling the starred sword wrenched from his side, “One riddle and one door.”

But, though he waited in the eye of darkness for the sword to fall, nothing touched him. He was caught suddenly, breathless, in their tension of waiting. Then Raederle’s voice, raised in a Great Shout, shook stones loose from the ceiling and jarred him out of his waiting. “Morgon!”

The sword hummed wildly with the aftermath of the shout. Morgon heard it bounce against the stones. He shouted Raederle’s name involuntarily, in horror, and the floor lurched under him again, shrugging him toward the lake. The sword slid after him. It was still vibrating, a strange high note that stilled as Morgon caught it and sheathed it. There was a sound as if a crystal in one of the walls had cracked.

It sang as it broke: a low, tuned note that shattered its own core. Other crystals began to hum; the ground floor of the mountain rumbled. The great slabs of ceiling stone ground themselves together. Dust and rubble hissed down; half-formed crystals snapped and pounded to pieces on the floor. Languages of bats, dolphins, bees brushed through the chamber. A tension snaked through the air, and Morgon heard Raederle scream. Sobbing a curse, he pulled himself to his feet. The floor grumbled beneath him, then roared. One side of it lifted, fell ponderously onto the other. It flung him into the lake. The whole lake basin, a huge, round bowl carved into solid stone, began to tilt.

He was buried for a few moments in a wave of black water. When he surfaced again, he heard a sound as if the mountain itself, torn apart at its roots, had groaned.

A wind blasted into the stone chamber. It blinded Morgon, drove his own cry back into his throat. It whirled the lake into a black vortex that dragged him down into it. He heard, before he was engulfed, something that was either the ring of blood in his ears or a note like a fine-tuned string at the core of the deep wind’s voice.

The water spat him back up. The basin had tilted farther, pouring him out with the water toward the sheer wall at the far side. He snatched a breath, dove under water, trying to swim against the wave. But it hurled him back, heaved him at solid stone. As he sensed the wall blur up before him, it split open. The wave poured through the crack, dragging him with it. Through the thunder of water, he heard the final reverberations of the mountain burying its own heart.

The lake water dragged him through the jagged split, poured over a lip of stone into a roiling stream. He tried to pull himself out, catching at ledges, at walls rough with jewels, but the wind was still with him, pushing him back into the water, driving the water before it. The stream flooded into another; a whirlpool dragged him under a ledge of stone into another river. The river cast him finally out of the mountain, dragged him down foaming rapids, and threw him, half-drowned, his veins full of bitter water, into the Ose.

He pulled himself ashore finally, lay hugging the sunlit ground. The wild winds still pounded at him; the great pines were groaning as they bent. He coughed up the bitter water he had swallowed. When he moved finally to drink the sweet waters of the Ose, the wind nearly flung him back in. He raised his head, looked at the mountain. A portion of its side had been sucked in; trees lay uprooted, splintered in the shift of stone and earth. All down the pass, as far as he could see, the wind raged, bending trees to their breaking point.

He tried to stand, but he had no strength left. The wind seemed to be hounding him out of his own shape. He reached out; his hands closed on huge roots. He felt, as the tree shivered in his hold, the core of its great strength.

Clinging to it, he pulled himself up by its knots and boles. Then he stepped away from it and lifted his arms as if to enclose the wind.

Branches grew from his hands, his hair. His thoughts tangled like roots in the ground. He strained upward. Pitch ran like tears down his bark. His name formed his core; ring upon ring of silence built around it. His face rose high above the forests. Gripped to earth, bending to the wind’s fury, he disappeared within himself, behind the hard, wind-scrolled shield of his experiences.

10

	10

HE DWINDLED BACK into his own shape on a rainy, blustery autumn day. He stood in the cold winds, blinking rain out of his eyes, trying to remember a long, wordless passage of time. The Ose, grey as a knife blade, shivered past him; the stone peaks of the pass were half-buried under heavy cloud. The trees around him clung deeply to the earth, engrossed in their own existences. They pulled at him again. His mind slid past their tough wet bark, back into a slow peace around which tree rings formed and hardened. But a wind vibrated through his memories, shook a mountain down around him, throwing him back into water, back into the rain. He moved reluctantly, breaking a binding with the earth, and turned toward Erlenstar Mountain. He saw the scar in its side under a blur of mist and the dark water still swirling out of it to join the Ose.

He gazed at it a long time, piecing together fragments of a dark, troubling dream. The implications of it woke him completely; he began to shiver in the driving rain. He scented through the afternoon with his mind. He found no one—trapper, wizard, shape-changer—in the pass. A windblown crow sailed past him on an updraft; he caught eagerly at its mind. But it did not know his language. He loosed it. The wild, sonorous winds boomed hollowly through the peaks; the trees roared around him, smelling of winter. He turned finally, hunched in the wind, to follow the flow of the Ose back into the world.

But he stood still after a step, watching the water rush away from him toward Isig and Osterland and the northern trade-ports of the realm. His own power held him motionless. There was no place anywhere in the realm for a man who unbound land-law and shaped wind. The river echoed the voices he had heard, speaking languages not even the wizards could understand. He thought of the dark, blank face of wind that was the High One, who would give him nothing except his life.

“For what?” he whispered. He wanted to shout the words suddenly at the battered, expressionless face of Erlenstar Mountain. The wind would simply swallow his cry. He took another step down the river toward Harte, where he would find shelter, warmth, comfort from Danan Isig. But the king could give him no answers. He was trapped by the past, the pawn of an ancient war he was finally beginning to understand. The vague longing in him to explore his own strange, unpredictable power frightened him. He stood at the river’s edge for a long time, until the mists along the peaks began to darken and a shadow formed across the face of Erlenstar Mountain. Finally, he turned away from it, wandered through the rain and icy mists toward the mountains bordering the northern wastes.

He kept his own shape as he crossed them, though the rains in the high peaks turned to sleet sometimes and the rocks under his hands as he climbed were like ice. His life hung in a precarious balance the first few days, though he hardly realized it. He found himself eating without remembering how he had killed, or awake at dawn in a dry cave without remembering how he had found it. Gradually, as he realized his disinclination to use power, he gave some thought to survival. He killed wild mountain sheep, dragged them into a cave and skinned them, living on the meat while the pelts dried and weathered. He sharpened a rib, prodded holes in the pelts and laced them together with strips of cloth from his tunic. He made a great shaggy hooded cloak and lined his boots with fur. When they were finished, he put them on and moved again, down the north face of the pass into the wastes.

There was little rain in the wasteland, only the driving, biting winds, and frost that turned the flat, monotonous land into fire at sunrise. He moved like a wraith, killing when he was hungry, sleeping in the open, for he rarely felt the cold, as if his body frayed without his knowledge into the winds. One day he realized he was no longer moving across the arc of the sun; he had turned east, wandering toward the morning. In the distance, he could see a cluster of foothills, with Grim Mountain jutting out of them, a harsh, blue-gray peak. But it was so far away that he scarcely put a name to it. He walked into mid-autumn, hearing nothing but the winds. One night as he sat before his fire, vaguely feeling the winds urge against his shape, he looked down and saw the starred harp in his hands.

He could not remember reaching back for it. He gazed at it, watching the silent run of fire down the strings. He shifted after a while and positioned it. His fingers moved patternlessly, almost inaudibly over the strings, following the rough, wild singing of the winds.

He felt no more compulsion to move. He stayed at that isolated point in the wastes, which was no more than a few stones, a twisted shrub, a crack in the hard earth where a stream surfaced for a few feet, then vanished again underground. He left the place only to hunt; he always found his way back to it, as if to the echo of his own harping. He harped with the winds that blew from dawn until night, sometimes with only one high string, as he heard the lean, tense, wailing east wind; sometimes with all strings, the low note thrumming back at the boom of the north wind. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a snow hare listening or catch the startled glance of a white falcon’s eyes. But as the autumn deepened, animals grew rare, seeking the mountains for food and shelter. So he harped alone, a strange, furred, nameless animal with no voice but one strung between his hands. His body was honed to the wind’s harshness; his mind lay dormant like the wastes. How long he would have stayed there, he never knew, for glancing up one night at a shift of wind across his fire, he found Raederle.

She was cloaked in rich silvery furs; her hair, blown out of her hood, streaked the dark like fire. He sat still, his hands stopped on the harp strings. She knelt down beside his fire, and he saw her face more clearly, weary, winter-pale, sculpted to a fine, changeless beauty. He wondered if she were a dream, like the face he had seen between his hands in the dark lake water. Then he saw that she was shivering badly. She took her gloves off, drew his windblown fire to a still bright blaze with her hands. Slowly he realized how long it had been since they had spoken.

“Lungold,” he whispered. The word seemed meaningless in the tumult of the wastes. But she had journeyed out of the world to find him here. He reached through the fire, laid his hand against her face. She gazed at him mutely as he sat back again. She drew her knees up, huddled in her furs against the wind.

“I heard your harping,” she said. He touched the strings soundlessly, remembering.

“I promised you I would harp.” His voice was husky with disuse. He added curiously, “Where have you been? You followed me across the backlands; you were with me in Erlenstar Mountain. Then you vanished.”

She stared at him again; he wondered if she were going to answer. “I didn’t vanish. You did.” Her voice was suddenly tremulous. “Off the face of the realm. The wizards have been searching everywhere for you. So have the shape—the shape-changers. So have I. I thought maybe you were dead. But here you are, harping in this wind that could kill and you aren’t even cold.”

He was silent. The harp that had sung with the winds felt suddenly chilled under his hands. He set it on the ground beside him. “How did you find me?”

“I searched. In every shape I could think of. I thought maybe you were with the vesta. So I went to Har and asked him to teach me the vesta-shape. He started to, but when he touched my mind, he stopped and told me he did not think he had to teach me. So, I had to explain that to him. Then he made me tell him everything that had happened in Erlenstar Mountain. He said nothing, except that you must be found. Finally, he took me across Grim Mountain to the vesta herds. And while I travelled with them, I began to hear your harping on the edge of my mind, on the edge of the winds… Morgon, if I can find you, so can others. Did you come out here to learn to harp? Or did you just run?”

“I just ran.”

“Well, are you—are you planning to come back?”

“For what?”

She was silent. The fire flickered wildly in front of her, weaving itself into the wind. She stilled it again, her eyes never leaving his face. She moved abruptly to his side and held him tightly, her face against the shaggy fur at his shoulder.

“I could learn to live in the wastes, I guess,” she whispered. “It’s so cold here, and nothing grows… but the winds and your harping are beautiful.”

His head bowed. He put his arm around her, drawing her hood back so that he could feel her cheek against his. Something touched his heart, an ache of cold that he finally felt, or a painful stirring of warmth.

“You heard the voices of the shape-changers in Erlenstar Mountain,” he said haltingly. “You know what they are. They know all languages. They are Earth-Masters, still at war, after thousands of years, with the High One. And I am bait for their traps. That’s why they never kill me. They want him. If they destroy him, they will destroy the realm. If they cannot find me, perhaps they will not find him.” She started to speak, but he went on, his voice thawing, harsher, “You know what I did in that mountain. I was angry enough to murder, and I shaped myself into wind to do it. There is no place in the realm for anyone of such power. What will I do with it? I’m the Star-Bearer. A promise made by the dead to fight a war older than the names of the kingdoms. I was born with power that leaves me nameless in my own world… and with all the terrible longing to use it.”

“So you came here to the wastes, where you would have no reason to use it.”

“Yes.”

She slid a hand beneath his hood, her fingers brushing his brow and his scarred cheekbone. “Morgon,” she said softly, “I think if you wanted to use it, you would. If you found a reason. You gave me a reason to use my own power, at Lungold and across the back-lands. I love you, and I will fight for you. Or sit here with you in the wastes until you drift into snow. If the need of the land-rulers, all those who love you, can’t stir you from this place, what can? What hurt you in the dark at Erlenstar Mountain?”

He was silent. The winds roared out of the night, a vast chaos converging upon a single point of light. They had no faces, no language he could understand. He whispered, gazing at them, “The High One cannot speak my name, any more than a slab of granite can. We are bound in some way, I know. He values my life, but he does not even know what it is. I am the Star-Bearer. He will give me my life. But nothing else. No hope, no justice, no compassion. Those words belong to men. Here in the wastes, I am threatening no one. I am keeping myself safe, the High One safe, and the realm untroubled by a power too dangerous to use.”

“The realm is troubled. The land-rulers put more hope in you than they do in the High One. You they can talk to.”

“If I made myself into a weapon for Earth-Masters to battle with, not even you would recognize me.”

“Maybe. You told me a riddle once, when I was afraid of my own power. About the Herun woman Arya, who brought a dark, frightening animal she could not name into her house. You never told me how it ended.”

He stirred a little. “She died of fear.”

“And the animal? What was it?”

“No one knew. It wailed for seven days and seven nights at her grave, in a voice so full of love and grief that no one who heard it could sleep or eat. And then it died, too.”

She lifted her head, her lips parted, and he remembered a moment out of a dead past: he sat in a small stone chamber at Caithnard, studying riddles and feeling his heart twist with joy and terror and sorrow to their unexpected turnings. He added, “It has nothing to do with me.”

“I suppose not. You would know.”

He was silent again. He shifted so that her head lay in the crook of his shoulder, and his arms circled her. He laid his cheek against his hair. “I’m tired,” he said simply. “I have answered too many riddles. The Earth-Masters began a war before history, a war that killed their own children. If I could fight them, I would, for the sake of the realm; but I think I would only kill myself and the High One. So I’m doing the only thing that makes any sense to me. Nothing.”

She did not answer for a long time. He held her quietly, watching the fire spark a silvery wash across her cloak. She said slowly, “Morgon, there is one more riddle maybe you should answer. You stripped all illusions from Ghisteslwchlohm; you named the shape-changers; you woke the High One out of his silence. But there is one more thing you have not named, and it will not die…” Her voice shook into silence. He felt suddenly, through all the bulky fur between them, the beat of her heart.

“What?” The word was a whisper she could not have heard, but she answered him.

“In Lungold, I talked to Yrth in crow-shape. So I did not know then that he is blind. I went to Isig, searching for you, and I found him there. His eyes are the color of water burned by light. He told me that Ghisteslwchlohm had blinded him during the destruction of Lungold. And I didn’t question that. He is a big, gentle, ancient man, and Danan’s grandchildren followed him all over the mountain while he was searching for you among the stones and trees. One evening Bere brought a harp he had made to the hall and asked Yrth to play it. He laughed a little and said that though he had been known once as the Harpist of Lungold, he hadn’t touched a harp for seven centuries. But he played a little… And, Morgon, I knew that harping. It was the same awkward, tentative harping that haunted you down Trader’s Road and drew you into Ghisteslwchlohm’s power.”

He lifted her face between his hands. He was feeling the wind suddenly, scoring all his bones with rime. “What are you telling me?”

“I don’t know. But how many blind harpists who cannot harp can there be in the world?”

He took a breath of wind; it burned through him like cold fire. “He’s dead.”

“Then he’s challenging you out of his grave. Yrth harped to me that night so that I would carry the riddle of his harping to you, wherever in the realm you were.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But I know that he wants to find you. And that if he was a harpist named Deth who travelled with you, as Yrth did, down Trader’s Road, then he spun riddles so secretly, so skillfully, that he blinded even Ghisteslwchlohm. And even you—the Riddle-Master of Hed. I think maybe you should name him. Because he is playing his own silent, deadly game, and he may be the only one in this realm who knows exactly what he is doing.”

“Who in Hel’s name is he?” He was shivering suddenly, uncontrollably. “Deth took the Black of Mastery at Caithnard. He was a riddler. He knew my name before I did. I suspected once that he might be a Lungold wizard. I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was the High One’s harpist. So I asked him what he was doing in Isig while Yrth made my harp, a hundred years before he was born. He told me to trust him. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. And then he betrayed me.” He drew her against him, but the wind ran between them like a knife. “It’s cold. It was never this cold before.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What does he want? Is he an Earth-Master, playing his own solitary game for power? Does he want me alive or dead? Does he want the High One alive or dead?”

“I don’t know. You’re the riddler. He’s challenging you. Ask him.”

He was silent, remembering the harpist on Trader’s Road who had drawn him without a word, with only a halting, crippled harping out of the night into Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands. He whispered, “He knows me too well. I think whatever he wants, he will get.” A gust struck them, smelling like snow, gnawing icily at his face and hands. It drove him to his feet, breathless, bundled, full of a sudden, helpless longing for hope. When he could see again, he found that Raederle had already changed shape. A vesta shod and crowned with gold gazed at him out of deep purple eyes. He caressed it; its warm breath nuzzled at his hands. He rested his brow against the bone between its eyes. “All right,” he said with very little irony, “I will play a riddle-game with Deth. Which way is Isig?”

She led him there by sunlight and starlight, south across the wastes, and then eastward down the mountains of the pass until at the second dawn he saw the green face of Isig Mountain rising beyond the Ose. They reached the king’s house at dusk, on a wild, grey autumn day. The high peaks were already capped with snow; the great pines around Harte sang in the north wind. The travellers changed out of vesta-shape when they reached Kyrth and walked the winding mountain road to Harte. The gates were barred and guarded, but the miners, armed with great broadswords tempered in Danan’s forge fires, recognized them and let them in.

Danan and Vert and half a dozen children left their supper to meet them as they entered the house. Danan, robed in fur against the cold, gave them a bear’s bulky embrace and sent children and servants alike scurrying to see their comfort. But, gauging their weariness, he asked only one question.

“I was in the wastes,” Morgon said. “Harping. Raederle found me.” The strangeness of the answer did not occur to him then. He added, remembering, “Before that, I was a tree beside the Ose.” He watched a smile break into the king’s eyes.

“What did I tell you?” Danan murmured. “I told you no one would find you in that shape.” He drew them toward the stairs leading up into the east tower. “I have a thousand questions, but I am a patient old tree, and they can wait until morning. Yrth is in this tower; you’ll be safe near him.”

A question nagged at Morgon as they wound up the stairs, until he realized what it was. “Danan, I have never seen your house guarded. Did the shape-changers come here looking for me?”

The king’s hands knotted. “They came,” he said grimly. “I lost a quarter of my miners. I would have lost more if Yrth had not been here to fight with us.” Morgon had stopped. The king opened a hand, drew him forward. “We grieved enough for them. If we only knew what they are, what they want…” He sensed something in Morgon. His troubled eyes drew relentlessly at the truth. “You know.”

Morgon did not answer. Danan did not press him, but the lines in his face ran suddenly deep.

He left them in a tower room whose walls and floor and furniture were draped with fur. The air was chilly, but Raederle lit a fire and servants came soon, bringing food, wine, more firewood, warm, rich clothes. Bere followed with a cauldron of steaming water. As he hoisted it onto a hook above the firebed, he smiled at Morgon, his eyes full of questions, but he swallowed them all with an effort. Morgon ridded himself of a well-worn tunic, matted sheepskin, and what dirt the harsh winds had not scoured from his body. Clean, fed, dressed in soft fur and velvet, he sat beside the fire and thought back with amazement on what he had done.

“I left you,” he said to Raederle. “I can understand almost everything but that. I wandered out of the world and left you…”

“You were tired,” she said drowsily. “You said so. Maybe you just needed to think.” She was stretched out beside him on the ankle-deep skins; she sounded warmed by fire and wine, and almost asleep. “Or maybe you needed a place to begin to harp…”

Her voice trailed away into a dream; she left him behind. He drew blankets over her, sat for a while without moving, watching light and shadows pursue one another across her weary face. The winds boomed and broke against the tower like sea waves. They held the echo of a note that haunted his memories. He reached automatically for his harp, then remembered he could not play that note in the king’s house without disrupting its fragile peace.

He played others softly, fragments of ballads wandering into patternless echoes of the winds. His fingers stopped after a while. He sat plucking one note over and over, soundlessly, while a face formed and vanished constantly in the flames. He stood up finally, listening. The house seemed still around him, with only a distant murmuring of voices here and there within its walls. He moved quietly past Raederle, past the guards outside the door, whom he made oblivious to his leaving. He went up the stairs to a doorway hung with white furs that yielded beneath them a strip of light. He parted them gently, walked into semi-darkness and stopped.

The wizard was napping, an old man nodding in a chair beside a fire, his scarred hands lying open on his knees. He looked taller than Morgon remembered, broad-shouldered yet lean beneath the long, dark robe he wore. As Morgon watched him, he woke, opening light, unstartled eyes. He bent down, sighing, groped for wood and positioned it carefully, feeling with his fingers through the lagging flames. They sprang up, lighting a rock-hard face, weathered like a tree stump with age. He seemed to realize suddenly that he was not alone; for an instant his body went motionless as stone. Morgon felt an almost imperceptible touch in his mind. The wizard stirred again, blinking.

“Morgon?” His voice was deep, resonant, yet husky, full of hidden things, like the voice of a deep well. “Come in. Or are you in?”

Morgon moved after a moment “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said softly. Yrth shook his head.

“I heard your harping a while ago. But I didn’t expect to talk to you until morning. Danan told me that Raederle found you in the northern wastes. Were you pursued? Is that why you hid there?”

“No. I simply went there, and stayed because I could think of no reason to come back. Then Raederle came and gave me a reason…”

The wizard contemplated the direction of his voice silently. “You are an amazing man,” he said. “Will you sit down?”

“How do you know I’m not sitting?” Morgon asked curiously.

“I can see the chair in front of you. Can you feel the mind-link? I am seeing out of your eyes.”

“I hardly notice it…”

“That’s because I am not linked to your thoughts, only to your vision. I travelled Trader’s Road through men’s eyes. That night you were attacked by horse thieves, I knew one of them was a shape-changer because I saw through his eyes the stars you kept hidden from men. I searched for him, to kill him, but he eluded me.”

“And the night I followed Deth’s harping? Did you see beneath that illusion, also?”

The wizard was silent again. His head bowed, away from Morgon; the hard lines of his face shifted with such shame and bitterness that Morgon stepped toward him, appalled at his own question.

“Morgon, I am sorry. I am no match for Ghisteslwchlohm.”

“You couldn’t have done anything to help.” His hands gripped the chair back. “Not without endangering Raederle.”

“I did what little I could, reinforcing your illusion when you vanished, but… that was very little.”

“You saved our lives.” He had a sudden, jarring memory of the harpist’s face, eyes seared pale with fire, staring at nothing until Morgon wavered out of existence in front of him. His hands loosed the wood, slid up over his eyes. He heard Yrth stir.

“I can’t see.”

His hands dropped. He sat down, in utter weariness. The winds wailed around the tower in a confusion of voices. Yrth was still, listening to his silence. He said gently, when Morgon did not break it, “Raederle told me what she could of the events in Erlenstar Mountain. I did not go into her mind. Will you let me see into your memories. Or do you prefer to tell me? Either way, I must know.”

“Take it from my mind.”

“Are you too tired now?”

He shook his head a little. “It doesn’t matter. Take what you want.”

The fire grew small in front of him, broke into bright fragments of memory. He endured once more his wild, lonely flight across the backlands, falling out of the sky into the depths of Erlenstar Mountain, The tower flooded with night; he swallowed bitterness like lake water. The fire beyond his vision whispered in languages he did not understand. A wind smashed through the voices, whirling them out of his mind. The tower stones shook around him, shattered by the deep, precise timing of a wind. Then there was a long silence, during which he drowsed, warmed by a summer light. Then he woke again, a strange, wild figure in a sheepskin coat that hung open to the wind. He drifted deeper and deeper into the pure, deadly voices of winter.

He sat beside a fire, listening to the winds. But they were beyond a circle of stone; they touched neither him nor the fire. He stirred a little, blinking, puzzling night and fire and the wizard’s face back into perspective. His thoughts centered once more in the tower. He slumped forward, murmuring, so tired he wanted to melt into the dying fire. The wizard rose, paced a moment, soundlessly, until a clothes chest stopped him.

“What did you do in the wastes?”

“I harped. I could play that low note there, the one that shatters stone…” He heard his voice from a distance, amazed that it was vaguely rational.

“How did you survive?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was part wind, for a while… I was afraid to come back. What will I do with such power?”

“Use it.”

“I don’t dare. I have power over land-law. I want it, I want to use it. But I have no right. Land-law is the heritage of kings, bound into them by the High One. I would destroy all law…”

“Perhaps. But land-law is also the greatest source of power in the realm. Who can help the High One but you?”

“He hasn’t asked for help. Does a mountain ask for help? Or a river? They simply exist. If I touch his power, he may pay enough attention to me to destroy me, but—”

“Morgon, have you no hope whatsoever in those stars I made for you?”

“No.” His eyes closed; he dragged them open again, wanting to weep with the effort. He whispered, “I don’t speak the language of stone. To him, I simply exist. He sees nothing but three stars rising out of countless centuries of darkness, during which powerless shapes called men touched the earth a little, hardly enough to disturb him.”

“He gave them land-law.”

“I was a shape possessing land-law. Now, I am simply a shape with no destiny but in the past. I will not touch the power of another land-ruler again.”

The wizard was silent, gazing down at a fire that kept blurring under Morgon’s eyes. “Are you so angry with the High One?”

“How can I be angry with a stone?”

“The Earth-Masters have taken all shapes. What makes you so certain the High One has shaped himself to everything but the shape and language of men?”

“Why—” He stopped, staring down at the flames until they burned the shadows of sleep out of his mind and he could think again. “You want me to loose my own powers into the realm.”

Yrth did not answer. Morgon looked up at him, giving him back the image of his own face, hard, ancient, powerful. The fire washed over his thoughts again. He saw suddenly, for the first time, not the slab of wind speaking the language of stone that he thought was the High One, but something pursued, vulnerable, in danger, whose silence was the single weapon he possessed. The thought held him still, wondering. Slowly he became aware of the silence that built moment by moment between his question and the answer to it.

He stopped breathing, listening to the silence that haunted him oddly, like a memory of something he had once cherished. The wizard’s hands turned a little toward the light and then closed, hiding their scars. He said, “There are powers loosed all over the realm to find the High One. Yours will not be the worst. You are, after all, bound by a peculiar system of restraints. The best, and the least comprehensible of them, seems to be love. You could ask permission from the land-rulers. They trust you. And they were in great despair when neither you nor the High One seemed to be anywhere on the face of the realm.”

Morgon’s head bowed. “I didn’t think of them.” He did not hear Yrth move until the wizard’s dark robe brushed the wood of his chair. The wizard’s hand touched his shoulder, very gently, as he might have touched a wild thing that had moved fearfully, tentatively, toward him into his stillness.

Something drained out of Morgon at the touch: confusion, anger, arguments, even the strength and will to wrestle with all the wizard’s subtlety. Only the silence was left, and a helpless, incomprehensible longing.

“I’ll find the High One,” he said. He added, in warning or in promise, “Nothing will destroy him. I swear it. Nothing.”

11

	11

HE SLEPT FOR two days in the king’s house, waking only once to eat, and another time to see Raederle sitting beside him, waiting patiently for him to wake up. He linked his fingers into hers, smiling a little, then rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke finally, clear-headed, at evening. He was alone. From the faint chaos of voices and crockery that seeped into his listening, he knew that the household was at supper, and Raederle was probably with Danan. He washed and drank some wine, still listening. Beneath the noises of the house, he heard the vast, dark, ageless silence forming the hollows and mazes within Isig Mountain.

He stood linked to the silence until it formed channels in his mind. Then, impulsively, he left the tower, went unobtrusively to the hall, where only Raederle and Bere noticed him, falling quiet amid the noise to watch his passage. He followed the path of a dream then, through the empty upper shafts. He took a torch from the wall at the mouth of a dark tunnel; as he entered it, the walls blazed around him with fiery, uncut jewels. He moved unhesitantly through his memory, down a honeycomb of passageways, along the sides of shallow streams and deep crevices, through unmined caves shimmering with gold, moving deeper and deeper into the immensity of darkness and stone until he seemed to breathe its stillness and age into his bones. At last he sensed something older, even, than the great mountain. The path he followed dwindled into crumbled stone. The torch fire washed over a deep green slab of a door that had opened once before to the sound of his name. There he stopped incredulously.

The ground floor was littered with the shards of broken rock. The door to the Earth-Masters’ dead was split open; half of it had fallen ponderously back into the cave. The tomb itself was choked with great chunks of jewelled ceiling stone; the walls had shrugged themselves together, hiding whatever was left of the strange pale stones within.

He picked his way to the door, but he could not enter. He crooked one arm on the door, leaned his face against it. He let his thoughts flow into the stone, seep through marble, amethyst, and gold until he touched something like the remnant of a half-forgotten dream. He explored farther; he found no names, only a sense of something that had once lived.

He stood for a long time, leaning against the door without moving. After a while, he knew why he had come down into the mountain, and he felt the blood beat through him, quick, cold, as it had the first time he had brought himself to that threshold of his destiny. He became aware, as he had never been before, of the mountain settled over his head, and of the king within it, his ancient mind shaped to its mazes, holding all its peace and all its power. His thoughts moved once again, slowly, into the door, until he touched at the core of the stone, the sense of Danan’s mind, shaped to that tiny fragment of mountain, bound to it. He let his brain become stone, rich, worn, ponderous. He drew all knowledge of it into himself, of its great strength, its inmost colors, its most fragile point where he might have shattered it with a thought. The knowledge became a binding, a part of himself, deep in his own mind. Then, searching within the stone, he found once more the wordless awareness, the law that bound king to stone, land-ruler to every portion of his kingdom. He encompassed that awareness, broke it, and the stone held no name but his own.

He let his own awareness of the binding dwindle into some dark cave deep in his mind. He straightened slowly, sweating in the cool air. His torch was out; he touched it, lit it again. Turning, he found Danan in front of him, massive and still as Isig, his face expressionless as a rock.

Morgon’s muscles tensed involuntarily. He wondered for a second if there was any language in him to explain what he was doing to a rock, before the slow, ponderous weight of Danan’s anger roused stones from their sleep to bury him beside the children’s tomb. Then he saw the king’s broad fist unclench.

“Morgon.” His voice was breathless with astonishment. “It was you who drew me down here. What are you doing?” He touched Morgon when he could not answer. “You’re frightened. What are you doing that you need to fear me?”

Morgon moved after a moment. His body felt drained, cumbersome as stone. “Learning your land-law.” He leaned back against the damp wall behind him, his face uplifted, vulnerable to Danan’s searching.

“Where did you get such power? From Ghisteslwchlohm?”

“No.” He repeated the word suddenly, passionately, “No. I would die before I did that to you. I will never go into your mind—”

“You are in it. Isig is my brain, my heart—”

“I won’t break your bindings again. I swear it. I will simply form my own.”

“But why? What do you want with such a knowledge of trees and stones?”

“Power. Danan, the shape-changers are Earth-Masters. I can’t hope to fight them unless—”

The king’s fingers wound like a tree root around his wrist. “No,” he said, as Ghisteslwchlohm had said, faced with the same knowledge. “Morgon, that’s not possible.”

“Danan,” he whispered, “I have heard their voices. The languages they spoke. I have seen the power locked behind their eyes. It is possible.”

Danan’s hand slipped away from him. The king sat down slowly, heavily, on a pile of rock shard. Morgon, looking down at him, wondered suddenly how old he was. His hands, calloused with centuries of work among stones, made a futile gesture. “What do they want?”

“The High One.”

Danan stared at him. ’They’ll destroy us.” He reached out to Morgon again. “And you. What do they want with you?”

“I’m their link to the High One. I don’t know how I am bound to him, or why—I only know that because of him I have been driven out of my own land, harried, tormented into power, until now I am driving myself into power. The Earth-Masters’ power seems bound, restrained by something… perhaps the High One, which is why they are so desperate to find him. When they do, whatever power they unleash against him may destroy us all. He may stay bound forever in his silence; it’s hard for me to risk my life and all your trust for someone who never speaks. But at least if I fight for him, I fight for you.” He paused, his eyes on the flecks of fire catching in the rough, rich walls around him. “I can’t ask you to trust me,” he said softly. “Not when I don’t even trust myself. All I know is where both logic and hunger lead me.”

He heard the king’s weary sigh in the shadows. “The ending of an age… That’s what you told me the last time you came to this place. Ymris is nearly destroyed. It seems only a matter of time before that war spills into An, into Herun, then north across the realm. I have an army of miners, the Morgol has her guard, the wolf-king… has his wolves. But what is that against an army of Earth-Masters coming back into their power? And how can one Prince of Hed, even with whatever knowledge of land-law you have the strength to acquire, fight that?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“How?”

“Danan, I’ll find a way. It’s either that or die, and I am too stubborn to die.” He sat down beside the king, gazing at the rubble around them. “What happened to this place? I wanted to go into the minds of the dead children, to see into their memories, but there is nothing left of them.”

Danan shook his head. “I felt it, near the end of summer: a turmoil somewhere in the center of my world. It happened shortly before the shape—the Earth-Masters came here looking for you. I don’t know how this place was destroyed, or by whom…”

“I know,” he whispered. “Wind. The deep wind that shatters stone… The High One destroyed this place.”

“But why? It was their one final place of peace.”

“I don’t know. Unless… unless he found another place for them, fearing for their peace even here. I don’t know. Maybe somehow I will find him, hold him to some shape that I can understand, and ask him why.”

“If you can do even that much—only that—you will repay the land-rulers for whatever power you take from the realm. At least we will die knowing why.” He pushed himself up and dropped a hand on Morgon’s shoulder. “I understand what you are doing. You need an Earth-Master’s power to fight Earth-Masters. If you want to take a mountain onto your shoulders, I’ll give you Isig. The High One gives us silence; you give us impossible hope.”

The king left him alone. Morgon dropped the torch to the ground, watched it burn away into darkness. He stood up, not fighting his blindness, but breathing the mountain-blackness into himself until it seeped into his mind and hollowed all his bones. His thoughts groped into the stone around him, slid through stone passages, channels of air, sluices of slow, black water. He carved the mountain out of its endless night, shaped it to his thoughts. His mind pushed into solid rock, expanded outward through stone, hollows of silence, deep lakes, until earth crusted over the rock and he felt the slow, downward groping of tree roots. His awareness filled the base of the mountain, flowed slowly, relentlessly upward. He touched the minds of blind fish, strange insects living in a changeless world. He became the topaz locked in a stone that a miner was chiseling loose; he hung upside down, staring at nothing in the brain of a bat. His own shape was lost; his bones curved around an ancient silence, rose endlessly upward, heavy with metal and jewels. He could not find his heart. When he probed for it within masses of stone, he sensed another name, another’s heart.

He did not disturb that name bound into every fragment of the mountain. Slowly, as hours he never measured passed, he touched every level of the mountain, groping steadily upward through mineshafts, through granite, through caves, like Danan’s secret thoughts, luminous with their own beauty. The hours turned into days he did not count. His mind, rooted to the ground floor of Isig, shaped to all its rifts and channels, broke through finally to peaks buried under the first winter snows.

He felt ponderous with mountain. His awareness spanned the length and, bulk of it. In some minute corner of the darkness far beneath him, his body lay like a fragment of rock on the floor of the mountain. He seemed to gaze down at it, not knowing how to draw the immensity of his thoughts back into it. Finally, wearily, something in him like an inner eye simply closed, and his mind melted into darkness.

He woke once more as hands came out of darkness, turned him over. He said, before he even opened his eyes, “All right. I learned the land-law of Isig. With one twist of thought I could hold the land-rule. Is that what you’ll ask of me next?”

“Morgon.”

He opened his eyes. At first he thought dawn had come into the mountain, for the walls around him and Yrth’s worn, blind face seemed darkly luminous. Then he whispered, “I can see.”

“You swallowed a mountain. Can you stand?” The big hands hauled him to his feet without waiting for his answer. “You might try trusting me a little. You’ve tried everything else. Take one step.”

He started to speak, but the wizard’s mind filled his with an image of a small firelit chamber in a tower. He stepped into it and saw Raederle rise, trail fire with her as she came to meet him. He reached out to her; she seemed to come endlessly toward him, dissolving into fire when he finally touched her.

He woke to hear her playing softly on a flute one of the craftsmen had given her. She stopped, smiling as he looked at her, but she looked weary and pale. He sat up, waited for a mountain to shift into place in his head. Then he kissed her.

“You must be tired of waiting for me to wake up.”

“It would be nice to talk to you,” she said wistfully. “Either you’re asleep or you vanish. Yrth was here most of the day. I read to him out of old spell books.”

“That was kind of you.”

“Morgon, he asked me to. I wanted so badly to question him, but I couldn’t. There seemed suddenly nothing to question… until he left. I think I’ll study wizardry. They knew more odd, petty spells than even witches. Do you know what you’re doing? Other than half-killing yourself?”

“I’m doing what you told me to do. I’m playing a riddle-game.” He got to his feet, suddenly ravenously hungry, but found only wine. He gulped a cup, while she went to the door, spoke to one of the miners guarding them. He poured more wine and said when she came back, “I told you I would do whatever he wanted me to do. I always have.” She looked at him silently. He added simply, “I don’t know. Maybe I have already lost. I’ll go to Osterland and request that same thing from Har. Knowledge of his land-law. And then to Herun, if I am still alive. And then to Ymris…”

“There are Earth-Masters all over Ymris.”

“By that time, I will begin to think like an Earth-Master. And maybe by then the High One will reach out of his silence and either doom me for touching his power, or explain to me what in Hel’s name I’m doing.” He finished the second cup of wine, then said to her suddenly, intensely, “There is nothing I can trust but the strictures of riddlery. The wise man knows his own name. My name is one of power. So I reach out to it. Does that seem wrong to you? It frightens me. But still I reach…”

She seemed as uncertain as he felt, but she only said calmly, “If it ever seems wrong, I’ll be there to tell you.”

He spoke with Yrth and Danan in the king’s hall late that night. Everyone had gone to bed. They sat close to the hearth; Morgon, watching the old, rugged faces of king and wizard as the fire washed over them, sensed the love of the great mountain in them both. He had shaped the harp at Yrth’s request. The wizard’s hands moved from string to string, listening to their tones. But he did not play it.

“I must leave for Osterland soon,” Morgon said to Danan, “to ask of Har what I asked of you.”

Danan looked at Yrth. “Are you going with him?”

The wizard nodded. His light eyes touched Morgon’s as if by accident. “How are you planning to get there?” he asked.

“We’ll fly, probably. You know the crow-shape.”

“Three crows above the dead fields of Osterland…” He plucked a string softly. “Nun is in Yrye, with the wolf-king. She came here while you were sleeping, bringing news. She had been in the Three Portions, helping Talies search for you. Mathom of An is gathering a great army of the living and dead to help the Ymris forces. He says he is not going to sit waiting for the inevitable.”

Danan straightened. “He is.” He leaned forward, his blunt hands joined. “I’m thinking of arming the miners with sword, ax, pick—every weapon we possess—and taking them south. I have shiploads of arms and armor in Kyrth and Kraal bound for Ymris. I could bring an army with them.”

“You…” Morgon said. His voice caught “You can’t leave Isig.”

“I’ve never done it,” the king admitted. “But I am not going to let you battle alone. And if Ymris falls, so will Isig, eventually. Ymris is the stronghold of the realm.”

“But, Danan, you aren’t a fighter.”

“Neither are you,” Danan said inarguably.

“How are you going to battle Earth-Masters with picks?”

“We did it here. Well do it in Ymris. You have only one thing to do, it seems. Find the High One before they can.”

“I’m trying. I touched every binding of land-law in Isig, and he didn’t seem to care. It’s as though I might be doing exactly what he wants.” His words echoed oddly through his mind. But Yrth interrupted his thoughts, reaching a little randomly for his wine. Morgon handed it to him before he spilled it. “You aren’t using our eyes.”

“No. Sometimes I see more clearly in the dark. My mind reaches out to shape the world around me, but judging small distances is not so easy…” He gave the starred harp back to Morgon. “Even after all these years, I can still remember what mountain stream, what murmur of fire, what bird cry I pitched each note to…”

“I would like to hear you play it,” Morgon said. The wizard shook his head imperturbably.

“No, you wouldn’t. I play very badly these days, as Danan could tell you.” He turned toward Danan. “If you leave at all for Ymris, you should leave soon. You’ll be warring on the threshold of winter, and there may be no time when you will be needed more. Ymris warriors dislike battling in snow, but the Earth-Masters would not even notice it. They and the weather will be merciless adversaries.”

“Well,” Danan said after a silence, “either I fight them in the Ymris winter, or I fight them in my own house. I’ll begin gathering men and ships tomorrow. I’ll leave Ash here. He won’t like it, but he is my land-heir, and it would be senseless to risk both our lives in Ymris.”

“He’ll want to go in your place,” Yrth said.

“I know.” His voice was calm, but Morgon sensed the strength in him, the obdurate power of stone that would thunder into movement perhaps once during its existence. “He’ll stay. I’m old, and if I die… the great, weathered, ancient trees are the ones that do the most damage as they fall.”

Morgon’s hands closed tightly on the arms of his chair. “Danan,” he pleaded, “don’t go. There is no need for you to risk your life. You are rooted in our minds to the first years of the realm. If you die, something of hope in us all will die.”

“There is need. I am fighting for all things precious to me. Isig. All the lives within it, bound to this mountain’s life. You.”

“All right,” he whispered. “All right. I will find the High One if I have to shake power from his mind until he reaches out of his secret place to stop me.”

He talked to Raederle for a long time that night after he left the king’s hall. He lay at her side on the soft furs beside the fire. She listened silently while he told her of his intentions and Danan’s war plans and the news that Nun had brought to Isig about her father. She said, twisting tufts of sheep pelt into knots, “I wonder if the roof of Anuin fell in with all the shouting there must have been over that decision.”

“He wouldn’t have made it unless he thought war was inevitable.”

“No. He saw that war coming long ago, out of his crow’s eyes…” She sighed, wrenching at the wool. “I suppose Rood will be at one side and Duac at the other, arguing all the way to Ymris.” She stopped, her eyes on the fire, and he saw the sudden longing in her face. He touched her cheek.

“Raederle. Do you want to go home for a while and see them? You could be there in a few days, flying, and then meet me somewhere—Herun, perhaps.”

“No.”

“I dragged you down Trader’s Road in the dust and heat; I harried you until you changed shape; I put you into Ghisteslwchlohm’s hands; and then I left you facing Earth-Masters by yourself while I ran—”

“Morgon.”

“And then, after you came into your own power and followed me all the way across the backlands into Erlenstar Mountain, I walked off into the wastes and left you without a word, so you had to search for me through half the northlands. Then you lead me home, and I hardly even talk to you. How in Hel’s name can you stand me by this time?”

She smiled. “I don’t know. I wonder sometimes, too. Then you touch my face with your scarred hand and read my mind. Your eyes know me. That’s why I keep following you all over the realm, barefoot or half-frozen, cursing the sun or the wind, or myself because I have no more sense than to love a man who does not even possess a bed I can crawl into at night. And sometimes I curse you because you have spoken my name in a way that no other man in the realm will speak it, and I will listen for that until I die. So,” she added, as he gazed down at her mutely, “how can I leave you?”

He dropped his face against hers, so that their brows and cheekbones touched, and he looked deeply into a single, amber eye. He watched it smile. She put her arms around him, kissed the hollow of his throat, and then his heart. Then she slid her hand between their mouths. He murmured a protest into her palm. She said, “I want to talk.”

He sat up, breathing deeply, and tossed another log on the fire. “All right.”

“Morgon, what will you do if that wizard with his harpist’s hands betrays you again? If you find the High One for him, and then realize too late that he has a mind more devious than Ghisteslwchlohm’s?”

“I already know he has.” He was silent, brooding, his arms around his knees. “I’ve thought of that again and again. Did you see him use power in Lungold?”

“Yes. He was protecting the traders as they fought.”

“Then he is not an Earth-Master; their power is bound.”

“He is a wizard.”

“Or something else we have no name for… that’s what I’m afraid of.” He stirred a little. “He didn’t even try to dissuade Danan from bringing the miners to Ymris. They aren’t warriors; they’ll be slaughtered. And Danan has no business dying on the battlefield. He said once he wanted to become a tree, under the sun and stars, when it was time for him to die. Still, he and Yrth have known each other for many centuries. Maybe Yrth knew it was futile to argue with a stone.”

“If it is Yrth. Are you even sure of that?”

“Yes. He made certain I knew that. He played my harp.”

She was silent, her fingers trailing up and down his backbone. “Well,” she said softly, “then maybe you can trust him.”

“I have tried,” he whispered. Her hand stilled. He lay back down beside her, listening to the pine keen as it burned. He put his wrist over his eyes. “I’m going to fail. I could never win an argument with him. I couldn’t even kill him. All I can do is wait until he names himself, and by then it may be too late…”

She said something after a moment. What it was he did not hear, for something without definition in the dark of his mind had stirred. It felt at first like a mind-touch he could not stop. So he explored it, and it became a sound. His lips parted; the breath came quick, dry out of him. The sound heaved into a bellow, like the bellow of the sea smashing docks and beached boats and fishermen’s houses, then riding high, piling up and over a cliff to tear at fields, topple trees, roar darkly through the night, drowning screams of men and animals. He was on his feet without knowing it, echoing the cry he heard in the mind of the land-ruler of Hed.

“No!”

He heard a tangle of voices. He could not see in the whirling black flood. His body seemed veined with land-law. He felt the terrible wave whirled back, sucking with it broken sacks of grain, sheep and pigs, beer barrels, the broken walls of barns and houses, fenceposts, soup cauldrons, harrows, children screaming in the dark. Someone gripped him, crying his name over and over. Fear, despair, helpless anger washed through him, his own and Eliard’s. A mind caught at his mind, but he was bound to Hed, a thousand miles away. Then a hand snapped painfully across his face, rocking him back, out of his vision.

He found himself staring into Yrth’s blind eyes. A hot, furious sense of the wizard’s incomprehensible injustice swept through him so strongly he could not even speak. He doubled his fist and swung. Yrth was far heavier than he expected; the blow wrenched his bones from wrist to shoulder, and split his knuckles, as if he had struck stone or wood. Yrth, looking vaguely surprised, wavered in the air before he might have fallen and then vanished. He reappeared a moment later and sat down on the rim of the firebed, cupping a bleeding cheekbone.

The two guards in the doorway and Raederle all had the same expression on their faces. They seemed also to be bound motionless. Morgon, catching his breath, the sudden fury dissipated, said, “Hed is under attack. I’m going there.”

“No.”

“The sea came up over the cliffs. I heard—I heard their voices, Eliard’s voice. If he’s dead—I swear, if he is dead—if you hadn’t hit me, I would know! I was in his mind. Tol—Tol was destroyed. Everything. Everyone.” He looked at Raederle. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I’m coming,” she whispered.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Morgon,” Yrth said. “You will be killed.”

“Tristan.” His hands clenched; he swallowed a painful, burning knot. “I don’t know if she’s alive or dead!” He closed his eyes, flinging his mind across the dark, rain-drenched night, across the vast forests, as far as he could reach. He stepped toward the edge of his awareness. But an image formed in his mind, drew him back as he moved, and he opened his eyes to the firelit walls of the tower.

“It’s a trap,” Yrth said. His voice sounded hollow with pain, but very patient. Morgon did not bother to answer. He drew the image of a falcon out of his mind, but swiftly, even before he had begun to change shape, the image changed to light, burned eyes that saw into his mind. They pulled him back into himself.

“Morgon, I’ll go. They are expecting you; they hardly know me. I can travel swiftly; I’ll be back very soon…” He stood up abruptly as Morgon filled his mind with illusions of fire and shadow and disappeared within them. He had nearly walked out of the room when the wizard’s eyes pierced into his thoughts, breaking his concentration.

The anger flared in him again. He kept walking and brought himself up against an illusion of solid stone in the doorway. “Morgon,” the wizard said, and Morgon whirled. He flung a shout into Yrth’s mind that should have jarred the wizard’s attention away from his illusion. But the shout echoed harmlessly into a mind like a vast chasm of darkness.

He stood still, then, his hands flat on the illusion, a fine sweat of fear and exhaustion forming on his face. The darkness was like a warning. But he let his mind touch it again, form around it, try to move through its illusion to the core of the wizard’s thoughts. He only blundered deeper into darkness, with the sense of some vast power constantly retreating before his searching. He followed it until he could no longer find his way back…

He came out of the darkness slowly, to find himself sitting motionless beside the fire. Raederle was beside him, her fingers locked to his limp hand. Yrth stood in front of them. His face looked almost grey with weariness; his eyes were bloodshot. His boots and the hem of his long robe were stained with dry mud and crusted salt. The cut on his cheek had closed.

Morgon started. Danan, on his other side, stooped to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Morgon,” he said softly, “Yrth has just come back from Hed. It’s mid-morning. He has been gone two nights and a day.”

“What did you—” He stood up, too abruptly. Danan caught him, held him while the blood behind his eyes receded. “How did you do that to me?” he whispered.

“Morgon, forgive me.” The strained, weary voice seemed haunted with overtones of another voice. “The Earth-Masters were waiting for you in Hed. If you had gone, you would have died there, and more lives would have been lost battling for you. They couldn’t find you anywhere; they were trying to drive you out of your hiding.”

“Eliard—”

“He’s safe. I found him standing among the ruins of Akren. The wave destroyed Tol, Akren, most of the farms along the western coast. I spoke to the fanners; they saw some fighting between strange, armed men, they said, who did not belong in Hed. I questioned one of the wraiths; he said there was little to be done against the shape of water. I told Eliard who I am, where you are… he was stunned with the suddenness of it He said that he knew you had sensed the destruction, but he was glad you had had sense enough not to come.”

Morgon drew breath; it seemed to burn through him. “Tristan?”

“As far as Eliard knows, she’s safe. Some feebleminded trader told her you had disappeared. So she left Hed to look for you, but a sailor recognized her in Caithnard and stopped her. She is on her way home.” Morgon put his hand over his eyes. The wizard’s hand rose, went out to him, but he drew back. “Morgon.” The wizard was dredging words from somewhere out of his exhaustion. “It was not a complex binding. You were not thinking clearly enough to break it.”

“I was thinking clearly,” he whispered. “I did not have the power to break it.” He stopped, aware of Danan behind him, puzzled, yet trusting them both. The dark riddle of the wizard’s power loomed again over his thoughts, over the whole of the realm, from Isig to Hed. There seemed no escape from it. He began to sob harshly, hopelessly, possessing no other answer. The wizard, his shoulders slumping as if the weight of the realm dragged at his back, gave him nothing but silence.

12

	12

THEY LEFT ISIG the next day: three crows flying among the billowing smoke from Danan’s forges. They crossed the Ose, flew over the docks at Kyrth; every ship moored there was being overhauled for a long journey down the river to the heavy autumn seas. The grey rains beat against them over the forests of Osterland; the miles of ancient pine were hunched and weary. Grim Mountain rose in the distance out of a ring of mist. The east and north winds swarmed around them; the crows dipped from current to current, their feathers alternately sleeked and billowed by the erratic winds. They stopped to rest frequently. By nightfall they were barely halfway to Yrye.

They stopped for the night under the broad eaves of an old tree whose thick branches sighed resignedly in the rain. They found niches in it to protect themselves from the weather. Two crows huddled together on a branch; the third landed below them, a big, dark, windblown bird who had not spoken since they left Isig. For hours they slept, shielded by the weave of branches, lulled by the wind.

The winds died at midnight. The rains slowed to a whisper, then faded. The clouds parted, loosing the stars cluster by cluster against a dazzling blackness. The unexpected silence found its way into Morgon’s crow-dreams. His eyes opened.

Raederle was motionless beside him, ,a little cloud of soft black plumage. The crow beneath him was still. His own shape pulled at him dimly, wanting to breathe the spices of the night, wanting to become moonlight. He spread his wings after a moment, dropped soundlessly to the ground, and changed shape.

He stood quietly, enfolded in the Osterland night. His mind opened to all its sounds and smells and shapes. He laid his hand against the wet, rough flank of the tree and felt it drowsing. He heard the pad of some night hunter across the soft, damp ground. He smelled the rich, tangled odors of wet pine, of dead bark and loam crumbled under his feet. His thoughts yearned to become part of the land, under the light, silvery touch of the moon. He let his mind drift finally into the vast, tideless night.

He shaped his mind to the roots of trees, to buried stones, to the brains of animals moving obliviously across the path of his awareness. He sensed in all things the ancient sleeping fire of Har’s law, the faint, perpetual fire behind his eyes. He touched fragments of the dead within the earth, the bones and memories of men and animals. Unlike the wraiths of An, they were quiescent, at rest in the heart of the wild land. Quietly, unable to resist his own longings, he began weaving his bindings of awareness and knowledge into the law of Osterland.

Slowly he began to understand the roots of the land-law. The bindings of snow and sun had touched all life. The wild winds set the vesta’s speed; the fierceness of seasons shaped the wolf’s brain; the winter night seeped into the raven’s eye. The more he understood, the deeper he drew himself into it: gazing at the moon out of a horned owl’s eyes, melting with a wild cat through the bracken, twisting his thoughts even into the fragile angles of a spider’s web, and into the endless, sinuous wind of ivy spiralling a tree trunk. He was so engrossed that he touched a vesta’s mind without questioning it. A little later, he touched another. And then, suddenly, his mind could not move without finding vesta, as if they had shaped themselves out of the moonlight around him. They were running: a soundless white wind coming from all directions. Curiously, he explored their impulse. Some danger had sent them flowing across the night, he sensed, and wondered what would dare trouble the vesta in Har’s domain. He probed deeper. Then he shook himself free of them; the swift, startled breath he drew of the icy air cleared his head.

It was nearly dawn. What he thought was moonlight was the first silver-grey haze of morning. The vesta were very close, a great herd wakened by Har, their minds drawn with a fine instinct towards whatever had brought the king out of his sleep and disturbed the ancient workings of his mind. Morgon stood still, considering various impulses: to take the crow-shape and escape into the tree; to take the vesta-shape; to try to reach Har’s mind, and hope he was not too angry to listen. Before he could act, he found Yrth standing next to him.

“Be still,” he said, and Morgon, furious at his own acquiescence, followed the unlikely advice.

He began to see the vesta all around them, through the trees. Their speed was incredible; the unwavering drive toward one isolated point in the forests was eerie. They were massed around him in a matter of moments, surrounding the tree. They did not threaten him; they simply stood in a tight, motionless circle, gazing at him out of alien purple eyes, their horns sketching gold circles against the trees and the pallid morning sky as far as he could see.

Raederle woke. She gave one faint, surprised squawk. Her mind reached into Morgon’s; she said his name on a questioning note. He did not dare answer, and she was silent after that. The sun whitened a wall of cloud in the east, then disappeared. The rain began again, heavy, sullen drops that plummeted straight down from a windless sky.

An hour later, something began to ripple through the herd. Morgon, drenched from head to foot and cursing Yrth’s advice, watched the movement with relief. One set of gold horns was moving through the herd; he watched the bright circles constantly fall apart before it and rejoin in its wake. He knew it must be Har. He wiped rain out of his eyes with a sodden sleeve and sneezed suddenly. Instantly, the vesta nearest him, standing so placidly until then, belled like a stag and reared. One gold hoof slashed the air apart inches from Morgon’s face. His muscles turned to stone. The vesta subsided, dropping back to gaze at him again, peacefully.

Morgon stared back at it, his heartbeat sounding uncomfortably loud. The front circle broke again, shifting to admit the great vesta. It changed shape. The wolf-king stood before Morgon, the smile in his eyes boding no good to whoever had interrupted his sleep.

The smile died as he recognized Morgon. He turned his head, spoke one word sharply; the vesta faded like a dream. Morgon waited silently, tensely, for judgment. It did not come. The king reached out, pushed the wet hair back from the stars on his face, as if answering a doubt. Then he looked at Yrth.

“You should have warned him.”

“I was asleep,” Yrth said. Har grunted.

“I thought you never slept.” He glanced up into the tree and his face gentled. He held up his hand. The crow dropped down onto his fingers, and he set it on his shoulder. Morgon stirred, then. Har looked at him, his eyes glinting, ice-blue, the color of wind across the sky above the wastes.

“You,” he said, “stealing fire from my mind. Couldn’t you have waited until morning?”

“Har…” Morgon whispered. He shook his head, not knowing where to begin. Then he stepped forward, his head bowed, into the wolf-king’s embrace. “How can you trust me like this?” he demanded.

“Occasionally,” Har admitted, “I am not rational.” He loosed Morgon, held him back to look at him. “Where did Raederle find you?”

“In the wastes.”

“You look like a man who has been listening to those deadly winds… Come to Yrye. A vesta can travel faster than a crow, and this deep into Osterland, vesta running together will not be noticed.” He dropped his hand lightly onto the wizard’s shoulder. “Ride on my back. Or on Morgon’s.”

“No,” Morgon said abruptly, without thinking. Har’s eyes went back to him.

Yrth said, before the king could speak, “I’ll ride in crow-shape.” His voice was tired. “There was a time when I would have chanced running blind for the sheer love of running, but no more… I must be getting old.” He changed shape, fluttered from the ground to Har’s other shoulder.

The wolf-king, frowning a little, his lined face shadowed by crows, seemed to hear something behind Morgon’s silence. But he only said, “Let’s get out of the rain.”

They ran through the day until twilight: three vesta running north toward winter, one with a crow riding in the circle of its horns. They reached Yrye by nightfall. As they slowed and came to a halt in the yard, their sides heaving, the heavy doors of weathered oak and gold were thrown open. Aia appeared with wolves at her knees and Nun behind her, smiling out of her smoke.

Nun hugged Raederle in vesta-shape and again in her own shape. Aia, her smooth ivory hair unbraided, stared at Morgon a little, then kissed his cheek very gently. She patted Har’s shoulder, and Yrth’s, and said in her placid voice, “I sent everyone home. Nun told me who was coming.”

“I told her,” Yrth said, before Har had to ask. The king smiled a little. They went into the empty hall. The fire roared down the long bed; platters of hot meat, hot bread, hissing brass pots of spiced wine, steaming stews and vegetables lay on a table beside the hearth. They were eating almost before they sat down, quickly, hungrily. Then, as the edge wore off, they settled in front of the fire with wine and began to talk a little.

Har said to Morgon, who was half-drowsing on a bench with his arm around Raederle, “So. You came to Osterland to learn my land-law. I’ll make a bargain with you.”

That woke him. He eyed the king a moment, then said simply, “No. Whatever you want, I’ll give you.”

“That,” Har said softly, “sounds like a fair exchange for land-law. You may wander freely through my mind, if I may wander freely through yours.” He seemed to sense something in a vague turn of Yrth’s head. “You have some objection?”

“Only that we have very little time,” Yrth said. Morgon looked at him.

“Are you advising me to take the knowledge from the earth itself? That would take weeks.”

“No.”

“Then, are you advising me not to take it at all?”

The wizard sighed. “No.”

“Then what do you advise me to do?” Raederle stirred in his hold, at the faint, challenging edge to his voice. Har was still in his great carved chair; the wolf at his knee opened its eyes suddenly to gaze at Morgon.

“Are you,” Har said amazedly, “picking a quarrel with Yrth in my hall?”

The wizard shook his head. “It’s my fault,” he explained. “There is a mind-hold Morgon was not aware pf. I used it to keep him in Isig a few days ago when Hed was attacked. It seemed better than to let him walk into a trap.”

Morgon, his hands locking around the rim of his cup, checked a furious retort. Nun said, puzzled, “What hold?” Yrth looked toward her silently. Her face grew quiet for a moment, remote as if she were dreaming. Yrth loosed her, and her brows rose. “Where in Hel’s name did you learn that?”

“I saw the possibility of it long ago, and I explored it into existence.” He sounded apologetic. “I would never have used it except under extreme circumstances.”

“Well, I would be upset, too. But I can certainly understand why you did it. If the Earth-Masters are searching for Morgon at the other end of the realm, there’s no reason to distract them by giving them what they want.”

Morgon’s head bowed. He felt the touch of Har’s gaze, like something physical, forcing his face up. He met the curious, ungentle eyes helplessly. The king loosed him abruptly.

“You need some sleep.”

Morgon stared down into his wine. “I know.” He felt Raederle’s hand slide from his ribs to touch his cheek, and the weight of despair in him eased a little. He said haltingly, breaking the silence that had fallen over the hall, “But first, tell me how the vesta are bound like that into the defense of land-law. I was never aware of it as a vesta.”

“I was hardly aware of it myself,” the king admitted. “It’s an ancient binding, I think; the vesta are extremely powerful, and I believe they rouse to the defense of the land, as well as land-law. But they have not fought anything but wolves for centuries, and the binding lay dormant at the bottom of my mind… I’ll show you the binding, of course. Tomorrow.” He looked across the fire at the wizard, who was refilling his cup slowly with hot spiced wine. “Yrth, did you go to Hed?”

“Yes.” The pitch of liquid pouring into the cup changed as it neared the rim, and Yrth set the pot down.

“How did you cross Ymris?”

“Very carefully. I took no more time than necessary on my way to Hed, but returning, I stopped a few minutes to speak to Aloil. Our minds are linked; I was able to find him without using power. He was with Astrin Ymris, and what is left of the king’s forces around Caerweddin.”

There was another silence. A branch snapped in the fire and a shower of sparks fled towards the smoke hole in the roof. “What is left of the king’s forces?” Har asked.

“Astrin was unsure. Half the men were pushed into Ruhn when Wind Plain was lost; the rest fled northward. The rebels—whatever they are: living men, dead men, Earth-Masters—have not attacked Caerweddin or any of the major cities in Ymris.” He gazed thoughtfully through someone else’s eyes at the fire. “They keep taking the ancient, ruined cities. There are many across Ruhn, one or two in east Umber, and King’s Mouth Plain, near Caerweddin. Astrin and his generals are in dispute about what to do. The war-lords contend that the rebels will not take King’s Mouth Plain without attacking Caerweddin. Astrin does not want to waste lives warring over a dead city. He is beginning to think that the king’s army and the rebel army are not fighting the same war…”

Har grunted. He rose, the wolf’s head sliding from his knee. “A one-eyed man who can see… Does he see an end to the war?”

“No. But he told me he is haunted by dreams of Wind Plain, as if some answer lies there. The tower on the plain is still bound by a living force of illusion.”

“Wind Tower.” The words came out of Morgon unexpectedly, some shard of a riddle the wizard’s words unburied. “I had forgotten…”

“I tried to climb it once,” Nun said reminiscently.

Har took his cup to the table for more wine. “So did I.” He asked, as Morgon glanced at him, “Have you?”

“No.”

“Why not? It’s a riddle. You’re a riddler.”

He thought back. “The first time I was on Wind Plain with Astrin I had lost my memory. There was only one riddle I was interested in answering. The second time…” He shifted a little. “I passed through very quickly, at night. I was pursuing a harpist. Nothing could have stopped me.”

“Then perhaps,” Har said softly, “you should try.”

“You’re not thinking,” Nun protested. “The plain must be full of Earth-Masters.”

“I am always thinking,” Har said. A thought startled through Morgon; he moved again without realizing it, and Raederle lifted her face, blinking.

“It’s bound by illusion… no one can reach the top of it. No one works an illusion unless there is something to be hidden, unseen… But what would be hidden for so long at the top of the tower?”

“The High One,” Raederle suggested sleepily. They gazed at her, Nun with her pipe smoldering in her fingers, Har with his cup halfway to his mouth. “Well,” she added, “that’s the one thing everyone is looking for. And the one place maybe that no one has looked.”

Har’s eyes went to Morgon. He ran his hand through his hair, his face clearing, easing into wonder. “Maybe. Har, you know I will try. But I always thought the binding of that illusion was some forgotten work of dead Earth-Masters, not… not of a living Earth-Master. Wait.” He sat straight, staring ahead of him. “Wind Tower. The name of it… the name… wind.” They roused suddenly through his memories: the deep wind in Erlenstar Mountain, the tumultuous winds of the wastes, singing to all the notes of his harp. “Wind Tower.”

“What de you see?”

“I don’t know… a harp strung with wind.” As the winds died in his mind, he realized that he did not know who had asked the question. The vision receded, leaving him with only words and the certainty that they somehow fit together. “The tower. The starred harp. Wind.”

Har brushed a white weasel off his chair and sat down slowly. “Can you bind the winds as well as land-law?” he asked incredulously.

“I don’t know.”

“I see. You haven’t tried, yet.”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin.” He added, “Once I shaped wind. To kill. That’s all I know I can do.”

“When—” He checked, shaking his head. The hall was very still; animals’ eyes glowed among the rushes. Yrth set his cup down with a small, distracting clink as it hit the edge of a tray. Nun guided it for him.

“Small distances,” he murmured ruefully.

“I think,” the wolf-king said, “that if I start questioning you, it will be the longest riddle I have ever asked.”

“You already asked the longest riddle,” Morgon said. “Two years ago, when you saved my life in that blizzard and brought me into your house. I’m still trying to answer it for you.”

“Two years ago, I gave you the knowledge of the vesta shape. Now you have come back for knowledge of my land-law. What will you ask of me next?”

“I don’t know.” He drained his cup and slid his hands around the mouth of it. “Maybe trust.” He set the cup down abruptly, traced the flawless rim with his fingertips. He was exhausted suddenly; he wanted to lay his head on the table among the plates and sleep. He heard the wolf-king rise.

“Ask me tomorrow.”

Har touched him. As he dragged his eyes open and stood up to follow the king out of the hall, he found nothing strange in the answer.

He slept dreamlessly until dawn beside Raederle in the warm, rich chamber Aia had prepared for them. Then, as the sky lightened, vesta slowly crowded into his mind, forming a tight, perfect circle about him so that he could not move, and all their eyes were light, secret, blind. He woke abruptly, murmuring. Raederle groped for him, said something incoherent. He waited until she was quiet again. Then he got up soundlessly and dressed. He could smell one last sweet pine log burning into embers from the silent hall, and he knew, somehow, that Har was still there.

The king watched him as he came into the hall. He stepped quietly past small animals curled asleep beside the hearth and sat down beside Har. The king dropped a hand on his shoulder, held him a moment in a gentle, comfortable silence.

Then he said, “We’ll need privacy or traders will spread rumors from here to Anuin. They have been flocking to my house lately, asking me questions, asking Nun…”

“There’s the shed in the back,” Morgon suggested, “where you taught me the vesta-shape.”

“It seems appropriate… I’ll wake Hugin; he can tend to our needs.” He smiled a little. “For a while, I thought Hugin might return to the vesta; he became so shy among men. But since Nun came and told him everything she knew about Suth, I think he might turn into a wizard…” He was silent, sending a thought, Morgon suspected, through the quiet house. Hugin wandered in a few moments later, blinking sleepily and combing his white hair with his fingers. He stopped short when he saw Morgon. He was big-boned and graceful like the vesta, his deep eyes still shy. He stirred the rushes a little, flushing, looking like a vesta might if it were on the verge of smiling.

“We need your help,” Har said. Hugin’s head ducked an acquiescence. Then, gazing at Morgon, he found his tongue.

“Nun said you battled the wizard who killed Suth. That you saved the lives of the Lungold wizards. Did you kill the Founder?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Hugin,” Har murmured. Then he checked himself and looked at Morgon curiously. “Why not? Did you spend all your passion for revenge on that harpist?”

“Har…” His muscles had tensed under Har’s hand. The king frowned suddenly.

“What is it? Are you wraith-driven? Yrth told me last night how the harpist died.”

Morgon shook his head wordlessly. “You’re a riddler,” he said abruptly. “You tell me. I need help.”

Har’s mouth tightened. He rose, telling Hugin, “Bring food, wine, firewood to the shed. And pallets. When Raederle of An wakes, let her know where we are. Bring her.” He added a little impatiently as the boy flushed scarlet, “You’ve talked to her before.”

“I know.” He was smiling suddenly. Under Har’s quizzical eye, he sobered and began to move. “I’ll bring her. And everything else.”

They spent that day and the next nine nights together in the smokey, circular shed behind the king’s house. Morgon slept by day. Har, seemingly inexhaustible, kept his court by day. Morgon, pulling out of Har’s mind each dawn, found Raederle beside him, and Hugin, and sometimes Nun, knocking her ashes into the fire. He rarely spoke to them; waking or sleeping, his mind seemed linked to Har’s, forming trees, ravens, snow-covered peaks, all the shapes deep in the wolf-king’s mind that were bound to his awareness. Har gave him everything and demanded nothing during those days. Morgon explored Osterland through him, forming his own binding of awareness with every root, stone, wolf pup, white falcon, and vesta in the land. The king was full of odd wizardry, Morgon discovered. He could speak to owls and wolves; he could speak to an iron knife or arrowtip and tell it where to strike. He knew the men and animals of his land as he knew his own family. His land-law extended even into the edges of the northern wastes, where he had raced vesta for miles across a desert of snow. He was shaped by his own law; the power in him tempered Morgon’s heart with ice, and then with fire, until he seemed one more shape of Har’s brain, or Har a reflection of his own power.

He broke loose from Har then, rolled onto a pallet, and fell asleep. Like a land-heir, he dreamed Har’s memories. With a restless, furious intensity, his dreams spanned centuries of history, of rare battles, of riddle-games that lasted for days and years. Be built Yrye, heard the wizard Suth give him five strange riddles for his keeping, lived among wolves, among the vesta, fathered heirs, dispensed judgment and grew so old he became ageless. Finally, the rich, feverish dreams came to an end; he drew deeply into himself, into a dreamless night. He slept without moving until a name drifted into his mind. Clinging to it, he brought himself back into the world. He blinked awake, found Raederle kneeling beside him.

She smiled down at him. “I wanted to find out if you were alive or dead.” She touched his hand; his fingers closed around hers. “You can move.”

He sat up slowly. The shed was empty; he could hear the winds outside trying to pick apart the roof. He tried to speak; his voice would not come for a moment. “How long—how long did I sleep?”

“Har said over two thousand years.”

“Is he that old?” He stared at nothing a little, then leaned over to kiss her. “Is it day or night?”

“It’s noon. You’ve slept nearly two days. I missed you. I only had Hugin to talk to most of the time.”

“Who?”

Her smile deepened. “Do you remember my name?”

He nodded. “You are a two-thousand-year-old woman named Raederle.” He sat quietly, holding her hand, putting the world into shape around him. He stood up finally; she slid an arm around him to steady him. The wind snatched the door out of his hand as he opened it. The first flakes of winter snow swirled and vanished in the winds. They shattered the silence in his mind, whipped over him, persistent, icy, shaping him back out of his dreams. He ran across the yard with Raederle, into the warmth of the king’s dark house.

Har came to him that evening as he lay beside the fire in his chamber. He was remembering and slowly absorbing the knowledge he had taken. Raederle had left him alone, deep in his thoughts. Har, entering, brought him out of himself. Their eyes met across the fire in a peaceful, wordless recognition. Then Har sat down, and Morgon straightened, shifting logs with his hands until the drowsing fire woke.

“I have come,” Har said softly, “for what you owe me.”

“I owe you everything.” He waited. The fire slowly blurred in front of him; he was lost to himself again, this time among his own memories.

The king worked through them a little randomly, not sure what he would find. Very early in his exploring, he loosed Morgan in utter astonishment.

“You struck an old, blind wizard?”

“Yes. I couldn’t kill him.”

The king’s eyes blazed with a glacial light. He seemed about to speak; instead he caught the thread of Morgon’s memories again. He wove backwards and forwards, from Trader’s Road to Lungold and Erlenstar Mountain, and the weeks Morgon had spent in the wastes, harping to the winds. He watched the harpist die; he listened to Yrth speaking to Morgon and to Danan in Isig; he listened to Raederle giving Morgon a riddle that drew him back out of the dead land, once again among the living. Then, he loosed Morgon abruptly and prowled the chamber like a wolf.

“Deth.”

The name chilled Morgon unexpectedly, as though Har had turned the impossible into truth with a word. The king paced to his side and stopped moving finally. He stared down into the fire. Morgon dropped his face against his forearms wearily.

“I don’t know what to do. He holds more power than anyone else in this realm. You felt that mind-hold—”

“He has always held your mind.”

“I know. And I can’t fight him. I can’t. You saw how he drew me on Trader’s Road… with nothing. With a harp he could barely play. I went to him… At Anuin I couldn’t kill him. I didn’t even want to. More than anything, I wanted a reason not to. He gave me one. I thought he had walked out of my life forever, since I left him no place in the realm to harp. I left him one place. He harped to me. He betrayed me again, and I saw him die. But he didn’t die. He only replaced one mask with another. He made the sword I nearly killed him with. He threw me to Ghisteslwchlohm like a bone, and he rescued me from Earth-Masters on the same day. I don’t understand him. I can’t challenge him. I have no proof, and he would twist his way out of any accusation. His power frightens me. I don’t know what he is. He gives me silence like the silence out of trees…” His voice trailed away. He found himself listening to Har’s silence.

He raised his head. The king was still gazing into the fire, but it seemed to Morgon that he was watching it from the distance of many centuries. He was very still; he did not seem to be breathing. His face looked harsher than Morgon had ever seen it, as if the lines had been riven into it by the icy, merciless winds that scarred his land.

“Morgon,” he whispered, “be careful.” It was, Morgon realized slowly, not a warning but a plea. The king dropped to his haunches, held Morgon’s shoulders very gently, as if he were grasping something elusive, intangible, that was beginning to shape itself under his hands.

“Har.”

The king shook away his question. He held Morgon’s eyes with an odd intensity, gazing through him into the heart of his confusion. “Let the harpist name himself…”