TWO WEEKS AFTER he left Hlurle, the winter snow began to fall. He had felt its coming, tasted it in the air, heard it coming in the voices of wild, restless winds. He had gone up the coast to the mouth of the Ose, the great river whose roots lay in the heart of Erlenstar Mountain. The river ran through Isig Pass, past the doorstep of Isig Mountain, to form the southern boundary of Osterland on its way to the sea. Morgon followed it upriver patiently, through unclaimed land, forgotten forests that only traders sailing down from Isig ever saw, rough, rocky country where herds of deer, elk, mountain sheep ranged, their coats thick against the winter. Once he thought he saw moving through a far stretch of forest a herd of vesta, their legendary horns thin slivers of gold among the trees. But against the white, empty sky, they could have been a drift of mist, and he was uncertain.

He moved as quickly as possible through the wild country, feeling the snow at his heels, hunting sporadically, wondering in the back of his mind if the wilderness would ever end, or if there were any men left in the High One’s realm, or if the river he followed were perhaps not the Ose but some unmapped water that wound westward into the vast, uninhabited backlands of the realm. That thought woke him more than once at night, to wonder what he was doing in the middle of nowhere, where a broken bone, a frightened animal, a sudden storm could kill him as easily as his enemies. The constant fears ran like a current in his mind. Yet there was an odd peace he sometimes felt when at night there were no colors but the fire and the black sky, and no sounds in the world but his harp. At those moments he belonged to the night; he felt nameless, bodiless, as though he could take root and become a tree, drift apart and become the night.

Finally, he began to see farms in the distance, herds of sheep, cattle grazing by the river, and knew somewhere he had crossed into Osterland. Partly from caution, partly out of a habit of silence that had grown with him the past weeks, he avoided the farms and small towns along the river. He stopped only once to buy bread, cheese and wine, and to get directions to Yrye. The curious glances made him uneasy; he realized how strange he must seem, neither trader nor trapper, coming out of the backlands of Osterland with a bright, worn, Herun coat and hair like an ancient hermit’s.

Yrye, the wolf-king’s home, lay north, in the arms of Grim Mountain, the central peak in a range of low, border mountains; there was a road leading to it out of one of the villages. Morgon, riding out of the town, camped for the night in a woods nearby. The winds whined like wolves through the pine; he woke near dawn chilled to the bone, made a fire that fluttered like a helpless bird. The winds moved about him as he rode that day, speaking to one another in some rough, deep language. At evening they quieted; the sky was a smooth fleece of cloud beyond which the sun wandered and set unnoticed. In the night the snow began to fall; he woke beneath a coat of white.

The fall was gentle, the cold winds were still; he rode through the day in a dreamlike silence of white broken only by the flick of a blackbird’s wing, a brown hare’s scuttle to shelter. He fashioned a tent, when he stopped at evening, out of the tanned skin he had been sleeping on, and found a snarled patch of dry bramble for kindling. His thoughts turned, as he ate, to the strange, ancient king who in his riddle-gatherings had chanced upon another the Masters at Caithnard had never learned. Har, the wolf-king, had been born even before most of the wizards; he had ruled Osterland since the years of Settlement. Tales of him were numerous and awesome. He could change shape. He had been tutored by the wizard Suth, during Suth’s wildest years. He bore scars on his hands the shape of vesta horns, and he riddled like a Master. Morgon leaned back against a boulder, sipped hot wine slowly, wondering where the king had got his knowledge. He felt again the faint stirrings of curiosity that had been dulled for weeks, of a longing to return to the world of men. He finished his wine, reached out to pack the cup. And then he saw, beyond the circle of his fire, eyes watching him.

He froze. His bow lay on the other side of the fire; his knife was stuck upright on the wedge of cheese. He began to reach for it slowly. The eyes blinked. There was a gathering, a soft stirring; then a vesta walked into his firelight.

Something jumped in the back of Morgon’s throat. It was huge, broad as a farmhorse, with a deer’s delicate, triangular face. Its pelt was blazing white; its hooves and crescents of horn were the color of beaten gold. It eyed him fathomlessly out of eyes of liquid purple, then reached up above his head to nibble at a pine bough. Morgon, his breath still as though he were reaching toward a forbidden thing, lifted one hand to the white, glowing fur. The vesta did not seem to notice the gentle touch. After a moment Morgon reached for his bread, tore a piece. The vesta’s head lowered curiously at the scent, nuzzled at the bread. Morgon touched the narrow bone of its face; it jerked beneath his hand, and the purple eyes rose again, huge and dimensionless, to his face. Then the vesta lowered its head, continued eating, while he gently scratched the space between its horns. It finished the piece, sniffed his hand for more. He fed it the rest, piece by piece, until there was no more. It searched his empty hands, his coat a moment, then turned, faded with scarcely a sound back into the night.

Morgon drew a full breath. The vesta, he had heard, were shy as children. It was a rare pelt seen in tradeshops, for they were wary of men, and the weight of Har’s wrath lay on any man, trader or trapper, caught killing vesta. They followed snow, wandering farther and farther into the mountains during the summer. Morgon, with a sudden touch of unease, wondered what it had smelled in the air that night that had brought it so far from the mountains.

Before morning he found out. A wind, wailing like a bee swarm, wrenched the tent loose over his head and spun it into the river. Huddled beside his horse, his eyes stinging with snow, he waited for a dawn that it seemed would never come. When it did come finally, it only turned the blankness of night into a milky chaos through which Morgon could not even see the river running ten steps away from him.

A helpless, terrible despair rose in him. Chilled even beneath the thick hooded coat, the winds snarling like wolves around him, he lost sense of the river’s position, felt the whole world a blind, patternless turmoil. He forced himself to remember. He rose stiffly, feeling his horse trembling with cold under the blanket he had thrown over it. He murmured something to it out of numb lips; heard it thrashing nervously to stand as he turned. Head bent against the snow, he walked almost blindly to where he thought the river was. It loomed out of the blizzard at him unexpectedly, swift, eddied with snow; he nearly stepped headlong into it. He turned back to get his horse, bent to retrace his footsteps. When he reached the end of them, he found his horse gone.

He stood still and called to it; the wind pushed the words back into his mouth. He took a step toward a shadow in the snow, and it melted away before his eyes into whiteness. When he turned again, he could not see in the drift of snow, either his pack or his harp.

He went forward blindly, dug in the snow with his hands, beneath boulders and trees that melted out of the blizzard. He tried to see; the wind spat flakes huge as coins into his eyes. He searched desperately, furiously, losing what fragile sense of direction he had gained, moving patternlessly, dazed by the incessant, whining winds.

He found the harp finally, already half-buried; as he held it in his hands, he began to think again. It lay where he had left it, beneath the boulder he had slept beside; the river, he knew, was to his left. His pack, and saddle were somewhere in the mist in front of him; he did not dare lose sense of the river again to look for them. He hung his harp over his shoulder and slowly, carefully, found his way back to the river.

His trek upriver was painfully slow. He stayed dangerously close to the water in order to see the faint, slate-grey glints of it; sometimes when everything melted before his eyes into one monotonous white blur, he would stop short, wondering if he had been threading his way along an illusion. His face and hands grew numb; the hair outside of his hood was icy. He lost all sense of time, not knowing if moments or hours had passed since he had started walking, not knowing whether it was noon or evening. He dreaded the coming of night.

He walked headlong into a tree once, instead of moving around it; he stood where he had stopped, his face resting against the cold, rough bark. He wondered absently how long he could continue, what would happen when he could not move another step, when night fell and he could no longer follow the river. The tree, swaying rhythmically in the wind, was soothing. He knew he should move, but his arms refused to loose the trunk. Unexpectedly, for his thoughts were formless as the blizzard, he saw Eliard’s face in his mind, angry, troubled, and he heard his own voice out of some long-lost past. I swear this: I will come back.

His grip on the tree loosened reluctantly. He remembered the belief in Eliard’s eyes. If Eliard had not believed him, he could root himself like a tree in the middle of the Osterland blizzard; but Eliard, stubborn, literal, would expect him to keep his vow. He opened his eyes again; the colorless world was still there, just beyond his eyelids, and he wanted to weep with the weariness of it.

Imperceptibly, the world began to darken. He did not notice at first, intent on the water, and then he realized that the river itself was melting into the wind. He stumbled frequently over roots, icy rocks, found it more and more tiring to fling an arm out to catch his balance. Once a rock slid into the water under his foot; only a wild grab at a branch saved him from following it. He found his footing again, gripped the tree, shivering uncontrollably like a dog. Looking up to keep himself awake, he was appalled at the color of the wind.

He set his face hard against the bark, tried to think. Night he could not outwit. He could find shelter—a cave, a hollow tree—try to build a fire; the chances of doing either were minute. He could not follow the river in the dark, yet if he left it, he would probably wander aimlessly for a short time, then simply stop and disappear into the snow and wind, become, in his vanishing, another curiosity of Hed, like Kern, for the Masters to put on their lists. He considered the problem stubbornly, staring at the whorls of bark to keep his eyes open. Shelter, a fire, impossible as they seemed, were his only hope. He straightened stiffly, realized that the tree, not his body, had been supporting him. An odd, moist warmth, frightening him more than anything else that day, touched his face; he startled, turning. The head of a vesta loomed over him out of the snow.

He did not know how long he stared into the purple eyes. The vesta was motionless, the wind rippling through its fur. His hands began to move of their own accord, brushing over the face, the neck; he murmured things almost to soothe himself more than it. He inched away from the tree, his hands following the arch of its neck, its back, until he stood at its side, his numb hands curled into the thick hair on its back. It moved finally, reaching for a pinecone on the tree. Poised, his lips tight between his teeth, he leaped for its back.

He was unprepared for the sudden, incredible explosion of speed that shot him like an arrow into the heart of the storm. He gripped the horns, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed, the harp crushed against his ribs; he was almost unable to breathe from the winds slamming against his face. A sound came out of him; as if in answer to it, the wild sprint of panic melted slowly into a slower, steadier pace that was effortless and faster than any horse he had ever ridden. He clung close to the creature’s warmth, not wondering where it was going, nor how long it would permit him to stay on its back, simply concentrating on the single thought of staying with it until it could run no more.

He fell into a light sleep, feeling beneath his sleep the effortless, rhythmic movement. His hands, cramped around the horns, loosened; he lost his balance and fell, hitting the earth hard. The sky was black, blazing overhead; silence lay above the light snow like an element. He got to his feet, gazing at star after star blurring together into light, curving down to meet the white horizon. He saw the vesta looking back at him, motionless, white against the snow. He went towards it. For a moment it simply watched him as though he were a curious animal. Then, its steps delicate, barely breaking the snow, it walked to meet him. He lifted himself onto its back, his arms shaking with the effort. It began to run again toward the stars.

He woke to the curious touch of snow on his face. The vesta walked sedately through the empty, snow-covered streets of a city. Beautiful, brightly painted wood houses and shops lined the streets, their doors and shutters closed in the early dawn. Morgon straightened with an effort, breaking a crust of snow on his coat. The vesta turned a corner; ahead of him Morgon saw a great unwalled house, its weathered walls patterned with wood gathered from distant corners of the realm; oak, pale birch, red-toned cedar, dark, rich timber; the eaves, window frames and double doors were traced with endless whorls of pure gold.

The vesta walked fearlessly into the yard and stopped. The dark house sat dreaming in the snow. Morgon stared at it senselessly a moment; the vesta made a little restless movement beneath him, as though it had finished a task and were anxious to leave. Morgon slid off its back. His muscles refused to hold him; he fell sharply to his knees, the harp jerked down beside him. Under the deep, curious gaze of the vesta, he tried to get up, fell back helplessly, trembling with exhaustion. The vesta nudged at him, its warm breath in his ear. He slid his arm around its neck, his face dropping against its face. It was still for a moment in his hold. Then it broke free with a sudden movement, its head jerking back; and as the circle of gold horn lifted like the rim of the sun against the white sky, the vesta faded, and a man stood in its place.

He was tall, lithe, white-haired, half-naked in the snow. His eyes in his lean, lined face were ice-blue; his hands, reaching down to Morgon, were scarred with the white imprint of vesta-horns.

Morgon whispered, “Har.” A little smile flared like a flame behind the light eyes. The wolf-king slid a powerful arm under Morgon’s arm, lifted him to his feet.

“Welcome.” He helped Morgon patiently up the steps, flung open the wide doors to a hall the size of the barn at Akren, with a firebed running almost the length of it. Har’s voice rose, shearing the silence; a couple of crows squawked, startled, on the ledge of a long window. “Is this house hibernating for the winter? I want food, wine, dry clothes, and I will not wait for them until my bones snap like ice with old age and my teeth drop out. Aia!”

Servants scurried blearily into the hall; dogs, springing up, swarmed eagerly about their legs. Half a tree trunk was thrown on the drowsing fire; sparks shot up toward the roof. A mantle of white wool was put over Har’s shoulders; Morgon’s clothes were stripped from him with unexpected thoroughness on the threshold. A long woolen tunic was pulled over his head, and a mantle of many colored furs thrown over his shoulders. Trays of food were brought in, placed by the fire; Morgon caught the smell of hot bread and hot, spiced meat. He sagged in Har’s grip; wine, cold, dry, was forced into his mouth. He swallowed it and choked, felt the blood begin to move again in him, sluggishly, painfully.

A woman came into the hall as they sat down at last and began to eat. She had a strong, lovely old face, hair the color of old ivory braided to her knees. She came to the fire, tightening a belt as she walked, her eyes moving from Har’s face to Morgon’s.

She dropped a gentle kiss on Har’s cheek and said placidly, “Welcome home. Whom did you bring this time?”

“The Prince of Hed.”

Morgon’s head turned sharply. His eyes caught Har’s, held them in an unspoken question. The little perpetual smile deepened in the wolf-king’s eyes. He said, “I have a gift for naming. I’ll teach it to you. This is my wife, Aia. I found him wandering on foot in a blizzard beside the Ose,” he added to her. “I have been shot at, in vesta form; a trapper threw a weighted net over me once in the hills behind Grim Mountain before he realized who I was; but I have never been fed a loaf of bread by a man half the traders in the realm have been trying to find.” He turned again to Morgon, who had stopped eating. He said, his voice gentle in the snapping fire, “You and I are riddle-masters; I will play no games with you. I know a little about you, but not enough. I don’t know what is driving you to Erlenstar Mountain, or who you are hiding from. I want to know. I will give you whatever you ask of me in knowledge or skills in return for one thing. If you had not come into my land I would have gone to yours eventually, in one form or another: an old crow, an old trader at your door selling buttons in exchange for knowledge. I would have come.”

Morgon put his plate down. Strength was coming back into his body and a strength, a sense of purpose was waking, at Har’s words, in his mind. He said haltingly, “If you hadn’t found me by the river, I would have died. I will give you whatever help you need.”

“That’s a dangerous thing to promise blindly in my house,” Har commented.

“I know. I’ve heard a little of you, too. I will give you what help you need.”

Har smiled. His hand came to rest a moment, lightly, on Morgon’s shoulder. “You made your way inch by inch up the Ose, against the wind in a raging blizzard, clinging to that harp like your life. I tend to believe you. The farmers of Hed are known for their stubbornness.”

“Perhaps.” He leaned back, his eyes closing in the hot drift of the fire. “But I left Deth in Herun to go back to Hed. I came here instead.”

“Why did you change your mind?”

“You sent a riddle out of Osterland to find me. . . .” His voice trailed silent. He heard Har say something from the heart of the fire, he saw the blizzard again, formless, whirling, darkening, darkening. . . .

He woke in a small rich room, dark with evening. He lay without thought, his arm over his eyes, until a scrape of metal by the hearth made him turn his head. Someone was probing the fire; at the sudden lift of a white head, Morgon said, startled, “Deth!”

The head turned. “No. It’s me. Har said I am to serve you.” A boy rose from the fireside, lit the torch beside Morgon’s bed. He was a few years younger than Morgon, big-boned, his hair milky-white. His face was impassive, but Morgon sensed a shyness, a wildness beneath it. His eyes in the torchlight were a lustrous familiar purple. Under Morgon’s puzzled gaze, his voice went on, breaking a little now and then as though it were not frequently used. “He said . . . Har said I am to give you my name. I am Hugin. Suth’s son.”

Morgon’s blood shocked through him. “Suth is dead.”

“No.”

“All the wizards are dead.”

“No. Har knows Suth. Har found . . . he found me three years ago, running among the vesta. He looked into my mind and saw Suth.”

Morgon stared up at him wordlessly. He gathered the tangled, aching knot of his muscles and bones, and rolled upright. “Where are my clothes? I have got to talk to Har.”

“He knows,” Hugin said. “He is waiting for you.”

Washed, dressed, Morgon followed the boy to Har’s great hall. It was filled with people, rich men and women from the city, traders, trappers, musicians, a handful of simply dressed farmers, drinking hot wine by the fire, talking, playing chess, reading. The informality reminded Morgon of Akren. Har, Aia beside him scratching the dog at her knee, sat in his chair by the fire, listening to a harpist. As Morgon made his way through the crowd, the king’s eyes lifted, met his, smiling.

Morgon sat down on a bench beside them. The dog left Aia to scent him curiously, and he realized then with a slight shock, that it was a wolf. Other animals lay curled by the fire: a red fox, a squat badger, a grey squirrel, a pair of weasels white as snow in the rushes.

Aia said tranquilly as he scratched the wolf’s ears gingerly, “They come in from the winter, Har’s friends. Sometimes they spend a season here, sometimes they come bringing news of both men and animals in Osterland. Sometimes our children send them when they can’t come to visit us—that white falcon sleeping high on the rafters, our daughter sent.”

“Can you speak to them?” Morgon asked. She shook her head smiling.

“I can only go into Har’s mind, and then when he is in his own shape. It’s better that way; otherwise I would have worried much more about him when I was younger and he wandered away, prowling his kingdom.”

The harp song came to an end; the harpist, a lean, dark man with a dour smile, rose to get wine. The wolf moved to Har as the king reached for his own cup. The king poured Morgon wine, sent a servant for food. Then he said, his voice soft in the weave of sounds about them, “You offered me your help. If you were any other man, I would not hold you to that, but you are a Prince of Hed, the most unimaginative of lands. What I ask will be very difficult, but it will be valuable. I want you to find Suth.”

“Suth? Har, how can he be alive? How, after seven hundred years?”

“Morgon, I knew Suth.” The voice was still soft, but there was an edge to it as to a chill wind. “We were young together, so long ago. We hungered for knowledge, not caring how it was got, how we used ourselves, one another. We played riddle-games even before Caithnard existed, games that lasted years as we were forced to search for answers. He lost an eye during those wild years; he himself scarred my hands with the vesta-horns, teaching me how to change shape. When he vanished with the school of wizards, I thought he must be dead. Yet three years ago, when a young vesta changed shape to a boy in front of my eyes, and when I looked into the thoughts and memories of his mind, I saw the man he knew as his father, and I knew that face as I know my heart. Suth. He is alive. He has been running, hiding for seven hundred years. Hiding. When I asked him once how he lost his eye, he laughed and said only that there was nothing that may not be looked upon. Yet he has seen something, turned his back to it and run, vanished like a snowfall in a land of snow. He did well to hide. He knows me. I have been at his heels like a wolf for three years, and I will find him.”

Patterns were shattering, shifting in Morgon’s mind, leaving him groping, blind. “The Morgol of Herun suggested that Ghisteslwchlohm, the Founder of Lungold, is also alive. But that was pure conjecture, there is no evidence. What is he running from?”

“What is driving you to Erlenstar Mountain?”

Morgon put his cup down. He slid his fingers through his hair, drawing it back from his face so that the stars shone blood-red against his pallor. “That.”

Har’s hands shifted slightly, his rings flashing. Aia sat motionless, listening, her eyes hooded with thought. “So,” the king said, “the movement of this great game of power revolves upon Hed. When did you first realize that?”

He thought back. “In Ymris. I found a harp with three stars matching the stars on my face, which no one else could play. I met the woman married to Heureu Ymris, who tried to kill me, for no other reason than those stars, who said she was older than the first riddle ever asked—”

“How did you come to be in Ymris?”

“I was taking the crown of Aum to Anuin.”

“Ymris,” Har pointed out, “is in the opposite direction.”

“Har, you must know what happened. Even if all the traders in the realm had gone to the bottom of the sea with the crown of Aum, you would still probably know, somehow.”

“I know what happened,” Har said imperturbably. “But I do not know you. Be patient with me, an old man, and begin at the beginning.”

Morgon began. By the time he finished the tale of his travellings, the hall was empty but for the king, Aia, the harpist playing softly, listening, and Hugin, who had come in to sit at Har’s feet with his head against the king’s knees. The torches burned low; the animals were sighing, dreaming in their sleep. His voice ran dry finally. Har got up, stood looking into the fire. He was silent a long time; Morgon saw his hands close at his sides.

“Suth . . .”

Hugin’s face flashed toward him at the name. Morgon said tiredly, “Why would he know anything? The Morgol thinks that knowledge of the stars must have been stripped from the wizards’ minds.”

Har’s hands eased open. He turned to look at Morgon, weighing a thought. He said, as though he had not heard Morgon’s question, “You dislike killing. There are other methods of defense. I could teach you to look into a man’s mind, to see beyond illusion, to close the doors of your own mind against entrance. You are vulnerable as an animal without its winter pelt. I could teach you to outwit winter itself . . .”

Morgon gazed back at him. Something moved in his mind, the glint of a half-surfaced thought. He said, “I don’t understand,” though he had begun to.

“I told you,” Har said, “you should never promise a thing blindly in my house. I believe Suth is running with the vesta behind Grim Mountain. I will teach you to take the vesta-shape; you will move among them freely through the winter as a vesta, yet not a vesta. Your body and instincts will be the vesta’s, but your mind will be your own; Suth may hide from the High One himself, but he will reveal himself to you.”

Morgon’s body shifted a little. “Har, I have no gift for shape-changing.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m not . . . No man of Hed was ever born with gifts like that.” He shifted again, feeling himself with four powerful legs honed to speed, a head heavy with gold horn, no hands for touching, no voice for speaking.

Hugin said hesitantly, unexpectedly, “It’s a thing to love—being the vesta. Har knows.”

Morgon saw Grim Oakland’s face, Eliard’s face, staring at him uncomprehendingly, baffled: You can do what? Why would you want to do that? He felt Har watching him, and he said softly, reluctantly, “I will try, because I promised you. But I doubt if it will work; all my instincts go against it.”

“Your instincts.” The king’s eyes reflected fire suddenly like an animal’s, startling Morgon. “You are stubborn. With your face toward Erlenstar Mountain, a thousand miles farther than any Prince of Hed has ever gone beyond his land, a harp and a name in your possession, you still cling to your past like a nestling. What do you know about your instincts? What do you know about yourself? Will you doom us all with your own refusal to look at yourself and give a name to what you see?”

Morgon’s hands closed on the edge of the bench. He said evenly, struggling to keep his voice from shaking, “I am a land-ruler, a riddle-master and a star-bearer, in that order—”

“No. You are the Star-Bearer. You have no other name but that, no other future. You have gifts no land-ruler of Hed was ever born with; you have eyes that see, a mind that weaves. Your instincts took you out of Hed before you even realized why; out of Hed to Caithnard, to Aum, to Herun, to Osterland, whose king had no pity for those who run from truth.”

“I was born—”

“You were born the Star-Bearer. The wise man knows his own name. You are no fool; you can sense as well as I can what chaos is stirring beneath the surface of our existence. Loose your grip on your past; it is meaningless. You can live without the land-rule if you must; it’s not essential—”

Morgon found himself on his feet before he even realized he had moved. “No—”

“You have a very capable land-heir, who stays home and farms instead of answering obscure riddles. Your land can exist without you; but if you run from your own destiny, you are liable to destroy us all.”

He stopped. A sound had come out of Morgon, involuntarily, a harsh, indrawn sob without tears. Aia’s face, Hugin’s face, seemed etched of white stone in the light; only the king’s face moved in the shifting fire, alien, neither man’s nor animal’s. Morgon put his hands over his mouth to still the sound and whispered, “What price do you put on landlaw? What incentive will you offer me to forsake it? What price will you pay me for all the things I have ever loved?”

The light, glittering eyes were unmoved, unwavering on his face. “Five riddles,” Har said. “Coin for the man who has nothing. Who is the Star-Bearer and what will he loose that is bound? What will one star call out of silence, one star out of darkness, and one star out of death? Who will come in the time’s ending and what will he bring? Who will sound the earth’s harp, silent since the Beginning? Who will bear stars of fire and ice to the Ending of the Age?”

Morgon’s hand slid slowly away from his mouth. The hall was soundless. He felt tears run like sweat down his face. “What ending?” The wolf-king did not answer. “What ending?”

“Answering riddles is your business. Suth gave me those riddles one day, like a man giving his heart to a friend for safekeeping. I have carried them unanswered since his disappearance.”

“Where did he learn them?”

“He knows.”

“Then I will ask him.” His face was bloodless, streaked with fire; his eyes, the color of charred wood, held Har’s, seemed to draw from them, in that moment, something of their pitilessness. “I will answer those riddles for you. And I think, when I have done that, you will wish to the last breath of your life that I had never set foot beyond Hed.”

He sat the next morning in a round stone shed behind Har’s house, waiting for the fire Hugin had built to bring some relief of warmth to the icy floor. He wore a light, short linen tunic; his feet were bare. There were pitchers of watered wine in a corner, cups, but nothing else, neither food nor bedding. The door was closed; there were no windows, only the hole in the roof through which the smoke billowed out, flurries of snow burning, melting, in it. Har sat opposite him, his face shaping and reshaping in the flames. Hugin, cross-legged behind him, was motionless as though he did not breathe.

“I am going into your mind,” the face beyond the fire said. “I will see things you keep there privately. Do not try to fight my prying. If you wish to elude me, simply let the thoughts drain out of you like water, become formless, invisible as wind.”

Morgon felt a light touch sorting his thoughts. Isolated moments, past events, rose unbidden in his mind: Rood, studying with him late at night, a candle hunched between them; the Lady Eriel speaking softly to him in a dark hall as his fingers slid toward the last, low string of a harp; Tristan, her feet muddy, watering her rose bushes; Lyra, picking up a sword that came alive in her hands, changing shape. He let the strange knowledge of another mind, the sense of other untrapped thoughts stay in his mind without struggling until unexpectedly out of the darkness of his thoughts he saw a man’s body whirl away from him, the spear in his chest holding the fluid, shifting, sea-colored lines of him still until his face became clear for one moment before he fell. Morgon started, murmuring. Har’s eyes gazed at him from the flames, unblinking.

“There is nothing that may not be faced, nothing that may not be looked upon. Again.”

The memories of his life ran behind his eyes in a current of slowly changing scenes, some of which Har seemed to linger over in his curiosity. As the hours passed, unmeasured except by the ashes of dying wood, Morgon accepted the probing patiently, learned to yield without flinching to memories buried deep in him. Then, wearied, he began to ease away from the incessant searching, let his thoughts slip away from him, become shapeless, like a mist through which the groping mind moved without finding a resting place. Finally, abruptly, he found himself on his feet, pacing back and forth in the tiny room, thinking of nothing but the hunger worrying at him like an animal, the cold that burned his feet as he walked, the cry of his body, like the incessant, unbearable cry of a child for sleep. He prowled the small hut, not hearing Har when he spoke, not seeing Hugin staring up at him, not noticing the door open to deep night when Hugin left to get more wood. Then he felt something forming in his mind that Har had not touched yet, the most private moment of his life: an uneasiness, a growing terror, the beginning of a grief so terrible that any moment he might drown in it. He tried to elude the probing, pitiless mind, felt the grief welling, blooming, struggled furiously against it, against Har without success, until he saw again in the firelight the unmoved, curious eyes, and he took the only escape left to him, slipping out of his own thoughts beyond the surface of another mind.

It was as though he had stepped into another world. He saw the shed from Har’s eyes, saw himself standing, surprised in the shadows. He tapped hesitantly the continuous spring of memory deep in Har’s mind. He saw a young woman with sun-colored hair he knew was Aia, watching the soaking and bending of the wood that would pattern the walls of her new home. He saw a wizard with wild white hair and grey-gold eyes standing barefoot in snow, laughing before he melted into a lank wolf’s form. He saw the private world of Osterland: a fox’s den in the warm earth under the snow swarming with red pups, a white owl’s nest in the hollow of a high tree, a herd of starving deer in the sparse, cold backlands, a farmer’s simple house, the plain walls gleaming with tools, his children rolling like puppies in front of the fire. He followed Har’s path through his kingdom, sometimes in animal form, sometimes as a slightly wealthy, slightly foolish old man, his sharp mind gleaning knowledge beneath his sleepy eyes. He realized as he began to recognize places Har had travelled, that he had not confined his wanderings to Osterland. A familiar house rose in Har’s mind: with a shock of surprise that threw Morgon back into himself, he recognized the threshold of his own home.

He said, “When? . . .” His voice grated as though he had wakened from sleep.

“I went to Hed to meet Kern. I was curious about a tale I heard of him and a Thing without a name. I had forgotten about that. You did well.”

Morgon sat down again on the stones. The demands of his body seemed vague, impersonal, as though they came from his shadow. The fire in the hearth died, flared again, dwindled, flared. The stones grew warm. Morgon went into Hugin’s mind, discovered his wordless language, shared with him a complaint of hunger that surprised a smile into the vesta eyes. Then Har held Morgon’s mind, probing constantly, teaching him to thrust past the barriers of a locked mind, to defend his own barriers, attacking and parrying again and again until Morgon, ready to explode with a rage of weariness, cleared his mind beyond possibility to try again. Har loosed him; he felt the sweat dripping down his face, his back, felt himself trembling even in the heat.

“How long . . . how long have we? . . .” His throat was parched.

“What is that to either of us? Hugin, get wine.”

Hugin knelt next to Morgon with a cup. The boy’s face was drawn, the skin beneath his eyes was dark with weariness. But his still face gave back to Morgon something of a smile. The small shed was dim with smoke. Morgon could not tell whether it was day or night beyond the smoke hole in the roof. Hugin opened the doors a moment; winds, blade-sharp, leaped in, scattering snow. The world was black beyond. The sweat froze on Morgon’s arms. He began to shiver, and Hugin closed the door.

“Again,” Har said softly, and slipped into Morgon’s mind like a cat, while Morgon groped, surprised, for the memory of his teachings. The long hours began again, Morgon struggling either to keep his mind free from Har’s probing, or to find a path through Har’s closed mind. Hugin sat shadow-still beside him. Sometimes Morgon saw him sleeping, stretched on the stones. Sometimes when he pulled away from Har, exhausted, the purple eyes turned to him, and he saw through them an image of the vesta. Then he began to see a vesta where Hugin sat, and was unsure afterward if Hugin had put the thought into his mind, or if the boy’s shape were shifting back and forth. Once he looked across the fire and saw not Har but a lean grey wolf with yellow, smiling eyes.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and Har returned saying, “Again.”

“No,” he whispered, feeling his mind and body slip away from him. “No.”

“Then leave.”

“No.”

The smoke engulfed him like a wind. He seemed to look down at himself from a distance, as though the man half-blind, too weak to move had nothing to do with him. Hugin and Har seemed formed of smoke, now king and wizard’s boy, now wolf and vesta, watching, waiting. The wolf began to move closer to him, closer, circling him, fire in its eyes, until it stood next to him. Morgon felt his hands opened, a pattern traced with ash on his palms.

Then the wolf said, “Now.”

The pain brought him abruptly back to himself. He opened his eyes, blinking at the salt tears of sweat that ran into them, and the purple eyes of the vesta gazed deep into his. A blade flashed in the corner of his eye; a sound split through his dry throat. Turning, fleeing away from the smoke, the agony of his weariness, the sear of the knife, he stumbled into the world beyond the vesta-eyes.

The stone walls melted away into the single flat line of winter horizon. He stood alone in a privacy of snow and sky, listening to the winds, untangling the scents in them. Somewhere within him, behind him, he sensed a struggling, a turmoil of thought; he avoided it, groping away from it, searching more deeply into the easy silence he had discovered. The winds snapped out of the sharp blue of the sky, carrying shades and tones of smell he could suddenly give names to: water, hare, wolf, pine, vesta. He heard the high, whirling voices of the winds, knew their strength, but felt them only vaguely. The chaotic, fearful voices he fled from weakened, mingled with the wind’s meaningless wail. He drew a long, clean breath of the winter, felt the voice fade. The wind traced its passage through him, molded the sinews of his heart, flowed through his veins, honed his muscles to its unfaltering strength and speed. He felt it urge against him, challenging him; and the hard, restless muscles of his body locked suddenly for a race with the wind.

The stones rose out of the unknown. He moved bewilderedly, seeking escape, aware of strange, silent figures watching him. The fire snapped at him; he backed away from it and turned. His horns scraped against the stones. Then, with a panic exploding through him, he realized that he had horns. He found himself in his own shape, trembling, staring at Har, his hands throbbing again, sticky with blood.

Hugin opened the door. A weak midday light stained the snow on the threshold. Har rose, his own hands trembling slightly. He said nothing, and Morgon, as familiar with the mind of the King as he was with his own, felt the panic die away, a stillness take its place. He went to the door, his steps halting, and leaned on the frame, breathing the wind, his limp hands staining his tunic. He felt an odd sorrow, as though he had turned away from something nameless in him. Har put a hand on his shoulder.

“Rest, now. Rest. Hugin—”

“I know. I will take him.”

“Bind his hands. Stay with him. Both of you: rest.”