IN SPRING, THREE things came invariably to the house of the King of An: the year’s first shipment of Herun wine, the lords of the Three Portions for the spring council, and an argument.
The spring of the year following the strange disappearance of the Prince of Hed, who had, with the High One’s harpist, vanished like a mist in Isig Pass, the great house with its seven gates and seven white towers seemed to be cracking like a seed pod out of a long, bitter winter of silence and grief. The season dusted the air with green, set patterns of light like inlay on the cold stone floors, and roused restlessness like sap in the deep heart of An, until Raederle of An, standing in Cyone’s garden, which no one had entered for the six months since her death, felt that even the dead of An, their bones plaited with grass roots, must be drumming their fingers in their graves.
She stirred after a while, left the tangle of weeds and withered things that had not survived the winter, and went back into the King’s hall, whose doors were flung wide to the light. Servants under the eye of Mathom’s steward, were shaking the folds out of the lords’ banners, hanging them precariously from the high beams. The lords were due any day, and the house was in a turmoil preparing to receive them. Already their gifts had been arriving for her: a milk-white falcon bred in the wild peaks of Osterland from the Lord of Hel; a brooch like a gold wafer from Map Hwillion, who was too poor to afford such things; a flute of polished wood inlaid with silver, which bore no name, and worried Raederle, since whoever had sent it had known what she would love. She watched the banner of Hel unrolling, the ancient boar’s head with tusks like black moons on an oak-green field; it rose jerkily on its hangings to survey the broad hall out of its small fiery eyes. She gazed back at it, her arms folded, then turned suddenly and went to find her father.
She found him in his chambers arguing with his land-heir. Their voices were low, and they stopped when she entered, but she saw the faint flush on Duac’s cheekbones. In the pale slashes of his brows and his sea-colored eyes, he bore the stamp of Ylon’s wild blood, but his patience with Mathom when everyone else had exhausted theirs was considered phenomenal. She wondered what Mathom had said to upset him.
The King turned a dour crow’s eye to her; she said politely, for his mood in the mornings was unpredictable, “I would like to visit Mara Croeg in Aum for a couple of weeks, with your permission. I could pack and leave tomorrow. I’ve been in Anuin all winter, and I feel—I need to get away.”
There was not a flicker of change in his eyes. He said simply, “No,” and turned to pick up his wine cup.
She stared at his back, annoyed, and discarded courtesy like an old shoe. “Well, I’m not going to stay here and be argued over like a prize cow out of Aum. Do you know who sent me a gift? Map Hwillion. Only yesterday he was laughing at me for falling out of a pear tree, and now he’s got his first beard and an eight-hundred-year-old house with a leaky roof, and he thinks he wants to marry me. You’re the one who promised me to the Prince of Hed; can’t you put a stop to all this? I’d rather listen to the pig herds of Hel during a thunderstorm than another spring council arguing with you about what to do with me.”
“So would I,” Duac murmured. Mathom eyed them both. His hair had turned iron-grey seemingly overnight; his sorrow over Cyone’s death had limned his face to the bone, but it had neither tempered nor bittered his disposition.
“What do you want me to tell them,” he asked, “other than what I have told them for nineteen years? I have made a vow, binding beyond life, to marry you to the man winning Peven’s game. If you want to run away and live with Map Hwillion under his leaky roof, I can’t stop you—they know that.”
“I don’t want to marry Map Hwillion,” she said, exasperated. “I would like to marry the Prince of Hed. Except that I don’t know any more who he is, and no one else knows where he is. I am tired of waiting; I am tired of this house; I am tired of listening to the Lord of Hel tell me that I am being ignored and insulted by the Prince of Hed; I want to visit Mara Croeg in Aum, and I don’t understand how you can refuse such a simple, reasonable request.”
There was a short silence, during which Mathom considered the wine in his cup. An indefinable expression came into his face; he set the cup down and said, “If you like, you can go to Caithnard.”
Her lips parted in surprise. “I can? To visit Rood? Is there a ship—” And then Duac brought his hand down flat on the wine table, rattling cups.
“No.”
She stared at him, astonished, and he closed his hand. His eyes were narrowed slightly as he gazed back at Mathom. “He’s asked me to go, but I’ve already refused. He wants Rood home.”
“Rood? I don’t understand.”
Mathom moved away from the window suddenly with an irritated whirl of sleeve. “I might as well have the entire council in here babbling at me at once. I want Rood to take a leave from his studies, come back to Anuin for a while; he’ll take that fact best from either Duac or you.”
“You tell him,” Duac said inflexibly. Under the King’s eye he yielded, sat down, gripping the arms of his chair as though he were holding fast to his patience. “Then will you explain so I can understand? Rood has just taken the Red of Apprenticeship; if he stays he’ll take the Black at a younger age than any living Master. He’s done fine work there; he deserves the chance to stay.”
“There are more riddles in the world than those in the locked books behind the walls of that College in Caithnard.”
“Yes. I’ve never studied riddle-mastery, but I have an idea that you can’t answer them all at once. He’s doing the best he can. What do you want him to do? Go lose himself at Erlenstar Mountain like the Prince of Hed?”
“For what, in Hel’s name? Are you planning to die or something?”
“Duac,” Raederle breathed, but he waited stubbornly for the King to answer. She felt, like a live thing beneath the irritation and obstinacy in them both, the binding between them beyond all definition. Then Duac heaved himself to his feet at Mathom’s silence and snapped before he slammed the door behind him so hard the stones seemed to rattle, “By Madir’s bones, I wish I could see into that peatbog you call a mind!”
Raederle sighed. She looked at Mathom, who seemed in spite of the rich robe he wore, black and impervious as a wizard’s curse in the sunlight. “I’m beginning to hate spring. I won’t ask you to explain the world to me, just why I can’t go visit Mara Croeg while Cyn Croeg is here at the council.”
“Who was Thanet Ross and why did he play a harp without strings?”
She stood a moment, dredging the answer out of interminable, half-forgotten hours of riddlery. Then she turned; she heard his voice again, just before the door slammed once more, “And stay out of Hel.”
She found Duac in the library, staring out the window. She joined him, leaning against the window, looking down at the city that sloped gently away from the King’s house to spill around the rim of the harbor. Trade-ships were drifting in with the midmorning tide, their colored sails deflating in the wind like weary sighs. She saw the white and green of Danan Isig’s ships bringing the marvellous crafts from Isig Mountain; and a hope stirred in her that the northern Kingdom had sent news more valuable than all its beautiful cargo. Duac stirred beside her, as the peace of the ancient library with its smell of hide, wax and the iron of old shields returned the composure to his face. He said softly, “He is the most pig-headed, arbitrary and exasperating man in the Three Portions of An.”
“I know.”
“Something’s going on in his head; something’s bubbling behind his eyes like a bad spell . . . It worries me. Because if it came to a choice between a blind step into a bottomless pit with him and a walk across the apple orchards with the Lords of An at their finest, I would shut my eyes and step. But what is he thinking?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped her chin in her palms. “I don’t know why he wants us all home now. I don’t understand him. I asked him why I couldn’t leave, and he asked me why Thanet Ross played a harp with no strings.”
“Who?” Duac looked at her. “How could . . . Why did he play a harp with no strings?”
“For the same reason he walked backward and shaved his head instead of his beard. For no reason except that there was no reason. He was a sad man and died backward.”
“Oh.”
“He was walking backward for no reason and fell in a river. Nobody ever saw him again, but they assumed he died since there was no reason—”
“All right,” Duac protested mildly. “You could spin that one into yarn.”
She smiled. “See what education you missed, not being destined to marry a riddle-master.” Then her smile faded; she bowed her head, traced a crack in the old mortar. “I feel as though I’m waiting for a legend to come down from the north, breaking out of winter with the spring water . . . Then I remember the farmer’s son who used to put shells to my ears so I could hear the sea, and, Duac, that’s when I become afraid for him. He has been gone so long; there has not been one word from him for a year, and no one in the realm has heard so much as a harp-note from the High One’s harpist. Surely the High One would never keep Morgon so long from his land. I think something must have happened to them in Isig Pass.”
“As far as anyone knows, the land-rule hasn’t passed from Morgon,” Duac said comfortingly, but she only shifted restlessly.
“Then where is he? At least he could get a message to his own land. The traders say that every time they stop at Tol, Tristan and Eliard are there at the dock waiting, hoping for news. Even at Isig, with all they say happened to him, he managed to write. They say he has scars on his hands like vesta-horns, and he can take the shape of trees . . .”
Duac glanced down at his own hands as if he expected to see the withered moons of white horns in them. “I know . . . The simplest thing to do would be to go to Erlenstar Mountain and ask the High One where he is. It’s spring; the Pass should be clearing. Eliard might do it.”
“Leave Hed? He’s Morgon’s land-heir; they’d never let him leave.”
“Maybe. But they say there’s a streak of stubbornness long as a witch’s nose in the people of Hed. He might.” He leaned over the ledge suddenly; his head turned towards a distant, double-column of riders making their way across the meadows. “Here they come. In full plumage.”
“Who is it?”
“I can’t . . . blue. Blue and black retinue; that would be Cyn Croeg. He appears to have met someone green . . .”
“Hel.”
“No. Green and cream; very small following.”
She sighed. “Map Hwillion.”
She stood by the window after Duac left to tell Mathom, watching the riders veer around the nut orchards, flickering in and out of the lacework of black, bare branches. They appeared again at a corner of the old city wall, to take the main road through the city, which led twisting and curving through the market and old high houses and shops whose windows would be wide open like eyes, full of watchers. By the time they disappeared through the gates of the city, she had decided what to do.
Three days later, she sat beside the pig-woman of the Lord of Hel under an oak tree, weaving grass blades into a net. From all around her in the placid afternoon came the vast snort and grumble of the great pig herds of Hel as they stirred through the tangled roots and shadows of oak. The pig-woman, whom no one had ever bothered to name, was smoking a meditative pipe. She was a tall, bony, nervous woman, with long, dishevelled grey hair and dark grey eyes; she had tended the pigs as long as anyone could remember. They were related, she and Raederle, through the witch Madir, in some obscure way they were trying to figure out. The pig-woman’s great gift was with pigs; she was abrupt and shy with people, but the beautiful, fiery Cyone had inherited Madir’s interest in pigs and had become friends with the taciturn pig-woman. But not even Cyone had discovered what Raederle knew: the odd store of knowledge that the pig-woman had also inherited from Madir.
Raederle picked another tough stem of grass, sent it snaking in and out of the small, square weave. “Am I doing this right?”
The pig-woman touched the tight strands and nodded. “You could carry water in that,” she said, in her plain, rugged voice. “Now, then, I think King Oen had a pigherder whom Madir might have been fond of, in Anuin.”
“I thought she might have been fond of Oen.”
The pig-woman looked surprised. “After he built the tower to trap her? You told me that. Besides, he had a wife.” She waved the words and her pipe smoke away at once with her hand. “I’m not thinking.”
“No king I ever heard of married Madir,” Raederle said wryly. “Yet somehow the blood got into the king’s line. Let’s see: she lived nearly two hundred years, and there were seven kings. I believe we can forget Fenel; he was too busy fighting almost to father a land-heir, let alone a bastard. I don’t even know if he kept pigs. It is possible,” she added, struck, “that you are a descendant of a child of Madir and one of the Kings.”
The pig-woman gave a rare chuckle. “Oh, I doubt it. Me with my bare feet. Madir liked pigherders as much as she liked kings.”
“That’s true.” She finished with the grass blade and pushed the stems close, frowning down at them absently. “It is also possible that Oen might have grown fond of Madir after he realized she wasn’t his enemy, but that seems a little scandalous, since it was through him that Ylon’s blood came into the Kings’ line. Oen was furious enough about that.”
“Ylon.”
“You know that tale.”
The pig-woman shook her head. “I know the name, but no one ever told me the tale.”
“Well.” She sat back against the tree trunk, the sun shimmering in and out of her eyes. Her own shoes were off; her hair was loose; and there was a small spider making a bewildered foray up one strand. She brushed it off without noticing. “It’s the first riddle I ever learned. Oen’s land-heir was not his own son, but the son of some strange sea-lord, who came into Oen’s bed disguised as the king. Nine months afterward, Oen’s wife bore Ylon, with skin like foam and eyes like green seaweed. So Oen in his anger built a tower by the sea for this sea-child, with orders that he should never come out of it. One night, fifteen years after his birth, Ylon heard a strange harping from the sea, and such was his love of it, and desire to find its source, that he broke the bars on his window with his hands and leaped into the sea and vanished. Ten years later Oen died, and to his other sons’ surprise, the land-rule passed to Ylon. Ylon was driven by his own nature back to claim his heritage. He reigned only long enough to marry and beget a son who was as dark and practical as Oen, and then he went back to the tower Oen had built for him and leaped to his death on the rocks below.” She touched the tiny net, squared a corner. “It’s a sad tale.” A frown strayed into her eyes, absent, puzzled, as if she had almost remembered something, but not quite. “Anyway, Ylon’s face appears once or twice a century, and sometimes his wildness, but never his terrible torment, because no one with his nature has ever again inherited the land-rule. Which is fortunate.”
“That’s true.” The pig-woman looked down at the pipe in her hand, which had gone out during her listening. She tapped it absently against the tree root. Raederle watched an enormous black sow nudge her way through the clearing in front of them to loll panting in the shade.
“It’s almost Dis’s time.”
The pig-woman nodded. “They’ll all be black as pots, too, sired by Dark Noon.”
Raederle spotted the boar responsible, the great descendant of Hegdis-Noon, rooting among the old leaves. “Maybe she’ll bear one who can talk.”
“Maybe. I keep hoping, but the magic, I think, has gone out of the blood and they are born silent.”
“I wish a few of the Lords of An had been born silent.”
The pig-woman’s brows flicked up in sudden comprehension. “That’s it, then.”
“What?”
She shifted, shy again. “The spring council. It’s nothing of my business, but I didn’t think you had ridden for three days to find out if we were first or third cousins.”
Raederle smiled. “No. I ran away from home.”
“You . . . Does your father know where you are?”
“I always assume he knows everything.” She reached for another stem of grass. The odd, tentative frown moved again into her face; she looked up suddenly to meet the pig-woman’s eyes. For a moment, the direct, grey gaze seemed a stranger’s look, curious, measuring, with the same question in it that she had barely put words to. Then the pig-woman’s head bowed; she reached down to pick an acorn out of an angle of root and tossed it to the black sow. Raederle said softly, “Ylon . . .”
“He’s why you can do these small things I teach you so well. He and Madir. And your father with his mind.”
“Maybe. But—” She shook the thought away and leaned back again to breathe the tranquil air. “My father could see a shadow in a barrow, but I wish he didn’t have a mouth like a clam. It’s good to be away from that house. It grew so quiet last winter I thought whatever words we spoke would freeze solid in the air. I thought that winter would never end . . .”
“It was a bad one. The Lord had to send for feed from Aum and pay double because Aum itself was growing short of corn. We lost some of the herd; one of the great boars, Aloil—”
“Aloil?”
The pig-woman looked suddenly a little flustered. “Well, Rood mentioned him once, and I thought—I liked the name.”
“You named a boar after a wizard?”
“Was he? I didn’t . . . Rood didn’t say. Anyway, he died in spite of all I could do for him, and the Lord himself even came to help with his own hands.”
Raederle’s face softened slightly. “Yes. That’s one thing Raith is good with.”
“It’s in his blood. But he was upset about—about Aloil.” She glanced at Raederle’s handiwork. “You might want to make it a little wider, but you’ll need to leave a fringe to hold it after you throw it.”
Raederle stared down at the tiny net, watching it grow big then small again in her mind’s eye. She reached for more grass, and felt, as her hand touched the earth, the steady drum of hoofbeats. She glanced, startled, toward the trees. “Who is that? Hasn’t Raith left for Anuin yet?”
“No, he’s still here. Didn’t you—” She stopped as Raederle rose, cursing succinctly, and the Lord of Hel and his retinue came into the clearing, scattering pigs.
Raith brought his mount to a halt in front of Raederle; his men, in pale green and black, drew to a surprised, disorderly stop. He stared down at her, his gold brows pulling quickly into a disapproving frown, and opened his mouth; she said, “You’re going to be late for the council.”
“I had to wait for Elieu. Why in Hel’s name are you running around in your stockinged feet in my pig herds? Where is your escort? Where—”
“Elieu!” Raederle cried to a brown-bearded stranger dismounting from his horse, and his happy smile, as she ran to hug him, made him once again familiar.
“Did you get the flute I sent to you?” he asked, as she gripped his arms; she nodded, laughing.
“You sent it? Did you make it? It was so beautiful it frightened me.”
“I wanted to surprise you, not—”
“I didn’t recognize you in that beard. You haven’t been out of Isig for three years; it’s about time you—” She checked suddenly, her hold tightening. “Elieu, did you bring any news of the Prince of Hed?”
“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “No one has seen him. I sailed down from Kraal on a trade-ship; it stopped five times along the way, and I lost count long ago of how many people I had to tell that to. There is one thing, though, that I came to tell your father.” He smiled again, touched her face. “You are always so beautiful. Like An itself. But what are you doing alone in Raith’s pig herds?”
“I came to talk to his pig-woman, who is a very wise and interesting woman.”
“She is?” Elieu looked at the pig-woman, who looked down at her feet.
Raith said grimly, “I would have thought you had outgrown such things. It was foolish of you to ride alone from Anuin; I’m amazed that your father—he does know where you are?”
“He has probably made a fairly accurate guess.”
“You mean you—”
“Oh, Raith, if I want to make a fool of myself that’s my business.”
“Well, look at you! Your hair looks as though birds have been nesting in it.”
Her hand rose impulsively to smooth it, then dropped. “That,” she said frostily, “is also my business.”
“It’s beneath your dignity to consort with my pig-woman like some—like some—”
“Well, Raith, we are related. For all I know she has as much right in the court at Anuin as I have.”
“I didn’t know you were related,” Elieu said interestedly. “How?”
“Madir. She was a busy woman.”
Raith drew a long breath through his nose. “You,” he said ponderously, “need a husband.” He jerked his reins, turning his mount; at his straight, powerful back and rigorous movements something desperate, uneasy, touched Raederle. She felt Elieu’s hand on her shoulder.
“Never mind,” he said soothingly. “Will you ride back with us? I would love to hear you play that flute.”
“All right.” Her shoulders slumped a little. “All right. If you’re there. But first tell me what news you have to tell my father that brought you all the way down from Isig.”
“Oh.” She heard the sudden awe in his voice. “It’s about the Prince—about the Star-Bearer.”
Raederle swallowed. As if the pigs themselves had recognized the name, there was a lull in their vigorous snortings. The pig-woman looked up from her feet. “Well, what?”
“It was something Bere, Danan’s grandson, told me. You must have heard the tale about Morgon, about the night he took the sword from the secret places of Isig, the night he killed three shape-changers with it, saving himself and Bere. Bere and I were working together, and Bere asked me what the Earth-Masters were. I told him as much as I knew, and asked him why. And he told me then that he had heard Morgon telling Danan and Deth that in the Cave of the Lost Ones, where no one had ever gone but Yrth, Morgon found his starred sword, and it had been given to him by the dead children of the Earth-Masters.”
The pig-woman dropped her pipe. She rose in a swift, blurred movement that startled Raederle. The vagueness dropped from her face like a mask, revealing a strength and sorrow worn into it by a knowledge of far more than Raith’s pigs. She drew a breath and shouted, “What?”
The shout cracked like lightning out of the placid sky. Raederle, flinging her arms futilely over her ears, heard above her own cry the shrill, terrified cries of rearing horses, and the breathless, gasping voices of men struggling to control them. Then came a sound as unexpected and terrible as the pig-woman’s shout: the agonized, outraged protest of the entire pig herd of Hel.
Raederle opened her eyes. The pig-woman had vanished, as though she had been blown away by her shout. The unwieldy, enormous pig herd, squealing with pain and astonishment, was heaving to its feet, turning blindly, massing like a great wave, panic rippling to the far edges of the herd in the distance. She saw the great boars wheeling, their eyes closed, the young pigs half-buried in the heave of bristled backs, the sows, huge with their unborn, swaying to their feet. The horses, appalled by the strange clamor and the pigs jostling against them, were wrenching out of control. One of them stepped back onto a small pig, and the double screech of terror from both animals sounded across the clearing like a battle horn. Hooves pounding, voices shrilling and snorting, the pride of Hel for nine centuries surged forward, dragging men and horses helplessly with them. Raederle, taking prompt, undignified shelter up the oak tree, saw Raith trying desperately to turn his horse and reach her. But he was swept away with his retinue, Elieu, whooping with laughter, bringing up the rear. The herd ebbed away and vanished into the distant trees. Raederle, straddling a bough, her head beginning to ache with the aftermath of the shout, thought of the pigs running along with the Lord of Hel all the way into the King’s council hall in Anuin, and she laughed until she cried.
She found, riding wearily back into her father’s courtyard at twilight three days later, that some of the pigs had gotten there before her. The inner walls were blazoned with the banners of the lords who had arrived; beneath the banner of Hel, limp in the evening air, were penned seven exhausted boars. She had to stop and laugh again, but the laughter was more subdued as she realized that she had to face Mathom. She wondered, as a groom ran to take her horse, why, with all the people in the house, it was so quiet. She went up the steps, into the open doors of the hall; amid the long lines of empty tables and the sprawl of chairs, there were only three people: Elieu, Duac and the King.
She said a little hesitantly as they turned at her step, “Where is everyone?”
“Out,” Mathom said succinctly. “Looking for you.”
“Your whole council?”
“My whole council. They left five days ago; they are probably scattered, like Raith’s pigs, all over the Three Portions of An. Raith himself was last seen trying to herd his pigs together in Aum.” His voice was testy, but there was no anger in his eyes, only a hiddenness, as if he were contemplating an entirely different train of thought. “Did it occur to you that anyone might be worried?”
“If you ask me,” Duac murmured into his wine cup, “it seemed more like a hunting party than a search party, to see who would bring home the prize.” Something in his face told Raederle that he and Mathom had been arguing again. He lifted his head. “You let them go like a cageful of freed birds. You can control your own lords better than that. I’ve never seen such shambles made of a council in my life, and you wanted it so. Why?”
Raederle sat down next to Elieu, who gave her a cup of wine and a smile. Mathom was standing; he made a rare, impatient gesture at Duac’s words. “Does it occur to you that I might have been worried?”
“You weren’t surprised when you heard she was gone. You didn’t tell me to go after her, did you? No. You’re more interested in sending me to Caithnard. While you do what?”
“Duac!” Mathom snapped, exasperated, and Duac shifted in his chair. The King turned a dour eye to Raederle. “And I told you to stay out of Hel. You had a remarkable effect on both Raith’s pigs and my council.”
“I’m sorry. But I told you I needed to get out of this house.”
“That badly? Riding precipitously off into Hel and back without an escort?”
“Yes.”
She heard him sigh.
“How can I command obedience from my land when I cannot even rule my own household?” The question was rhetorical, for he exacted over his land and his house what he chose.
Duac said with dogged, weary patience, “If you would try explaining yourself for once in your life, it would make a difference. Even I will obey you. Try telling me in simple language why you think it is so imperative for me to bring Rood home. Just tell me. And I’ll go.”
“Are you still arguing about that?” Raederle said. She looked curiously at their father. “Why do you want Duac to bring Rood home? Why did you want me to stay out of Hel, when you know I am as safe on Raith’s lands as in my garden?”
“Either,” Mathom said tersely, “you, Duac, bring Rood home from Caithnard, or I will send a ship and a simple command to him. Which do you think he would prefer?”
“But why—”
“Let him puzzle his own brain about it. He’s trained to answer riddles, and it will give him something to do.”
Duac brought his hands together, linked them tightly. “All right,” he said tautly. “All right. But I’m no riddler and I like things explained to me. Until you explain to me precisely why you want the one who will become my land-heir if you die back here with me, I swear by Madir’s bones that I’ll see the wraiths of Hel ride across this threshold before I call Rood back to Anuin.”
There was a chilling leap of pure anger in Mathom’s face that startled Raederle. Duac’s face lost nothing of its resolve, but she saw him swallow. Then his hands pulled apart, lowered to grip the table edge. He whispered, “You’re leaving An.”
In the silence, Raederle heard the far, faint bickering of sea gulls. She felt something hard, a word left in her from the long winter, melt away. It brought the tears for a moment into her eyes so that Mathom blurred to a shadow when she looked at him. “You’re going to Erlenstar Mountain. To ask about the Prince of Hed. Please. I would like to come with you.”
“No.” But the voice of the shadow was gentle.
Elieu’s head was moving slowly from side to side. He breathed, “Mathom, you can’t. Anyone with even half a mind to reason with must realize—”
“That what he is contemplating,” Duac interrupted, “is hardly a simple journey to Erlenstar Mountain and back.” He rose, his chair protesting against the stones. “Is it?”
“Duac, at a time when the air itself is an ear, I do not intend to babble my business to the world.”
“I am not the world. I am your land-heir. You’ve never been surprised once in your life, not when Morgon won that game with Peven, not even at Elieu’s news of the waking of the children of the Earth-Masters. Your thoughts are calculated like a play on a chessboard, but I don’t think even you know exactly who you are playing against. If all you want to do is to go to Erlenstar Mountain, you would not be sending for Rood. You don’t know where you are going, do you? Or what you will find, or when you will get back? And you knew that if the Lords of the Three Portions were here listening to this, there would be an uproar that would shake the stones loose in the ceiling. You’ll leave me to face the uproar, and you’ll sacrifice the peace of your land for something that is not your concern but the business of Hed and the High One.”
“The High One.” Something harsh, unpleasant in the King’s voice made the name almost unfamiliar. “Morgon’s own people scarcely know a world exists beyond Hed, and except for one incident, I would wonder if the High One knows that Morgon exists.”
“It’s not your concern! You are liable to the High One for the rule of An, and if you let loose of the bindings in the Three Portions—”
“I don’t need to be reminded of my responsibilities!”
“You can stand there plotting to leave An indefinitely and tell me that!”
“Is it possible that you can trust me when I weigh two things in the balance and find one looming more heavily than a momentary confusion in An?”
“Momentary confusion!” Duac breathed. “If you leave An too long, stray too far away from it, you will throw this land into chaos. If your hold on the things you bind in the Three Portions loosens, you’ll find the dead kings of Hel and Aum laying siege to Anuin, and Peven himself wandering into this hall looking for his crown. If you return at all. And if you vanish, as Morgon did, for some long, wearisome length of time, this land will find itself in a maelstrom of terror.”
“It’s possible,” Mathom said. “So far in its long history An has had nothing more challenging to fight than itself. It can survive itself.”
“What worse can happen to it than such a chaos of living and dead?” He raised his voice, battering in anger and desperation against the King’s implacability. “How can you think of doing this to your land? You don’t have the right! And if you’re not careful, you’ll no longer have the land-rule.”
Elieu leaned forward, gripped his arm. Raederle stood up, groping for words to quiet them. Then she caught sight of a stranger entering the hall, who had stopped abruptly at Duac’s shout. He was young, plainly dressed in sheepskin and rough wool. He glanced in wonder at the beautiful hall, then stared a little at Raederle without realizing it. The numb, terrible sorrow in his eyes made her heart stop. She took a step towards him, feeling as though she were stepping irrevocably out of the predictable world. Something in her face had stopped the quarrel. Mathom turned. The stranger shifted uneasily and cleared his throat.
“I’m—my name is Cannon Master. I farm the lands of the Prince of Hed. I have a message for the King of An from—from the Prince of Hed.”
“I am Mathom of An.”
Raederle took another step forward. “And I am Raederle,” she whispered, while something fluttered, trapped like a bird, in the back of her throat. “Is Morgon . . . Who is the Prince of Hed?”
She heard a sound from Mathom. Cannon Master looked at her mutely a moment. Then he said very gently, “Eliard.”
Into their incredulous silence, the King dropped one word like a stone. “How?”
“No one—no one knows exactly.” He stopped to swallow. “All Eliard knows is that Morgon died five days ago. We don’t know how, or where, only that it was under very strange and terrible circumstances. Eliard knows that much because he has been dreaming about Morgon the past year, feeling something—some nameless power weighing into Morgon’s mind. He couldn’t—he couldn’t seem to free himself from it. He didn’t even seem to know himself at the end. We can’t begin to guess what it was. Five days ago, the land-rule passed to Eliard. We remembered the reason why Morgon had left Hed in the first place, and we—Eliard decided . . .” He paused; a faint flush of color came into his weary face. He said diffidently to Raederle, “I don’t know if you would have chosen to come to Hed. You would have been—you would have been most welcome. But we thought it right that you should be told. I had been once to Caithnard, so I said I’d come.”
“I see.” She tried to clear the trembling in her throat. “Tell him—tell him I would have come. I would have come.”
His head bowed. “Thank you for that.”
“A year,” Duac whispered. “You knew what was happening to him. You knew. Why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you let us know sooner?”
Cannon Master’s hands clenched. He said painfully, “It’s what—it’s what we ask ourselves now. We—we just kept hoping. No one of Hed has ever asked outside of Hed for help.”
“Has there been any word from the High One?” Elieu asked.
“No. Nothing. But no doubt the High One’s harpist will show up eventually to express the High One’s sorrow over the death of—” He stopped, swallowing the bitterness from his voice. “I’m sorry. We can’t—we can’t even bury him in his own land. I’m ignorant as a sheep outside of Hed; I hardly know, stepping out of your house, which direction to turn to go home. So I have to ask you if, beyond Hed, such things happen to land-rulers so frequently that not even the High One is moved by it.”
Duac stirred, but Mathom spoke before he could. “Never,” he said flatly. Cannon, drawn by something smoldering in his eyes, took a step toward the King, his voice breaking.
“Then what was it? Who killed him? Where, if the High One himself doesn’t care, can we go for an answer?”
The King of An looked as though he were swallowing a shout that might have blown the windows out of the room. He said succinctly, “I swear by the bones of the unconquered Kings of An, that if I have to bring it back from the dead I will find you an answer.”
Duac dropped his face in one hand. “You’ve done it now.” Then he shouted, while Cannon stared at him, amazed, “And if you go wandering through this realm like a peddlar and that darkness that killed Morgon snatches you out of time and place, don’t bother troubling me with your dreams because I won’t look for you!”
“Then look to my land,” Mathom said softly. “Duac, there is a thing in this realm that eats the minds of land-rulers, that is heaving restlessly under the earth with more hatred in it than even in the bones of the dead of Hel. And when it rouses at last, there will not be a blade of grass in this land untouched by it.”
He vanished so quickly that Duac started. He stood staring at the air where Mathom had gone out like a dark, windblown flame. Cannon said, appalled, “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I never dreamed—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Elieu said gently. His face was bloodless. He put a hand on Raederle’s wrist; she looked at him blindly. He added to Duac, “I’ll stay in Hel. I’ll do what I can.”
Duac ran his hands up his face, up through his hair. “Thank you.” He turned to Cannon. “You can believe him. He’ll find out who killed Morgon and why, and he’ll tell you if he has to drag himself out of a grave to do it. He has sworn that, and he is bound beyond life.”
Cannon shuddered. “Things are much simpler in Hed. Things die when they’re dead.”
“I wish they did in An.”
Raederle, staring out at the darkening sky beyond the windows, touched his arm suddenly. “Duac . . .”
An old crow swung over the garden on a drift of wind, then flapped northward over the rooftops of Anuin. Duac’s eyes followed it as though something in him were bound to the deliberate, unhurried flight. He said wearily, “I hope he doesn’t get himself shot and cooked for dinner.”
Cannon looked at him, startled. Raederle, watching the black wings shirr the blue-grey twilight, said, “Someone should go to Caithnard to tell Rood. I’ll go.” Then she put her hands over her mouth and began to cry for a young student in the White of Beginning Mastery who had once put a shell to her ear so she could hear the sea.