He said, “Did they hurt you?”

“No.” She touched his cheek, and he winced. “That shout did. From a man of Hed, that was a marvellous shout.”

He stared at her, frozen again. “You shouted.”

“I didn’t shout,” she whispered. “You did.”

“I didn’t.” He sat up, then settled his skull into place with his hands. “Who in Hel’s name shouted?”

She shivered suddenly, her eyes moving through the night. “Someone watching, maybe still watching… How strange. Morgon, were they only men wanting to steal our horses?”

“I don’t know.” He searched the back of his head with his fingers. “I don’t know. They were men trying to steal our horses, yes, which was why it was so hard for me to fight them. There were too many to fight, but they were too harmless to kill. And I didn’t want to use much power, to attract attention.”

“You gave that one man boar bristles all over his body.”

Morgon’s hand slid to his ribs. “He earned it,” he said dourly. “But that last man coming out of the water—”

“The one whose beard I set on fire.”

“I don’t know.” He pushed his hands over his eyes, trying to remember. “That’s what I don’t know. If the man coming back out of the river was the same one who ran into it.”

“Morgan,” she whispered.

“He might have used power; I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe I was just seeing what I expected to see.”

“If it was a shape-changer, why didn’t he try to kill you?”

“Maybe he was unsure of me. They haven’t seen me since I disappeared into Erlenstar Mountain. I was that careful, crossing the realm. They wouldn’t expect me to be riding a plow horse in broad daylight down Trader’s Road.”

“But if he suspected — Morgon, you were using power over the horses.”

“It was a simple binding of silence, peace; he wouldn’t have suspected that.”

“He wouldn’t have run from a Great Shout, either. Would he? Unless he left for help. Morgon—” She was trying suddenly to tug him to his feet. “What are we doing sitting here? Waiting for another attack, this time maybe from shape-changers?”

He pulled his arm away from her. “Don’t do that; I’m sore.”

“Would you rather be dead?”

“No.” He brooded a moment, his eyes on the swift, shadowy flow of the river. A thought ran through his mind, chilling him. “Wind Plain. It lies just north of us… where Heureu Ymris is fighting his war against men and half-men… there might be an army of shape-changers across the river.”

“Let’s go. Now.”

“We would only attract attention, riding in the middle of the night. We can move our camp. Then I want to look for whoever it was that shouted.”

They shifted their horses and gear as quietly as they could, away from the river and closer to a cluster of traders’ carts. Then Morgon left Raederle, to search the night for a stranger.

Raederle argued, not wanting him to go alone; he said patiently, “Can you walk across dry leaves so gently they don’t stir? Can you stand so still animals pass you without noticing you? Besides, someone has to guard the horses.”

“What if those men return?”

“What if they do? I’ve seen what you can do to a wraith.”

She sat down under a tree, muttering something. He hesitated, for she looked powerless and vulnerable.

He shaped his sword, keeping the stars hidden under his hand, and laid it in front of her. It disappeared again; he told her softly, “It’s there if you need it, bound under illusion. If you have to touch it, I’ll know.”

He turned, slipped soundlessly into the silence between the trees.

The forest had quieted again after the shout. He drifted from camp to camp around them, looking for someone still awake. But travellers were sleeping peacefully in carts or tents, or curled under blankets beside their firebeds. The moon cast a grey-black haze over the world; trees and bracken were fragmented oddly with chips and streaks of shadow. There was not a breath of wind. Single sprays of leaves, a coil of bramble etched black in the light seemed whittled out of silence. The oak stood as still. He put his hand on one, slid his mind beneath its bark, and sensed its ancient, gnarled dreaming. He moved towards the river, skirted their old camp. Nothing moved. Listening through the river’s voice, his mind gathering its various tones, defining and discarding them one by one, he heard no human voices. He went farther down the river, making little more noise than his own controlled breathing. He eased into the surface he walked on, adjusting his thoughts to the frail weight of leaves, the tension in a dry twig. The sky darkened slowly, until he could scarcely see, and he knew he should turn back. But he lingered at the river’s edge, facing Wind Plain, listening as if he could hear the shards of battle noises in the broken dreams of Heureu’s army.

He turned finally, began to move back upriver. He took three soundless steps and stopped with an animal’s fluid shift from movement into stillness. Someone was standing among the trees with no discernible face or coloring, a broad half-shadow, half-faded, as Morgon was, into the night. Morgon waited, but the shadow did not move. Eventually, as he hovered between decisions on the river bank, it simply merged into the night. Morgon, his mouth dry, and blood beating hollowly into his thoughts, formed himself around a curve of air and flew, with an owl’s silence, a night hunter’s vision, back through the trees to the camp.

He startled Raederle, changing shape in front of her. She reached for the sword; he stilled her, squatting down and taking her hand. He whispered, “Raederle.”

“You’re frightened,” she breathed.

“I don’t know. I still don’t know. We’ll have to be very careful.” He settled beside her, shaped the sword, and held it loosely. He put his other arm around her. “You sleep, I’ll watch.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I’ll wake you before sunrise. We’ll have to be careful.”

“How?” she asked helplessly, “if they know where to find you: somewhere on Trader’s Road, riding to Lungold?” He did not answer her. He shifted, holding her more closely; she leaned her head against him. He thought, listening to her breathing, that she had fallen asleep. But she spoke after a long silence, and he knew that she, too, had been staring into the night “All right,” she said tightly. “Teach me to change shape.”

4

He tried to teach her when she woke at dawn. The sun had not yet risen; the forest was cool, silent around them. She listened quietly while he explained the essential simplicity of it, while he woke and snared a falcon from the high trees. The falcon complained piercingly on his wrist; it was hungry and wanted to hunt. He quieted it patiently with his mind. Then he saw the dark, haunted expression that had crept into Raederle’s eyes, and he tossed the falcon free.

“You can’t shape-change unless you want to.”

“I want to,” she protested.

“No, you don’t.”

“Morgon…”

He turned, picked up a saddle and heaved it onto one of the horses. He said, pulling the cinch tight, “It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” she said angrily. “You didn’t even try. I asked you to teach me, and you said you would. I’m trying to keep us safe.” She moved to stand in front of him as he lifted the other saddle. “Morgon.”

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly, trying to believe it. “I’ll think of something.”

She did not speak to him for hours. They rode quickly through the early morning, until the easier pace of the traffic made them conspicuous. The road seemed full of animals: sheep, pigs, young white bullocks being driven from isolated farms to Caithnard. They blocked traffic and made the horses skittish. Traders’ carts were irritatingly slow; farmers’ wagons full of turnips and cabbages careened at a slow, drunken pace in front of them at odd moments. The noon heat pounded the road into a dry powder that they breathed and swallowed. The noise and smell of animals seemed inescapable. Raederle’s hair, limp with dust and sweat, kept sliding down, clinging to her face. She stopped her horse once, stuck her hat between her teeth, wound her hair into a knot in the plain view of an old woman driving a pig to market, and jammed her hat back on her head. Morgon, looking at her, checked a comment. Her silence began to wear at him subtly, like the heat and the constant interruptions of their pace. He searched back, wondering if he had been wrong, wondering if she wanted him to speak or keep quiet, wondering if she regretted ever setting foot out of Anuin. He envisioned the journey without her; he would have been halfway across Ymris, taking a crow’s path to Lungold, a silent night flight across the backlands to a strange city, to face Ghisteslwchlohm again. Her silence began to build stone by stone around his memories, forming a night smelling of limestone, broken only by the faint, faroff trickle of water running away from him.