He was silent, staring at her. A light, chill shudder ran through him. “They have that much power.” He sat up abruptly, scarcely noticing the drag of pain down his shoulder. “Why don’t they use it? They never use it. They should have killed me long ago. In Herun, the shape-changer Corrig could have killed me as I slept; instead he only harped. He challenged me to kill him. In Isig — three shape-changers could not kill one farmer-prince of Hed who had never used a sword in his life? What in Hel’s name are they? What do they want of me? What does Ghisteslwchlohm want?”
“Do you think they killed him?”
“I don’t know. He would have had sense enough to run. I’m surprised we didn’t find him in the wagon with us.”
“They’ll look for you in Lungold.”
“I know.” He slid his palms over his face. “I know. Maybe with the wizards’ help, I can draw them away from the city. I’ve got to get there quickly. I’ve got to—”
“I know.” She drew a deep breath and loosed it wearily. “Morgon, teach me the crow-shape. At least it’s a shape of the Kings of An. And it’s faster than walking barefoot.”
He lifted his head. He lay back down after a moment, drew her down with him, searching for some way to speak at once all the thoughts crowding into his head. He said finally, “I’ll learn to harp,” and he felt her smile against his breast. Then all his thoughts froze into a single memory of a halting harping out of the dark. He did not realize he was crying again until he lifted his hand to touch his eyes. Raederle was silent, holding him gently. He said, after a long time, when her fire had died down, “I sat with Deth in the night not because I was hoping to understand him, but because he drew me there, he wanted me there. And he didn’t keep me there with his harping or his words, but something powerful enough to bind me across all my anger. I came because he wanted me. He wanted me, so I came. Do you understand that?”
“Morgon, you loved him,” she whispered. “That was the binding.”
He was silent again, thinking back to the still, shadowed face beyond the flame, listening to the harpist’s silence until he could almost hear the sound of riddles spun like spider’s web in the darkness in a vast, secret game that made his death itself a riddle. Finally some herb Raederle had laid against his cheek breathed across his mind and he slept again.
He taught her the crow-shape the next morning when they woke at dawn. He went into her mind, found deep in it crow-images, tales of them, memories she scarcely knew were there: her father’s unreadable crow-black eyes, crows among the oak trees surrounding Raith’s pigherds, crows flying through the history of An, carrion-eaters, message-bearers, cairn-guardians, their voices full of mockery, bitter warnings, poetry.
“Where did they all come from?” she murmured, amazed.
“They are of the land-law of An. The power and heart of An. Nothing more.”
He called a sleepy crow out of one of the trees around them; it landed on his wrist. “Can you go into my mind? See behind my eyes, into my thoughts?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try. It won’t be hard for you.” He opened his mind to the crow-mind, drew its brain-workings into his own, until he saw his blurred, nameless face out of its eyes. He heard movements, precise and isolated as flute notes, under dead leaves, under oak roots. He began to understand its language. It gave a squawk, more curious than impatient. His mind filled then with a sense of Raederle, as if she were within him, touching him gently, filling him like light. His throat ached with wonder. For a moment the three minds drew from one another, fearlessly, tentatively. Then the crow cried; its wings soared blackly over Morgon’s vision. He was left alone in his mind, groping for something that had gone out of him. A crow fluttered up, landed on his shoulder. He looked into its eyes.
He smiled slowly. The crow, its wings beating awkwardly, swooped to a high branch. It missed its perch landing. Then it caught itself, and the fine balance of instinct and knowledge within it wavered. The crow became Raederle, dodging leaves as she changed shape.
She looked down at Morgon, breathless and astonished. “Stop laughing. Morgon, I flew. Now, how in Hel’s name do I get down?”
“Fly.”
“I’ve forgotten how!”
He flew up beside her, one wing stiff with his half-healed wound. He changed shape again. The branch creaked a warning under his weight, and she gasped. “We’ll fall in the river! Morgon, it’s breaking—” She fluttered up again with a squawk. Morgon joined her. They streaked the sunrise with black, soared high above the woods until they saw the hundreds of miles of endless forest and the great road hewn through it, crossing the realm. They rose until traders’ wagons were only tiny lumbering insects crawling down a ribbon of dust. They dropped slowly, spiralling together, their wings beating the same slow rhythm, winding lesser and lesser rings through the sunlight until they traced one last black circle above the river. They landed among ferns on the bank, changed shape. They gazed at one another wordlessly in the morning. Raederle whispered,
“Your eyes are full of wings.”
“Your eyes are full of the sun.”
They flew in crow-shape for the next two weeks. The silent golden oak forest melted away at the edge of the backlands. The road turned, pushed northward through rich, dark forests of pine whose silence seemed undisturbed by the passage of centuries. It wound up dry rocky hills pounded the color of brass by the noon sun, bridged chasms through which silvery veins of water-flowing down from the Lungold Lakes flashed and roared against sheer walls of stone. Trees blurred endlessly together in the crows’ vision, ebbed toward a faint blue mist of mountains bordering the remote western edges of the backlands. By day the sun fired the sky a flawless, metallic blue. The night shook stars from one horizon to another, down to the rim of the world. The voices of the back-lands, of land and stone and ancient untamed wind, were too loud for sound. Beneath them lay a silence implacable as granite. Morgon felt it as he flew; he breathed it into his bones, sensed its strange, cold touch in his heart. He would grope away from it at first, reach into Raederle’s mind to share a vague, inarticulate language. Then the silence wore slowly into the rhythm of his flight and finally into a song. At last, when he scarcely remembered his own language and knew Raederle only as a dark, wind-sculpted shape, he saw the interminable trees part before them. In the distance, the great city founded by Ghisteslwchlohm sprawled against the shores of the first of the Lungold Lakes, glinting of copper and bronze and gold under the last rays of the sun.
The crows beat a final weary flight toward their destination. The forest had been pushed back for miles around the city to make room for fields, pastures, orchards. The cool scent of pine yielded to the smell of harrowed earth and crops that teased at Morgon’s crow-instincts. Trader’s Road, striped with shadow, ran its last scarred mile into the mouth of the city. The gateway was a fragile, soaring arch of dark polished timber and white stone. The city walls were immense, thick, buttressed with arms of timber and stone that rose high above the buildings scattered beyond the old bounds of the city. Newer streets had made inroads into the ancient walls; lesser gateways opened in it; houses and shops had grow against, and even on top of the walls, as if their builders had long forgotten the terror that had flung the walls up seven centuries before.
The crows reached the main gate, rested among the arches. The gates themselves looked as if they had not been closed for centuries. They were of thick slabs of oak, hinged and reinforced with bronze. Birds were nesting on the hinges in the shadows. Within the walls, a maze of cobbled streets wandered away in all directions, lined by brightly painted inns, trade-halls, merchants’ and craftsmen’s shops, houses with tapestries and flowers trailing from the windows. Morgon, sifting through his crow-vision, saw across the rooftops and chimneys to the north edge of the city. The setting sun struck the lake with a full, broad battery, spangling it with fire, until the hundred fishing-boats moored at the docks seemed to burn on the water.