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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just ran.”

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

“For what?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the animal? What was it?”

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

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

“I suppose not. You would know.”

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

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

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

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