“I’m coming,” she whispered.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Morgon,” Yrth said. “You will be killed.”

“Tristan.” His hands clenched; he swallowed a painful, burning knot. “I don’t know if she’s alive or dead!” He closed his eyes, flinging his mind across the dark, rain-drenched night, across the vast forests, as far as he could reach. He stepped toward the edge of his awareness. But an image formed in his mind, drew him back as he moved, and he opened his eyes to the firelit walls of the tower.

“It’s a trap,” Yrth said. His voice sounded hollow with pain, but very patient. Morgon did not bother to answer. He drew the image of a falcon out of his mind, but swiftly, even before he had begun to change shape, the image changed to light, burned eyes that saw into his mind. They pulled him back into himself.

“Morgon, I’ll go. They are expecting you; they hardly know me. I can travel swiftly; I’ll be back very soon…” He stood up abruptly as Morgon filled his mind with illusions of fire and shadow and disappeared within them. He had nearly walked out of the room when the wizard’s eyes pierced into his thoughts, breaking his concentration.

The anger flared in him again. He kept walking and brought himself up against an illusion of solid stone in the doorway. “Morgon,” the wizard said, and Morgon whirled. He flung a shout into Yrth’s mind that should have jarred the wizard’s attention away from his illusion. But the shout echoed harmlessly into a mind like a vast chasm of darkness.

He stood still, then, his hands flat on the illusion, a fine sweat of fear and exhaustion forming on his face. The darkness was like a warning. But he let his mind touch it again, form around it, try to move through its illusion to the core of the wizard’s thoughts. He only blundered deeper into darkness, with the sense of some vast power constantly retreating before his searching. He followed it until he could no longer find his way back…

He came out of the darkness slowly, to find himself sitting motionless beside the fire. Raederle was beside him, her fingers locked to his limp hand. Yrth stood in front of them. His face looked almost grey with weariness; his eyes were bloodshot. His boots and the hem of his long robe were stained with dry mud and crusted salt. The cut on his cheek had closed.

Morgon started. Danan, on his other side, stooped to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Morgon,” he said softly, “Yrth has just come back from Hed. It’s mid-morning. He has been gone two nights and a day.”

“What did you—” He stood up, too abruptly. Danan caught him, held him while the blood behind his eyes receded. “How did you do that to me?” he whispered.

“Morgon, forgive me.” The strained, weary voice seemed haunted with overtones of another voice. “The Earth-Masters were waiting for you in Hed. If you had gone, you would have died there, and more lives would have been lost battling for you. They couldn’t find you anywhere; they were trying to drive you out of your hiding.”

“Eliard—”

“He’s safe. I found him standing among the ruins of Akren. The wave destroyed Tol, Akren, most of the farms along the western coast. I spoke to the fanners; they saw some fighting between strange, armed men, they said, who did not belong in Hed. I questioned one of the wraiths; he said there was little to be done against the shape of water. I told Eliard who I am, where you are… he was stunned with the suddenness of it He said that he knew you had sensed the destruction, but he was glad you had had sense enough not to come.”

Morgon drew breath; it seemed to burn through him. “Tristan?”

“As far as Eliard knows, she’s safe. Some feebleminded trader told her you had disappeared. So she left Hed to look for you, but a sailor recognized her in Caithnard and stopped her. She is on her way home.” Morgon put his hand over his eyes. The wizard’s hand rose, went out to him, but he drew back. “Morgon.” The wizard was dredging words from somewhere out of his exhaustion. “It was not a complex binding. You were not thinking clearly enough to break it.”

“I was thinking clearly,” he whispered. “I did not have the power to break it.” He stopped, aware of Danan behind him, puzzled, yet trusting them both. The dark riddle of the wizard’s power loomed again over his thoughts, over the whole of the realm, from Isig to Hed. There seemed no escape from it. He began to sob harshly, hopelessly, possessing no other answer. The wizard, his shoulders slumping as if the weight of the realm dragged at his back, gave him nothing but silence.

12

They left Isig the next day: three crows flying among the billowing smoke from Danan’s forges. They crossed the Ose, flew over the docks at Kyrth; every ship moored there was being overhauled for a long journey down the river to the heavy autumn seas. The grey rains beat against them over the forests of Osterland; the miles of ancient pine were hunched and weary. Grim Mountain rose in the distance out of a ring of mist. The east and north winds swarmed around them; the crows dipped from current to current, their feathers alternately sleeked and billowed by the erratic winds. They stopped to rest frequently. By nightfall they were barely halfway to Yrye.

They stopped for the night under the broad eaves of an old tree whose thick branches sighed resignedly in the rain. They found niches in it to protect themselves from the weather. Two crows huddled together on a branch; the third landed below them, a big, dark, windblown bird who had not spoken since they left Isig. For hours they slept, shielded by the weave of branches, lulled by the wind.

The winds died at midnight. The rains slowed to a whisper, then faded. The clouds parted, loosing the stars cluster by cluster against a dazzling blackness. The unexpected silence found its way into Morgon’s crow-dreams. His eyes opened.

Raederle was motionless beside him, ,a little cloud of soft black plumage. The crow beneath him was still. His own shape pulled at him dimly, wanting to breathe the spices of the night, wanting to become moonlight. He spread his wings after a moment, dropped soundlessly to the ground, and changed shape.

He stood quietly, enfolded in the Osterland night. His mind opened to all its sounds and smells and shapes. He laid his hand against the wet, rough flank of the tree and felt it drowsing. He heard the pad of some night hunter across the soft, damp ground. He smelled the rich, tangled odors of wet pine, of dead bark and loam crumbled under his feet. His thoughts yearned to become part of the land, under the light, silvery touch of the moon. He let his mind drift finally into the vast, tideless night.

He shaped his mind to the roots of trees, to buried stones, to the brains of animals moving obliviously across the path of his awareness. He sensed in all things the ancient sleeping fire of Har’s law, the faint, perpetual fire behind his eyes. He touched fragments of the dead within the earth, the bones and memories of men and animals. Unlike the wraiths of An, they were quiescent, at rest in the heart of the wild land. Quietly, unable to resist his own longings, he began weaving his bindings of awareness and knowledge into the law of Osterland.

Slowly he began to understand the roots of the land-law. The bindings of snow and sun had touched all life. The wild winds set the vesta’s speed; the fierceness of seasons shaped the wolf’s brain; the winter night seeped into the raven’s eye. The more he understood, the deeper he drew himself into it: gazing at the moon out of a horned owl’s eyes, melting with a wild cat through the bracken, twisting his thoughts even into the fragile angles of a spider’s web, and into the endless, sinuous wind of ivy spiralling a tree trunk. He was so engrossed that he touched a vesta’s mind without questioning it. A little later, he touched another. And then, suddenly, his mind could not move without finding vesta, as if they had shaped themselves out of the moonlight around him. They were running: a soundless white wind coming from all directions. Curiously, he explored their impulse. Some danger had sent them flowing across the night, he sensed, and wondered what would dare trouble the vesta in Har’s domain. He probed deeper. Then he shook himself free of them; the swift, startled breath he drew of the icy air cleared his head.