“He is like an Earth-Master,” Raederle said, and an odd chill ran through Morgon. Her words sounded as if they hurt. “They all have that terrible beauty.” They watched the bird lift from the ground, dark in the sudden fading of the light. Something dragged from its talons. She stood up slowly, began gathering wood. “He’ll want a spit.”

Morgon stripped a sapling bough and peeled it as the bird flew back. It left a dead hare beside Raederle’s fire. Yrth stood before them again. For a moment, his eyes seemed unfamiliar, full of the clear, wild air, and the fierce precision of the falcon’s kill. Then they became familiar again. Morgon asked his question in a voice that sounded timbreless, subdued.

“I scented its fear,” the wizard said. He slid a knife from his boot before he sat down. “Will you skin it? That would be a problem for me.”

Morgon set to work wordlessly. Raederle picked up the spit, finished peeling it. She said abruptly, almost shyly, “Can you speak a falcon’s language?”

The blind, powerful face turned toward her. Its sudden gentleness at the sound of her voice stilled Morgon’s knife. “A little of it.”

“Can you teach me? Do we have to fly all the way to Herun as crows?”

“If you wish… I thought, being of An, you might be most comfortable as a crow.”

“No,” she said softly. “I am comfortable now as many things. But it was a kind thought.”

“What have you shaped?”

“Oh… birds, a tree, a salmon, a badger, a deer, a bat, a vesta — I lost count long ago, searching for Morgon.”

“You always found him.”

“So did you.”

Yrth sifted the ground around him absently, for twigs to hold the spit. “Yes…”

“I have shaped a hare, too.”

“Hare is a hawk’s prey. You shape yourself to the laws of earth.”

Morgon tossed skin and offal into the bracken and reached for the spit. “And the laws of the realm?” he asked abruptly. “Are they meaningless to an Earth-Master?”

The wizard was very still. Something of the falcon’s merciless power seemed to stir behind his gaze, until Morgon sensed the recklessness of his challenge. He looked away. Yrth said equivocally, “Not all of them.” Morgon balanced the spit above the fire, turned the hare a couple of times to test it. Then the ambiguity of the wizard’s words struck him. He slid back on his haunches, gazing at Yrth. But Raederle was speaking to him, and the clear note of pain in her voice held him silent.

“Then why, do you think, are my kinsmen on Wind Plain warring against the High One? If the power is a simple matter of the knowledge of rain and fire, and the laws they shape themselves to are the laws of the earth?”

Yrth was silent again. The sun had vanished, this time into deep clouds across the west. A haze of dusk and mist was beginning to close in upon them. He reached out, felt for the spit and turned it slowly. “I would think,” he said, “that Morgon is correct in assuming the High One restrains the Earth-Masters’ full power. Which is reason enough in itself for them to want to fight him… But many riddles seem to lie beneath that one. The stone children in Isig drew me down into their tomb centuries ago with the sense I felt of their sorrow. Their power had been stripped from them. Children are heirs to power; perhaps that was why they were destroyed.”

“Wait,” Morgon’s voice shook on the word. “Are you saying — are you suggesting the High One’s heir was buried in that tomb?”

“It seems possible, doesn’t it?” Fat spattered in the blaze, and he turned the hare again. “Perhaps it was the young boy who told me of the stars I must put on a harp and a sword for someone who would come out of remote centuries to claim them…”

“But why?” Raederle whispered, still intent on her question. “Why?”

“You saw the falcon’s flight… its beauty and its deadliness. If such power were bound to no law, that power and the lust for it would become so terrible—”

“I wanted it. That power.”

The hard, ancient face melted again to its surprising gentleness. Yrth touched her, as he had touched the grass blade. “Then take it.”

He let his hand fall. Raederle’s head bent; Morgon could not see her face. He reached out to move her hair. She rose abruptly, turning away from him. He watched her walk through the trees, her hands gripping her arms as if she were chilled. His throat burned suddenly, for no coherent reason, except that the wizard had touched her, and she had left him.

“You left me nothing…” he whispered.

“Morgon—”

He stood up, followed Raederle into the gathering mists, leaving the falcon to its kill.

They flew through the next few days sometimes as crows, sometimes as falcons when the skies cleared. Two of the falcons cried to one another, in their piercing voices; the third, hearing them, was silent. They hunted in falcon-shape; slept and woke glaring at the pallid sun out of dear, wild eyes. When it rained, they flew as crows, plodding steadily through the drenched air. The trees flowed endlessly beneath them; they might have been flying again and again over the same point in space. But as the rains battered at them and vanished and the sun peered like a wraith through the clouds, a blur across the horizon ahead of them slowly hardened into a distant ring of hills breaking out of the forest.

The sun came out abruptly for a few moments before it drifted into night. Light glanced across the land, out of silver veins of rivers, and lakes dropped like small coin on the green earth. The falcons were flying wearily, in a staggered line that stretched over half a mile. The second one, bewitched, seemingly, by the light, shot suddenly ahead, in and out of sun and shadow, in a straight, exuberant flight towards their destination. Its excitement shook Morgon out of his monotonous rhythm. He picked up speed, soared past the lead falcon to catch up with the dark bolt hurtling hrough the sky. He had not realized Raederle could fly so fast. He streamed down currents of the north wind, but still the falcon kept its distance. He pushed toward it until he felt he had left his shape behind and was nothing more than a love of speed swept forward on the crest of light. He gained on the falcon slowly, until he saw its wingspan and the darkness of its underside and realized it was Yrth.

He kept his speed, wanting then, with all the energy in him, to overtake the falcon in the pride of its power and pass it. He sprinted toward it with all his strength, until the wind seemed to burn past him and through him. The forest heaved like a sea beneath him. Inch by inch, be closed the distance between them, until he was the falcon’s shadow in the blazing sky. And then he was beside it, matching its speed, his wings moving to its rhythm. He could not pass it.He tore through air and light until he had to loose even his furious desire, like ballast, to keep his speed. It would not let him pass, but it lured him even faster, until all his thoughts and a shadow over his heart were ripped away and he felt if he went one heartbeat faster, he would burnnto wind.

He gave a cry as he fell away from the falcon’s side, down toward the gentle hills below. He could hardly move his wings; he let the air currents toss him from one to another until he touched the ground. He changed shape. The long grass spun up to meet him. He burrowed against the earth, his arms outstretched, clinging to it, until the terrible pounding of his heart eased and he began breathing air again instead of fire. He rolled slowly onto his back and stood up. The falcon was hovering above him. He watched it motionlessly, until the wild glimpse into his own power broke over him again. His hand rose in longing toward the falcon. It fell toward him like a stone. He let it come. It landed on his shoulder, clung there, its blind eyes hooded. He was still in its fierce grip, caught in its power and its pride.

Three falcons slept that night on the Herun hills. Three crows flew through the wet mists at dawn, above villages and rocky grazing land, where swirling winds revealed here and there a gnarled tree, or the sudden thrust of a monolith. The mists melted into rain that drizzled over them all the way to the City of Circles.