For once, the Morgol had not seen them coming. But the wizard Iff was waiting for them patiently in the courtyard, and the Morgol joined him there, looking curious, as the three black, wet birds lighted in front of her house. She stared at them, amazed, after they had changed shape.
“Morgon…” As she took his thin, worn face gently between her hands, he realized who it was that he had brought with him into her house.
Yrth was standing quietly; he seemed preoccupied, as though he had linked himself to all their eyes and had to sort through a confusion of images. The Morgol pushed Raederle’s wet hair back from her face.
“You have become the great riddle of An,” she said, and Raederle looked away from her quickly, down at the ground. But the Morgol lifted her face and kissed her, smiling. Then she turned to the wizards.
Iff put his hand on Yrth’s shoulder, said in his tranquil voice, “El, this is Yrth; I don’t think you have met.”
“No.” She bent her head. “You honor my house, Star-Maker. Come in, out of the rain. Usually I can see who is crossing my hills and prepare for my guests; but I did not pay any attention to three tired crows.” She put her hand lightly on Yrth’s arm to guide him. “Where have you come from?”
“Isig and Osterland,” the wizard said. His voice sounded huskier than usual. Guards in the rich maze of corridors gazed without a change of stance at the visitors, but their eyes were startled, conjecturing. Morgon, watching Yrth’s back as he walked beside the Morgol, his head angled toward her voice, realized slowly that Iff had dropped back and was speaking to him.
“The news of the attack on Hed reached us only a few days after it happened — word of it passed that swiftly through the realm. It caused great fear. Most of the people have left Caithnard, but where can they go? Ymris? An, which Mathom will leave nearly defenseless when he brings his army north? Lungold? That city is still recovering from its own terror. There is no place for anyone to go.”
“Have the Masters left Caithnard?” Raederle asked.
The wizard shook his head. “No. They refuse to leave.” He sounded mildly exasperated. “The Morgol asked me to go to them, see if they needed help, ships to move themselves and their books. They said that perhaps the strictures of wizardry held the secret of eluding death, but the strictures of riddlery hold that it is unwise to turn your back on death, since turning, you will only find it once more in front of you. I asked them to be practical. They suggested that answers, rather than ships, might help them most. I told them they might die there. They asked me if death is the most terrible thing. And at that point, I began to understand riddlery a little. But I had no skill to riddle with them.”
“The wise man,” Morgon said, “pursues a riddle inflexibly as a miser pursues a coin rolling towards a crack in a floorboard.”
“Apparently. Can you do anything? They seemed to me something very fragile and very precious to the realm…”
The fault smile in his eyes died. “Only one thing. Give them what they want.”
The Morgol stopped in front of a large, light room, with rugs and hangings of gold, ivory, and rich brown. She said to Morgon and Raederle, “My servants will bring what you need to make you comfortable. There will be guards stationed throughout the house.
Join us when you’re ready, in Iff’s study. We can talk there.”
“El,” Morgon said softly. “I cannot stay. I did not come to talk.”
She was silent, riddling, he suspected, though her expression changed very little. She put her hand on his arm. “I have taken all the guards out of the cities and borders; Goh is training them here, to go south, if that is what you need.”
“No,” he said passionately. “I saw enough of your guards die in Lungold.”
“Morgon, we must use what strength we have.”
“There is far more power in Herun than that.” He saw her face change then. He was aware of the wizard behind her, still as a shadow, and he wondered then without hope of an answer whether he gathered power by choice or at the falcon’s luring. “That is what I have come for. I need that.”
Her fingers closed very tightly on his forearm. “The power of land-law?” she whispered incredulously. He nodded mutely, knowing that the first sign of mistrust in her would scar his heart forever. “You have that power? To take it?”
“Yes. I need the knowledge of it. I will not touch your mind. I swear it. I went into Har’s mind, with his permission, but you — there are places in your mind where I do not belong.”
Some thought was growing behind her eyes. Standing so quietly, still gripping him, she could not speak. He felt as if he were changing shape in front of her into something ancient as the world, around which riddles and legends and the colors of night and dawn clung like priceless, forgotten treasures. He wanted to go into her mind then, to find whatever lay in his harsh, confused past to make her see him like that. But she loosed him and said, “Take from my land, and from me, what you need.”
He stood still, watching her move down the hall, her hand beneath Yrth’s elbow. Servants came, breaking into his thoughts. While they roused the fire and set water and wine to heat, he spoke softly to Raederle.
“I’ll leave you here. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Neither one of us will be very safe, but at least Yrth and Iff are here, and Yrth — he does want me alive. I know that much.”
She slid her hand onto his shoulder. Her face was troubled. “Morgon, you bound yourself to him as you flew. I felt it.”
“I know.” He lifted her hand, held the back of it against his chest “I know,” he repeated. He could not meet her eyes. “He lures me with myself. I told you that if I played with him, I would lose.”
“Maybe.”
“Watch over the Morgol. I don’t know what I have brought into her house.”
“He would never hurt her.”
“He lied to her and betrayed her once already. Once is enough. If you need me, ask the Morgol where I am. She’ll know.”
“All right. Morgon…”
“What?”
“I don’t know…” she answered, as she had several times in the past days. “Only I remember, sometimes, what Yrth said about fire and night being such simple things when you see them clearly. I keep thinking that you don’t know what Yrth is because you never see him, you see only dark memories…”
“What in Hel’s name do you expect me to see? He’s more than a harpist, more than a wizard. Raederle, I’m trying to see. I’m—”
She put her hand over his mouth as servants glanced at them. “I know.” She held him suddenly, tightly, and he felt himself trembling. “I didn’t mean to upset you. But — be quiet and listen. I’m trying to think. You don’t understand fire until you forget yourself and become fire. You learned to see in the dark when you became a great mountain whose heart was of darkness. You understood Ghisteslwchlohm by assuming his power. So, maybe the only way you will ever understand the harpist is to let him draw you into his power until you are part of his heart and you begin to see the world out of his eyes…”
“I may destroy the realm that way.”
“Maybe. But if he is dangerous, how can you fight him without understanding him? And if he is not dangerous?”
“If he’s not—” He stopped. The world seemed to shift slightly around him, all of Herun, the mountain kingdoms, the southern lands, the entire realm, adjusting into place under the falcon’s eye. He saw the falcon’s shadow spanning the realm in its powerful, silent flight, felt it fall across his back. The vision lasted a fraction of a moment. Then the shadow became a memory of night and his hands clenched. “He is dangerous,” he whispered. “He always has been. Why am I so bound to him?”
He left the City of Circles that evening and spent days and nights he did not count, hidden from the world and almost from himself, within the land-law of Herun. He drifted shapelessly in the mists, seeped down into the still, dangerous marshlands, and felt the morning frost silver his face as it hardened over mud and reeds and tough marsh grasses. He cried a marsh bird’s lonely cry and stared at the stars out of an expressionless slab of stone. He roamed through the low hills, linking his mind to rocks, trees, rivulets, searching into the rich mines of iron and copper and precious stones the hills kept enclosed within themselves. He spun tendrils of thought into a vast web across the dormant fields and lush, misty pastureland, linking himself to the stubble of dead roots, frozen furrows, and tangled grasses the sheep fed on. The gentleness of the land reminded him of Hed, but there was a dark, restless force in it that had reared up in the shapes of tors and monoliths. He drifted very close to the Morgol’s mind, as he explored it; he sensed that her watchfulness and intelligence had been born out of need, the heritage of a land whose marshes and sudden mists made it very dangerous to those who had settled it. There was mystery in its strange stones, and richness within its hills; the minds of the Morgols had shaped themselves also to those things. As Morgon drew deep into its law, he felt his own mind grow almost peaceful, bound by necessity to a fine clarity of awareness and vision. Finally, when he began to see as the Morgol saw, into things and beyond them, he returned to the City of Circles.