Eliard, reaching into the darkness, touched his face with a gentleness that had been their father’s. Tristan was still clinging to him; Morgon held her tightly, kissed the top of her hair. Then he stepped back, stood suddenly alone in the night feeling the wood shiver under his feet in the roiling water.
He turned, found his way blindly up the ship’s ramp, back down into the black hull.
3
The ship found a quiet berth in the Caithnard harbor near dawn. Morgon heard the anchor splash in still water and saw through the lattice of the hatch covers squares of pearl-grey sky. Raederle was asleep. He looked at her a moment with an odd mixture of weariness and peace, as if he had brought some great treasure safely out of danger. Then he sagged down on the spice sacks and went to sleep. The clamor on the docks at midmorning, the stifling noon heat in the hold hardly troubled his dreams. He woke finally at late afternoon and found Raederle watching him, covered with floating spangles of sunlight.
He sat up slowly, trying to remember where he was. She said, “Caithnard.” Her arms were crooked around her knees; her cheek was crosshatched with weave from the sacking. Her eyes held an odd expression he had to puzzle over, until he realized that it was simply fear. His throat made a dry, questioning sound. She answered him softly.
“Now what?”
He leaned back against the side, gripped her wrist lightly a moment, then rubbed his eyes. “Bri Corbett said he would find horses for us. You’ll have to take the pins out of your hair.”
“What? Morgon, are you still asleep?”
“No.” His eyes fell to her feet “And look at your shoes.”
She looked. “What’s the matter with them?”
“They’re beautiful. So are you. Can you change shape?”
“Into what?” she asked bewilderedly. “A hoary old hag?”
“No. You have a shape-changer’s blood in you; you should be able to—”
The expression in her eyes, of fear, torment, loathing, stopped him. She said distinctly, “No.”
He drew breath, fully awake, cursing himself silently. The long road sweeping across the realm, straight towards the setting sun, touched him, too, then, with an edge of panic. He was silent, trying to think, but the stale air in the hold seemed to fill his brain with chaff. He said, “We’ll be on the road to Lungold for a long time, if we ride. I thought to keep the horses just until I could teach you some shape.”
“You change shape. I’ll ride.”
“Raederle, look at yourself,” he said helplessly. “Traders from all over the realm will be on that road. They haven’t seen me for over a year, but they’ll recognize you, and they won’t have to ask who the man beside you is.”
“So.” She kicked her shoes off, pulled the pins out of her hair and shook it down her back. “Find me another pair of shoes.”
He looked at her wordlessly as she sat in a billow of wrinkled, richly embroidered cloth, the fine, dishevelled mass of her hair framing a high-boned face that, even tired and white, looked like something out of an ancient ballad. He sighed, pushing himself up.
“All right. Wait for me.”
Her voice checked him briefly as he climbed the ladder. “This time.”
He spoke to Bri Corbett, who had been waiting patiently all day for them to wake. The horses Bri had found were on the dock; there were some supplies packed on them. They were placid, heavy-hooved farmhorses, restless at being tethered so long. Bri, as the fact and implications of the long journey began filling his mind, gave Morgon varied, impassioned arguments, to which he responded patiently. Bri ended by offering to come with them. Morgon said wearily, “Only if you can change shape.”
Bri gave up. He left the ship, returned an hour later with a bundle of clothes, which he tossed down the hatch to Morgon. Raederle examined them expressionlessly, then put them on. There was a dark skirt, a linen shift, and a shapeless over-tunic that went to her knees. The boots were of soft leather, good but plain. She coiled her hair up under the crown of a broad-brimmed straw hat. She stood still resignedly for Morgon’s inspection.
He said, “Pull the hat brim down.”
She gave it a wrench. “Stop laughing at me.”
“I’m not,” he said soberly. “Wait till you see what you have to ride.”
“You aren’t exactly inconspicuous. You may be dressed like a poor farmer, but you walk like a land-ruler, and your eyes could quarry stone.”
“Watch,” he said. He let himself grow still, his thoughts shaping themselves to his surroundings: wood, pitch, the vague murmur of water and indistinct rumblings of the harbor. His name seemed to flow away from him into the heat. His face held no discernible expression; for a moment his eyes were vague, blank as the summer sky.
“If you aren’t aware of yourself, few people will be aware of you. That’s one of a hundred ways I kept myself alive crossing the realm.”
She looked startled. “I almost couldn’t recognize you. Is it illusion?”
“Very little of it; It’s survival.”
She was silent. He saw the conflict of her thoughts in her face. She turned away without speaking and climbed up the ladder to the deck.
The sun was burning into night at the far edge of the realm as they bade farewell to Bri and began to ride. Great shadows from masts and piled cargo loomed in their path across the docks. The city, a haze of late light and shadow, seemed suddenly unfamiliar to Morgon, as if, on the verge of taking a strange road, he became a stranger to himself. He led Raederle through the twists of streets, past shops and taverns he had known once, toward the west edge of the city, down one cobbled street that widened as it left the city, wore out of its cobblestones, widened again, rutted with centuries of cartwheels, widened again and ran ahead of them through hundreds of miles of no-man’s-land, until it angled northward at the edge of the known realm towards Lungold.
They stopped their horses, looking down it. Tangled shadows of oak faded as the sun set; the road lay tired, grey, and endless in the dusk. The oak fanned over their heads, branches nearly joined across the road. They looked weary, their leaves dulled with a patina of dust kicked up by the cartwheels. The evening was very quiet; the late traffic had already wound its way into the city. The forests blurred grey in the distance, and then dark. From the greyness an owl woke and sang a riddle.
They began to ride again. The sky turned black, and the moon rose, spilling a milky light through the forest. They rode the moon high, until their shadows rode beneath them on a tangle of black leaves. Then Morgon found the leaves blurring together into one vast darkness under his eyes. He reined; Raederle stopped beside him.
There was the sound of water not far away. Morgon, his face coated with a mask of dust, said tiredly, “I remember. I crossed a river, coming south out of Wind Plain. It must follow the road.” He turned his horse off the road. “We can camp there.”
They found it not far from the road, a shallow streak of silver in the moonlight. Raederle sank down at the foot of a tree while Morgon unsaddled the horses and let them drink. He brought their packs and blankets to a clear space among the fern. Then he sat down beside Raederle, dropped his head in his arms.
“I’m not used to riding, either,” he said. She took her hat off, rested her head against him.
“A plow horse,” she murmured. She fell asleep where she sat. Morgon put his arm around her. For a while he stayed awake, listening. But he heard only the secret noises of hunting animals, the breath of owl’s wings, and as the moon set, his eyes closed.
They woke to the blaze of the summer sun and the tortured groan of cartwheels. By the time they had eaten, washed, and made their way back to the road, it was filled with carts, traders on horseback with their packs, farmers taking produce or animals from outlying farms into Caithnard, men and women with retinues and packhorses making the long journey, for indiscernible reasons, across the realm to Lungold. Morgon and Raederle eased their horses into the slow, rhythmic pace that would wear the monotonous, six-weeks journey to its ending. Riding in traffic varying between pigs and rich lords, they were not conspicuous. Morgon discouraged traders’ idle conversation, responding grumpily to their overtures. Once he startled Raederle by cursing a rich merchant who commented on her face. The man looked angry a moment, his hand tightening on his riding crop; then, glancing at Morgon’s patched boots and the sweat beading his dusty face, he laughed, nodded to Raederle, and passed on. Raederle rode in silence, her head bowed, her reins bunched in one fist. Morgon, wondering what she was thinking, reached across and touched her lightly. She looked at him, her face filmed with dust and weariness.