Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He might have used power; I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe I was just seeing what I expected to see.”

  “If it was a shape-changer, why didn’t he try to kill you?”

  “Maybe he was unsure of me. They haven’t seen me since I disappeared into Erlenstar Mountain. I was that careful, crossing the realm. They wouldn’t expect me to be riding a plow horse in broad daylight down Trader’s Road.”

  “But if he suspected—Morgon, you were using power over the horses.”

  “It was a simple binding of silence, peace; he wouldn’t have suspected that.”

  “He wouldn’t have run from a Great Shout, either. Would he? Unless he left for help. Morgon—” She was trying suddenly to tug him to his feet. “What are we doing sitting here? Waiting for another attack, this time maybe from shape-changers?”

  He pulled his arm away from her. “Don’t do that; I’m sore.”

  “Would you rather be dead?”

  “No.” He brooded a moment, his eyes on the swift, shadowy flow of the river. A thought ran through his mind, chilling him. “Wind Plain. It lies just north of us . . . where Heureu Ymris is fighting his war against men and half-men . . . there might be an army of shape-changers across the river.”

  “Let’s go. Now.”

  “We would only attract attention, riding in the middle of the night. We can move our camp. Then I want to look for whoever it was that shouted.”

  They shifted their horses and gear as quietly as they could, away from the river and closer to a cluster of traders’ carts. Then Morgon left Raederle, to search the night for a stranger.

  Raederle argued, not wanting him to go alone; he said patiently, “Can you walk across dry leaves so gently they don’t stir? Can you stand so still animals pass you without noticing you? Besides, someone has to guard the horses.”

  “What if those men return?”

  “What if they do? I’ve seen what you can do to a wraith.”

  She sat down under a tree, muttering something. He hesitated, for she looked powerless and vulnerable.

  He shaped his sword, keeping the stars hidden under his hand, and laid it in front of her. It disappeared again; he told her softly, “It’s there if you need it, bound under illusion. If you have to touch it, I’ll know.”

  He turned, slipped soundlessly into the silence between the trees.

  The forest had quieted again after the shout. He drifted from camp to camp around them, looking for someone still awake. But travellers were sleeping peacefully in carts or tents, or curled under blankets beside their firebeds. The moon cast a grey-black haze over the world; trees and bracken were fragmented oddly with chips and streaks of shadow. There was not a breath of wind. Single sprays of leaves, a coil of bramble etched black in the light seemed whittled out of silence. The oak stood as still. He put his hand on one, slid his mind beneath its bark, and sensed its ancient, gnarled dreaming. He moved towards the river, skirted their old camp. Nothing moved. Listening through the river’s voice, his mind gathering its various tones, defining and discarding them one by one, he heard no human voices. He went farther down the river, making little more noise than his own controlled breathing. He eased into the surface he walked on, adjusting his thoughts to the frail weight of leaves, the tension in a dry twig. The sky darkened slowly, until he could scarcely see, and he knew he should turn back. But he lingered at the river’s edge, facing Wind Plain, listening as if he could hear the shards of battle noises in the broken dreams of Heureu’s army.

  He turned finally, began to move back upriver. He took three soundless steps and stopped with an animal’s fluid shift from movement into stillness. Someone was standing among the trees with no discernible face or coloring, a broad half-shadow, half-faded, as Morgon was, into the night. Morgon waited, but the shadow did not move. Eventually, as he hovered between decisions on the river bank, it simply merged into the night. Morgon, his mouth dry, and blood beating hollowly into his thoughts, formed himself around a curve of air and flew, with an owl’s silence, a night hunter’s vision, back through the trees to the camp.

  He startled Raederle, changing shape in front of her. She reached for the sword; he stilled her, squatting down and taking her hand. He whispered, “Raederle.”

  “You’re frightened,” she breathed.

  “I don’t know. I still don’t know. We’ll have to be very careful.” He settled beside her, shaped the sword, and held it loosely. He put his other arm around her. “You sleep. I’ll watch.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll wake you before sunrise. We’ll have to be careful.”

  “How?” she asked helplessly, “if they know where to find you: somewhere on Trader’s Road, riding to Lungold?” He did not answer her. He shifted, holding her more closely; she leaned her head against him. He thought, listening to her breathing, that she had fallen asleep. But she spoke after a long silence, and he knew that she, too, had been staring into the night.

  “All right,” she said tightly. “Teach me to change shape.”

  HE TRIED TO teach her when she woke at dawn. The sun had not yet risen; the forest was cool, silent around them. She listened quietly while he explained the essential simplicity of it, while he woke and snared a falcon from the high trees. The falcon complained piercingly on his wrist; it was hungry and wanted to hunt. He quieted it patiently with his mind. Then he saw the dark, haunted expression that had crept into Raederle’s eyes, and he tossed the falcon free.

  “You can’t shape-change unless you want to.”

  “I want to,” she protested.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Morgon . . .”

  He turned, picked up a saddle and heaved it onto one of the horses. He said, pulling the cinch tight, “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right,” she said angrily. “You didn’t even try. I asked you to teach me, and you said you would. I’m trying to keep us safe.” She moved to stand in front of him as he lifted the other saddle. “Morgon.”

  “It’s all right,” he said soothingly, trying to believe it. “I’ll think of something.”

  She did not speak to him for hours. They rode quickly through the early morning, until the easier pace of the traffic made them conspicuous. The road seemed full of animals: sheep, pigs, young white bullocks being driven from isolated farms to Caithnard. They blocked traffic and made the horses skittish. Traders’ carts were irritatingly slow; farmers’ wagons full of turnips and cabbages careened at a slow, drunken pace in front of them at odd moments. The noon heat pounded the road into a dry powder that they breathed and swallowed. The noise and smell of animals seemed inescapable. Raederle’s hair, limp with dust and sweat, kept sliding down, clinging to her face. She stopped her horse once, stuck her hat between her teeth, wound her hair into a knot in the plain view of an old woman driving a pig to market, and jammed her hat back on her head. Morgon, looking at her, checked a comment. Her silence began to wear at him subtly, like the heat and the constant interruptions of their pace. He searched back, wondering if he had been wrong, wondering if she wanted him to speak or keep quiet, wondering if she regretted ever setting foot out of Anuin. He envisioned the journey without her; he would have been halfway across Ymris, taking a crow’s path to Lungold, a silent night flight across the backlands to a strange city, to face Ghisteslwchlohm again. Her silence began to build stone by stone around his memories, forming a night smelling of limestone, broken only by the faint, faroff trickle of water running away from him.

  He blinked away the darkness, saw the world again, dust and bedraggled green, sun thumping rhythmically off brass kettles on a peddlar’s cart. He wiped sweat off his face. Raederle chipped at the wall of her own silence stiffly.

  “What did I do wrong? I was just listening to you.”

  He said wearily, “You said yes with your voice and no with your mind. Your mind does the work.”

  She was silent again, frowning at him. “What’s wrong?”


  “Nothing.”

  “You’re sorry I came with you.”

  He wrenched at his reins. “Will you stop? You’re twisting my heart. It’s you who are sorry.”

  She stopped her own horse; he saw the sudden despair in her face. They looked at one another, bewildered, frustrated. A mule brayed behind them, and they were riding again, suddenly, in the familiar, sweltering silence, with no way out of it, seemingly, like a tower without a door.

  Then Morgon stopped both their horses abruptly, led them off the road to drink. The noise dwindled; the air was clear and gentle with bird calls. He knelt at the river’s edge and drank of the cold, swift water, then splashed it over his face and hair. Raederle stood beside him, her reflection stiff even in the rippling water. He sank back on his heels, gazing at its blurred lines and colors. He turned his head slowly, looked up at her face.

  How long he gazed at her, he did not know, only that her face suddenly shook, and she knelt beside him, holding him. “How can you look at me like that?”

  “I was just remembering,” he said. Her hat fell off; he stroked her hair. “I thought about you so often in the past two years. Now all I have to do is turn my head to find you beside me. It still surprises me sometimes, like a piece of wizardry I’m not used to doing.”

  “Morgon, what are we going to do? I’m afraid—I’m so afraid of that power I have.”

  “Trust yourself.”

  “I can’t. You saw what I did with it at Anuin. I was hardly even myself, then; I was the shadow of another heritage—one that is trying to destroy you.”

  He gathered her tightly. “You touched me into shape,” he whispered. He held her quietly a long time. Then he said tentatively, “Can you stand it if I tell you a riddle?”

  She shifted to look at him, smiling a little. “Maybe.”

  “There was a woman of Herun, a hill woman named Arya, who collected animals. One day she found a tiny black beast she couldn’t name. She brought it into her house, fed it, cared for it. And it grew. And it grew. Until all her other animals fled from the house, and it lived alone with her, dark, enormous, nameless, stalking her from room to room while she lived in terror, unfree, not knowing what to do with it, not daring to challenge it—”

  Her hand lifted, came down over his mouth. She dropped her head against him; he felt her heartbeat. She whispered finally, “All right. What did she do?”

  “What will you do?”

  He listened for her answer, but if she gave him one, the river carried it away before he heard it.

  The road was quieter when they returned to it. Late shadows striped it; the sun was hovering in the grip of oak boughs. The dust had settled; most of the carts were well ahead of them. Morgon felt a touch of uneasiness at their isolation. He said nothing to Raederle, but he was relieved when, an hour later, they caught up with most of the traders. Their carts and horses were outside of an inn, an ancient building big as a barn, with stables and a smithy attached to it. From the sound of the laughter rumbling from it, it was well-stocked and its business was good. Morgon led the horses to the trough outside the stable. He longed for beer, but he was wary of showing himself in the inn. The shadows faded on the road as they went back to it; dusk hung like a wraith ahead of them.

  They rode into it. The birds stilled; their horses made the only noise on the empty road. A couple of times, Morgon passed gatherings of horse traders camped around vast fires, their livestock penned and guarded for the night. He might have been safe in their vicinity, but he was seized by a sudden reluctance to stop. The voices faded behind them; they pushed deeper into the twilight. Raederle was uneasy, he sensed, but he could not stop. She reached across, touched him finally, and he looked at her. Her face was turned back toward the road behind them, and he reined sharply.

  A group of horsemen a mile or so behind them dipped down into a hollow of road. The twilight blurred them as they appeared again, riding no more quickly than the late hour justified. Morgon watched them for a moment, his lips parted. He shook his head wordlessly, answering a question in Raederle’s mind.

  “I don’t know . . .” He turned his horse abruptly off the road into the trees.

  They followed the river until it was almost too dark to see. Then they made a camp without a fire, eating bread and dried meat for supper. The river was deep and slow where they stopped, barely murmuring. Morgon could hear clearly through the night; the horsemen never passed them. His thoughts drifted back to the silent figure he had seen among the trees, to the mysterious shout that had come so aptly out of nowhere. He drew his sword then, soundlessly.

  Raederle said, “Morgon, you were awake most of last night. I’ll watch.”

  “I’m used to it,” he said. But he gave her the sword and stretched out on a blanket. He did not sleep; he lay listening, watching patterns of stars slowly shift across the night. He heard again the faint, hesitant harping coming out of the blackness like a mockery of his memories.

  He sat up incredulously. He could see no campfires among the trees; he heard no voices, only the awkward harping. The strings were finely tuned; the harp gave a gentle, mellow tone, but the harpist tripped continually over his notes. Morgon linked his fingers over his eyes.

  “Who in Hel’s name . . .” He rolled to his feet abruptly.

  Raederle said softly, “Morgon, there are other harpists in the world.”

  “He’s playing in the dark.”

  “How do you know it’s a man? Maybe it’s a woman, or a young boy with his first harp, travelling alone to Lungold. If you want to destroy all the harps in the world, you’d better start with the one at your back, because that’s the one that will never give you peace.” He did not answer. She added equivocally to his silence, “Can you bear it if I tell you a riddle?”

  He turned, found the dim, moon-struck lines of her, the blade glittering faintly in her hands. “No,” he said. He sat down beside her after a while, his mind worn from straining for the notes of a familiar Ymris ballad the harpist kept missing. “I wish,” he muttered savagely, “I could be haunted by a better harpist.” He took the sword from her. “I’ll watch.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she pleaded, reading his mind. He sighed.

  “All right.” He angled the sword on his knees, stared down at it while the high moon tempered it to cold fire, until at last the harping stopped and he could think again.

  The next night, and the next, and the next, Morgon heard the harping. It came at odd hours of the night, usually when he sat awake listening. He heard it at the far edges of his awareness; Raederle slept undisturbed by it. Sometimes he heard it in his dreams and it woke him, numb and sweating, blinking out of a dream of darkness into darkness, both haunted by the same inescapable harping. He searched for the harpist one night, but he only got lost among the trees. Returning wearily near dawn in the shape of a wolf, he scared the horses, and Raederle flung a circle of fire around them and herself that nearly singed his pelt. They discussed matters furiously for a few moments, until the sight of their weary, flushed, bedraggled faces made them both break into laughter.

  The longer they rode, the longer the road seemed to stretch itself, mile after mile through changeless forest. Morgon’s mind milled constantly through scraps of conversations, expressions on faces they passed, noises ahead and behind them, the occasional mute imagery behind the eyes of a bird flying overhead. He grew preoccupied, trying to see ahead and behind them at the same time, watching for harpists, for horse thieves, for shape-changers. He scarcely heard Raederle when she spoke. When she stopped speaking to him altogether once, he did not realize it for hours. As they grew farther from Caithnard, the traffic lessened; they had isolated miles, now and then, of silence. But the heat was constant, and every stranger appearing behind them after a quiet mile looked suspicious. Except for the harping, though, their nights were peaceful. On the day that Morgon finally began to feel secure, they lost their horses.

  They had camped early that day, for they were both exhausted.
Morgon left Raederle washing her hair in the river and walked half a mile to an inn they had passed to buy a few supplies and pick up news. The inn was crowded with travellers: traders exchanging gossip; impoverished musicians playing every instrument but a harp for the price of a meal; merchants; farmers; families who looked as if they had fled from their homes, carrying all their possessions on their backs.

  The air was heavy with wine-whetted rumors. Morgon, picking a rich, heavy voice at random from a far table, followed it as though he were following an instrument’s voice. “Twenty years,” the man said. “For twenty years I lived across from it. I sold fine cloth and furs from all parts of the realm in my shop, and I never saw so much as a shadow out of place in the ruins of the ancient school. Then, late one night while I was checking my accounts, I saw lights here and there in the broken windows. No man ever walks across those grounds, not even for the wealth of it: the place reeks of disaster. So that was enough for me. I took every bolt of cloth out of that shop, left messages for my buyers to bring what they had for me to Caithnard, and I fled. If there is going to be another wizard’s war in that city, I intend to be on the other side of the realm.”

  “In Caithnard?” another merchant answered incredulously. “With half the Ymris coastline to the north plagued with war? At least Lungold has wizards in it. Caithnard has nothing but fishwives and scholars. There’s as much defense in a dead fish as in a book. I’ve left Caithnard. I’m heading for the backlands; I might come out again in fifty years.”

  Morgon let the voices fade back into the noise. He found the innkeeper hovering at his shoulder. “Lord?” he said briskly, and Morgon ordered beer. It was from Hed, and it washed a hundred miles of road dust down his throat. He dipped sporadically into other conversations; one word from a sour-looking trader caught his attention.

  “It’s that cursed war in Ymris. Half the farmers in Ruhn had their horses drafted into war—the descendants of Ruhn battle horses bred to the plow. The king is holding his own on Wind Plain, but he’s paying a bloody price for stalemate. His warriors buy what horses they are offered—so do the farmers. No one asks any more where the horses come from. I’ve had an armed guard around my wagon teams every night since I left Caithnard.”