Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I know.”

  “I keep wanting—I keep wanting to trust him. Until I remember how he hurt you. Then I become afraid of him, of where he is leading us, and how skillfully. . . . But I forget my fear again so easily.” Her fingers tugged a little absently at his lank hair. “Morgon.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” She rose abruptly, impatient with herself. “I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  She crossed the clearing to explore a pallid cluster of mushrooms. Morgon went to the broad river, waded into the shallows, and stood silently as an old tree stump, watching for fish and trying not to think. He splashed himself twice, while trout skidded through his fingers. Finally, he made his mind a mirror of greyness to match the water and the sky and began to think like a fish.

  He caught three trout and gutted them awkwardly, for lack of anything else, with his sword. He turned at last to bring them back to the fire and found Yrth and Raederle watching him. Raederle was smiling. The wizard’s expression was unfathomable. Morgon joined them. He set the fish on a flat stone and cleaned his blade on the grass. He sheathed it once more within an illusion and squatted down by the fire.

  “All right,” he said. “Instinct.” He took Raederle’s mushrooms and began stuffing the fish. “But that doesn’t explain your journey to Hed.”

  “How far can you travel in a day?”

  “Maybe across Ymris. I don’t know. I don’t like moving from moment to moment across distances. It’s exhausting, and I never know whose mind I might accidently touch.”

  “Well,” the wizard said softly, “I was desperate. I didn’t want you to fight your way out of that mind-hold before I returned.”

  “I couldn’t have—”

  “You have the power. You can see in the dark.”

  Morgon stared at him wordlessly. Something shivered across his skin. “Is that what it was?” he whispered. “A memory?”

  “The darkness of Isig.”

  “Or of Erlenstar Mountain.”

  “Yes. It was that simple.”

  “Simple.” He remembered Har’s plea and breathed soundlessly until the ache and snarl of words in his chest loosened. He wrapped the fish in wet leaves, pushed the stone into the fire. “Nothing is simple.”

  The wizard’s fingers traced the curve of a blade of grass to its tip. “Some things are. Night. Fire. A blade of grass. If you place your hand in a flame and think of your pain, you will burn yourself. But if you think only of the flame, or the night, accepting it, without remembering . . . it becomes very simple.”

  “I cannot forget.”

  The wizard was silent. By the time the fish began to spatter, the rains had started again. They ate hurriedly and changed shape, flew through the drenching rains to shelter among the trees.

  They crossed the Ose a couple of days later and changed shape again on the bank of the swift, wild river. It was late afternoon. Light and shadow dazzled across their faces from the wet, bright sky. They gazed at one another a little bewilderedly, as if surprised by their shapes.

  Raederle dropped with a sigh on a fallen log. “I can’t move,” she whispered. “I am so tired of being a crow. I am beginning to forget how to talk.”

  “I’ll hunt,” Morgon said. He stood still, intending to move, while weariness ran over him like water.

  Yrth said, “I’ll hunt.” He changed shape again, before either of them could answer. A falcon mounted the air, higher and higher, in a fierce, blazing flight into the rain and sunlight, then he levelled finally, began circling.

  “How?” Morgon whispered. “How can he hunt blind?” He quelled a sudden impulse to burn a path through the light to the falcon’s side. As he watched, the falcon plummeted down, swift, deadly, into the shadows.

  “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 reach
ed 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 clear, 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 to 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 through 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, he 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 burn into 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 in 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.

  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 faint 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—”