Riddle-Master Trilogy

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I forgot about the water. Poor man.”

  Lyra’s eyes slid uncertainly to her face. “What… Did you do something? What exactly did you do?”

  She showed them her frayed cuff. “Just a little thing the pig-woman taught me to do with a tangled piece of thread…”

  The ship got underway finally, slipping like a dream out of the dark harbor, leaving the scattering of city lights and the beacons flaring on the black horns of the land. Lyra, relaxing her guard when the ship turned unerringly northward and the west wind hit their cheeks, joined Raederle at the side. They did not speak for a while; the handful of lights vanished as the cliffs rose under the stars to block them. The jagged rim of unknown land running like a black thread against the sky was the only thing to be seen. Then Raederle, shivering a little in the cool night wind, her hands tightening on the rail, said softly, “It’s what I’ve been wanting to do for two years, since he lost that crown somewhere around here in the bottom of the sea. But I couldn’t have done it alone. I’ve never been farther than Caithnard in my life, and the realm seems enormous.” She paused, her eyes on a moonlit swirl and dip of froth; she added with simple pain, “I only wish I had done it sooner.”

  Lyra’s body made a rare, restive movement against the side. “How could any one of us have known to go? He was the Star-Bearer; he had a destiny. Men with destinies have their own protection. And he was travelling to the High One escorted by the High One’s harpist. How could we have known that not even the High One would help him? Or help even his own harpist?”

  Raederle looked at her shadowed profile. “Deth? Does the Morgol think he is dead?”

  “She doesn’t know. She—That was one reason she came here, to see if the Masters had any knowledge of what might have happened to him.”

  “Why didn’t she go to Erlenstar Mountain?”

  “I asked her. She said because the last land-ruler who had gone to see the High One was never seen nor heard of again.”

  Raederle was silent. Something that was not the wind sent a chill rippling through her. “I always thought Erlenstar Mountain must be the safest, the most beautiful place in the world.”

  “So did I.” Lyra turned as the small, dark-haired guard spoke her name. “What, Kia?”

  “The ship-master is giving us quarters in the king’s cabin; he says it’s the only one big enough for us all. Do you want a guard during the night?”

  Lyra looked at Raederle. It was too dark to see her face, but Raederle could sense the question on it. She said slowly, “I would trust him. But why even tempt him to turn back? Can you stay awake?”

  “In shifts.” She turned to Kia again. “One guard at the helm in two hour shifts until dawn. I’ll take the first watch.”

  “I’ll join you,” Raederle said.

  She spent most of the two hours trying to teach Lyra the simple spell she had worked on the trader. They used a piece of twine the intrigued helmsman gave them. Lyra, frowning down at it for some minutes, threw it in the path of a sailor who walked over it and went serenely about his business.

  The helmsman protested. “You’ll have us all overboard,” but she shook her head.

  “I can’t do it. I stare and stare at it, but it’s only a piece of old twine. There’s no magic in my blood.”

  “Yes, there is,” Raederle said. “I felt it. In the Morgol.”

  Lyra looked at her curiously. “I’ve never felt it. One day, I’ll have her power of sight. But it’s a practical thing, nothing like this. This I don’t understand.”

  “Look at it, in your mind, until it’s not twine anymore but a path, looped and wound and twisted around itself, that will bind the one who touches it to its turnings… See it. Then put your name to it.”

  “How?”

  “Know that you are yourself, and the thing is itself; that’s the binding between you, that knowledge.”

  Lyra bent over the twine again. She was silent a long time, while Raederle and the helmsman watched, then Bri Corbett came out of the chart-house and Lyra tossed the twine under his boot.

  “Where,” he demanded of the helmsman, “in Hel’s name are you taking us? Prow first into the Ymris coast?” He stepped unswervingly to the wheel and straightened their course. Lyra got to her feet with a sigh.

  “I am myself, and it’s an old piece of twine. That’s as far as I can get. What else can you do?”

  “Only a few things. Make a net out of grass, make a bramble stem seem like an impossible thorn patch, find my way out of Madir’s Woods, where the trees seem to shift from place to place… Little things. I inherited the powers from the wizard Madir, and someone—someone named Ylon. For some reason neither of my brothers could do such things, either. The pig-woman said magic finds its own outlet. It used to frustrate them, though, when we were children, and I could always find my way out of Madir’s Woods and they never could.”

  “An must be a strange land. In Herun, there’s very little magic, except what the wizards brought, long ago.”

  “In An, the land is restless with it. That’s why it’s such a grave thing that my father left his land indefinitely. Without his control, the magic works itself loose, and all the dead stir awake with their memories.”

  “What do they do?” Her voice was hushed.

  “They remember old feuds, ancient hatreds, battles, and get impulses to revive them. War between the Three Portions in early times was a passionate, tumultuous thing; the old kings and lords died jealous and angry, many of them, so the land-instinct in kings grew to bind even the dead, and the spell-books of those who played with sorcery, like Madir and Peven…”

  “And Ylon? Who was he?”

  Raederle reached down to pick up the twine. She wound it around her fingers, her brows drawn slightly as she felt the tangle run deceptively smooth and even in her hands. “A riddle.”

  Imer came then to relieve Lyra, and she and Raederle went gratefully to bed. The easy roll of the ship in the peaceful sea sent Raederle quickly to sleep. She woke again at dawn, before the sun rose. She dressed and went on deck. The sea, the wind, the long line of the Ymris coast were grey under the dawn sky; the mists along the vast, empty eastern horizon were beginning to whiten under the groping sunlight. The last of the guards, looking bleary at her post, glanced at the sky and headed for bed. Raederle went to the side feeling disoriented in the colorless world. She saw a tiny fishing village, a handful of houses against the bone-colored cliffs, nameless on the strange land; its minute fleet of boats was inching out of the dock into open sea. A flock of gulls wheeled crying overhead, grey and white in the morning, then scattered away southward. She wondered if they were flying to An. She felt chilly and purposeless and wondered if she had left her name behind with all her possessions at Anuin.

  The sound of someone being sick over the rail made her turn. She stared mutely at the unexpected face, afraid for a moment that she had stolen out of the harbor a ship full of shape-changers. But no shape-changer, she decided, would have changed deliberately into such a miserable young girl. She waited considerately until the girl wiped her mouth and sat down in a pallid heap on the deck. Her eyes closed. Raederle, remembering Rood’s agonies when he sailed, went to find the water bucket. She half-expected, returning with the dipper, that the apparition would have vanished, but it was still there, small and inconspicuous, like a bundle of old clothes in a corner.

  She knelt down, and the girl lifted her head. She looked, opening her eyes, vaguely outraged, as though the sea and ship had conspired against her. Her hand shook as she took the dipper. It was a lean hand, Raederle saw, strong, brown and calloused, too big, yet, for her slender body. She emptied the dipper, leaned back against the side again.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. “I have never, in my entire life, felt so utterly horrible.”

  “It will pass. Who are you? How did you get aboard this ship?”

  “I came—I came last night. I hid in one of the rowboats, under the canvas, until—un
til I couldn’t stand it anymore. The ship was swaying one way, and the boat was swaying another. I thought I was going to die…” She swallowed convulsively, opened her eyes and shut them again quickly. The few freckles on her face stood out sharply. Something in the lines of her face, in the graceful determined bones of it, made Raederle’s own throat close suddenly. The girl, taking a gulp of wind, continued, “I was looking for a place to stay last night when I heard you talking by the warehouses. So I just—I just followed you on board, because you were going where I want to go.”

  “Who are you?” Raederle whispered.

  “Tristan of Hed.”

  Raederle sat back on her heels. A memory, brief and poignant, of Morgon’s face, clearer than she had seen it for years, imposed itself over Tristan’s; she felt a sharp, familiar ache in the back of her throat. Tristan looked at her with an oddly wistful expression; then turned her face quickly, huddling a little closer into her plain, shapeless cloak. She moaned as the ship lurched and said between clenched teeth, “I think I’m going to die. I heard what the Morgol’s land-heir said. You stole the ship; you didn’t tell anyone in your own lands. I heard the sailors talking last night, about how the guards forced them to go north, and that—that they were better off pretending they wanted to go in the first place, rather than making themselves the laughing-stock of the realm by protesting. Then they talked about the High One, and their voices went softer; I couldn’t hear.”

  “Tristan—”

  “If you put me ashore, I’ll walk. You said that yourself, that you’d walk. I had to listen to Eliard crying in his sleep when he dreamed about Morgon; I would have to go wake him. He said one night—one night he saw Morgon’s face in his dream, and he cou… he couldn’t recognize him. He wanted to go then, to Erlenstar Mountain, but it was dead winter, the worst in Hed for seventy years, old Tor Oakland said, and they persuaded him to wait.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten through the Pass.”

  “That’s what Grim Oakland told him. He almost went anyway. But Cannon Master promised he would go, too, in spring. So spring came…” Her voice stopped; she sat absolutely still a moment, looking down at her hands. “Spring came and Morgon died. And all I could see in Eliard’s eyes, no matter what he was doing, was one question: Why? So I’m going to Erlenstar Mountain to find out.”

  Raederle sighed. The sun had broken through the mists finally, patterning the deck through the criss-cross of stays with a web of light. Tristan, under its warm touch, seemed a shade less waxen; she even straightened a little without wincing. She added, “There’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.”

  “It’s not me, it’s Bri Corbett.”

  “He took you and Lyra—”

  “He knows me, and it’s difficult to argue with the Morgol’s guards. But he might balk at taking the land-heir of Hed, especially if no one knows where in the world you are. He might turn the ship around and head straight for Caithnard.”

  “I wrote Eliard a note. Anyway, the guards could stop him from turning.”

  “No. Not in open sea, when there’s no one else we could get to sail the ship.”

  Tristan glanced painfully at the rowboat slung beside her. “I could hide again. No one’s seen me.”

  “No. Wait.” She paused, thinking. “My cabin. You could stay there. I’ll bring you food.”

  Tristan blanched. “I don’t think I’m planning to eat for a while.”

  “Can you walk?”

  She nodded with an effort. Raederle helped her to her feet, with a swift glance around the deck, and led her down the steps to her own small chamber. She gave Tristan a little wine, and when Tristan reeled to the bed at a sudden welter of the ship, covered her with her cloak. She lay limp, to the eye scarcely visible or breathing, but Raederle heard her voice hollow as a voice out of a barrow as she closed the door, “Thank you…”

  She found Lyra wrapped in a dark, voluminous cloak at the stem, watching the sun rise. She greeted Raederle with a rare, impulsive smile as Raederle joined her.

  Raederle said softly, so that the helmsman would not hear, “We have a problem.”

  “Bri?”

  “No. Tristan of Hed.”

  Lyra stared at her incredulously. She listened silently, her brows knit, as Raederle explained.

  She gave a quick glance at Raederle’s cabin, as though she could see through the walls to the inert form on the bed, then she said decisively, “We can’t take her.”

  “I know.”

  “The people of Hed have already suffered so much over Morgon’s absence; she’s the land-heir of Hed, and she must be… How old is she?”

  “Thirteen, maybe. She left them a note.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “If we turn back to Caithnard now, we could talk to Bri until spiders spun webs on him, and he would never agree to take us north again.”

  “If we turn back,” Lyra said, “we may find ourselves face-to-face with the Morgol’s ship. But Tristan has got to go back to Hed. Did you tell her that?”

  “No. I wanted time to think. Bri said we would have to stop for supplies. We could find a trade-ship to take her back.”

  “Would she go?”

  “She isn’t in any condition to argue at the moment. She’s never been out of Hed in her life; I doubt if she has any idea of where Erlenstar Mountain is. She’s probably never even seen a mountain in her life. But she has—she has all of Morgon’s stubbornness. If we can get her off one ship and onto another while she’s still seasick, then she might not realize what direction she’s going until she winds up back on her own doorstep. It sounds heartless, but if she—if anything happened to her on the way to Erlenstar Mountain, I don’t think anyone, in or out of Hed, could bear hearing of it. The traders will help us.”

  “Should we tell Bri Corbett?”

  “He would turn back.”

  “We should turn back,” Lyra said objectively, her eyes on the white scrollwork of waves on the Ymris coast. She turned her head, looked at Raederle. “It would be hard for me to face the Morgol.”

  “I am not going back to Anuin,” Raederle said softly. “Tristan may never forgive us, but she’ll have her answers, I swear by the bones of the dead of An. I swear by the name of the Star-Bearer.”

  Lyra’s head gave a quick, pleading shake. “Don’t,” she breathed. “It sounds so final, as if that is the only thing you will do with your life.”

  Tristan slept most of the day. In the evening, Raederle brought her some hot soup; she roused herself to eat a little, then vanished back under her cloak when the night winds, coming out of the west pungent with the smell of turned earth, gave the ship an energetic roll. She moaned despairingly, but Bri Corbett, in the chart house, was pleased.

  “We’ll make it to Caerweddin by midmorning if this wind holds,” he told Raederle when she went to bid him good-night. “It’s a marvellous wind. We’ll take two hours there for supplies and still outrun anyone who might be following.”

  “You’d think,” Raederle commented to Lyra when she went to borrow a blanket, since Tristan was sleeping on top of hers, “all this was his idea in the first place.” She made herself an unsatisfying bed on the floor and woke, after a night of sketchy sleeping, feeling stiff and slightly sick herself. She stumbled into the sunlight, taking deep breaths of the mellow air, and found Bri Corbett talking to himself at the bow.

  “They’re not out of Kraal, they’re not Ymris trade-ships, too low and sleek,” he murmured, leaning out over the rail. Raederle, trying to keep her hair from being whipped to a wild froth in the wind, blinked at the half-dozen ships bearing down at them. They were low, lean, single-masted ships; their billowing sails were deep blue, edged with a thin silver scallop. Bri brought one hand down on the rail with a sharp exclamation. “Madir’s bones. I haven’t seen one of those in ten years, not since I’ve been in your father’s service. But I didn’t hear a word of it at Caithnard.”

  “What?”

  “War. Those are Ymris war-shi
ps.”

  Raederle, suddenly awake, stared at the light, swift fleet. “They just ended a war,” she protested softly to no one. “Hardly a year ago.”

  “We must have missed trouble by a cat’s breath. It’s another coastal war; they must be watching for shiploads of arms.”

  “Will they stop us?”

  “Why should they? Do we look like a trade-ship?” He stopped then; they stared at one another, shaken by the same realization.

  “No,” Raederle said. “We look like the private ship of the King of An, and we’re about as conspicuous as a pig in a tree. Suppose they want to give us an escort to Caerweddin? How are you going to explain the presence of the Morgol’s guards on—”

  “How am I going to explain? Me? Did I hear any complaint about the color of my sails when you overran my ship and demanded I take you north?”

  “How was I to know Ymris would start a war? You were the one gossiping with that trader; he didn’t mention it? You didn’t have to keep so close to the land; if you had kept more distance between us and Ymris, we wouldn’t be running into the Ymris King’s ships. Or did you know about them? Were you hoping we’d be stopped?”

  “Hagis’s beard!” Bri snapped indignantly. “If I wanted to turn around, there’s not a guard trained yet who could stop me, especially not these—the only thing they would shoot to harm aboard this ship are knotholes and corks, I know that. I’m sailing north because I want to—and who in Hel’s name is that?”

  He was staring, his face a deep, veined purple, at Tristan, who had staggered out to throw up over the rail. Bri, watching, swallowed words, making little, incredulous noises in his throat. He found his voice again as Tristan straightened, mist-colored and sweating.

  “Who is that?”

  “She’s Just a—a stowaway,” Raederle said futilely. “Bri, there’s no need to be upset. She’ll get off at Caerweddin—”

  “I won’t, either,” Tristan said slowly but distinctly. “I’m Tristan of Hed, and I’m not getting off until we reach Erlenstar Mountain.”