Riddle-Master Trilogy

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  It came as a single eye staring at him through white mist. He drew back into himself, his hands full of winds. He was alone on a quiet plain. The Earth-Masters had shifted their battleground eastward, moving across Ruhn. He stood quietly a moment, wondering if he had lived through a single night or a century of them. Then he turned his mind away from the night to scent the path of the Earth-Masters.

  They had fled across Ruhn. Towns and farms, lords’ houses lay in ruins; fields, woods, and orchards had been harrowed and seared with power. Men, children, animals trapped in the range of their minds had been killed. As his awareness moved across the wasteland, he felt a harp song building through him. Winds in his control stirred to it, angry, dangerous, pulling him out of his shape until he was half-man, half-wind, a harpist playing a death song on a harp with no strings.

  Then he roused all the power that lay buried under the great cities across Ymris. He had sensed it in the High One’s mind, and he knew at last why the Earth-Masters had warred for possession of their cities. They were all cairns, broken monuments to their dead. The power had lain dormant under the earth for thousands of years. But, as with the wraiths of An, their minds could be roused with memory, and Morgon, his mind burrowing under the stones, shocked them awake with his grief. He did not see them. But on Wind Plain and King’s Mouth Plain, in the ruins across Ruhn and east Umber, a power gathered, hung over the stones like the eerie, unbearable tension in the sky before a storm breaks. The tension was felt in Caerweddin and in towns still surviving around the ruins. No one spoke that dawn; they waited.

  Morgon began to move across Wind Plain. An army of the Earth-Masters’ dead moved with him, flowed across Ymris, searching out the living Earth-Masters to finish a war. Winds hounded the Earth-Masters out of the shape of stone and leaf they hid in; the dead forced them with a silent, relentless purpose out of the land they had once loved. They scattered across the back lands, through wet, dark forests, across bare hills, across the icy surfaces of the Lungold Lakes. Morgon, the winds running before him, the dead at his back, pursued them across the threshold of winter. He drove them as inflexibly as they had once driven him toward Erlenstar Mountain.

  They tried to fight him one last time before he compelled them into the mountain. But the dead rose around him like stone, and the winds raged against them. He could have destroyed them, stripped them of their power, as they had tried to do to him. But something of their beauty lingered in Raederle, showing him what they might have been once; and he could not kill them. He did not even touch their power. He forced them into Erlenstar Mountain, where they fled from him into the shape of water and jewel. He sealed the entire Mountain—all shafts and hidden springs, the surface of the earth, and ground floor of rock—with his name. Among trees and stones, light and wind, around the mountain, he bound the dead once more, to guard the mountain. Then he loosed the winds from his song, and they drew winter down from the northlands across the whole of the realm.

  He returned to Wind Plain, then, drawn by memory. There was snow all over the plain and on all the jagged, piled faces of the stones. There was smoke among the trees around the plain, for no one had left it. The gathering of men, women, animals was still there, waiting for his return. They had buried their dead and sent for supplies; they were settling for the winter, bound to the plain.

  Morgon took his shape out of the winds, beside the ruined tower. He heard the Morgol talking to Goh; he saw Har checking the splint on a crippled vesta. He did not know if Eliard was still alive. Looking up at the huge cairn, he stepped forward into his sorrow. He laid his face against one of the cold, beautiful stones, stretched his arms across it, wanting to encompass the entire cairn, hold it in his heart. He felt bound, suddenly, as if he were a wraith, and all his past was buried in those stones. As he mourned, men began to move across the plain. He saw them without thinking about them in his mind’s eye: tiny figures drawn across the blank, snow-covered plain. When he finally turned, he found them in a silent ring around him.

  They had been drawn to him, he sensed, the way he had always been drawn to Deth: with no reason, no question, simply instinct. The land-rulers of the realm, the four wizards stood quietly with him. They did not know what to say to him as he stood there in his power and his grief; they were simply responding to something in him that had brought peace to the ancient plain.

  He looked at the faces he knew so well. They were scarred with sorrow for the High One, for their own dead. Finding Eliard among them, he felt something quicken painfully in his heart. Eliard’s face was as he had never seen it: colorless and hard as winter ground. A third of the farmers of Hed had been sent back to Hed, to be buried beneath the frozen ground. The winter would be hard for the living, and Morgon did not know how to comfort him. But as he looked at Morgon mutely, something else came into his eyes that had never seen in the changeless, stolid heritage of the Princes of Hed: he had been touched by mystery.

  Morgon’s eyes moved to Astrin. He seemed still dazed by Heureu’s death and the sudden, far-flung power he possessed. “I’m sorry,” Morgon said. The words sounded as light and meaningless as the snow flecking the massive stones behind him. “I felt him die. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t help him. I felt so much death…”

  The single white eye seemed to gaze into him at the word. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “High One. You survived to name yourself at last, and you brought peace to this morning.”

  “Peace.” He felt the stones behind him, cold as ice.

  “Morgon,” Danan said softly, “when we saw that tower fall, none of us expected to see another dawn.”

  “So many didn’t. So many of your miners died.”

  “So many didn’t. I have a great mountain full of trees; you gave it back to us, our home to return to.”

  “We have lived to see the passage of power from the High One to his heir,” Har said. “We paid a price for our seeing, but… we survived.” His eyes were oddly gentle in the pure, cold light. He shifted the cloak over his shoulders: an old, gnarled king, with the first memories of the realm in his heart. “You played a wondrous game and won. Don’t grieve for the High One. He was old and near the end of his power. He left you a realm at war, an almost impossible heritage, and all his hope. You did not fail him. Now we can return home in peace, without having to fear the stranger at our thresholds. When the door opens unexpectedly to the winter winds, and we look up from our warm hearths to find the High One in our house, it will be you. He left us that gift.”

  Morgon was silent. Sorrow touched him again, lightly, like a searching flame, in spite of all their words. Then he felt from one of them an answering sorrow that no words could comfort. He sought it, something of himself, and found it in Mathom, tired and shadowed by death.

  Morgon took a step toward him. “Who?”

  “Duac,” the King said. He drew a dry breath, standing dark as a wraith against the snow. “He refused to stay in An… the only argument I have ever lost. My land-heir with his eyes of the sea…”

  Morgon was mute again, wondering how many of his bindings had been broken, how many deaths he had not sensed. He said suddenly, remembering, “You knew the High One would die here.”

  “He named himself,” Mathom said. “I did not need to dream that. Bury him here, where he chose to die. Let him rest.”

  “I can’t,” he whispered, “I was his death. He knew. All that time, he knew. I was his destiny, he was mine. Our lives were one constant, twisted riddle-game… He forged the sword that would kill him, and I brought it here to him. If I had thought… if I had known—”

  “What would you have done? He did not have the strength to win this war; he knew you would, if he gave you his power. That game, he won. Accept it.”

  “I can’t… not yet.” He put one hand on the stones before he left them. Then he lifted his head, searching the sky for something that he could not find in his mind. But its face was pale, motionless. “Where is Raederle?”

  “She was with me for a
while,” the Morgol said. Her face was very quiet, like the winter morning that drew a stillness over the world. “She left, I thought, to look for you, but perhaps she needs a time to sorrow, also.” He met her eyes. She smiled, touching his heart. “Morgon, he is dead. But for a little while, you gave him something to love.”

  “So did you,” he whispered. He turned away then, to find his own comfort somewhere within his realm. He became snow or air or perhaps he stayed himself; he was not certain; he only knew he left no footprints in the snow for anyone to follow.

  He wandered through the land, taking many shapes, reworking broken bindings, until there was not a tree or an insect or a man in the realm he was not aware of, except for one woman. The winds that touched everything in their boundless curiosity told him of lords and warriors without homes in Ymris taking refuge in Astrin’s court, of traders battling the seas to carry grain from An and Herun and beer from Hed to the war-torn land. They told him when the vesta returned to Osterland, and how the King of An bound his dead once more into the earth of the Three Portions. They listened to the wizards at Caithnard discussing the restoration of the great school at Lungold, while the Masters quietly answered the last of the unanswered riddles on their lists. He felt Har’s waiting for him, beside his winter fire, with the wolves watching at his knees. He felt the Morgol’s eyes looking beyond her walls, beyond her hills, every now and then, watching for him, watching for Raederle, wondering.

  He tried to put an end to his grieving, sitting for days on end in the wastes, like a tangle of old roots, piecing together the games the harpist had played, action by action, and understanding it. But understanding gave him no comfort. He tried harping, with a harp as vast as the night sky, its face full of stars, but even that brought him no peace. He moved restlessly from cold, barren peaks to quiet forests, and even the hearths of taverns and farmhouses, where he was greeted kindly as a stranger wandering in from the cold. He did not know what his heart wanted; why the wraith of the harpist roamed ceaselessly through his heart and would not rest.

  He drew himself out from under a snowdrift in the northern wastes one day, impelled south without quite knowing why. He shifted shapes all across the realm; no shape gave him peace. He passed spring as it came northward; the restlessness in him sharpened. The winds coming out of the west and south smelled of plowed earth and sunlight. They strung his wind-harp with gentler voices. He did not feel gentle. He shambled in bear-shape through forests, flung himself in falcon-shape across the noon sun as it crossed his path. He rode the bow of a trade-ship three days as it scudded and boomed across the sea, until the sailors, wary of his sea bird’s strange, still eyes, chased him away. He followed the Ymris coast, flying, crawling, galloping with wild horses until he reached the coast of Meremont. There he followed the scent of his memories to Wind Plain.

  He found on the plain the shape of a prince of Hed, with scarred hands and three stars on his face. A battle echoed around him; stones fell soundlessly, vanished. The grass quivered like the broken strings of a harp. A blade of light from the setting sun burned in his eyes. He turned away from it and saw Raederle.

  She was in Hed, on the beach above Tol. She was sitting on a rock, tossing bits of shell into the sea as the waves splashed around her. Something in her face, an odd mixture of restlessness and sadness, seemed to mirror what was in his heart. It drew him like a hand. He flew across the water, nickering in and out of the sunlight, and took his own shape on the rock in front of her.

  She gazed up at him speechlessly, a shell poised in her hand. He found no words either; he wondered if he had forgotten all language in the northern wastes. He sat down beside her after a moment, wanting to be near her. He took the shell from her hand and tossed it into the waves.

  “You drew me all the way down from the northern wastes,” he said. “I was… I don’t know what I was. Something cold.”

  She moved after a moment, drew a strand of his shaggy hair out of his eyes. “I wondered if you might come here. I thought you would come to me when you were ready.” She sounded resigned to something beyond his comprehension.

  “How could I have come? I didn’t know where you were. You left Wind Plain.”

  She stared at him a moment “I thought you knew everything. You are the High One. You even know what I am going to say next.”

  “I don’t,” he said. He picked a shell bit from a crevice, fed it to the waves. “You aren’t bound to my mind. I would have been with you long ago, except I didn’t know where in Hel’s name to begin to look.”

  She was silent, watching him. He met her eyes finally, then sighed and put his arm around her shoulders. Her hair smelled of salt; her face was getting brown under the sun. “I’m wraith-driven,” he said. “I think my heart was buried under that cairn.”

  “I know.” She kissed him, then slid down until her head rested in the hollow of his shoulder. A wave rolled to their feet, withdrew. The dock at Tol was being rebuilt; pine logs brought down from the north-lands lay on the beach. She gazed across the sea to Caithnard, half in shadow, half in fading light. “The College of Riddle-Masters has been reopened.”

  “I know.”

  “If you know everything, what will we have to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose nothing.” He saw a ship cross the sea from Tol, carrying a Prince of Hed and a harpist. The ship docked at Caithnard; they both disembarked to begin their journey… He stirred a little, wondering when it would end. He held Raederle more closely, his cheek against her hair. In that late light, he loved to harp, but the starred harp was broken, its strings snapped by grief. He touched a mussel clinging to the rock and realized he had never shaped one. The sea was still a moment, idling around the rock. And in that moment he almost heard something like a fragment of a song he had once loved.

  “What did you do with the Earth-Masters?”

  “I didn’t kill them,” he said softly. “I didn’t even touch their power. I bound them in Erlenstar Mountain,”

  He felt the breath go out of her noiselessly. “I was afraid to ask,” she whispered.

  “I couldn’t destroy them. How could I? They were a part of you, and of Deth… They’re bound until they die, or I die, whichever comes first…” He considered the next few millenniums with a weary eye. “Riddlery. Is that the end of it? Do all riddles end in a tower with no door? I feel as if I built that tower stone by stone, riddle by riddle, and the last stone fitting into place destroyed it.”

  “I don’t know. When Duac died, I was so hurt; I felt a place torn out of my heart. It seemed so unjust that he should die in that war, since he was the most clear-headed and patient of us. That healed. But the harpist… I keep listening for his harping beneath the flash of water, beneath the light… I don’t know why we cannot let him rest.”

  Morgon drew her hair out of the wind’s grasp and smoothed it. He tapped randomly into the continual stream of thoughts just beneath the surface of his awareness. He heard Tristan arguing placidly with Eliard as she set plates on the table at Akren. In Hel, Nun and Raith of Hel were watching a pig being born. In Lungold, Iff was salvaging books out of the burned wizards’ library. In the City of Circles, Lyra was talking to a young Herun lord, telling him things she had not told anyone else about the battle in Lungold. On Wind Plain, the broken pieces of a sword were being slowly buried under grass roots.

  He smelled twilight shadowing Hed, full of new grass, broken earth, sun-warmed leaves. The odd memory of a song that was no song caught at him again; straining, he almost heard it. Raederle seemed to hear it; she stirred against him, her face growing peaceful in the last warm light.

  He said, “There’s a speaking pig being born in Hel. Nun is there with the Lord of Hel.”

  She smiled suddenly. “That’s the first in three centuries. I wonder what it was born to say? Morgon, while I was waiting for you, I had to do something, so I explored the sea. I found something that belongs to you. It’s at Akren.”

  “What?”

&n
bsp; “Don’t you know?”

  “No. Do you want me to read your mind?”

  “No. Never. How could I argue with you, then?” His expression changed suddenly, and her smile deepened.

  “Peven’s crown?”

  “Eliard said it was. I had never seen it. It was full of seaweed and barnacles, except for one great stone like a clear eye… I loved the sea. Maybe I’ll live in it.”

  “I’ll live in the wastes,” he said. “Once every hundred years, you will shine out of the sea and I’ll come to you, or I will draw you into the winds with my harping…” He heard it then, finally, between the drift of the waves, in the rock they sat on, old, warm, settled deep hi the earth, deep in the sea. His heart began to open tentatively to something he had not felt for years.

  “What is it?” She was still smiling, watching him, her eyes full of the last light. He was silent for a long tune, listening. He took her hand and stood up. She walked with him to the shore road, up the cliff. The final rays of the sun poured down across the green fields; the road ahead of them seemed to run straight into light. He stood, his heart opened like a seedling, hearing all over Hed, all over the realm, a familiar stillness that came out of the heart of all things.

  The silence drew deep into Morgon’s mind and rested there. Whether it was a memory or part of his heritage or a riddle without an answer, he did not know. He drew Raederle close to him, content for once with not knowing. They walked down the road toward Akren. Raederle, her voice tranquil, began telling him about pearls and luminous fish and the singing of water deep in the sea. The sun set slowly; dusk wandered across the realm, walked behind them on the road, a silver-haired stranger with night at his back, his face always toward the dawn.