Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  They left Umber at dawn, rode through a morning mist that coiled and pearled on black, bare orchards. The mist resolved into a rain that stayed with them all the way up the long road from Umber to Caerweddin. Morgon, riding hunched against it, felt the damp collect in his bones, like a mildew. He bore it absently, vaguely aware of Astrin’s concern, something drawing his thoughts forward, an odd pull out of the darkness of his ignorance. Finally, racked by a nagging cough as he rode, he felt the half-healed wound in his side scored as with fire, and he reined sharply. The High One’s harpist put a hand on his shoulder. Looking at the still, austere face, Morgon drew a sudden breath, but the moment’s strange recognition wavered and passed. Astrin, riding back to them, his face taut, unapproachable, said briefly, “We’re almost there.”

  The ancient house of the Ymris Kings stood near the sea on the mouth of the Thul River, which ran eastward across Ymris from one of the seven Lungold Lakes. Trade ships were anchored in its deep waters; a fleet of ships with the scarlet and gold sails of Ymris were docked at the mouth of the river like colorful birds. As they rode across the bridge, a messenger, sighting them, turned hurriedly into the open gates of a sprawling stone wall. Beyond it, on a hill, stood the house that Galil Ymris had built, its proud face and wings and towers alive with beautiful patterns of color formed by the brilliant stones of the Earth-Masters.

  They rode through the gates, up the gentle incline of a cobbled road. Thick oak doors in the mouth of a second wall were opened for them: they entered a courtyard where serving men took their horses as they dismounted and flung heavy fur cloaks over their shoulders. They went in silence across the wide yard, the rain gusting against their faces.

  The King’s hall, built of smooth, dark, glittering stones, held a fire that ran half the length of the inner wall. They were drawn to the fire like moths, shuddering and dripping, unaware of the men falling silent, motionless around them. A quick step on the stones made them turn.

  Heureu Ymris, lean, big boned, his dark hair speckled with rain, bent his head courteously to Morgon and said, “You are welcome to my house. I met your father not too long ago. Rork, Deth, I am in your debt. Astrin—” He stopped then, as though the word he had spoken was strange or bitter to his mouth. Astrin’s face was closed as surely as one of Yrth’s books; his white eyes were expressionless. He looked placeless in the rich hall, with his colorless face and worn robe. Morgon, suddenly possessed of a father he did not know, wished futilely, desperately, that he and Astrin were back where they belonged, in the small house by the sea fitting pieces of glass shard together. He glanced around at the silent, watching strangers in the hall. Something snagged his eye then, down the long hall, something that flamed across the distance, turning his face toward it like a touch.

  A sound came out of him. In the shifting torchlight, a great harp stood on a table. It was of beautiful, ancient design, with gold twisted into pale, polished wood inlaid with moons and quarter moons of ivory or bone. Down the face of it, among full moons, inset in gold, were three flawless blood-red stars.

  Morgon went toward them, feeling as though his voice and name and thoughts had been stripped from him a second time. There was nothing in the room but those flaming stars and his movement toward them. He reached them, touched them. His fingers moved from them to trace the fine network of gold buried deep in the wood. He ran his hand across the strings, and at the rich, sweet sounds that followed, a love of that harp filled him, overpowering all care, all memory of the past, dark weeks. He turned, looked back at the silent group behind him. The harpist’s quiet face rippled a little in the firelight. Morgon took a step toward him.

  “Deth.”

  NO ONE MOVED. Morgon, feeling a world slip easily, familiarly into place as though he were waking from a dream, gave a second look at the massive, ancient walls of the house, at the strangers watching him, jewelled, double-linked chains of rank flashing on their breasts. His eyes went back to the harpist. “Eliard . . .”

  “I went to Hed to tell him—somehow—that you might have drowned; he said you must be still alive since the land-rule had not passed to him. So I searched for you from Caithnard to Caerweddin.”

  “How did you—?” He stopped, remembering the empty ship sagging on its side, the screaming horses. “How did we both survive?”

  “Survive what?” Astrin said. Morgon gazed at him without seeing him.

  “We were sailing to An at night. I was taking the crown of Peven of Aum to Anuin. The crew just vanished. We went down in a storm.”

  “The crew did what?” Rork demanded.

  “They vanished. The sailors, the traders, in open sea . . . In the middle of a storm, the ship just stopped and sank, with all its grain and animals.” He stopped again, feeling the whip of the wet, mad winds, remembering someone who was himself and yet not himself lying half-drowned on the sand, nameless, voiceless. He reached out to touch the harp. Then, staring down at the stars burning under his hand like the stars on his face, he said sharply, amazed, “Where in the world did this come from?”

  “Some fisherman found it last spring,” Heureu Ymris said, “not far from where you and Astrin were staying. It had washed up on the beach. He brought it here because he thought it was bewitched. No one could play it.”

  “No one?”

  “No one. The strings were mute until you touched them.”

  Morgon moved his hand away from it. He saw the awed expression in Heureu’s eyes repeating itself in Astrin’s as they looked at him, and he felt again, for a moment, a stranger to himself. He turned away from the harp, walked back to the fire. He stopped in front of Astrin; their eyes met in a little, familiar silence. Morgon said softly, “Thank you.”

  Astrin smiled for the first time since Morgon had met him. Then he looked over Morgon’s shoulder at Heureu. “Is that sufficient? Or do you still intend to bring me to judgment for trying to murder a land-ruler?”

  Heureu drew a breath. “Yes.” His face, set with the same stubbornness, was a dark reflection of Astrin’s. “I will, if you try to walk out of this hall without giving me any explanations of why you killed two traders, and threatened to kill a third when he saw the Prince of Hed wounded in your house. There have been enough unfounded rumors spreading through Ymris about you; I will not have something like this added to them.”

  “Why should I explain? Will you believe me? Ask the Prince of Hed. What would you have done with me if he hadn’t found his voice?”

  Heureu’s own voice rose in exasperation. “What do you think I would have done? While you’ve been at the other end of Ymris digging up potshards, Meroc Tor has been arming half the coastal lands of Ymris. He attacked Meremont yesterday. You would be dead by now if I hadn’t sent Rork and Deth to get you out of that hut you’ve been clinging to like a barnacle.”

  “You sent—?”

  “What do you think I am? Do you think I believe every tale I hear about you—including the one that you go out in animal-shape every night and scare cattle?”

  “I do what?”

  “You are the land-heir of Ymris, and you are my brother whom I grew up with. I’m tired of sending messengers to Umber every three months to find out from Rork if you are alive or dead. I have a war on my hands that I don’t understand and I need you. I need your skill and your mind. And I need to know this: who were those traders that tried to kill you and the Prince of Hed? Were they men of Ymris?”

  Astrin shook his head. He looked dazed. “I have no idea. We were . . . I was taking him to Caithnard to see if the Masters knew him when we were attacked. He was wounded; I killed the traders. I don’t believe they were traders.”

  “They weren’t,” the trader who had come with them said glumly; and Morgon said, suddenly, “Wait. I remember. The red-haired man—the one who spoke to us. He was on the ship.”

  Heureu looked at them bewilderedly. “I don’t understand.” Astrin turned to the trader.

  “You knew him.”

  The trader nodded. His fac
e was white, unhappy in the firelight. “I knew him. I’ve looked at that face I saw in the woods night and day, tried to tell myself that the death in it was playing tricks on me. But I can’t. There was the same front tooth gone, the same scar he got when a loading cable snapped and hit him in the face—it was Jarl Aker, from Osterland.”

  “Why would he attack the Prince of Hed?” Heureu asked.

  “He wouldn’t. He didn’t. He’s been dead for two years.”

  Heureu said sharply, “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Astrin said grimly. He was silent, struggling a little with himself while Heureu watched. “Meroc Tor’s rebels aren’t the only men arming themselves in Ymris.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Astrin glanced at the curious, expectant faces of the gathering in the hall. “I would rather tell you privately. That way if you don’t—” He stopped abruptly. A woman had joined Heureu quietly; her dark, shy eyes, flicking over the group, lingered a little on Morgon’s face, then moved to Astrin’s.

  She said, her brows crooked, her voice soft in the murmurings of the fire, “Astrin, I’m glad you’ve come back. Will you stay now?”

  Astrin’s hands closed at his sides, his eyes going to Heureu’s face. There was a mute, brittle struggle between them; the Ymris King, without moving, seemed to shift closer to the woman.

  He said to Morgon, “This is my wife, Eriel.”

  “You don’t favor your father,” she commented interestedly. Then the blood burned into her face. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s all right,” Morgon said gently. The firelight brushed like soft wings over her face, her dark hair. Her brows crooked again, troubled.

  “You don’t look well. Heureu—”

  The Ymris King stirred. “I’m sorry. You could all do with some dry clothes and food; you’ve had a rough ride. Astrin, will you stay? The only thing I ask is that if you ever speak of that matter that came between us five years ago, you give me unshakable, absolute proof. You’ve been away from Caerweddin long enough; there’s no one I need more now.”

  Astrin’s head bowed. His hands in his frayed sleeves were still closed. He said softly, “Yes.”

  An hour later, Morgon, washed, shorn of five weeks’ growth of hair, the edge taken off his hunger, surveyed the fur-covered bed in his chamber and lay down without undressing. There was a knock on his door in what seemed only a moment later; he sat up, blinking. The room, except for a low fire, was dark. The stone walls seemed to move and settle around him as he rose; he could not find the door. He considered the problem, murmured the stricture of an ancient riddle from An:

  “See with your heart what your eyes cannot, and you will find the door that is not.”

  The door opened abruptly in front of him, light flaring in from the hall. “Morgon.”

  The harpist’s face and silver hair were oddly blurred with torchlight. Morgon said with an odd sense of relief, “Deth. I couldn’t find the door. For a moment I thought I was in Peven’s tower. Or the tower Oen of An built to trap Madir. I just remembered that I promised Snog Nutt I would fix his roof before the rains start. He’s so addled he won’t think of telling Eliard; he’ll sit there all winter with the rain dripping down his neck.”

  The harpist put a hand on his arm. His brows were drawn. “Are you ill?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Grim Oakland thinks I should get another pigherder, but Snog would die of uselessness if I took his pigs away from him. I’d better go home and fix his roof.” He started as a shadow loomed across the threshold.

  Astrin, unfamiliar in a short, close-fitting coat, his hair neatly trimmed, said brusquely to Deth, “I have to talk to you. Both of you. Please.” He took a torch from the hall; the shadows flitted away in the room, sat hunched in corners, behind furniture.

  Astrin closed the door behind them, turned to Morgon, “You have got to leave this house.”

  Morgon sat down on the clothes chest. “I know. I was just telling Deth.” He found himself shivering suddenly, uncontrollably, and moved to the fire that Deth was rousing.

  Astrin, prowling through the room like Xel, demanded of Deth, “Did Heureu tell you why we quarrelled five years ago?”

  “No. Astrin—”

  “Please. Listen to me. I know you can’t act, you can’t help me, but at least you can listen. I left Caerweddin the day Heureu married Eriel.”

  An image of the shy, fragile face, richly colored with firelight, rose in Morgon’s mind. He said sympathetically, “Were you in love with her, too?”

  “Eriel Meremont died five years ago on King’s Mouth Plain.”

  Morgon closed his eyes. The harpist, kneeling with his hands full of wood, was so still not even the light trembled on the chain across his breast. He said, his voice changeless as ever, “Do you have proof?”

  “Of course not. If I had proof, would that woman who calls herself Eriel Meremont still be married to Heureu?”

  “Then who is married to Heureu?”

  “I don’t know.” He sat down finally beside the fire. “The day before the wedding, I rode with Eriel to King’s Mouth Plain. She was tired of the preparations and wanted a few moments of peace, and she asked me to go with her. We were close; we had known each other since we were children, but there was nothing more than deep friendship between us. We rode to the ruined city of the plain and separated. She went to sit on one of the broken walls to watch the sea, and I just walked through the city, wondering as always what force had scattered the stones like leaves on the grass. At one moment, as I walked, everything grew suddenly very quiet: the sea, the wind. I looked up. I saw a white bird flying above me against the blue sky. It was very beautiful, and I remember thinking that the silence must be like the still eye of a maelstrom. Then I heard a wave break, and the wind rise. I heard a strange cry; I thought the bird had made it. Then I saw Eriel ride past me without looking back or speaking. I called to her to wait, but she didn’t look back. I went to get my horse, and when I passed the rock she had been sitting on, I saw a white bird lying dead on it. It was still warm, still bleeding. I held it in my hands, and felt sorrow and terror overwhelm me as I remembered the silence, and the cry of the bird and Eriel riding away from me without looking back. I buried the bird there among the ancient stones above the sea. That night I told Heureu what I had seen. We ended up shouting at each other, and I swore as long as he was married to that woman I would never return to Caerweddin. I think Rork Umber is the only man to whom Heureu told the truth about why I left. He never told Eriel, but she must know. I only began to realize what she must be as I watched the army being gathered, ships built, arms unloaded at night from Isig and Aniun. . . . I’ve seen, late at night, what Meroc Tor has not: that part of this army he has formed is not human. And that woman is of this nameless, powerful people.” He paused, his eyes moved from Deth’s face to Morgon’s. “I decided to stay at Caerweddin for one reason only: to find proof of what she is. I don’t know what you are, Morgon. They gave you a name in my house, but I’ve never heard of a Prince of Hed winning a riddle-game with death, playing an ancient harp made only for him by someone, sometime, who put the touch of a destiny on that harp’s face.”

  Morgon leaned back in his chair. He said wearily, “I can’t use a harp to fix Snog Nutt’s roof.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never heard that a destiny is of any use at all to a Prince of Hed. I’m sorry Heureu married the wrong woman, but that’s his business. She’s beautiful, and he loves her, so I don’t see why you’re upset. I was on my way to Anuin to get married myself when I nearly got killed. Logically it would seem that someone wants to kill me, but that’s their business; I don’t want to be bothered trying to figure out why. I’m not stupid; once I start asking questions—even one question: What are three stars—I’ll begin a riddle-game I don’t think I’ll want to finish. I don’t want to know. I want to go home, fix Snog Nutt’s roof, and go to bed.”

  Astrin gaz
ed at him a moment, then turned to Deth. “Who is Snog Nutt?”

  “His pigherder.”

  Astrin reached out, touched Morgon’s face. “You may as well have died in that woods for all the good four days’ riding in the rain has done you. I’d row you back to Hed and patch your pigherder’s roof myself if I thought you could even walk out of this room and stay alive. I’m afraid for your life in this house, especially now since you found that harp so conveniently here, under the eyes of Eriel Ymris. Deth, you nearly lost your own life because of those people; who does the High One say they are?”

  “The High One, beyond saving my life and doubtlessly Morgon’s, for his own reasons, has said absolutely nothing to me. I had to find out for myself whether Morgon was alive, and where he was. It was unexpected, but the High One follows his own inclinations.” He settled a log on the fire and stood up. Lines had formed, faint, taut, down the sides of his mouth. He added, “You know I can do nothing without his instructions. I cannot in any way offend the King of Ymris, since I act in the High One’s name.”

  “I know. You’ll notice I haven’t asked you if you believe me or not. But do you have any suggestions?”

  Deth glanced at Morgon. “I suggest you send for the King’s physician.”

  “Deth—”

  “There is nothing either one of us can do but wait. And watch. As ill as Morgon is, he should not be left alone.”

  Something eased in the lean, colorless face. He rose abruptly. “I’ll get Rork to help us watch. He may not believe me, but he knows me well enough to be uneasy about this.”

  The King’s physician, the Lady Anoth, an elderly, comforting, dry-voiced woman took one look at Morgon, and, ignoring his arguments, gave him something that whirled him into a drugged sleep. He woke hours later, light-headed, restless. Astrin, who had stayed to keep watch over him, had fallen asleep by the fire, exhausted. Morgon eyed him a moment, wanting to talk, then decided to let him sleep. His thoughts strayed to the harp in the hall; he heard again the light, rich voice of it, felt the taut, perfectly tuned strings under his fingers. A thought occurred to him then, a question underlying the agelessness, the magic behind the harp. He rose a little unsteadily, wrapped himself in fur from the bed, and left the room soundlessly. The hallway was empty, quiet; the torchlight flared over the private faces of closed doors. With an odd certainty, he found his way down a stairway that led to the great hall.