Riddle-Master

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Lyra glanced at her. “He’ll go to An.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And then where will he go? Lungold?”

  “I don’t know. Wherever Deth is, I suppose.”

  On the other side of Lyra, Tristan lifted her head. “Do you think,” she said with unexpected bitterness, “that he’ll come to Hed before that? Or is he planning to kill Deth and then go home and tell everyone about it?”

  They looked at her. Her eyes were heavy with unshed tears; her mouth was pinched taut. She added after a moment, staring down at the bolt heads in the planks, “If he wouldn’t move so fast, if I could just catch up with him, maybe I could persuade him to come home. But how can I do that if he won’t stay still?”

  “He’ll go home eventually,” Raederle said. “I can’t believe he’s changed so much he doesn’t care about Hed anymore.”

  “He’s changed. Once he was the land-ruler of Hed, and he would rather have killed himself than someone else. Now—”

  “Tristan, he has been hurt, probably more deeply than any of us could know . . .”

  She nodded a little jerkily. “I can understand that with my head. People have killed other people in Hed, out of anger or jealousy, but not—not like that. Not tracking someone like a hunter, driving him to one certain place to be killed. It’s—what someone else would do. But not Morgon. And if—if it happens, and afterwards he goes back to Hed, how will we recognize each other any more?”

  They were silent. A sailor carrying a keg of wine across his shoulders shook the ramp with his slow, heavy, persistent steps. Behind them, Bri Corbett shouted something, lost like a sea gull’s cry in the wind. Raederle stirred.

  “He’ll know that,” she said softly. “Deep in him. That he has every justification to do this except one. That the only man who might condemn him for it would be himself. Maybe you should trust him a little. Go home and wait and trust him.”

  There was another step behind them. Bri Corbett said, looking down at them, “That is the most rational thing I’ve heard this entire journey. Who’s for home?”

  “Caithnard,” Raederle said, and he sighed.

  “Well, it’s close enough for a start. Maybe I can look for work there, if your father decides he doesn’t want to see my face in An after this. But if I can just get you and this ship together back into the harbor at Anuin, he can curse the hair off my head and I’ll still be content.”

  Lyra stood up. She hugged Bri suddenly, upsetting his hat with her spearhead. “Thank you. Tell Mathom it was my fault.”

  He straightened his hat, his face flushed, smiling. “I doubt if he’d be impressed.”

  “Have you heard any news of him here?” Raederle asked. “Is he back home?”

  “No one seems to know. But—” He stopped, his brows tugging together, and she nodded.

  “It’s been nearly two months. He doesn’t have a vow to fulfill anymore, since Morgon is alive, and he won’t have a house to return to if he doesn’t get himself back to An before it rouses.” The guards rounded the dock side, in two straight lines. Kia, holding Lyra’s horse, brought it over to her. Raederle and Tristan stood up, and Lyra gave them her quick, taut embrace.

  “Good-bye. Go home.” She held Raederle’s eyes a moment before she loosed her and repeated softly, “Go home.”

  She turned, mounted, and gave them a spear-bearer’s salute, her spear flaring upward like a silver torch. Then she wheeled her horse, took her place beside Trika at the head of the lines, and led the guards out of the Hlurle docks without looking back. Raederle watched her until the last guard disappeared behind the warehouses. Then she turned almost aimlessly and saw the empty ramp before her. She went up slowly, found Bri and Tristan watching the flicker of spears in the distance. Bri sighed.

  “It’s going to be a quiet journey without someone using the boom for target practice. We’ll finish getting supplies here and sail a straight run past Ymris to Caithnard. Making,” he added grimly, “the widest possible detour around Ymris. I would rather see the King of An himself off my bowsprit than Astrin Ymris.”

  They saw neither on the long journey to Caithnard, only an occasional trade-ship making its own prudent path around the troubled Ymris coast. Sometimes the ships drew near to exchange news, for tales of the errant ship out of An had spread from one end of the realm to the other. The news was always the same: war in Ymris had spread up into Tor and east Umber; no one knew where Morgon was; no one had heard anything of Mathom of An; and one startling piece of news from Caithnard: the ancient College of Riddle-Masters had sent away its students and closed its doors.

  The long journey ended finally as the weary ship took the lolling afternoon tide into the Caithnard harbor. There were cheers and various remarks from the dockside as the dark sails wrinkled and slumped on the mast and Bri eased the ship into its berth. Bri ignored the noise with patience tempered by experience, and said to Raederle, “We’re taking in a little water; she’ll need repairs and supplies before we continue to Anuin. It will be a day or two, maybe. Do you want me to find you lodgings in the city?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She gathered her thoughts with an effort. “Yes. Please. I’ll need my horse.”

  “All right.”

  Tristan cleared her throat. “And I’ll need mine.”

  “You will.” He eyed her. “For what? Riding across the water to Hed?”

  “I’m not going to Hed, I’ve decided.” She bore up steadily under his flat gaze. “I’m going to that city—the wizards’ city. Lungold. I know where it is; I’ve looked on your maps. The road leads straight out of—”

  “Hegdis-Noon’s curved eyeteeth, girl, have you got a sensible bone anywhere in you?” Bri exploded. “That’s a six-weeks journey through no-man’s land. It’s only because I have a hold weeping bilge water that I didn’t take you straight to Tol. Lungold! With Deth and Morgon headed there, the Founder and who knows how many wizards coming like wraiths out of the barrows of Hel, that city is going to fall apart like a worm-eaten hull.”

  “I don’t care. I—”

  “You—”

  They both stopped, as Tristan, her eyes moving past Bri, took a step backward. Raederle turned. A young man with a dark, tired, vaguely familiar face had come up the ramp. Something in his plain dress, his hesitant entry onto Bri’s ship, stirred a memory in her mind. His eyes went to her face as she moved, and then, beyond her, to Tristan.

  He stopped, closing his eyes, and sighed. Then he said, “Tristan, will you please come home before Eliard leaves Hed to look for you.”

  Something of the mutinous, trapped expression in her eyes faded. “He wouldn’t.”

  “He would. He will. A trader coming down from Kraal spotted this ship at Hlurle and said you were coming south. Eliard was ready to leave then, but we—I won a wrestling match with him, and he said if I came back without you, he’d leave Hed. He’s worn to the bone with worry, and his temper is short as a hen’s nose. There’s no living on the same island with him, drunk or sober.”

  “Cannon, I want to come home, but—”

  Cannon Master shifted his stance on the deck. “Let me put it this way. I have asked you politely, and I will ask you again. The third time, I won’t ask.”

  Tristan gazed at him, her chin lifted. Bri Corbett allowed a slow smile of pure contentment to spread over his face. Tristan opened her mouth to retort; then, under the weight of Cannon’s implacable, harassed gaze, changed tactics visibly.

  “Cannon, I know where Morgon is, or where he’s going to be. If you’ll just wait, just tell Eliard to wait—”

  “Tell him. I told him it was a fine morning once and he threw a bucket of slops at me. Face one thing, Tristan: when Morgon wants to come home, he’ll come. Without help from any of us. Just as he managed to survive. I’m sure, by now, he appreciates the fact that you cared enough to try to find out what happened to him.”

  “You could come with me—”

  “It takes all my courage just to stand here
with that bottomless water between me and Hed. If you want him to come home, then go back yourself. In the High One’s name, give him something he loves to come home to.”

  Tristan was silent, while the water murmured against the hull and the lean black shadow of the mast lay like a bar at her feet. She said finally, “All right,” and took a step forward. She stopped. “I’ll go home and tell Eliard I’m all right. But I don’t promise to stay. I don’t promise that.” She took another step, then turned to Raederle and held her tightly. “Be careful,” she said softly. “And if you see Morgon, tell him . . . Just tell him that. And tell him to come home.”

  She loosed Raederle, went slowly to Cannon’s side. He dropped a hand down her hair, drew her against him, and after a moment she slid an arm around his waist. Raederle watched them go down the ramp, make their way through the hectic, disorderly docks. A longing for Anuin wrenched at her, for Duac, and Elieu of Hel, for Rood with his crow-sharp eyes, for the sounds and smells of An, sun-spiced oak and the whisper, deep in the earth, of the endless fabric of history.

  Bri Corbett said gently behind her, “Don’t be sad. You’ll smell the wind of your own home in a week.”

  “Will I?” She looked down and saw the white brand on her palm that had nothing to do with An. Then sensing the worry in him, she added more lightly, “I need to get off this ship, I think. Will you ask them to bring my horse up?”

  “If you’ll wait, I’ll escort you.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be all right. I want to be alone for a while.”

  She rode through the docks, down the busy merchants’ streets of the city, and if anyone troubled her, she did not notice. The fading afternoon drew a net of shadows across her path as she turned onto the silent road that led up to the College. She realized she had seen no students that day, with their bright robes and restless minds, anywhere in Caithnard. There were none on the road. She took the final wind to the top and saw the empty sweep of the College grounds.

  She stopped. The dark, ancient stones with their blank windows seemed to house a hollowness, a betrayal of truth as bitter and terrible as the betrayal at Erlenstar Mountain. The shadow of that mountain had swept across the realm into the hearts of the Masters, until they found the greatest deceit within their own walls. They could send the students away, but she knew that though they might question themselves, they would never question the constant, essential weave and patterning of Riddle-Mastery.

  She dismounted at the door and knocked. No one came, so she opened it. The narrow hall was empty, dark. She walked down it slowly, glimpsing through the long line of open doors each small chamber that had once held bed, books and endless games over guttering candles. There was no one downstairs. She took the broad stone stairs to the second floor and found more lines of open doors, the rooms holding no more in them than an expressionless block of sky. She came finally to the door of the Masters’ library. It was closed.

  She opened it. Eight Masters and a King, interrupting their quiet discussion, turned to her, startled. The King’s eyes, ancient, ice-blue, burned as he looked at her with sudden curiosity.

  One of the Masters rose. He said gently, “Raederle of An. Is there some way we can help you?”

  “I hope so,” she whispered, “because I have no place else to go.”

  SHE TOLD THEM, sitting in their gentle, impartial silence, of the shape-changer, who had come to her in Danan’s house, and of her flight out of Isig Mountain. She told them of the stone Astrin had found on King’s Mouth Plain and showed them the mark of it on her palm. She told them how she had held fire in the empty hollow of night in the backlands, while the wine cup of the High One’s harpist flashed and fell in its light. She told them, knowing they knew it, but telling them by right of sorrow and heritage, the tale of Ylon, born out of An and the formless sea, and she saw in their eyes the gathering of the threads of riddlery. When she finished, dusk had crept in to the room, blurring the silent, dark-robed figures, old parchment and priceless, gold-hinged manuscripts. One of the Masters lit a candle. The flame gave her the patient, weary working of lines on his face, and beyond him, the spare, ungentle face of the Osterland King. The Master said simply, “We are all questioning ourselves these days.”

  “I know. I know how imperatively. You have not closed your doors only because you accepted the Founder of Lungold as a Master here. I know who was there to meet Morgon when Deth brought him to Erlenstar Mountain.”

  The taper the Master held dipped toward a wick and halted. “You know that, too.”

  “I guessed. And later, Deth—Deth told me it was so.”

  “He seems to have spared you very little,” Har said. His voice sounded dry, impersonal, but she saw in his face a hint of the anger and confusion the harpist had loosed into the realm.

  “I was not asking to be spared. I wanted truth. I want it now, so I came here. It’s a place to start from. I can’t go back to An with this. If my father were there, maybe I could. But I can’t go back and pretend to Duac and Rood and the Lords of An that I belong to An as surely as the roots of trees and the old barrows of Kings. I have power, and I am afraid of it. I don’t know—I don’t know what I might loose in myself without meaning to. I don’t know, any more, where I belong. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Ignorance,” the wolf-king murmured, “is deadly.”

  Master Tel shifted, his worn robe rustling in the hush. “You both came for answers; we have few to give you. Sometimes, however, the turn of a question becomes an answer; and we do have many questions. Above all: one regarding the shape-changers. They appeared almost without warning at the moment the Star-Bearer began realizing his destiny. They knew his name before he did; they knew of the sword bearing his stars deep in the grave of the Earth-Masters’ children at Isig. They are old, older than the first weave of history and riddlery, originless, unnamed. They must be named. Only then will you know the origins of your own power.”

  “What else do I need to know about them, except that they have tried to destroy the King’s lines in An and Ymris, that they blinded Astrin, they almost killed Morgon, they have no mercy, no pity, no love. They gave Ylon his life, then drove him to his death. They have no compassion even for their own—” She stopped, then, remembering the voice of the shape-changer striking its unexpected, puzzling timbre of richness.

  One of the Masters said softly, “You have touched an incongruity?”

  “Not compassion, but passion . . .” she whispered. “The shape-changer answered me with that. And then she wove her fire into such beauty that I hungered for her power. And she asked me what had driven Ylon back to them, if they were so terrible. She made me hear the harping Ylon heard, made me understand his longing. Then she told me Morgon had killed the harpist.” She paused in their silence, the practiced stillness of old men, the heart of patience. “She handed me that riddle.” Her voice was toneless. “That incongruity. Like Deth’s kindness, which maybe was only habit, and . . . maybe not. I don’t know. Nothing—the High One, this College, good or evil—seems to keep its own shape any more. That’s why I wanted Morgon, then, so badly. At least he knows his own name. And a man who can name himself can see to name other things.”

  Their faces under the restless candlelight seemed molded out of shadow and memory, they sat so quietly when her voice faded.

  At last Master Tel said gently, “Things are themselves. We twist the shapes of them. Your own name lies within you still, a riddle. The High One, whoever he is, is still the High One, though Ghisteslwchlohm has worn his name like a mask.”

  “And the High One’s harpist is what?” Har asked. Master Tel was silent a moment, withdrawing into a memory.

  “He studied here, also, centuries ago . . . I would not have believed a man who took the Black could have so betrayed the disciplines of riddle-mastery.”

  “Morgon intends to kill him,” Har said brusquely, and the Master’s eyes lifted again, startled.

  “I had not heard . . .”
>
  “Is that a betrayal of riddle-mastery? The wise man does not pursue his own shadow. There are no instincts of his own land-law in him to stay his hand; there is not one land-ruler, including the Morgol, who will not comply with his wishes. We give him understanding; we bar the gates to our kingdoms as he requests. And we wait for his final betrayal: self-betrayal.” His implacable gaze moved from face to face like a challenge. “The Master is master of himself. Morgon has absolute freedom of this realm. He has no longer the restraints of land-law. The High One is nowhere in evidence except in the evidence of his existence. Morgon has bound himself, so far, to his destiny by the tenets of riddle-mastery. He also has enormous, untested power. Is there a riddle on the master lists that permits the wise man to revenge?”

  “Judgment,” one of the Masters murmured, but his eyes were troubled. “Who else is permitted to judge and condemn this man who has betrayed the entire realm for centuries?”

  “The High One.”

  “In lieu of the High One—”

  “The Star-Bearer?” He twisted their silence like a harp string, then broke it. “The man who wrested his power from Ghisteslwchlohm because no one, not even the High One, gave him any help? He is bitter, self-sufficient, and by his actions he is questioning even the elusive restraints of riddle-mastery. But I doubt if he sees even that in himself, because wherever he looks there is Deth. His destiny is to answer riddles. Not destroy them.”

  Something eased in Raederle’s mind. She said softly, “Did you tell him that?”

  “I tried.”

  “You complied with his wishes. Deth said he was driven out of Osterland by your wolves.”

  “I had no desire to find even the shape of Deth’s footprint in my land.” He paused; his voice lost its harshness. “When I saw the Star-Bearer, I would have given him the scars off my hands. He said very little about Deth or even about Ghisteslwchlohm, but he said . . . enough. Later, as I began to realize what he was doing, how far from himself he seemed to have grown, the implications of his actions haunted me. He was always so stubborn . . .”