5
Morgon whispered, “Deth.”
The harpist’s hands stilled. His face was so worn and haggard there was little familiar in it but the fine cast of his bones and the expression in his eyes. He had no horse or pack, no possessions that Morgon could see besides a dark harp, adorned by nothing but its lean, elegant lines. His broken hands rested a moment on the strings, then slid down to tilt the harp to the ground beside him.
“Morgon.” His voice was husky with weariness and surprise. He added, so gently that he left Morgon floundering wordlessly in his own turmoil, “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
Morgon stood motionlessly, even the flame in his hand was drawn still in the windless night. The deadly, flawless harping that ran always in some dark place beneath his thoughts tangled suddenly with the hesitant, stumbling efforts he had heard the past nights. He hung at the edge of his own light, wanting to shout with fury, wanting to turn without speaking and go, wanting even more to take one step forward and ask a question. He did, finally, so noiselessly he scarcely realized he had moved.
“What happened to you?” His own voice sounded strange, flinching a little away from its calm. The harpist glanced down at his hands, lying at his sides like weights.
“I had an argument,” he said, “with Ghisteslwchlohm.”
“You never lose arguments.” He had taken another step forward, still tense, soundless as an animal.
“I didn’t lose this one. If I had, there would be one less harpist in the realm.”
“You don’t die easily.”
“No.” He watched Morgon move another step, and Morgon, sensing it, stilled. The harpist met his eyes clearly, acknowledging everything, asking nothing. Morgon shifted the brand in his hand. It was burning close to his skin; he dropped it, started a small blaze in the dead leaves. The change of light shadowed Deth’s face; Morgon saw it as behind other fires, in earlier days. He was silent, hovering again within the harpist’s silence. It drew him forward, as across a bridge, narrow as a blade, slung across the gulf of his anger and confusion. He squatted finally beside the fire, traced a circle around it, keeping it small with his mind in the warm night.
He asked, after a while, “Where are you going?”
“Back, to where I was born. Lungold. I have no place else to go.”
“You’re walking to Lungold?”
He shrugged slightly, his hands shifting. “I can’t ride.”
“What will you do in Lungold? You can’t harp.”
“I don’t know. Beg.”
Morgon was silent again, looking at him. His fingers, burrowing, found an acorn cap and flicked it into the fire. “You served Ghisteslwchlohm for six hundred years. You gave me to him. Is he that ungrateful?”
“No,” Deth said dispassionately. “He was suspicious. You let me walk out of Anuin alive.”
Morgon’s hand froze among the dead leaves. Something ran through him, then, like a faint, wild scent of a wind that had burned across the northern wastes, across the realm, to bring only the hint of its existence to the still summer night. He let his hand move after a moment; a twig snapped between his fingers. He added the pieces to the fire and felt his way into his questioning, as if he were beginning a riddle-game with someone whose skill he did not know.
“Ghisteslwchlohm was in An?”
“He had been in the backlands, strengthening his power after you broke free of him. He did not know where you were, but since my mind is always open to him, he found me easily, in Hel.”
Morgon’s eyes rose. “Are your minds still linked?”
“I assume so. He no longer has any use for me, but you may be in danger.”
“He didn’t come to Anuin looking for me.”
“He met me seven days after I left Anuin. It seemed unlikely that you would still be there.”
“I was there.” He added a handful of twigs to the fire, watched them turn bright then twist and curl away from the heat. His eyes slid suddenly to the harpist’s twisted fingers. “What in Hel’s name did he do to you?”
“He made a harp for me, since you destroyed mine, and I had none.” A light flicked through the harpist’s eyes, like a memory of pain, or a distant, cold amusement. The flame receded, and his head bent slightly, leaving his face in shadow. He continued dispassionately, “The harp was of black fire. Down the face of it were three burning, white-hot stars.”
Morgon’s throat closed. “You played it,” he whispered.
“He instructed me to. While I was still conscious, I felt his mind drawing out of mine memories of the events at Anuin, of the months you and I travelled together, of the years and centuries I served him, and before… The harp had a strange, tormented voice, like the voices I heard in the night as I rode through Hel.”
“He let you live.”
He leaned his head back against the tree, meeting Morgon’s eyes. “He found no reason not to.”
Morgon was silent. The flame snapped twigs like small bones in front of him. He felt cold suddenly, even in the warm air, and he shifted closer to the fire. Some annual drawn from the brush turned lucent, burning eyes toward him, then blinked and vanished. The silence around him was haunted with a thousand riddles he knew he should ask, and he knew the harpist would only answer them with other riddles. He rested a moment in the void of the silence, cupping light hi his hands.
“Poor pay for six centuries,” he said at last. “What did you expect from him when you entered his service in the first place?”
“I told him that I needed a master, and no king deluded by his lies would suffice. We suited one another. He created an illusion; I upheld it.”
“That was a dangerous illusion. He was never afraid of the High One?”
“What cause has the High One given him to be afraid?”
Morgon moved a leaf in the fire with his fingers. “None.” He let his hand lay flat, burning in the heart of the flame, while memories gathered in his mind. “None,” he whispered. The fire roared suddenly, noiselessly under his hand as his awareness of it lapsed. He flinched away from it, tears springing into his eyes. Through the blur, he saw the harpist’s hands, knotted, flame-ridden, clinging, even hi torment, to his silence. He hunched over his own hand, swallowing curses. “That was careless.”
“Morgon, I have no water—”
“I noticed.” His voice was harsh with pain. “You have no food, you have no water, you have no power of law or wealth, or even enough wizardry to keep yourself from getting burned. You can hardly use the one thing you do possess. For a man who walked away from death twice in seven days, you create a great illusion of powerlessness.” He drew his knees up, rested his face against them. For a while he was quiet, not expecting the harpist to speak, and no longer caring. The fire spoke between them, in an ancient language that needed no riddles. He thought of Raederle and knew he should leave, but he did not move. The harpist sat with an aged, worn stillness, the stillness of old roots or weathered stone. The fire, loosed from Morgon’s control, was dying. He watched the light recede between the angles of his arms. He stirred finally, lifting his head. The flame drifted among its ashes; the harpist’s face was dark.
He stood up, his burned fist cradled in his palm. He heard the faint, dry shift of the harpist’s movement and knew, somehow, that if he had stayed all night beside that fire, the harpist would have been there, silent and sleepless, at dawn. He shook his head wordlessly over his own confusion of impulses.
“You drag me out of my dreams with your harping, and I come and crouch like a dog in your stillness. I wish I knew whether to trust you or kill you or run from you because you play a game more skillful and deadly than any riddler I have ever known. Do you need food? We can spare some.”