“Fool,” he said without touching the harp. He watched the light leap soundlessly down the strings. “At least I know my name.”
“You are the Star-Bearer. Why can’t you leave me alone to make my own choices? What I am doesn’t matter.”
He stared at her over the flaming harp. Something he said or thought without realizing it snapped the harp to pieces in her hand. He reached across the fire, gripped her shoulders, and pulled her to her feet.
“How can you say that to me? What in Hel’s name are you afraid of?”
“Morgon—”
“You’re not going to change shape into something neither of us will recognize!”
“Morgon.” She was shaking him suddenly, trying to make him see. “Do I have to say it? I’m not running from something I hate, but something I want. The power of that bastard heritage. I want it. The power eating across Ymris, trying to destroy the realm and you — I am drawn to it. Bound to it. And I love you. The riddler. The Master. The man who must fight everything of that heritage. You keep asking me for things you will only hate.”
He whispered, “No.”
“The land-rulers, the wizards at Lungold — how can I face them? How can I tell them I am kin to your enemies? How will they ever trust me? How can I trust myself, wanting such terrible power—”
“Raederle.” He lifted one hand stiffly, touched her face, brushing at the fire and tears on it, trying to see clearly. But the uneasy shadows loomed across it, molding her out of flame and darkness, someone he had not quite seen before and could not quite see now. Something was eluding him, vanishing as he touched it. “I never asked anything from you but truth.”
“You never knew what you were asking—”
“I never do know. I just ask.” The fire was shaping itself between them into the answer his mind grasped at. He saw it suddenly, and he saw her again, at the same time, the woman men had died for in Peven’s tower, who had shaped her mind to fire, who loved him and argued with him and was drawn to a power that might destroy him. For a moment pieces of the riddle struggled against each other in his mind. Then they slid together, and he saw the faces of shape-changers he knew: Eriel, the harpist Corrig, whom he had killed, the shape-changers in Isig he had killed. A chill of fear and wonder brushed through him. “If you see… if you see something of value in them,” he whispered, “then what in Hel’s name are they?”
She was silent, gripping him, her face gone still, fiery with tears. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t. There’s nothing of value in their power.”
“Yes, there is. You sense it in you. That’s what you want.”
“Morgon—”
“Either you change shape in my mind, or they change shape. You, I know.”
She let go of him slowly. She was uncertain. He held her, wondering what words would make her trust him. Slowly he realized what argument she would hear.
He loosed her and touched the harp into shape at his back. It filled his hands like a memory. He sat down while she watched him at the edge of the fire, not moving, not speaking. The stars on the harp’s face, enigmatic, answerless, met his gaze. Then he turned it and began to play. For a while he thought of little but her, a shadowy figure at the edge of the light, drawn to his harping. His fingers remembered rhythms, patterns, drew hesitant fragments of song out of a year of silence. The ancient, flawless voice of the harp, responsive to his power, touched him again with unexpected wonder. She drew closer to him as he played, until step by step she had reached his side. She stood still again. With the fire behind her, he could not see her face.
A harpist echoed him in the shadows of his memory. The more he played to drown the memory, the more it haunted him: a distant, skilled, beautiful harping, coming from beyond blackness, beyond the smell of water that went nowhere and had gone nowhere for thousands of years. The fire beyond Raederle grew small, a point of light that went farther and farther away from him, until the blackness came down over his eyes like a hand. A voice startled him, echoing over stones, fading away into harsh cadences. He never saw the face. Reaching out in the darkness, he touched only stone. The voice was always unexpected, no matter how hard he listened for a footstep. He grew to listen constantly, lying on stone, his muscles tensed with waiting. With the voice came mind-work he could not fight, pain when he fought with his fists, endless questions he would not answer out of a desperate fury, until suddenly his fury turned to terror as he felt the fragile, complex instincts for land-law begin to die in him. He heard his own voice answering, rising a little, answering, rising, no longer able to answer… He heard harping.
His hands had stopped. The bones of his face ached against the harpwood. Raederle sat close to him, her arm around his shoulders. The harping still sounded raggedly through his mind. He stirred stiffly away from it. It would not stop. Raederle’s head turned; he realized, the blood shocking through him, that she was healing it, too.
Then he recognized the familiar, hesitant harping. He stood up, his face white, frozen, and caught a brand out of the fire. Raederle said his name; he could not answer. She tried to follow him, barefoot, limping through the bracken, but he would not wait. He tracked the harpist through the trees, across the road to the other side, where he startled a trader sleeping under his cart; through brambles and underbrush, while the harping grew louder and seemed to circle him. The torch, flaring over dead leaves, lit a figure finally, sitting under a tree, bowed over his harp. Morgon stopped, breathing jerkily, words, questions, curses piling into his throat. The harpist lifted his face slowly to the light.
Morgon’s breath stopped. There was not a sound anywhere in the black night beyond the torchlight The harpist, staring back at Morgon, still played softly, awkwardly, his hands gnarled like oak root, twisted beyond all use.
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.”