She led him there by sunlight and starlight, south across the wastes, and then eastward down the mountains of the pass until at the second dawn he saw the green face of Isig Mountain rising beyond the Ose. They reached the king’s house at dusk, on a wild, grey autumn day. The high peaks were already capped with snow; the great pines around Harte sang in the north wind. The travellers changed out of vesta-shape when they reached Kyrth and walked the winding mountain road to Harte. The gates were barred and guarded, but the miners, armed with great broadswords tempered in Danan’s forge fires, recognized them and let them in.
Danan and Vert and half a dozen children left their supper to meet them as they entered the house. Danan, robed in fur against the cold, gave them a bear’s bulky embrace and sent children and servants alike scurrying to see their comfort. But, gauging their weariness, he asked only one question.
“I was in the wastes,” Morgon said. “Harping. Raederle found me.” The strangeness of the answer did not occur to him then. He added, remembering, “Before that, I was a tree beside the Ose.” He watched a smile break into the king’s eyes.
“What did I tell you?” Danan murmured. “I told you no one would find you in that shape.” He drew them toward the stairs leading up into the east tower. “I have a thousand questions, but I am a patient old tree, and they can wait until morning. Yrth is in this tower; you’ll be safe near him.”
A question nagged at Morgon as they wound up the stairs, until he realized what it was. “Danan, I have never seen your house guarded. Did the shape-changers come here looking for me?”
The king’s hands knotted. “They came,” he said grimly. “I lost a quarter of my miners. I would have lost more if Yrth had not been here to fight with us.” Morgon had stopped. The king opened a hand, drew him forward. “We grieved enough for them. If we only knew what they are, what they want…” He sensed something in Morgon. His troubled eyes drew relentlessly at the truth. “You know.”
Morgon did not answer. Danan did not press him, but the lines in his face ran suddenly deep.
He left them in a tower room whose walls and floor and furniture were draped with fur. The air was chilly, but Raederle lit a fire and servants came soon, bringing food, wine, more firewood, warm, rich clothes. Bere followed with a cauldron of steaming water. As he hoisted it onto a hook above the firebed, he smiled at Morgon, his eyes full of questions, but he swallowed them all with an effort. Morgon ridded himself of a well-worn tunic, matted sheepskin, and what dirt the harsh winds had not scoured from his body. Clean, fed, dressed in soft fur and velvet, he sat beside the fire and thought back with amazement on what he had done.
“I left you,” he said to Raederle. “I can understand almost everything but that. I wandered out of the world and left you…”
“You were tired,” she said drowsily. “You said so. Maybe you just needed to think.” She was stretched out beside him on the ankle-deep skins; she sounded warmed by fire and wine, and almost asleep. “Or maybe you needed a place to begin to harp…”
Her voice trailed away into a dream; she left him behind. He drew blankets over her, sat for a while without moving, watching light and shadows pursue one another across her weary face. The winds boomed and broke against the tower like sea waves. They held the echo of a note that haunted his memories. He reached automatically for his harp, then remembered he could not play that note in the king’s house without disrupting its fragile peace.
He played others softly, fragments of ballads wandering into patternless echoes of the winds. His fingers stopped after a while. He sat plucking one note over and over, soundlessly, while a face formed and vanished constantly in the flames. He stood up finally, listening. The house seemed still around him, with only a distant murmuring of voices here and there within its walls. He moved quietly past Raederle, past the guards outside the door, whom he made oblivious to his leaving. He went up the stairs to a doorway hung with white furs that yielded beneath them a strip of light. He parted them gently, walked into semi-darkness and stopped.
The wizard was napping, an old man nodding in a chair beside a fire, his scarred hands lying open on his knees. He looked taller than Morgon remembered, broad-shouldered yet lean beneath the long, dark robe he wore. As Morgon watched him, he woke, opening light, unstartled eyes. He bent down, sighing, groped for wood and positioned it carefully, feeling with his fingers through the lagging flames. They sprang up, lighting a rock-hard face, weathered like a tree stump with age. He seemed to realize suddenly that he was not alone; for an instant his body went motionless as stone. Morgon felt an almost imperceptible touch in his mind. The wizard stirred again, blinking.
“Morgon?” His voice was deep, resonant, yet husky, full of hidden things, like the voice of a deep well. “Come in. Or are you in?”
Morgon moved after a moment “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said softly. Yrth shook his head.
“I heard your harping a while ago. But I didn’t expect to talk to you until morning. Danan told me that Raederle found you in the northern wastes. Were you pursued? Is that why you hid there?”
“No. I simply went there, and stayed because I could think of no reason to come back. Then Raederle came and gave me a reason…”
The wizard contemplated the direction of his voice silently. “You are an amazing man,” he said. “Will you sit down?”
“How do you know I’m not sitting?” Morgon asked curiously.
“I can see the chair in front of you. Can you feel the mind-link? I am seeing out of your eyes.”
“I hardly notice it…”
“That’s because I am not linked to your thoughts, only to your vision. I travelled Trader’s Road through men’s eyes. That night you were attacked by horse thieves, I knew one of them was a shape-changer because I saw through his eyes the stars you kept hidden from men. I searched for him, to kill him, but he eluded me.”
“And the night I followed Deth’s harping? Did you see beneath that illusion, also?”
The wizard was silent again. His head bowed, away from Morgon; the hard lines of his face shifted with such shame and bitterness that Morgon stepped toward him, appalled at his own question.
“Morgon, I am sorry. I am no match for Ghisteslwchlohm.”
“You couldn’t have done anything to help.” His hands gripped the chair back. “Not without endangering Raederle.”
“I did what little I could, reinforcing your illusion when you vanished, but… that was very little.”
“You saved our lives.” He had a sudden, jarring memory of the harpist’s face, eyes seared pale with fire, staring at nothing until Morgon wavered out of existence in front of him. His hands loosed the wood, slid up over his eyes. He heard Yrth stir.
“I can’t see.”
His hands dropped. He sat down, in utter weariness. The winds wailed around the tower in a confusion of voices. Yrth was still, listening to his silence. He said gently, when Morgon did not break it, “Raederle told me what she could of the events in Erlenstar Mountain. I did not go into her mind. Will you let me see into your memories. Or do you prefer to tell me? Either way, I must know.”
“Take it from my mind.”
“Are you too tired now?”
He shook his head a little. “It doesn’t matter. Take what you want.”
The fire grew small in front of him, broke into bright fragments of memory. He endured once more his wild, lonely flight across the backlands, falling out of the sky into the depths of Erlenstar Mountain, The tower flooded with night; he swallowed bitterness like lake water. The fire beyond his vision whispered in languages he did not understand. A wind smashed through the voices, whirling them out of his mind. The tower stones shook around him, shattered by the deep, precise timing of a wind. Then there was a long silence, during which he drowsed, warmed by a summer light. Then he woke again, a strange, wild figure in a sheepskin coat that hung open to the wind. He drifted deeper and deeper into the pure, deadly voices of winter.