Roc hesitated. "It's a mighty temptation," he muttered. "I can see it might be a burden… it's a gamble… but then so's every breath you draw…"
"Well then," said Kermorvan. "You hear the voice of the citizen." He shrugged. "I see no great harm in it."
"Do you not?" blazed Elof, so loud he feared the
alfar
below might hear. More quietly he added, "Then look at it as it has taken effect! That architect, Ils; that bard, Kermorvan. What became of them? A hall half built, songs half sung, is that not so?" Ils looked at him uneasily, making no reply, but Kermorvan only shrugged.
"There must be many who could not stay the course, even men worthy and gifted. What of that? Is it not better to fall in a venture, than never to have tried? The more so, when the fall is so merciful, the venture so worthwhile. Has it not saved for this day such as Svethan, as Korentyn?"
"Saved?" echoed Elof, very quietly. "And for this day? I wonder. What might they have achieved in the world outside, these folk, if they had not been prevented from reaching the west? King Keryn's son, your ancestor, would not have lacked support. Korentyn and Ase would have established his throne, as Keryn intended; they would have prevented the bitter sundering of north and south that has so weakened our folk. Instead, what have they done? They have survived; and that is all. Aye, they live. But as what? Shadows in a court of shadows, remote, ineffectual, powerless to help or harm. Korentyn is noble, aye, and kind; he could not be otherwise and still himself. But what else have all these centuries riven from him? Where is the fiery prince he once was, the strong warrior against the evils of the Ice? And Svethan, far from his seas, what meaning has he anymore? And the lady Tens, is she any more than once she was?" Kermorvan's eye grew bleak and cold, but he held it. "And what of you? How have you fared, since you came here? What plans have you laid to summon your folk hither, those who depend on you, little though they may know it? When will word be sent back to Kerbryhaine?"
Kermorvan frowned. "I cannot act in haste! Do you imagine Korentyn and I have not taken counsel over this, long and deep? This place must first be made ready to receive great numbers, folk must be summoned little by little, as Tapiau decrees, and their doubts resolved. We will need more than a few days to plan such matters, will we not?"
"A few days?" asked Elof quietly, though chill fingers traced out his spine. "How long do you imagine we have been here? Roc and the others have been away hunting, I have had a whole forge built for me; it did not take shape overnight!" He saw the bewilderment in their faces, in Kermorvan's most of all, and he thought back to the night of their coming. "I wonder how long it has seemed to Korentyn?"
"Ach, that's as Tapiau told you!" Roc objected. "No wonder his sense of time's a bit blurred, after all these centuries…"
"No?" muttered Ils uneasily. "When already it seems to be happening to us? Elof, how long were we gone? It seemed a night or two only."
"Three weeks, perhaps. Maybe even four; how should I know, if you do not? The forge was three in the building." The travelers stared uneasily at each other, but Kermorvan shaded his eyes.
"Perhaps our sense of time fades as our bodies cease to age," said Ils quietly. "Tapiau might not be aware of that, for it seems he takes no form, human or otherwise. But it makes it hard to trust him, now…"
"How am I to know?" Kermorvan burst out suddenly. "When you told me of Tapiau's words I believed we had found what we sought! That out of the horrors of the journey I had stumbled on something greater than I had ever dared hope, the past I dreamed of restoring come again…"
"
Henceforth let none of us be deceived by phantoms of his vanished past
!" quoted Elof, darkly. "Whose words were those?"
Kermorvan hammered fist against palm. "But how am I to tell? How can I delve for truth in this morass? What profit would Tapiau find in so ensnaring us, when he could sweep us from the earth with a gesture, or have his creatures tear us to shreds? It makes no sense, Elof! I must have proof! And even if he is our enemy, how shall we fight him, or escape him? How shall we raise hand or will against a living Power?"
Elof hesitated, but in the end, as all the others were silent, he dared to speak. "That will be hard, indeed. But it may be that I can help you. Now that I have my forge…"He did not look up, but he felt their eyes upon him.
"You would wield smithcraft against the Powers?" demanded Bure, in doubt and wonder.
"A man must use what he has! I would turn my craft against the Steerers of the Stars if they threatened… those things I care for!" The fervor in his own words startled him; speaking without thought, he had bared feelings he hardly knew he had. He was aware as never before of the craft within him, a roaring furnace flame hungry to be used; he bent his mind upon it, and it narrowed to a needle of devouring incandescence, precise, measured, irresistible. "But I had no thought of open battle. Guile is used against us, and is best repaid in the same coin." He turned then to Kermorvan, who had not answered him. "Well? It seems to me that we came upon this place at an evil time for you, when you had begun to doubt your own leadership, your own wisdom in making this journey; perhaps the Forest had already begun to work on you, as it had on me. But I am not of that mind! You are our leader yet. You ask for proof; I will try to find it, though the attempt may be perilous. So perilous that if you choose, if you deem we may trust the Forest so completely, I will pursue it no further. Say now! Which shall it be?"
Kermorvan stood up on the rock, and gazed out over the Forest in silence. But it was only a moment before he spoke, his voice crisp and calm. "You may try what you will."
They came down from the mountains laden under many a sack of ores and other stones, which they gladly left at Elof's forge on their way to the castle. But Ils lingered a moment, and Roc at once began to busy himself about the forge as he had so many times in the past. Elof looked at him. "You need have no part in this, if you do not wish to. Nor you, Ils."
Ils chuckled, and leaned against the workbench. Roc screwed up his florid features into a ferocious scowl. "Yours are not the only hands can wield a hammer! Could be ours grow a trifle itchy again, at that. And you'll be needing a brace of good forgehands, if only to pin down the top of your skull now and again. Eh, lady?"
Elof looked at them both, and he smiled. A great weariness seemed to lift from him, a cloud from his spirits. He hooked an arm round Ils' broad shoulders, and rumpled Roc's thick hair down into his eyes. "Ass! I'm blessed in the pair of you! But I doubt any such task will need many hands. Slow and subtle it will have to be…"
"Aye, and secret," said Roc quietly. "You were wondering yourself about the Forest's eyes and ears. We might distract it somehow…"
"And share the peril, yes; I know your mind too well now, my lad! But that may not be necessary." And he took up Gorthawer, which he was careful to leave outside, and showed them the dwindling of its shadow. "Tapiau said it would avail me little among the cold stonework of men, and indeed upon Kerbryhaine's walls it faded. There he betrayed a limit to the Forest's power! I guessed that was why Lys Arvalen was completed in wood, not stone; in stone his thoughts cannot dwell! And I guessed also that both he and the castle folk would be wary of fire. So for reasons innocent in themselves I shaped a place within which his power could not extend, a dark spot in his mind." He looked around the barren little hut with a feeling of grim satisfaction. "Within the Forest I built my forge. But within my forge the Forest cannot come."
Roc blew out an astonished breath. "Whew! So you've dared turn your craft against a Power already!"
"And succeeded!" said Ils quietly, her eyes shining.
"Only at the first step," cautioned Elof. "I do not think he has guessed yet, for I have spent little time in here. When I begin my labors he will find out, sooner or later; he will not do anything at first, I guess. He seems more concerned to win me over, for now. But he will not hold his hand forever; I will have only one try at my work. And I do not yet know what that will be."
Roc stared. "No idea at all?"
"I did not say that. I know what I need, and I know how hard it will be to achieve, subtler even than the mindsword. For it will brook no compulsion, but seek rather to loosen chains…"
Ils drew breath. "I begin to see. But the craft that would take! And the time! You could use pattern-welding again, or alloying, but the one might be too coarse, the other too fine; you must needs try over and over till you hit upon the balance… Elof, little short of mastership will suffice."
"I know!" he said, striving to steady the tremor of desperation. "And how will I find it here? But I have to try!"
"Try indeed!" said Roc, chewing idly at a grass stem. "It's often enough you've surprised yourself in the past, let alone me. When you need us, here we are. For now, well, there's your fire lit, bread and meat by your books, your tools laid to hand. And us on our way down to the castle, I think."
Ils nodded, a little sadly. "Toward nightfall we'll be back. If only to see that you sleep. I know you, Elof!"
Elof smiled as he watched them trudge away through the trees. Somehow he felt strangely free once more, here in this crude cavern of a forge; he did not understand why until evening, when he looked up from his reading as shadows fell and birds trilled their twilight songs. In his mind's eye reeds hissed in the breeze, and mists rolled silently over them; it was very like his strange old marshland smithy here, that place where he had sought and found healing, and with it himself. He smiled; the memory was newly clear in his mind once more.
He laid down his book. Roc and Ils would have no need to come and fetch him, that night or any other. Haste and worry might lead him to miss something vital. So it was that every evening around nightfall he would walk down alone through the darkling woods, following the path of the stream. And it is told that often in those times he spoke again with Tapiau.
It made him nervous at first, that voice that was many voices, the more so as it seemed well aware of his misgivings. But still it sought to win him over, and he spoke and questioned freely as before, and was told of many wonders. As the late summer drew on toward autumn, he heard the voice among the rush and whistle of the wind in the pines, the solemn thunder of a cataract, and once, fearfully, in the devouring roar of a distant earthslide among the pines. It was then, angry at his fright, that he grew bold enough to ask of Tapiau why he took no single form to speak, if the lesser Powers that haunted his woods could do as much. The deep pools of the stream bubbled up the answer.
It is because they are lesser that they may do so with ease. Would you confine this stream within your trough, this pool within your cup? You would catch only as much as your vessel might hold. So it is with Powers of high order.
"Yet I heard that some may do so, on occasion. The one they call the Raven…"
Indeed. Such as we may take human shape, or any other we care to. But in so doing we become only a facet of
ourselves. The greater we are, the less easy we find it; forming a body becomes a difficult concern, and its result less like us. More than a man he may be—or she, for gender goes beyond the body—but less, far less than the Power itself And flesh hangs on us like fetters. There is so much of ourselves, our wisdom and knowledge, that we cannot draw on till we revert to our true shape. Worse, we fall victim to all the strange demands of flesh, and often cope less well than those born into it; many become too like human beings, and may turn strange and willful, pur-suing their purposes in odd manner, or even delighting in pleasures perverse or evil along the way. I would not so lose my dignity. Nor would I become so vulnerable; to be injured or destroyed in body is pain and weakening to us, and a lasting drain on our strength, even permanent, in some cases. Few will gladly risk it. And that is as well for your petty races and nations, for the ills the Powers of the Ice now cause are as nothing to what they would do if they could walk freely among men. Vast is their power, singly or together, yet vastly is it bound up in the sheer effort of sustaining the Ice, their most potent weapon. So it is that they tend to shun any true form, remaining immanent around the Ice and their domains nearby. Such is Taoune, whose realm borders upon my own, my mocker, my shadow, my great enemy, Lord of the Withered Marches. At most, when they wish to meet mortal eyes they may take on some half-substantial mask of power and terror.
"I believe I have seen such, benighted once upon the Ice…"
/
hear it by the shiver in your voice. But being bound thus may force human shape upon them. For where the Ice will not serve them, they must seek out new weapons, new agents apt to their thought
.
Elof remembered his late master, and nodded. Then it was as if the Ice clenched a chill fist beneath his stomach, for he guessed at Tapiau's next words ere they were spoken.
Now only the greatest of those cold minds are strong enough to do this, to don the shape they abhor. Once, an
age past, Taoune was their leader; sustained by his weaker brethren, he roamed the world and sought to twist weak men to his fell purpose. But I am the friend of men, and had the service of many. I wrestled with him, and threw him down, and drove him back, stripped of his body and sunken to a shadow of the power that once he owned. In these days another rules, a clutching, binding spinner of intrigue who ofttimes walks the world in a fair form to sway the hearts of men. Veiled so in flesh, she shows but a small portion of her own great beauty and majesty and terror; yet I have heard that to men it seems great indeed.