"You must be the judge of that, lord. Enter, and excuse the discomfort." Korentyn ducked through the doorway, as Elof had never needed to, and stood looking around him at the disorder of equipment on every side.
"This is a strange place," he said softly. "Forces are at work here, I could sense them if I were blindfold. You are a smith of power and craft, Elof."
Elof bit his lip. "Then accept this, lord, as some earnest of your words!" He reached beneath the bench, and lifted an object wrapped in barkcloth. "For you are a great prince, and it is… fitting that this, my first work here, should be yours."
The barkcloth fell away, and the others gasped; Korentyn himself went momentarily very pale as the gleaming thing was lifted to his eyes. But it was Kermorvan who spoke first, astonished.
"That is an image of the Coronet of Morvannec!" he barked. "How did you know of such a thing, Elof?"
"I found it, drawn in one of the texts here."
Korentyn laughed, shaking his head in wonder. "But why then have you set this fair thing on so rich a warhelm, smith? For I am nothing if not a man of peace, now!"
"Thus it was shown in the text, lord. And it seemed to me right that you should have your crown so, who fought so valiantly in your youth for the right. But will you not don it, if only for the measure?"
Korentyn seemed genuinely much moved. He bowed deeply to Elof, and raised the work of bright silver, tall plated helm and many peaked crown, high above his head. The sun was falling westward, an angry bronze globe in the gray waste of sky, its long rays streaming in through the open doorway. They caught helm and crown, mirror-bright, and set upon its patterned plates a glow of fire, tipped its peaks scarlet as they did the mountain snows, awoke white fire and rainbows from the cluster of pale gems at its brow. The light seemed to shine through Korentyn's fingers as, slowly and with grave dignity, he lowered the crown onto his head. There for an instant it rested, framing his face, noble and serene as some ancient statue. Then the eyes flew wide, a spasm crossed the features, and they twisted in anguish. Korentyn screamed aloud, once, hoarsely; his fingers knitted with fearful tension, tearing at each other, at his garments. His tall frame convulsed and crumpled, and the Prince of Morvannec collapsed amid his streaming robes onto the stony floor of the smithy.
Roc and Ils cried out and ran to him, but Elof spread his arms and thrust them back by main force. Kermorvan rounded on him. "You! This is your doing! To him, who has shown you so much kindness!
What have you done to him?"
"The cruelest thing I could possibly have done," said Elof, and in his voice was utter blackness. "I have restored him to himself."
"What… Enough of your folly!" growled the warrior, and plunged forward to the prince. But now it was Ils who jerked him back, thrusting him down on a bench, and so startled was he that he suffered it a moment. Elof looked down at him, his face bloodless.
"With the virtues set within that crown, that helm, I have broken the holds of the Forest, the fetters Tapiau has set upon him."
Kermorvan stared up at him, lips moving before he could speak clear. "You… you measure yourself against one of the Powers? You claim…"
"In a small space. For a short span of time. His mind and memory are laid clear now, set free with no sweet songs to cloud them."
"Free to remember…" growled Roc hoarsely, kneeling slowly by the prince's side. He could not continue.
"Free to remember a thousand years," whispered Ils, and tears trickled down her plump cheeks. "To remember, all at once… Poor man! Poor lost man!"
Abruptly Kermorvan barged past Elof and knelt by Ko-rentyn. Elof saw him raise a hand to draw off the helm, and nerved himself to intervene. But it was another hand that clutched Kermorvan's wrist, and thrust it sharply away. Korentyn's eyes were open wide, gray and desolate as the winter sky they mirrored. "My dear lord!" whispered Kermorvan. "Prince Korentyn…"
The tall man shook his head, slowly. "Prince no longer," he muttered, and his voice was a whisper, dry and unsteady. "Korentyn no more… Korentyn is dead. His shadow am I, nothing more; his mask, empty, eyeless, hollow within. So are we all, all this court, a play of shadows dancing on the wall, the dancers long since fled. Shadows of life, of love, of honor… All lost. All sped. His work, his doing, accursed be he…"
"You see, Elof?" hissed Kermorvan. "You torment him, and to what…"
"No!" croaked Korentyn, clutching again at Kermorvan's arm. "Not him! Not him, for this pain I would buy with my own heart's blood, if need be! It is Tapiau I curse, the Forest and its poisoned gift of years! So many years, so many, of seeing, understanding, yet being blind…"
"Seeing what?" Elof's voice grew strange in his own ears, harsh and imperious, tinged with night. "What have you understood?"
Korentyn stared up at him, wide-eyed. "I know that voice, I know it of old… Tapiau's will, that I have understood, his design for men. His grand design!" The long fingers clawed in the dust.
Kermorvan looked at him doubtfully. "We know something of that. To be immortals, or
alfar
, as suits men best, are mere not worse choices than that?"
"Are there?" There was no kindness now in Korentyn's laughter; it was cold and bleak. "Do you not see that there
is
no choice at all? Save whether
to linger, or fall swiftly
. To preserve the aspect of a man awhile, or surrender it at once. A year, a thousand years, what does that matter? The burden of the years is too great for any man, and the Forest knows that well. In time the change must come to all, slowly, subtly, insidious as poison." He looked down at his long fingers; his fists clenched in sudden spasm, and blood started between the taut fingers. "Do I not see it at work? Even now, within me? Look at me! Look at any of us! Are we not, all of us, on the road to the
alfar
form? And that is Tapiau's will."
"But… He's not one of the evil Powers, is he?" spluttered Roc. "The ones of the Ice? I mean, if the Forest's not on the side of life, who is?"
"Of life, yes," said Korentyn bleakly. "But of men? Are we, as we are, on the side of life untrammeled, unbounded? Of any life save our own? One thing of worth these long years beneath the trees have taught me, and that is that all nature is one, that when we waste it we spill our own blood, we tear bread from our own lips. That lesson it is the lot of all men to learn in time, perhaps. But Tapiau would not have us learn; he sees in us the wasting of his domain, the taming of his power. He fears us, as the first Powers feared the coming of life into the lifeless perfection of their world. Yet he dare not rebel as they have, for what would become of the Forest then? He seeks instead to force men into the mold he thinks best. To strip us of what sets us most in conflict with all else that lives…"
"Our minds," said Elof heavily. "As I feared. He told me that unending life was only for the heroes among men. But I see now that no man cheats the River without a price. Such life is for nobody. In the world outside, with all its chances and perils, it could not be. Only here, in this womb of the Forest, can the bodies of ordinary men endure thus. And that robs endurance of all meaning! For what value had your life here, what purpose? To tread the same paths over again, to dance the same dances, say the same words, act the same pale acts of love sunken to ritual. And all the time his hand lay on your minds, told you this was perfection, the best you could hope to find. Perhaps he truly believes it is, so little does he comprehend men. Small wonder you have all grown weary in time, however hard you fought to remain yourselves. And as you grow weary your minds cloud, your bodies change. Until you are driven to lay aside your humanity as a relief from lingering pain. Small wonder."
Silence fell. Korentyn drew himself painfully to his knees, gazing at Elof in growing puzzlement. But suddenly his eyes shifted, staring past the smith, out of the doorway into the mass of trees beyond. Elof moved to bar it, lest he should try to flee, but then he also saw what had caught Korentyn's eye.
"See!" croaked the prince. "See! Snow falls! The first snow… Snow on the Forest!"
Kermorvan blinked like a man awaking from deep sleep. "Aye, my lord! A few flakes, only. And it cannot lie long, for spring is not far off. What of it? Let me…"
"What of it?" Korentyn twisted toward him, seized his arm once more with a frightening urgency and scrambled to his feet. "It comes every winter, now. But it did not fall, not then, not here, even this far north, ever… There was no snow when first I came here."
Kermorvan's face grew suddenly grim. "What is it you seek to tell me, my lord?"
Korentyn stared out into distances further than the trees. "Can you not see?" His voice grew clearer, edged now with a bitterness and a desolation that tore Elof's heart. "Why, it means that even a great Power may be blind to what he does not wish to see! It means that even Tapiau may welter in his own self-deceiving. For all that he has done to us, he has done in the name of helping us, saving us, even if only as animals among other animals. But even in that he fails! Across his boundaries the dark trees of Taoune'la spread, and behind them the barrens, the tundra, that smooth the paths of the Ice." The prince laughed again, and Elof shuddered at the sound. "There is snow on the Forest, where once there was none! And where the snow comes, the winters worsen, the icecaps lengthen, the snow line sinks ever lower, the cold creeps ever southward, southward… till glaciers spawn in the Meneth Aithen. Till down these very slopes they sweep, to meet their chill brethren of the north. And what of the Forest then?" He laughed again, but in the taut furrows of his face tears glistened. "Why did I endure, to come only to this?"
"You told me why," said Elof quietly. "You told me, and I understood. To pass on the wisdom in your charge, that was your wish, and your purpose. For such a chance, if no other, you have fought to remain yourself throughout long centuries. Give us now what counsel you can!"
Korentyn turned to gaze at him. "And that chance you have made possible. Hear me, then, what counsel I can give in pain and haste! You must flee, and soon. At the Forest margins its power is weakest. Join one of the hunts that is being readied, the hunt for onehorns, for that will turn near the Forest's northern margins."
"Northern?" asked Us, alarmed. "Is that not the most perilous way?"
"Aye; southward is less so, or was in my day. That is the way Lord Vayde took Ase and her followers, sailing southward from Morvannec into a great bay that opens there, and thence up a river and across the margins of Forest and Waste. A hard route, but with fewer great perils than these trees, or the haunted swamp and barren of Taoune'la. But from here the south is too far, near three times the distance, and through the Forest's heart; you could never escape the
alfar
, or worse sentinels. Seize what chance you have; flee north and follow your quest!"
"You must come with us," said Kermorvan quietly. In the dim firelight of the forge he seemed to have grown, almost to the equal of Korentyn's height. "Morvan's scattered children, east or west, have need of Korentyn Rhudri to lead them once again."
Korentyn shook his head slowly, and the crown flashed and sparkled among the shadows. "Not so! Not when they have Keryn again! For you are more like him than I would have thought possible, save perhaps that you have not yet come to believe enough in yourself. Seeing you, I could believe in truth that the River does cast us up upon its shores once again; and so, perhaps, the fear of it, the avoiding of it, is a cheat and a deception after all. If that is so, then perhaps we may meet once again. But not now. For I am out of my time, and strangely altered, no longer fit to wrestle with the world. That I leave to you, kinsman, descendant, brother, worthy bearer of our name, to you and these friends who follow you, valiant and wise. Do you succeed where we have failed! And my blessing upon you!" Kermorvan knelt before him, and Korentyn raised him, and embraced him.
In the turmoil of his heart Elof stepped forward, and he also bowed his head and knelt. "I ask no blessing, my lord! Only your justice, and your forgiveness, if you can spare it! For the deception I wrought upon you, and the cruel pain I cost you. But you know why these things had to be."
Then Elof looked up into Korentyn's eyes, and felt sick and faint at the torment he saw there, a mind rent asunder in its struggle to be free. "I know none better," said the prince, and that same air that Kermorvan bore, of justice and judgment out of the deeps of time, seemed to settle about him. "You are clear-sighted, young smith; you have wisdom and power beyond your years. You have done a deed few if any mastersmiths of my own time could have equaled. Do you yourself think it master's work?"
Unable to look away from those agonized eyes, Elof nodded. "Aye, lord. For it was as I planned it, from the start, the virtues I set in it harnessed and controlled. But it cost me dear."
"Then for that," said Korentyn sternly, "as was a prince's right of old, I name you now a smith born, made and proven, a master of your guild and mystery! Arise, Mastersmith, and prosper!" Elof stumbled up, startled, and felt Korentyn's hard hand on his shoulder. "And for that deed I hold you quit of the ill you have done me. But hear the doom I lay upon you in requital! For you have also a gift for cunning and ruthlessness; already it has served you ill, and may do so again. As well that you and others should be warned. So from this day forth you shall bear the name of Elof Valantor, which may mean the Skilled Hand, but also the Hand Hidden. Bear it with honor, but do not forget shame! And bear it with my blessing."