Gate of Ivrel

It was late that he realized the nature of the road he had begun to travel, and that it was the old qujalin road and not the one he sought. Occasional paving rang under the bay mare’s hooves. Occasional stones thrust up by the roadside and he began to fear indeed that it led to the dead places, the cursed grounds. Snow fell for a time, whiting everything out—stopping pursuit (he hoped that, at least). And he spent the night in the saddle, daring only to sleep a time in the early morning, after the movings in the brush were silenced and he not longer feared wolves.

Then he rode the long day down from the Aenish side of the pass, weak and sick with hunger.

He found himself entering a valley of standing stones.

There was no longer doubt that qujalin hands had reared such monoliths. It was Morgaine’s vale: he knew it now, of the songs and of evil rumor. It was a place no man of Kursh or Andur would have traveled with a light heart at noontide, and the sun was sinking quickly toward dark, with another bank of cloud rolling in off the ridge of the mountains at his back.

He dared look up between the pillars that crowned the conical hill called Morgaine’s Tomb, and the declining sun shimmered there like a butterfly caught in a web, all torn and fluttering. It was the effect of Witchfires, like the great Witchfire on Mount Ivrel where the Hjemur-lord ruled, proving qujalin powers were not entirely faded there or here.

Vanye wrapped his tattered cloak about his mailed shoulders and put the exhausted horse to a quicker pace, past the tangle of unhallowed stones at the base of the hill. The fair-haired witch had shaken all Andur-Kursh in war, cast half the Middle Realms into the lap of Thiye Thiye’s-son. Here the air was still uneasy, whether with the power of the Stones or with the memory of Morgaine, it was uncertain.

When Thiye ruled in Hjemur

came strangers riding there,

and three were dark and one was gold,

and one like frost was fair.

The mare’s hooves upon the crusted snow echoed the old verses in his mind, an ill song for the place and the hour. For many years after the world had seen the welcome last of Morgaine Frosthair, demented men claimed to have seen her, while others said that she slept, waiting to draw a new generation of men to their ruin, as she had ruined Andur once at Irien.

Fair was she, and fatal as fair,

and cursed who gave her ear;

now men are few and wolves are more,

and the Winter drawing near.

If in fact the mound did hold Morgaine’s bones, it was fitting burial for one of her old, inhuman blood. Even the trees hereabouts grew crooked: so did they wherever there were Stones of Power, as though even the nature of the patient trees was warped by the near presence of the Stones; like souls twisted and stunted by living in the continual presence of evil. The top of the hill was barren: no trees grew there at all.

He was glad when he had passed the narrow stream-channel between the hills and left the vicinity of the Stones. And suddenly he had before him as it were a sign that he had run into better fortunes, and that heaven and the land of his cousins of Aenor-Pyven promised him safety.

A small band of deer wandered belly-deep in the snows by the little brook, hungrily stripping the red howan berries from the thicket

It was a land blessedly unlike that of the harsh Cedur Maje, or Gervaine’s Morij Erd, where even the wolves often went hungry, for Aenor-Pyven lay far southward from Hjemur, still untouched by the troubles that had so long lain over the Middle Realms.

He feverishly unslung his bow and strung it, his hands shaking with weakness, and he launched one of the gray-feathered Nhi shafts at the nearest buck. But the mare chose that moment to shift weight, and he cursed in frustration and aching hunger: the shaft sped amiss and hit the buck in the flank, scattered the others.

The wounded buck lunged and stumbled and began to run, crazed with pain and splashing the white snow with great gouts of blood. Vanye had no time for a second arrow. It ran back into Morgaine’s valley, and there he would not follow it He saw it climb—insane, as if the queerness in that valley had taken its fear-hazed wits and driven it against nature, killing itself in its exertions, driving it toward that shimmering web which even insects and growing things avoided.

It struck between the pillars and vanished.

So did the tracks and the blood.

The deer grazed, on the other side of the stream.