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unchanging, but it became more cracked and overgrown. Other travelers were few, rarely on foot, and always armed and distrustful. The station they came to late on the third night was a ruin, little better than a low wall with a firepit; on the fourth night, after a day of driving rain, they could not find the station, so overgrown was it. At last they settled in the shelter of a great cedar, wrapping themselves in all their blankets, skins and oiled cloth. In the morning they were all shivering and miserable again except Alv and the Mastersmith. "And this is the best of our journey so far!" the smith remarked, listening to coughs and curses as he led the party away on a narrow trail through the brush. "From here on the High road has not been maintained this last hundred years, and the land reclaims it. So instead we are setting off across the Starkenfells—a good week's ride over moorland."
    "Is this where your house is, Mastersmith?" asked Alv, looking around dubiously as they neared the top of a slope. The trees were thinning out around them, and the underbrush also; ahead were wide patches of long grass, waving in the cool humid wind.
    "No indeed—the climate is anything but healthy! It lies beyond the Fells—a day or two's travel through the forests, and then another two into the mountains—high above the cares of this world. But I imagine you have never seen a mountain?"
    "I've heard of them," said Alv, a little casually. The Mastersmith smiled faintly, and stretched out a long hand northward. Alv followed his gaze as they crested the slope, and gasped aloud. The wave he had seen from afar seemed to tower over him now, a vast wall of gray-green glass sparkling in the clear air, flinging its jagged white crests up into the blue infinity like spray from the rocks. For a moment, such was the power and terror of the spectacle, he almost thought to see it come sweeping down across the land. And then it seemed a greater miracle that so immense and graceful a shape could remain frozen in that instant of motion.
    "Mastersmith—"
    "Yes?"
    "How did mountains come to be? They have not always been there, surely? They look—as if they had been thrust up from somewhere."
    The Mastersmith turned in his saddle to stare at Alv. "I was not mistaken, I see. There is perception in you, boy, true perception. Yes, they were thrust up, like a wave— and I believe not so long ago, in the life of the land, for the edges of the rock are sharp and little touched by the weather, and the fires under the Earth burn strong there— as you will see. But all the mountains are not the same age, I think, for some are more weathered than others and of different rock. That you will learn about in due time, boy, for a good smith must be able to find and mine his own new ore at times—to make it truly pure, and truly his. You will enjoy that, I think."
    Indeed, Alv could hardly wait. In this alone he would surpass that old idiot Hervar, for the graybeard had not strayed beyond the village in all the years Alv could remember, let alone gone searching for ore. Small wonder he had got himself killed, if he was so little concerned with his art. It was not a mistake Alv intended to make.
    Over the next few days it was increasingly he and not Ingar who rode and talked with the Mastersmith, plying him with questions and never failing to find an answer that fed the fires in his mind. He was wary of offending the senior apprentice at first, but for his part Ingar seemed glad of the rest. Hard as it was to believe, he seemed to find his master's company a strain, and was happier joking with Roc. Ernan rode in pinch-mouthed silence, which suited the others as much as it seemed to suit him.
    So they journeyed across the moorland, a lonely, eerie place in which they saw no other traveler, and the only sounds of life were thin cool bird calls echoing through the damp air. At times the Mastersmith would point out the wheeling flight of a condor, high against the