The Riddle

  This time she did not try to speak to him, and he did not speak to her at all. When he left, Nim confirmed they would soon be at Arkan-da.

  "I suppose then I shall not see you again," he said.

  "I will escape," said Maerad. "And I will go to Annar. You should too."

  "I have to look after my grandmother and my sister," said Nim. "My father is dead, too, and there is no one else to care for them. I cannot leave my people."

  "Then maybe we will not meet. Unless one day there is peace in our lands, and perhaps then we could visit each other's homes." It was a childish fantasy, but Maerad said it anyway. Speaking of any future was only dreaming.

  Nim laughed. "My people are not peaceful," he said.

  "Peace is better than killing," said Maerad with feeling.

  "I think so too." Nim was silent; he seemed to be remembering something. "I used to like gathering the wildflowers with my sister. We were sent out to get berries and we would gather flowers instead. My mother would be very angry."

  Maerad looked at him curiously. "An old woman told me that the Jussacks keep their women in holes in the ground," she said.

  "That's not true. Pilani lies," Nim spat.

  "Well, maybe the Jussacks tell lies about the Pilani, too. The man you killed—my cousin, Dharin a Lobvar—he too might have gathered flowers instead of berries."

  Nim was silent for almost an hour after that. Maerad settled down to sleep, her eyes heavy. She still found moving difficult, although she did not feel as sick as she had. She was quite certain that Amusk had almost killed her when he had captured her. All her hatred now focused on him, and on the Winterking. She brooded, wondering what she would find at Arkan-da.

  "I do not know much of the world," said Nim, breaking into her thoughts. "Perhaps you are right. You know different peoples and different languages. All I know is my people and my language."

  "I don't know that much," said Maerad sleepily. "Some people have taught me some things."

  "Well, you are lucky," said Nim. "Maybe what they tell about the Pilani are lies. But would we stop warring against them if there were no lies?"

  "You might." Maerad leaned on her elbow and looked at him.

  "And we might not," said Nim. "I don't know."

  "Maybe you will become the big chieftain and stop them," said Maerad.

  "And maybe then I will visit you in Annar."

  They smiled at each other, each knowing the impossibility of what they were saying. For a moment, they were like children playing a game in which, for a short time, they could hide from a cruel adult world.

  The next day Maerad saw a range of mountains in the distance ahead of them, a low purple shape on the horizon that might have been clouds. Nim told her that they were mountains, the range his people called the Trukuch. The ground began to rise, and the flatness was relieved by hills and low ridges. Maerad began to see dwarf hazels pushing through the crust of snow, and then groves of spruce or fir.

  They drew ever closer and closer, until they were running in the mountains' shadow eastward to Arkan-da, along a road marked by standing stones. The Trukuch mountains rose on their right, sharp blades against the gloomy skies, their sheer sides naked of snow, their crowns shrouded in dark clouds, and Maerad's spirits dropped again to their lowest ebb. The mountain walls seemed like the outlying ramparts of a vast fortress. She began to realize how foolish it was to believe that she could escape the Winterking's stronghold once she was enclosed within it. The little hope she had distilled from her friendship with Nim evaporated and vanished.

  Her continual silent battle with the sorcerer briefly intensified. She was maliciously satisfied to see his drawn face grow grayer, his eyes bloodshot, his thin mouth yet thinner. But he still had the upper hand; she could struggle against his enchantment, but she could not break it. Perhaps, though, she was breaking him.

  She hated Amusk with a passion that contained all her grief and love for everyone she had lost. She would have liked to make him so strained that his heart burst and he fell to the ground, his eyes turned up, the blood from his mouth staining the snow as Dharin's had stained it, steaming in the cold. The image gave her a grim pleasure. But Amusk did not break.

  Nim and Maerad's conversations almost ceased when they came close to the mountains. Nim also looked strained, for reasons Maerad could not guess, and he was as sharp with her as he had been when she was first captured. But Maerad did not mind; she was past caring about herself now. She felt a rising gladness that she was being taken to face her enemy. The Winterking had sent the stormdog against her in the Straits of Thorold, and the Winterking had killed Cadvan in the Gwalhain Pass, and finally he had murdered Dharin. Perhaps, as Inka-Reb seemed to, he knew about the marks on the lyre, and wanted them for himself. Whatever he wanted, Maerad was not going to gratify him. He had taken such care to ensure that she survived that she was sure the way to disappoint him was to bring about her own death.

  She had already decided that she could not do so while she was in Nim's care; she could not bear the weight of his inevitable death on her conscience. She waited, while the sled swept past the mountains, which grew higher and grimmer the farther they journeyed.

  I feel you, my enemy, she said to the night. I feel you closer and closer. At last I will look on your face. Something within her laughed, but it was not joyful laughter; it was the defiance of someone who faced certain death, and no longer cared. I will not die a slave, she said to herself. I have earned that much.

  The day before they reached Arkan-da, a heavy mist rolled down from the mountains, enclosing the sleds in an eerie white silence. Their pace slowed considerably, and Nim was sent ahead to track the way. Maerad sat on the sled before him indifferently. The mist seemed full of frightening apparitions that dissolved as they neared them, and they could hear dreadful noises that seemed to be the very stones groaning and crying out in pain or rage. Maerad could feel the fear of the men in the sleds behind them. But the apparitions and the noises had no effect on her; nothing frightened her anymore. She pushed against the sorcerer's spell and felt Amusk weaken. Even he is afraid, she thought. He still wants to live; he still wants to have power in this world. I do not, and so I am not afraid.

  That night, Nim and Maerad spoke for the last time. Maerad searched through her clothes; she badly wanted to give him something. She unpinned her silver lily brooch, the sign that marked her as a Bard of Pellinor. He would be able to hide it from the others, and she would not be needing it anymore. She stroked it, remembering the gentle, stern woman who had given it to her: Oron, First Bard of Innail.

  Perhaps Oron would not think it amiss that she should give away this token for the sake of the rough kindness Nim had shown her. It was in Innail that Maerad had first understood the value of human kindness. She remembered Silvia telling her: The law is that the hungry must be fed, and the homeless must be housed, and the sick must be healed. That is the way of the Light. Maerad smiled at the memory, so distant from her bitter present, and ran her fingers over the lily sign of Pellinor one last time.

  "Nim," she said. "This is for you." She handed him the brooch.

  He took it with wonder, his eyes widening. "It is a lovely thing," he said. "A precious thing. I have nothing that I can give you in return."

  "You have given me much," said Maerad. "This is to thank you. You have been kind to me. You didn't have to be."

  She saw a flush run up his neck and over his face, and he took the brooch awkwardly and put it inside his clothes.

  "I will not forget," he said, and turned away.

  The sun no longer seemed to exist. The day was distinguishable from night only because the shadows were slightly less dark. The mist enveloped the sleds so they were barely visible. There were no stars: the ground threw up a white glimmer, as if it were itself a source of light, and was the only thing that kept them from moving through complete darkness.

  When they had begun that morning, the teams had turned south and started running swiftly
along a narrow mountain pass. The standing stones loomed out of the mist and vanished, and Maerad thought of those she had seen along the Gwalhain Pass: the same people must have made this road, in ages long past. The air was still and freezing.

  Maerad sat on Nim's sled, ahead of the others, hugging her lyre between her knees. She felt dizzy, unable to think; she could feel the closeness of the Winterking in her mind, the shadow that had been pressing upon her ever since she had set foot in Zmarkan. Waves of blackness broke over her; she sank into them, as she had when she had first been captured, to re-emerge not knowing how long she had been unconscious. She could feel Amusk's spell pressing harder against her, and his sense of triumph as he felt her resistance waver, and a reflexive contempt stirred in her stomach. It was not Amusk who made her falter.

  It was certainly night when they reached a lofty arch of black stone. Its keystone stood high over the road, and, as they neared it, Maerad felt dread tightening her stomach. The road ran through it into a natural courtyard walled by high buttresses of stone. At the far end reared the dark flank of a mountain. The arch seemed to be made of some kind of polished basalt covered with strange reliefs; the carvings looked as sharp as if they had been finished the day before, and yet the arch seemed ancient. It stood all by itself, with no buildings of any kind around it. Its power made Maerad feel faint.

  The dogs would not pass beneath the arch, despite being severely whipped, and finally, cursing, the Jussacks stepped out of their sleds. Maerad was ordered to walk in front of them. The men's fear was palpable. Maerad hurriedly grabbed her lyre, slinging it in front of her under her coat, and stepped onto the ground. Immediately her knees buckled beneath her. Somebody kicked her, and she curled herself into a ball around her lyre, feeling the ground cold against her face, suddenly indifferent. They could kick her as much as they liked. Let them kill her.

  There was more cursing; an argument was breaking out between Amusk and two of the other men. Nim was silent. Finally she was pulled upright, and her arms were slung about the shoulders of Nim and Amusk, so that her toes scraped the ground. The other three Jussacks stayed behind with the sleds.

  As they passed under the arch, a great coldness fell on her heart, as if everything inside her turned to ice.

  Chapter XXIII

  THE ICE PALACE

  MAERAD thought she was dreaming. She was deliriously warm—warm as she had not been since she had left Murask eight weeks before—and she was curled up in a bed of surpassing comfort. She was dressed in a long nightgown that stretched down to her toes. Her skin felt silky and clean, and her hair was spread out over the furs, freshly washed and smelling of sweet herbs.

  She sat up and looked around in amazement. She was in a room that seemed to be made of something like moonstone: the walls were translucent and shimmered with a dim light. She reached out and touched the wall; it was cold, but not unpleasantly so. Before her was a doorway covered with an unfigured azure hanging, and on the floor, which was made of the same substance as the walls, was a rich rug of the same color.

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes, blinking, and then stopped and looked down at her left hand. It was the wrong shape. She dropped it on the fur coverlet, as if it didn't belong to her, and looked again. Something was wrong. She had a thumb, a forefinger, half of her middle finger, to its first knuckle, and then a clean, white scar. There was no pain.

  She studied her hand with a kind of dazed wonder, and then spread out her right hand next to it on the fur. She wore the golden ring Ardina had given her on her right hand, on the third finger. For a while, as if to steady herself, Maerad stared at its delicate pattern of entwined lilies. When she didn't look at her left hand, it felt exactly the same as it had before, as if her mind made ghostly fingers to replace those that weren't there. She curled her left hand, feeling its new shape, and then hid it under the coverlet. It's just an ugly claw, she thought. How am I going to play? And then she looked around. Where am I? Am I dead, after all? But if I were dead, would my fingers be missing?

  She shook her head in bewilderment. Her last memory was of passing under the black arch on the road in the mountains. She had known already it was the entrance to Arkan-da, the stronghold of Arkan, the Winterking, and she had been consumed with dread. But here she felt only peace and light.

  She looked around the room again: it must be enchanted, but she couldn't sense any magery around her. The room was very beautiful, as beautiful as some of the rooms she had seen in Annar, but stranger: there were no lamps, although the room was softly illuminated, and no furniture apart from the bed, which was little more than a mattress on the floor, and a strangely carved black stool. Against the stool leaned her pack, and her lyre in its leather case. She stared at them, feeling more amazed by their presence than almost anything else. What were they doing there? They must have been placed there by someone, as if she were a guest in a Bardhouse.

  She searched within herself, looking for her own magery, but nothing was there. Once I was the most powerful Bard in Edil-Amarandh, she thought, and now I am nothing. What has happened to me? Where did my Gift go? But no self-pity or despair stirred with these thoughts; all she felt was a kind of blank amazement.

  I must be dead, she thought again. But I don't feel dead. Unless the dead can feel exhausted . . . and why wouldn't they? She took her left hand out from under the cover and looked at it again. It looked like an injury that had happened years ago. Where her fingers had been was just smooth white skin. She felt a sudden pity for her maimed hand and stroked the scar; it was a little sensitive, but that was all. Then she hid it again and lay down and shut her eyes.

  If I am not dead, she thought, I must be alive. But if I am alive, where am I? The questions circled around in her head like aimless flies, bumping into each other and reaching no destination until exhaustion crept up on her again, and she drifted back into sleep.

  When Maerad next opened her eyes, she was still in the same warm bed, and her fingers were still missing. What woke her was thirst; her mouth was parched. She sat up, wondering where she was going to find some water, and saw that next to the bed there was now a table, made in the same style as the stool, and on it was a crystal decanter and a cup. In the corner of the room now stood a plain wooden chest. She awkwardly poured herself some water and drank it greedily, struggling to use her maimed hand.

  She swung her legs out of the bed and put her feet on the carpet. It was thick and warm, and involuntarily she wiggled her toes. To be comfortable, to be warm, to be clean, to feel her body sighing out in relief; these were seductions that were hard to resist after the hardships and harshness of her recent life. But her mind felt alert and suspicious. This was surely enchantment, of a most powerful kind, and she felt she ought to resist it. But not now. Not now.

  She walked over to her pack, her legs wobbly and weak, as she had not walked for many weeks, and picked it up. The familiar smell of its worn leather was reassuring. She emptied it onto the bed. Everything was there, apparently untouched: her spare clothes, her blue cloak, the oilskin-wrapped book of Dernhil's poems, her almost-empty bottle of medhyl, the pipes Ardina had given her, the ivory carving of the fish from the Wise Kindred, even, to her surprise, the blackstone. Her fighting gear, her sword, Irigan, and her helm, were missing, but her mail coat was folded up where she had left it in the pack. The small dagger she had carried since leaving Gilman's Cot was also missing. She slowly repacked everything, caressing each object as she did so, and put her bag back against the stool. She picked up her lyre, holding it in the crook of her arm, although she did not take it from its leather casing.

  It had been ages since she had looked properly at her possessions. It was like a retelling of herself. Since Dharin's murder, she had been in and out of a twilight of the soul, scarcely remembering who she was, wanting to die. I am Elednor, she said fiercely to herself. That means something. But what? answered that other mocking voice in her head. What does it mean?

  "It means I have failed," she s
aid out loud, and felt her despair surge back in a dark, heavy wave. She thought of the Bard Ilar, whom she had killed in Annar, and of the deaths of Cadvan and of the horses. She flinched away from the memory of the landslide, only to see a vivid image of Dharin, his face still in death. She had murdered the Bard from Lirigon: was that why Cadvan and Dharin had died? Was it a kind of payment? She wasn't able to think about what that might mean. At least she had not seen Dernhil die. Some mercies, she thought bitterly, are very small.

  She got back into her bed, holding the lyre in her arms. She didn't want to play it; she was too frightened to try. It was quite likely that she would never play anything again.

  Maerad hadn't seen anyone since she had first woken, but at some point, while she had been unconscious, someone had washed her and dressed her and put her into bed. And someone had placed the water and the table by her bed while she had been asleep. The thought was disturbing.

  She walked to the doorway and pulled back the azure hanging. Outside the room was a windowless corridor illuminated with the same soft, sourceless light as her chamber. The ceiling was high and vaulted, and she could see doorways leading to other chambers. She looked up and down, but she couldn't see any sign of life. For a moment she toyed with the idea of exploring, but her knees were shaking from the small effort she had expended in walking to the door, and she was afraid of getting lost. She went back to her bed and picked up her lyre again.

  Maerad was hungry now. Perhaps someone would bring her food, as someone had brought her water. She might be able to ask where she was.

  She sat on the bed and waited. For the moment, there was nothing else to do.

  She didn't know how long it was before someone finally appeared. The light in her room was unchanging, giving no idea of the passing of time. She struggled against the overwhelming temptation to go back to sleep: she was determined to be conscious next time someone came into her room.