"Yes," said Maerad, looking down. Tears prickled her eyes.
"But I think he was right. The Treesong belongs to the Elidhu,
not to the Light or to the Dark, and we have to give it back to
them. It is not something that the Light should have. But, then,
you see, I betrayed him. Although if I had stayed, I would have
betrayed everyone else " She trailed off into silence.
Cadvan leaned forward and brushed Maerad's hair out of her eyes.
"Look at me, Maerad," he said. Unwillingly she lifted her eyes to meet his. "I had already begun to think that this is a matter of undoing what Light or Dark should never have done," he said. "If that is so, then that is what we must do. And you could not complete that quest while you were bound in the Ice Palace. Perhaps you have not betrayed the Winterking, after all. Perhaps you have helped him not to betray himself."
Maerad nodded. Cadvan gazed at her with a tenderness he had never shown her before.
"Never be ashamed of your love," he said gently. "The only thing to be ashamed of is denying your love. That is what makes the shadow grow within your heart; that is the darkening of the Light. And we all have many loves."
"I remembered the other people I love," said Maerad, her voice rough. "I remembered Hem most of all. And I dreamed of you, even though I thought you were dead. It gave me hope. But it was still almost the worst pain I had ever felt in my life, leaving the Winterking."
She began to sob, and leaned on Cadvan's shoulder. He wordlessly stroked her hair, saying nothing, until she had cried herself out and sat up, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.
"I want to find Hem," she said.
"We'll start tomorrow," answered Cadvan, smiling gently. "In my heart, I, too, think we must find him. But right now I feel as tired as ever I have in my life."
Maerad gave him a wobbly smile. "Tomorrow, then," she said.
That night, Maerad dreamed she was walking through a green meadow full of wildflowers, with grass almost as high as her knees. She reached a high hedge, and unlatched a gate and passed into an orchard of apple trees. It was early spring, and all of them held a heavy burden of pink-and-white blossoms.
Blossoms littered the ground like snow, and among the white-starred grasses nodded daffodils and bluebells and crocuses of many colors.
She wandered through the orchard into a garden just now greening from its winter slumber, and continued over a path of raked white gravel toward a beautiful house. Maerad knew it was her home, although she had never seen such a place before. It was a long, double-storied building of yellow stone, with wide windows that shone in the sunshine.
When she reached the front door, it opened of its own accord, and she passed inside. She entered every room, seeking something, but they were all empty. She ran upstairs, breathless, beginning to feel distressed, flinging open every door in an increasingly desperate search, but no one was there. A panic seized her, and she ran down the stairs and out of the house into the garden, tears falling down her cheeks.
And then she saw Hem among the apple trees, a half-eaten apple in his hand. He waved and started running toward her, his face radiant with joy.
He was coming home.
Here Ends
The Second Book
of Pellinor
Appendices
THESE notes are intended to be supplementary to and in some cases to update the Appendices to The Naming, the first volume of Pellinor, in which I sketched an introduction to the history and society of the Bards of Annar, and discussed briefly the central importance of the Speech to Bardic power. The Naming comprises the first two books of the Naraudh Lar-Chane, the Riddle of the Treesong, the great Annaren epic that chronicles the Second Rising of the Dark in Edil-Amarandh. The Riddle is translated from Books III and V of the Naraudh Lar-Chane.
The complex and fascinating world of Edil-Amarandh is one of the fastest-growing areas of contemporary scholarship, with branches in the disciplines of sociology, literature, history, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, women's studies, and even in the sciences; and it is consequently almost impossible to keep up with all the ongoing research. These notes cannot be anything but the briefest introduction to this field, but I have done my best to ensure that they accord with the most recent scholarship available.
THE PEOPLES OF
EDIL-AMARANDH
Annar and the Seven Kingdoms1
Edil-Amarandh is a general term for the continent that stretched from the deep North down to beyond the Suderain, from the Western Sea to the wilderness beyond the eastern side of the Osidh Annova. It is a term from the Speech, which can be translated variously as Earth-Throne or Navel of the Earth, and referred to the whole of the known world. Maerad's Bardic Truename, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na, was similar to saying, in modern English, "Maerad of the World."2
The Bards used two calendars, referred to as the Afinil and the Norloch yearcounts (A and N). The history of Edil-Amarandh was divided into three main Ages. The Age of the Elementals ended approximately 5,000 years before the time of the present story and concerns mainly the Wars of the Elementals, especially the War by Arkan, the Winterking, against the Elidhu of Annar, led by Ardina. Legends and songs, such as the many lays concerning Ardina, were preserved in tradition from this time, and were written down later.
Second was the Dawn Age, when the culture of the Dhyllin flowered across Annar, centering on the legendary citadel of Afinil. The Afinil yearcount started on its founding. It is reckoned that Bards, or Dhillarearen, appeared in Edil-Amarandh shortly before the Dawn Age, in a period known as the pre-Dawn, or Inela. The Afinil yearcount starts in the Dawn Age, and it continued until A2041, when Sharma, the Nameless One, overthrew the forces of Imbral and Lirion in the Battle of the Firman Plains and began the tyranny of the Dark, which became known later as the Great Silence.
Lanorgil3 named the third Age the Restoration; it dates from the founding of Norloch, and institutes the Norloch yearcount. At this time, Maninae founded the Schools and the Monarchy of Annar.
The Great Silence, which lasted more than a millennium from A2041 to A3234, was not counted as an Age.
The largest realm in the continent was Annar, but within Annar the different regions were widely diverse; there were huge differences between, say, Innail and Il-Arunedh, despite their speaking a common language. The diversity of Edil-Amarandh was even clearer in the Seven Kingdoms, which were distinct both from Annar and from each other in their cultures and languages. The sharing of power between Bards and what might be called for convenience "civil authorities" varied in each of the Seven Kingdoms. But perhaps because they were relatively small, and also because they were (despite being called kingdoms) not strictly speaking monarchies, conflict between the dual authorities was extremely rare and never reached, as it did in Annar, the point of civil war. In two of the kingdoms—Amdridh and the Suderain—civil authority was determined by heredity, although rulers could be legally deposed by the other authorities if they were considered by the population to be exceeding or abusing their powers. This, in fact, happened only once, in Turbansk in A1333, when Aleksil the Tyrant, who was mightily resented for the crippling taxes he instituted to finance his opulent court, was overthrown in a bloodless coup after a popular uprising supported by the School of Turbansk. More common than hereditary succession were varying degrees of democracy, ranging from full enfranchisement (Lanorial, Culain, Lirhan), where every adult citizen was expected to vote, to partial representation, as in Thorold and Ileadh, where village Mayors or Thanes would represent popular interests and vote for the Chamber in Thorold, or the Parliament, in Ileadh.
The relationships between these different authorities were extremely complex, and varied from kingdom to kingdom, but they worked effectively to balance the possible extremes of each. Bardic authority was complementary to the civil authority of non-Bards, and each took supreme authority in different areas. Bards in the Seven Kingdoms were greatly respected. They provid
ed education, expertise, and training in various arts and crafts; the rituals of the year such as the Midsummer Festival described in Thorold in The Riddle; spiritual authority; and (not unimportantly) a great deal of entertainment— music, in particular. Civil authorities took care of most areas of justice, administration, and defense, although there was a lot of crossover— for example, a plaintiff could appeal to a Bardic tribunal if he felt aggrieved by civic justice, and Bards, both as soldiers and mages, were important contributors to a region's military power.
By their nature, the civic authorities tended to be parochial in their concerns, whereas the Bards' view was wider. In practice, this led to cultures of negotiation and diplomacy, and mitigated against any tendencies to absolute rule. It also led to frustrations: the Bard Liric was not alone when he complained peevishly during a dispute over the placement of a bridge in N356 that the Councilors of Lirhan were "stiff-neck'd and ignorant" and that Lirhan's citizenship was "barellheaded" for electing them. Many Bards complained over the centuries about the conservatism and resistance to change of the civic authorities. There were frequent arguments about trade and other interests between the different kingdoms: most of these kinds of disputes were resolved through the mediation of the Bards. However, despite these hiccups, nothing disturbed the model of dual authority in the Seven Kingdoms, and in the presence of external threat it was proverbial that all smaller disputes were forgotten to protect the common interest. The Seven Kingdoms were proud that they had been the centers of resistance to the Nameless One during the Great Silence, and both the civic authorities and the Bards nourished that tradition, represented by a common code of fealty to the Light and the Balance, which, at its best, balanced both local and general interests.
Although it was by far the largest in area and population of all the realms of Edil-Amarandh, Annar's power over the surrounding territories was nonexistent: it was a relationship of cooperation, promulgated in large part by the practical unity of Bards. Any attempt by Annar to assert central rule was always resisted fiercely by the Seven Kingdoms.
The most serious crisis before the events of this book occurred during the Long Wars (N710-N751), when Dhuran the Red (so named for his red hair and bad temper) proclaimed Annaren the Empire and himself Emperor after a coup in which he assassinated his brother, Ilbaran III, in N710. His claim to rule the Seven Kingdoms by Right of the Triple Sceptre led to open warfare between the Seven Kingdoms and Annar. He launched invasions against Lanorial and Ileadh after they sharply rejected his authority as both illegitimate and a corruption of the Balance and the Light. The actual invasions were easily beaten back, since Dhuran was simultaneously embroiled in ruinous civil war against the sons of Ilbaran, Baran, and Ebaran, and did not have the resources to mount an effective offensive. For most of the four decades of conflict that followed, the Seven Kingdoms, after severing their alliances with Norloch and Annar and strengthening their defenses, remained warily aloof from these internecine wars, waiting to see who would win. None of the claimants for the throne was an attractive prospect: the two sons of Ilbaran were as ruthless in their pursuit of power as Dhuran, and the fourth possible candidate, Dhuran's daughter Ilseticine the Fair, was murdered by Baran early in the Long Wars. When Dhuran was cast off the throne by Baran in N749, the new King's first act was to take the tide of the White Flame (the prefix Nor), an act of staggering hubris that signified his appropriation of the traditional authority of the Bards. The newly styled Nor-Baran instituted a tyranny crueler than that of his predecessor: exacting an implacable revenge on anyone he knew or suspected of opposing him, and imprisoning and executing his brother, Ebaran, for treason. He also announced that the Schools would now exist only by Royal favor, and that any Schools that did not acknowledge this would be destroyed by force of arms. Even Dhuran the Red had not dared to alienate the Bards.
At this point, the Seven Kingdoms became deeply alarmed, as they rightly guessed that armed invasion of their territories was not far away, and made open alliance with the Bards of Annar. Nor-Baran's defeat and death in battle occurred two years later.
The Long Wars led to the final overthrow of the monarchy, the end of the line of Maninae, and the subsequent rule of Annar by the Norloch Bards. This outcome was often considered, especially in the Seven Kingdoms, a calamitous result, since it upset the balance between civil and Bardic authority, although two centuries of wise and fair rule by Noldor (First Bard from N745-N866) and Nardil (N866-N939) ensued. However, Enkir's reign as First Bard from N939 amply bore out their forebodings.
The history of the relationship between the Seven Kingdoms and Annar was, therefore, by no means untroubled. This background contributed to the disquiet with which the First Bards of the Seven Kingdoms had been watching developments in Norloch after the sacking of the School of Pellinor in N935, ten years before the events recounted in the Naraudh Lar-Chane. Although Enkir was a practiced politician, and was careful to stress his fealty to the Light, his uncompromising insistence on the necessity of central authority and his increased campaigning against female Bards ensured that his rapid rise to power and his appointment to Norloch's First Circle in the early decades of the N900s was viewed with alarm in the Seven Kingdoms. The First Bards and civil rulers were disturbed enough to strengthen what had always been an unofficial alliance designed to protect the Seven Kingdoms against the machinations of Annar.
All their fears were confirmed by Enkir's extraordinary Edict of Loyalty after the Burning of Norloch, which demanded their allegiance in terms that entirely rewrote the old alliances. The Kingdoms began to arm themselves against Norloch. Annar itself, with Schools and Fesses across the realm differing sharply in their responses to Enkir's Edict, seemed to be dangerously close to the brink of civil war. Massive forces from Den Raven marched against the fortress cities of the Suderain with the aim of taking Baladh, Turbansk, and Car Amdridh, and acquiring bases from which to attack Annar itself. Sharma, the Nameless One, was marshaling his armies to war against Annar and the Seven Kingdoms at a time when the forces of the Light had never been more bitterly divided.
The Pilanel
The Pilanel4 (or the Pilani, as they referred to themselves) were a nomad people who inhabited the northern land of Zmarkan, a wide tundra that stretched north of the Osidh Elanor. No records exist of when they first settled the Arkiadera, or Mother Plains, but it was probably before the time of the founding of Afinil, after the end of the Elemental Wars.
The Pilanel, having an almost completely oral culture, did not keep written records as the Bards did, and so it is much less well documented than Annaren culture. They did invent a system of runes, which the Bards adapted and extended into the Ladhen runes. Unfortunately, all we know of the Pilanel writing is what remains in the Ladhen runes, since no examples have so far been found; it seems likely that the Pilanel runes were simply scratched at need into trees and stones, to be read by other travelers. Such knowledge as we do have of the Pilanel peoples comes mainly from those Pilanel Dhillarearen who became Annaren Bards, and wrote about their own people in Annaren script. However, even those records are full of elisions, as it was forbidden for Pilanel to reveal many of their customs and beliefs to nonPilanel.5
The extant records portray an extremely resourceful and adaptive people who possessed a rich and ancient visual and oral culture of their own with roots that went back, unbroken, to before the Great Silence. They had their share of Dhillarearen, some of whom, like Maerad's father, Dorn a Triberi, went south to the Schools to be trained in Annaren lore. Those who went to the Schools seem to be the exceptions, rather than the rule, and Pilanel with the Voice (as they referred to those born with the Gift) held honored places in Pilanel culture. These roles were similar in some ways to those that Bards held in Annar and the Seven Kingdoms. However, the Pilanel did not have the system of dual authority that held sway in the south, and it was not unusual for the chieftains of the tribes to be Dhillarearen. Lineages of the Howe leaders recorded by Anarkin of Lirigon, himself a
Pilanel Bard, mark about half the Pilanel rulers as Dhillarearen.6
The Pilanel divided themselves roughly into two major populations, the Northern and the Southern Clans, who were identified by the Howe—Murask in the South or Tlon in the North—to which they traveled to spend each winter. There was no clear division between the Northern and Southern Clans, as intermarriage was common, and some clans would regularly swap between the Howes. A clan was a loose grouping generally, but not necessarily, related by blood, which traveled together during the summer months; it varied in size from perhaps half a dozen people to several dozen. Moving between clans, through marriage or need or inclination, was also not uncommon.
The Southern Pilanel were famous horsebreeders and trainers (most of the Bard horses were bred and trained by Pilanel), but they also pursued a bewildering range of crafts and employments during the summer months. Some were traders, selling goods made during the long winter months in the Howe, and would also travel as far as the Suderain to buy goods in the markets, which they would then sell in Annar; some were hawkers and tinkers, repairing household goods; some became itinerant laborers and worked on Annaren farms during the summer. The Northern Pilanel traded furs, textiles, and carved goods, and also herded and bred the oribanik deer, which they used for milk, skins, and meat.
The Howes, giant earth and stone fortresses capable of housing several thousand, were some of the most ancient structures in Edil-Amarandh, dating (like Turbansk, the great city of Suderain in the South) from the Inela, the time after the Age of the Elementals and before the Dawn Age. There is an extremely detailed description of the Murask Howe's sophisticated heating and water system by Belgar of Gent at the Restoration,7 and there is every reason to believe that the Schools borrowed and adapted the Howe systems for their own use. The Murask Howe is described in detail in the Naraudh Lar-Chane, as is the Pilanel's communal style of living.