The Riddle (27 page)

“In my light?” Maerad met his eyes, and then flinched away. “Well, I’ve been feeling a little — sad. So perhaps it makes me seem dimmer, or something. I noticed that with Silvia, whenever she was thinking about her daughter and was missing her.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean that some darkness within you might be gathering itself. Not just a sadness, but an active malice, which you must learn how to resist. I fear what it might mean if we find ourselves again in peril. I don’t know what you might do.”

Maerad gasped as if he had hit her. Cadvan’s words bit deeply, striking her worst fears. “How can you say that?” she asked when she had recovered from her shock. “It’s not true. Oh, Cadvan, I know I did something wrong, but you are talking as if I am something evil myself. . . .”

“I did not say that,” said Cadvan sharply. “I said that your light has changed and that within you moves some shadow. I do not understand what it is, or why it has happened, but I think your killing of Ilar of Desor was a token of something. . . .”

“It was just a mistake!” Maerad stood up in her agitation, unaware that tears were gathering in her eyes. “I didn’t mean to, Cadvan. I didn’t mean to. She was just so horrible, and then she hit me with that blast —”

“I know what happened.” Cadvan cut her off. “Maerad, I don’t want to talk about that incident, not now. What I am trying to talk about is much more difficult. I think you need to understand what is moving within you.”

“If you hadn’t been punishing me these past few days, treating me like I was beneath your notice, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so dark.” All Maerad’s resentment welled up inside her; she wanted to hit him. “You’ve made me feel like a piece of offal or something. Well, I’m sorry for what I did. But that doesn’t mean that you can treat me like —”

“Maerad, Maerad . . .” Cadvan stood up and took both her hands in his. She withdrew them roughly and turned away. “Maerad, I was not punishing you. I did not know what to say. I needed to think.”

“About how evil I am,” said Maerad bitterly.

“No.” Cadvan took a deep breath. “Maerad, you have more innate power than any Bard I have ever met. Those powers are dangerous, and you have to know how to use them, so you don’t hurt yourself, so you don’t hurt the Light. You need to —”

“I know how to use them.” Maerad glared at Cadvan. “What I don’t need is you standing there telling me that I’m some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of Hull.”

“We all have darknesses within us,” said Cadvan. “And we all have to learn how to deal with them. You more than anyone. But we have to recognize what they are first.”

“I know what they are!” Maerad turned fiercely, trembling with anger. “I need to know I have friends who trust me. I need to know I have a family who loves me. And I don’t have either of these things.” Tears of self-pity rose in her throat, choking her, but she swallowed them down with a massive effort of will. “I’m just a tool of the Light. Those Bards don’t care about me. You don’t; nobody does. You all just want to use me, so the Nameless One is destroyed. Well, I can’t go up to his big black tower and cast him down by myself, can I? So I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. There’s all this gibberish about finding the Treesong, when we don’t know what it is, and being nice even when people want to kill us, and I’m just supposed to nod my head and do what I’m told and be what I’m supposed to be. Well, I’m just me, and that’s that.”

Cadvan had listened to her without interrupting, his face downcast, his expression unreadable. “I’m sorry I’ve made you feel more lonely,” he said.

“I don’t need your understanding,” she answered harshly. “I’ve learned how to get along without that.”

There was a long silence while Maerad, her back turned to Cadvan, tried to master herself. She wanted to fling herself on the floor and weep until she was completely emptied of tears. But she would not cry in front of Cadvan.

“Maerad, this is more important for you than anyone else,” said Cadvan at last. “And I am saying it because I care for you. If you do not understand this, my heart forebodes disaster.”

“I understand enough,” said Maerad in a muffled voice. “I understand that I’m on my own. Well, that’s no different from how it’s always been.”

“You’re not alone,” said Cadvan, but this time, she did not answer him.

After that night, Cadvan was gentler with Maerad, but once she had let out her resentment, she couldn’t put it back. She rebuffed his attempts at conversation, and they rode through the mountains for the next two days in silence. The horses were also glum and unspeaking, catching their riders’ moods. They didn’t like the cold, and they missed their nightly cropping of grass.
Oats are all very well,
said Darsor impatiently,
but give me a sweet mouthful of grass from the Rilnik Plains any day.

The bright weather held; Maerad’s eyes began to ache from the constant glare, and she tired of looking at mountains. They stretched on ahead always, past crevasses and walls and peaks, gray barren stone and blinding white snow — grim, unrelenting, mercilessly there. Despite her gloves and warm boots, she had chilblains, and she was certain her nose was bright red from being pinched by frost. She was grateful for the sunshine, all the same; they had managed to keep up a steady pace, and were much more than halfway through the range now. In a couple of days, according to Cadvan, they would arrive in Zmarkan. Though what they were going to do once they got there, Maerad thought, overwhelmed by a bitter hopelessness, the Light only knew. Talk to the Pilanel? Their quest was an idiotic waste of time, a chase for wild geese, based on a couple of random guesses and some mumbled pieces of lore. And she would probably die for it.

As they prepared their camp that night, Maerad felt the air shift. At the same time, Cadvan turned his head alertly, as if he were a deer scenting danger, and sniffed the air. At that moment a sudden strong wind came up, blowing a scattering of gravel into the bay, and died away to a steady current of air, but now it was coming from the north, and it held a new chill. Neither of them remarked on the change, but it was colder that night than it had been, and when Maerad woke in the morning, her blanket was stiff with rime.

They started as soon as they had broken their fast, just to get the blood moving in their chilled limbs. The sun was hidden in a swathe of gray clouds that muffled all the higher peaks and rolled in thick fogs down the sides of the mountains, where they were blown into shreds by the increasing wind. Around midday the wind picked up further, and it began to sleet. Maerad and Cadvan covered their faces with their scarves and pressed on doggedly. The horses trudged along the pass, their hooves slipping on the icy trail, their tails miserably pressed between their legs, their ears flat against their skulls. As the afternoon wore on, the light grew worse and worse, and Maerad got colder and colder.

This was the most miserable day yet, and she almost cried with relief when they at last found a bay out of the wind and sleet and she saw there was firewood. It took a while to light, and Maerad was almost incandescent with impatience before Cadvan coaxed a flame out of the tinder. The horses stood against the far wall, disburdened of their packs, miserably munching oats in silence, while the Bards rubbed their frozen hands in front of the fire, trying to get some blood into them, and steam rose off their soaked clothes. They each had a dose of medhyl, and then Cadvan prepared a stew for their dinner.

The bay was hardly as cozy as a cave would have been, since it was little more than a hollow scooped into the mountainside. Stray blasts of wind threw handfuls of sleet onto the floor, where they melted and ran sizzling into the fire. But it sheltered them from the worst of the weather, which with the increasing wail of the wind was getting steadily worse. Beyond the friendly flickering of the firelight, it was impenetrably dark. Maerad sat as close to the fire as she could without actually catching fire herself and slipped into a stupor of miserable exhaustion.

“I hope this passes by tomorrow,” said Cadvan. “A bad storm could keep us holed up here for days.”

“Days?” said Maerad, starting awake. “We can’t stay here for days.”

“Well, it’s better than being blown off the side of the mountain,” he answered. “Unless that’s what you’d prefer.”

“I just want to get out of this place.” Maerad looked despairingly up at Cadvan, her eyes ringed by deep shadows, and, for a moment, she saw an expression in his eyes she had never seen before, an unguarded tenderness. But it vanished at once, and she thought she must have imagined it.

“So do I. But not at the price of my life.”

“Well, couldn’t you just calm the wind, if it’s still going tomorrow?” asked Maerad without much hope. Even tonight, Cadvan hadn’t used magery to light the fire; his miserliness with his powers sometimes made her furious.

“I dare not try to work the winds here,” said Cadvan. “It would alert any evil creature for leagues around to our presence. Our best bet is to go on as we have, unseen.”

“It’s easier to hide in a storm,” said Maerad stubbornly. “It’s not that bad.” As if to spite her, the wind rose suddenly into a high screech.

“Yes, and your body might never be found. Don’t be foolish.”

Maerad sulkily prepared herself for sleep. The idea of being trapped in this bay for days on end appalled her beyond measure; even walking through the sleet, as they had today, could hardly be worse.

The next day the wind had dropped, and the world was white with fog. It was possible to see only a few paces ahead, but Maerad, panicking at the thought of being stuck in the mountains, argued that they should continue regardless. Cadvan was dubious, saying that the fog could as equally thicken as lift, and that in a thick fog it was quite possible to get completely disoriented and turn back without realizing it, or fall down an unseen precipice. But Maerad was adamant, and after anxiously testing the wind, Cadvan agreed to chance it, as long as they waited to see if the fog was getting worse.

After a while, it seemed to have thinned slightly, and so they mounted and cautiously pressed on. Riding through this whiteness was eerie; it seemed as if they were suspended in midair, in the middle of nothing. All they could see was the road, still dark and wet after yesterday’s sleet, twisting for a few paces in front of them before it vanished into a white haze. The standing stones by the side of the road would loom over them suddenly, as if they appeared out of nowhere.

It wasn’t long before they were soaked with dew. Maerad felt as if her ears were stuffed full of cloth; hoofbeats died instantly on the air, and there were no other sounds except the snorting and puffing of the horses.

By midafternoon, the wind suddenly rose — a chill, buffeting blast. The fog began to break up, flying past them in wisps and rags. Every now and then, Maerad could see a glimpse of a mountain slope or a crevasse or a stand of trees, only to have the veil of mist instantly drawn over it again.

“Look out for a bay,” called Cadvan over his shoulder. “There’s going to be a storm.” The wind whipped his words away as he shouted.

Maerad was too cold and tired to say anything. She just hoped there would be wood in the next bay, so they could have a fire. She started looking along the left wall; there should be one not so far ahead, she thought. There seemed to be one every league or so, and they must have gone that far by now. She scanned the rock face anxiously. It remained obdurately blank, and the wind was getting stronger every moment. Then a fierce hail started, driving almost sideways, so Imi and Darsor shied, snorting. The hailstones were big, like pebbles hurtling at them out of the sky; they hurt; and they made the stone road treacherously slippery. Cadvan signaled to Maerad to dismount, and holding their horses’ reins, they fought their way forward against the wind.

“If we make it to the next turn, we’ll have some shelter,” Cadvan shouted. Maerad could barely hear him, but nodded. On the mountain’s flank, they were directly exposed to the gale, and even a little relief from the wind and hail would be better than nothing. Visibility was not much better than it had been in the fog, but at least it wasn’t night, though with a sudden stab of fear, she realized that they didn’t know how far the nearest bay was, and evening was coming quickly. In the fog they might have already passed one without seeing it. A night in the open in weather like this didn’t bear imagining. She gritted her teeth and forced herself on, her legs feeling as heavy and cold as iron.

Then Cadvan stopped suddenly, and Imi nearly ran into Darsor’s rump. Cadvan turned around to Maerad and shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him over the howling wind. With a leap of hope, she thought perhaps he had found a bay at last, but his final words were drowned in a huge crash, as if hundreds of tons of rock had smashed into the mountain. She saw that Cadvan had drawn his sword and was blazing with power, a sudden terrible light that dazzled Maerad’s eyes, but she was so cold and tired, so battered by the hail, that she could barely react, and looked on in bewilderment.

Imi neighed with terror and reared, tearing the reins from Maerad’s frozen hands, and then bolted back down the pass, her reins swinging wildly and the packs falling from her saddle. Maerad watched her vanish into the storm with a sense of unreality, as if she were in a dream and this had nothing to do with her, and then she turned again to Cadvan. He was standing with his arms held high, shouting something in the Speech, but she could hear nothing over the storm. There was another huge crash, and a boulder the size of a horse hit the road in front of her, just missing Cadvan and Darsor, and then rebounded and plunged into the darkness beyond.

This jolted Maerad out of her stupor, and she was seized with fear. Cadvan was fighting some assailant, but she couldn’t see what it was. The hail worsened, slamming into her like hammers of ice. She put up her forearm to protect her face and struggled toward Cadvan, not knowing what else to do. She couldn’t go after Imi; she didn’t know where she was. Perhaps the mare, in her terror, already had plunged over the edge of the narrow road.

As she neared Cadvan, her head began to ring with the force of his power. He was a brilliant figure of blazing silver, globed in a shield of White Fire, and she could barely look at him. She stared beyond him, into the darkness, and at last saw what he was fighting.