The Riddle (54 page)

She had almost convinced herself that she was completely lost when she felt the smallest whisper of cold air touch her face. It was fresh and clean, unlike the slightly heavy air of the palace: she was going in the right direction. Encouraged, she pressed on, and before long she saw the mouth of the cave emerge from the darkness, limned silver by starlight.

Almost dizzy with relief, Maerad stepped out onto the snow and looked up into the sky. Automatically she searched for Ilion, the star of dawn and evening, which she thought of as her own, but she could not see it; it was probably deep night. The air felt like blades of ice as she drew it into her lungs, but she breathed deeply, savoring the taste of freedom.

Within moments, she was shivering with the cold. She took her cloak out of her pack, remembering how Dharin had cast it aside as inadequate, and wishing fruitlessly that she had not lost her warm fur coat. Dharin had been right: the cloak could not offer the kind of protection against the cold that she needed.

Maerad looked down the snowy slope toward the stone arch that stood over the road. This, she was sure, was the Winterking’s most powerful defense; no one could enter or leave the palace without passing under it, and the Winterking had told her that even birds would not fly over it. If she could not find a way to pass it unseen, all her magery had been in vain. And she did not know how. Yet. And even if she did manage to pass it, what then?

She squared her shoulders, trying to will away her tiredness, and walked slowly toward the black arch.

MAERAD was not entirely surprised to see the wolf standing on the slope beyond the arch, its form frosted by the waning moon. It was standing very still, staring straight at her despite her charm. A terrible doubt rose inside her, constricting her throat: had her charms been unsuccessful? Was the Winterking, even now, laughing as she walked into an elaborate trap?

She bit down her doubts and stopped an arm’s length away from the arch, looking through it to the road beyond. It ran on about twenty paces before it met the snow-covered mountain road, which glimmered slightly as it wound around the mountain wall and disappeared. She deliberately didn’t look at the wolf. Unwillingly she dragged her eyes back to the arch and pondered her next step. She could feel the power invested in the stone from where she stood: it seemed to bear down on her with a malevolent vigilance. Its message could not have been clearer if it had been written in letters of fire:
You shall not pass.

I have to pass, thought Maerad. But it will take everything I have left, and it will probably be for nothing.

As she took a deep breath, gathering herself for one last exertion, she heard a voice in her mind.

Do not speak until you pass the Arch,
it said.

Maerad nodded.

You cannot pass the Arch,
it went on.
It will reveal you. You must become wolf.

Maerad looked at the wolf in bewilderment, and silenced the questions that rushed into her mind. Wolf?

The wolf sat down on its haunches, still looking at her. The starlight sparked cold off its eyes.

Become wolf,
it said again. It settled down casually and put its head on its paws, looking for all the world like a domestic dog lying down in front of a fire. Maerad stared at it in exasperation, thinking it could at least have given her a clue. After a few moments, the wolf pricked up its ears and looked at her.

You do not have long,
it said.
The stars will soon begin to fade.

Maerad gave the sky a swift glance and saw the wolf was right. It would not be long before daylight, and she would need to be well away from Arkan-da by then if she was to have any hope of escape.

She tiredly put down her pack, sat down on a rock, and put her face in her hands. The cold pierced her clothes, and she was shivering. Inside her a voice said,
You can’t do this. You’re mad to try. You can still go back to your chamber and undo the semblance and make everything as it was, and the Winterking will never know.
And underneath this voice there was another, which whispered,
And you will then see the Winterking tomorrow.

Maerad miserably let the implications of this rise in her mind. Leaving here would mean that she would never see Arkan again. Despite everything — despite the wrongs he had done her, despite his tyranny, despite his cruelty during their last meeting — something in her cried out in protest. She could remember only his face in repose, his cruel, sensual mouth. My enemy, she thought bitterly: my own heart. It calls me back into prison, even as the gate opens. But how can I leave my heart behind me? It would be a maiming deeper than the loss of my fingers. Then even my heart would be songless.

Maerad didn’t know how long she sat, shrouded in her unhappiness, forgetting the wolf, forgetting that she sat at Arkan’s very door, insensible even to her present peril. She felt as if she were being very slowly torn in two. At last, the wolf called her back to herself.

Become wolf,
it said again.
Or you will be a tame dog forever.
Maerad looked up, startled, and realized that the sky was beginning to lighten. She was almost frozen, her hair iced and her feet numb. The wolf was standing up again, and it seemed to be looking at her with something like scorn.

Maerad closed her eyes.

I choose to leave,
she said steadily to herself. She felt as if she had stepped out into an abyss. Now she could not turn back.

As the decision formed irrevocably within her, she realized that she did understand what the wolf meant. Of course she could transform into a beast. It was not the magery of Bards, which could work such a transformation only in seeming. It was part of the Knowing of the Elidhu, and with it, she could worst the Winterking’s powers.

She stood up slowly, her limbs cold and stiff, and deliberately shouldered her pack, which had to transform with her. She looked the wolf in the eye; it stared back at her unblinkingly. Without hurry, as if she had done it a thousand times, she focused deep within herself, sinking through layers — slave, Bard, Pilanel, Maerad, Elednor, woman — deeper and deeper, until she came to a place where all the skins fell away and she had no name at all, and her mind was as empty and clear as water. Now she sought the still point of transformation, the fulcrum on which all turned; she found it and balanced, swaying easily like an eagle on the wind.

Be wolf, she thought; be my heart, my hunger. Be my freedom.

For a heartbeat her whole body was racked by terrible pain, as if she had been thrown into a furnace, but that passed almost as soon as it arrived, giving her no time to do more than gasp. The next thing she knew, she was overwhelmed by a new sense, the sense of smell; her tongue and her nose were suddenly flooded with odors, so rich and detailed that they were like brightly colored images.

She could smell the arch; it smelled like burned metal, hot and dangerous, the smell of sorcery. Her hackles rose, and she leaned forward and sniffed the stone tentatively.

It will not burn you,
said the wolf.
Hurry. You have wasted much time.

Maerad did not stop to wonder that she was standing on all fours. She gathered herself and leaped through the black arch, and felt its power part before her and close seamlessly behind her, as if she were a sleek diver who left not a ripple of water in her wake. When she landed on the other side, she left no mark in the snow, although she could see her human footprints all the way back to the door of Arkan-da, already beginning to blur under a thin layer of snow.

Without speaking, the wolf turned and began to lope very fast down the south road. Maerad leaped forward in its wake, her heart suddenly soaring. All tiredness seemed to have fallen from her. She was a wolf, lean and swift and strong, and if she wanted, she could run all day and night. She felt the pleasure of her muscles sliding over each other, the heat of her running, her inextinguishable energy.

She was free.

The darkness faded slowly out of the sky as the sun rose above the mountains, staining the barred clouds red. The snow fell lightly, whirling idly about the wolves, and rising in small puffs of white where their paws struck the ground. They were running at an even pace that ate up the ground, and they were already far from Arkan-da, following the pass that led through the mountains. Maerad could sense now that the road was winding down, and that they would soon be out of the mountains and onto the plains.

She was beginning to tire, panting as she ran, and her left forepaw was aching fiercely, but the other wolf led her on without pausing, without even turning to see if she still followed. Maerad made no protest; fear drove her past her weariness. She now wanted to get as far away as possible before the Winterking discovered she was gone.

Maerad’s semblance would last about half a day, but she thought it likely that her absence would be discovered before that. Perhaps Gima would leave her alone out of pity, but it was likely she would become alarmed if she tried to rouse her and could not, and her stratagem would then be revealed. She had no idea what would happen when the Winterking found that his captive had fooled him, but she knew that the anger he had shown in the throne room would not be a tithe of his rage when he discovered her escape. And his arm was long: he had sent his stormdogs to Thorold and attacked her in the Osidh Elanor; he had captured and imprisoned her when she was on the far side of Zmarkan. What real chance of escape did she have in the shadow of his own mountains?

For all these reasons she kept running, but another part of her ran for the sheer joy of it. Even her tiredness could not abate her pleasure in her freedom. Her senses rang with the sharp smell of pine sap, the scent and scuffle of a hare bounding for its lair, the sudden strange stink of a fox, the clean, empty taste of snow dissolving on her hot tongue. She could feel the ground stretching far beneath her paws, turning in its ancient, unchanging rhythms as the wolves skated over its surface, leaving not even a mark on the snow, transient and silent as snowflakes. Only the sharpest eyes could have seen them as they ran, white ghosts slipping through shifting curtains of snow.

At about midday, they left the road and climbed to the top of a snow-covered ridge. Maerad found herself looking down on a forest of spruce, which stretched from the knees of the mountains southward. Here, at last, they stopped. Maerad drew up beside the wolf and stood, her sides heaving, too spent for the moment to speak.

We have traveled well,
said the wolf into Maerad’s mind after she had caught her breath.
But farther would be better.

Yes,
said Maerad, speaking for the first time since she had fled Arkan-da. She turned and looked into the wolf’s eyes, resisting the urge to sniff, overcome by curiosity.
Who are you?
she asked.
You are no ordinary wolf, surely. Why did you help me?

You know me better than you think,
answered the wolf.
I have my own reasons for helping you.

You’re Ardina,
said Maerad with a sudden conviction.

The wolf looked at her, and Maerad realized it was laughing.
I might be Ardina, if I were not a wolf,
she said.
You have a sharp wit. Not even Arkan himself would know me in this guise.

The two stood companionably, staring down over the ridge. Maerad did not feel surprised: somehow it seemed completely natural.

Then Ardina’s ears pricked up and she sniffed the air. A moment later, Maerad heard a low rumble behind her and turned her head to look. At first she saw nothing, but then a black cloud rose over the shoulders of the northern mountains. She watched as it boiled upward into the sky, blacker than any cloud she had ever seen, shimmering with forked lightning. Black twisting vortexes snaked down from its belly, striking the mountainside like giant whips. It was spreading out across the sky with a terrifying speed. She strained her ears: could she hear the baying of stormdogs? Maerad flinched and moved closer to Ardina.

The Winterking comes in wrath,
said Ardina. She showed no fear.
We must move.

The great wolf leaped over the ridge and ran down the long slope toward the forest. Maerad ran at her shoulder, her tiredness forgotten in a fresh surge of fear. She could see the edge of the forest in the middle distance, and the wolves could move very swiftly, but Maerad could feel the storm racing up behind them, swallowing up the thin winter light. He will find me, she thought, and all will be lost. . . .

They reached the forest just as the outriders of the storm hit the trees — a gale so strong it sent their branches thrashing like reeds. At first, plunging through the darkness of the forest, Maerad was grateful for its shelter, but a branch broke and crashed behind her, just missing her tail, and she realized that it had its own dangers. She thought of the iriduguls with their clubs, or the paws of the stormdogs; they could easily flatten the whole forest.

Do not fear,
said Ardina as if she heard her thoughts.
The Winterking cannot identify us, and neither can his minions, so long as we are creatures.