The Gift (29 page)

Then she thought she heard something, a voice that seemed to dance on the boundaries of hearing, so at first she wasn’t sure if it was a voice at all; perhaps it was the wind fluting through branches, or the far cry of a bird. It would sound, and then vanish before she could grasp it, and then sound again, all the time seeming nearer. She began to feel afraid and glanced across at Cadvan, willing him to mention it. But he continued on, saying nothing. At last, unable to contain her agitation, she said: “Cadvan, do you hear something?”

“You can hear our fellow traveler?” He turned to her and smiled. “Not all ears can hear that song.”

“What is it?”

As if the voice were aware they were listening, it at once carried a new clarity. Maerad began to hear words, although they seemed abstracted, as if they were forms moving beneath the shifting surfaces of water. Then it seemed to her that a focus shifted, as it sometimes does when you gaze into a pool, so that where you had seen only the sunlit edges of ripples dazzling the face of the water, now you see clearly in its depths the still form of a trout stippled with red and gold, its fins waving lazily in the lazy currents. With a slight shock Maerad realized she could understand the words:

Imi and Darsor stopped and put up their heads, neighing. Maerad sat still, gripped by the enchantment of the song, which was utterly strange and seemed to echo within her head, rather than be heard. She wasn’t aware of Cadvan’s swift concern, or that he dismounted and went to Imi, holding the reins and reaching up to grasp Maerad’s hands.

It seemed then to Maerad that the woods darkened around them, and there appeared from between the trees a wavering silvery illumination, like light from beneath water, and within the shifting light a figure.

“Hail, daughter,” said the figure to Maerad. “I have been watching thee.”

Maerad stared back in amazement. The figure was a woman, who would have been naked except for the strange impression she gave of being dressed in light, as if the bright silvery waves covered rather than revealed her. Maerad looked into her eyes, and they were the same yellow eyes that had startled her the night before. She had the wildest face she had ever seen, inhuman and fey, amoral and beautiful as a flower.

“Why?” stammered Maerad. “Why have you been watching me?”

The figure laughed. “How often does one of my kin come this way? I thought perhaps you were coming to greet me, and make music in the old way. But I see you are with one of these dolts, these humans.” She laughed again, and Maerad felt a shiver of ice run down her spine. She shook herself and looked down; Cadvan was staring up at her, but it was as if she looked at him through a veil.

“What do you want of me?” she asked.

“I know thee,” said the figure. “I will not hinder thee.” She came closer to Maerad, and it seemed that she stepped on the air and stood before her, globed in the aqueous light. “I do not hinder my children.” She took Maerad’s chin in her hand and lifted it, so they gazed eye to eye. “I loved thy forefather many an age ago, and his head rested on my breast, and such pleasure was a wonder to me.”

She let Maerad go and stretched sensuously, like a cat, reaching her arms up into the trees. “But like all mortals, he aged and died. I forgot him. And then I heard your voice, and it sounded like his, and I remembered. So I followed thee, and saw; you are my kin.”

Maerad was silent.

“Is he your lover, this human? Forget them; they die like the reeds. Come with me to your own kingdom.”

Maerad felt a stab of fear. Was she going to be magicked away? “No,” she said, more loudly than she intended.

“No?” The figure shrugged and then smiled. “I understand love. I too loved once. But listen, I’ll give thee this. Perhaps you will weary of humans; they soil the world, and poison the root of things.” She handed Maerad a little flute made out of a reed. “Play on it, and I’ll hear thee.”

Maerad blinked, and in that instant the figure was gone and all was as it had been, except that she now held the little reed flute in her hand. She looked down. Cadvan was holding Imi’s bridle, staring speechlessly up at her. She shook her head, trying to free herself of the strangeness of what had just happened, and laughed.

“What was
that
?” she said shakily.

“What was what?” said Cadvan urgently. “Tell me, Maerad, what happened?”

“Who was she?”

“She is an Elemental Spirit, an Elidhu. What did she say to you?”

“Couldn’t you hear?” asked Maerad in astonishment.

“I could hear her, but no human alive speaks their language. If they want to speak to human beings, which is seldom, they will use our tongue, or perhaps the Speech. Maerad, you spoke a language I do not know when you spoke with her.”

Maerad sat very still, digesting this information. “I did?”

“Yes, you did.” Cadvan sounded agitated. “I didn’t know if you had been bewitched.”

“No,” said Maerad slowly. “No, I don’t think so. She said, ‘I will not hinder thee.’” She then recounted their odd conversation, omitting the Elidhu’s comments about Cadvan, and he began to look less worried, if not less stunned. He took the little flute and inspected it thoughtfully.

“I used to make pipes like this when I was a child,” he said, and handed it back to her. “But this is of some reed that is strange to me.” He looked at Maerad with a new curiosity, not untinged, she felt, by amazement. “There were rumors that there was Elemental blood in the House of Karn. I never believed them. Clearly I was wrong.” He shook his head, as if he were trying to clear his thoughts. “What does this mean? It’s strange, very strange. . . .”

Maerad looked back at him blankly, still feeling as if she were resurfacing from deep water. Cadvan made as if he was about to ask her another question, but stopped himself abruptly. Instead he handed her the reins and returned to Darsor and remounted. “We should press on,” he said. “There’s a Bardhome a league or so from here. There we’ll talk further.”

At the Bardhome they unsaddled and loosed the horses, and then, as had already become routine, lit a fire in the cavern and prepared a meal. Cadvan seemed distracted and Maerad kept silent, although she burned with questions. When they had finished eating, Cadvan stretched out his legs and leaned back against the cave wall, and Maerad studied him in the firelight. He looked tired; deep furrows ran from nose to mouth, and his eyes were hooded. In such moments he seemed a stranger to her — a dark, withdrawn man, his face lined with thought, toughened and weathered by a life of which she had no knowledge. She waited, and eventually, as the evening darkened, he emerged from himself and looked up at her, smiling.

“Forgive me,” he said. “What happened today was wholly unexpected. I had no idea. . . .” He shook his head. “I knew you were full of surprises, Maerad, but this surprises even me.”

“It surprises me too,” said Maerad. “How can I speak to the Elidhu and yet not know the Speech?”

“I don’t know,” said Cadvan. “Barding is an ancient knowledge. But there is a Knowing more ancient, as ancient as the waters and the trees and the earth, and much of this is unknown to us, or but dimly guessed. This is the Knowing from which the Barding grows, the root. They are not the same. Barding is the concern of humankind, but these Elidhu walked the earth before we did.” He paused, and then continued. “To have the blood of Elementals is, among Bards, not quite considered to be a good thing,” he said. “If it was in the House of Karn, it is no wonder it was kept secret.”

“Why?” asked Maerad. “She was not evil.”

“No, not evil,” said Cadvan. “But neither can they be relied on in the human world. You spoke to the Elidhu; would you trust her? The things of the Wild are not as us; they are apt to forget what we must remember, and turn like fire in a trice from benign to deadly.”

Maerad was silent, staring into the flames. “And what is the House of Karn?”

Cadvan looked up at her swiftly and then looked down. “It is
your
House, your family,” he said. “Some Bards, perhaps about half of them, come from families in which Barding has never been known — I am one of those — others do not. The House of Karn is an ancient family of Bards. They were at the founding of Pellinor, and before that at Lirion in the north, and throughout the Silence their line continued unbroken far in the west, on the Isle of Thorold. Lanorgil the Seer was of that family. Andomian and Beruldh, whose story you have sung so often, are your distant ancestors. Milana, your mother, was the daughter of a great heritage of Barding. As are you.”

“Me?” Maerad was more staggered by this news than by the encounter with the Elidhu. Suddenly the tragic story of Andomian took on a new immediacy.
It’s
my
story,
she thought: my
history.
She imagined Andomian dying in the dungeons of the sorcerer Karak, alone and desperate, after rescuing her brothers from slavery, and shuddered. “Why haven’t you told me this before?” she said.

Cadvan was silent. “Usted mentioned your heritage at the Council in Innail, but apart from that it hasn’t come up,” he said at last. “And perhaps I do not trust the idea of inherited Barding. There are those who are not worthy of their ancestry, and who are proud beyond their ability or right.”

They didn’t speak for some time, each following their own thoughts. Maerad thought she sensed a new distance in Cadvan, a retreat from the intimacy that had begun to grow between them, and this grieved her. It wasn’t her fault, she thought, that she came from such a family; she had never chosen it, just as she had not chosen to be a slave throughout her childhood. She was still who she was, whatever rags of history she dragged behind her. But then Cadvan stirred.

“I am puzzling over something,” he said. “Can you tell me again the song the Elidhu sang?”

Maerad spoke the stanzas that she had heard, and Cadvan listened attentively.

“Yes,” he said. “The ‘deathless moss on the singing tree,’ and also the ‘hidden root.’ And Lanorgil spoke of the ‘Treesong.’ Now, Maerad, I am deeply learned in the Speech, and there is much in that lore that speaks of the root of language, and the Tree of Life, and so on. I guess that these are linked. But I have not heard of the Treesong. I don’t know what it is.” He poked the fire impatiently. “I think it might be rather important that we find out,” he said. “And perhaps the Knowing of the Elementals matters a bit more in our affairs than Bards have reckoned. It is written that the Elementals were often at Afinil, and sang with the Bards there; and much of the Knowing was lost in the Great Silence. There is much that perplexes me here. I wish I could talk with Nelac!” He sighed.

“Your teacher?” asked Maerad curiously.

“Yes, he was my teacher,” said Cadvan, glancing across at her. “He’s very old now. The greatest of the Readers in this land. He is the main reason I wish to go to Norloch. We need his counsel.”

“Is he the First Bard there?”

“No, not the First, although of course he is of the Circle. To my mind he is the wisest there; long ago, after Noldor died, Nelac was asked to be First Bard, but he refused, saying he sought not such eminences. The First Bard is Enkir, another great Reader. The First Bards at Norloch have almost without exception been Readers, although there have been a few Makers. Enkir’s intellect is as stern as adamant, and among the wise he is held to be very great indeed; he is a proud and lofty Bard, from another great House, the House of Lenar.”

“But Nelac is the greater Bard?” said Maerad.

Cadvan looked up at Maerad and grinned, and her earlier worries suddenly dissolved. “Yes, to my mind, although many would disagree,” he said. “For Nelac of Lirigon is also wise in the ways of the heart, which Enkir is too cold, too stern, too proud to understand. But you will meet these people and judge for yourself.”

“It sounds as if Norloch . . . well, that it has nothing to do with me,” said Maerad dubiously.

“Norloch is very different from Innail,” said Cadvan. “But you have already withstood more frightening things than old men.”

The following day they continued through the Weywood, and at last Maerad thought she detected a subtle thinning of the trees and wondered if they neared its edges. Cadvan confirmed this. “Another’s day’s ride, and we’ll be out in the northeast of Annar, a day or two from Milhol,” he said. “And then we will have to decide which way to go. There we could meet the Ettinor Road, and I think it would not be wise to travel that way, although we could go more swiftly; but to wend our way farther north takes us even more out of our way. I am even tempted to go to my own School, Lirigon, and thence south to Norloch. I would dearly like to gather some news. But it is many days’ ride northward, and would be little to our advantage in the end, I think.”

“Do we have to stick to the roads?” asked Maerad.

“No, not always,” said Cadvan. “And I think we will not, although west of Milhol the countryside is rough and in some places impassable. I also fear getting lost!”

They rode on in companionable silence. After her encounter with the Elidhu the day before, the Weywood no longer seemed hostile to Maerad; and although she still longed to get out of the twilight of the trees into sunlight and wind, she also realized she felt safer here, hidden from prying eyes, despite the dangers of the forest itself. She felt, for no reason that she could trace, as if the Elidhu protected them. The long days riding through the wood had also given her a chance to absorb the events of the past three weeks. She felt less confused in herself, less doubtful, although it seemed the more she found out, the more her questions multiplied. She said as much to Cadvan, who replied: “It is ever the way of the Knowing. I have often thought it is like a light blooming on a dark sea: as it increases, so does the depth and size of the unknown. The most wise are those who know how little they know!”