The Riddle (19 page)

She set a floating magelight near her ear and looked around the small, neat cabin. All seemed to be as it should be, but a mounting tension sent the blood thrumming through her body. She felt all the hairs on her neck standing on end. Her breath hung in front of her face; even down here, it was freezing. She swung herself out of the hammock, dragged on her boots, and reached for one of Owan’s oilskins, which hung near the table. She had to get outside, to see what was happening.

Just as she shrugged the oilskin over her cloak, there was a massive crash, like a huge crack of thunder, and the whole boat lurched violently as if it were tipping over, and then just as violently righted itself. Maerad was flung over to the table, narrowly missing the edge of it with her head, and her magelight went out. She scrambled to her feet, breathing hard, and relit the light. Now the strange silence that had woken her was broken: the boat was creaking and groaning again, but in such a way that it sounded as if its timbers might fly to pieces at any moment, and the wind suddenly increased to an ear-piercing howl. Not howling, Maerad thought: it’s screaming. It sounded as if a thousand dogs were being roasted alive. She covered her ears, shuddering, until the scream died back to storm.

Had they hit a reef? Maerad panicked at the thought of being trapped in this tiny space as the
White Owl
spiraled down into the chill depths of the sea. She staggered to the gangway, and had just reached it when there came another crash, just as loud, and the boat lurched again. This time, she was holding on to the ladder and wasn’t flung down. She waited until the craft righted itself, and then scrambled up the ladder as fast as she could, flinging up the trapdoor just as a huge wave broke over the deck, drenching her instantly and pouring down the gangway behind her. She gasped, stunned by the cold, and swallowed a mouthful of seawater.

The wave had the effect, at least, of shocking her out of panic. When she had recovered from the dousing, she crawled through the gangway and, clinging to the railings, kicked the trapdoor shut behind her. She squinted through the chaotic darkness, trying to see what was happening.

It was a black, starless night, and the
White Owl
pitched on a huge sea. As her eyes adjusted, Maerad almost lost courage: maybe it would feel safer in the cabin, where she could not see anything at all. But at the thought of crouching alone in that suffocating darkness, she steeled her nerves. The boat was now hurtling down into what seemed like a bottomless abyss, and Maerad’s stomach lurched. When at last they reached the trough, the boat twirled sideways until frantically corrected by Owan; then they were lifted with a heart-stopping suddenness to the top of the next wave, where they paused for a brief dizzying moment before tipping down again, the deck as steep as the side of a mountain, into the boiling blackness.

The noise was almost deafening, and the sky was a strange color, the clouds infused with a greenish blue glow. The sails were furled to the mizzenmast, the ropes that lashed them standing out horizontally in the gale, and Owan was at the tiller. Maerad looked around wildly for Cadvan, fearing that he had been swept overboard, and saw him at the prow of the boat. Around him was a strange stillness; it seemed as if the wind did not affect him. Maerad clutched the railing, her heart in her mouth, and then remembered a charm of fastening that would stop her being swept off the deck. She muttered it frantically, and felt a little safer.

She put her head down and fought her way, step by step, toward Cadvan. Her mouth was full of salt and her hair whipped into her eyes, stinging them. Although she was wet through, she was glad she had put on the oilskin; at least it kept out the worst of the gale. Another wave broke over the deck, and she stopped, clinging to the rail and gasping again with the cold, until it had rolled off the boat. She looked up; Cadvan was only five paces away, but it could have been five leagues, at the rate she was going. She took one more step, and then stopped — a chill that had nothing to do with cold, gripping her heart.

It was difficult to tell the difference between sea and sky; both were a boiling chaos. But what appeared in front of Cadvan now was neither; it was some monstrous being, almost too big to look at, which seemed to be made out of stormlight and cloud. Maerad shut her eyes, staving off her terror, and then forced herself to look again.

What she saw looked like a giant dog, a heavy hunting dog, like a mastiff, snarling and slavering, crouched for attack. The monster seemed to boil out of the very clouds, and was as difficult as vapor or air to fix in the vision; its jaws were etched with the same weird green-blue light Maerad had noticed earlier in the sky and its eyes were points of emerald fire. Its form shimmered eerily with little lightnings that continually flashed and vanished, so it was not quite substantial, despite the impression it gave of massive bulk. It was, Maerad realized, reaching back to tales of fear she had heard as a child, a stormdog. She was frightened of ordinary dogs, from a childhood memory of seeing a man torn apart by them, but this was much worse than the dogs of Gilman’s Cot. It opened its huge mouth, baring long fangs, and howled. Maerad cowered. The sound she had heard below decks had been its baying; on the open deck of the ship it was completely terrifying.

Cadvan stood unmoving on the ship’s prow, his sword drawn, his form blazing with power. He was only a little bigger than the stormdog’s fangs; its size was staggering. It seemed inconceivable that it would not simply bend forward and snap up the
White Owl
as a lion would a mouse. As she watched, it reared up and crashed its huge paw against the ship, hitting it with a crash of thunder. Cadvan slashed down with his sword, bringing behind it a blinding arc of white light. Even through the stormdog’s baying and the chaos of the storm, Maerad could feel his words of power echoing through her bones.

The
White Owl
spun dizzily into the face of a wave and Maerad feared that they were sinking; cataracts of water broke violently over the deck, so that it seemed that they were already all but drowned. Miraculously the
Owl
righted herself, bobbing upright as the water streamed off the deck. Maerad, clinging to her railing, dashed the water from her eyes and looked desperately to the prow: Cadvan was still there, balancing easily, as if he were a part of the boat, a figurehead rather than a man who merely stood on the deck. He was so bright now it was difficult to look at him and, from an answering shiver deep in her mind, Maerad could feel the power he was invoking. She looked down at her hands and with a thrill of wonder saw that a silver-gold light was breaking between her fingers: Cadvan was investing the entire craft with his power. Before long every timber, every rope and spar of the boat was shining, as if it were made of light, and the glow kept increasing until it was so bright that tears of dazzlement ran down Maerad’s cheeks, mingling with the cold spray that lashed her face. As the
White Owl
glowed in the tumultuous darkness, suddenly transformed from a humble fishing smack into an airy thing of light, beautiful and strange, the stormdog howled with rage.

Even in the midst of peril, Maerad felt a deep awe: this was a different power from that which Cadvan had revealed during the Rite of Renewal. He was unleashing capacities that Maerad didn’t know Bards possessed. In the full strength of his power, he was almost as terrifying as the stormdog itself.

She pulled herself straighter, collecting her mind into some semblance of thought. There had to be some way she could use her own powers to assist Cadvan.

The stormdog lashed out again, but this time the boat barely shuddered. Maerad was relieved; she wondered how many blows the
White Owl,
for all its sturdiness and Bardic charms, could take from such a monster. She wiped the hair and water from her eyes, and sent out her mind to join Cadvan’s, gently, lest she jolt his will and disturb his magery. There was a slight answering surprise, and then relief as he let her join her power to his.

To join Cadvan’s mind was to share with him the full force of the stormdog’s fury, and Maerad staggered under its sudden onslaught. At the same time, her fear of the monster suddenly vanished altogether, and was replaced by a strange exhilaration. It was almost as if she could understand the stormdog, although it spoke no language that she knew. She looked into its eyes, and for the first time it noticed her presence. It snapped at her, letting out a volley of yells, and into Maerad’s mind sprang the most incongruous memory possible: her mother stroking her hair when she was a very little girl.

Maerad took a deep breath. Then, keeping her eyes fixed on the dog, she began to sing. She sang both in her mind and with her physical voice, although any sound she made was instantly torn away by the gale. It was the smallest of whispers in the tumult, but she thought the stormdog heard her. She felt Cadvan falter in surprise, and the boat briefly dimmed as he momentarily lost concentration.

The old melody — how long since she had heard it? — rose in her throat, and her voice grew stronger. Was she mad? Singing a lullaby to a stormdog? But she thought she saw a change in the stormdog’s eyes. She took another breath and sang the next verse, filling her mind with tenderness: remembering the way her mother had stroked her brow as she lay near sleep, the soft burr of her voice, her kiss as she fell into slumber.

Now Maerad was sure her mad idea was working; the wind was abating, and the stormdog had stopped its baying and seemed to be looking at her inquiringly, its ears cocked. Its lightnings were flickering less violently and its terrible shrieks muted to a strange low thunder. She kept on singing, starting again when she reached the end of the lullaby, keeping her eyes fixed on the stormdog, and as she sang, the force of the sea gradually lessened, until the waves were only a little larger than the height of their boat. She sang and sang, her voice loud enough now to be heard over the gentling wind, and the stormdog dimmed, and then began to vanish, almost imperceptibly, as a cloud vanishes in a clear sky if you keep staring at it. At last it was gone.

As the stormdog faded, the boat slowly returned to its ordinary colors of dark varnished wood and white paint and furled red sail. It was only as Maerad blinked at the colors that she realized it was morning.

OWAN lashed the tiller and stumbled up to Cadvan and Maerad. He was not his usual neat self: his face was gray with exhaustion, his eyes rimmed red, his hair and clothes stiff with salt, his knuckles skinned raw from his battle to keep the
White Owl
upright. He fiercely embraced both Bards.

“By the Light,” he said hoarsely. “I thought we were for the Gates, and my
Owl
was going down to join the fishes.”

Maerad looked up into his eyes and saw reflected there her own emotions: simple relief at being alive, a dazed exhaustion, and the warm fellowship of those who have survived peril together. She could feel tremors running through Owan’s body, in long waves. She smiled back shakily, and unexpected tears filled her eyes.

Owan let them go, and Maerad stepped back and looked around with a sense of disbelief. The night’s terror was like a dream that had vanished without trace; the sun was shining mildly in a pale blue sky, and all she could hear was the faint mewling of seagulls and the peaceful lapping of the waves against the boat. Only the
White Owl
showed any evidence of the night’s travail; the deck, which was usually spotless, was covered in a mess of ropes and detritus all rimed with salt, her sail was still furled to the mast, and her starboard rail was snapped and splintered where the stormdog had landed a blow.

Cadvan surveyed the damage. “We got off lightly,” he said. “Not many survive such a meeting on the open sea.” Maerad smiled tiredly, and Cadvan took her hands and kissed her cheek. “It was well done, Maerad,” he said quietly. “Very well done. I do not know if we would have survived, else.”

“It was certainly the strangest audience I’ve had,” said Maerad, and Cadvan smiled gently and let go of her hands.

“I confess, I’m dying of curiosity,” he said. “Why did you
sing
to the monster? What on earth or under it made you think of that?”

“I couldn’t believe it, when I worked out what you were doing,” put in Owan, grinning. “There I was, in the teeth of a tornado, battling to keep the
Owl
upright, and there you are, singing lullabies. I know Bards are peculiar, but . . .” He shook his head.

Maerad studied her hands, searching for words. “I don’t know when I’ve been more frightened,” she said at last. “Even when we saw the wight, I don’t think I was more terrified than when I saw the stormdog. And when I joined my mind with yours, I could feel all its fury. The funny thing was, as soon as I could
feel
it, I wasn’t frightened anymore.”