The Riddle (32 page)

The walking emptied Maerad’s mind of everything that troubled her. She entered the rhythms of her body, letting her arms swing and her legs push her forward, enjoying the feeling of health that coursed through her after the long, dark days in Mirka’s hut. She didn’t think about Cadvan or Darsor or Imi, though they lingered in the shadows at the back of her mind, regrets and griefs she would never lose.

When the sun was at its height, she stopped for a quick meal and then pressed on. Around midafternoon she emerged from the forest and saw before her the great plains of Zmarkan, which the Pilanel people called the Arkiadera, or the Mother Plains. They stretched past the horizon, a flat sea of red sedges and yellowing grasses and heathers. The road ran straight on through the plains, turning neither right nor left, underneath the huge, empty sky. The only trees Maerad could see were some low, dark withies and hazels. They followed a twining course that meandered alongside the road like a drunk; Maerad guessed with relief that they marked the course of a river.

In the distance, she could see animals moving across the plains, but she couldn’t tell what they were. She didn’t know if they were wild or if they signaled the presence of people. She felt exposed as soon as she left the shelter of the trees, and although there was no one in sight, and no chance of anyone creeping up unseen on that level ground, she put on a glimmerspell to make herself unseen. It made her feel a little safer. She did not fear that she would meet Hulls or Bards so far north, but she knew that now she was within the reaches of the Winterking’s domain, and she thought she felt a presence, a sense of ill will that beat on her from the northeast. It was only the vaguest of senses, but it was insistent enough to trouble her awareness. Instinctively she shielded her mind against it, squared her shoulders, and kept on.

She walked until evening, when she thought she ought to make a camp. There were no trees to shelter her, so she made a detour to the riverside and camped there among the withies. They were of a kind Maerad had never seen before, with reddish violet branches spotted with blue, their yellow leaves shivering in the evening wind. A gaggle of ducks squabbled unseen on the water, and in the distance she could hear the mournful cries of plovers. She found a place between two old trees that offered a little shelter and crouched down among the roots, the sense of well-being she had felt during the day beginning to shrink and vanish.

As soon as the sun disappeared, it began to get very cold, and Maerad was shivering as she huddled, wrapped in her blanket, trying to get comfortable among the tree roots. She felt unsafe; there was no one to keep watch, and she would have to sleep unprotected in the wild. She still wore her glimmerspell, but she knew the spells did not fool animals. And she could light no fire to cheer her, because she had nothing to light it with. She pondered briefly lighting one with magery, but abandoned the idea: a fire would attract notice anyway.

She lay awake for a long time, listening to the night, shifting restlessly on the hard ground. The stars glittered in the darkness. Maerad stared at the bright path of the Lukemoi, the riders of the stars, which arched right across the middle of the sky. She had never seen it shining so brilliantly. It was said that the dead walked that road on their way to the Gates. She wondered if Cadvan lingered there, watching for her even as he made his way to the Groves of Shadow. The thought brought her no comfort. No, she thought; Cadvan was long gone. She was alone.

When she woke up, Maerad had a brief moment of panic; she couldn’t remember where the road was, and she couldn’t see it from the river. She realized that she could easily wander in circles for days in these flat, featureless plains: the only thing that gave her any sense of direction was the road. She breakfasted quickly, set out away from the river in what she thought was the right direction, and before she became too anxious, hit the road again. The next night, when she left the road to find a camping place, she marked her direction much more carefully.

She walked quickly, taking a rest at midday, but otherwise moving all day, anxious to reach Murask before the weather changed. She had been lucky: the days were cold and clear, and there had been no rain. She had unpleasant memories of sleeping in the open in bad weather, and here it was colder than she was used to. In the morning when she woke, the world was white with frost, the dews frozen on the leaves, and the little warmth she had managed to generate overnight quickly dissipated as soon as she moved. She was glad of her sheepskins, for otherwise she might have frozen to death.

The animals she had seen on the plains turned out to be wild herds of a large, shaggy kind of deer. She never came very close to them, as they avoided the road, though once she came upon a small group of about twenty before they scented her and stampeded. There were also groups of wild ponies, of the kind the Pilanel herded: tough and long-haired and wary. Otherwise she saw little creatures like weasels with glossy brown coats, and occasional foxes and hares, and birds: black-and-white terns, which hovered overhead, and enormous flocks of geese and ptarmigans migrating south for the winter, and once a pair of eagles hunting, dropping like stones to the grass and sweeping off with a small luckless animal caught in their talons.

She saw no other human beings. She didn’t feel lonely; being alone was a relief. She didn’t think about the incident in the Gwalhain Pass. The terrible dreams she had suffered at Mirka’s, in which she endlessly relived the moment of Cadvan’s death, had stopped; she was too tired, after walking all day, to dream about anything. She felt empty and dry, as if she would never feel anything again. She concerned herself with the trivial details of each day: making sure each evening that her feet were properly massaged with balm to prevent blisters, eating enough food to keep her going, and keeping alert for any sign of danger. She watched carefully for strange shifts in the wind or weather, which might signal the arrival of a frost creature or stormdog. But the sky remained clear and blue.

Doing these banal tasks inevitably reminded her of Cadvan. She realized, with a poignancy that pierced even her numbed emotions, that if he hadn’t taught her these rudimentary skills, she wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving alone in the wild. And this induced other anxieties: even though she was traveling as fast as she could to Murask, she dreaded arriving there. What would she do when she did? Whenever she had met strangers before, Cadvan had been there, to introduce her, or to deal with any difficulties that might have arisen.

Maerad reflected bitterly that she knew very little of people; for most of her life, her world had been so small, the space of Gilman’s Cot, and since then she had learned only of Bards. She couldn’t speak the Pilanel language, although Mirka had said there were many Pilanel with the Gift, and being travelers, perhaps most of them spoke some Annaren. Should she just walk in and ask for help? Should she explain who she was or what she was doing, or should she dissemble? She knew nothing of the Pilanel people; even Hem would have been better prepared than she was. She was no good at the disguising charm, which, in any case, wouldn’t give her the Pilanel language. She was sure that Cadvan could have passed himself off as a Pilanel if he had wanted to, as sure as she was that she couldn’t; he most certainly spoke the language. And Cadvan knew the north well, probably better than any other in Annar — he had traveled its length just before he met her. Maerad had only the faintest memory of the maps she had perused at Gahal’s house, and the maps of Zmarkan had been rather empty anyway. There had been no mention that she could recall of the Wise Kindred, or of where such people might live.

She went on, in truth, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Becoming a Bard had invested her life with a meaning it had never possessed before; now that meaning had shriveled and vanished, poisoned by her own foolish vanity. Perhaps the only way to restore that meaning was to stay true to her promises to Cadvan, to Nelac, to Nerili, to all those who had shown faith in her, and whom she felt she had so dismally failed.

When the puzzle of her Elemental nature raised itself, she simply put it aside as something she couldn’t solve. She didn’t understand her closeness to Ardina: why the Elemental queen called her “daughter” as if she were much closer kin than merely a distant descendant. She didn’t know why she had powers that other Bards did not. She didn’t understand why she was considered to be so significant — the Fire Lily, the Foretold, the One — and how that matched her feeling that she was, in truth, utterly insignificant, a tiny human being toiling along in the immense world, alone and powerless, of no more importance than any other, and of much less worth than most. Mirka, she reflected, for all her madness and grief, had made a kind of peace with herself. In her unrest and doubt, Maerad envied Mirka; all she knew of peace was the deadness in her heart.

Mirka had told her that Murask was a week to ten days’ walk away from the mountains. Maerad kept careful count of the days, watching the slender moon waxing each night, and after seven days began to look around for signs of the settlement. The Arkiadera stretched away before and behind her, the huge range of the Osidh Elanor now merely a purple smudge on the horizon, the only sign that she had traveled any distance at all. She began to worry about her food supply, which would last only a couple of weeks. If Mirka was mistaken in her reckoning, or if she was going in completely the wrong direction, she would soon be in serious difficulty.

On the tenth day of her trek, Maerad at last began to see signs of other human beings; in the distance she would occasionally see a Pilanel caravan or sole herders with horses. She began to think hopefully that she was indeed on the correct road and had not been, as she had feared, simply wandering into the heart of the plains.

She kept herself unseen — out of caution, she told herself, but it was also shyness. If she had been heading to a School, she might not have felt so nervous. She wished, not for the first time, that she were not so ignorant. She often fingered the token that Mirka had given her, wondering what it meant and if it would help her, as the old woman had promised.

On the thirteenth day, she saw a smudge of smoke rising before her and guessed that she was at last close to Murask. Encouraged, she sped up, and by nightfall it was in clear view: still a few leagues off, but unmistakably a settlement of many people, since the smoke from numerous fires rose into the sky. She was puzzled because she couldn’t see any buildings, only what appeared to be a low hill.

She could have continued and reached Murask just after dark, but she decided against that, feeling unprepared. Instead she made camp again by the river, planning to arrive early the next day. Despite her weariness, she slept badly; the moon was now at the full and burned brilliantly in the frozen sky, throwing sharp black shadows over the sedges. Looking at it through the tangled branches of the withies, Maerad shivered; it was a powerful moon, dragging up feelings she had thought dead, but they were distorted and unrecognizable, turning strange faces toward her. I no longer know who I am, she thought; I never really knew in the first place. A terrible desolation seized her heart, and she lay on her back, shivering with cold, unable to find any comfort in either her body or her mind.

She woke when it was still dark from troubled dreams that she did not remember. There had been no frost, but she was drenched with a freezing, heavy dew, and the gray world around her seemed bleak and empty. She sniffed the air; the wind was changing, bringing a colder blast from the north, and the sky was heavy with yellowish clouds. She ate her humble breakfast hastily, watching the massing clouds, and then washed briefly in the river’s freezing water: as always when there was a full moon, her period had arrived, and she longed to take a bath. She cursed the timing; she felt more fragile than usual, as if she were made of glass, and now more than ever she needed to be strong. She tried to comb her hair, but it was so tangled after days of sleeping in the open that she almost broke the comb, and she gave up. At last, finding no other reason to procrastinate, but with a heavy reluctance, she began to walk to Murask.

The closer she came to the settlement, the more it puzzled her. It did not look like a town at all. Now she frequently passed grazing herds of ponies, attended by herders in bright Zmarkan jackets, but she could see no caravans. The green hill grew bigger and bigger as she approached it; it was the only high ground in these huge, flat plains. She began to realize that Murask must be inside the hill. She grew more and more apprehensive, and part of her played with the idea of just turning around and walking away. Where to? she thought despairingly. You have no choice — if they don’t let you in here, you’ll freeze to death. As if in answer to her thoughts, a few stray flakes of snow started whirling idly from the sky. She put her head down, postponing all further speculation, and concentrated on walking.

She arrived at the gate to Murask by midmorning. The countryside around her was already white with a thin layer of snow, and she stamped her feet to keep them warm as she stood before the gate, wondering what to do next. Above her loomed the hill, rising higher than two pine trees end to end, and almost as steep as a wall. Close up, it was obvious this was no natural mound, although it was covered with a short green turf that made it seem part of the plains, and hazels and small willows and thornbushes hugged its base.

The gate itself was huge, as high as four men, and made of thick iron bars through which Maerad could see a dark tunnel lit with torches. Behind the bars stood two leaves of a stout wooden door. It was unadorned, and it somehow gave the impression of immense age. It seemed older than anything Maerad had seen at the Bard Schools; maybe it was as old as the standing stones she had seen in the Hollow Lands in Annar. Maerad swallowed, momentarily daunted. The gate was shut, and she could see no one nearby to open it. Experimentally, she set her hand to one of the bars and pushed. As she expected, it was locked.