The Riddle (45 page)

The first thing she wanted back was her pack. When she saw that the Jussacks had brought Dharin’s sled and dogs with them, she realized that her pack must be there as well. It contained everything that mattered to her in the world, including her lyre. When she and Nim talked, she told him of her longing for her music, for her lyre. He stared at her with his pale blue eyes.

“You might want to trick me,” he said. “I know you are a witch, and you may have something for your spells in there.”

“No,” said Maerad. “There is a lyre. A harp. For music.” She hummed, hoping that Nim could understand her broken Jussack. “It belonged to my mother. She is dead.”

“My mother is dead as well,” said Nim. He pondered in silence for a short time, and then drew out a circular pendant from underneath his jerkin. It was made of black polished stone. “This was hers.”

Maerad was unexpectedly moved, and reached out and gently touched the pendant with the tip of a finger. “Beautiful,” she said.

Nim looked at his pendant and then put it back inside his clothes.

“I will get your things for you,” he said. “But if you decide to do magic or to escape because of what I have done, I will be killed.”

Maerad looked at him as straightly as she could. “I can’t escape,” she said. “And I can’t do magic with my lyre. I would like to hold it again.” As she spoke, it was as if a hunger flowered in her fingers.

“I am stupid to do this,” Nim said. “But I will do my best. I do not know why, but I do not think you lie to me. Perhaps you are a good liar.”

Maerad smiled, thinking of Inka-Reb. “A wise man once said I was a liar,” she replied. “Perhaps he was right. But I am not lying to you.”

“How would I know?” said Nim. “I am only a simple man. I don’t know why we had to travel so far to find you. Amusk cast runes all the way there to track you. I think they take you back to Arkan-da.”

Maerad looked up in confusion: this was the first she had heard of where she was going.

“Even I can see that though Amusk has bewitched you, you are powerful; I have never seen him afraid of anyone except you and the Ice King. If the Ice King wants you, then you must be powerful.”

“If I was powerful, I am no longer,” said Maerad. Amusk was afraid of her? “But I can still play music. Maybe if you can get my pack, I can play you a song of my people.”

Nim sighed. “If you do, they will hear, and I will be punished,” he said. “But I would like that.” He looked down at his hands again, and suddenly seemed very shy. And Maerad was at once aware of him, simply as a man, not as a Jussack or an enemy. For the first time in her life, it did not make her feel afraid. She wondered at this: she had more reason to be afraid than at any time since she left Gilman’s Cot; perhaps she had been through so much that things that once frightened her now seemed trivial. Or perhaps, somehow, she trusted this young man.

Nim had nursed and washed her throughout her illness, even though such tasks were demeaning to him. The thought of those intimacies made her blush. He need not have been gentle, but he had been. And he had never been anything but respectful of her. Perhaps it had been out of fear at the Winterking’s displeasure should she sicken and die. But Maerad now thought that it might also be a simple kindness.

“Are you really taking me to Arkan-da?” she asked. “Do you mean the Winterking?”

“I think that is what the Pilani call the Ice King, curse them.”

Maerad was silent for a while. “Why do you curse them? They are good people,” she said at last. “My father was Pilani.”

Nim looked up quickly. “I am sorry to offend you. The Pilani have taken over our land. We want it back.”

“And who told you that?” asked Maerad, wondering. “The Pilanel have been in Zmarkan since the beginning of time. They can’t have taken your land. And isn’t there enough space in Zmarkan for everybody?”

“Everyone knows that it is true,” said Nim, with absolute certainty. “They are an evil people.”

Maerad wanted her pack back, and she didn’t want to make him angry, so she didn’t argue. But the night’s conversation gave her something to think about the following day, when she was put into the sled for the next stage of their interminable journey.

That night, although Maerad half expected that he wouldn’t, Nim brought her lyre, in its leather case. He had not brought her pack. Reverently, her hands shaking with feeling, she took out the instrument and showed it to him, brushing her fingers lightly over the strings to make a faint chord. His eyes widened in wonder.

“I wish I could play,” she whispered.

“I wish that too,” he said. “I have never heard anything so beautiful.”

“Thank you, Nim,” she said. “I won’t forget, ever.” She looked up and saw in Nim’s eyes a wakened longing that made her pity him.

“Perhaps you could go to Annar one day,” she said softly. “People there are good. They are not cruel, like Amusk. And then you could hear the music.”

Nim suddenly looked ashamed, as if she had seen him naked, and turned away, speaking no more that night, and the next day he was harsh with her when he put her in the sled. But Maerad felt no animus toward him for that; she knew the pain of awakenings. Once she too had protected herself against her own feelings as Nim did. And no one was going to rescue Nim and show him a new world, as Cadvan had rescued her from Gilman’s Cot. Not, she reflected sadly, that anyone was going to save her now, either. But having her lyre back made her feel slightly less helpless. Even though she could not play it, she caressed it at night, running her swollen fingers over the runes, wondering if she would ever know what secrets they contained.

Nim had told her that Amusk was the most powerful of all the Jussacks. Maerad had thought about this; it meant that her capture had been carefully planned, perhaps after the failure of the stormdog and the iriduguls. Her journey with Dharin had been doomed from the beginning. She remembered Sirkana’s sadness when she had farewelled them and was sure that Sirkana had foreseen his death. Why, then, had she let him go with Maerad?

But she flinched from thinking too much about Dharin; it raised too many painful memories. Dernhil, Cadvan, Dharin; Imi, Darsor, and Claw; how many had died to protect her? The Pilanel had told her that the Jussacks worshiped the Winterking and if such an important man as Amusk had been sent to capture her, it meant that the Winterking wanted her badly. She was a trophy, she thought bitterly — not only for the Dark and the Light, but now the Elementals. No doubt the Winterking would deliver her to the Nameless One himself.

When she was next inspected by the sorcerer Amusk, he was not so displeased with her condition, but he looked closely at her left hand and pursed his lips. Three fingers were a strange color, a dark purple, and she could not feel them at all. He did some healing magery, but it made very little difference.

This time Maerad could follow the conversation a little, though she kept her knowledge of the language secret, in part out of natural caution, and in part to protect Nim. She gathered they were not far, perhaps a week, from their destination. She was briefly amazed; they had traversed the vast expanse of the Arkiadera, from one side to the other. She had twenty-five scratches on the wooden rail. Even given that she didn’t know how many days she had been unconscious after her capture, they were traveling swiftly.

Maerad inspected Amusk closely. He did not look at all like Nim; she wondered now how she could ever have confused them. His face was thin and cruel, and it seemed to Maerad that he looked much more drawn than when he had last come into the tent. Good, she thought; he battles hard to keep me under his control. Alerted by Nim’s comment, she looked for signs of fear when he inspected her, but his eyes were cold and did not reveal anything. An arrogance within her stirred under his cold regard, and she would not avert her gaze, although she could tell he was used to people lowering their eyes in his presence. Especially women, thought Maerad. But if he wanted her in good condition, he could not punish her too much. And, indeed, he did not punish her.

This time she did not try to speak to him, and he did not speak to her at all. When he left, Nim confirmed they would soon be at Arkan-da.

“I suppose then I shall not see you again,” he said.

“I will escape,” said Maerad. “And I will go to Annar. You should too.”

“I have to look after my grandmother and my sister,” said Nim. “My father is dead, too, and there is no one else to care for them. I cannot leave my people.”

“Then maybe we will not meet. Unless one day there is peace in our lands, and perhaps then we could visit each other’s homes.” It was a childish fantasy, but Maerad said it anyway. Speaking of any future was only dreaming.

Nim laughed. “My people are not peaceful,” he said.

“Peace is better than killing,” said Maerad with feeling.

“I think so too.” Nim was silent; he seemed to be remembering something. “I used to like gathering the wildflowers with my sister. We were sent out to get berries and we would gather flowers instead. My mother would be very angry.”

Maerad looked at him curiously. “An old woman told me that the Jussacks keep their women in holes in the ground,” she said.

“That’s not true. Pilani lies,” Nim spat.

“Well, maybe the Jussacks tell lies about the Pilani, too. The man you killed — my cousin, Dharin à Lobvar — he too might have gathered flowers instead of berries.”

Nim was silent for almost an hour after that. Maerad settled down to sleep, her eyes heavy. She still found moving difficult, although she did not feel as sick as she had. She was quite certain that Amusk had almost killed her when he had captured her. All her hatred now focused on him, and on the Winterking. She brooded, wondering what she would find at Arkan-da.

“I do not know much of the world,” said Nim, breaking into her thoughts. “Perhaps you are right. You know different peoples and different languages. All I know is my people and my language.”

“I don’t know that much,” said Maerad sleepily. “Some people have taught me some things.”

“Well, you are lucky,” said Nim. “Maybe what they tell about the Pilani are lies. But would we stop warring against them if there were no lies?”

“You might.” Maerad leaned on her elbow and looked at him.

“And we might not,” said Nim. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you will become the big chieftain and stop them,” said Maerad.

“And maybe then I will visit you in Annar.”

They smiled at each other, each knowing the impossibility of what they were saying. For a moment, they were like children playing a game in which, for a short time, they could hide from a cruel adult world.

The next day Maerad saw a range of mountains in the distance ahead of them, a low purple shape on the horizon that might have been clouds. Nim told her that they were mountains, the range his people called the Trukuch. The ground began to rise, and the flatness was relieved by hills and low ridges. Maerad began to see dwarf hazels pushing through the crust of snow, and then groves of spruce or fir.

They drew ever closer and closer, until they were running in the mountains’ shadow eastward to Arkan-da, along a road marked by standing stones. The Trukuch mountains rose on their right, sharp blades against the gloomy skies, their sheer sides naked of snow, their crowns shrouded in dark clouds, and Maerad’s spirits dropped again to their lowest ebb. The mountain walls seemed like the outlying ramparts of a vast fortress. She began to realize how foolish it was to believe that she could escape the Winterking’s stronghold once she was enclosed within it. The little hope she had distilled from her friendship with Nim evaporated and vanished.

Her continual silent battle with the sorcerer briefly intensified. She was maliciously satisfied to see his drawn face grow grayer, his eyes bloodshot, his thin mouth yet thinner. But he still had the upper hand; she could struggle against his enchantment, but she could not break it. Perhaps, though, she was breaking him.

She hated Amusk with a passion that contained all her grief and love for everyone she had lost. She would have liked to make him so strained that his heart burst and he fell to the ground, his eyes turned up, the blood from his mouth staining the snow as Dharin’s had stained it, steaming in the cold. The image gave her a grim pleasure. But Amusk did not break.

Nim and Maerad’s conversations almost ceased when they came close to the mountains. Nim also looked strained, for reasons Maerad could not guess, and he was as sharp with her as he had been when she was first captured. But Maerad did not mind; she was past caring about herself now. She felt a rising gladness that she was being taken to face her enemy. The Winterking had sent the stormdog against her in the Straits of Thorold, and the Winterking had killed Cadvan in the Gwalhain Pass, and finally he had murdered Dharin. Perhaps, as Inka-Reb seemed to, he knew about the marks on the lyre, and wanted them for himself. Whatever he wanted, Maerad was not going to gratify him. He had taken such care to ensure that she survived that she was sure the way to disappoint him was to bring about her own death.

She had already decided that she could not do so while she was in Nim’s care; she could not bear the weight of his inevitable death on her conscience. She waited, while the sled swept past the mountains, which grew higher and grimmer the farther they journeyed.

I feel you, my enemy,
she said to the night.
I feel you closer and closer. At last I will look on your face.
Something within her laughed, but it was not joyful laughter; it was the defiance of someone who faced certain death, and no longer cared.
I will not die a slave,
she said to herself.
I have earned that much.

The day before they reached Arkan-da, a heavy mist rolled down from the mountains, enclosing the sleds in an eerie white silence. Their pace slowed considerably, and Nim was sent ahead to track the way. Maerad sat on the sled before him indifferently. The mist seemed full of frightening apparitions that dissolved as they neared them, and they could hear dreadful noises that seemed to be the very stones groaning and crying out in pain or rage. Maerad could feel the fear of the men in the sleds behind them. But the apparitions and the noises had no effect on her; nothing frightened her anymore. She pushed against the sorcerer’s spell and felt Amusk weaken. Even he is afraid, she thought. He still wants to live; he still wants to have power in this world. I do not, and so I am not afraid.