The Riddle (49 page)

“Lying is not the same thing as not speaking the truth,” said Arkan. “Elidhu do not lie. Why should we lie? Only humans lie, because they think that language can give them another reality. And then out of their lies they make that reality. Have you not understood that yet? Why do you think Sharma is as he is? He is the Great Liar, and his lie almost became the whole world.”

“But it was still a lie.” Maerad found these conversations disconcerting; they never seemed to go in the directions she imagined. “He wanted to destroy truth.”

“The truth that he wanted to destroy was the truth that he must die. I have seldom met a human being who really wanted to die. Sharma found death a great insult, and he envied the Elidhu, because we do not die. Why do you think he stole our Song? But even he, one of the greatest mages of a golden age of Bards, could not make the truth as he wanted it.”

“So he wished to destroy all truths,” said Maerad.

“No,” said Arkan. “He did know one truth: power. And power is the only thing that humans understand.”

“No, it’s not,” said Maerad stubbornly. “There are other truer truths.” She stared at Arkan, thinking that his veins, if he indeed possessed any, probably ran with ice water. How would he understand the truths of love, of kin, of blood? Of unassuagable grief and longing?

“I know what you think,” said Arkan. He glanced at her, and his glance went deeply into Maerad, like a lance of ice. “What of love? What of sorrow?”

“I don’t think you know what those things are,” said Maerad sharply.

“You have no idea what I know.” His scorn was naked, and she flinched. “No human knows anything of truth. Could you pick the smallest pebble out of a stream and tell me the truth of it? Could you tell me its story of long eons of water and wind and ice and fire? No, to you it would be just a pebble, resting in your hand, of note only because you had picked it up. But that is not its truth.”

“Does that make me a liar?”

“Perhaps.”

“I do not claim anything,” said Maerad, and suddenly felt forlorn. It was true: she did not, and could not, claim anything. “That doesn’t explain why Inka-Reb said I was a liar. He meant something else. If you know everything, perhaps you can explain that.”

“I do not know why the Singer said you were a liar,” said Arkan indifferently. “I think you are a liar because you think you know what is true. You think you feel what is true. But you do not yet know what you do feel and what you do know. You desire and do not take; you love and are too afraid to feel your love; you conceal your vanity and pettiness from yourself; you are afraid to look into your soul and see what you are. That is why you are a liar.”

Maerad was unexpectedly stung, and glared at Arkan. “You have no right to say such things,” she said.

He shrugged. “You asked. You know enough to know that I speak truly.”

Maerad stared down the throne room toward the pool. Arkan is right, she thought. It’s what people mean when they mention how young I am. “What if I do learn truth?” she asked at last.

“Then you will be miserable,” said Arkan. “So, you see, it is easy to understand why humans are such liars.” He seemed to be laughing, and Maerad stared at him defiantly.

“Why would a human not choose what is true?” she asked.

Arkan held her gaze, and then glanced away, and as he did so, the throne room seem to shiver, as if it were made of water instead of stone, and his face seemed like a double face, as if a mask had slipped. It revealed something dark and cold and dangerous that made Maerad feel really afraid for the first time. Then the mask was back, but the impression remained, like an afterimage of a brilliant light. Her heart started beating fast. He did not seem so duplicitous now; his face was comely as before, but now it had dimension, depth, weight, darkness. Maerad was suddenly deeply unsettled.

“I have only once known a human choose what is true,” said Arkan. “Why should they? They do not live long enough to find out anything: they are like snowflakes, which die in the air and disappear.”

“To you it seems that way,” said Maerad. “But time feels different to us than it does to you.”

A silence fell between them. Maerad was thinking of her dungeon, which his illusions made into a luxurious chamber. Perhaps the Winterking thought that was really what she preferred and was, by his standards, being kind.

“Why did you capture me?” she asked at last. “I know nothing of the Treesong. I have been told I must seek it, so that the Nameless One will not prevail in his new rising. And I have been told that you ally yourself with him, and that he released you from your banishment. Is this true?” She paused. “And you still haven’t told me how you know my Truename.”

“So many questions! You are impatient,” said the Winterking. “It was not difficult to know your Truename. If you truly were the Foretold, then you would have no other name. A flaw in the plans, yes? For anyone who is attentive to the signs and knows the lore will be aware of your name. Your prophets were farsighted, but not wise.” He smiled at her and Maerad shivered: the Nameless One, too, would know her Truename.

“And is the Nameless One your ally?”

Arkan’s mouth thinned. “I would not call him an ally. Yes, it is true: he broke my banishment. You cannot understand what a terrible punishment it is to be exiled from my mountains, my rocks, my place. . . . It is something no human can understand. It is to have no body, no mind, no home, no life.” He looked directly at Maerad, and as if a door had suddenly opened, she felt a desolation that staggered her. She knew what it was to feel homeless, to be alone and abandoned without kin, but Arkan was speaking of something else: millennia of exile, of unbeing. She blinked.

“So you owe the Nameless One your gratitude,” she said.

“I owe him nothing.” The throne room flickered with icy rage. “Do not be so stupid. It does not become you.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I told you what I want.”

“But I don’t have it.” Maerad studied his face, looking for any sign that he knew she was not telling the truth.

“Of course you have it. Or you have the half that Sharma desires. Do you think me a fool?” Maerad felt his displeasure; the room darkened, as if a shadow fell over the pool, and for the briefest second the throne room was as cold as ice. “You do not understand that it means nothing.”

To Maerad’s alarm, the Winterking stood up. He was very tall, much taller than a man. He stepped off the dais and walked toward the pool, moving with the fluid, predatory grace of a snow lynx. When he reached the pool, he stood there with his back to her, dark against the glow, a halo of frosted light about his form.

“It means nothing to me,” said Maerad angrily. “It is of no use to me at all. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to read it.”

“Do you know where it is?” said Arkan.

Maerad bit her lip. Arkan was tricking her, confusing her with his talk of exile and right and wrong; she was being slow-witted. She had just admitted that she had the Treesong. “What do you mean, ‘where it is?’” she asked, trying to buy time.

Arkan turned violently, his face dark with anger, and strode back to Maerad, standing above her. “Do not play these childish games with me,” he said. “I am not interested in your lies; you are here because I wish to speak with you, and to speak anything but truth is a waste of time. I know perfectly well that half of my Song is written down on your lyre.”

Maerad’s heart sank. “Then why don’t you just take it, and give it to the Nameless One?” said Maerad bitterly. “And that will be the end of love and truth and all those things that you say don’t exist, and then you can just cover the whole earth with snow and ice. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Did you hear nothing that I said?”

“I don’t trust anything you say to me.”

“You should.” Arkan grasped Maerad’s shoulder, and she started and tried to move away, but could not: the cold pierced to her bone with a strange thrill. “We have interests in common, you and I.”

Arkan’s eyes were alight, but not with laughter; it was some other intensity she did not understand, and it frightened her. She pulled away from him. “Let me go,” she said. “It hurts.” He released his clasp. “I don’t understand,” Maerad said passionately, her fear flaming into anger. “You have murdered my dearest friends.” An ache gathered in her throat. “You sent stormdogs and iriduguls to kill us. You ordered those Jussack thugs to capture me, and they dragged me hundreds of leagues, half dead, across the winterlands. I am your prisoner, held here against my will. And then you say to me, we have things in common. We have nothing in common.”

Arkan sat down again on his throne, his face turned from Maerad, and there was silence for some time. Maerad rubbed her shoulder where he had touched it, trying to get some warmth back. At last, he stirred and spoke.

“I am not used to speaking to such as you. I do not wish you to be afraid, and I do not desire your anger. I regret your sorrow.”

“Yet everything you have done has made me full of sorrow and fear and anger,” Maerad said. “Should I now forgive you those things?”

“Your sorrow evades me,” Arkan answered. “It is prideful and full of anger against death. All those you say are dead — they are merely in another place. There is another sorrow, the sorrow of deathlessness, which humans do not understand.”

“Except the Nameless One,” said Maerad.

“Except Sharma. But he does not understand it in the way of the Elidhu. For him endless life is endless torment. It is not so with us.”

There was another pause while Maerad tried to sort out her thoughts. She remembered her vow to escape, her need to find out what Arkan knew.

“You want a Song that I don’t understand and can’t read. You know it is written on my lyre, but you say it’s no use to you. You say you know more about me than I do, but you won’t tell me what you know. If there’s no point to my being here, and you don’t want to kill me, why don’t you just let me go?”

“There is something that I do not know,” said Arkan.

“That I do know?” Maerad looked at him questioningly. “What do I know? I don’t know anything.”

“Knowing and being are not so different.” Arkan fixed Maerad with a penetrating stare. “Do you not understand that you are part of the riddle?”

“Part of what riddle?” asked Maerad with exasperation. “I thought the riddle was the Treesong.”

“Aye,” said the Winterking. “And you are part of the Treesong. It will not be free unless by your hands.”

Maerad looked at Arkan in disbelief. “What do you mean? I have to play the Song?”

“It must be released, to be given back. You are the player, and the singer as well as the seeker. Did you not know that?”

Maerad held up her maimed hand and thrust it into Arkan’s face. “I cannot play anything now,” she said passionately. “Let alone a Song that I do not understand. I am crippled, you understand? And I can’t read like Bards can. My whole life, I was a slave. But even if I weren’t, even if I were wise as wise, I still couldn’t read it. Even the most learned Bards can’t read that script.”

Maerad paused, breathing hard, and stared bitterly at Arkan. “I have failed. I have failed everyone I love, everyone who loved me. I have failed my name and I have failed the prophecies. And now I have even failed you. Why don’t you just let me go?”

“Why do you wish to leave here? It is comfortable, yes? But perhaps that is not enough for you. Say what you desire, and I will do what I can to provide it.”

Maerad paused and thought. She desired her freedom, but clearly that was the one thing Arkan would not give her. “I don’t like being shut in my room,” she said in a softer voice. “I would like to look around the palace. I would like to go outside.”

“You cannot leave here, Elednor of Edil-Amarandh. I think you would do well to remember that, instead of wasting your time in futile efforts to escape.” As Arkan said her name, Maerad felt as if he jerked a tight leash on her mind, reminding her of his power over her, but this time she sensed something, a weakness. Perhaps his control was not as complete as he had thought.

“And how long do you plan to keep me here?”

“You will stay so long as I need you to. While you are here, Sharma cannot take you: he has not the power to challenge me in my own domain. You do not know how much he desires to find you, nor how fortunate you are that I found you first. You cannot outrun Sharma’s spies and servants; they are everywhere, and they all seek one thing: you. Do not believe that they will not find you. They will.”

Maerad shuddered, remembering her nightmares where Hulls reached for her, the foredream where the darkness sought her.

“The Nameless One is cruel, as I am not,” said Arkan. “You would not be permitted the escape of death: your most secret mind would be open, skinless and raw, to his hatred and malice. You could hide nowhere. Your existence would be an endless torment. There would be no resistance; he would break you, and you would do anything he desired.”

Maerad considered this. She thought that Arkan was probably speaking the truth. And it seemed clear that the Winterking was pursuing his own interests; she found it difficult to believe that anyone so arrogant would consent to serve another. She studied him mistrustfully.

“I thought you and Ardina were enemies,” she said at last. “And yet you say you are not.”

Arkan made a dismissive gesture with his hands. “In the deeps of time we waged different wars,” he said. “Things change.”

A terrible thought occurred to Maerad: had Ardina delivered her to the Winterking? Had she betrayed Maerad? She thought of Ardina, the beautiful, amoral Elidhu she had first met in the Weywood, the wise and just Queen of Rachida, the blazing Moonchild. Ardina was a creature of many faces: Maerad had no reason to believe that she would not have betrayed her. The thought made her feel miserable, and she realized that she was exhausted. She looked down at her hands: they were trembling.

“I want to go back to my room,” she said.

“As you like,” said Arkan. “We will speak when you next wake. You have the freedom of the palace; you may wander where you will.”

Maerad stepped off the dais and walked toward the door of the throne room without saying anything further. At the door, she turned and looked back. The king’s throne was empty.