The Riddle (50 page)

Once back in her room, Maerad flung herself on the bed and covered her face to shut out the sight of the chamber. Her conversations with the Winterking seemed to turn everything on its head. What was real and what was illusion? She felt as if she didn’t know anything anymore. She sat up and put her hands in front of her eyes. Was it illusion that her hand was mutilated? But no, when she had played the lyre, her fingers were still missing: only then they were not so well healed. Or maybe her wound was an illusion as well? How was she to tell? On a sudden impulse, she scratched her right hand viciously with her left forefinger, hard enough to draw blood. It opened a wound: but, as she watched, the skin joined and healed, and it seemed as if she were not scratched at all.

That, at least, could not be real.

She picked up her lyre and slowly stroked a chord. As the notes rang out, she saw the scratch open on her hand, the blood running down into her palm. It tickled, and she licked the blood off her hand thoughtfully until the music faded and her hand was whole and she was back again in her beautiful prison of ice.

The more she thought about it, the more she thought that Arkan was being honest with her. She did not trust him, but she believed what he said about the Nameless One and his story of betrayal. Perhaps it was Arkan himself who had revealed the Treesong to the Nameless One. She wished fiercely she knew more of the history of the Dhyllin, of the legendary citadel of Afinil, when Bards and Elidhu had sung together, before the Great Silence. She would be better able to judge his tale then: she would know whether he sought to mislead her, whether he warped the truth to his own ends.

Ardina had told her she was neither of the Dark nor the Light. Arkan had more or less said the same thing. They both were very different from what she had been told of other Elidhu, like the Lamedon. She struggled to remember what Cadvan taught her. No one knew how many there were, and when the Great Silence had fallen on Annar, they had withdrawn from human affairs and would no longer take human shape. Except, she thought, Arkan and Ardina, who had domains over which they ruled as king and queen. Ardina had done so for love, or that was the legend. But Arkan — why had he? Was it also for love of a human being? Perhaps — she dismissed the thought as ridiculous almost as soon as it occurred to her, but it returned and she puzzled over it, wondering if it was perhaps not so far-fetched — perhaps Arkan had loved Sharma, and perhaps he had been betrayed by him. Love would explain why Arkan spoke of the Nameless One with such bitterness, and also, maybe, why he might have given him the Treesong. If he had. After all, there were many stories of love between Elementals and humans. But the Treesong, she thought suddenly, did not belong only to Arkan. Did he want it only for himself?

Maerad felt dizzy. She lay on her back and shut her eyes.

Beneath all these thoughts was the necessity of escape. Whatever Arkan wanted of her, he had no right to keep her against her will. She had no doubt that he was not exaggerating the dangers of the Dark in Annar: even the Light had been conscripted against her. Yet some deep instinct, beyond her desire for freedom, told her that she must get back to Annar.

Hem needed her; maybe he was the only person who really needed her — not as an embodiment of prophecy, not as the final hope of the Light against the Nameless One, but as his sister. And Saliman could help her quest; he was almost as powerful a Bard as Cadvan. But how could she possibly find them? The chaos of war must be everywhere by now: perhaps Turbansk had already fallen and Annar itself was riven by civil war.

Arkan was confident she could not escape him — so confident that she felt a little hope. She did not think that he knew that she had pierced the illusion of his ice palace. But it was possible that he was toying with her: he knew, after all, that the Treesong was written on the lyre, and perhaps he knew of its power to break his sorcery. But Maerad thought that he did not know, and it was much better that he didn’t.

Perhaps he underestimates me, Maerad thought hopefully. In which case, I am a little freer: he will not watch me so carefully. And if I am careful enough, if I am clever enough, perhaps I will find a way out of here.

She pondered for a while whether she was capable of being careful and clever enough to outwit the Winterking. She felt somewhat dubious. But, she thought, she had little to lose by trying. Living in Gilman’s Cot, she had played private games to escape the misery of her life. Here life was not so miserable: she was more like an honored hostage than a slave. It would be a game, a game with high stakes, a game for her freedom, for her truth.

A thought struck Maerad like a hammer, and she sat up. Perhaps Arkan could read the runes on her lyre.

Could she risk showing the lyre to Arkan and asking him? Could she risk not doing so? If it was Arkan who gave the Song to the Nameless One, he may have had a part in making the runes. Perhaps he understood what they meant. It might be her single chance to decipher the runes.

Maerad lay down again. She was so tired. . . . She tried to weigh the risks of taking her lyre to Arkan against the possible gains, but sleep blanked out her mind before she reached any decision.

She woke knowing she had dreamed, but without any memory of dreaming. Again she felt a little easier in her soul, as if sleep had offered her some respite. She opened her eyes and saw that the walls were the rock walls of a dungeon. She rubbed her eyes and the dungeon shimmered and faded, and in a few moments her comfortable chamber had returned.

Perhaps — perhaps there was a way out.

It struck her that she had had no idea what the time was since she had been in Arkan-da. There was no window in her room, and the light, anywhere she walked, was always the same soft illumination. It always seemed to be night, and she had lost her bodily sense of time: she ate when she was fed, rose when she woke, slept when she was tired, with no idea whether it was morning, noon, or night. It was disturbing. It also occurred to her that although Gima had said that hundreds of people lived in Arkan-da, Maerad had seen no one except Gima and the Winterking. There were not even guards at the door of his throne room.

Her question had answered itself while she slept. She would take the lyre to the Winterking. She would have to be wary, and careful not to reveal that she saw through the enchantments of his stronghold. But it did seem the best chance she had of reading the runes. It was possible that even if he could read them, he would not tell her what they meant; although if he wished her to play the Song, then surely he could not keep the meaning from her?

That day, Gima took her to a bathroom, and she was able to wash. Steaming hot water fell in a constant waterfall from a pipe carved as the mouth of a fish, and it was caught in a deep and narrow stone bath. To sit in it she had to draw her knees up to her chest; the water reached her shoulders. There was no soap or lavender oil, she noted regretfully, but there was no shortage of hot water. As the water foamed around her neck, she wondered whether it was real or not. Perhaps she really sat in a freezing cold pool, or maybe there was no water at all. Maerad decided she didn’t want to know. She would enjoy the bath anyway.

She stepped out at last, her skin pink and steaming, and changed into the clean clothes Gima had put out for her. They were very warm; there was finely spun woolen underwear and several layers of woolen garments before she put on the fur-lined robes. If they were what they seemed, she thought, they were not utterly impractical; she might not die of cold if she escaped. When she went back to her chamber, she played a few chords on her lyre and was surprised to see that her clothes remained unchanged, although they were less rich in color.

Probably he doesn’t want me to freeze to death in my dungeon, she thought. She felt cheered by her discovery, and inspected her pack again. Her cloak was folded up, and her spare clothes had been washed. She didn’t know where the warm overcoat Dharin had given her was; she would need that. If she had the freedom of the palace, she might be able to find it, or at least a coat that would be warm enough to protect her from the weather.

She took out Dernhil’s book of poems, unwrapping it carefully from its oilskin. It was a small book, not much bigger than her hand, with a tooled calfskin cover, and each page was exquisitely illuminated in bright inks and gold leaf. The book fell open on a poem without a title. On the facing page was a detailed picture of a landscape, with a silver river winding away through green fields toward mountains ghostly with distance. In the foreground sat a young man playing a flute, his head bent in concentration. It looked very like, and probably was, somewhere in the valley of Innail, and Maerad felt a sudden pang of longing for its gentle green landscapes, so different from the harsh beauty of the north. In her mind’s eye she saw Silvia, grave and merry and beautiful all at once, turning toward her with her face full of light, her lips open with what she was about to offer — a song, a joke, a kiss.

Maerad began to read the poem silently, moving her lips as she did, and as she read, she heard in her mind the cadence of Dernhil’s voice reading it to her, in another age of her life, in his rooms in Innail:

An icy splinter seemed to melt in Maerad’s heart as she read, and she looked up blindly from the page, her eyes full of tears. Dernhil would never read that poem to anyone again, would never sit gravely in his study with his cloak thrown carelessly on a chair nearby, surrounded by crooked towers of books, oblivious to everything but the scratching of his pen on parchment. Yes, we are frail, thought Maerad, but within that frailty is such strength and such beauty, such love. . . . Surely it is not all for nothing? Surely it means something, even should the dark overwhelm us utterly?

Sorrow flooded through her, and she hid her face in her hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. She had not been able to weep for Dharin’s death. Her despair had shriveled her soul: she had been too hurt for such a generosity as tears. At last she mourned him, his gentleness, his courage, his friendship, the wound his absence left within her. She wept for Dernhil and Cadvan, for Darsor, for Imi, for Hem and his broken childhood, for her mother and father, so cruelly killed, and last she wept for herself. And as she wept, she felt as if all those she loved and missed, the dead and the living, were somehow present, and in her sorrow was a painful comfort.

At last, her tears ceased. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, and saw that she was in the dungeon, not the enchanted room. It was cold, and she wrapped her robes tightly around herself, and looked back down at the book. Its colors seemed brighter still in the dim, flickering light of the oil lamp.

I am free, Maerad thought. I am here, imprisoned, but at last I am free.

MAERAD decided to take Arkan at his word, and since Gima did not come to her chamber again that day, she began to explore the Ice Palace. Her moonstone chamber was back, but it had now a sense of unreality, as if it were slightly less stable than it had been. She took care to remember her route; she didn’t want to get lost. She decided to use a system of counting, as if she were remembering a complex piece of music, so she could find her way back. No one stopped her; no one was there to stop her. She didn’t see anyone else at all.

Arkan-da was eerie and deserted. It seemed to be a busy place, where people lived and made things and ate, but wherever Maerad walked it was as if they had abandoned their tasks and left just before she got there. There were endless corridors with scores of doorways, and when she lifted the hangings that covered the doors, she saw a bewildering variety of rooms. Some seemed to be bedchambers, furnished simply but beautifully, with personal belongings scattered on the bed or the floor, as if someone had just walked out. She saw a place that seemed to be a kitchen, with black iron implements hanging from the ceiling and an iron cauldron suspended on a tripod over a fire, bubbling, but no one was there.

There were many grand halls with pillars of iron and stone, so big that the columns marched off into long distances, and storerooms with shelves full of dried or smoked foods, sides of meats or long sausages or onions, and she saw armories, with rows of pikes and maces and strange leather helms.

She looked always for an exit or a window, but she didn’t find any until she entered a high, wide passageway supported by iron pillars. She was just about to turn to find her way back to her own room when a difference in the light at the other end made her look again. Although her legs were already beginning to ache, she made herself walk to the other end, and as she did, she saw that she had indeed found a door. And the door was open.