The Riddle

by Alison Croggon

  "I'm not a monster. I made a mistake. You made a mistake, too, didn't you? But nobody calls you a monster."

  "Some do, in fact," Cadvan responded dryly. "That is not the point. Maerad, I know what it's like to misuse power. It is a terrible thing. Out of all the terrible things that have happened to me, my own actions have been the worst. They scarred my life as nothing else has."

  Maerad stirred at the urgency in his voice, but said nothing. If she broke now, she would break into pieces. She did not want to break. She felt herself hard and stern, and something in her rejoiced at her resistance.

  "Maerad," said Cadvan. "Listen to me. If you do not learn how to control these powers you have, I fear for you. I fear for all of us."

  Then be afraid, said some inner voice. She looked steadily across the fire into Cadvan's eyes. "There's nothing to be frightened of," she said. "I am sorry I killed the Bard. I won't do it again."

  Cadvan held her gaze; she felt herself faltering, and her eyes dropped. She knew it was not so simple, but she pushed that thought away. She was no longer a young girl, who could be easily chastened. She was not a naughty child, to be scolded for playing with fire. She was Maerad, Elednor, the Fire Lily of Edil-Amarandh. Without speaking, she pulled her cloak around herself and rolled over, her back turned to Cadvan, preparing herself for sleep. But she did not sleep for a long time.

  After a while, she heard Cadvan begin to sing in a soft voice, a chant that she knew was a lament for the dead Bard. He sang low, so she couldn't hear the words, but the melody burned her heart like a rain of fire. She turned over, covering her ears, and her eyes grew hot with unshed tears.

  Cadvan sighed and poked the fire with a stick. Its flames flared up briefly, a frail light in the empty darkness that filled the world.

  The following day, they left the North Road and forded the Lir River into the Rilnik Plains of western Lirhan, the most northern of the Seven Kingdoms. Maerad was glad to be out of Annar; she had felt cursed as soon as they had entered that land. They bore northeast, following a track, little more than a well-beaten path wide enough for a single cart, which meandered across the plains, occasionally crossed by others.

  The light possessed a diamond clarity: every detail seemed to have a heightened solidity and luminosity, as if the landscape were some marvelous carving of precious stones, run through by silver rivers. They passed into wide, empty plains of grass and sedges, now yellowing and sere beneath tangles of blackthorn and gorse. The plains were punctuated by stands of ash and larch, and aspens and willows crowded the many small streams that ran down to the Lir. Before them on the horizon, faint and distant, but visible in every detail as if inscribed in ink by a master penman, loomed the Osidh Elanor, the mountains of the dawn.

  It was a beautiful countryside, but its loneliness intensified the breach that had now opened between Cadvan and Maerad. The silence between them was now almost complete; they spoke only at absolute need, and then as briefly as possible. It seemed the breach even extended to the horses, who bickered uncharacteristically; Imi once nipped Darsor on the flank, and received a kick in the belly for the liberty. It was only enough to wind her, to Maerad's relief, but the Bards attended to their horses separately, rebuking and comforting them without speaking to each other. Maerad was also privately worried about Imi, whose coat was beginning to look rough and dull; she was as tough and stubborn as a mule, but this unrelenting journey was beginning to tell on her.

  Western Lirhan, Maerad knew, was largely devoid of towns and villages, which tended to cluster closer to Lirigon. In the summer months it was inhabited by the southern clans of the Pilanel people, nomad horse breeders and traders who grazed their herds on the sweet grasses of the plains and moved with the seasons and their need. She saw a clan in the distance, a gathering of brightly painted caravans drawn in a circle around the rising smoke of a large fire, and she saw herds of horses grazing on far hills, but they went nowhere near the Pilanel and passed no one on the road. The desolation felt like a cruel mercy, since it left Cadvan and Maerad to each other, and that was cold comfort for both of them, but after their last encounter, she dreaded meeting any other wayfarers.

  They were traveling as fast as before, both of them sure that pursuit must not be far behind, but despite this, Maerad's exhaustion abated slightly. Lirhan did not erode the soul as Annar had, and perhaps that had been the greater part of her fatigue. She was very fit, after three weeks of hard riding, and her natural toughness reasserted itself.

  She began now to feel the loss of Cadvan's company; although he always tended to the taciturn, his silence was now an impenetrable wall. Her only company was Imi, who sensed her unhappiness and would lie close at night to comfort her. She was grateful for the beast's simple understanding, but it only slightly eased the ache within her. She felt somehow exiled from humankind.

  She bitterly regretted her killing of Ilar of Desor, and she also felt contrite about her words to Cadvan that night. But both were equally impossible to undo. Her contrition was somewhat tempered by a certain resentment at Cadvan's withdrawal, which felt like a punishment. She was too proud to ask for forgiveness, although she would have welcomed any softening from him. And underneath, Maerad was simply afraid: afraid of her quest; afraid of whoever pursued them; afraid, perhaps most of all, of herself.

  Their ride was uneventful, except that the mountains grew slowly closer and closer and the plains lifted into highlands, growing hillier and colder. The weather held, each day dawning into clear skies in which rode huge clouds, purple beneath and gold and white above, but the sun now held little warmth and the chill of the fading year was palpable.

  Cadvan had reckoned it would take about a week to ride to the Osidh Elanor. The Elanor was one of the two major ranges of Edil-Amarandh, supposed to have been formed in the devastating Wars of the Elementals many eons before, and it was by far the highest. There were only two ways through: the Gwalhain Pass, which the southern clans of the Pilanel used in their migrations from their winter fastnesses in Zmarkan to their summer grazing grounds in West Lirhan, and the Loden Pass farther east, just north of Pellinor. The Gwalhain Pass had been Gahal's main objection to their plans to travel by land: he argued that if anyone knew Maerad and Cadvan were heading north, they would simply have to wait there and ambush them.

  "We shall have to count on their not knowing," Cadvan had said at the time. But the closer they drew to the mountains, the greater seemed their risk. Maerad's murder of the Bard had increased their danger sevenfold: it would be widely known by now that they had been in the north of Annar, although Cadvan considered that the Bards would think it most likely that they were heading for his home School of Lirigon. The Light may well be already hunting them through West Lirhan, and it was not unlikely that others might guess they intended to go to Zmarkan; the Dark had been one step ahead of them all along.

  Chapter XII

  THE GWALHAIN PASS

  THE mountains seemed to emerge from their swathe of distance all at once, as if the leagues of hazy air that had held them at bay, making them seem mere pictures and not real things at all, had suddenly drawn themselves up like veils and vanished. From the foot of the mountains, riding eastward along the Osidh Elanor, it was as if the eye could not take in such vastness. From here Maerad could see only the lesser peaks, and even they looked grim and forbidding. They dwarfed the Lamedon, and even the mountains of the Osidh Annova, where she had spent her childhood in slavery, and she couldn't see the heights that rose behind them at all.

  All the tracks that trailed through the Rilnik Plains here converged into a single broader road, riven with many deep ruts and marked regularly on each side by standing stones, which threw long shadows forward as the day dipped to evening. The road traveled east along the foot of the Elanor, gradually climbing its lower slopes. It wasn't long before their way fell into the shadow cast by the steep ridges that towered above, and a deep chill settled over them despite their fast pace. Maerad shivered and drew her cloak clos
er about her shoulders; it was time now to take out the fleeces they had carried with them since Thorold. Cadvan rode ahead, his shoulders hunched against the cold, unspeaking and driven as he had been for the past week. It grew dark early, but they pushed on: Cadvan wanted to reach the Gate of the Gwalhain Pass by the end of their ride that day.

  It was a clear night, and the light from the crescent moon and the stars was enough to see by, if they went slowly There was no wind, but the air crackled with frost.

  At last they pulled up to camp. Even in the darkness, Maerad could see they had halted at the very root of the mountains: the sheer south wall of Mount Gwalhain rose straight up in front of them, glittering in the starlight, before it bent, as sharply as if the rock had been folded like paper, to its east wall. The Gate of the pass was a narrow canyon with Gwalhain on its left and the cliffs of Morchil Mountain on its right, its narrow entrance guarded by two more of the standing stones.

  They camped a little way from the entrance, which looked too black and ominous to turn their backs on, next to a small thicket of dwarf birches. They lit no fire, fearing it would be seen even in such lonely country, and the horses stamped disconsolately, snorting and whickering as they grazed on the grasses on either side of the road. After a poor dinner of hard biscuit and dried fruits and nuts, eaten in silence, Maerad took first watch, pulling her blanket out of her pack to protect her from the heavy dew that was already falling. She leaned against a granite rock and stared down the road away from the mountains, toward Annar. The lands fell away below them, somber and wide under the veil of darkness, with the occasional gleam of silver where a river or a pond lay. It all looked huge and empty.

  She felt as if she were taking one deep breath before she dived. Through Cadvan's silence, Maerad discerned his anxiety about their journey through the pass, and it made her feel even more nervous. And there was nothing to alleviate her fear, not even the casual banter of companionship; since the killing of Ilar, she felt as if Cadvan had abandoned her. A wave of loneliness swept over her, a fierce longing. Was there anyone in this vast empty world who cared for her, just as she was, for herself? Anyone who thought of her simply as a fellow human being, and not as some symbol burdened by a destiny she barely understood? Hem, the one person who loved her simply because she was Maerad, was probably already dead, slaughtered in the ruins of Turbansk.

  She reached out with her mind, trying to touch, as she often could, that obscure sense that told her Hem was alive. She felt nothing, nothing at all, and a part of her went numb with despair.

  Well, she knew about darkness now. She stared out bitterly into the night.

  They broke their fast the next day in the gray light before dawn, barely able to see each other through a thick fog that had descended in the dark hours, and entered the pass soon afterward. Here, in this deep defile, no sunlight entered: the chill was permanent. The road narrowed dramatically, becoming just wide enough for a caravan, and leaped steeply upward. Every league or so, a bay was carved into the rock of the mountain, Maerad supposed to permit caravans to pass each other if they met face-to-face, for there was no room for more than one. The rock face leaped up sheer on either side of them, with every now and then a tiny stream tumbling down in miniature waterfalls and running away in a little channel carved into the side of the road. In that dim, cold light grew only mosses and bearded lichens, trailing dull greens and yellows down the scabbed face of the rock. Sunlight was visible only long after dawn as a thin strip of light dizzyingly far above them. Not even snow could fall here in the hardest winters. They pressed on, slowed to a walk because of the steepness of the climb and because the road was slick with ice, keeping their hearing alert for any sign of ambush or other travelers.

  They paused for a dismal meal, Maerad already feeling heartily sick of the gloom of the defile. It was late afternoon when they suddenly emerged from the mountainside into daylight again. The light flooded their eyes, and they stopped, but it wasn't only the light that made Maerad pause. Inside the Gate, they had climbed up into the heart of the Osidh Elanor, and now they could see across the snowfields and mountain peaks that stretched for leagues before them. Not ten paces before her the road turned sharply left, and only a low wall stood between her and a vast, cold emptiness of air.

  The Gwalhain Pass was not a Bard Road, although the Bards had improved it centuries before, cutting a little farther into the mountain to make it broader and adding low side walls. Its origin was lost in legend; some said it had been made by the ancestors of the Pilanel, just after the Wars of the Elementals. Whoever had made it had also set the standing stones that marched alongside it, now so ancient and blotched with lichens and mosses it was impossible to tell whether they had once been carved into the semblance of figures. Many had long fallen and lay broken, and others leaned drunkenly sideways.

  The pass was cut into the living rock, zigzagging back and forth across the mountains and sometimes even tunneling through the mountainside. From where she stood, blinking in the bright sunlight, Maerad could see the Osidh Elanor stretching before her far into the distance, white peak after white peak, blinding in the unreal clarity of the sunlight, with the gray scar of the road gleaming along its flanks. Across the valley in front she saw forests of spruce and fir, their greens sharp against the snow; below them was a sheer wall of rock on which no snow or soil could find purchase, and which dropped to a depth she could not measure. She could see a pair of mountain eagles circling lazily upward from beneath their feet. She caught her breath.

  Her first feeling was awe. None of the mountains she had seen had prepared her for this endless panorama. Her next was a sinking feeling akin to nausea: the cliffs above and below the road were vast, and any careless footstep could spell doom. The road wound on for leagues and leagues; they would be in this maze of mountains for days.

  "It's only ten leagues to Zmarkan from here as the eagle flies," said Cadvan, making her jump: he hadn't spoken all day. "But it is thrice that by the pass. And we cannot go swiftly here. May the weather hold!"

  "Do you think it will?" Maerad said. She squinted up at the sky. It was mild and clear, without a cloud in sight.

  "The weather in the Elanor is treacherous," said Cadvan. "It shifts without warning; last time I went through this pass, a fog came over me, swift as a racing horse. It was so thick I couldn't see farther than my nose and had to feel my way like a blind man. A storm in these mountains is beyond description."

  "Perhaps we will be lucky" said Maerad.

  "Perhaps." Cadvan gathered up his reins. "If it were only the weather, I would not be so worried. If the Winterking can send a stormdog as far south as Thorold, then here will hardly be a challenge. And I do not think, Maerad, that even you could sing more than one such creature to sleep. Not in their own lands."

  He smiled crookedly at Maerad, and she looked back uncertainly. This was the most Cadvan had spoken to her in a week. Did this mean he had forgiven her? She didn't feel like forgiving him so easily, as if she were a puppy to be seduced by a pat.

  "With any luck, we won't have to find out," she said, more coldly than she had intended. Cadvan's face was suddenly expressionless again, and she kicked herself. If he shouted at her, it would be easier, or if they could laugh together, but there was nothing, it seemed, to laugh at. Cadvan was so often beyond her, withdrawing into some inaccessible place within himself, but now it seemed as if nothing would heal the breach. Perhaps it was partly that in some secret place within herself, she didn't want to, that she feared their closeness. She dismissed that thought as ridiculous; Cadvan's withdrawal made her so miserable, how could she want it? How she wished he had not looked at her as he had on the voyage from Thorold; everything since then had just gone wrong.

  Cadvan urged Darsor into a walk, and they started their slow, interminable journey.

  Maerad was suspended between delight at the astounding vistas that opened up before her and a constant anxiety about the dizzying depths and heights that seemed to wait only
a few steps from her feet. The road was lonely; they saw no living things except the eagles and occasionally, in the distance, the scuts of mountain hares playing on slopes and, once, a snow lynx, which surveyed them with a mixture of curiosity and scorn from below the road. It wasn't long before their days assumed a pattern. The days were long and they rode from dawn to dusk, camping each evening in one of the many bays carved into the mountain walls for travelers—wide caves big enough to hold two caravans, which provided shelter from the worst weather. They protected themselves as best they could against the punishing cold of night, waking up often with frost in their hair and on their clothes. Maerad was more grateful than she could say for the winter clothes they had brought from Gent, which miraculously kept in their body heat, but even with these, the deep cold of the mountains made sleeping difficult. Very often there was wood stacked in the bays, left there by traveling Pilanel, and then they would light a fire; there was precious little firewood this high up.

  The first time, their third night on the pass, Maerad was surprised to see the neat stack. "Can we take it?" she asked.

  "These are for the use of travelers such as us," said Cadvan. "Look at the wall."

  Carved into the rock next to the pile were two signs that looked very like Ladhen runes. Maerad examined them curiously: one, she thought, was the sign for light, the other she didn't know. She looked at Cadvan, her eyebrows raised in inquiry.

  "They're slightly different from those the Bards use," said Cadvan. "Bards adapted the Ladhen runes from the Pilanel, who use them all the time to communicate with each other from place to place. It means, roughly, that this wood is a gift to travelers in the name of the Light: that is the rune for Light, written over the rune for travel, and this the sign for an offering or gift."