"Not to you," she said. "Not to anyone I love."
"A lightning strike or a tempest does not distinguish between friend and foe," said Saliman.
Maerad eyes blazed with anger. "Mistrust me if you will," she said.
"Think not that I mistrust you," said Saliman gently. "Anyone who witnesses what you have just done and claims they are not afraid of that power is either a liar or a fool. And for all my faults, I am neither of those."
Maerad met his eyes for a long moment, and her face softened. Impulsively she flung her arms around Saliman's neck and kissed his cheek, and then without saying anything more, she turned back to the camp. She wanted to talk to Hem.
That night, freed for the moment of the fear of pursuit, they made a large fire and sat long in talk as a ripening moon rose into a clear spring sky. Outside the circle of firelight it was a cold night, but none of them felt the chill. Cadvan made a stew of rabbit flavored with wild sage and thyme and, aside from the grim stories they all had to tell, it was a merry gathering.
The horses, with the exception of Darsor, had panicked and run off, but were swiftly tracked down with Darsor's help, and now were exchanging equine gossip as they casually cropped the turf nearby. Irc had returned cautiously after the confrontation with the Hulls, his feathers still stiff with alarm, and had been formally introduced to Maerad and Cadvan. He wanted to dislike Maerad—he was a jealous bird, and he regarded Hem as his own special possession—but when she greeted him respectfully and offered him some food, he allowed himself to be charmed, and even hopped onto her forearm, a special sign of trust.
Hem had been shocked when he saw Maerad's hand, and at first he tried to avoid looking at it, as the sight pained him. Maerad herself was no longer self-conscious about her missing fingers and gestured as freely as she had before her hand was maimed; and gradually Hem became more used to her injury and didn't feel a stab in his heart every time he glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye. They sat very close to each other, and joked and squabbled as if they were any brother and sister meeting again after a long parting. Except, thought Cadvan, for the magery that still flickered subtly under Maerad's skin, surrounding her form with a faint, ever-changing nimbus of golden light. She remained pale and feverish, her eyes unnaturally bright, and Cadvan noticed with concern that she ate very little, and only when pressed. She gave most of her meal to Irc.
Everyone agreed they could not stay where they were, but no one knew where they ought to go. Innail, their nearest haven, was quite likely to be under attack again from the forces gathered in Desor, and traveling in that direction would very likely bring an unwelcome encounter with the army. The closest
Schools were Desor and Ettinor, but none of them had any inclination to travel that way. Maerad remained silent, staring into the fire. Irc had crept onto her lap and was crooning as she idly stroked his neck, and Hem was beginning to nod with sleep.
"The main question," said Cadvan, "is the Treesong. If we understood what happened today, perhaps we could decide what we should do."
All eyes turned toward Maerad.
"I don't understand it, either," she said slowly. "It's difficult to explain, even to myself..."
"Can you guess what was wrong?" asked Saliman.
"Something was missing." Maerad paused, as if she were trying to listen to an inner voice, and then shook her head. "But I don't know what it was ..."
"Hekibel, you knew that it wasn't running true," said Saliman. Hekibel, who had been almost as silent as Maerad during this discussion, looked up. "I am wondering how you knew, and whether that same knowing might tell us something?"
"I know nothing of magery," said Hekibel, her voice low.
"Saliman and I are not considered beginners in the Arts," said Cadvan. "And yet we had no inkling of any trouble."
"Perhaps Hekibel felt it because she has no training, and we were hampered by what we expected, instead of looking at what was in front of our noses," said Saliman. "It is not Bardic magery, after all, and it moves in other ways. Simpler ways, perhaps."
"I suppose, for me, it was a bit like a scene in a play where somebody has forgotten the lines, or the scenery is wrong, or a player is missing, or something like that," said Hekibel. "But, well, worse. In a play, you're just pretending that people die, but I thought that if it went on much longer, Hem and Maerad would really be killed."
Maerad looked up, startled. "Not killed," she said. "Worse, maybe . . ." There was a silence as the others waited for her to explain what she meant. She started to speak, and then stopped, biting her lip.
"It's difficult to talk about," Maerad said at last. "I don't have the right words; they don't fit, somehow. I mean, as you know, it often happens in magery that if the—if the circumstance is right, then the action follows. And so, when the lyre and the tuning fork were close together, it was as if the Treesong woke up and—became something, almost as if there were another person there." She frowned with concentration. "And the Treesong was there, it wanted to be whole, and that wanting was all there was, and it just got more and more unbearable because whatever it wanted couldn't happen. And there was nothing else in the whole world except that wanting. And if Hekibel hadn't made the Treesong sleep again, Hem and I would have been trapped in that wanting, with no way out of it." She lifted her hands in frustration. "I can't say it properly," she said.
"What does it want?" said Cadvan.
"To be whole. To be free. To be alive." She remembered, with a sudden stab of pain, the Winterking's bitterness when he had told her the meanings of the runes on her lyre in his cold throne room in Arkan-da. "Arkan said—he said the runes were dead, that Nelsor had trapped the power of the Treesong within them, like a flower in ice. He said they were a song, and I had to play them. And when I said I didn't know the music, he said"— she swallowed, recalling his icy rage, the strange mix of fear and desire that Arkan had invoked within her—"he said, Do you think anything can be alive, when it is cloven in half?"
Hem sat up, his eyes shining. "I'm the music," he said. "That's what Nyanar meant." Maerad looked at him inquiringly, and he explained. "Nyanar was an Elidhu I spoke to, in the Suderain. He was ... I don't know how to describe how he was." Hem paused, remembering. "He told me there were two foretold. One for the singing and one for the music." Hem slumped and looking broodingly at the ground. "Only the music didn't happen. I know what the music sounds like. I mean, I know what it feels like. But it didn't feel like that at all today..."
"Arkan also said that the Song could only be sung with love." The high flush on Maerad's cheeks brightened, as if she were making a shameful confession. "And that love can't be stolen or feigned, that it can only be given." She paused. "I don't know what that means, either."
"These are deep riddles," Cadvan said, half smiling. "All the same, I think that whatever was missing today, it was not love."
"Perhaps we have to go back to the beginning? I mean, where all this began?" said Hekibel hesitantly.
Maerad stared at her. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I think so... but nobody knows when the Treesong was first sung. There's that story Ankil told us, about the Split Song ..."
"Ah yes," said Cadvan. "So the Song came out of the nowhere into the now, and slipped into the veins of the Elidhu, as if it were a shoal of minnows slipping into a stream, and each Elidhu felt the Song within it like a shudder of life, and all the sounds of the world burst in on them: the fall of the rain, and the sough of the sea, and the endless sighing of the wind through the green trees. And they opened their mouths in wonder, and so it was the Song leaped out of their mouths, and at last became itself."
"That's beautiful," said Hekibel, listening intently.
Saliman was staring at his hands, his mobile face thoughtful. "I think what might have been missing was the right place," he said. "It would only make sense. The Elidhu are creatures of place, after all. But then, where would that place be? The
Winterking's mountain? Or perhaps somewhere like Nal
-Ak-Burat, where Hem saw Nyanar?"
Maerad shook her head, and Cadvan spoke. "That's unlikely, I think," he said. "From what Maerad has told me, the Song doesn't belong to any one Elidhu."
"Well, then, where it first appeared in Edil-Amarandh," said Saliman. "Wherever that might be."
"It's not the Treesong we should be thinking about, but the runes," said Maerad softly. "And the runes were made in Afinil, by Nelsor himself, in the deep of time."
"If it is a matter of undoing what has been wrongly done, then the place of the doing is the proper place," said Cadvan. He sounded as if he were quoting something, and Saliman looked up and unexpectedly laughed.
"Menellin's Rules," he said. "Learned by rote by every Minor Bard in Annar. How many times I wished, as I chanted them over and over again in the learning halls and watched the sun playing outside, that he hadn't written so many! But yes, perhaps it will do to remember our first lessons."
Maerad was staring fixedly into the fire, her eyes shining.
"Afinil is the place," she said. As she spoke, it seemed to those who listened that echoes gathered around her words, as if many voices spoke behind hers. "We must journey to Afinil for the singing. Under the sign of Ura, by ash, alder, and willow, in the season of renewal..."
There was a blank silence.
"That is all very fine," said Cadvan at last. "But Afinil no longer exists. The Nameless One loathed that city above all others and scoured it from the face of the earth. Even its ruins were ground into dust and scattered on the sixteen winds. And no one living can tell where once it stood."
XIX
THE DANCE OF THE DEAD
T
HAT night, Maerad didn't sleep. She lay on her back, her eyes open, staring at the blackness of the rough stone above her and listening to the gentle breathing of her companions. Hem stirred restlessly in his sleep and began to snore, and she smiled at the sound, thinking of the times when she had held him in her arms and stilled his nightmares. It seemed so long ago, in another lifetime. That was before she had even known that he was her brother. Though something inside her had known the first moment she saw him, cowering in the wrecked caravan in the middle of the Valverras.
Hem was much changed since then. It wasn't only that he had grown at least two handspans and was now taller than Maerad by a head. He had always been thin, but his face had lost the softness of childhood, and his body had the ranginess of a young colt, at once awkward and graceful. It was possible now to see clearly the young man he would soon be.
To have found Hem at last was a deep happiness that lay, like a glowing coal, in the middle of her being, and she warmed herself against it like a shivering child. Beyond that one simple thing, all was uncertain. After her reunion with Hem, what she remembered most vividly when she thought about the previous day was the flash of fear in Saliman's face when she had destroyed the Hulls. Cadvan had promised not to be afraid of her, and yet even he could not entirely conceal his own anxiety. But what were her powers? Even now, she felt she had little understanding of these forces that moved through her: she was a vessel, nothing more. The Treesong had its own imperative, and she was merely its instrument, for good or ill. The thought filled her with an aching emptiness.
It's strange, she thought. The more powerful I become, the less choice I seem to have about anything. She felt as if she were fixed on the rim of a great wheel, which was turning slowly toward the singing of the Treesong. No force on earth could stop its inevitable revolution; and yet she didn't know what would happen, what might begin or end with the undoing of Nelsor's magery. Beyond the act of the singing, everything was blank.
I might die, she thought. Hem might die. Everything I love might be swept away. Cadvan and Saliman know that, yet still they stand by me. They do not think of turning back, although they do not know what they will meet at the end. They must be allowed their fear, if they are so brave in the face of it. Am I as brave as that? Why do I feel so lonely?
Maerad stared into the darkness. She had no right to feel such self-pity. She might be in the middle of the wilderness, in mortal danger, but with her were the people she loved most in the world. Somehow, that only made her feel worse. If she failed, their lives were forfeit. She thought of Cadvan's choice to stand by her, his willingness to risk everything he believed in for his faith in her. Was she equal to such faith? She feared, deeply, that she would fail him, that she was weaker than he thought.
At last she gave up trying to sleep. She wrapped her blanket around her and wandered outside to sit with Cadvan, who was keeping the watch. He turned and smiled as she sat next to him, but said nothing. It was the coldest part of the night; the turf glittered with rime under the still moonlight, and Cadvan's breath curled white on the air.
Maerad stared over the hills, and she thought that she could feel the landscape's very bones. As she watched, it seemed to her that a dance of shadows began to unfold and dissolve before her, a dance of such intricacy and nuance that she could barely comprehend it. But she knew it was a dance of the same echoes and shadows that had haunted her dreams the past few nights.
It was a dance of the dead, but now she saw them with her waking senses. She heard their voices ringing dimly on the frosty air, and saw the soft nimbus of their numberless shifting forms. This time she was not afraid; she knew that these were not revenants, the undead who walked again, but rather their memory. Time seemed to her to move in veils that constantly shifted, one over the other, dissolving as swiftly as she perceived them, and through its layers she could follow the shimmering traces of those who had lived here. She saw not only the shadow marks of what they had made or broken with their hands, but the passions that had lived within them: their hatreds and loves and griefs and desires and fears. Every moment when time had stopped under the intense impression of feeling—the joy of a young child at the return of its father, the ardor of lovers, the moment of dying—sang faintly through the fabric of the earth, filling the Hollow Lands with an eerie, melancholy music.
Maerad caught her breath and turned to Cadvan, her heart beating fast, and she cried out. In that moment she clearly saw the skull beneath the skin and muscles of his face, and she knew she was seeing the future of his own death. The vision filled her with utter desolation: how could she bear a world without Cadvan in it?
Cadvan took her hand, urgently asking what troubled her. At once the vision vanished; but Maerad did not know how to tell him what she had seen, and held his hand tightly until her grief and horror began to subside.
She lifted her eyes from the earth and stared at the moon, which blazed high in the black, frosty night. She realized it would not be very long—seven or eight days, perhaps—before it waxed to the full.
"I have been thinking that the most likely place to look for Afinil is in the Hutmoors," said Cadvan, after a long silence. "Though it could have been near Rachida. Or even Rachida itself."
"Wherever it is, we have to find it quickly," said Maerad. "We have to get there before the moon is full. Or it will be too late. Not just for us, I mean, but for everyone: for Innail, for all of Annar ..."
"I don't like our chances," Cadvan said. "But then, I never have. And yet we have come this far."
Maerad nodded. "How long would it take to ride to the Hutmoors?" she asked.
"It depends. We could get there in five days, riding hard. But where Afinil might be in that sorry, desolate place, I do not know."
"Ardina would know where it was. She went there when Nelsor was alive..."
"We need all the help we can get," said Cadvan.
Maerad thought a little longer, and then stood up and went back to the shelter. She returned with her pipes, and standing close by Cadvan, she began to play them. The tune she played was sad, and the notes echoed plaintively in the still night. But this time, Ardina did not come.
At last, Maerad gave up and sat down disconsolately, holding her pipes in her maimed hand. "Why will she not answer me?" she said.
"I do
n't know," said Cadvan. "But both you and Hem have spoken of how the Elidhu fear and loathe the Treesong. It could be that, now the runes are close together, they emanate a great power, and she cannot come."
"But how are we to find Afinil without her help?"
Cadvan didn't answer for a long time. Finally he said, "If we are meant to find it, we will. But you should sleep, Maerad, especially if we are to begin our journey tomorrow."
"I can't sleep," said Maerad. "I don't think I'll ever sleep again."
Cadvan was about to tell her that she must sleep, that she could not contemplate traveling on no sleep at all, but something in her face, the traces of a deep and inarticulate pain, made him bite his tongue. Maerad stared out with burning eyes over the dim hills, and clutched her blanket more tightly around her body, although she was no longer conscious of the cold.
Hem dreamed of the Black Army that he had seen marching toward Desor. In his dream, the dead soldiers that lay strewn behind the army in the floodplains had risen and were marching on rotting feet, their blank eyes staring at nothing. When he awoke, he remembered that he had seen eyes with that same horrifying blankness in his waking life. They had stared out of the faces of the snouts, the child soldiers of the Dark, when they were bewitched in battle fever.
Alison Croggon - [Pellinor 04] Page 37