The Riddle - Alison Croggon [105]
She walked until evening, when she thought she ought to make a camp. There were no trees to shelter her, so she made a detour to the riverside and camped there among the withies. They were of a kind Maerad had never seen before, with reddish violet branches spotted with blue, their yellow leaves shivering in the evening wind. A gaggle of ducks squabbled unseen on the water, and in the distance she could hear the mournful cries of plovers. She found a place between two old trees that offered a little shelter and crouched down among the roots, the sense of well-being she had felt during the day beginning to shrink and vanish.
As soon as the sun disappeared, it began to get very cold, and Maerad was shivering as she huddled, wrapped in her blanket, trying to get comfortable among the tree roots. She felt unsafe; there was no one to keep watch, and she would have to sleep unprotected in the wild. She still wore her glimmerspell, but she knew the spells did not fool animals. And she could light no fire to cheer her, because she had nothing to light it with. She pondered briefly lighting one with magery, but abandoned the idea: a fire would attract notice anyway.
She lay awake for a long time, listening to the night, shifting restlessly on the hard ground. The stars glittered in the darkness. Maerad stared at the bright path of the Lukemoi, the riders of the stars, which arched right across the middle of the sky. She had never seen it shining so brilliantly. It was said that the dead walked that road on their way to the Gates. She wondered if Cadvan lingered there, watching for her even as he made his way to the Groves of Shadow. The thought brought her no comfort. No, she thought; Cadvan was long gone. She was alone.
When she woke up, Maerad had a brief moment of panic; she couldn’t remember where the road was, and she couldn’t see it from the river. She realized that she could easily wander in circles for days in these flat, featureless plains: the only thing that gave her any sense of direction was the road. She breakfasted quickly, set out away from the river in what she thought was the right direction, and before she became too anxious, hit the road again. The next night, when she left the road to find a camping place, she marked her direction much more carefully.
She walked quickly, taking a rest at midday, but otherwise moving all day, anxious to reach Murask before the weather changed. She had been lucky: the days were cold and clear, and there had been no rain. She had unpleasant memories of sleeping in the open in bad weather, and here it was colder than she was used to. In the morning when she woke, the world was white with frost, the dews frozen on the leaves, and the little warmth she had managed to generate overnight quickly dissipated as soon as she moved. She was glad of her sheepskins, for otherwise she might have frozen to death.
The animals she had seen on the plains turned out to be wild herds of a large, shaggy kind of deer. She never came very close to them, as they avoided the road, though once she came upon a small group of about twenty before they scented her and stampeded. There were also groups of wild ponies, of the kind the Pilanel herded: tough and long-haired and wary. Otherwise she saw little creatures like weasels with glossy brown coats, and occasional foxes and hares, and birds: black-and-white terns, which hovered overhead, and enormous flocks of geese and ptarmigans migrating south for the winter, and once a pair of eagles hunting, dropping like stones to the grass and sweeping off with a small luckless animal caught in their talons.
She saw no other human beings. She didn’t feel