The Riddle - Alison Croggon [120]
“Aye, he is your cousin,” she said. “I think he is meant to travel along your path. But it is a heavy price.”
Sirkana would not say further what she meant, although Maerad pressed her. She merely said that Maerad would be equipped with everything she needed for her journey to the north, and that she would ask Dharin the following day if he wanted to go on the journey. Their quiet intimacy seemed to have been broken; Sirkana made it clear, without saying anything, that she wanted to be alone, and Maerad retreated to her chamber, filled with a sudden gloom.
Maerad was eager to leave. She was free to wander wherever she liked in Murask, but everyone seemed busy with various tasks — smoking meats for the coming winter, or putting food and grain in the storage houses, or cleaning out their winter quarters — and she most often felt that she was in the way. It had started snowing again, a seemingly unending blizzard, so when she wanted to leave Sirkana’s house, she used the underground tunnel that linked it to the warren of the Howe. Maerad had spent her childhood in mountain country and was not unused to snow, but she felt the oddness of this blizzard and did not need the Pilanel to tell her it was unseasonal, two months before the midwinter solstice, to have such heavy weather. She thought of the stormdogs, and the iriduguls in the Gwalhain Pass, and her heart grew heavy. A cold intelligence was aware of her, and brooded over her presence in the north; she was surer and surer of it. It felt like a shadow in her mind, inchoate but present, which intensified with the cold weather. Arkan, the Winterking, knew she was here.
Her single pleasure was the beginning of a friendship with Dharin. As she had promised, Sirkana spoke with him privately, and the following day he came to her at the noon meal and clasped both her hands in his. Maerad looked down: his hands were enormous, her whole hand barely covering his palm.
“Sirkana tells me you are on a quest and she asked if I would take you north, to the Wise Kindred,” he said. “I will be your guide; I know the telling of the way there. No one from the southern clans has been that way since my father’s father was alive. It will be a great adventure!”
He grinned, and Maerad could not help smiling back.
“She told me that we’d have to go by dog from Tlon,” said Maerad. “I didn’t know you could ride dogs.”
At that, Dharin burst out laughing. “You don’t ride them, little cousin.” Maerad flinched; did he know her real identity? But he used her pseudonym Mara — Sirkana had been insistent that her real identity be kept secret within Murask. “Come, after the meal I will show you. We might be using dogs all the way from Murask, the way this snow is falling, so you should get to know them.”
As he promised, that afternoon Dharin took her to see his dogs. Because of the blizzard, they went by the underground tunnels to a part of Murask that Maerad had not seen. She had assumed the Howe was perfectly round, but it was not; the dog stables, as they were called, were in another open area that was separated from the common where Sirkana’s house stood. It was divided into big pens by high stone walls, and was kept apart from the rest of Murask to prevent the working dogs from hunting the livestock in the main part of the Howe. There were at least fifty dogs there, penned in groups ranging from six to more than a dozen.
It was clear the dogs were Dharin’s pride, and Maerad, who could not quite overcome her fear of them, did her best to conceal her nervousness. They were bigger than any dog she had ever seen, bigger by far than Gilman’s hounds — they stood as high as her chest — and were unsettlingly like wolves.
To Maerad’s surprise, despite the bitter weather, the dogs were all curled up outside, covered in a thin drift of snow, rather than in the shelters provided for them. Even with her untrained eye, she could see that Dharin’s dogs were unusually fine: