The Riddle - Alison Croggon [142]
“What do you mean?” Maerad looked up at him. “How will it be catastrophe? And do you know who could tell me what it means?”
“You ask too many questions.” Inka-Reb stared over her head. Now he looked bored. “I have told you what you asked for,” he said. “I can tell you nothing more. Now you can take your lies and go.”
Maerad looked up, another question on her lips, but Inka-Reb’s face told her the interview was over. He held out his hand for the tusk and she gave it back to him, bowing her head.
“I thank you,” she said.
“Go,” he said. The wolves were beginning to stand up and were looking at Maerad with less-than-friendly eyes, their hackles rising, their lips drawing back from their teeth.
She went.
MAERAD dreamed. In her dream she stood in the ruins of Pellinor, not as she had last seen them, fleeing as a terrified child with her mother through the burning streets, but as they must be now. She stood among broken stone walls, their blackened outlines softened and sometimes completely concealed by ivies and other creeping plants, in what must have been the central circle of the School. The remains of paving still existed, broken by weeds and even a sapling here and there, but it was still mainly a clear space. In the middle of the circle, at a distance, she saw a figure bent over a fire, cloaked and hooded in black. At first she thought it was a Hull; then she realized it was a Bard. It reminded her of Cadvan, and she almost cried out his name; then she remembered that Cadvan was dead, and the figure disappeared.
She woke, and the dream vanished completely from her mind, leaving behind it a ghost-print of grief. It was still some hours before the sun would rise. Beside her, Dharin snored gently, and outside the tent she could hear a dog growling in its sleep. Inside her furs she was warm, but her nose was very cold. Soon it would be time to rise and to prepare for their long journey back south. And what then?
She lay on her back, her heart heavy as a stone in her breast, trying to rally her spirits. She had completed part of her quest, but, all the same, her feeling of failure was overwhelming. All she had discovered on her long journey north was that she had carried the Treesong with her all her life.
It was like some bad joke, she thought. Even though she knew the Treesong as well as her own hands, unlocking its riddle was as far beyond her as it had ever been. Even a Bard as learned as Nelac hadn’t recognized the runes, let alone known how to read them. Her dream of the destruction of Turbansk came back to her with agonizing clarity: all those who had put their trust in her had been mistaken. Cadvan and Dernhil, Darsor and Imi, had died for nothing.
It was no use having the Treesong if she did not know what it meant.
She battled her despair all that day, as she and Dharin packed to set off once again over the ice sea. They took their leave of the Wise Kindred, who pressed on them gifts of food: unprepossessing packages of meat that looked to be mainly fat, and two yellow ivory tusks, on which were carved the images of a seal and a fish. Maerad had bowed, touched, and accepted the gifts, feeling that she was a fraud.
Since Maerad had returned from Inka-Reb’s cave and reported that Inka-Reb had spoken to her, she and Dharin had been treated with respect bordering on awe; it seemed that he barely deigned to speak to anybody. But this only compounded her feeling of failure. It might have been better if Inka-Reb had said nothing; what he had told her had made her more responsible than she had been before, without giving her any clue what to do about it.
Dharin had merely asked her if she had found out what she needed. She told him briefly what Inka-Reb had said, and he had shrugged. “Well, then, we must find someone who can read the runes,” he said.
Maerad looked at him. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “But if they are written, they must be readable.”
Not if the only people who can read them are dead, thought Maerad; but she didn’t say it out loud.