The Riddle - Alison Croggon [150]
Nim sighed. “If you do, they will hear, and I will be punished,” he said. “But I would like that.” He looked down at his hands again, and suddenly seemed very shy. And Maerad was at once aware of him, simply as a man, not as a Jussack or an enemy. For the first time in her life, it did not make her feel afraid. She wondered at this: she had more reason to be afraid than at any time since she left Gilman’s Cot; perhaps she had been through so much that things that once frightened her now seemed trivial. Or perhaps, somehow, she trusted this young man.
Nim had nursed and washed her throughout her illness, even though such tasks were demeaning to him. The thought of those intimacies made her blush. He need not have been gentle, but he had been. And he had never been anything but respectful of her. Perhaps it had been out of fear at the Winterking’s displeasure should she sicken and die. But Maerad now thought that it might also be a simple kindness.
“Are you really taking me to Arkan-da?” she asked. “Do you mean the Winterking?”
“I think that is what the Pilani call the Ice King, curse them.”
Maerad was silent for a while. “Why do you curse them? They are good people,” she said at last. “My father was Pilani.”
Nim looked up quickly. “I am sorry to offend you. The Pilani have taken over our land. We want it back.”
“And who told you that?” asked Maerad, wondering. “The Pilanel have been in Zmarkan since the beginning of time. They can’t have taken your land. And isn’t there enough space in Zmarkan for everybody?”
“Everyone knows that it is true,” said Nim, with absolute certainty. “They are an evil people.”
Maerad wanted her pack back, and she didn’t want to make him angry, so she didn’t argue. But the night’s conversation gave her something to think about the following day, when she was put into the sled for the next stage of their interminable journey.
That night, although Maerad half expected that he wouldn’t, Nim brought her lyre, in its leather case. He had not brought her pack. Reverently, her hands shaking with feeling, she took out the instrument and showed it to him, brushing her fingers lightly over the strings to make a faint chord. His eyes widened in wonder.
“I wish I could play,” she whispered.
“I wish that too,” he said. “I have never heard anything so beautiful.”
“Thank you, Nim,” she said. “I won’t forget, ever.” She looked up and saw in Nim’s eyes a wakened longing that made her pity him.
“Perhaps you could go to Annar one day,” she said softly. “People there are good. They are not cruel, like Amusk. And then you could hear the music.”
Nim suddenly looked ashamed, as if she had seen him naked, and turned away, speaking no more that night, and the next day he was harsh with her when he put her in the sled. But Maerad felt no animus toward him for that; she knew the pain of awakenings. Once she too had protected herself against her own feelings as Nim did. And no one was going to rescue Nim and show him a new world, as Cadvan had rescued her from Gilman’s Cot. Not, she reflected sadly, that anyone was going to save her now, either. But having her lyre back made her feel slightly less helpless. Even though she could not play it, she caressed it at night, running her swollen fingers over the runes, wondering if she would ever know what secrets they contained.
Nim had told her that Amusk was the most powerful of all the Jussacks. Maerad had thought about this; it meant that her capture had been carefully planned, perhaps after the failure of the stormdog and the iriduguls. Her journey with Dharin had been doomed from the beginning. She remembered Sirkana’s sadness when she had farewelled them and was sure that Sirkana had foreseen his death. Why, then, had she let him go with Maerad?
But she flinched from thinking too much about Dharin; it raised too many painful memories. Dernhil, Cadvan, Dharin; Imi, Darsor, and Claw; how many had died to protect