The Riddle - Alison Croggon [152]
“And we might not,” said Nim. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe you will become the big chieftain and stop them,” said Maerad.
“And maybe then I will visit you in Annar.”
They smiled at each other, each knowing the impossibility of what they were saying. For a moment, they were like children playing a game in which, for a short time, they could hide from a cruel adult world.
The next day Maerad saw a range of mountains in the distance ahead of them, a low purple shape on the horizon that might have been clouds. Nim told her that they were mountains, the range his people called the Trukuch. The ground began to rise, and the flatness was relieved by hills and low ridges. Maerad began to see dwarf hazels pushing through the crust of snow, and then groves of spruce or fir.
They drew ever closer and closer, until they were running in the mountains’ shadow eastward to Arkan-da, along a road marked by standing stones. The Trukuch mountains rose on their right, sharp blades against the gloomy skies, their sheer sides naked of snow, their crowns shrouded in dark clouds, and Maerad’s spirits dropped again to their lowest ebb. The mountain walls seemed like the outlying ramparts of a vast fortress. She began to realize how foolish it was to believe that she could escape the Winterking’s stronghold once she was enclosed within it. The little hope she had distilled from her friendship with Nim evaporated and vanished.
Her continual silent battle with the sorcerer briefly intensified. She was maliciously satisfied to see his drawn face grow grayer, his eyes bloodshot, his thin mouth yet thinner. But he still had the upper hand; she could struggle against his enchantment, but she could not break it. Perhaps, though, she was breaking him.
She hated Amusk with a passion that contained all her grief and love for everyone she had lost. She would have liked to make him so strained that his heart burst and he fell to the ground, his eyes turned up, the blood from his mouth staining the snow as Dharin’s had stained it, steaming in the cold. The image gave her a grim pleasure. But Amusk did not break.
Nim and Maerad’s conversations almost ceased when they came close to the mountains. Nim also looked strained, for reasons Maerad could not guess, and he was as sharp with her as he had been when she was first captured. But Maerad did not mind; she was past caring about herself now. She felt a rising gladness that she was being taken to face her enemy. The Winterking had sent the stormdog against her in the Straits of Thorold, and the Winterking had killed Cadvan in the Gwalhain Pass, and finally he had murdered Dharin. Perhaps, as Inka-Reb seemed to, he knew about the marks on the lyre, and wanted them for himself. Whatever he wanted, Maerad was not going to gratify him. He had taken such care to ensure that she survived that she was sure the way to disappoint him was to bring about her own death.
She had already decided that she could not do so while she was in Nim’s care; she could not bear the weight of his inevitable death on her conscience. She waited, while the sled swept past the mountains, which grew higher and grimmer the farther they journeyed.
I feel you, my enemy, she said to the night. I feel you closer and closer. At last I will look on your face. Something within her laughed, but it was not joyful laughter; it was the defiance of someone who faced certain death, and no longer cared. I will not die a slave, she said to herself. I have earned that much.
The day before they reached Arkan-da, a heavy mist rolled down from the mountains, enclosing the sleds in an eerie white silence. Their pace slowed considerably, and Nim was sent ahead to track the way. Maerad sat on the sled before him indifferently. The mist seemed full of frightening apparitions that dissolved as they neared them, and they could hear dreadful noises that seemed to be the very stones groaning and crying out in pain or rage. Maerad could feel the fear of the men in the sleds behind them. But the apparitions and the noises had no effect