The Riddle - Alison Croggon [154]
There was more cursing; an argument was breaking out between Amusk and two of the other men. Nim was silent. Finally she was pulled upright, and her arms were slung about the shoulders of Nim and Amusk, so that her toes scraped the ground. The other three Jussacks stayed behind with the sleds.
As they passed under the arch, a great coldness fell on her heart, as if everything inside her turned to ice.
MAERAD thought she was dreaming. She was deliciously warm — warm as she had not been since she had left Murask eight weeks before — and she was curled up in a bed of surpassing comfort. She was dressed in a long nightgown that stretched down to her toes. Her skin felt silky and clean, and her hair was spread out over the furs, freshly washed and smelling of sweet herbs.
She sat up and looked around in amazement. She was in a room that seemed to be made of something like moonstone: the walls were translucent and shimmered with a dim light. She reached out and touched the wall; it was cold, but not unpleasantly so. Before her was a doorway covered with an unfigured azure hanging, and on the floor, which was made of the same substance as the walls, was a rich rug of the same color.
She brushed her hair out of her eyes, blinking, and then stopped and looked down at her left hand. It was the wrong shape. She dropped it on the fur coverlet, as if it didn’t belong to her, and looked again. Something was wrong. She had a thumb, a forefinger, half of her middle finger, to its first knuckle, and then a clean, white scar. There was no pain.
She studied her hand with a kind of dazed wonder, and then spread out her right hand next to it on the fur. She wore the golden ring Ardina had given her on her right hand, on the third finger. For a while, as if to steady herself, Maerad stared at its delicate pattern of entwined lilies. When she didn’t look at her left hand, it felt exactly the same as it had before, as if her mind made ghostly fingers to replace those that weren’t there. She curled her left hand, feeling its new shape, and then hid it under the coverlet. It’s just an ugly claw, she thought. How am I going to play? And then she looked around. Where am I? Am I dead, after all? But if I were dead, would my fingers be missing?
She shook her head in bewilderment. Her last memory was of passing under the black arch on the road in the mountains. She had known already it was the entrance to Arkan-da, the stronghold of Arkan, the Winterking, and she had been consumed with dread. But here she felt only peace and light.
She looked around the room again: it must be enchanted, but she couldn’t sense any magery around her. The room was very beautiful, as beautiful as some of the rooms she had seen in Annar, but stranger: there were no lamps, although the room was softly illuminated, and no furniture apart from the bed, which was little more than a mattress on the floor, and a strangely carved black stool. Against the stool leaned her pack, and her lyre in its leather case. She stared at them, feeling more amazed by their presence than almost anything else. What were they doing there? They must have been placed there by someone, as if she were a guest in a Bardhouse.
She searched within herself, looking for her own magery, but nothing was there. Once I was the most powerful Bard in Edil-Amarandh, she thought, and now I am nothing. What has happened to me? Where did my Gift go? But no self-pity or despair stirred with these thoughts; all she felt was a kind of blank amazement.
I must be dead, she thought again. But I don’t feel dead. Unless the dead can feel exhausted . . . and why wouldn’t they? She took her left hand out from under the cover and looked at it again. It looked like an injury that had happened years ago. Where her fingers had been was just smooth white skin. She felt a sudden pity for her maimed hand and stroked the scar; it was a little sensitive, but that was all. Then she hid it again and lay down and shut her eyes.
If I am not dead, she thought, I must be alive. But if I am alive, where