The Riddle - Alison Croggon [164]
Arkan held her gaze, and then glanced away, and as he did so, the throne room seem to shiver, as if it were made of water instead of stone, and his face seemed like a double face, as if a mask had slipped. It revealed something dark and cold and dangerous that made Maerad feel really afraid for the first time. Then the mask was back, but the impression remained, like an afterimage of a brilliant light. Her heart started beating fast. He did not seem so duplicitous now; his face was comely as before, but now it had dimension, depth, weight, darkness. Maerad was suddenly deeply unsettled.
“I have only once known a human choose what is true,” said Arkan. “Why should they? They do not live long enough to find out anything: they are like snowflakes, which die in the air and disappear.”
“To you it seems that way,” said Maerad. “But time feels different to us than it does to you.”
A silence fell between them. Maerad was thinking of her dungeon, which his illusions made into a luxurious chamber. Perhaps the Winterking thought that was really what she preferred and was, by his standards, being kind.
“Why did you capture me?” she asked at last. “I know nothing of the Treesong. I have been told I must seek it, so that the Nameless One will not prevail in his new rising. And I have been told that you ally yourself with him, and that he released you from your banishment. Is this true?” She paused. “And you still haven’t told me how you know my Truename.”
“So many questions! You are impatient,” said the Winterking. “It was not difficult to know your Truename. If you truly were the Foretold, then you would have no other name. A flaw in the plans, yes? For anyone who is attentive to the signs and knows the lore will be aware of your name. Your prophets were farsighted, but not wise.” He smiled at her and Maerad shivered: the Nameless One, too, would know her Truename.
“And is the Nameless One your ally?”
Arkan’s mouth thinned. “I would not call him an ally. Yes, it is true: he broke my banishment. You cannot understand what a terrible punishment it is to be exiled from my mountains, my rocks, my place. . . . It is something no human can understand. It is to have no body, no mind, no home, no life.” He looked directly at Maerad, and as if a door had suddenly opened, she felt a desolation that staggered her. She knew what it was to feel homeless, to be alone and abandoned without kin, but Arkan was speaking of something else: millennia of exile, of unbeing. She blinked.
“So you owe the Nameless One your gratitude,” she said.
“I owe him nothing.” The throne room flickered with icy rage. “Do not be so stupid. It does not become you.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I told you what I want.”
“But I don’t have it.” Maerad studied his face, looking for any sign that he knew she was not telling the truth.
“Of course you have it. Or you have the half that Sharma desires. Do you think me a fool?” Maerad felt his displeasure; the room darkened, as if a shadow fell over the pool, and for the briefest second the throne room was as cold as ice. “You do not understand that it means nothing.”
To Maerad’s alarm, the Winterking stood up. He was very tall, much taller than a man. He stepped off the dais and walked toward the pool, moving with the fluid, predatory grace of a snow lynx. When he reached the pool, he stood there with his back to her, dark against the glow, a halo of frosted light about his form.
“It means nothing to me,” said Maerad angrily. “It is of no use to me at all. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to read it.”
“Do you know where it is?” said Arkan.
Maerad bit her lip. Arkan was tricking her, confusing her with his talk of exile and right and wrong; she was being slow-witted. She had just admitted that she had the Treesong. “What do you mean, ‘where it is?’” she asked, trying to buy time.
Arkan turned violently, his face dark with anger, and strode back to Maerad, standing above her. “Do not play these childish games with me,” he said. “I am not interested in your lies; you are here