The Riddle - Alison Croggon [168]
Maerad lay down again. She was so tired. . . . She tried to weigh the risks of taking her lyre to Arkan against the possible gains, but sleep blanked out her mind before she reached any decision.
She woke knowing she had dreamed, but without any memory of dreaming. Again she felt a little easier in her soul, as if sleep had offered her some respite. She opened her eyes and saw that the walls were the rock walls of a dungeon. She rubbed her eyes and the dungeon shimmered and faded, and in a few moments her comfortable chamber had returned.
Perhaps — perhaps there was a way out.
It struck her that she had had no idea what the time was since she had been in Arkan-da. There was no window in her room, and the light, anywhere she walked, was always the same soft illumination. It always seemed to be night, and she had lost her bodily sense of time: she ate when she was fed, rose when she woke, slept when she was tired, with no idea whether it was morning, noon, or night. It was disturbing. It also occurred to her that although Gima had said that hundreds of people lived in Arkan-da, Maerad had seen no one except Gima and the Winterking. There were not even guards at the door of his throne room.
Her question had answered itself while she slept. She would take the lyre to the Winterking. She would have to be wary, and careful not to reveal that she saw through the enchantments of his stronghold. But it did seem the best chance she had of reading the runes. It was possible that even if he could read them, he would not tell her what they meant; although if he wished her to play the Song, then surely he could not keep the meaning from her?
That day, Gima took her to a bathroom, and she was able to wash. Steaming hot water fell in a constant waterfall from a pipe carved as the mouth of a fish, and it was caught in a deep and narrow stone bath. To sit in it she had to draw her knees up to her chest; the water reached her shoulders. There was no soap or lavender oil, she noted regretfully, but there was no shortage of hot water. As the water foamed around her neck, she wondered whether it was real or not. Perhaps she really sat in a freezing cold pool, or maybe there was no water at all. Maerad decided she didn’t want to know. She would enjoy the bath anyway.
She stepped out at last, her skin pink and steaming, and changed into the clean clothes Gima had put out for her. They were very warm; there was finely spun woolen underwear and several layers of woolen garments before she put on the fur-lined robes. If they were what they seemed, she thought, they were not utterly impractical; she might not die of cold if she escaped. When she went back to her chamber, she played a few chords on her lyre and was surprised to see that her clothes remained unchanged, although they were less rich in color.
Probably he doesn’t want me to freeze to death in my dungeon, she thought. She felt cheered by her discovery, and inspected her pack again. Her cloak was folded up, and her spare clothes had been washed. She didn’t know where the warm overcoat Dharin had given her was; she would need that. If she had the freedom of the palace, she might be able to find it, or at least a coat that would be warm enough to protect her from the weather.
She took out Dernhil’s book of poems, unwrapping it carefully from its oilskin. It was a small book, not much bigger than her hand, with a tooled calfskin cover, and each page was exquisitely illuminated in bright inks and gold leaf. The book fell open on a poem without a title. On the facing page was a detailed picture of a landscape, with a silver river winding away through green fields toward mountains ghostly with distance. In the foreground sat a young man playing a flute, his head bent in concentration. It looked very like, and probably was, somewhere in the valley of Innail, and Maerad felt a sudden pang of longing for its gentle green landscapes, so different from the harsh beauty of the north. In her mind’s eye she saw Silvia, grave and merry and beautiful all at once, turning toward her with