The Riddle - Alison Croggon [194]
Maerad kissed his nose. Finding friends I thought were dead is better than any amount of greatness, she said.
Many mages would disagree with you, he answered.
Maybe that’s why they’re not great, said Maerad, kissing his nose again.
Darsor whinnied with equine laughter and returned to his own meal.
Cadvan and Maerad ate the rabbit stew together, falling easily back into their old companionship. And then they talked for hours, huddled by the fire as the skies cleared above them and the shadows lengthened into evening. The white stars came out one by one in the black wintry sky, and still they talked.
The first thing Maerad wanted to know was how Cadvan had survived the landslide. “We were lucky,” he said. “The road ran into a tunnel through the mountainside. Darsor ran in as the mountain collapsed, but it was a near thing.”
Maerad was silent for a time, reliving the terrible moment when she thought she had seen Cadvan and Darsor die. “Why couldn’t I see it?” she asked at last. “If I had known — if I had had even a little hope . . .” She thought of how things might have been different, and then considered whether, if they had been, she would know what she now did.
“It was dark,” said Cadvan. “Darsor saw it after you fell off; that’s what he was racing for. I didn’t even know it was there until we were inside.”
They had waited until the landslide had subsided and the iriduguls had vanished, and then had ridden to the other end of the tunnel. Leaving Darsor to wait on the other side, Cadvan had climbed over the mountain to get back to the road where they had fought the iriduguls, which took him until dawn the following day. He had found the road entirely blocked by the landslide, and no sign at all of Maerad.
“I thought you had been crushed beneath the rocks, or taken by the iriduguls,” he said. “I have never felt such blackness. All seemed vain. I went back along the pass a league or so and ran into several caravans of Pilanel, who were heading north to Murask. They had Imi with them; she had run back along the road in a panic and literally crashed into them.”
Maerad cried out gladly. “Where is she?”
“She had bruised herself, but nothing worse. I don’t know how she didn’t bolt off the side of the mountain that night, but it seems luck was with her, too. And she is, after all, of mountain stock. She is still with the Pilanel; they are kindly people and will care for her. She was heartbroken that you were lost and did not wish to come with me.
“The Pilanel had not seen you, and I did not think you would have gone back that way, although you might have passed them easily with a glimmerspell. I didn’t know whether to search, or whether it was useless, and if I was to search, where should I look first? I told the Pilanel about the blocked road, and they decided to clear it. They had strong men and tools, but unless they had more hands, they thought it would take two weeks to dig out that rock.”
“So what did you do?” asked Maerad.
“I could not afford to wait so long, and, in the end, Darsor decided me. I could not leave him, and he was on the other side of the tunnel. I climbed back over the mountain and we talked for a long time. Darsor is a wise animal: he said that he did not believe you were dead, though he could not tell me why he thought so, and that if you were alive, you were either taken by the Winterking or would continue the quest. So we continued over the pass into Zmarkan, looking always for signs of you. But we found nothing.”
“So why did I not see you at Murask?” asked Maerad. “I arrived there — oh — four weeks afterward. Surely they would have told me.”
“Because you seemed to have vanished into thin air, I thought it more likely that if you were alive, you had been captured,” said Cadvan. “I decided to go to Arkan-da first.”
Cadvan had ridden hard over the Arkiadera Plains, reaching Lake Zmark in less than a week. There he had disguised himself as a Jussack and journeyed through the Jussack settlements dotted around the lake until he reached Ursk, the