The Riddle - Alison Croggon [210]
Hem stared at the letter as if the sheer intensity of his gaze could unriddle its meanings, but all it did was to make the page swim and blur. The only word he could make out was Maerad. And what had Maerad not written down? What other dangers was she facing? The letter was already days old: was she still alive?
Maerad was the one person in the world he felt at home with. In the short period they had been together his nightmares had stopped for the first time in his life. Even before she knew he was her brother, she had taken him in her arms and stroked his face when the bad dreams came. Even now it seemed amazing; Hem would have hit with his closed fist at anyone else who took such liberties. He had trusted Maerad from the start: he sensed her gentleness, and underneath that, her loneliness and sadness. But more than anything else, Maerad accepted him just as he was, and didn’t want him to be anything else. Maerad, he thought painfully, loved him.
Now Maerad was so far away that she might as well not exist at all. It was almost two months since he had last seen her, and she could be anywhere in Edil-Amarandh. And here all anybody could talk about was the war. It lay inside every conversation, like a fat evil worm. It might kill Maerad; it might kill him. They might never see each other again.
Hem puffed his cheeks and blew out a big breath, as if trying to expel his morbid thoughts. There was Saliman, of course. Saliman was everything Hem would have liked to be himself: tall, handsome, strong, generous, brave, funny . . . Hem had adored him, with a passion akin to hero-worship, from the first time he had seen him. It had seemed like a miracle when Saliman had offered to be his guardian and to bring him to Turbansk, the great city of the south, to go to School there and learn how to be a Bard.
Since he had first gained the Speech and had been able to speak to birds, Hem had dreamed of coming to the south, where — the birds had told him — grew trees full of bright fruits as big as his own head. And now, here he was. He lived in a grand Bardhouse with Saliman, and had as much to eat as he wanted, and dressed in fine clothes, rather than the rags he had been used to. But although he now sat in a tree surrounded by the sweet fruit he had once dreamed of, happiness seemed as far beyond him as ever.
For one thing, coming to Turbansk had meant that he had to part from Maerad. The unfairness of this struck deep, although even at his most surly Hem knew it wasn’t anyone’s fault. And he had found that he didn’t like the School much. He wasn’t used to having to sit still and concentrate, and he took the criticisms of his mentors badly, however kindly they were given. They also insisted on calling him Cai, which was the name he had been given as a baby, before he had been kidnapped by Hulls and placed in the orphanage where he had spent most of his childhood. He constantly forgot that it was his name, so he kept getting into trouble for ignoring his teachers, when really he hadn’t realized they were speaking to him.
Hem brooded on the injustice of the Bards for a while, unconsciously plucking and eating another mango. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know anything. Nobody seemed to understand how hard reading and writing were for him, and when he stumbled over a word the scornful looks of the seven-year-olds with whom he did scripting classes scorched his pride.
But the core of Hem’s discontent was that he was lonely. Saliman, the only person in Turbansk he trusted, was often away, or occupied with Bard business. And these days Saliman was usually preoccupied, even when they did have time to speak together. Hem was the only northern child in the School, and his pale olive face stood out among the black-skinned Turbansk children, who