The Riddle - Alison Croggon [26]
It was all very different from anything she had encountered before, but she found that she liked it very much. It wasn’t long before she was as argumentative and noisy as the best of them.
“Wild girl,” Cadvan teased her one night when she sat down, flushed and out of breath, after dancing. “I said you were part Thoroldian.”
“Well, if I am, maybe you are too,” said Maerad, laughing.
“Not as far as I know,” he answered. “But anything is possible.” It was true that Cadvan, usually so solitary and often so ill at ease when he stayed for any length of time in a School, was unusually relaxed in Busk.
Apart from Norloch’s ultimatum, the major topic of discussion among both Bards and townfolk was the Midsummer Festival, one of the high celebrations of the Bardic year: it was when the new year was welcomed in and the old farewelled. Maerad and Cadvan had arrived just under three weeks before the summer solstice, when the festival occurred, and this year’s was especially auspicious because it coincided with the full moon.
“There will be a procession,” said Kabeka, the tall Bard Maerad had seen declaiming a poem that first day. “Everyone comes to the procession — every man, woman, child, dog, and chicken in Thorold, and half of Thorold is in it.”
“It must be total chaos,” said Maerad, trying to imagine how such a crowd could fit in the narrow streets of Busk.
“It is!” Kabeka answered, grinning. “But it’s great fun. We look forward to it all year. The children wear masks and are allowed to steal sweetmeats from the stalls and to cheek their elders and get into all sorts of mischief, for they can’t be punished on that day.
“But the real event is the Rite of Renewal, which is always made by the First Bard. It is one of the most beautiful of the Bardic Rites; I have seen it so many times, and I never tire of it. The First Bard takes the Mirror of Maras, which holds the old year, and she smashes it. Then she remakes it, and from the Mirror grows the Tree of Light.”
Maerad remembered the glimmerspell Nerili had made in their first lesson, and her heart quickened.
“And afterward there is dancing and eating and drinking. And kissing,” Kabeka added wickedly, making Maerad blush. “You shall have to find someone to kiss.”
“I don’t want to kiss anyone,” said Maerad hotly, thinking suddenly of Dernhil.
“There are plenty who want to kiss you,” Kabeka answered, and Maerad’s blush deepened. “You’ll just have to work out how to stop them, then.”
One day, Maerad finished her lessons early and decided to go to the library to find Cadvan, who she knew would be searching through its archives for any mention of the Treesong. The Busk Library, off the central square, was a labyrinthine building that stretched back deep into the rocky hill behind it. It had been added to in a chaotic fashion in the centuries since it had been built, and it was now a bewildering honeycomb of rooms. Some were huge halls lit by long windows; others were tiny, dark chambers. But they were all lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, each of which was piled with scrolls or huge, leather-bound volumes or strange objects whose purpose she could not guess.
Maerad was quite happy to wander through the rooms, nodding to the Bards who sat reading at tables or stood on stepladders rummaging through the shelves. She wondered how anyone found anything, and after a while began to feel awed by the sheer weight of the knowledge she was walking past so lightly. Even if she spent her whole life doing nothing but reading, she would never get through it all. As she worked her way to the back of the library — she supposed Cadvan would be in the older rooms that were delved into the rock — she found more and more chambers that looked as if no one ever went there: the shelves were covered with thick dust, and they had a forlorn air. She picked up a lamp, for many of these rooms were dark, and continued