The Riddle - Alison Croggon [3]
“Maerad? Are you all right?”
Maerad sat up, rubbing her head. “Cadvan,” she said with relief. “Oh, I had a terrible dream. I’m sorry, did I cry out?”
“Cry out? It sounded as if a Hull were in here, at least.”
Maerad managed a wan smile. “No Hulls,” she said. “Not yet.”
Cadvan helped her up, and Maerad groped her way to a bench along the walls of the tiny cabin and sat down. Her hands were trembling.
“Bad dreams?” said Cadvan, looking at her intently. “It is little wonder you should have nightmares, after what we’ve been through.”
Maerad felt his unasked question. “I think it was a foredream,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “But I don’t understand what it was about. It was horrible.” Foredreams, in Maerad’s experience, were always horrible.
“Tell me, then.” Cadvan sat next to her on the bench.
Maerad haltingly told him of the dream. Put into words, it didn’t sound so awful: the worst thing about it was the feeling of despair and horror it had inspired within her. Cadvan listened gravely, without interrupting, and when she finished, there was a short pause.
“What you describe sounds to me like the deserts south of Dén Raven,” he said. “And perhaps your dreaming semblance stood on the peaks of the Kulkilhirien, the Cruel Mountains above the Plains of Dust, where the Nameless One was said to have marshaled his forces in the days before the Great Silence.”
“Was it a vision, maybe, of the past?” Maerad looked earnestly at Cadvan, and he met her eyes.
“It is possible that you might dream of the past,” he said. “Foredreams come from beyond the Gates, where time is not as it seems on this earth. But I think it more likely you saw the armies of the Dark as they are now, massing in the south for an attack on Turbansk.”
Maerad drew in her breath sharply, and thought of her brother, Hem, now riding to Turbansk with their friend Saliman.
“I hope that I dreamed of something else,” she said. “It was an evil thing I saw. The soldiers looked — they didn’t seem to be human beings.”
“They sound like dogsoldiers to me,” said Cadvan. “They are not creatures born as others are; they are forged of metal and flesh by some ill art in the mighty armories of Dén Raven. They are invested with a strange parody of life, so they seem to have will and intelligence.”
Maerad’s heart constricted with fear for her brother: so young, so damaged, so lately found and lost again. For an instant, she saw his face vividly before her, with its mixture of arrogance and mischief and vulnerability and, behind that, a bitter desolation she did not quite understand, but which pierced her heart with pity.
She had, by the strangest of chances — although Cadvan said it was not chance at all — discovered Hem in the middle of the wilderness. She had long thought him dead, slaughtered as a baby during the sack of Pellinor. He was now a gangly twelve-year-old boy, dark-skinned like their father, and unlike Maerad, whose skin was very white; but they both shared the same dark hair and intense blue eyes.
She had felt bonded to Hem even before she knew who he was. For most of her sixteen years Maerad had been unbearably lonely, and when she had found Hem — silent, terror-stricken, and even more destitute than she had been — her starved soul had flowered toward him: she loved him fiercely, protectively, with all her passion. The thought of the army she had seen in her dream marching on Turbansk, marching on her brother, filled her with black dismay.
Cadvan broke her gloomy reverie by offering her a brown stoppered bottle and a glass from a cupboard nearby. “Have some of this,” he said.
It was a strong spirit designed to ward off chills on cold nights at sea, and Maerad gulped it gratefully, feeling the liquor sear a path down her gullet. She coughed and then sat up straight, feeling more substantial.
“If my dream is