The Riddle - Alison Croggon [31]
Nerili opened her eyes and looked up at Cadvan. Her face was white as paper, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. “I failed to make the Tree,” she whispered. “I have failed you all. The Rite has failed.”
“No, the Tree has been made,” Cadvan said, stroking her hair back from her face. “The year has been renewed. The Rite did not fail.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” Nerili seemed on the verge of bursting into tears, which was grievous to see in one so self-controlled. “I saw . . . the Tree . . .”
“Don’t say now,” said Cadvan in an urgent whisper. “Later. The Tree has been made. All is as it should be.”
Nerili grasped Cadvan’s hand hard, examining his face with a desperate intensity. “It has been made? How?”
“I made it,” he said.
She let go his hand, bowed her head, and said nothing more. Cadvan helped her up and led her through the square, the crowd silently parting to make way for them. The Bards of the First Circle and Maerad followed them to the Bardhouse, unspeaking, and as they left, Maerad heard people beginning to emerge from their shocked silence, to murmur, and then to talk.
Elenxi and the three other Bards of the First Circle who had participated in the Rite of Renewal were already in Nerili’s sitting room when the rest of them entered. They looked almost as ashen as Nerili herself. Cadvan poured the First Bard a glass of the golden liquor laradhel, which she gulped down, her hands trembling on the glass. Her head was still bowed, as if she were unable to look anyone in the eye. All in the room watched her with silent concern. At last, she gave herself a little shake and sat up, looking straight at Elenxi, her eyes dark with grief and shame. She looked utterly exhausted.
“I am undone,” she said. “I have failed my place as First Bard. You must elect another.”
“No!” said Elenxi and several others. “No,” he continued. “I was there. I felt it. It was not that you failed.”
“If Cadvan of Lirigon had not been there, the Tree of Light would not have been renewed,” she said, a flat deadness in her voice. “I had not the strength.”
“Not to remake the Mirror and the Tree as well,” said Cadvan. “There were other forces at work.” He shook his head. “I felt it, too, Neri. It took everything I had to make the Tree, and I doubt that I could have made the Mirror as well.”
There was a long silence.
“I saw . . . I saw something terrible,” said Nerili. “In the Mirror.”
“Please say,” said Kabeka gently. “Please tell us what you saw.”
Nerili drew a long, shuddering breath. “I was so tired. I have never had such a struggle to renew the Mirror; it was as if all the fragments were pushing apart, resisting me, as if it wanted to remain broken. So when it was remade, I looked into it, and I felt I had spent all my power. I was weak.” She said this with a kind of contempt. “So . . . I looked. And at first it seemed to be as it should be. The sapling sprouted and grew as it always does, brightly and with joy, and my heart lifted. It grew to its full height and began to put forth buds. But then . . .” She shut her eyes, and began to speak in a whisper. “Then I felt a terrible sense of wrong; it was like a dagger slipped between my ribs. I cannot explain it. As I watched, a sickness began to spread from the roots of the Tree. A terrible poison, it seemed, that ran up the trunk. About the whole Tree was a stench of corruption. I watched the leaves and blossoms wither and fall, and leave the naked trunk bleached and lightless, and then even that rotted before my eyes, and nothing remained, nothing, except a vile smoke, a vapor of darkness . . .”
She began to shake all over, and Cadvan wordlessly poured her another glass of laradhel. Maerad looked around at the half dozen Bards in the room. They were all pale, and some also reached for the laradhel. She realized that, unlike them, she was not shocked, that what Nerili described was already somehow