The Riddle - Alison Croggon [4]
“It is ill news, and not only for Turbansk,” said Cadvan. “But even that vast force is only one piece in the great stratagem the Nameless One is now unleashing. And you, Maerad, are as significant to him as that huge army. Maybe more so. Everything turns on you.”
Maerad bowed her head, oppressed beyond measure by Cadvan’s words. On me? she thought bitterly. And yet she knew it was true.
She pressed her hands together to stop their trembling, and glanced at Cadvan as he sat down again beside her, his face somber and abstracted with thought.
Their first meeting came vividly into her mind. It had been a mere three months before, but to Maerad it felt like a lifetime. She had been milking a cow in Gilman’s Cot, the grim northern settlement where, for most of her short life, she had been a slave. He had stood silently before her, amazed and disconcerted that she could see through his charm of invisibility.
It had been a morning like any other, notable only for being the Springturn when winter, in theory at least, began to retreat from the mountains. Then, as now, his face had been shadowed with exhaustion and anxiety and — Maerad thought — an indefinable sadness. Despite everything — despite his being a stranger, despite her fear of men, learned from the violence of life in the cot — she had trusted him at once. She still didn’t really know why; it went too deep for words.
It was Cadvan who had revealed to her who she was, and he had helped to unravel some of the history of her family. With her mother, Milana, Maerad had been captured and sold as a very small child after the sack of Pellinor, the School where she had been born. It was Cadvan who helped her escape from the misery of slavery, who had told her of her Gift and opened up to her the world of Bards. He had taken her to the School of Innail, and for the first time in her conscious life she had found a place where she felt at home. A sudden sharp ache constricted Maerad’s throat as she thought of Silvia, who had become like a mother to her in the short time they had known each other; and then of Dernhil, who had loved her. Despite that love she had spurned him, and when Dernhil had been killed by Hulls — the Black Bards who were servants of the Nameless One — she had mourned both his absence and a vanished possibility that she would always regret.
She wished fiercely that she had been able to stay in Innail — loved as you should be, Dernhil had said to her — and that she could have spent a quiet life learning the Bardic Arts of Reading, Tending, and Making. She would have liked nothing better in the world than to learn the scripts of Annar and decipher their immense riches of poetry and history and thought, or to study herblore and healing and the ways of animals, to observe the rites of the seasons and keep the Knowing of the Light, as Bards had done for centuries before her. Instead, she was on a tiny boat in the middle of a dark sea, hundreds of leagues from the gentle haven of Innail, fleeing from darkness into darkness, her future more uncertain than it had ever been.
It wasn’t fair. The tale of her life since leaving Gilman’s Cot had been of finding what she loved, and almost at once losing it. Closely pursued by the Dark, she and Cadvan had fled Innail, heading for Norloch, the chief center of the Light in Annar. During their journey across Annar, Maerad had at last come into the Speech, the inborn language of the Bards, and had found her full powers. Her abilities were much greater and stranger than those of a normal Bard: she had vanquished a wight, the malign spirit of a dead king from the days of the Great Silence, which was beyond the magery of even the most powerful Bards. She had discovered that part of her strangeness was her Elemental blood, her Elidhu ancestry that led back to Ardina, Queen of the golden realm of Rachida, which lay hidden in the center of the Great Forest. But she was still nowhere near able to control the powers of her Gift.
When they had at last