The Riddle - Alison Croggon [40]
Maerad found a tranquility in this simple life, very different from the busy intensity of Busk, and her nightmares again subsided. The longer she stayed with Ankil, the more the peace of the mountains began to enter her. Sometimes, when her day’s work was done and Cadvan was off helping Ankil with the garden or the goats, she would climb to another tiny meadow nearby and just sit, letting the deep quiet fill her up slowly, an unhurried accretion of light. From this meadow she could look over the whole south of the Isle of Thorold, right down to where the sea vanished into blue mists of distance. At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.
In these moments she usually didn’t think about anything. But when she did, her thoughts most often turned to Hem. He would rise vividly in her mind, his gangly limbs, which had, nevertheless, a surprising grace; his dark, haunted face with its mischievous smile; the intense blue eyes that alone hinted that he was her brother. She remembered the terrible day that she and Cadvan had found him, stinking of urine and terror, concealed in a Pilanel caravan. Maerad still dreamed sometimes of the slaughtered bodies of the family who had hidden him. It had been the first time Maerad had really understood the horror of Hulls — the “Black Bards,” as Hem called them. It had opened up a shocking vista of emptiness that appalled her. Hulls enjoy the suffering of others, Cadvan had said to her at the time; it answers some lack within themselves. . . .
Maerad sometimes felt she was all lack. It frightened her. Hem had filled an emptiness within her that she had not been aware of. She smiled, thinking of how he refused to call himself Cai, his birth name; he was, he insisted, Hem. But she also wondered what was behind that refusal, what it was about himself that he sought to deny. She had thought it was because Hem was not comfortable as a Bard. But perhaps it was something else. Hem, after all, was not an Annaren name; it came from the wandering people of Zmarkan. Maybe, without realizing it, Hem was cleaving to the distant memory of their Pilanel father.
There was about her brother something irrepressible, a spark that even his abused childhood had not extinguished; and yet she feared for him, feared that the blackness stamped in him was a damage that would never be healed. But, Maerad thought fiercely, it must be healed; she could heal it, if they only had time.
At least she knew her brother was alive, and that mere fact made her feel a little less alone in the world. No matter how many friends she made, Maerad still felt deeply alone. Part of it was her fate as the One, but it was more than that. She had been alone for as long as she could remember.
It was inevitable that their evening conversations would turn at some point to Maerad and Cadvan’s quest, and to the Riddle of the Treesong. Ankil hadn’t expressed any curiosity about their reasons for concealment in the mountains, although he was clearly well informed about the recent events in Busk.
One night, they were speaking of Maerad’s Elemental ancestry, which interested Ankil keenly. Maerad showed him the gold ring that the Elidhu Ardina had given her, and then ran upstairs to get the pipes that she had been given when they met in the Weywood in Annar. Ankil inspected the pipes closely; like all Bards, he was a musician. He refrained blowing