The Riddle - Alison Croggon [61]
She put her head down and fought her way, step by step, toward Cadvan. Her mouth was full of salt and her hair whipped into her eyes, stinging them. Although she was wet through, she was glad she had put on the oilskin; at least it kept out the worst of the gale. Another wave broke over the deck, and she stopped, clinging to the rail and gasping again with the cold, until it had rolled off the boat. She looked up; Cadvan was only five paces away, but it could have been five leagues, at the rate she was going. She took one more step, and then stopped — a chill that had nothing to do with cold, gripping her heart.
It was difficult to tell the difference between sea and sky; both were a boiling chaos. But what appeared in front of Cadvan now was neither; it was some monstrous being, almost too big to look at, which seemed to be made out of stormlight and cloud. Maerad shut her eyes, staving off her terror, and then forced herself to look again.
What she saw looked like a giant dog, a heavy hunting dog, like a mastiff, snarling and slavering, crouched for attack. The monster seemed to boil out of the very clouds, and was as difficult as vapor or air to fix in the vision; its jaws were etched with the same weird green-blue light Maerad had noticed earlier in the sky and its eyes were points of emerald fire. Its form shimmered eerily with little lightnings that continually flashed and vanished, so it was not quite substantial, despite the impression it gave of massive bulk. It was, Maerad realized, reaching back to tales of fear she had heard as a child, a stormdog. She was frightened of ordinary dogs, from a childhood memory of seeing a man torn apart by them, but this was much worse than the dogs of Gilman’s Cot. It opened its huge mouth, baring long fangs, and howled. Maerad cowered. The sound she had heard below decks had been its baying; on the open deck of the ship it was completely terrifying.
Cadvan stood unmoving on the ship’s prow, his sword drawn, his form blazing with power. He was only a little bigger than the stormdog’s fangs; its size was staggering. It seemed inconceivable that it would not simply bend forward and snap up the White Owl as a lion would a mouse. As she watched, it reared up and crashed its huge paw against the ship, hitting it with a crash of thunder. Cadvan slashed down with his sword, bringing behind it a blinding arc of white light. Even through the stormdog’s baying and the chaos of the storm, Maerad could feel his words of power echoing through her bones.
The White Owl spun dizzily into the face of a wave and Maerad feared that they were sinking; cataracts of water broke violently over the deck, so that it seemed that they were already all but drowned. Miraculously the Owl righted herself, bobbing upright as the water streamed off the deck. Maerad, clinging to her railing, dashed the water from her eyes and looked desperately to the prow: Cadvan was still there, balancing easily, as if he were a part of the boat, a figurehead rather than a man who merely stood on the deck. He was so bright now it was difficult to look at him and, from an answering shiver deep in her mind, Maerad could feel the power he was invoking. She looked down at her hands and with a thrill of wonder saw that a silver-gold light was breaking between her fingers: Cadvan was investing the entire craft with his power. Before long every timber, every rope and spar of the boat was shining, as if it were made of light, and the glow kept increasing until it was so bright that tears of dazzlement ran down Maerad’s cheeks, mingling with the cold spray that lashed her face. As the White Owl glowed in the tumultuous darkness, suddenly transformed from a humble fishing smack into an airy thing of light, beautiful and strange, the stormdog howled with rage.
Even in the midst of peril, Maerad felt a deep awe: this was a different power from that which Cadvan had revealed during the Rite of Renewal. He was unleashing capacities that Maerad didn’t know Bards possessed. In the full strength of his power, he