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By Root 824 0

she had ever met: something within him drew away from human contact. In Thorold he had been more relaxed than she had ever seen him, but even there she had felt his abiding solitariness. And yet he was, paradoxically, capable of profound friendship, and was loved deeply and loyally by those he befriended. He was not an easy man to know. She remembered what Nelac had said of him: If he seeks to keep something hidden, it is near impossible to find it out. She thought of the moment on the boat when he had looked at her so unsettlingly. She flinched away from the memory, thinking confusedly of Gahal’s warning: Beware of yourself. There was something within her that Gahal did not trust. It made her feel uneasy, because she knew her knowledge of herself was uncertain. Involuntarily she glanced over at Cadvan’s dark profile, seemingly abstracted in thought as he rode beside her.

It was all too complex to unravel, and too disturbing. To divert her mind, she decided to run through the alphabets and runes she had learned in the past weeks. It passed the time, and the soft rhythm of the horses cantering over dead leaves melded with the rhythm of the letters: onna, inla, tref, chan, edlan, cuif, va, a, ricla, pa, dha . . .

There followed days of hard riding through the woods and farmlands of Ileadh. On their left the purple shoulders of the Ileadh Fells reared above the woodlands, and to their right ran a wide plain, the fertile downlands of the Osirian, well stocked with grazing cattle and sheep, and run through by many small streams. The weather continued clear, but there was a chill in the air each night that told them summer was over: the moon, waning now to a nail paring, had a blue halo about it, and the stars blazed coldly in a frosty sky.

When they neared Gent, they charmed themselves and the horses with a glamor that could deceive even Bard eyes. They had decided to disguise themselves as messengers, which would both explain their haste and the fact that they were strangers. Darsor and Imi became handsome bays ridden by two young men dressed in moss green, with a messenger’s red feather pinned to each of their cloaks.

The charm was a speciality of Cadvan’s and, to her chagrin, Maerad found it almost impossible. It took four attempts before she managed her own transformation, and in the end Cadvan had to help her with Imi, which considerably piqued her pride. It was also exhausting; she was dizzy for some time afterward.

They joined the Bard Road at Gent, and on the well-made course their pace picked up. It was sixty leagues to Carfedis, Gent’s sister School, which stood at the border between Ileadh and Annar, and then a farther eighty along the Bard Road to Edinur, where they would turn north and cross the Aldern River. The North Road ran with the Valverras Waste to the east, and the Caln Marish, a maze of fens and marshes, on its other side. By Cadvan’s reckoning, they would reach Edinur in ten days.

They arrived at Carfedis late on the fourth day, and passed into the School, handing the First Bard, Melchis, a letter from Gahal. Maerad was too exhausted to take in more than a confused impression of halls painted with bright murals and a stone-lipped pond outside the Bardhouse, where many white swans swam like ghosts in the dusk. For one wonderful night they ate well, bathed, and slept in comfortable beds. And then they were on the road again, before the sun peeped above the horizon, pursuing their punishing journey north.

Maerad had bad memories of both Edinur and the Valverras Waste, and her heart sank as they neared them. It was in the Valverras that she and Cadvan had found Hem shaking with terror in a ransacked caravan, and the Pilanel family, who had taken him in, brutally murdered by Hulls. The image of their pathetic bodies haunted her, and they began to appear again in her dreams. After they left Carfedis and entered Annar, she began to feel more keenly that she and Cadvan were on their own; it made her edgy and irritable, and once or twice they found themselves on the verge of an argument.

Her mood wasn’t