The Riddle - Alison Croggon [83]
After a while, she heard Cadvan begin to sing in a soft voice, a chant that she knew was a lament for the dead Bard. He sang low, so she couldn’t hear the words, but the melody burned her heart like a rain of fire. She turned over, covering her ears, and her eyes grew hot with unshed tears.
Cadvan sighed and poked the fire with a stick. Its flames flared up briefly, a frail light in the empty darkness that filled the world.
The following day, they left the North Road and forded the Lir River into the Rilnik Plains of western Lirhan, the most northern of the Seven Kingdoms. Maerad was glad to be out of Annar; she had felt cursed as soon as they had entered that land. They bore northeast, following a track, little more than a well-beaten path wide enough for a single cart, which meandered across the plains, occasionally crossed by others.
The light possessed a diamond clarity: every detail seemed to have a heightened solidity and luminosity, as if the landscape were some marvelous carving of precious stones, run through by silver rivers. They passed into wide, empty plains of grass and sedges, now yellowing and sere beneath tangles of blackthorn and gorse. The plains were punctuated by stands of ash and larch, and aspens and willows crowded the many small streams that ran down to the Lir. Before them on the horizon, faint and distant, but visible in every detail as if inscribed in ink by a master penman, loomed the Osidh Elanor, the mountains of the dawn.
It was a beautiful countryside, but its loneliness intensified the breach that had now opened between Cadvan and Maerad. The silence between them was now almost complete; they spoke only at absolute need, and then as briefly as possible. It seemed the breach even extended to the horses, who bickered uncharacteristically; Imi once nipped Darsor on the flank, and received a kick in the belly for the liberty. It was only enough to wind her, to Maerad’s relief, but the Bards attended to their horses separately, rebuking and comforting them without speaking to each other. Maerad was also privately worried about Imi, whose coat was beginning to look rough and dull; she was as tough and stubborn as a mule, but this unrelenting journey was beginning to tell on her.
Western Lirhan, Maerad knew, was largely devoid of towns and villages, which tended to cluster closer to Lirigon. In the summer months it was inhabited by the southern clans of the Pilanel people, nomad horse breeders and traders who grazed their herds on the sweet grasses of the plains and moved with the seasons and their need. She saw a clan in the distance, a gathering of brightly painted caravans drawn in a circle around the rising smoke of a large fire, and she saw herds of horses grazing on far hills, but they went nowhere near the Pilanel and passed no one on the road. The desolation felt like a cruel mercy, since it left Cadvan and Maerad to each other, and that was cold comfort for both of them, but after their last encounter, she dreaded meeting any other wayfarers.
They were traveling as fast as before, both of them sure that pursuit must not be far behind, but despite this, Maerad’s exhaustion abated slightly. Lirhan did not erode the soul as Annar had, and perhaps that had been the greater part of her fatigue. She was very fit, after three weeks of hard riding, and her natural toughness reasserted itself.
She began now to feel the loss of Cadvan’s company; although he always tended to the taciturn, his silence was now an impenetrable wall. Her only company was Imi, who sensed her unhappiness and would lie close at night to comfort