The Riddle - Alison Croggon [93]
Darsor and Cadvan raced along the cliff side. It was too far to the next bend; they would never make it.
Just as they vanished in the gloom, the entire side of the mountain slid onto the road with a terrible sound like thunder that just rolled on and on and on, and the ground beneath Maerad shook and trembled so she was nearly flung off the road. Icy sludge and pebbles struck her face. The edge of the rockfall was only a body-length away, and she crawled toward the cliff face, sobbing with terror. When the noise stopped, she looked up. Where the road had been was just an impassable blankness of rock and ice, and the iridugul had vanished.
There was no chance Cadvan and Darsor had escaped. Buried beneath those mountains of rubble, she understood with an agony as clear and sharp as a fresh wound, were those she loved as much as her own life. Maerad covered her face with her hands, stunned and disbelieving. Cadvan and Darsor were dead. It couldn’t be true; it must be some awful nightmare. She slid down the mountain wall, hiding her face. It could not be true, and yet it was. In a paroxysm of grief she beat her forehead against the mountainside until it bled and fell insensible onto the frozen stone.
WHEN Maerad opened her eyes, it was so dark she thought she had gone blind. She tried to sit up, but her body wouldn’t obey her. Perhaps I’m paralyzed, she thought, or maybe I’m dead. The thought was strangely comforting, and she lay in the darkness for a long time, without memory or thought. After a while, a sharp rock pressing into her cheek became irritatingly uncomfortable and she tried to move again. This time she was able to shift her head, and as she did, sensation flooded back into her body. She hurt all over, as if she had been beaten with sticks from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, and she was wet through and freezing. Groaning, she managed to crawl up, and sat with her back to the cliff wall, holding her head, her body shuddering with violent, uncontrollable tremors.
As she sat there, memory crept back, first one image and then another. She did not search for it; something within her pulled back from the terrible realization of what had happened to her. But randomly, inexorably, images floated into her mind. Finally, with a numbing feeling of shock, she remembered the terrible sight of Cadvan and Darsor engulfed by the landslide. She stared blindly into the darkness, her eyes dry.
This time she really was alone. All her complaints and resentments of the past days seemed so trivial now. This was the disaster Cadvan had tried to warn her of, and she had brushed off his warnings, sure and arrogant in her power. And her power had failed her. She hadn’t been able to meld with Cadvan, as a Bard should, and she hadn’t been able to work her Elemental powers either. She had cowered abjectly in the middle of herself, and she had failed. As she remembered what had happened, she was almost glad of the physical pain; compared to her mental anguish, it was a relief.
Cadvan and Darsor’s deaths were her fault. And Imi, she thought, had been killed in her panicked flight, or worse, lay with broken legs on some inaccessible slope, dying