The Riddle Page 5

  As Cadvan had predicted, Maerad used her time well, and within a week all her mentors were telling her that they were astonished by her progress. Years of brusque tutelage from the Bard Mirlad in Gilman's Cot, being taught musicianship by ear, meant her memory was excellent; she had only to be told something once to remember it. But more than that, she seemed to have an innate knowledge of Barding, which her teachers merely had to reawaken. They all commented privately on this to Cadvan; they found her aptitude a little unnerving.

  Her teachers were all senior Bards in the School of Busk. Elenxi of Busk taught her swordcraft, Intatha of Gent taught her reading and writing, and, to Maerad's initial abashment, Nerili herself had taken on the task of introducing her to High Magery. Partly, Cadvan explained, the senior Bards were teaching her because Maerad was such an unusual case and because she needed swift teaching, but another reason was secrecy. Maerad was known within the School as Maerad of Innail, traveling with Cadvan, who was too well known to conceal his identity.

  "I don't doubt that some will guess that you are Maerad of Pellinor," said Cadvan the first night after her lessons commenced. "Bards are the worst gossips, and your arrival and acceptance as a Minor Bard at Innail caused a lot of comment: a survivor of the sack of Pellinor was big news. As was the scandal when I applied to be your sole mentor. But even so, it's better for us to lie low and be discreet, even here. We are just traveling Bards, visiting the School at Nerili's invitation. There is nothing unusual about that."

  Maerad shrugged. "Do you think there are spies here?" "For the Dark, you mean?" said Cadvan. "I do not think there are spies in the School, but nowhere is safe for us and I would be surprised if there weren't any in the town. Busk is a trading port, remember, and strangers go unmarked. News has not reached here yet from Norloch. I don't doubt that it will soon. And then things will become more dangerous."

  Maerad pondered what "dangerous" meant, and then her thoughts turned, as they so often did, to Hem. The day before, Cadvan had sent a message by bird to Turbansk, to tell Saliman of their safe arrival in Thorold. Hem and Saliman would be riding there now; Maerad wondered where they were, and if they were safe.

  The lessons were interesting. Her sessions with Intatha of Gent gave her a pang at first; they could not but recall Dernhil, who was the first to open for her the world of reading and writing. For Maerad, reading itself was imbued with memories of him. And Intatha was of the same School as Dernhil, although Maerad never dared to ask her if she had known him.

  Intatha was an imposing-looking Bard: tall, with high cheekbones, a formidable eagle nose, and hair that was silvering from black. She was a stern teacher, but gentle. Maerad worked hard for her, not because she feared her dispraise, but because Intatha expected much of her and Maerad wished not to disappoint. She found herself mastering the alphabetic script of Nelsor very quickly, building on the basics Dernhil had taught her, and even found that her handwriting began to look pleasing, instead of scratchy and ill formed. Intatha also started teaching her the Ladhen runes, coded symbols that Bards used when traveling to leave signs for each other, and some of the Dhyllic pictograms. It was intense work, and Maerad left their long sessions feeling both stimulated and drained, with her arms full of work to do on her own.

  Classes with Elenxi of Busk were surprisingly fun. For all his age and his giant frame, he was quick and agile, and Maerad was not surprised to find he had been a famous warrior in his youth: she imagined that he would have been fearsome. Unlike Indik, the master swordsman who had taught Maerad at Innail, Elenxi was a patient and encouraging teacher. Maerad was also no longer a raw beginner: holding a sword no longer felt strange. She had quick reactions and good natural balance, and was strong for someone of her size. Elenxi coached her in advanced swordcraft and unarmed combat, and Maerad began to feel for the first time that perhaps she might be able to hold her own against attack.

  "Don't get overconfident," Elenxi warned, after praising her efforts in her first lesson. "You are still only a beginner. It's the stroke you don't see that kills you." He looked at her, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. "I think we deserve a wine, yes, young Bard? We have worked hard today."

  "A wine?" said Maerad shyly, thinking of the vociferous Bards. Elenxi looked at her and laughed.

  "Don't tell me you are frightened! Well, we'll have to cure that."

  "But I'm filthy!" Maerad objected, blushing.

  Elenxi lifted an eyebrow. "So? Does one have to be clean to drink? I should like to know when that was made a rule. No, young Bard, I will hear no excuses. We'll go to Oreston's house; he has the best wines."

  They stowed their fighting gear, and permitting her only a quick wash, Elenxi led a reluctant Maerad down the road to one of the houses nearer the town. He strode among the tables confidently, expecting Maerad to be right behind him, and when he saw her still hesitating in the road, he went back and took hold of her, almost dragging her to a table where about six Bards, men and women, were engaged in lively conversation. At one end of the table, a young man was idly plucking arpeggios, which ran like a quick river of music underneath the talk, on a beautiful big-bellied stringed instrument.

  Maerad felt paralyzed by shyness, and sat down quietly, hoping nobody would notice her. Elenxi exchanged cheerful greetings with all the Bards and then introduced Maerad as a guest from Innail. She was immediately swamped with questions in both the Speech and Thoroldian: Innail? It is long since someone came all the way from the east—how goes it there? How is Oron? They had heard of the death of Dernhil of Gent—how could that have happened? Hulls murdering Bards in a School?

  Elenxi put up his hand to stem the tide. "Now, be fair," he said in the Speech. "Maerad is clever, but she can't speak Thoroldian. How can she answer all of you? Anyway, what does she know about the high policies of Innail? She is only a young Bard, and she hasn't been there for months. We have been working hard at improving her swordcraft this afternoon, and she is tired and needs some wine. She came all this way to be taught by me, which shows remarkable good taste."

  He winked at her slyly, and Maerad, grateful for his intervention, gave him a small smile; she hadn't understood much, but she knew they had asked about Dernhil, and the mention distressed her. Suddenly a glass full of a dark red wine was in front of her, and she was being plied with delicacies instead of questions. She clutched her glass and gulped the wine. The conversation resumed, in the Speech so she could understand it, and she sat quietly listening. After a while, emboldened by her second glass of wine, she asked the young man with the instrument, a Bard called Honas, what it was.

  "It's a makilon," he said. "My father made this one especially for me: he's a master crafter of instruments, famous in Thorold. It's beautiful, yes?" He handed it to her, and she stroked the smooth, mellow wood, admiring the mother-of-pearl inlay around the soundhole and the delicate carving of its neck.

  "Oh, yes, it's lovely," said Maerad. She let her fingers trickle over the strings, listening to its resonance. "So beautifully made. I've never seen one before. How do you play it?"

  Honas, his face alight with obvious passion, took the instrument back and started to show her the complicated fingerings and plucking styles for the makilon. Maerad's fingers itched to try them, and before long Honas gave it to her, placing her hands correctly on the neck and the strings. She ventured an arpeggio, marveling at the sound. Honas was beginning to be more interested in Maerad than the music, but only Elenxi, keeping discreet watch from the other side of the table, noticed this. He smiled into his beard. Maerad was completely absorbed, and had now forgotten her shyness altogether.

  Maybe they weren't so frightening, these Bards.

  The most demanding studies were those in High Magery. This was something Maerad had never studied formally, although Cadvan had taught her much on their travels together. She went to Nerili's rooms for her first lesson with a strange reluctance; she hadn't spoken to the First Bard since the night she had arrived in Busk, and she felt apprehensive, as if s
he would not know what to say. Nerili took care to put her at her ease.

  "Well, Maerad," she said, smiling, when Maerad entered. "Cadvan has told me of your feats, striking down both a Kulag and a wight. It seems passing strange to be teaching you, when you have already done more than most Bards."

  That day Nerili was dressed plainly, but Maerad still found her beauty dazzling and she felt stiff and awkward. "There's still a lot I don't know," she mumbled, embarrassed. "I didn't think about anything when those things happened. It just— burst out of me."

  "So I understand. Well, we will just have to feel strange about it, no? I'm sure that will disappear once we start working."

  And so, Maerad found, it did.

  They worked in a room that was clearly set aside for teaching: there were few pieces of furniture, only a big table and a bench by the wall where they could both sit, if need be. A broad window stood open in the south wall, and through it blew a wind that carried the distant soughing of the sea.

  A large part of what Maerad learned over the ensuing weeks was the theoretical study of what the Bards called the Knowing, which was roughly divided into the Three Arts: Reading, Making, and Tending, each of which was intricately related to the others. She was also taught various traditions about the Speech, some of which contradicted each other. "There is no single truth," Nerili explained. "But all these truths, woven together, might give us a picture of what is true. That is why it's important to know all the different stories. We can never see all the sky at once."

  Maerad was also introduced to the complex system of Bardic ethics. It had evolved over many centuries and was centered on the idea of the Balance. The more she learned about these things, the more Maerad wondered that Bards did magic at all: it seemed that drawing on her powers was fraught with responsibilities and implications, and that in most cases Bards practiced their powers in order not to use them. Often, in those days, she thought uneasily of the times when her powers had exploded out of her, uncontrollable and terrifying, and of the wild exhilaration she had felt when she had finally come into the Speech. Serious magery, she learned, was something practiced seldom and only in great need. The Balance was a delicate thing, and the smallest action could have unexpected and unintended consequences. Bards who had turned to the Dark, the Hulls, were those who desired power above all else and eschewed the responsibilities of the Balance.

  "The difficulty is, of course," said Nerili thoughtfully during their first session, "that because they have not the same inhibitions on their powers, they can access forces and take actions that Bards will not. And this can make it difficult to fight them: they laugh at us, because they say our hands are tied and we are weak. Despite their mockery, we are well able to defend ourselves, but we remember that if we did not try to adhere to the Balance, even in our extremity, we would become like them. And that would be the greater defeat."

  Maerad wondered at this, but for the moment did not argue. She thought of the brutality of her childhood in Gilman's Cot and the malice of the Dark. She remembered the times when she had had to kill, in order to save her own life. She had always felt, with a deep discomfort, that the killing wounded her somehow, even though it had been necessary, even if she felt it completely justified. Yet, she thought, there might come a time when the Light couldn't afford such niceties.

  Nerili looked at her steadily and then added, as if she caught the tenor of her thoughts, "There's a great force in the renunciation of power that those who are blinded by the lust for domination cannot understand, because those who love truly do not desire power. Among Bards, it is often known as the Way of the Heart. The Dark understands nothing of this: it is its greatest weakness."

  Maerad started—this chimed a little too uncomfortably with her thoughts of the earlier night—but Nerili was staring out the window, as if Maerad were not there.

  "Love is never easy," said Nerili. "We begin by loving the things we can, according to our stature. But it is not long before we find that what we love is other than ourselves, and that our love is no protection against being wounded. Do we then seek to dominate what we love, to make it bend to our will, to stop it from hurting us, even though to do so is to betray love? And that is only where the difficulty begins."

  She turned to Maerad, smiling a little sadly, but Maerad didn't respond: she felt too surprised. For a moment she was sure that Nerili was speaking of her own feelings for Cadvan, and that she was aware, too, of the tangle of Maerad's emotions and sought, obscurely, to comfort her. To her relief, Nerili dropped the subject, and moved on to the more practical aspects of High Magery.

  In these lessons, Maerad began to learn properly how to use her Bardic powers: how to control and shape the Speech, and how to make enchantments and spells. Nerili started with glimmerspells, the least part, she explained, of Bardic magic: a magic of illusion, not of substance. "You can already do glimmerspells, simply by willing them," Nerili said. "You are aware of that?"

  "Yes," said Maerad. It was easy to make herself unseen or to change her appearance.

  "There's more to them, nevertheless, than those instinctive powers. Glimmerspells can be quite useful. Not against Bards, of course; Bard eyes can always see through them. But if we do this"—and Nerili made a strange pass with her hands—"we can persuade Bard eyes to collude with us, though it won't work against a Bard's will. Then we can share our imaginations."

  Suddenly, in the middle of the room, there appeared a silver sapling. As Maerad watched, enchanted, it grew to the height of the ceiling, putting out branches and broad silver leaves. When it was fully grown, there burst out all over it little golden buds, which opened wide to luminous flowers that seemed to be made of pure light. The petals withered and vanished, releasing a delicate fragrance, and where the flowers had been there swelled marvelous fruits: golden apples so bright they threw shadows over the walls. There was a music in the room, the same clear inhuman voices Maerad had heard during her instatement, which seemed to her like the sound of stars singing. She gasped in pure delight.

  "The Tree of Light, as I see it each year at Midsummer," said Nerili, looking at it with her head cocked to one side. "It is beautiful, yes? Each First Bard sees it in her own way. This is how it appears to me. If ever you do the Rite of Renewal, you will see a different one. But it will be just as beautiful." She clapped her hands, and the tree vanished. "Now you try."

  Maerad's mind went blank. "What?" she asked.

  Nerili shrugged. "Show me something," she said. "Something you remember. Did you catch the passes?" She showed Maerad the hand gestures again, and Maerad copied them slowly, fixing them in her memory. Into her mind leaped an image of the wight she had destroyed at the Broken Teeth, just before Norloch. She bent her imagination to visualizing it, and Nerili gasped.

  "Not that!" she said quickly. "Not a creature of the Dark. No, show me something else."

  My memories are full of horror, Maerad thought. I can't help it. Obediently she pushed the wight out of her mind and cast about for another image. Gradually, shimmering a little, the figure of a woman appeared in the room, facing away from them. She was dressed in white robes, and her long dark hair fell unbound down her back. Slowly she turned to look at the two Bards. Her face was full of sadness.

  "Your mother, Milana of Pellinor," said Nerili softly. "I never met her. She looks very much like you. Thank you, Maerad."

  The figure faded and vanished, and there was a short silence. Maerad looked away. She didn't know why she had shown Nerili her mother, and she now wished she hadn't. Nerili took her hand, and Maerad jumped. If she had said anything to her, Maerad might have started crying, but they just sat wordlessly for a while, until Maerad collected herself.

  "Magery, even the slightest, calls on the deepest parts of ourselves," Nerili said at last, releasing her hand. "And often that is painful. It is the pain of being in the world, where so much that is fair passes into death and forgetfulness. But if we are to know joy, we must embrace that pain. You cannot have one wit
hout the other."

  Maerad nodded, her face downcast. Sometimes, it seemed to her, the pain far outweighed the joy.

  Emissaries arrived from Norloch very quickly, five days after Maerad and Cadvan. They made council with Busk's First Circle and left early the next day for Gent. After they had gone, Nerili called another council of the First and Second Circles—all the senior Bards of the School of Busk—and this time Maerad and Cadvan were summoned.

  When they arrived in the Council Room, Maerad was surprised to see half a dozen people who were clearly not Bards. They were the Steward of Busk, a tall, burly man called Arnamil, and the members of his Chamber—three women and two men— one of whom, Maerad saw, was Owan d'Aroki. In tandem with the six Bards of the First Circle of the School, the Chamber governed the Isle of Thorold. With the sixteen Bards, there was a sizable gathering around the large round table that dominated the room. When everyone was seated, Nerili stood and began without preamble.

  "Welcome, Chamber and Bards. Thank you for answering my call. I realize this meeting is not at the usual time." She paused and looked slowly around the table, meeting the eyes of each person present. "Bards of the First Circle, you know why I have called you here. You were present yesterday, when Igan of Norloch issued the edict of Norloch to the School of Busk. What he told me deeply concerns all of Thorold, and this is why I asked you, Lord Steward, and your Chamber to be present."

  She drew a deep breath, as if she were nervous, but Maerad realized quickly that Nerili was, with difficulty, restraining fury.

  "Igan of Norloch informed me yesterday that there have been certain changes within the School of Norloch, and within Annar." Here Maerad sat up straighter. "There has been revealed, he said, a plot within the First Circle itself, a faction of rebels who are in league with the Dark. The rebellion has been put down, and its leaders imprisoned. The imprisoned traitors are Nelac of Lirigon, Tared of Desor, and Caragal of Norloch."