Arkan's eyes were alight, but not with laughter; it was some other intensity she did not understand, and it frightened her. She pulled away from him. "Let me go," she said. "It hurts." He released his clasp. "I don't understand," Maerad said passionately, her fear flaming into anger. "You have murdered my dearest friends." An ache gathered in her throat. "You sent stormdogs and iriduguls to kill us. You ordered those Jussack thugs to capture me, and they dragged me hundreds of leagues, half dead, across the winterlands. I am your prisoner, held here against my will. And then you say to me, we have things in common. We have nothing in common."
Arkan sat down again on his throne, his face turned from Maerad, and there was silence for some time. Maerad rubbed her shoulder where he had touched it, trying to get some warmth back. At last, he stirred and spoke.
"I am not used to speaking to such as you. I do not wish you to be afraid, and I do not desire your anger. I regret your sorrow."
"Yet everything you have done has made me full of sorrow and fear and anger," Maerad said. "Should I now forgive you those things?"
"Your sorrow evades me," Arkan answered. "It is prideful and full of anger against death. All those you say are dead— they are merely in another place. There is another sorrow, the sorrow of deathlessness, which humans do not understand."
"Except the Nameless One," said Maerad.
"Except Sharma. But he does not understand it in the way of the Elidhu. For him endless life is endless torment. It is not so with us."
There was another pause while Maerad tried to sort out her thoughts. She remembered her vow to escape, her need to find out what Arkan knew.
"You want a Song that I don't understand and can't read. You know it is written on my lyre, but you say it's no use to you. You say you know more about me than I do, but you won't tell me what you know. If there's no point to my being here, and you don't want to kill me, why don't you just let me go?"
"There is something that I do not know," said Arkan.
"That I do know?" Maerad looked at him questioningly. "What do I know? I don't know anything."
"Knowing and being are not so different." Arkan fixed Maerad with a penetrating stare. "Do you not understand that you are part of the riddle?"
"Part of what riddle?" asked Maerad with exasperation. "I thought the riddle was the Treesong."
"Aye," said the Winterking. "And you are part of the Treesong. It will not be free unless by your hands."
Maerad looked at Arkan in disbelief. "What do you mean? I have to play the Song?"
"It must be released, to be given back. You are the player, and the singer as well as the seeker. Did you not know that?"
Maerad held up her maimed hand and thrust it into Arkan's face. "I cannot play anything now," she said passionately. "Let alone a Song that I do not understand. I am crippled, you understand? And I can't read like Bards can. My whole life, I was a slave. But even if I weren't, even if I were wise as wise, I still couldn't read it. Even the most learned Bards can't read that script."
Maerad paused, breathing hard, and stared bitterly at Arkan. "I have failed. I have failed everyone I love, everyone who loved me. I have failed my name and I have failed the prophecies. And now I have even failed you. Why don't you just let me go?"
"Why do you wish to leave here? It is comfortable, yes? But perhaps that is not enough for you. Say what you desire, and I will do what I can to provide it."
Maerad paused and thought. She desired her freedom but clearly that was the one thing Arkan would not give her. "I don't like being shut in my room," she said in a softer voice. "I would like to look around the palace. I would like to go outside."
"You cannot leave here, Elednor of Edil-Amarandh. I think you would do well to remember that, instead of wasting your time in futile efforts to escape." As Arkan said her name, Maerad felt as if he jerked a tight leash on her mind, reminding her of his power over her, but this time she sensed something, a weakness. Perhaps his control was not as complete as he had thought.
"And how long do you plan to keep me here?"
"You will stay so long as I need you to. While you are here, Sharma cannot take you: he has not the power to challenge me in my own domain. You do not know how much he desires to find you, nor how fortunate you are that I found you first. You cannot outrun Sharma's spies and servants; they are everywhere, and they all seek one thing: you. Do not believe that they will not find you. They will."
Maerad shuddered, remembering her nightmares where Hulls reached for her, the foredream where the darkness sought her.
"The Nameless One is cruel, as I am not," said Arkan. "You would not be permitted the escape of death: your most secret mind would be open, skinless and raw, to his hatred and malice. You could hide nowhere. Your existence would be an endless torment. There would be no resistance; he would break you, and you would do anything he desired."
Maerad considered this. She thought that Arkan was probably speaking the truth. And it seemed clear that the Winterking was pursuing his own interests; she found it difficult to believe that anyone so arrogant would consent to serve another. She studied him mistrustfully.
"I thought you and Ardina were enemies," she said at last. "And yet you say you are not."
Arkan made a dismissive gesture with his hands. "In the deeps of time we waged different wars," he said. "Things change."
A terrible thought occurred to Maerad: had Ardina delivered her to the Winterking? Had she betrayed Maerad? She thought of Ardina, the beautiful, amoral Elidhu she had first met in the Weywood, the wise and just Queen of Rachida, the blazing Moonchild. Ardina was a creature of many faces: Maerad had no reason to believe that she would not have betrayed her. The thought made her feel miserable, and she realized that she was exhausted. She looked down at her hands: they were trembling.
"I want to go back to my room," she said.
"As you like," said Arkan. "We will speak when you next wake. You have the freedom of the palace; you may wander where you will."
Maerad stepped off the dais and walked toward the door of the throne room without saying anything further. At the door, she turned and looked back. The king's throne was empty.
Once back in her room, Maerad flung herself on the bed and covered her face to shut out the sight of the chamber. Her conversations with the Winterking seemed to turn everything on its head. What was real and what was illusion? She felt as if she didn't know anything anymore. She sat up and put her hands in front of her eyes. Was it illusion that her hand was mutilated? But no, when she had played the lyre, her fingers were still missing: only then they were not so well healed. Or maybe her wound was an illusion as well? How was she to tell? On a sudden impulse, she scratched her right hand viciously with her left forefinger, hard enough to draw blood. It opened a wound: but, as she watched, the skin joined and healed, and it seemed as if she were not scratched at all.
That, at least, could not be real.
She picked up her lyre and slowly stroked a chord. As the notes rang out, she saw the scratch open on her hand, the blood running down into her palm. It tickled, and she licked the blood off her hand thoughtfully until the music faded and her hand was whole and she was back again in her beautiful prison of ice.
The more she thought about it, the more she thought that Arkan was being honest with her. She did not trust him, but she believed what he said about the Nameless One and his story of betrayal. Perhaps it was Arkan himself who had revealed the Treesong to the Nameless One. She wished fiercely she knew more of the history of the Dhyllin, of the legendary citadel of Afinil, when Bards and Elidhu had sung together, before the Great Silence. She would be better able to judge his tale then: she would know whether he sought to mislead her, whether he warped the truth to his own ends.
Ardina had told her she was neither of the Dark nor the Light. Arkan had more or less said the same thing. They both were very different from what she had been told of other Elidhu, like the Lamedon. She struggled to remember what Cadvan taught her. No
one knew how many there were, and when the Great Silence had fallen on Annar, they had withdrawn from human affairs and would no longer take human shape. Except, she thought, Arkan and Ardina, who had domains over which they ruled as king and queen. Ardina had done so for love, or that was the legend. But Arkan—why had he? Was it also for love of a human being? Perhaps—she dismissed the thought as ridiculous almost as soon as it occurred to her, but it returned and she puzzled over it, wondering if it was perhaps not so far-fetched—perhaps Arkan had loved Sharma, and perhaps he had been betrayed by him. Love would explain why Arkan spoke of the Nameless One with such bitterness, and also, maybe, why he might have given him the Treesong. If he had. After all, there were many stories of love between Elementals and humans. But the Treesong, she thought suddenly, did not belong only to Arkan. Did he want it only for himself?
Maerad felt dizzy. She lay on her back and shut her eyes.
Beneath all these thoughts was the necessity of escape.
Whatever Arkan wanted of her, he had no right to keep her against her will. She had no doubt that he was not exaggerating the dangers of the Dark in Annar: even the Light had been conscripted against her. Yet some deep instinct, beyond her desire for freedom, told her that she must get back to Annar.
Hem needed her; maybe he was the only person who really needed her—not as an embodiment of prophecy, not as the final hope of the Light against the Nameless One, but as his sister. And Saliman could help her quest; he was almost as powerful a Bard as Cadvan. But how could she possibly find them? The chaos of war must be everywhere by now: perhaps Turbansk had already fallen and Annar itself was riven by civil war.
Arkan was confident she could not escape him—so confident that she felt a little hope. She did not think that he knew that she had pierced the illusion of his ice palace. But it was possible that he was toying with her: he knew, after all, that the Treesong was written on the lyre, and perhaps he knew of its power to break his sorcery. But Maerad thought that he did not know, and it was much better that he didn't.
Perhaps he underestimates me, Maerad thought hopefully. In which case, I am a little freer: he will not watch me so carefully. And if I am careful enough, if I am clever enough, perhaps I will find a way out of here.
She pondered for a while whether she was capable of being careful and clever enough to outwit the Winterking. She felt somewhat dubious. But, she thought, she had little to lose by trying. Living in Gilman's Cot, she had played private games to escape the misery of her life. Here life was not so miserable: she was more like an honored hostage than a slave. It would be a game, a game with high stakes, a game for her freedom, for her truth.
A thought struck Maerad like a hammer, and she sat up. Perhaps Arkan could read the runes on her lyre.
Could she risk showing the lyre to Arkan and asking him? Could she risk not doing so? If it was Arkan who gave the Song to the Nameless One, he may have had a part in making the runes. Perhaps he understood what they meant. It might be her single chance to decipher the runes.
Maerad lay down again. She was so tired. . . . She tried to weigh the risks of taking her lyre to Arkan against the possible gains, but sleep blanked out her mind before she reached any decision.
She woke knowing she had dreamed, but without any memory of dreaming. Again she felt a little easier in her soul, as if sleep had offered her some respite. She opened her eyes and saw that the walls were the rock walls of a dungeon. She rubbed her eyes and the dungeon shimmered and faded, and in a few moments her comfortable chamber had returned.
Perhaps—perhaps there was a way out.
It struck her that she had had no idea what the time was since she had been in Arkan-da. There was no window in her room, and the light, anywhere she walked, was always the same soft illumination. It always seemed to be night, and she had lost her bodily sense of time: she ate when she was fed, rose when she woke, slept when she was tired, with no idea whether it was morning, noon, or night. It was disturbing. It also occurred to her that although Gima had said that hundreds of people lived in Arkan-da, Maerad had seen no one except Gima and the Winterking. There were not even guards at the door of his throne room.
Her question had answered itself while she slept. She would take the lyre to the Winterking. She would have to be wary, and careful not to reveal that she saw through the enchantments of his stronghold. But it did seem the best chance she had of reading the runes. It was possible that even if he could read them, he would not tell her what they meant; although if he wished her to play the Song, then surely he could not keep the meaning from her?
That day, Gima took her to a bathroom, and she was able to wash. Steaming hot water fell in a constant waterfall from a pipe carved as the mouth of a fish, and it was caught in a deep and narrow stone bath. To sit in it she had to draw her knees up to her chest; the water reached her shoulders. There was no soap or lavender oil, she noted regretfully, but there was no shortage of hot water. As the water foamed around her neck, she wondered whether it was real or not. Perhaps she really sat in a freezing cold pool, or maybe there was no water at all. Maerad decided she didn't want to know. She would enjoy the bath anyway.
She stepped out at last, her skin pink and steaming, and changed into the clean clothes Gima had put out for her. They were very warm; there was finely spun woolen underwear and several layers of woolen garments before she put on the furlined robes. If they were what they seemed, she thought, they were not utterly impractical; she might not die of cold if she escaped. When she went back to her chamber, she played a few chords on her lyre and was surprised to see that her clothes remained unchanged, although they were less rich in color.
Probably he doesn't want me to freeze to death in my dungeon, she thought. She felt cheered by her discovery, and inspected her pack again. Her cloak was folded up, and her spare clothes had been washed. She didn't know where the warm overcoat Dharin had given her was; she would need that. If she had the freedom of the palace, she might be able to find it, or at least a coat that would be warm enough to protect her from the weather.
She took out Dernhil's book of poems, unwrapping it carefully from its oilskin. It was a small book, not much bigger than her hand, with a tooled calfskin cover, and each page was exquisitely illuminated in bright inks and gold leaf. The book fell open on a poem without a title. On the facing page was a detailed picture of a landscape, with a silver river winding away through green fields toward mountains ghostly with distance. In the foreground sat a young man playing a flute, his head bent in concentration. It looked very like, and probably was, somewhere in the valley of Innail, and Maerad felt a sudden pang of longing for its gentle green landscapes, so different from the harsh beauty of the north. In her mind's eye she saw Silvia, grave and merry and beautiful all at once, turning toward her with her face full of light, her lips open with what she was about to offer—a song, a joke, a kiss.
Maerad began to read the poem silently, moving her lips as she did, and as she read, she heard in her mind the cadence of Dernhil's voice reading it to her, in another age of her life, in his rooms in Innail:
The breath of heaven teases my lips
With a single petal dislodged from the sky:
My love you are that single petal.
The gazelle looks up from the pool
Blinded by one spark of Light's radiance:
My love you are that single spark.
The peacock cries in the empty garden
Tor the memory of a tear outshining him:
My love you are that single tear.
O petal that is my garden of delight!
O spark that is my heart's conflagration!
O tear that is my swelling ocean of sorrow!
An icy splinter seemed to melt in Maerad's heart as she read, and she looked up blindly from the page, her eyes full of tears. Dernhil would never read that poem to anyone again, would never sit gravely in his study with his cloak thrown carelessly on a chair nearby, surrounded by crooked towers of books,
oblivious to everything but the scratching of his pen on parchment. Yes, we are frail, thought Maerad, but within that frailty is such strength and such beauty, such love.. .. Surely it is not all for nothing? Surely it means something, even should the dark overwhelm us utterly?
Sorrow flooded through her, and she hid her face in her hands. She couldn't remember the last time she had cried. She had not been able to weep for Dharin's death. Her despair had shriveled her soul: she had been too hurt for such a generosity as tears. At last she mourned him, his gentleness, his courage, his friendship, the wound his absence left within her. She wept for Dernhil and Cadvan, for Darsor, for Imi, for Hem and his broken childhood, for her mother and father, so cruelly killed, and last she wept for herself. And as she wept, she felt as if all those she loved and missed, the dead and the living, were somehow present, and in her sorrow was a painful comfort.
At last, her tears ceased. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, and saw that she was in the dungeon, not the enchanted room. It was cold, and she wrapped her robes tightly around herself, and looked back down at the book. Its colors seemed brighter still in the dim, flickering light of the oil lamp.
I am free, Maerad thought. I am here, imprisoned, but at last I am free.
Chapter XXV
THE SONG
MAERAD decided to take Arkan at his word, and since Gima did not come to her chamber again that day, she began to explore the Ice Palace. Her moonstone chamber was back, but it had now a sense of unreality, as if it were slightly less stable than it had been. She took care to remember her route; she didn't want to get lost. She decided to use a system of counting, as if she were remembering a complex piece of music, so she could find her way back. No one stopped her; no one was there to stop her. She didn't see anyone else at all.
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