The Riddle Read Free

why; it went too deep for words.
    It was Cadvan who had revealed to her who she was, and he had helped to unravel some of the history of her family. With her mother, Milana, Maerad had been captured and sold as a very small child after the sack of Pellinor, the School where she had been born. It was Cadvan who helped her escape from the misery of slavery, who had told her of her Gift and opened up to her the world of Bards. He had taken her to the School of Innail, and for the first time in her conscious life she had found a place where she felt at home. A sudden sharp ache constricted Maerad’s throat as she thought of Silvia, who had become like a mother to her in the short time they had known each other; and then of Dernhil, who had loved her. Despite that love she had spurned him, and when Dernhil had been killed by Hulls — the Black Bards who were servants of the Nameless One — she had mourned both his absence and a vanished possibility that she would always regret.
    She wished fiercely that she had been able to stay in Innail —
loved as you should be,
Dernhil had said to her — and that she could have spent a quiet life learning the Bardic Arts of Reading, Tending, and Making. She would have liked nothing better in the world than to learn the scripts of Annar and decipher their immense riches of poetry and history and thought, or to study herblore and healing and the ways of animals, to observe the rites of the seasons and keep the Knowing of the Light, as Bards had done for centuries before her. Instead, she was on a tiny boat in the middle of a dark sea, hundreds of leagues from the gentle haven of Innail, fleeing from darkness into darkness, her future more uncertain than it had ever been.
    It wasn’t fair. The tale of her life since leaving Gilman’s Cot had been of finding what she loved, and almost at once losing it. Closely pursued by the Dark, she and Cadvan had fled Innail, heading for Norloch, the chief center of the Light in Annar. During their journey across Annar, Maerad had at last come into the Speech, the inborn language of the Bards, and had found her full powers. Her abilities were much greater and stranger than those of a normal Bard: she had vanquished a wight, the malign spirit of a dead king from the days of the Great Silence, which was beyond the magery of even the most powerful Bards. She had discovered that part of her strangeness was her Elemental blood, her Elidhu ancestry that led back to Ardina, Queen of the golden realm of Rachida, which lay hidden in the center of the Great Forest. But she was still nowhere near able to control the powers of her Gift.
    When they had at last reached Norloch . . .
    Maerad flinched, thinking of the burning citadel they had left behind them only two days earlier. It was in Norloch that she had met Nelac, Cadvan’s old teacher, a wise and gentle man who had instated her as a full Bard of the White Flame. The simple ceremony had revealed her Bardic Name, the secret name that was an aspect of her deepest self. It had confirmed that she was, as Cadvan had suspected, the Fated One, prophesied to bring about the downfall of the Nameless One in his darkest rising.
Elednor Edil-Amarandh na:
the starspeech echoed in her mind, with its cold, inhumanly beautiful music. Yet, for all her innate potencies, Maerad was but a young girl, unschooled and vulnerable: it was a mystery to her how she was to defeat the Nameless One, and it seemed more likely to her than not that she would fail. Prophecies, as Cadvan had once told her, often went awry; her birth was foreseen, but not her choices, and it was through her choices that her destiny would unfold.
    And it was in Norloch that she had last seen her brother. The loss of Hem seemed the cruelest of all. She had found, in Hem, a missing part of herself, and losing him was the old grief all over again, multiplied by new anxieties. When they had fled Norloch, it had been safer to split their paths: Cadvan and Maerad’s