The Riddle by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online

somehow holds the very secret of our powers. Your powers, Neri, and mine, and those of every Bard in Annar. And something is wrong at the heart of Barding. Badly wrong. Even here, in the haven of Thorold, you must know that.”
    Cadvan spoke with such conviction that the skepticism vanished from Nerili’s face, and for a moment she looked simply afraid, although she covered it swiftly.
    Maerad and Cadvan then began to tell her the full story of their journey. It was a tangled telling: Nerili constantly interrupted with questions and speculations, and led the conversation in different directions. The atmosphere relaxed, and Maerad decided she liked Nerili very much; she spoke as someone sure of her authority, and there was a quick warmth behind her apparent austerity. Cadvan’s face was inscrutable, and Maerad could not guess what he felt.
    To distract herself, she experimented with the food. She discovered that she liked olives, although she found their bitter, oily taste a little unpleasant at first. The bread, crusty and tough, was delicious, and she enjoyed the pickled vegetables, most of which she didn’t recognize, and the meats, which were flavored with lemon and garlic and herbs.
    She fared less well with the shellfish, which she had not eaten before, as she had never lived by the sea. Cadvan told her the orange-lipped shells were mussels, so she picked one up and, as Cadvan instructed her, split open the bivalve shell and picked out the flesh. Even that made her feel a little sick, but she persevered and put a small piece in her mouth. Only politeness prevented her from spitting it out on the table and she put the rest of it aside, uneaten. The black spiky things were sea urchins, boiled and split in half so their rosy insides were exposed, like exotic, poisonous flowers. Nerili ate them with enthusiasm, spooning out the flesh from the shell, but Maerad thought they smelled like rotting boots. She noticed that Cadvan, who was monopolizing the mussels, wasn’t touching the sea urchins.
    Nerili and Cadvan began a complicated conversation about the politics of Norloch, which bored Maerad slightly, and the wine conspired with her tiredness to make her drowsy. Her mind began to wander. She hadn’t thought of Cadvan having a lover, apart from Ceredin, who had died when he was a young man, but now she did think of it, there was no reason to suppose that he hadn’t. She guessed he and Nerili were not lovers now, and it wasn’t as if she and Cadvan were, well, were . . . she had no reason to feel jealous. But she did, all the same. She had so few friends.
    She thought again of Dernhil, who had loved her, and whom she had turned away in panic and confusion, so long ago it seemed, in Innail. Dernhil had spoken to her of the Way of the Heart, and Silvia had, too . . . even the Queen Ardina had talked to her of love.
You have a great heart,
the Queen had told her,
but will only find it to be so through great pain. This is the wisdom of love, and its doubtful gift.
    But Maerad hadn’t understood. She still didn’t understand. Was it love that had given Nerili’s smile its ironic edge? But maybe she was imagining it all. Cadvan and Nerili were simply two Bards, debating questions of high policy, and these subterranean feelings, which so disturbed Maerad, were but flutterings of her tired mind.
    She stared abstractedly out of the window, where the garden was now wrapped in purple shadows, with flowers glimmering palely in the darkness. Whenever Bards had mentioned the Way of the Heart to her, it had filled her with an unreasoning fear. She had spent her childhood protecting herself from the violent men of Gilman’s Cot, and that was certainly part of it, but at a deeper level was some kind of foreboding, a sense of darkness that wrapped itself around the part of her that might love, as if to love might extinguish her. It seemed too full of risk, and she already risked too much, simply by being who she was.
    “Are you