The Naming by Alison Croggon Page A

be?"
    "Yes. But I might be wrong. What I guess is that the Landrost has sent his messengers out, and that the hunt is on. I have only seen crows today; all other birds are in hiding."
    "The hunt?" said Maerad, faltering. She realized Cadvan was correct about the crows; she had seen no other birds all day.
    They were steering southeast, with the mountains on their right and the forest on their left. The sky was clear and cold, a high pale blue, and all through the morning the sun scarcely warmed them. All around them the earth was alive with the pale green of early spring; snowdrops and jonquils pushed through the tangled herbs and grasses, and marjoram and wild mint released sharp fragrances as they bruised beneath their feet. Low thorny trees and scruffy clumps of pines grew in the lees of the hills, bent by the winds, surrounded by tangles of gorse and bramble. Everywhere crept a pale blue flower shaped like a star, which Cadvan said was called aelorgalen. "Dawnflower, in the Speech," Cadvan explained. "It only grows this far north." Maerad tried repeating the name, butfound that her tongue stumbled over it, and afterward she couldn't remember it at all.
    It was a beautiful countryside, but Maerad thought it curiously lonely. Their footsteps sounded loudly in the emptiness; they seemed to be the only things moving as far as the eye could see. There was no sign of habitation anywhere, although strange grass-covered ridges and mounds, which seemed too regular to be natural, constantly threatened to trip them up; perhaps they were remains of buildings long vanished. And she saw few animals—only some rabbits running in the distance, but that was all.
    "I thought the Landrost was just a mountain," she said, looking back at its high, snow-tipped peak. "You talk as if it were a man.... And what's the hunt?"
    "The Landrost is a power, yes, a person.... The mountain is merely his dwelling. But he is not a man, and never was."
    "Like the Nameless One?" said Maerad.
    "Not so powerful as him, although the Nameless was once a man. The Landrost is but one of his slaves. I will not speak his name here, although I know it." Cadvan paused, and Maerad noticed again the exhaustion on his face: it was, she saw, a deep exhaustion born of long struggle and pain. "He captured me, and held me in his fastness, deep in the mountain. I saw things there that he would rather I did not know, because in his pride he thought to make me tremble before I died. But I escaped, and his vengefulness is deadly, and we are not beyond his reach, not yet. I only just held him back in the valley, with your help; he would have brought the mountain down on us, else. His power wanes the farther we go, but here we are still too close.
    "He does not easily countenance escape from his claws. I think he sends out the wers, and that is why it is quiet. Their shadows track us, although they can do nothing while the sunstill shines. Only in the dark can they take their forms. It will be a bad night."
    He was silent for some time. His words seemed to magnify the stillness around them, and Maerad again looked around her uneasily. The landscape seemed peaceful and unthreatening, but some more subtle sense told her otherwise. Her skin began to creep with an indefinable dread.
    "Maerad," said Cadvan at last. "I think I should have left you, rather than draw you into my own danger. I didn't think enough, when I stumbled across you in that cot. I was too astonished, and too weary. And now it is too late to turn back."
    "No," said Maerad warmly. She thought of the suffocating despair of Gilman's Cot. At least here, now, she could breathe freely. "No, you were right to ask me to leave. I would rather die than stay there."
    "Well, you might die," said Cadvan.
    "At least I won't die a slave," Maerad answered. Proud words, she thought, but she meant them.
    Cadvan pushed the pace and they walked in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts.
    Maerad still couldn't quite believe she had