Chapter 36
“Trial Gate?” Cara asks as we emerge into the clearing.
“Yes.” Daerios drops his pack and begins to pace along the wall of light, scanning the forest floor as if looking for a gap in the wall.
“It’s an old elvish method of protection.
Quite different from stone walls or spears and swords, but…
” He smiles wryly over his shoulder. “You know how the elves value wisdom above all else.”
“I don’t understand.” I walk toward the Trial Gate. Its surface glows a bright bluish white. Up close, I can see that the wall is not actually one unbroken beam of light; it’s millions of little particles dancing side to side. “What does this wall have to do with wisdom?”
“You’re about to find out,” says Berendir.
My fingertips make contact with the wall. It feels surprisingly solid. “What do you—”
But my question is interrupted by a high, airy voice that floats out of the Trial Gate and breezes through the treetops.
“VEDUI-NA NIN PENNAS.”
I jump, stumbling backward several steps. Two large hands grab my shoulders, steadying me.
“Just listen,” Daerios whispers.
The four of us stand in an uneven line, looking up at the wall. Daerios leaves his hands on my shoulders. The voice disappeared, but the Gate’s particles have begun to shift. Some change color, forming long, dark lines that loop and curve along the wall.
“What did the Gate say?” Cara whispers.
“Hear my tale,” I whisper back. “It’s Lukkarin.”
“It’s going to be a riddle.” Berendir rubs his hands together. “Fabulous. I love riddles.”
“VEDUI-NA NIN PENNAS,” the Trial Gate says again. As it does, the swirling dark lines coalesce, and I realize that they aren’t lines at all; they’re letters. “NIN EMEL NA-VOR.”
As the Gate recites the riddle, the letter begin to form words, as if an invisible quill were scrawling them onto its surface.
NIN EMEL NA-VOR.
NIN FAE COL-NAUR.
DúATH NIN LAMAN-A
LUITHIA-LI FAUL.
NIN GREST-MINUI
NA MíTHA EGOR-RHACH.
When the Gate finishes speaking, we translate it for Cara.
My heart is black.
My soul on fire.
The night cannot tame me, nor
quench my thirst.
My only salvation
is a kiss or a curse.
“The hell?” Berendir scrunches his nose. “The night cannot tame me, nor quench my thirst? That makes no sense.”
Daerios snorts. “This from the guy who loves riddles.”
“How does this work?” Cara asks. “Do we just shout the answer at the wall, or what?”
“Probably,” Berendir says. “If there is an answer. This is the worst riddle I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, let’s think it through.” I watch as my best friend transforms into Computer Science Cara, who likes to lay out a puzzle and work through it piece by piece. “Riddles are never what they seem. We can’t take the lines literally.”
“Right.” Berendir nods. “So we go abstract.”
“Exactly.” Cara taps her chin. “Maybe it’s like Sleeping Beauty. Her salvation was a kiss. Try sleep.”
“D?l!” I yell at the Gate.
“D?lorra,” Berendir tries, which means dream.
Neither works. The Gate remains stubbornly closed.
We spend another ten minutes guessing. Our answers become wilder and wilder, verging on outrageous.
“Blindness.”
“Deafness.”
“Evil.”
“Love.”
“A mountain range.”
“Vaaska.”
“Paal.”
“An ass-crack.”
“Gonorrhea.”
“His Royal Extravagance’s sexy abs.”
This answer—given in English—earns Berendir a shove from Daerios.
After a few more minutes of guessing, Berendir pulls his spear from its holster and drives it into the dirt.
“This is fucking pointless. The riddle has no answer. The Shadow Elves are doing this on purpose. I bet they were alerted to our presence as soon as we touched the gate, and this bullshit is just to keep intruders occupied while they gather their forces.”
“That could be true,” Daerios nods. “In which case, we need to…”
But I’m no longer listening to the prince’s words, because I’ve noticed something strange about the way the riddle is written.
It’s the breaks in the lines. They aren’t split in the way I would normally expect from a Lukkarin poem or verse.
The breaks seem to be chosen almost at random.
But that’s impossible, right? Nothing that elves do is random.
Everything is carefully plotted, often with clever tricks woven into their words to cloak their true meaning.
And I think these line breaks might be exactly that.
But to what end? I study the riddle again, this time thinking only of its Lukkarin structure, discarding the English translation entirely.
NIN EMEL NA-VOR.
NIN FAE COL-NAUR.
DúATH NIN-LAMAN A
LUITHIA LI-FAUL.
NIN GREST-MINUI
NA-MíTHA EGOR RHACH.
I stare at the lines for a long time. What is it about this structure that bothers me so much? It feels like there’s a message hidden within the words, a clue of some kind. It’s staring me right in the face, and if I could only—
“The dashes,” I say aloud.
“What?” Everyone turns to look at me.
“The dashes,” I say again. “The lines are broken up so that each one contains exactly one dash. That’s the answer.”
Daerios looks back up at the words, rereading. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Ber is right. The riddle is nonsense. Its answer has nothing to do with the content; it has to do with the way the sentences are structured. It isn’t literal.” Slowly, I turn to look at them, face spreading into a grin. “It’s morphological.”
“What?” Berendir demands, looking back up at the riddle. “How is it morphological? You know I never paid attention in Linguistics.”
“It’s the dashes,” I say. Then, voice louder, “It’s the fucking dashes.”
“Quinn,” Daerios says, “if you don’t explain what the hell you’re talking about—”
But before he can finish his sentence, I shout at the Trial Gate, “Vor naur laman faul minui mítha.”
“Black fire tames my only kiss?” Berendir repeats in English, face twisted into a grimace. “What the hell does that m—?”
He stops speaking when the riddle disappears and the gate starts to open.
The light slides open in either direction, revealing a space through which we can comfortably pass. Through the opening, I spot a second Trial Gate in the distance.
Great.
“Come on.” I bend over to scoop up my pack and march through the Gate. “Let’s get the hell past this thing before it closes and we have to answer another riddle.”
It’s just over a hundred yards from one Trial Gate to the next. We encounter no guards or beasts roaming the interior, which unsettles me. If they don’t feel they need reinforcements, the second trial must be even tougher than the first.
I reach the Gate before the others. Without hesitation, I press my palm to the solid wall of light. The airy voice echoes out into the forest before my companions even reach my side.
Daerios sighs. “If the Shadow Elves didn’t already know we were approaching árrion, this godforsaken voice is sure as hell going to let them know.”
“That’s probably the point,” I say.
“SOD E’ VAASKA,” the Trial Gate calls into the night.
“Find the vaaska?” Berendir translates. “What the hell does that mean?” He starts to look around, as if expecting bread to swoop out of the sky, but then the Trial Gate resumes speaking in Lukkarin.
This time, there are no verses. No breaks in the lines. It is straightforward prose, much longer than the first riddle. In English, it translates as follows:
A week before Zithe?lrea, a clever loaf of vaaska hides from a family that wants to eat it during the festival.
There are five boxes in a straight row. The vaaska hides in one of the boxes.
Each night, the vaaska moves one box to the left or right.
Each morning, the family can look in one box to try and find the vaaska.
How can the family guarantee they will find the vaaska before Zithe?lrea?
Note: There are only six mornings until Zithe?lrea.
Note: The vaaska must move every night.
For a long, horrible moment, we just stare up at the Trial Gate, dumbfounded.
At last, Berendir breaks the silence by saying, helpfully, “But vaaska can’t move.”
I turn to the rest of the group to say that we’re fucked. But before the words leave my mouth, I notice the enormous grin plastered to Cara’s face.
“What is it?” I ask, hope prickling tentatively at my chest.
“Oh.” She turns to look at us, grin widening. “Don’t worry, everyone. The Computer Science major has got this one.”
“Huh?” Berendir frowns at Cara. “What does CS have to do with elvish bread?”
“Nothing.” Cara drops to her knees in the dirt and picks up a stick. “But this is a mathematical riddle. And that, my friend, is my shit.”
She starts to drag the stick along the earth.
She draws five boxes and labels them 1-5.
“Right,” she mutters, drawing a series of lines between the boxes.
“If they check in the order 223443, they can know that, by checking 2 twice, if they haven’t found the vaaska, it must be in 3, 4, or 5.
Then when they check 3 the next morning, it must be in 2, 4, or 5.
Then when they check 4 the next turn, it must be in 1, 3, or 5.
Now they know that for the subsequent turn, the vaaska will be in 2 or 4. ”
Daerios and Berendir look at me, dumbfounded. I shrug. This is just how she is.
She’s still going at it. “For the sixth morning, pick 3. Either they find the vaaska, or it’s 1, and then will have to move to 2 the next night.
So, if they had a seventh check, they would open box 2 and…
” She freezes, staring at the boxes and the confusing mess of lines drawn between them.
Then, without warning, she thrusts her stick toward the sky and hollers, “WAIT!”
We all jump.
“I overcomplicated,” Cara says, using the stick to scratch out all the lines around the boxes. “All you have to do is do the last three steps twice.”
“What?” Berendir asks.
She points toward the boxes with her stick, like a professor lecturing to her class.
“The vaaska can only move one box at a time, which means that, each day, it will alternate odd and even. So, either it must be in 2 or 4 on the first morning, or in 2 or 4 on the fourth morning. We use this logic twice, which gives us six steps.” She looks up at us then, grinning. “QED.”
“I,” Berendir says, “have no fucking idea what you just said.”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s simple, you troll.
If it’s odd first, then the first 3 moves aren’t useful.
But since evens and odds alternate, the fourth one will always be even.
So, essentially, once we know it’s on an even, we can get the vaaska in three steps.
” She points back at the boxes with the stick.
“We don’t know if it will be on even on the first or fourth, so we’ll try both and one must be right. ”
Berendir narrows his eyes, clearly just as lost as before.
Cara sighs, pushing herself up off the ground. She looks up at the Trial Gate and says, “432432.”
The Trial Gate lets out a loud exhale as the light splits open, as if sighing in relief at someone finally getting the answer right.
Same as before, the text vanishes as the Gate opens, revealing nothing but trees in the distance.
Trees and something else, too. Not another Trial Gate.
No. There are shapes amongst the black trees, towers and arches, a cornice, a colonnade, a shadowy stream with a stone bridge connecting one side to the other—
“árrion,” says Daerios, his voice thick with emotion.
Berendir claps a hand to his shoulder. When he speaks, he sounds just as choked up as Daerios. “We made it, brother. We’re home.”