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“You-you unscrupulous... fish ! How can you be so-so mean-spirited and
still dare to call yourself a Prentice?”
    “Oh, Meredydd!” Brys cooed. “Please abuse me further. It
tickles my ears royal to hear you use such words for me. Unscrupulous fish ! By the First Being, you make
me quake! I dare call myself a Prentice because my father says I dare.”
    She started to coil herself for another attack, but saw
Aelder Prentice Wyth entering the classroom just down the North Wing hall. “I
don’t want to be late for class,” she said and shoved past him. Lealbhallain
followed close behind.
    Today Aelder Prentice Wyth chose to discuss the use of
symbology in riddles. Riddles had always seemed to Meredydd an absurd way of
imparting information, and she’d decided they were more of a mental game than
any part of spiritual discipline. Osraed Bevol had never stressed them in his
private tutoring, but she had always done reasonably well with them anyway.
    Wyth began with that hoary old poser, “What has four legs in
the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening.”
    Everyone’s hand went up except Meredydd’s. She was
exercising her mind in the excellent web supplied by the window-frame spider,
climbing, sliding, swinging. It vibrated beneath her like ship’s rigging in a
stiff breeze, chanty-singing, strong and resilient.
    “Did you hear me, Prentice Meredydd? Prentice Brys says you
are daydreaming and not paying a bit of attention to me. Is this so?” Aelder
Wyth stood nearly atop her.
    Meredydd blinked. “No, sir,” she lied before she could stop
herself.
    “Good. Then you will be able to tell me what enters a trap
but is never caught.”
    She could hear the web whispering lightly from the window, a
breeze brushing its silken fibers. She strained to hear what it said, then
smiled up at Aelder Wyth. “The wind,” she said. “The wind enters a trap but is
never caught.”
    Aelder Wyth was not impressed. His long, angular face
displayed a tight displeasure out of keeping with such a minor incident. “Remove
that mocking grin from your face, cailin, and tell me the answer to this
riddle: That which flies gives birth to that which does not fly; that which
does not fly gives birth to that which flies.”
    It was all Meredydd could do not to roll her eyes. “The
riddle describes the life cycle of a bird. The bird gives birth to an egg—which
does not fly—and the egg, in turn, gives birth to another bird—which eventually
flies.”
    Aelder Wyth walked about the room, then, calling out riddles
to other students. They were simple ones for the most part, and only Phelan
guessed wrongly what was always behind you, but which, turning, you never saw.
(The answer, of course, was the back of your head, and Phelan should have known
it, but he rarely paid any attention to anyone but his lord-god Brys, and very
likely had missed Wyth’s lecture on the Form and Logic of Riddles.)
    It took the class a minute or two to twit Phelan adequately
and Meredydd thought Wyth was finished with his puzzling, when he came up
behind her and said, “I have a white house with no doors and windows.”
    Startled, she squeaked and said, “You have an egg!”
    Brys echoed the squeal, then guffawed. Phelan giggled
inanely and the other Prentices snickered. Aelder Wyth, for his part, speared
Brys-a-Lach with his sharp, over-large eyes and said, “What can you beat
without leaving a bruise?”
    Brys grinned. “An egg.”
    The class was suddenly so quiet Meredydd could hear the
spider web trying to trap the wind. Then she laughed, explosively and loudly,
unable to withstand the mental image of Brys beating a defenseless egg to prove
he could do so without bruising it.
    “Silence!” demanded Wyth and the class complied, their eyes
dancing between Meredydd and the red-faced Brys. “Will you share the joke with
us, Prentice Meredydd?”
    She choked back her laughter and tried to appear contrite. “It
was only that Prentice