Page 101 of Prince of the Sun

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 intrudersoccupied 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 nothingto 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 fuckingdashes.”