The Diamond Warriors
Book Four of the Ea Cycle
DAVID ZINDELL

COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2007

Copyright © David Zindell 2007

David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

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Source ISBN: 9780006486237

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780007386536

Version: 2016-09-01

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Keep Reading

Appendices

Heraldry

The Gelstei

The Greater Gelstei

The Lesser Gelstei

Books of the Saganom Elu

The Ages of Ea

The Months of the Year

About the Author

By David Zindell

About the Publisher

MAP

1

On clear summer nights, I have stood on desert sands in awe of the stars. From these countless radiant points, my ancestors believed, comes all that is good, beautiful and true. The Lightstone had its source there. The stars make light itself and that secret, irresistible force which warms angels’ hearts and illuminates all things. What man could ever hold this most brilliant of fires? Only one who can endure burning. And one who wills with all his heart that the stars must go on shining forever and can never die.

They shone upon my grandfather and upon Elahad and the ancient Valari who came to earth from other worlds; and still they shone upon my world, even though the Great Red Dragon named Morjin threatened to make war upon all Ea’s lands and call down that black and starless night without end. In the spring of the fourth year since I had set out to seek the Lightstone and defy Morjin, the stars guided me home. Late into evenings filled with the calls of meadowlarks and the fragrance of new flowers, my companions and I ventured across savage lands, setting our course by Aras and Solaru and the heavens’ other bright lights. And at dawn we journeyed toward the Great Eastern Sun: the Morning Star for which my grandfather had named me Valashu. This fiery orb still rose each day over the mountains of Mesh and the dwellings of my people. Where Morjin called my brothers and sisters demons from hell that must be nailed up on crosses or burned alive, I knew them as noble warriors of the sword – and spirit – who remained true Valari. It was upon me to return to them in order to seize my fate and become their king.

On the first day of Soldru, on a warm afternoon, my seven companions and I rode through the Valley of the Swans below my family’s ancient, burned-out castle. Our way took us through a thick and ancient wood. Here grew tall oaks and elms through which I had run as a child. Wild grape and honeysuckle twined themselves around the trunks of these great trees, while ferns blanketed the forest floor. Many flowers brightened this expanse of green and sweetened the air: bluets and trillium and goldthread, whose white sepals gleamed like stars. Each growing thing, it seemed, greeted me like an old friend to which I had long ago pledged my life. So it was with the warblers and the sparrowhawks calling out from branch or sky, and the rabbits, voles and badgers who made their abodes beneath them. Our procession through the trees startled a stag feeding on the bracken; just before he sprang away, his large, dark eye fixed on my eyes and called to me as if we were brothers. He did not, I sensed, worry that his forest home might soon be destroyed and the whole world with it This great being cared nothing for the struggles and aspirations of men, and knew only that it was good to be alive.

‘Ah, another deer.’ Next to me, from on top of a big, brown horse, my friend Maram watched the stag bounding off through the trees. He was himself a big man, with a thick beard and soft brown eyes which easily filled with worry. ‘These woods are still full of deer.’

We rode along a few paces, and our horses’ hooves cracked through old leaves and twigs.

‘And where there are deer,’ he went on, ‘there are certainly bears. These huge, brown bears of yours whose like I have seen in no other land.’

I turned in my saddle to look after Daj and Estrella riding behind us. Daj’s gaze met mine, and his black curls fell over his face as he inclined his head to me. Although he couldn’t have been much older than twelve years, he held himself straight and proud as if he were a knight who knew no fear. Already he had slain more men than had most knights – and sent on as well an evil creature more powerful than any man. Estrella, of an age with him, guided her pony along in silence. Although she could make no words with her throat and lips, her dark eyes and lively face seemed almost infinitely expressive and full of light. Behind her rode Master Juwain and Liljana, who might have been the children’s grandparents. They wore the same hooded traveling cloaks that we all did, even Atara, who brought up the rear. This beautiful woman – my betrothed – hated the itch of woven wool against her sunburned skin, for she had lived too long on the plains of the Wendrush with the savage Sarni warriors, who usually wore silks or beaded skins, when they wore garments at all. She was herself a warrior, of that strange society of women known as the Manslayers. As she pressed her knees against the flanks of her great roan mare, Fire, she gripped one of the great, double-curved Sarni bows. A white blindfold bound her thick blond hair and covered the hollows beneath her brows. It was a great miracle of her life that although Morjin had taken her eyes, sometimes by the virtue of her second sight she could still see. If a bear charged out of the bracken at us, I thought, she could put an arrow straight through its heart.

‘Bears,’ I said, turning back toward Maram, ‘rarely hunt deer – only if they come upon one by chance.’

‘Like that bear that came upon you?’ He pointed at my face and added, ‘The one who gave you that?’

I pressed my finger against the scar cut into my forehead. This mark, shaped like a lightning bolt, had actually been present from my birth, when the midwife’s tongs had ripped my skin. The bear, who had nearly killed my brother Asaru and me during one of our forays into the woods, had only deepened it.

‘I doubt if it is my fate,’ I said, smiling at him, ‘to see us attacked here by a bear.’

‘Ah, fate,’ Maram said, shaking his great, bushy head. ‘You speak of it too much these days, and contemplate it too deeply, I think.’

‘Perhaps that is true. But we’ve avoided the worst that might have befallen us and come to our journey’s end without mishap.’

‘Almost to our journey’s end,’ he said, waving his huge hand at the trees ahead of us. ‘If you’re right, we’ve still five miles of these gloomy woods to endure. If you hadn’t insisted on this longcut, we might already have been sitting at Lord Harsha’s table with Behira, putting down some roasted beef and a few pints of your good Meshian beer.’

I cast him a long, burning look. He knew well enough the reasons for our detour through the woods, and had in fact agreed upon them. But now that he could almost smell his dinner and taste his dessert, it seemed that he had conveniently forgotten them.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, turning his head away from me to gaze off through the trees. ‘Why indeed take any chances when we have come so far without mishap? It’s just that now I’m ready to enjoy the comforts of Lord Harsha’s house, it seems that the farmland hereabouts – and the rest of your kingdom – surely holds fewer perils than do these woods.’

‘It is not my kingdom,’ I reminded him. ‘Not yet. And whoever wins Mesh’s throne, you may be sure that this wood will remain near the heart of his realm.’

Far out on the grasslands of the Wendrush, as we had taken meat and fire with the chieftain of the Niuriu, Vishakan, we had heard disquieting rumors that Mesh’s greatest lords were contending with each other to gain my father’s vacant throne. War, it seemed, threatened. Vishakan himself told me that Morjin had stolen the souls of some of my own countrymen – and had turned the hearts of others with threats of crucifixion and promises of glory and everlasting life for anyone who followed him. The Lord of Lies had pledged a thousand-weight of gold to any man who brought him my head. So it was that my companions and I had entered Mesh in secret. Twenty-two kel keeps, great fortresses of iron and stone, encircled the whole of the kingdom and guarded the passes through the mountains. But I knew unexplored ways around three of them – and through the country of the Sawash River and past Arakel, Telshar and the other great peaks of the Central Range. And, of course, through the fields and forests of the Valley of the Swans. So it was that we had come nearly all the way to Lord Harsha’s little stone chalet without stopping at an inn or a farmhouse.

‘The heart of your realm,’ Maram said to me, ‘surely lies with the hearts of those who know you. There can’t be many in this district who will fail to acclaim you when the time comes.’

‘No, perhaps not many.’

‘And there can’t be any who have gone over to the Red Dragon, despite what that barbarian chieftain said. Surely it will be safe to show ourselves here. After all, we don’t have to give out our names.’

I only smiled at this. Even in the best of times, Mesh saw few strangers from other lands. Maram and my other friends would stand out here like rubies and sapphires in a tapestry woven of diamonds. The Valari are a tall people, with long, straight black hair, angular faces like the planes of cut stone, dark ivory skin and bright black eyes. None of us looked anything like that – none of us, of course, except myself.

‘As soon as we show ourselves,’ I told Maram, ‘the word will spread that Valashu Elahad and his companions have returned to Mesh. We should hear what Lord Harsha advises before that moment comes.’

We rode on for a while, into a small clearing, and then Estrella, who was good at finding things, espied a bush near its edge bearing ripe, red raspberries. She nudged her horse over to it, then dismounted. Her joyful smile seemed an invitation for all of us to join her in a midafternoon refreshment. And so the rest of us dismounted as well, and began plucking the soft, little fruits.

‘These,’ Maram said, as he filled his mouth with a handful of raspberries, ‘would make a good meal for any bear.’

‘And you,’ I said, poking his big belly with a smile, ‘would make a better one.’

Master Juwain, a short man with a large head as bald as a walnut, stepped over to me. His face, I thought, with his large gray eyes, had always seemed as luminous as the moonlit sea. He looked at me deeply, then said, ‘We are close to the place that the bear attacked you, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, close,’ I said, staring off through the elms. Then I turned back to smile at him. ‘But you aren’t afraid of bears, too, are you, sir?’

‘I’m afraid of you, Valashu Elahad. That is, afraid for you.’ He pointed a gnarly finger at me as he fixed me with a deep, knowing look. ‘Most of us flee from that which torments us, but you must always seek out the thing you most dread and go poking it with a stick.’

I only laughed at this as I reached back to grip the hilt of my sword, slung over my shoulder. I said, ‘But, sir, I have no stick – only this blade. And I’m sure I won’t have to use it today against any bear.’

Daj, munching on some raspberries, returned my smile in confidence that I had spoken the truth, and so did Estrella. They pressed in close to me, not to take comfort from the protection of my sword – not just – but because such nearness gladdened all our hearts. Then I noticed Atara standing next to the raspberry bush as she held her bow in one hand and her scryer’s sphere of clear, white gelstei with her other. The sun’s light poured down upon her in a bright shower. Her beautiful face, as perfectly proportioned as the sculptures of the angels, turned toward me. She smiled at me, too: but coldly, as if she had seen some terrible future that she did not wish to share. All she said to me was: ‘The only bear you’ll find here today is the one that nearly killed you years ago. It still lives, doesn’t it?’

Yes, I thought, as my fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword, the bear called out from somewhere inside me – and in some strange way, from somewhere in these woods. Even as Asaru, who had saved me from the bear, still lived on as well. My mother and grandmother, and all my murdered family, seemed to take on life anew in the stems of the wildflowers and in the breath of the leaves of the new maple trees. My father, I knew, would always stand beside me like the mountains of the land that I loved.

Liljana, who could not smile, came up to me and grasped my hand. Her iron-gray hair framed her pretty face, which too often fell stern and forbidding. But despite her relentless and domineering manner, she could be the kindest of women, and the wisest, too. She said to me, ‘You’ve always been drawn to these woods, haven’t you?’

Her calm, hazel eyes filled with understanding. She didn’t need to call on the power of her blue gelstei to read my mind – or, rather, to know what grieved my heart.

Across the clearing, through the shadowed gloom of the elms, I heard a tanager trilling out notes that sounded much like a robin’s song: shureet, shuroo. I looked for this bird, but I could not see it. It seemed that this wood, above all other places, held answers to the secret of my past and the puzzle of my future. There dwelled a power here that called to me like a song of fire racing along my blood.

‘Drawn, yes,’ I said to Liljana. I felt a nameless dread working at my insides like ice water. ‘And repelled, too.’

‘Well,’ Maram said, wiping a bit of raspberry juice from his lip, ‘I wish you had been repelled a little more that day Salmelu shot you with his filthy arrow. But who would have thought a Valari prince would go over to the Dragon and hire out as one of his assassins? And use the filthiest of poisons? Does it still burn you, my friend?’

I pressed my hand to my side in remembrance of that day when Salmelu’s poisoned arrow had come streaking out of the trees – not so very far from here. The scratch that it had left in my skin had long since healed, but I would forever feel the kirax poison like a heated iron sizzling deep into every fiber of my body.

‘Yes, it burns,’ I said to him.

‘Well, then perhaps we should take greater care here. If a prince of Ishka can turn traitor, then I suppose a Meshian can – though I’ve always thought your countrymen preserved the soul of the Valari, so to speak.’

I suddenly recalled Lansar Raasharu, my father’s greatest lord, who had lost his soul and his very humanity to Morjin through a hate and a fear that I knew only too well. And I said, ‘No one is immune from evil.’

‘No one except you.’

I felt my throat tighten in anger as I said, ‘Myself least of all, Maram. You should know that.’

‘I know what I saw during this last journey of ours. Who else but you could have led us out of the Skadarak?’

I did not need to close my eyes to feel the blighted forest called the Skadarak pulling me down into an icy cold blackness that had no bottom. Sometimes, when I looked into the black centers of Maram’s eyes – or my own – I felt myself hurtling down through empty space again.

‘Do not,’ I told him, ‘speak of that place.’

‘But you kept yourself from falling – and all of us as well! And then, at the farmhouse with Morjin, when everything was so impossibly dark, he might have seized your will and made you into a filthy ghul. But as you always do, you found that brightness inside yourself that he couldn’t stand against, and you –’

‘It is one thing to keep from falling into evil,’ I told him. ‘And it is another to succeed in accomplishing good. Why don’t we try to keep our sight on the task ahead of us?’

‘Ah, this impossible task,’ Maram muttered, shaking his head.

‘Don’t you speak that way!’ Liljana scolded him with a wag of her finger. ‘The more you doubt, the harder you make it for Val to become king.’

‘It’s not his kingship that I doubt,’ Maram said. ‘At least, I don’t doubt it on my good days. But even supposing that Val can win Mesh’s warriors and knights where he couldn’t before, what then? That is the question I’ve asked myself for a thousand miles.’

So had I asked myself this question. And I said to Maram simply, ‘Then Morjin must be defeated.’

‘Defeated? Well, I suppose he must, yes, but defeated how?’

Master Juwain rubbed at the back of his brown-skinned head, then sighed out: ‘The closer that we have come to our journey’s end, the more sure I have become of what our course should be. I told this to Val years ago: that evil cannot be vanquished with a sword, and darkness cannot be defeated in battle but only by shining a bright enough light. And now, the brightest of lights has come into the world.’

He spoke, of course, of Bemossed: a slave whom we had rescued out of Hesperu on the darkest of all our journeys. A simple slave – and perhaps the great Maitreya and Lord of Light long prophesied for Ea and all the other worlds of Eluru. I couldn’t help smiling in joy whenever I thought of this man whom I loved as a brother. It gladdened my heart to know that he was well-hidden in the fastness of the White Mountains – in the safest place on Earth. And guarded from Morjin by Abrasax and the Seven: the Masters of the Great White Brotherhood whose virtues in healing, meditation and the other ancient arts exceeded even those of Master Juwain.

‘Morjin retains the Lightstone,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘but Bemossed keeps him from twisting it toward his purpose. Soon, I think, with Bemossed so well-instructed, he will be able to grasp the Lightstone’s radiance, if not the cup itself. And then …’

Liljana caught his gaze and said, ‘Please don’t mind me – go on.’

‘And then,’ Master Juwain said, ‘Bemossed will bring this radiance into all lands. Men will feel an imperishable life shining within them like a star. Truth will flourish. So will courage. Men will no longer listen to the lies of wicked kings and the Kallimun priests who serve Morjin. They will resist these dark ones with their every thought and action – and eventually they will cast them down. Then new kings will follow Val’s example here in creating a just and enlightened realm, and they will rebuild our Brotherhood’s schools in every land. The schools will be open to all: not just to kings’ and nobles’ sons, and the gifted. Then the true knowledge will flourish along with the higher arts, as it was in the Age of Law. And as it came to be during the reign of Sarojin Hastar, there will be a council of kings, and a High King, and all across Ea, men will turn once more toward the Law of the One.’

While Master Juwain paused in his speech to draw in a breath of air, Liljana kept silent as she stared at him.

‘And then,’ Master Juwain said, ‘we will finally build the civilization that we were sent here from the stars to build. In time, through the great arts and the Maitreya’s splendor, men will become more than men, and we will rejoin the Elijin and Galadin as angels out in the stars. And then the Galadin will make ready a new creation and become the luminous beings we call the Ieldra, and the Age of Light will begin.’

Master Juwain, I thought, had spoken simply and even eloquently of the Great Chain of Being and its purpose. But his words failed to stir Liljana. She stood with her hands planted on her wide hips as she practically spat out at him: ‘Men, kings, laws – and this becoming that keeps you always looking to the stars! Your order’s old dream. In the Age of the Mother, women and men needed no laws to live in peace on this world – no law other than love of the world. And each other. Why become at all when we are already so blessed? So alive? If only we could remember this, there would be a quickening of the whole earth, and men such as Morjin wouldn’t live out another season. We would rid ourselves of his kind as nature does a rabid dog or a rotten tree.’

Most of the time, Liljana seemed no more than a particularly vigorous grandmother who had a talent for cooking and keeping body and soul together. But sometimes, as she did now in the strength that coursed through her sturdy frame and the adamantine light that came over her face, she took on the mantle of the Materix of the Maitriche Telu.

Atara stepped between Liljana and Master Juwain, and she held her blindfolded head perfectly still. Then she said, ‘The Age of the Mother decayed into the Age of Swords because of the evil that men such as Morjin called forth. And Morjin himself put an end to the Age of Law and brought on these terrible times. So long as he draws breath, he will never suffer kings such as Val to arise while he himself is cast down.’

‘No, I’m afraid you are right,’ Master Juwain said, nodding his head at her. ‘And here we must look to Bemossed, too. I believe that he is the Maitreya. And so I must believe that somehow he will heal Morjin of the madness that possesses him. I know this is his dream.’

And I knew it, too, though it worried me that Bemossed might blind himself to the totality of Morjin’s evil and dwell too deeply on this healing that Master Juwain spoke of. Was it truly possible, I wondered? Could the Great Beast ever atone for the horrors that he had wreaked upon the world – and himself – and turn back toward the light?

It took all the force of my will and the deepest of breaths for me to say, ‘I would see Morjin healed, if that could be. But I will see him defeated.’

‘Oh, we are back to that, are we?’ Maram groaned. He looked at me as he licked his lips. ‘Why can’t it be enough to keep him at bay, and slowly win back the world, as Master Juwain has said? That would be a defeat, of sorts. Or – I am loath to ask this – do you mean he must be defeated defeated, as in –’

‘I mean utterly defeated, Maram. Cast down from the throne he falsely claims, reviled by all as the beast he is, imprisoned forever,’ I gripped my sword’s hilt as a wave of hate burned through me. ‘Or killed, finally, fittingly, and even the last whisper of his lying breath utterly expunged from existence.’

As Maram groaned again and shook his head, Master Juwain said to me, ‘That is something that Kane might say,’

My friends stood around regarding me. Although I was glad for their companionship, I was keenly aware that we should have numbered not eight but nine. For Kane, the greatest of all warriors, had ridden off to Galda to oppose Morjin through knife, sword and blood, in any way he could.

‘Kane,’ I told Master Juwain, ‘would say that I should stab my sword through Morjin’s heart and cut off his head. Then cleave his body into a thousand pieces, burn them and scatter the ashes to the wind.’

Maram’s ruddy face blanched at this. ‘But how, Val? You cannot defeat him in battle.’

‘We defeated him in Argattha, when we were outnumbered a hundred against nine,’ I told him. ‘And on the Culhadosh Commons when he sent three armies against us. And we defeated his droghuls and his forces in the Red Desert – and in Hesperu, too.’

‘But that was different, and you know it!’ Maram’s face now heated up with anger – and fear. ‘If you seek battle, none of the Valari kings will stand with you. And even if they did, Morjin will call up all his armies, from every one of his filthy kingdoms. A million men, Val! Don’t tell me you think Mesh’s ten thousand could prevail against that!’

Did I truly think that? If I didn’t, then I must at least act as if I did. I looked at Atara, whose face turned toward me as she waited for me to speak. Then it came to me that bravura was one thing, while truly believing was another. And knowing, with an utter certainty of blood and breath that I could not fail to strike down Morjin, was of an entirely different order.

‘There must be a way,’ I murmured.

‘But, Val,’ Master Juwain reminded me, ‘it has always been your dream to bring an end to these endless battles – and to war, itself.’

For a moment I closed my burning eyes because I could not see how to defeat Morjin other than through battle. But neither could I imagine any conceivable force of Valari or other free people defeating Morjin in battle. Surely, I thought, that would be death.

‘There must be a way,’ I told Master Juwain. I drew my sword then. My hands wrapped around the seven diamonds set into its black jade hilt while I gazed at Alkaladur’s brilliant blade. ‘There is always a way.’

The silver gelstei of which it was wrought flared with a wild, white light. Somewhere within this radiance, I knew, I might grasp my fate – if only I could see it.

‘You will never,’ Master Juwain said, ‘bring down Morjin with your sword.’

‘Not with this sword, perhaps. Not just with it.’

‘Please,’ Master Juwain said, stepping closer to lay his hand on my arm, ‘give Bemossed a chance to work at Morjin in his way. Give it time.’

A shard of the sun’s light reflected off my sword’s blade, and stabbed into my eyes. And I told Master Juwain, ‘But, sir – I am afraid that we do not have much time.’

Just then, from out of the shadows that an oak cast upon the raspberry bush, a glimmer of little lights filled the air. They began whirling in a bright spray of crimson and silver, and soon coalesced into the figure of a man. He was handsome of face and graceful of body, and had curly black hair, sun-browned skin and happy eyes that seemed always to be singing. We called him Alphanderry, our eighth companion. But we might have called him something other, for although he seemed the most human of beings, he was in his essence surely something other, too. At times, he appeared as that sparkling incandescence we had known as Flick; but more often now he took shape as the beloved minstrel who had been killed nearly three years previously in the pass of the Kul Moroth. None of us could explain the miracle of his existence. Master Juwain hypothesized that when the great Galadin had walked the earth ages ago, they had left behind some shimmering part of their being. But Alphanderry, I thought, could not be just pure luminosity. I could almost feel the breath of some deep thing filling up his form with true life; a hand set upon his shoulder would pass through him and send ripples through his glistening substance as with a stone cast into water. Day by day, as the earth circled the sun and the sun hurtled through the stars, it seemed that he might somehow be growing ever more tangible and real.

‘Hoy!’ he laughed out, smiling at Master Juwain and me. As it had once been with my brother, Jonathay, something in his manner suggested that life was a game to be played and enjoyed for as long as one could, and not taken too seriously. But today, despite his light, lilting voice, his words struck us all with their great seriousness: ‘Hoy, time, time! – it runs like the Poru river into the ocean, does it not? And we think that, like the Poru, it is inexhaustible and will never run out.’

‘What do you mean?’ Master Juwain asked, looking at him.

Alphanderry stood – if that was the right word – on a mat of old leaves and trampled ferns covering the ground. And he waved his lithe hand at me, and said, ‘Val is right, and too bad for that. We don’t have as much time as we would like.’

‘But how do you know?’ Master Juwain asked him.

‘I just know,’ he said. ‘We can’t let Bemossed bear the entire burden of our hope.’

‘But our hope, in the end, rests upon the Lightstone. And the Maitreya. As you saw, Bemossed has kept Morjin from using it.’

‘I did see that, I did,’ Alphanderry said. ‘But what was will not always be what is.’

Atara, I saw, smiled coldly at this, for Alphanderry suddenly sounded less like a minstrel than a scryer.

‘Did you think it would be so easy?’ he asked Master Juwain.

‘Easy? No, certainly not,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But I believe with all my heart that as long as Bemossed lives, Morjin will never be able to use the Cup of Heaven to free the Dark One.’

The hot Soldru sun burned straight down through the clearing with an inextinguishable splendor. And yet, upon Master Juwain’s mention of the Dark One – also known as Angra Mainyu, the great Black Dragon – something moved within the unmovable heavens, and I felt a shadow fall over the sun. It grew darker and darker, as if the moon were eclipsing this blazing orb. In only moments, an utter blackness seemed to devour the entire sky. I believed with all my heart that if Angra Mainyu, this terrible angel, were ever freed from his prison on Damoom, then he would destroy not only my world and its bright star, but much of the universe as well.

Master Juwain’s brows wrinkled in puzzlement as he looked up at the sky to wonder what I might be gazing at. So did my other friends, who seemed not to be afflicted by my wild imaginings.

‘The Seven,’ Master Juwain said, turning back towards Alphanderry, ‘aid Bemossed with all their powers. And so Bemossed’s power grows.’

‘So does Morjin’s,’ Alphanderry said. ‘For Angra Mainyu aids him.’

‘Even so, I believe that Bemossed will resist Morjin’s lies and his vile attacks.’

‘I pray he will; I fear that he may not. For Angra Mainyu himself has lent all his spite toward assaulting Bemossed’s body, mind and soul.’

Master Juwain’s brows pulled even tighter with worry. ‘But how do you know this? And how can that be? The greatest of the Galadin have bound him on Damoom, and have laid protections against such things.’

‘No shield is proof against all weapons,’ Alphanderry said. ‘Angra Mainyu has had ages of ages to battle those who bind him. The shield you speak of has cracked. And things will only get worse.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some time this autumn,’ Alphanderry said, ‘there will be a great alignment of planets and stars. Damoom and its star will perfectly conjunct the earth. Toward that day, Angra Mainyu’s malice will rain down upon Ea ever more foul and deadly. And on that day, if Morjin should prevail and cripple Bemossed, or kill him, he will loose the Dark One upon the universe, and all will be destroyed.’

The sun blazed down upon us, and from somewhere in the woods, the tanager continued trilling out its sweet song. We stood there in silence staring at Alphanderry. And then Master Juwain asked him again, ‘But how could you know this?’

‘I do not know … how I know,’ Alphanderry said. ‘As I stand here, as I speak, the words come to my lips, like drops of dew upon the morning grass – and I do not know what it will be that I must tell you. But my words are true.’

So it had been, I thought, in the Kul Moroth, when Alphanderry had recreated the perfect and true words of the angels – and for a few glorious moments had sung back an entire army bent on killing us all.

‘And these words, above all others,’ he said to us in his beautiful voice. ‘Listen, I know this must be, for it is the essence of all that we strive for: The Lightstone must be placed in the Maitreya’s hands. In the end, of course, there is no other way.’

He had said a simple thing, a true thing, and as with all such, it seemed obvious once it had been spoken. My heart whispered that it must be I who delivered the golden cup to the Maitreya. But how could I, I wondered, unless I first wrested it from Morjin in that impossible battle I could not bear to contemplate?

I held my sword up to the sun, and I felt something within its length of bright silustria align perfectly with other suns beyond Ea’s deep blue sky. My fate, shaped like the dark world of Damoom, seemed to come hurtling out of black space straight toward me. In the autumn, I knew, it would find its way here and drive me down against the hard earth. Despite all my hopes and dreams, I could no more avoid it than I could the blood burning through my eyes or taking my next breath.

‘Val – what is wrong?’ Maram asked me. ‘What do you see?’

I saw the forests of Mesh blackened by fire, and her mountains melted down into a hellish, glowing slag. I saw Maram fallen dead upon a vast battlefield, and my other companions, too. Atara lay holding her hands over her torn, bleeding belly, from which our child had been taken and ripped into pieces. I saw myself: as cold as stone upon the reddened grass, unmoving and waiting for the carrion birds. And something else, the worst thing of all. As I stood there beneath the trees staring into my sword’s mirrored surface, I gasped at the dread cutting through my innards like an ice-cold knife, and I wanted to scream out against the horror that I could not bear.

And at that moment, in the air near the center of the clearing, a dark thing appeared. Altaru, my great, black warhorse, whinnied terribly and reared up to kick his hooves at the air. I jumped back and swept my sword into a ready posture, for I feared that Morjin had somehow sent a vulture or some kind of deadly creature to devour me – either that or I had fallen mad.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram cried out, drawing out his sword, too.

‘What is that?’ Daj asked, hurrying to my side.

‘Hoy!’ Alphanderry cried out in alarm. ‘Hoy! Hoy!’

Once, Morjin had sent illusions to torment me, but the darkness facing me seemed as real as a river’s whirlpool. It hovered over the ferns and flowers like a spinning blackness. My eyes had trouble holding onto it. It shifted about, and seemed to have no definite size or shape, for at one moment it appeared as a smear of char and at the next as a mass of frozen ink. I felt it fixing its malevolence on me. I took a step closer to it and positioned my sword, and it floated closer and seemed to mirror my movements as it positioned itself before me. A vast and terrible cold emanated from it, and seized hold of my heart. It called to me in a dark voice that I could not bear to hear.

‘What is it?’ Daj shouted again.

And Alphanderry in a voice filled with awe, told him, ‘It is the Ahrim.’

I did not have time to speculate on this strange name or wonder at the dark thing’s nature, for it suddenly shot through the air straight toward me. I whipped my sword up to stop it. The gleam of my bright blade seemed to give it pause. Like a whirl of smoke, it spun slowly about in the air three feet from my face. Somehow, I thought, it watched and waited for me. I felt sick with hopelessness and a mind-numbing dread. Although it did not seem to bear for me any kind of human hate, I hated it, for I sensed that the Ahrim was that soul-destroying emptiness which engendered pure hate itself.

‘Valashu Elahad,’ it seemed to whisper to me.

I gripped my sword and shook my head. The dark thing had no form nor face nor lips with which to move the air, and yet I heard its voice speaking to me along a strange and sudden wind. And then, in a flash, it shifted yet again, and its secret substance took on the lineaments of a face I knew too well: that of Salmelu Aradar. It was an ugly face, nearly devoid of a chin or any redeeming feature. His great beak of a nose pointed at me, as did his black and beadlike eyes. I hated the way he looked at me, deep into my eyes, and so I brought up my sword to block his line of sight. And his head, like a cobra’s, swayed to the right, and I repositioned my sword, and then again to the left as he seemed to seek access in that direction to the dark holes in my eyes. And so it went, our motions playing off each other, almost locked together, faster and faster as it had been during our duel of swords in King Hadaru’s hall when Salmelu had nearly killed me, and I had nearly killed him.

‘Valashu,’ he whispered again, ‘I wish you had seen your mother’s eyes when we crucified and ravished her in your father’s hall.’

A dark fire leaped in my heart then, and I fought with all my will to keep it from burning out of my arms and hands into my sword. But my restraint availed me nothing. Salmelu roared out in triumph, and then he was Salmelu no more. The blackness of his being metamorphosed yet again, this time into a thing of scales, wings and a savagely swaying tail.

‘The dragon!’ Daj cried out from beside me. ‘The dragon returns!’

I set my hand on Daj’s shoulder, and shouted to Liljana, ‘Take the children into the trees!’

I could not spare a moment to watch Liljana gather up Daj and Estrella and carry out my command. The Ahrim, now shaped as a dragon, even as Daj had said, hung in the air before me with an almost delicate poise. It seemed to feed on the fire inside me, and make it its own; in mere moments it grew into a raging, red beast fifty feet in length. I recognized this terrible dragon as Angraboda, into whose belly I had once plunged my sword in the deeps of Argattha. And now Angraboda regarded me with her fierce, cold, vengeful eyes. Then her leather wings beat at the air in a thunder of wind as she flew straight up toward the sun. She grew vaster and vaster and ever darker, and her bloated body blocked out the sun’s light and seemed to fill all the sky. She opened her mighty jaws to spit down fire at me and burn me into nothingness. And I felt the hateful fire building inside me, inciting me into a madness to destroy her.

ANGRABODA!

From a thousand miles and years away, I heard myself cry out this name as I readied myself to slay this beast yet again. But dragons cannot be harmed by such fire; only the fulgor of the red gelstei or the stars can pierce through their iron-like scales to a dragon’s heart. And so I drew in a deep breath and willed the fire within me to blaze hotter, purer and brighter until I could not hold it anymore, and it poured out into my sword. For one perfect moment, Alkaladur flared with all the brilliance of a star. Maram and Master Juwain cried out in pain at this fierce light. And so did the dragon. Then her jaws closed, and so did her great, golden eyes, and for a moment I thought that I had slain her. But the Ahrim, I sensed, might be unkillable. All at once the dragon’s immensity dissolved again into a blackness that sifted down through the air like soot. And as it fell to earth, the powdery-like particles of its essence reassembled themselves into the form of yet another man – or rather, a once-bright being who was something more than a man.

‘Elahad,’ he called out to me in a strong, beautiful voice that carried all the command of death. ‘The common murderer who would be king.’

Morjin, for such the Ahrim had now become, stood before me and bowed his gold-haired head to me. His golden eyes twisted screws of hate into my eyes, and I could not look away from him, nor could I lift my sword to block his fearful gaze. From somewhere off in the trees, Daj shouted out in detestation and dread of his old master. Atara, to my right, fitted an arrow to her bowstring and loosed it at him. But the arrow sailed right through his shadowed substance as if it were a cloud.

He paid her no attention, but only continued to stare at me. He appeared as he had been in his youth before his fall: fine of feature, golden-skinned and graceful in his bearing. The compassion in his eyes gleamed almost like gold.

‘Morjin!’ I shouted out. At last, I managed to raise up my sword.

His smile chilled me. Then he opened his mouth and breathed at me, almost as if he were blowing a kiss. No fire shot forth to scorch me, but only a bit of blackness from which he was made. I lifted my sword still higher, but I moved in vain, for it flowed around my bright blade as oil would a stick. And then his breath fell upon my head and arms, smothering me, blinding me. An unbearable cold burned through my skin deep into my bones. I stood as for an hour inside a lightless and airless cavern, gasping and coughing for breath.

‘Valashu Elahad, look at me!’ his hateful voice commanded. All at once, the black fog cleared from around my head, and I could not keep myself from staring at him. ‘You cannot defeat me.’

My fingers seemed frozen around the hilt of my sword, with all my joints locked and shrieking in pain. I could not even blink my eyes. My heart, though, still beat within me, quick and hard and hurtful, almost as with a will of its own. At last I found my will, and I raised back my sword.

‘Val, do not!’ Atara called out from somewhere near me. ‘Do not!’

I could not listen to her. I looked on in loathing as Morjin smiled at me and his features took on their true cast to reveal the hideous man that he had become: sagging flesh all pale with rot, stringy white hair and bloodshot eyes raging with hate. I struck out with my sword then, driving the gleaming point straight into his face. Nothing stopped this murderous thrust; it was as if I drove my sword through pure black air. And yet I felt a resistance to my sword’s silustria and its cutting edges, not of flesh and bone, but of spite and pain and cold. I fought this piercing numbness, and pulled back my sword. I stared at it in fury, for somehow the Ahrim’s substance had turned it black, like frozen iron. Then I stared at Morjin in horror, for even as I watched, his face became as my own, only blackened and twisted with hate.

‘You cannot defeat me,’ he said to me again.

Or perhaps it was the Ahrim that spoke these words to me, or myself – I could not tell. But some irresistible force moved the features of the thing standing before me.

There is a fear so terrible and deep that it turns one’s insides into a mass of sickened flesh and makes it seem that life cannot go on another moment. I stood there shaking and sweating and wanting to vomit up my very bowels. I knew that the dark thing standing before me had the power to kill me – and worse. But I seemed to have no power over it.

‘Val, fight!’ Maram shouted out from my left.

I was vaguely aware that he had sheathed his sword and taken out his firestone, for the long ruby crystal caught the sun’s rays in a glint of red light. And then, guided by Maram’s hand and heart, the crystal drank up the sun’s blaze and gave it out as a bolt of pure fire that streaked straight into the Ahrim. I felt the heat of this blast, but the Ahrim felt nothing. The face that seemed so very much my own just smiled at Maram as the black cavern of its mouth seemed ready to drink up more of Maram’s fire and his very life – and the lives of Master Juwain and Atara, too.

‘Yes, Val, fight!’ Atara called out to me, as she stood in a spray of crushed flowers by my side.

I stared at the dreadful thing wearing my face, and I wanted to fight it with every beat of my heart and down to my last breath. But how could I destroy something that was already nothing?

‘You know the way!’ Atara called to me again. ‘As it was at the farmhouse with the droghul!’

I glanced off into the trees, where Estrella stood looking at me. She seemed to have no fear of the Ahrim, but a great and terrible concern for me. I could feel her calling out to me in silence that I must always remember who I really was.

Then the Ahrim moved nearer to me – drawn, I sensed, by my blood and the kirax burning through it. Burning, yes, always hot and hateful, but something in this bitter poison seemed to awaken me to the immensity of pain that was life. And not just my own, but that of the trees standing around me tall and green, and the birds that made their nests among them, and the bees buzzing in the flowers, and everything. But life is much more than suffering. In all the growing things around me, I felt as well a wild joy and overflowing delight in just being alive. This was my gift, to sense in other creatures and people their deepest passions; Kane had once named this magic connection of mine as the valarda.

‘Valashu,’ the Ahrim seemed to whisper to me as it raised up its arm and opened out its fingers to me. ‘Take my hand.’

But Atara’s words sounded within me, too, as did Estrella’s silence and the song of the tanager piping out sweet and urgent from somewhere nearby. I finally caught sight of this little bird across the clearing to my right, perched high in the branches of a willow tree. It was a scarlet tanager, all round and red like the brightest of flowers. In the way it cocked its head toward me and sang just for me, it seemed utterly alive. Its heart beat even more quickly than did my own, like a flutter of wings, and it called me to take joy in the wild life within myself. There, too, I remembered, blazed a deep and unquenchable light.

‘Valashu Elahad.’

The Ahrim, I sensed, like a huge, blood-blackened tick, wanted my life. Very well, then I would give it that, and something more.

‘Val!’ Maram cried out to me. ‘Do what Atara said! What are you waiting for?’

At the farmhouse, Morjin had been unable to bear my anguish of love for my murdered family. What was it, I wondered, that the Ahrim could not bear? Its immense and terrifying anguish seemed to pour out through its black eyes and outstretched hand.

‘Now, Val!’ Master Juwain called to me. He stood staring at the Ahrim as he lifted his glowing, emerald crystal toward me in order to quicken the fires of my life.

Kane had told me, too, that I held inside my heart the greatest of weapons. It was what my gift became when I turned my deepest passion outward and wielded the valarda to open others’ hearts and brighten their souls. As I wielded it now. With Master Juwain feeding me the radiance of his green gelstei, and my other friends passing to me all that was beautiful and bright from within their own beings, I struck out at the Ahrim. Master Juwain believed that darkness could never be defeated by the sword, but he meant a length of honed steel and destruction, and not a sword of light.

ELAHAD!

For what seemed an age, all that was within me passed into the Ahrim in a blinding brilliance. But it was not enough. The Ahrim did not disintegrate into a shower of sparks, nor shine like the sun, nor did it disappear back into the void, like a snake swallowing its own tail. I sensed that I had only stunned it, if that was the right word, for it suddenly shrank into a ball of blackness and floated over toward an oak tree at the edge of the clearing. It seemed still to be watching me.

‘You have no power over me!’ I shouted at it. But my angry words seemed to make it grow a bit larger and even blacker, if that was possible.

Atara came up to me then, and laid her hand on my ice-cold hands, still locked onto the hilt of my sword. And she said to me, ‘Do not look at it. Close your eyes and think of the child that someday we’ll make together.’

I did as she asked, and my heart warmed with the brightest of hopes. And when I opened my eyes, the Ahrim had disappeared.

‘But where did it go?’ Maram asked, coming over to me. ‘And will it return?’

Daj came running out of the trees toward me, followed by Liljana and Estrella. All my friends gathered around me. And I told them, ‘It will return. In truth, I am not sure it is really gone.’

As I stood there trying to steady my breathing, I still felt the dark thing watching me, from all directions – and from my insides, as if it could look out at me through my very soul.

‘But what is it?’ Daj asked yet again. He turned toward Alphanderry who had remained almost rooted to the clearing’s floor during the whole time of our battle. ‘You called it the Ahrim. What does that mean?’

‘Hoy, the Ahrim, the Ahrim – I do not know!’

‘I suppose the name just came to you?’ Maram said, glaring at him.

‘Yes, it did. Like –’

‘Drops of blood on a cross!’ Maram snapped. ‘That thing is evil.’

‘So are all of Morjin’s illusions,’ Liljana said. ‘But that was no illusion.’

‘No, certainly not,’ Master Juwain said. Now he, too, touched his hand to my hands. He touched my face and told me, ‘Your fingers are frozen – and your nose and cheeks are frostbitten.’

I would have looked at myself in Alkaladur’s shimmering surface, but the silustria was an ugly black and I could see nothing.

‘It was so cold,’ I said. ‘So impossibly cold.’

I watched as the sun’s rays fell upon my sword and the blade slowly brightened to a soft silver. So it was with my dead-white flesh: the warm spring air thawed my face and hands with a hot pain that flushed my skin. Master Juwain held his green crystal over me to help the healing along. Soon I found that I could open and close my fingers at will, and I did not worry that they would rot with gangrene and have to be cut off. But forever after, I knew, I would feel the Ahrim’s terrible coldness burning through me, even as I did the kirax in my blood.

A sudden gleam of my sword gave me to see a truth to which I had been blind. And I said to Alphanderry, with much anger, ‘You do know things about the Ahrim, don’t you? It has something to do with the Skadarak, doesn’t it?’

At the mention of this black and blighted wood at the heart of Acadu, Alphanderry hung his head in shame. And then he found the courage to look at me as he said, ‘It was there, waiting, Val. During our passage, it attached itself to you. It has been following you ever since.’

‘Following!’ I half-shouted. ‘All the way to Hesperu, and back, to the Brotherhood’s school? And then here, to my home? Why could I not see it? And why could Abrasax not see it – he who can see almost everything?’

Again, Alphanderry shrugged his shoulders.

‘But how is it,’ I demanded, ‘that you can see it?’

It was Daj who answered for him. He passed his hand through Alphanderry’s watery-like form, and said, ‘But how not, since they are made of the same substance!’

Master Juwain regarded the glimmering tones that composed Alphanderry’s being. He said, ‘Similar, perhaps, but certainly not the same.’

I waved my hand at such useless speculations, and I called out to Alphanderry, ‘But why did you never tell me of this thing?’

The look on his face was that of a boy stealing back to his room after dark. He said to me simply, ‘I didn’t want to worry you, Val.’

‘Oh, excellent, excellent!’ Maram muttered, shaking his head. ‘Well, I am worried enough for all of us, now. What I wonder is why that filthy Ahrim, whatever it is, attacked us here? And more important, what will keep it away?’

But none of us, not even Alphanderry, had an answer to these questions. As it was growing late, it seemed the best thing we could do would be to leave these strange woods behind us as soon as possible.

‘Come,’ I said, clapping Maram on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go get some of that roast beef and beer you’ve been wanting for so long.’

After that, I pulled myself up onto Altaru’s back, and my friends mounted their horses, too. I pointed the way toward Lord Harsha’s farm with all the command and assurance that I could summon. But as we rode off through the shadowed trees, I felt the dark thing called the Ahrim still watching me and still waiting, and I knew with heaviness in my heart that it would be no easy task for me to become king.

2

We came out of the woods with the late sun touching the farmland of the Valley of the Swans with an emerald blaze. To the west, the three great mountains, Telshar, Arakel and Vayu, rose up as they always had with their white-capped peaks pointing into the sky. Lord Harsha’s large stone house stood framed against the sacred Telshar: a bit of carved and mortared granite almost lost against the glorious work of stone that the Ieldra had sung into creation at the beginning of time. We caught Lord Harsha out weeding his wheatfield to the east of his house. When he heard the noise of our horses trampling through the bracken, he straightened up and shook his hoe at us as he peered at us with his single eye. He called out to us: ‘Who is it who rides out of the wildwood like outlaws at this time of day? Announce yourselves, or I’ll have to go and get my sword!’

Lord Harsha, I thought, would prove a formidable opponent against outlaws – or anyone else – with only his iron-bladed hoe to wield as a weapon. Despite a crippled leg and his numerous years, his thick body retained a bullish power. And even though he wore only a plain woolen tunic, he bore on his finger a silver ring showing the four brilliant diamonds of a Valari lord. A black eyepatch covered part of his face; twelve battle ribbons had been tied to his long, white hair, and in all of Mesh, there were few warriors of greater renown.

‘Outlaws, is it?’ I called back to him. ‘Have our journeys really left us looking so mean?’

So saying, I threw back the hood of my cloak and rode forward a few more paces. I came to the low wall edging Lord Harsha’s field. Once, I remembered, I had sat there with Maram, my brother Asaru and his squire, Joshu Kadar, as we had spoken with Lord Harsha about fighting the Red Dragon and ending war – and other impossible things.

‘Who is it?’ Lord Harsha called out again. His single eye squinted as the sun’s slanting rays burned across my face. ‘Announce yourself, I say!’

‘I am’ I called back to him, ‘the seventh son of Shavashar Elahad, whose father was King Elkamesh, who named me –’

‘Valashu Elahad!’ Lord Harsha shouted. ‘It can’t be! But surely it must be, even though I don’t know how!’

I dismounted and climbed over the wall. Lord Harsha came limping up to me, and he embraced me, pounding my back with his hard, blunt hands. Then he pulled back to fix me with his single, bright eye.

‘It is you,’ he said, ‘but you look different, forgive me. Older, of course, but not so much on the outside as within. And something else. Something has lit a fire in you, like that star you were named for. At last. When you skulked out of Mesh last year, you did seem half an outlaw. But now you stand here like a king.’

I bowed my head to him, and he returned this grace, inclining his head an inch lower than mine. And he said to me, ‘You have his look, you know.’

‘Whose look?’ I asked him.

‘King Elkamesh’s,’ he said. ‘When he was a young knight. I never saw the resemblance until today’

I smiled at him, and told him, ‘It is good to be home, Lord Harsha.’

‘It is good to have you home.’ His gaze took in Maram and my other companions, who had nudged their horses up to the wall and dismounted as well. And Lord Harsha pointed at Alphanderry and said, ‘I count eight of you, altogether, and eight it was who set out for Argattha. But here rides a stranger in Kane’s place. Don’t tell me such a great warrior has fallen!’

‘He has not fallen,’ I said, ‘as far as I know. But circumstances called him to Galda. And as for Argattha, we did not journey there after all.’

‘No – that is clear. If you had, we would not be gathered here having this discussion. But where then did you journey?’

I looked at Maram, who said, ‘Ah, that is a long story, sir. Might we perhaps discuss it over dinner? For more miles than I can tell you, I’ve been hoping to sit down to some of Behira’s roast beef and few glasses of your excellent beer.’

At the mention of his daughter’s name, I felt something inside Lord Harsha tighten, and he said to Maram, ‘It’s been a bad year, as you will find out, and so you will have to settle on some chops of lamb or perhaps a roasted chicken. But beer we still have in abundance – surely Behira will be glad to pour you all you can drink.’

He motioned for us to follow him, and we led our horses around his field toward his house. Although I still felt a dark presence watching my every movement, Lord Harsha seemed completely unaware of the Ahrim or that we had fought a battle for our lives scarcely an hour before. As we passed the barn and drew up closer to the house, he called out in his gruff voice: ‘Behira – come out and behold what the wind has blown our way!’

A few moments later, the thick wooden door of the house opened, and Lord Harsha’s only remaining child stepped out to greet us. Like Lord Harsha, Behira was sturdy of frame and wore a rough woolen tunic gathered in with a belt of black leather. With her ample breasts and wide hips that Maram so appreciated, my mother had once feared that Behira might run to fat. But time had treated this young woman well, for she had lost most of her plumpness while retaining all that made her pretty, and more. Her long hair gleamed a glossy black like a sable’s coat, and her large, lovely eyes regarded Maram boldly, and so with the rest of us. I might have expected that she would run out and fall into Maram’s arms, but time had changed her in other ways, too. The rather demure and good-natured girl, it seemed, had become a proud and strong-willed woman.

‘Lord Marshayk!’ she called out to Maram with an uncomfortable formality. ‘Lord Elahad! You’ve come back!’

So it went as she greeted all of us in turn, and then her gaze drew back to Maram. I sensed in her a churning sea of emotions: astonishment; shame; adoration; confusion. I felt hot blood burning up through her beautiful face as she said, ‘Oh, but we’ve much to talk about, and you will all want a good hot bath before we do. I’ll go and heat the water’

And with that she bowed to us, and went back into the house. The explanations for her strange behavior, I thought, would have to wait until we cleaned ourselves. After Behira had filled the cedarwood tub in the bathing room, we went inside the house and took turns immersing our bodies in steaming hot water: first Atara, Liljana and Estrella took a rare pleasure in washing away their cares, and then Master Juwain, Maram, Daj and I. While Master Juwain and Daj were pulling on fresh tunics, Lord Harsha came into the wood-paneled bathing room to inform us that dinner would soon be ready. He eyed the strange, round scars marring Maram’s great hairy body, but did not remark upon them. He seemed to be waiting for a more appropriate moment to tell of things that he was loath to tell and to hear of things that he might not want to hear.

At last, when we were all well-scrubbed and attired in clean clothing, Lord Harsha called us to dinner at his long table just off his great room. As we were about to take our seats, the clopping of a horse’s hooves against the dirt lane outside made me draw my sword and hurry over to the door. I said to Lord Harsha, ‘We have enemies we haven’t told you about, and we are not ready to make our presence known.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said to me as he stood by the window and peered out into the twilight. ‘It’s only Joshu Kadar – in all the excitement, I forgot to tell you that we’ve invited him to dinner. Surely you can trust him’.

Surely, I thought, I could. Joshu had been Asaru’s squire, and he had stood by the horses that day when Salmelu had shot me with his poisoned arrow – and he had served my brother faithfully at the Culhadosh Commons as well.

‘All right,’ I said, sheathing my sword and leaning it against the side of the table. ‘But please let me know if you are expecting anyone else.’

Lord Harsha opened the door and invited Joshu inside. The youth I remembered from the days when Asaru and I had taught him fighting skills had grown into a powerful man nearly as tall as I. He wore a single battle ribbon in his long hair. With his square face and strong features, he had a sort of overbearing handsomeness that reminded me of my brother, Yarashan. But in his manner Joshu seemed rather modest, respectful and even sweet. The moment he saw me, he nearly dropped the bouquet of flowers that he was holding and called out happily: ‘Lord Valashu! Thank the stars you have returned! We all thought you were dead!’

He bowed his head to me, then greeted Master Juwain with the great affection that many of my people hold for the masters of the Brotherhood. With perfect politeness he likewise said hello to the rest of our company, but when he came to Maram, I felt the burn of embarrassment heating up his face, and he could hardly speak to him. He gave his flowers to Behira, who put them in a blue vase which she set on the table along with platters of food and pitchers of dark, frothy beer.

There came an awkward moment as Lord Harsha took his place at the head of the table and Joshu sat down in the chair to his right. I had the place of honor at the opposite end of the table, with Maram to my right and Atara at my left. It seemed a strange thing for Alphanderry to join us, for he didn’t so much sit upon his chair as occupy its space. He could of course eat no food nor imbibe no drink, and soon enough we would have to explain his strange existence as best we could. But as Behira seated herself across from Joshu, it came time for other explanations.

‘Well, here it is,’ Lord Harsha said, looking at Maram. Lord Harsha was not a man of subterfuge or nuance, and he had put off this unpleasant task longer than he had liked. ‘We did think you were dead, and too bad for that. And so I had to promise my daughter to another’

As Behira looked across the table at Joshu, and Joshu lowered his eyes toward the empty plate in front of him, Maram’s ruddy face flushed an even brighter red. And he called out, ‘But you said that you’d wait for our return!’

Lord Harsha sighed as he rubbed at his eye, and then said, ‘We did wait, for as long as seemed wise. Longer than a year it was. But you had told us that you were going to Argattha, and so what was there really to wait for?’

As Maram fought back his rising choler, he fell strangely silent. And so I spoke for him, saying, ‘We had indeed planned to go to Argattha, but in the end we set out on a different quest. My apologies if we misled you. It seemed the safest course, however, for then you could not betray our mission should any of our enemies come here and question you.’

Now Lord Harsha’s face filled with a choler of its own. He rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, which he too had leaned against the edge of the table. He said, ‘I have taken steel, wood and iron through my body in service of your father and grandfather, and have never betrayed anyone!’

I said to Lord Harsha: ‘My apologies, sir. But you know what the Red Dragon and the Prince of Ishka did to my mother and grandmother. Don’t be so sure you would be able to keep your silence if he did the same to your daughter.’

Lord Harsha removed his hand from his sword and made a fist. He looked at it a moment, before saying to me, ‘No, my apologies, Lord Valashu. These are hard, bad times. You did what you had to do, as we have done. And it’s good that we’re gathered here together, for this is a family matter, and you and your friends are like family to Sar Maram. And so you should advise him on what our course should be.’

‘What can our course be?’ Maram said. ‘Other than this: you promised Behira to me first! And promises must be kept!’

Lord Harsha pressed his hand against his eye patch as if he could still feel the piercing pain of the arrow that long ago had half-blinded him. And he said to Maram, ‘On the field of the Raaswash more than two years ago, you promised to wed my daughter, and I still see no ring upon her finger’

Now it was Behira’s turn to make a fist as she set her right hand over her left.

‘But I had duties!’ Maram said to Lord Harsha. ‘There were quests to be undertaken, journeys to be made, to Tria, across the Wendrush – and beyond. And the battles we fought were –’

‘Excuses,’ Lord Harsha snapped out. ‘For three years, you’ve been making excuses and putting my daughter off. Well, now it’s too late.’

‘But I love Behira!’ Maram half-shouted.

At this, Behira lifted up her head and turned to gaze down the table at Maram. Her face brightened with hope and longing. It was the first time, I thought, that either she or any of us had heard Maram announce his affection for her so openly.

‘Love,’ Lord Harsha said to Maram, ‘is the fire that lights the stars, and we should all surrender up our deepest love to the One that created them. And a father loves his daughter, which is why I promised Behira to you in the first place, for every hour I had to bear my daughter’s talk of loving you. But everyone knows that such love matches often end unhappily. That kind of love is only for the stars, not for men and women, for it quickly burns out.’

At this, I reached over and took hold of Atara’s hand. The warmth of her fingers squeezing mine reminded me of that bright and beautiful star to which our souls would always return. I did not believe that it could ever die.

‘Are you saying,’ Maram asked Lord Harsha, ‘that a man should not love his wife?’

On the wall above the table hung a bright tapestry that Lord Harsha’s dead wife had once woven. He gazed at it with an obvious fondness, and he said, ‘Of course a man should come to love his wife. But it is best if marriage comes first, and so then a man does not let love sweep away his reason so that he loses sight of the more important things.’

‘But what could be more important than love?’ Maram asked.

And Lord Harsha told him, ‘Honor, above all else.’

‘But I had to honor my duty to Val, didn’t I?’

Lord Harsha nodded his head. ‘Certainly you did. But before you went off with him, you might have married my daughter and given her your name.’

‘But I –’

‘Too, you might have given her your estates, such as they are, and most important of all, a child.’

As the look of longing lighting up Behira’s face grew even brighter, Maram closed his mouth, for he seemed to have run out of objections. And then he said, ‘But our journeys were dangerous! You can’t imagine! I didn’t want to leave behind a fatherless child.’

Lord Harsha sighed at this, then said, ‘In our land, since the Great Battle, there are many fatherless children. And too few men to be husbands to all the widows and maidens.’

All my life, I had heard of the ancient Battle of the Sarburn referred to in this way, but it seemed strange for Lord Harsha to give the recent Battle of the Culhadosh Commons that name as well.

‘Sar Joshu himself,’ Lord Harsha continued, ‘lost his father and both his brothers there.’

Joshu looked straight at me then, and I felt in him the pain of a loss that was scarcely less than my own. I remembered that his mother had died giving him birth, while his two older sisters had been married off. Joshu had inherited his family’s rich farm lands only a few miles from here, and who could blame Lord Harsha for wanting to join estates and take this orphan into his own family?

‘Sar Joshu,’ I said, looking down the table. I studied the two diamonds set into the silver ring that encircled his finger. ‘Before the battle, my brother gave you your warrior’s ring. And now you wear that of a knight?’

Sar Joshu bowed his head at this, but seemed too modest to say anything. And so Lord Harsha told us of his deeds: ‘You came late, Lord Valashu, to the fight with the Ikurians, and so you did not witness Sar Joshu’s slaying of two knights in defense of Lord Asaru. Nor the lance wound through his lung that unhorsed him and nearly killed him. In reward for his valor, Lord Sharad, Lord Avijan and myself agreed that he should be knighted.’

Now I could only bow my head to Joshu. ‘Then Mesh has another fine knight to help make up for those who have fallen.’

‘Nothing,’ Joshu said, ‘can ever replace those who fell at the Great Battle.’

I thought of my father and my six brothers, and I said, ‘No, of course not. But as I have had to learn, life still must go on.’

‘And that,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘is exactly the point I have been trying to make. Morjin’s cursed armies cut down a whole forest of warriors and knights. It’s time new seeds were planted and new trees were grown.’

I considered this as I studied the way that Joshu looked at Behira. I sensed in him a burning passion – but not for her.

‘Sar Joshu,’ I asked, ‘have you ever been in love?’

He looked down at his hands, and he said simply, ‘Yes, Lord Valashu.’

As Behira took charge of finally passing around the roasted chickens, blueberry muffins, mashed potatoes and asparagus that she had prepared for dinner, it came out that Joshu had indeed known the kind of all-consuming love that makes the very stars weep – and he still did. It seemed that he had been smitten by a young woman named Sarai Garvar, of the Lake Country Garvars. But a great lord had married her instead.

‘My father was to have spoken with her father, Lord Garvar, after the battle,’ Joshu told us. Although he shrugged his shoulders, I felt his throat tighten with a great sadness. ‘But my father died, my brothers, too, and so it nearly was with me. And so I lost her to another. Everyone knows how bitter Lord Tanu was when the enemy killed his wife during the sack of the Elahad castle. So who can blame him for wanting to take a new wife? And who can blame Lord Garvar for wanting to make a match with one of Mesh’s greatest lords?’

Lord Tanu, of course, had been not only my father’s second-in-command but held large estates around Godhra, and his family owned many of the smithies there. As Joshu had said, who could blame any father for wanting to join fortunes with such a man?

‘But Lord Tanu is old!’ Behira suddenly called out as she banged a spoonful of potatoes against her plate. She seemed outraged less for Joshu’s sake than for Lord Tanu’s new wife. ‘And Sarai is only my age!’

‘Here, now!’ Lord Harsha said, laying his hand upon her arm. ‘Mind the crockery, will you? Your mother made it herself out of good clay before you were born!’

Behira looked down at the disk of plain earthenware before her, and she fell into a silence. And I said to Joshu, ‘Then if any man should appreciate Maram’s feelings in this matter, it is you.’

‘I do,’ he agreed, nodding his head sadly to Maram. ‘But Lord Harsha is right: how can any man’s feelings count at a time such as this?’

Although I sensed his sympathy for Maram, there was steel in him too, and great stubbornness. I knew that, having lost one prospective bride, he would not easily surrender what Lord Harsha had rightly deemed as a good match.

For a while we busied ourselves eating the hearty food that Behira had prepared us. For dessert, she brought out a cherry pie and cheese, and made us chicory tea as well. But Maram wanted something stronger than this – stronger even than the black beer that he had been swilling all through dinner. And so he announced that he had to retrieve a gift from the barn; he nudged my knee beneath the table to indicate that I should follow him.

We stepped out into a warm spring night full of chirping crickets and twinkling stars. We lit the lantern that Lord Harsha had given us, then went into the barn, with its smells of cattle and chicken droppings. We rummaged around in the saddlebags that we had placed on the straw near our horses’ stalls. And Maram said to me, ‘This is not the homecoming I had imagined.’

I nodded my head at this, then asked him: ‘But can you really blame Lord Harsha for wanting what is best for Behira?’

‘I am best for her!’ Maram half-bellowed. Then his voice softened as he said, ‘I love her – this time, I’m really sure that I do.’

I tried not to smile at this, and I said, ‘But you have put off the wedding, again and again. Some might take this as a sign that you don’t really want to marry her’

‘That doesn’t mean I’m ready to let that little squire take her!’

‘Sar Joshu,’ I told him, ‘is a full knight now, and a good man.’

‘I don’t care if he’s a damn angel! He doesn’t love Behira as I do, and she doesn’t love him! Will you help with this, Val?’

I thought about this for a while then said, ‘You’re my best friend, but what I won’t do is to help you make Behira into an old maid.’

‘But I will marry her, if I can, as soon as our business here is done – I swear I will!’

‘Will you?’

He found his sword resting upon a bale of hay, and drew it out of its scabbard. He laid his hand on the flat of the blade and said, ‘I swear by all that I honor that I will marry Behira!’

I gripped his wrist, and urged him to sheathe his sword. Then I pointed at the bottle of brandy that Maram had pulled out of his saddlebags and set on top of the hay, too. I took his hand and placed it on the bottle.

‘Swear by all that you love,’ I told him, ‘that you will marry her’

‘Ah, all right then – I do, I do!’

‘Swear by me, Maram,’ I said, looking at him.

In the lantern’s flickering light, Maram looked back at me, and finally said, ‘Sometimes I think you ask too much of me, but I do swear by you.’

‘All right then,’ I said, clapping him on the shoulder. I retrieved the lantern from its hook on one of the barn’s wooden supports. ‘I will do what I can. It may be that there is something that Sar Joshu desires much more than marriage.’

We went back into the house, and Maram presented the brandy to Lord Harsha as a gift. He told him, ‘It’s the last of the finest vintage I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve been saving this bottle for you for at least a thousand miles.’

‘Thank you,’ Lord Harsha said, holding up the bottle to the room’s candles. Then, with a wry smile, he asked, ‘Will you help me drink it?’

After Behira had retrieved some cups from the adjacent great room and Lord Harsha had poured a bit of brandy into each, I gave them presents, too. For Behira I had silk bags full of rare spices: anise, pepper, cardamom, clove. To Lord Harsha I gave a simple steel throwing knife. He hefted it in his rough hands and promised to add it to his collection of swords, knives, maces, halberds and other weapons mounted on the wall of his great room. When I told him the story behind the knife, he sat looking at me and shaking his head.

‘This was Kane’s, and he wanted you to have it,’ I said to him. ‘When we were made captive in King Arsu’s encampment, one of Morjin’s High Priests made Kane cast the knife at Estrella and split an apple placed on top of her head.’

Lord Harsha’s hand closed around the knife’s handle as he regarded Estrella in amazement – and concern.

But Estrella remained nearly motionless nibbling on a gooey cherry that she had plucked from a slice of pie. Her large, dark eyes filled with a strange light. In the past, she had suffered greater torments than that which the Kallimun priest, Arch Uttam, had inflicted on her. It was her grace, however, to dwell in the present, most of the time, and here and now she seemed to be happy just sitting safe and sound with those she loved.

‘Well, you have stories to tell,’ Lord Harsha called out, ‘and we must hear them. Let’s drink a toast to your safe return from wherever it was that the stars called you.’

So saying, he lifted up his cup, and we all joined him in drinking Maram’s brandy.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s clear that you haven’t come home just to see Maram happily wed to my daughter’

It came time to give an account of our journey. I said that we had set forth into the wilds of Ea on a quest to find the Maitreya. Many parts of our story I could not relate, or did not want to. It wouldn’t do for Lord Harsha – or anyone – to learn the location of the Brotherhood’s school or of the greatest of the gelstei crystals that they kept there. Of the terrible darkness I had found within myself in our passage of the Skadarak I kept silent, although I did speak of the Black Jade buried in the earth there and how this evil thing called out to capture one’s soul. Likewise I did not want to have to explain to Behira that the round scars marking Maram’s cheek and body had been torn into him by the teeth of a monstrous woman called Jezi Yaga. Nothing, however, kept me from telling of our journey through the Red Desert and crossing of the hellish and uncrossable Tar Harath. Behira listened in wonderment to the story of the little people’s magic wood hidden in the burning sands of the world’s worst wasteland – and how this Vild, as we called it, had quickened Alphanderry’s being so that he could speak and dwell almost as a real man. She wanted to hear more of the Singing Caves of Senta than I could have related in a month of evenings. At last though, I had to move on to our nightmarish search through Hesperu: nearly the darkest and worst of all the Dragon kingdoms. It was there, I told Behira and her father, in a village called Jhamrul, that we had come across a healer named Bemossed.

‘With a laying on of his hand,’ I said to Lord Harsha, ‘he healed a wound to Maram’s chest that even Master Juwain could not heal. In Bemossed gathers all that is best and brightest in men. It is almost certain that he is the Maitreya.’

Lord Harsha sipped his brandy as he looked at me. He said, ‘Once before you believed another was the Maitreya.’

Truly I had: myself. And the lies that I had told myself – and others – had inexorably brought Morjin’s armies down upon my land and had nearly destroyed all that I loved.

‘Once,’ I said to Lord Harsha, ‘I was wrong. This time I am not’

Now Lord Harsha took an even longer pull at his brandy as his single eye fixed upon me. And he said to me, ‘Something has changed in you, Lord Elahad. The way you speak – I cannot doubt that you tell the truth.’

‘Then do not doubt this either: when it is safe, the Maitreya will come forth. The Free Kingdoms must be made ready for him. And our kingdom, before all others, must be set in order. It is why I have returned.’

‘To become king!’ he said as his eye gleamed. ‘I knew it! Valashu Elahad, crowned King of Mesh – well, lad, I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished that day would come!’

Then his face fell into a frown, and the light went out of him. ‘But after what’s happened, how can that day ever come?’

I noticed Joshu Kadar studying me intently, and I asked, ‘Then has another already been made king?’

‘What!’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Have you had no news at all?’

‘No – we entered Mesh in secret, and have spoken to no one.’

‘Likely, it’s good that you haven’t. There are those who would not want you to gain your father’s throne. I can’t think that they would resort to a knife in the back, but as I said, these are bad times.’

‘Bad times, indeed,’ I said, looking down the table at him, ‘if you would even speak of such a thing.’

‘Well, with your father having sired seven sons, I never thought I would live to see such a day: Mesh’s throne empty, and at least three lords vying to claim it.’

I let my hand rest on my sword’s hilt, and I said, ‘Lord Tomavar, certainly’

Lord Harsha nodded his head. ‘He is the greatest contender – and he has become your enemy. He blames you for what happened to his wife.’

I looked down at my sword’s great diamond pommel glimmering in the candlelight, and I thought of how Morjin’s men had carried off the beautiful Vareva – most likely to ravishment and death. How could I blame Lord Tomavar for being stricken to his soul when I already blamed myself?

‘Too many,’ Lord Harsha told me, ‘still believe that you abandoned the castle out of vainglory. And then told the baldest of lies.’

‘But that itself is a lie!’ Joshu Kadar called out. His hand pressed against his chest as if his brandy had stuck in his throat and burned him. ‘Everyone who knows Valashu Elahad knows this! I have spoken of this everywhere! Many of my friends have, as well. Lord Valashu, they say, led us to victory in the Great Battle and should have been made king.’

‘He should have,’ Lord Harsha agreed with a sigh. ‘But on the battlefield, five thousand warriors stood for Lord Valashu, and eight thousand against, and that is that.’

‘That is not that!’ Joshu half-shouted. It must have alarmed him, I sensed, to speak with such vehemence to a lord knight who might become his father-in-law. ‘If the warriors were to stand again, they would acclaim Lord Valashu – I know they would!’

Lord Harsha sighed again, and he poured both Joshu and himself more brandy. And he said, ‘If the warriors were free to gather and stand, it might be so. But we might as well hope that horses had wings so that we could just fly to battle.’

He told us then that Lord Tomavar had made many of the knights and warriors who followed him swear oaths of loyalty in support of his kingship. In order for them to stand for another, he would have to relieve them of their oaths. So it was with Lord Tanu and Lord Avijan, the two other major contenders for Mesh’s throne.

‘Lord Avijan!’ I called out, shaking my head. This young lord resided in his family’s castle near Mount Eluru just to the north of the Valley of the Swans. ‘My father was very fond of him and trusted no man more.’

‘And no man is more trustworthy,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Of all Mesh’s lords, none has spoken more forcefully in favor of your becoming king. But when you went off with your friends and did not return, he thought you must be dead, as everyone did. He never wanted to put himself forward against Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu, but we persuaded him that he must’

‘We, Lord Harsha?’ I said to him.

I felt the blood and brandy heating up his rough, old face as he said, ‘Myself, yes, and Lord Sharad and Sar Jessu – and many others. Almost every warrior around Silvassu and the Valley of the Swans.’

‘Then have you taken oaths to support Lord Avijan?’

Lord Harsha rubbed at his face to hide his shame. ‘We had to. Otherwise we would have come under Lord Tomavar’s boot, or Lord Tanu’s. In any case …’

‘Yes?’

‘In any case, only one can become king, and we all agreed that no one deserves the throne more than Lord Avijan.’

I remained silent as I squeezed the hilt of my sword, and I felt Maram, Master Juwain and Liljana looking at me.

‘No one, of course,’ Lord Harsha went on, ‘except yourself. But we all thought you would never return.’

I gazed at him and said, ‘But I have returned.’

‘That you have, lad,’ he said. ‘And Lord Avijan would release us all from our oaths and be the first to stand for you. But Lord Tomavar commands six thousand warriors, and another four thousand follow Lord Tanu, and they will surely oppose you if you come forth.’

Although Atara, sitting near the middle of the table, kept her face still and stern, I could almost feel her heart beating in time with my own. I wondered if she had foreseen this moment in her scryer’s crystal sphere or what might befall next.

‘Will Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar,’ I asked Lord Harsha, ‘oppose me so far as to go to war?’

I would rather die, I thought, than see Meshians slay Meshians.

‘Who can say?’ Lord Harsha muttered. ‘These are bad times, very bad. And since the Great Battle, Mesh is weaker, much too weak. New trees we need to stand in the ranks and face our enemies, but we’ll be a whole generation growing them. Our enemies know this. Already, it’s said, the Waashians are looking for a way to attack us. And the Urtuk already have: they invaded through the Eshur pass last fall. They weren’t many, only a thousand, and they might have been just testing our strength – and so Lord Tomavar’s army threw them back easily enough. And then there is Anjo.’

‘Anjo!’ I said. ‘But Anjo has never threatened us.’

‘No, and that is exactly the point: Anjo hasn’t had a real king in two hundred years, and can threaten no one. Her dukes and barons still battle each other bloody. You will not have heard that only two months ago, the Ishkans annexed Adar and Natesh. And King Hadaru still looks for other of Anjo’s domains to bite off. Lord Tanu has vowed that this must never happen to Mesh.’

‘And it must not!’ I told him.

‘No – and so Lord Tanu has said that Mesh must have a new king, and soon, if we don’t want to wind up like Anjo. Lord Tomavar has said the same thing. They have each demanded that the other stand aside, and have made threats.’

‘But if they make war upon each other,’ I said, ‘then they would make Mesh like Anjo!’

Lord Harsha shrugged his shoulders as his face fell sad and grave. He muttered into his cup of brandy: ‘These are bad times, the worst of times, so who can blame an old man for wanting to see his daughter well-wed and give his grandson his first sword? Now, in your father’s day, and your grandfather’s, no one would ever have thought that –’

‘Lord Harsha,’ I said, with greater force. ‘Will Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu take up arms against me?’

With a jerk of his head, Lord Harsha downed the last of his brandy and sighed out, ‘I don’t know. Lord Tanu will be cautious, as always. Once he makes up his mind about something, though, he can strike fast and hold on like a bulldog. And Lord Tomavar …’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Lord Tomavar is burning for vengeance now. Full of the blood madness, do you understand? His warriors captured thirty of the Urtuk – and Lord Tomavar accused them of helping Morjin escape across the steppe with Vareva. And so he had them hacked to death.’

‘But that is not our way!’

‘No, it is not,’ he said. He let loose an even deeper sigh. ‘And so what will he do when you come forth to claim your father’s crown? That I don’t want to know, lad.’

The sound of steel forks against earthen plates full of pie rang out into the narrow room, and echoed off the stone walls. I noticed Liljana concentrating all her attention on Behira and Joshu, while Master Juwain looked at me as if admonishing me to find a way of peace in a world full of hate and vengeful swords.

‘What needs to be decided,’ Lord Harsha finally said to me, ‘is what you will do. Will you go to war for your father’s throne, Valashu Elahad?’

Would I draw my sword against my countrymen, I wondered? I sat considering this while I gripped Alkaladur’s hilt. As Lord Harsha had said, only one man could be king of Mesh.

‘There must be a way without war,’ I said to Lord Harsha, and everyone. ‘If I could step aside and see Lord Avijan crowned king, I would. Or even Lord Tomavar or Lord Tanu. But from what has been said here tonight, this is not possible.’

‘No,’ Lord Harsha agreed, ‘such a grace on your part might only make the situation worse.’

Atara, who had said little all during dinner, now drew forth her sparkling crystal, and told us: ‘Neither Lord Tanu nor Lord Tomavar will ever be king. Nor Lord Avijan. It must be Val – or no one.’

I tried not to smile at Atara’s seeming assurance. Most of the time, she refrained from saying such things. I could not tell if her words were a true prophecy or whether she wished the mere force of her statement to bring about the future that she willed to be.

I drew my sword a few inches out of its scabbard, and the flash of silustria warmed my blood. And I said, ‘It must be me. I never wanted this, but what other choice is there?’

‘But Val,’ Maram said, ‘what will you do? Coming forth now will be dangerous – even more dangerous than we had thought. And what if Kane’s worries prove out, and you find that some of your countrymen have joined the Order of the Dragon?’

At the mention of this secret society of blood drinkers and murderers who followed Morjin, Lord Harsha said, ‘It is bad enough to know that Prince Salmelu went over to the Red Dragon, and is now a filthy priest who calls himself by the filthy name of Igasho. For even one Valari in all the Nine Kingdoms to turn traitor this way is a disgrace.’

He tapped his sword and said, ‘Despite what I said earlier, I won’t believe that any man of Mesh would ever dishonor himself so – I won’t! And the warriors of the Valley of the Swan are as true as diamonds.’

‘Yes,’ Maram agreed with a nod of his head, ‘but will they be true to Val?’

‘Nine of ten will be – perhaps more.’

‘But what of Lord Tanu, then? His army is only a two-day march away. And Lord Tomavar? How long would it take him to lead his six thousand here – a couple of days more?’

How long, indeed, would the hot-headed Lord Tomavar need to march his army from the northwest down across our small kingdom?

Lord Harsha frowned at this as he rubbed the lines creasing his face. He had never been a quick thinker or a brilliant one, but once he decided on a thing, his reasoning usually shone with good common sense.

‘We had thought,’ I said to him, ‘that we might send out a call to those who would follow me to assemble at my father’s castle.’

Lord Harsha slowly shook his head at this. ‘That won’t do, lad. The castle is all burned out, and it would take a week even to get the gates working again. And Lord Tanu might move before you had enough warriors to man the walls.’

He drummed his thick fingers on the table as he looked at me.

‘What do you suggest then?’ I asked him.

‘Let’s do this,’ he said, looking at Joshu Kadar. ‘Sar Joshu and I will ride out tomorrow and gather up those we absolutely trust. We’ll escort you to Lord Avijan’s castle, where you’ll be safe. And then we’ll put out the word that Valashu Elahad has returned to Mesh. Two thousand warriors have sworn oaths to Lord Avijan, and another thousand, at least, look to the weather vane to see which way the wind will blow. Let’s see how many will declare for you.’

I thought about this for a while as I traded glances with Maram, Master Juwain and Liljana. Atara inclined her head toward me. Then I told Lord Harsha: ‘Very well, then, it will be as you have said.’

Our decision so stirred Joshu that he whipped forth his sword and raised it up toward me. ‘Tomorrow morning I will speak with Viku Aradam and Shivalad and a dozen others! I know they’ll all ride with you, Sire!’

This word seemed to hang in the air like a trumpet’s call. And Lord Harsha banged the table with his fist, and turned his angry eye on Joshu.

‘Here, now – that won’t do!’ he snapped. ‘You may call Lord Valashu “Sire” when the warriors have acclaimed him, but not before!’

Joshu bowed his head in acquiescence of Lord Harsha’s admonishment. Lord Harsha, as he should have known, was a stickler for the ancient forms, and he believed that a king must always draw his power from the will of the warriors whom he led.

‘All right, then,’ Lord Harsha said as he stood up from the table and picked up the brandy bottle. He went around the table filling up everyone’s cup. He returned to his place and raised his own as he said, ‘To Valashu Elahad – may he become the next in the unbroken line of Elahad kings and protect our sacred realm!’

After we had clinked cups and sipped our brandy, Behira stared across the table at Joshu and said, ‘Then tomorrow you’ll ride off again?’

At this, Joshu turned toward me. I sensed that he didn’t want to wed Behira half as much as he burned to take his revenge for what had happened upon the Culhadosh Commons. As our eyes met, I felt a bright flame come alive within him.

‘I must serve Lord Valashu,’ he told her. ‘There will be war – if not against Lord Tanu or Lord Tomavar, then against the Waashians when Lord Valashu becomes king. Or the Urtuk will invade in force, and the Mansurii with them. Perhaps Morjin himself will march against Mesh again. And when he does, I must ride with Lord Valashu.’

‘If he is your king, then you must,’ Lord Harsha agreed. ‘And so must I. And that is why we should arrange a wedding while we can.’

I felt Maram’s knee pressing against mine beneath the table, and I said to Lord Harsha, ‘I am afraid there will be war. Why not let the question of your daughter’s marriage wait until greater matters are settled?’

‘Do you mean, wait until one of Morjin’s knights puts a spear through Joshu’s other lung?’ Lord Harsha said bluntly.

As my father had once told me, sometimes problems worked out best if left alone. And death solved all of life’s problems.

‘Or Sar Maram,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘I would no more see him lying bloodied on the battlefield than I would Sar Joshu.’

In the dark corner of the room above Maram’s head, I caught a sense of a deeper darkness. The Ahrim, I knew, followed Maram as it did me.

‘I understand your concern,’ I said to Lord Harsha, ‘and I will do what I can to ease it. Do you know of the estate my family holds along the Kurash River?’

‘The lands by the Old Oaks?’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Five hundred acres of the best bottomland?’

‘Yes, those,’ I said. ‘It shall be my present to Behira at her wedding.’

Lord Harsha nodded his head at this as he regarded me. Ever a practical man, he said, ‘You’re even more generous than your father, lad. But suppose that neither Sar Joshu nor Sar Maram survive what is to come? Suppose – may the stars forbid it – that you yourself do not?’

‘Then,’ I told him, ‘let these lands be held in dower for Behira to whomever she might marry.’

‘Generous, indeed!’ Lord Harsha called out. Again he lifted up his cup. ‘Well, let us drink to that!’

At this, Maram smiled at me in gratitude. We raised our cups, even Master Juwain, though he would drink no intoxicants. Behira, however, sat still and stolid, refusing to touch her cup.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lord Harsha asked her.

And in a clear, strong voice, she said, ‘What if I don’t want to marry?’

Lord Harsha sat in a stunned silence staring at her. ‘Not marry – what do you mean?’

‘I mean, father, that I’m not sure I want to marry anyone.’

Her words struck Lord Harsha speechless, and he glared at her.

Then Behira looked down the table at Liljana, and caught her eye. Usually Liljana stayed out of such business, but something in Behira must have moved her, for she said, ‘There are other things a young woman can do besides marry.’

Her words caused Lord Harsha to turn his black blazing eye upon her. And he commanded Behira, ‘You won’t listen to such outlandish talk!’

But he wasn’t the only one in the Harsha family who could summon up the more wrathful emotions. Behira shook her head at her father and without warning exploded into what might have been a tantrum if it hadn’t been so well-reasoned: ‘Oh, won’t I? And why not? Why must I marry? Because you want grandsons, father? More meat to skewer on our enemies’ swords? I won’t see my children killed this way – I won’t! All this talk tonight of people dying and noble men defending Mesh while I wait and wait yet again for Maram or Joshu or someone else to return someday and favor me with their precious seeds – as if I’m no more than a field of dirt to plant them in! Well, what if I don’t want to wait?’

Lord Harsha, utterly taken aback by this outburst, stared at her and said, ‘But if you don’t marry, what do you think you will do?’

Behira looked at Atara sitting quietly as well-balanced and straight as one of her arrows. And Behira said, ‘The Sarni women, some of them, become warriors.’

‘The Sarni are savages!’ Lord Harsha shouted. Then I felt shame burning his face as he looked at Atara and said, ‘Forgive me, Princess!’

‘It’s all right,’ Atara said with a cold smile. ‘Sometimes we are savages – and worse.’

‘Do you see?’ Lord Harsha said to Behira. ‘Do you see?’

Behira turned to look down the table at me. Then she told her father, ‘I see a man who would become King of Mesh, and not be content merely to keep the roads in good repair and hold feasts. If Lord Elahad wins the throne, then there will be war – a war such as we’ve never seen. And we Valari women are supposed to be warriors aren’t we? With the whole world about to spill its blood, you can’t just expect us to sit around and hope for our men to return and bestow upon us babies!’

Lord Harsha forced himself to breathe in and out ten times before he made response to this: ‘Our women are warriors: warriors of the spirit. Who teaches our children to meditate, and so ennobles them with the grace and power of the One? Who teaches them to tell the truth? It’s the truth I’ll tell you now, as your mother would have if she were still alive: our women are the keepers of the very flame that makes us Valari.’

Behira placed her hand across her breast as she looked at me and said, ‘This flame burns for a better world, as it is with Lord Valashu. Whatever spirit I have, I wish to use in his service helping him to win. Then, father, it might be safe to wed and bring a child into the world.’

Lord Harsha, who had finally borne too much, banged his fist against the table and thundered: ‘You will wed when I say you will and whom I choose as your husband!’

At this, Behira burst into tears. But she soon gathered up her pride, and stood up from her chair. With an almost violent clacking of the crockery, she began stacking up our dirty plates. And she announced, ‘I’m going to do the dishes, and then go for a walk outside. Atara, will you help me? Liljana?’

Without another word, these three very willful women cleared the table and then disappeared into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them. Their voices hummed beyond it like the buzzing of bees from within a hive. Then Lord Harsha gazed at me with accusation lighting up his eye.

‘You have returned, Lord Elahad, to lead us to war,’ he said, ‘for now there is war even in my own house. These are bad times indeed – the worst times I’ve ever seen!’

For a while he sat sipping his brandy and rubbing at his temple. Then I smiled and said to him, ‘Tomorrow I’ll talk with Behira – it will all come out all right. There is always a way’

‘Hearing you say this,’ Lord Harsha told me, ‘I do believe it.’

‘I am no scryer,’ I said, ‘but your family shall have the lands that I spoke of, and you shall have many grandchildren as well.’

‘I want to believe that, too,’ he sighed out, reaching for the brandy bottle. ‘Well, let us make a toast to children then.’

The fiery taste of brandy lingered on my lips that night long after we all had left the table and had gone off to our beds. For hours I lay tossing and turning and dreaming of children: Behira’s brood of boys and girls playing happily in Lord Harsha’s wheatfields, and Daj and Estrella and the son or daughter whom Atara would someday bear for me. All the children in the world. Although it seemed a vain and vainglorious thing to imagine that their future and very lives depended upon my deeds, the painful throbbing of my heart told me that this was so. Tomorrow, I thought, and in the days that followed, I must do that which must be done in order to become king and finally defeat Morjin. Even if it seemed impossible, I must believe that there was always a way.

3

Lord Harsha and Joshu rode out early the next morning. Along with my companions, I whiled away the hours resting and reading and eating the good, hearty foods that Behira prepared for us. As promised, I took her aside and tried to reason with her. I reminded her that Valari ways were different from those of the Sarni, and that the Valari women have never marched into battle. A sword, I told her, would always be a man’s weapon, while a woman made better use of her soul. And I had need of her father’s sword and all his concentration on the task at hand. I asked her to give her word that she would not anger her father by openly decrying marriage or refusing to wed. If she helped me in this way, I said, I would help her in whatever way I could. We clasped hands to seal our agreement. And then she went off to ask Atara to teach her how to work her great horn bow and fire off her steel-tipped arrows.

We waited all that day, and a little longer. The following morning, just before noon, Lord Harsha returned at the head of fifteen knights whose great horses pounded the little dirt lane into powder. All had accoutered themselves for war: they bore long, double-bladed kalamas and triangular shields and wore suits of splendid diamond armor. I recognized most of them from the charges emblazoned on their surcoats. Sar Shivalad bore a red eagle as his emblem, while Sar Viku Aradam’s surcoat showed three white roses on a blue field. I stood with my friends outside Lord Harsha’s house watching them canter up to us in clouds of dust. As they calmed their mounts and the dust cleared, a sharp-faced man called Sar Zandru pointed at me and called out: ‘It is the Elahad! He lives – as Lord Harsha has said.’

He and the other knights dismounted, then bowed their heads to me. They came up to clasp my hand and present themselves, where presentations were needed. I knew some of these knights quite well: Sar Shivalad, with his fierce eyes and great cleft nose, and Kanshar, Siraj the Younger, Ianaru of Mir and Jurald Evar. Others had familiar faces: Sar Yardru, Sar Barshar and Vijay Iskaldar. Sar Jessu and I had practiced at swords when we were children running around the battlements of my father’s castle; I had last seen him at the Culhadosh Commons leading his warriors into the gap in our lines that might have destroyed the whole army – and Mesh along with it. For his great valor and even greater deed, he should have been rewarded with a ring showing four brilliant diamonds instead of the three of a master knight. But only a Valari king has the power to make a knight into a lord.

‘Valashu Elahad,’ he said, stepping up to me and squeezing my hand. He was a stocky man whose lively eyes looked out from beneath the bushiest black eyebrows I had ever seen. ‘Forgive me for pledging to Lord Avijan, for I would rather have given my oath to you – as we all would.’

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ I said, returning his clasp. I brought his hand up before my eyes. ‘I only wish I could have given you the ring you deserve.’

When I praised him for saving Mesh from defeat in the Great Battle, he told me, ‘But I only fought as everyone did. It was you who had the foresight and courage to let the gap remain open until our enemy was trapped inside. You have a genius for war, Lord Valashu. I have told this to all who would listen.’

‘And you have the heart of a lion,’ I told him, looking at the red lion emblazoned on his white surcoat and shield. ‘I shall call you “Jessu the Lion-Heart,” since I cannot yet call you “Lord Jessu.”’

He smiled as he bowed his head to me. The other knights approved of this honor, for they drew out their kalamas and clanged their steel pommels against their shields. And they called out, ‘Jessu the Lion-Heart! Jessu the Lion-Heart!’

I looked around for Joshu Kadar, but could not see him. When I asked Lord Harsha about this, he told me, ‘The lad has gone off to retrieve his armor and his warhorse, and should meet up here soon.’

He told me that he had preserved my armor, and Maram’s too, and he led the way inside his house up to his room. There, from within a great, locked chest, he drew out three suits of armor reinforced with steel along the shoulders and studded with bright diamonds. After we, too, had accoutered ourselves, Lord Harsha handed me my old surcoat, folded neatly and emblazoned with a great silver swan and seven silver stars. He said to me, ‘You’ll want to wait, I suppose, to wear this?’

‘No,’ I said taking it from him. I pulled it over my head so that the surcoat’s black silk fell down to my knees, with the swan centered over my heart. ‘I am tired of skulking about in secret, as you said. I will go forth beneath my family’s arms.’

Lord Harsha smiled at this. At the very bottom of the chest, he found a great banner also showing my emblem. He said to me, ‘There is no force that can molest us between here and Lord Avijan’s castle, and so why not ride as the Elahad you are? In any case, the news that you have returned will spread through all Mesh soon enough.’

When we went back outside, we found that Joshu Kadar had arrived decked out in heavy armor and bearing on his shield the great white wolf of the Kadars. It came time to say goodbye to Behira, for she would be staying home in order to milk the cows and hoe the fields – and, I guessed, to take up one of Lord Harsha’s swords and practice the ancient forms out in the yard, since there would be no one looking over her shoulder in disapproval of such an unwomanly act.

‘Farewell,’ Behira said to Maram, standing by his horse with him and clasping his hand. She gave him a blueberry tart that she had baked that morning. ‘This will sustain you on at least the first leg of your new adventure.’

‘I pray that it will be my last adventure,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘Just as I pray that someday you will be my wife.’

Behira smiled nicely at this as if she wanted to believe him. She had little gifts as well for Joshu Kadar and her father, and for the children. Master Juwain and Liljana had brought our horses and remounts out from the barn into the yard. Atara sat on top of Fire, while Daj climbed up onto a bay named Brownie and Estrella rode a white gelding we called Snow. They formed up behind Lord Harsha and the fifteen knights – now seventeen counting Joshu Kadar and Maram. Lord Harsha insisted that I take my place at the head of the knights, and so I did. Then, in two columns, we set out down the road.

We had fine weather for travel, with a warm, westerly wind and blue skies full of puffy white clouds. Bees buzzed in the wildflowers growing along the barley and wheat fields, and crows cawed in the cherry orchards. After turning past a farm belonging to a widow named Jereva and her two crippled sons, we made our way east toward Mount Eluru and the white-capped peaks of the Culhadosh range that shone in the distance. The ground rose steadily into a hillier country, and after six or seven miles, the farms began giving way to more orchards, pastures full of sheep and cattle, and patches of forest. The road, like every other in Mesh, had been made of the best paving stones and kept in good repair. Our horses’ hooves drummed against it in a clacking, rhythmic pace, and we made good distance without too much work. Twenty-four miles it was from Lord Harsha’s farm to Lord Avijan’s castle, straight through the heartland of what had once been my father’s realm. And at nearly every house or field that we passed, men, women and children paused in their labors to watch us pound down the road.

At the edge of a pear orchard, a hoary warrior raised his hand to point at my father’s banner streaming in the breeze as he called out to his grandson: ‘Look – the swan and stars of the Elahad!’

He was too old and infirm to do more than wish us well, but we came across other warriors who wanted to take part in our expedition. Those who owned warhorses – and whom Lord Harsha or the other knights could vouch for – I asked to join us. By the time the sun began dropping toward the mountains behind us, we numbered thirty-three strong.

About eight miles from Lord Avijan’s castle, we turned onto a much narrower road leading north. This took us through a band of pasture with the Lake of the Ten Thousand Swans to our left and the steep slopes of Mount Eluru rising almost straight up to the right. In one place, only a strip of grass ten yards wide separated the sacred mountain’s granite walls from the icy blue waters of the lake. Lord Avijan’s ancestors had built the Avijan castle farther up through the pass in a cleft between two spurs of Mount Eluru’s northern buttress. In all the world, I could think of few castles harder to reach or possessing such great natural defenses.

We approached the castle up a very steep and rocky slope that would have daunted any attacking army. A shield wall, fronted with a moat and protected by many high towers, surrounded the castle’s yards and shops, with the great keep rising up like a stone block beneath the much greater mass of Mount Eluru behind it.

Lord Avijan, followed by a retinue of twenty knights, met us on the drawbridge that was lowered over black waters. He had decked himself out in full armor, and sat upon a huge gray stallion. His blue surcoat showed a golden boar. He was a tall man with a long, serious face that reminded me of a wolfhound. At twenty-six years of age, he was young to be a lord, but my father had found few men in Mesh so skilled at leading a great many knights in wild but well-organized charges of steel-clad horses.

‘Lord Elahad!’ he called out to me in a strong, stately voice. ‘Welcome home to Mesh – and to my home. My castle is yours for as long as you need it. And my warriors and knights are yours to command, for as you must have been told, they have taken oaths to me, and it is my command that they should support you in becoming king.’

This, I thought, was Lord Avijan’s way of apologizing for a thing that he had no need to apologize for. A proud and intelligent man with little vanity, he came from a long and honored line of warriors. His grandfather had married my great-grandfather’s youngest sister, and so we counted ourselves as kin. This distant tie of blood, however, formed no basis for his claim on Mesh’s throne. That came from his skill at arms, his coolness of head on the battlefield and his good judgment off it – and the way he inspired courage and loyalty in the men whom he led.

‘Thank you, Lord Avijan,’ I told him. I nudged Altaru closer to him so that I could clasp his hand. ‘But it is my wish that you release your warriors from their oaths. I would have them follow me, or not, according to their hearts. And then, if it is my fate to become king, they may make their oaths to me.’

Lord Avijan bowed his head at this, and then so did the knights lined up in the tunnel of the tower behind him. They drew out their kalamas to salute me, then struck them against their shields in a great noise of steel against steel. And one of them – a knight I recognized as Tavish the Bold – cried out: ‘You will become king, and we will follow you to the end of all battles, oaths or no oaths!’

Lord Avijan then invited all of us to a feast. After we had ridden into the castle and given our horses to the care of the stableboys, we settled into whatever rooms or quarters that Lord Avijan had appointed for us. Half an hour later, we gathered in Lord Avijan’s great hall, on the first floor of the keep. Many long tables laden with roasted joints of meat and hot breads filled this large space; many stands of candles had been set out to light it, and hundreds of little, flickering flames cast their fire into the air. The great wood beams high above us were blackened with generations of soot. A hundred knights and warriors joined us there, for word of my arrival had gone ahead of me. Many of these tall, powerful men I had known since my childhood. I paid my respects to a master knight named Sar Yulmar, and to Sar Vikan, whom I had led into battle at the Culhadosh Commons. Also to Lord Sharad, a very tall and lean man with hair as gray as steel, who had taken command of Asaru’s battalion after my brother had been killed. He had gained great renown at the Battle of Red Mountain against Waas, and fourteen years before that, at the Diamond River, where the Ishkans had practically murdered my grandfather. Despite his years, he had a gallant manner and didn’t mind taking risks in the heat of battle.

We all filled our bellies with good food that night, and then it came time to fill our souls with good conversation. We might have hoped for many rounds of toasts, entertaining stories told and minstrels singing out the great, ancient tales. But as Lord Avijan’s grooms went around filling and refilling the warriors’ cups with thick, black beer, our talk turned toward serious matters. Soon it became clear that our gathering would be less a celebration than a council of war.

After Lord Avijan’s young children had been sent off to bed, he and I came down off the dais at the front of the room where we had taken the table of honor. I insisted that all present should be honored equally that night, and so near the center of the hall I found a table littered with empty cups and spilled beer, and I leaned back against it. Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and others gathered around informally, sitting on tables or the long benches nearby – or standing all crowded-in close. Atara sat on one side of me as if she were my queen, while Maram pressed his huge body up against my other side. Master Juwain and my other companions took their places at the other end of the table. More than a few of the warriors looking on must have thought it strange that we included Daj and Estrella in our discussion, but that was because they did not know these two remarkable children.

‘Let me say, first and last,’ I told the warriors gathered around me, ‘that you do me a great honor in coming forth for me after all that has happened – and in such perilous times. I will never forget this, and no matter what befalls, I will stand by you to my last breath.’

‘You will stand as king – that is what will befall!’ Sar Vikan barked out. He, himself, stood a good few inches shorter than most Valari, but what he lacked in height he made up in the power of his thickly muscled body. His square-cut face seemed animated with a rage of restlessness streaming through him. ‘When Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar hear that you have returned, they will surely step aside.’

‘They will not step aside!’ Lord Sharad said. He leaned against the table opposite me, and pulled at one of the battle ribbons tied to his long, gray hair. ‘Let us, at least, be clear about that.’

‘Then we will make them step aside!’ Sar Vikan snapped as he grasped the hilt of his sword. ‘Just as we will make known the truth about Valashu Elahad – at last. Who, hearing this, will try to hold his warriors to oaths made under false knowledge and great duress?’

‘Well, lad, it is one thing to hear the truth,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘and another to take it to heart. Here’s the truth that I know: Lord Tanu has hardened his heart to the plight of our kingdom, and Lord Tomavar has lost his altogether – and his head!’

Although he had not spoken with humorous intent, his words caused the fierce warriors standing around us to laugh. But any levity soon gave way to more serious passions as Lord Avijan said, ‘If we allow it, Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar will tear the realm apart – that has been obvious from the first. But we must not allow it!’

‘But our choices,’ protested Sar Jessu, who was sitting next to him, ‘are growing fewer. And things between Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu are only growing worse.’

‘Truly, they are,’ Lord Avijan said. ‘And all over mere matters of marriage.’

These ‘mere’ matters, it seemed, had fairly exploded with pure vitriol. The first, and ostensibly the most trivial, concerned a brooch. Lord Tanu’s cousin, Manamar Tanu, was the father of Vareva, whom Lord Tanu had arranged to marry to Lord Tomavar in order to strengthen the bonds between these two prominent families. Now that more than a year had passed since Vareva’s abduction, according to our law, Manamar had declared Vareva dead. He had asked Lord Tomavar for the return of a beautiful diamond brooch that his wife, Dalia, had given to Vareva as a wedding gift. Manamar held that the marriage agreement called for the return of this brooch should Vareva either die or produce no issue. The brooch, he said, had passed down in Dalia’s family for generations, and Dalia now wished to give it to her second daughter, Ursa. But Lord Tomavar claimed that the law was vague concerning such declarations of decease, and said that in any case his beloved Vareva could not be dead. The brooch, he said, was dear to him, and he would not surrender it unless Manamar Tanu took it from him by the victor’s right in battle.

‘Lord Tomavar challenged Sar Manamar to a duel!’ Lord Avijan said. ‘In effect, he did. For the time being, Lord Tanu has forbidden Sar Manamar to go up against Lord Tomavar. But if he wishes for a cause of war, he has only to let his cousin impale himself on Lord Tomavar’s sword.’

‘And that, I fear,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘would be the result of such a duel. I was there at the tournament in Nar twenty years ago when Lord Tomavar won a third at the sword.’

‘Twenty years ago!’ Joshu Kadar called out from behind me.

‘Don’t let Lord Tomavar’s age fool you, lad. We old wolves might get longer in the tooth with the years, but some of us get longer in the reach of our swords, too. I’ve seen Lord Tomavar’s kalama at work, and there are few knights in all of Mesh who could stand up to him.’

Here he looked at me, and so did Lord Avijan and everyone else. In Nar, only two years before, I had won a first at the sword and had been declared the tournament’s champion.

‘A brooch,’ I said, ‘a simple brooch.’

It seemed the most foolish thing in the world that two families could tear themselves apart over a piece of jewelry – and take a whole kingdom along with it.

‘Well,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘it is a diamond brooch, said to be made of the finest Ice Mountain bluestars – haven’t we Valari always fought each other over diamonds?’

‘That we have,’ Lord Avijan said sadly. ‘But Meshians have never fought Meshians.’

‘And now Zenshar Tanu is dead – just two weeks ago on Moonday,’ Sar Jessu put in. ‘And so who can see a chance for peace?’

This was the second matrimonial matter that Lord Avijan had spoken of. Some years before, Sar Zenshar Tanu, Lord Tanu’s youngest nephew, had married Lord Tomavar’s niece, a headstrong young woman named Raya. During the Great Battle, Sar Zenshar had taken an arrow through his leg. Although the arrow had been successfully drawn and Raya had cared for him with great devotion, the wound had festered and had poisoned his blood. Sar Zenshar, to the horror of all, had taken a whole year rotting, withering and dying. After the funeral, as Zenshar had neither father nor brothers, Lord Tanu had taken charge of Raya and her children. But Raya had declared that she would not live under the command of a man who had become her uncle’s enemy. And so in the middle of the night, she put her children onto the backs of swift horses and fled through the Lake Country and the Sawash River Valley to Pushku, where Lord Tomavar had his estates. And so she had broken the final chain that linked the two families together.

‘The whole Tanu clan,’ Sar Jessu said, ‘is outraged over what they are calling the abduction of Zenshar’s children. They’ve put out the word to their smithies, and are refusing to sell swords to anyone who would follow Lord Tomavar.’

The best swords in the world, of course, have always been forged in Godhra, and every Meshian warrior aspires to wield one and invest it with his very soul.

‘And worse,’ Sar Jessu went on, ‘the Tanus have pressured the armorers not to sell to the Tomavar clan. The Tomavars have no diamond mines of their own, or so the Tomavars whine, and so how can they make their own armor?’

‘Diamonds, always diamonds,’ Lord Harsha muttered. ‘It’s been scarcely two years since we nearly went to war with the Ishkans over Mount Korukel’s diamond mines.’

‘But Valashu Elahad,’ Joshu Kadar said to him, ‘returned with the Lightstone and cooled the Ishkans’ blood!’

At this, Sar Shivalad and Sar Viku Aradam and other knights gazed at me as if they were looking for something within me. I felt the whole room practically roiling with strong passions: wonder, doubt, elation and dread.

Lord Avijan bowed his head to me, then said, ‘The Elahad did return, it’s true, but now that the Lord of Lies has regained the Lightstone, the Ishkans’ blood is rising again. Already they have taken a part of Anjo, and have defeated Taron in battle.’

And this, as he was too kind to say, had been the inevitable result of my failure in Tria to unite the Valari against Morjin.

But I must never, I told myself, fail again.

‘Pfahh – the Ishkans!’ Sar Vikan called out to Lord Avijan. ‘You think about them too much.’

‘King Hadaru,’ Lord Avijan reminded him, ‘remains a merciless man – and a cunning one.’

‘Yes, but he has been wounded, and some say the wound rots him to his death.’

‘Some do say that,’ Lord Avijan admitted. ‘But I would not hold my breath waiting for the Ishkan bear to die.’

The story he now told angered everyone, and saddened them, too, for it was only a continuation of the ancient tragedy of our people. After the conclave in Tria where I had slain Ravik Kirriland before thousands, the Valari kings had lost faith in me – and in themselves. Seeing no hope for peace, they had fallen back upon war. Old grievances had festered, and new ambitions fired their blood. In the course of only a few months, Athar had attacked Lagash, while King Waray of Taron had begun plotting against Ishka and King Hadaru. King Waray had tried to help the duchies and baronies of Anjo unite against Ishka – with the secret agenda of trying to make Anjo a client state and so strengthening Taron. But King Hadaru had sniffed out King Waray’s plans, and had marched the strongest army in the Nine Kingdoms into Taron. He defeated King Waray at the Battle of the Broken Tree, where a lance had pierced him. As punishment he had not only annexed part of Anjo but was now demanding that King Waray surrender up territory as well – either that or a huge weight of diamonds in blood payment for the warriors that King Hadaru had lost.

‘But has King Hadaru,’ I said to Lord Avijan, ‘made any move toward Mesh?’

‘Not yet,’ Lord Avijan said. ‘Surely he waits for us to weaken ourselves first.’

‘It is a pity,’ Sar Vikan said, ‘that we didn’t make war upon the Ishkans on the Raaswash. Then we might have weakened them.’

I felt many pairs of eyes searching for something in my eyes, weighing and testing. And I said to Sar Vikan, ‘No, that is not the war we must fight.’

‘But what of Waas, then?’ Lord Avijan asked me. ‘There bodes a war that we might not be able to avoid.’

I turned toward the hall’s eastern window, now dark and full of stars. In that direction only twenty-five miles away across the Culhadosh River lay Waas, where I had fought in my first battle at the Red Mountain. King Sandarkan, as Lord Avijan now told us, burned to avenge the defeat that my father had dealt him. He said that there were signs that King Sandarkan might be planning to lead the Waashians in an attack against Kaash.

‘If they do,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘we must aid them. It is a matter of honor.’

How could I disagree with him? King Talanu Solaru of Kaash was my uncle, and Kaash was Mesh’s ancient ally, and so how could ties of blood and honor be ignored?

‘We cannot march to Kaash’s aid,’ Lord Avijan said, ‘if we are busy fighting ourselves. Surely King Sandarkan is counting on this. Surely he will defeat the Kaashans, for they are too few, and then he will annex the Arjan Land and extract a promise from King Talanu that Kaash won’t come to our aid if Waas then attacks us.’

Joshu Kadar slapped his hand against his sword’s scabbard and said, ‘But we defeated Waas handily once, and can again!’

Lord Harsha sighed at this and said, ‘Little good that will do us, lad, for we’ll only weaken ourselves further, and then King Hadaru will surely lead the Ishkans here.’

‘Or else,’ Lord Avijan said, ‘Waas won’t attack alone but will ally with the Ishkans to put an end to Mesh once and for all.’

‘At least,’ Lord Sharad added, nodding his head at me, ‘that is our best assessment of matters as they now stand.’

For a few moments no one spoke, and the hall fell quiet. Everyone knew that, from more than one direction, Mesh faced the threat of defeat. And everyone looked to me to find a way to escape such a fate.

‘When you left Mesh last year,’ Lord Avijan said to me, ‘you could not have known how things would fall out. But you should not have left.’

I stood away from the table behind me to ease the stiffness in my legs. Then I looked out at the knights and warriors standing around me, and said, ‘My apologies, but I had to. There are things you don’t know about. But now you must be told.’

With everyone pressing in closer, I drew in a deep breath and wondered just how much I should divulge to them? I thought I might do best to conjure up some plan by which we Meshians might prevail against the more familiar enemies: the Ishkans and the Waashians, the Sarni tribes in their hordes of horse warriors – even ourselves. And so save ourselves. But I had vowed never to lie again, and more, to tell the truth so far as it could be told. Were my fellow warriors strong enough, I wondered, to hold the most terrible of truths within their hearts? In the end, either one trusted in men, or did not.

‘For thousands of years,’ I said to them, ‘Mesh has had enemies. And where necessary we defeated them – all except one. And his name is Morjin.’

‘But we defeated him at the Sarburn!’ Sar Vikan called out.

‘Three thousand years ago we did,’ Lord Avijan said. ‘With the help of all the Valari kingdoms.’

‘And at the Culhadosh Commons!’ Sar Jessu cried out to me. ‘Upon your lead, we crushed an army that outnumbered us four to one!’

His words caused most of the warriors present to cry out and strike their swords’ pommels against the tables in great drumming of steel against wood. Then I held up my hand and said to them, ‘Those were great victories, it is true, won by the most valorous of warriors. But they were not defeats, as the Red Dragon must be defeated. He has other armies, and greater than the ones we faced. What good does it do to strike off a serpent’s head if two more grow back in its place?’

I told them then of our journey to Hesperu and of our triumphant quest to find the Maitreya. A great light, I said, we had found in the far west, but along the way we had endured great darkness, too. Morjin had wrought horrors everywhere – and now was planning to work the greatest of evils: to loose the Dark One upon Ea. I feared that this doom would prove too great a terror for many of the warriors staring at me to contemplate. Who really wanted to believe, or could believe, that the whole world – and the very universe itself – might be destroyed down to the last grain of sand?

‘As always,’ I said to them, ‘Morjin remains the true enemy’

My words gave the warriors pause. All through Lord Avijan’s great hall, I saw brave men looking at each other in a dreadful silence.

‘For now,’ I continued, ‘the man called Bemossed, who must be the Maitreya, keeps Morjin from using the Lightstone to free the Dark One. But he needs our help, as we need his.’

At this, a white-haired warrior named Lord Noldashan turned to me and said, ‘You appear to know things that it seems would be hard for any man to know. May it be asked how you have come by such knowledge?’

‘Only through great suffering!’ Maram called out from beside me. ‘And through great fortune, if that is the right word.’

Because it pained me to think of the torture that I had led Maram to endure in the Red Desert, and in other places, I laid my hand on his knee and squeezed it. And then I said to Lord Noldashan, and the others: ‘It was Kane who told me about the Dark One named Angra Mainyu. And I do not doubt his word, for much of what he related is hinted at in the last three books of the Saganom Elu.’

‘An old book,’ Lord Sharad said with a smile. ‘Almost as old as Lord Noldashan – and myself.’

But Lord Noldashan, it seemed, could not be moved from his intense seriousness. He nodded at Master Juwain, and called out in his raspy voice: ‘The Brotherhood teaches that much of what is written in the Valkariad and the Trian Prophecies can be taken in different ways. And even more so with the Eschaton. How, then, should we take this doom that Lord Valashu’s companion has told of? This Kane is a mysterious man – and an outlander, as we should not forget.’

‘He is the greatest warrior I have ever known!’ Lord Sharad called back. ‘I was there when he slew the Ikurians beneath the Mare’s Hill, and I have never seen a sword worked so!’

‘Lord Sharad tells true,’ Sar Vikan said. ‘I fought near Sar Kane, and when his blood is up, he seems less a man than an angel of battle.’

Upon these words, I struggled to keep my face still and my gaze fixed straight ahead. I hoped my companions, too, would keep the secret of Kane’s otherworldly origins.

‘Man or angel,’ Lord Noldashan said, ‘Sar Kane might well have come by his knowledge through great quests, with a true heart, and yet have learned things that are not true.’

‘They are true!’ I suddenly called out. The force of my voice seemed to strike Lord Noldashan and others as with the blow of a war hammer. I fought to control myself. In some dark room of Lord Avijan’s castle, I sensed, perhaps even in the great hall itself, the Ahrim waited for me – and perhaps for everyone. ‘Angra Mainyu still dwells on Damoom, and he turns his dark gaze on Ea. But even if he were only legend, there is still Morjin. He exists, as we all know. And so do his armies.’

The men standing around me considered this. Then Lord Sharad looked at me and said, ‘I think I have to believe what Kane has told, though I am loath to. But why hasn’t Kane returned with you from your last quest to tell us himself?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘he has gone into Galda.’

‘Galda! But why?’

‘Because,’ I told him, ‘we heard that Morjin might have gone there.’

And this, I said, was a consequence of our battle with Morjin and his creatures in Hesperu. I explained more about the worst of the enemies that we had faced on our quest: the three droghuls that Morjin had sent to destroy my companions and me. As with any ghul made from a man, I said, Morjin seized the droghuls’ minds and caused them to work his will, as if they were puppets being pulled by strings. But the droghuls were particularly deadly, for Morjin had made these dreadful beings from his own flesh, in his likeness, and had imbued them with a part of his power. After we – actually young Daj – had slain the third of the droghuls, a rumor had shot across the world that Morjin himself had been slain. And so Morjin had been compelled to come out of the stone city of Argattha to show himself and prove that he still lived. He had gone through the Dragon Kingdoms one by one, finally leading an army from Karabuk into Galda, where brave knights had revolted against Morjin upon the false news of his death.

‘Kane,’ I told Lord Sharad, ‘went down into Galda so that he might take part in the rebellion.’

‘You mean,’ Lord Harsha said with a distasteful look, ‘he went to put an arrow into Morjin’s back, if he can.’

I smiled sadly at this. ‘Kane would be more likely to use a knife. But, yes, he went to Galda to slay Morjin – if he can. And if Morjin is really there.’

‘And if he is not?’ Lord Avijan asked me.

‘Wherever Morjin is,’ I said, ‘his plans will go ahead unless we do kill him. What happened in Hesperu has delayed him, but no more. Already, it is said, he has ordered a great fleet up from Sunguru and Hesperu to attack Eanna. If it takes him a hundred years, he will conquer Ea’s free lands one by one until he has the Nine Kingdoms surrounded. But it will not take him a hundred years.’

As I paused to take a sip of beer, a half dozen speculations and arguments broke out among the warriors standing around me. The hall filled with the stridor of angry and confused voices. And then Lord Avijan turned to Maram and asked, ‘You are from Delu – will the Delians fight if the Red Dragon attacks them?’

‘Will we fight?’ Maram called out. ‘Of course we will! Ah, that is, a few knights and diehards will fight, while my father tries to make terms. He is no fool, and he’ll no more want to stand isolated against the Red Dragon than would any other king – even, I might add, King Hadaru or King Waray, or any of the Valari kings.’

Here he glanced at me as if wishing that I would proclaim that Mesh would never go alone against the Red Dragon. But I looked down into my beer and said nothing.

‘And what of the Sarni tribes?’ Lord Avijan asked, turning toward Atara. ‘Has the Manslayer had news of her people?’

Next to me, Atara nodded her head at this, and her white blindfold moved up and down like a signal banner. ‘The Kurmak will never make terms with Morjin, so long as Sajagax is chief – and I think my grandfather still has a good few years left to him. He will call for the other tribes to ride with him in battle, if battle there must be. The Niuriu might join with him. Perhaps the Danladi, too, and the central Urtuk. I cannot say about the Adirii, for their clans are divided. But I believe that the Manslayers will decide for Sajagax, should the Red Dragon ever attack him.’

She did not add that the fierce women warriors of the Manslayer Society, who came from all the tribes, favored making Atara their Chiefess, and Atara would certainly lead them in aid of Sajagax, if she could.

Now Master Juwain let out a long sigh as he clamped his gnarly hands around his beer mug – filled with apple cider. And he said, ‘There are other ways of opposing the Red Dragon than through war.’

While the warriors listened with the great reverence they held for Masters of the Brotherhood, Master Juwain told them of much the same plan for the peaceful defeat of Morjin that he had put forth two days before in the wood where we had fought the Ahrim.

‘The Maitreya,’ he said, ‘will light a fire in men’s hearts that the Red Dragon cannot put out. In the end it will consume him.’

‘This is our hope,’ I added. ‘But the Maitreya must first live long enough to pass on this flame.’

‘The Maitreya!’ Sar Jessu cried out, looking at me. ‘Always, the Maitreya! Once, we believed that you were the great Shining One.’

At this, a hundred warriors stared straight at me. I, too, had shared in their delusion. In truth, I had engendered it.

‘We believed,’ Sar Jessu went on, ‘that the Maitreya would lead us to victory. But now we don’t want to believe in miracles – it is enough to believe in you!

Again, the warriors around me struck their swords against the wooden tables.

Then Lord Harsha’s single eye swept around the hall as he regarded the warriors sternly. And he reminded them, ‘The Shining One will come forth, as has been promised in the Trian Prophecies and the Progressions. Is he, then, the man Bemossed that Lord Elahad has told of? I would like to believe he is. But whoever he is, flame or no, we must look to our own swords for our defense, as we always have!’

So saying, he whipped free his long, shining kalama, and saluted me. Lord Avijan inclined his head to him, and said, ‘That is my thought, too. But what, indeed, is the best course for defending Mesh?’

‘There is only one course for us,’ Sar Jessu called out. ‘And it is as Lord Valashu has said: we must stop Morjin!’

‘But stop him how?’ Sar Shivalad said, turning his great, cleft nose toward Lord Harsha. ‘That is the question we must decide.’

‘That it is, lad,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘And here I’m in agreement with Master Juwain. Let us make Mesh strong again, as it was in the reign of King Shamesh. Then let us remember that we have destroyed or thrown back every army that tried to invade our land – even Morjin’s.’

‘But what of the Lightstone?’ Sar Shivalad asked him.

And Lord Noldashan broke in, crying out, ‘Let Morjin keep it! It is a cursed thing, and it nearly destroyed our land!’

His vehemence stunned me, and I looked from Lord Noldashan to his son, Sar Jonavar, beside him. He was a tall, well-made knight, perhaps a few years older than I, and he stood gripping his gauntleted hand around the hilt of his sword as he looked at me in great turmoil.

‘No, it is just the opposite,’ I said to Lord Noldashan. ‘The Lightstone holds marvels and miracles. In the hands of the Maitreya –’

‘It nearly destroyed you!’ Lord Noldashan shouted. ‘Do not dream of leading us on impossible expeditions to win it back!’

‘Do not,’ Lord Sharad said, moving closer to Lord Noldashan, ‘speak to Lord Valashu so. Remember why you’ve come here!’

‘To make Valashu Elahad King of Mesh!’ Lord Noldashan said. ‘Not to follow him on a fool’s mission!’

‘I would follow him to the end of the earth!’ Lord Sharad cried out.

‘And I!’ Lord Jessu said.

‘And I!’ Joshu Kadar said.

‘So would I,’ Sar Vikan said, drawing his sword, ‘if it meant a chance to put this through Morjin’s neck! I would think that Lord Noldashan, of all knights, would want his vengeance!’

As Lord Noldashan faced Sar Vikan and moved his hand onto his sword’s hilt, I remembered that Lord Noldashan had a second son, Televar, whom I did not see anywhere in the hall.

‘Peace, honored knight!’ I said to Lord Noldashan as I held up my hand. ‘Let us sit together and drink our beer – and cool our heads!’

‘Peace!’ Lord Noldashan cried out. ‘Have you truly returned to bring peace, Lord Elahad? Or only to bring more blood, as you did a year ago when you practically called down the Red Dragon upon us?’

‘Do not speak to Lord Valashu so!’ Lord Sharad said again. ‘Remember yourself, Lord Knight!’

‘I remember,’ Lord Noldashan said with a rising anger, ‘whole streams on the Culhadosh Commons running red with our warriors’ blood!’

‘Pfahh, blood!’ Sar Vikan spat out. ‘When has a true warrior been afraid of spilling it?’

The moment that these words left Sar Vikan’s mouth, his face tightened in horror, as if he could not believe that he had spoken them. But it was too late. Quick as a bird, Lord Noldashan drew his sword five inches from its scabbard before Lord Avijan and others closed in and managed to clamp their hands around Lord Noldashan’s arm.

‘This warrior,’ Lord Noldashan said to Sar Vikan as he struggled against those who held him, ‘would not be afraid to see your blood spilled here!’

His challenge filled my belly with a sickness as if I had eaten splinters of iron. As other warriors came up to restrain Sar Vikan from drawing his sword and setting off an inescapable duel, I felt many people looking at me. Maram and Master Juwain – and my other companions, too – were clearly distressed to witness things falling out so badly. I felt them wondering what I wondered: why had we returned to Mesh at all if we could not even keep my own countrymen from killing each other?

‘Stop!’ I called out to Lord Noldashan and Sar Vikan. ‘Let go of your swords! We are all one people here!’

My voice fell upon them with the force of a battering ram, stunning them into motionlessness. But it did not, I sensed, touch their hearts.

Lord Avijan finally let go of Lord Noldashan, and he said to me, ‘Lord Noldashan has cause for grieving and grievance, and few men more. And he raises an important question, Lord Elahad: is it your purpose to go against Morjin or to protect Mesh?’

‘But they are the same thing!’ I called out. ‘Mesh will never be safe so long as Morjin draws breath!’

I looked around the hall at the tens of warriors weighing my words. The older ones such as Lord Noldashan and Lord Harsha, had grown to manhood in an era when the Sarni and the other Valari kingdoms posed the greatest threat to Mesh. They held a more cautious sentiment, shared by such prominent warriors as Lord Tanu: that Mesh had repelled Morjin once, and could again if we had to. They believed that the Dragon, as with bears, would be likely to leave us alone if we left him alone. Although they would fight like angels of battle, to use Lord Sharad’s words, if Morjin did try to invade our land again, they had no liking to march out of Mesh to make war against him. Others, such as Lord Avijan, desired vengeance for Morjin’s desecration of Mesh and believed that he must somehow be defeated, though they, too, feared to seek him out and bring him to battle. A smaller number of men – and these were mostly younger knights such as Joshu Kadar, Sar Shivalad and their friends – burned with the fever of our generation to annihilate Morjin from the face of the earth and make the world anew.

‘Morjin,’ I finally said to Lord Avijan, and to everyone, ‘must be destroyed. How that is to be remains unclear. But until he is destroyed, we will never bring peace to the world.’

‘You’ Lord Noldashan said to me, ‘if we follow you, will bring only death.’

I could tell from the grave faces of such prominent warriors as Lord Kanshar and Sar Juladar, even Lord Harsha, that many of the men gathered in the hall feared that Lord Noldashan had spoken truly – as I feared it even more. But I must, I thought, at all costs hide my disquiet. The gazes of a hundred warriors burned into me, and I thought that I must gaze right back at them, bravely and boldly, and betray not the slightest doubt or hesitation. Every moment that I stood among them, in field, forest or a great lord’s castle, with my every word or gesture, I must surround myself as with a gleaming shield of invincibility. How, I wondered, was this possible? How had my father ever managed to last a single day as king?

Lord Noldashan stared straight at me, and continued his indictment: ‘You would bring death, I think, Lord Elahad. Even as you brought it to Tria – and so destroyed all hope of an alliance of the Valari. And without an alliance, how could you ever hope to destroy the Red Dragon?’

In Tria, I thought, we had been so close to uniting. The Valari kings had nearly had the very stars within their grasp. But in the end, I had failed them.

‘How many of our warriors fell at the Great Battle?’ Lord Noldashan went on. ‘How many of our women and children died at the Red Dragon’s command?’

From somewhere in the hall I caught a sense of the great darkness that pulled me always down. Again, I saw my mother and grandmother nailed to planks of wood. And again, I saw a great grassland covered with tens of thousands of broken and bleeding bodies.

‘How many, Lord Elahad?’ Lord Noldashan asked me. ‘How many of our people must die for your impossible dream?’

I tried to speak then, but I could not, and so I took a sip of beer to moisten my bone-dry throat. Then I looked at Sar Jonavar standing in close to his father, and I said to Lord Noldashan, ‘You had another son, didn’t you? Did he fall at the Commons?’

‘He fell before the Great Battle,’ Lord Noldashan told me. ‘If that is the right word. For in truth, Morjin’s men crucified him.’

Many standing in the hall knew the story that Lord Noldashan now told me: that when Morjin’s army had invaded and laid waste the Lake Country, Lord Noldashan’s two sons had been out on a hunting trip in the mountains to the north. After waiting as long as he could for them to come home, Lord Noldashan finally rode off to join the gathering of the warriors. But Televar and Sar Jonavar had never received my father’s call to arms. They returned to find that Morjin’s army had swept through the Lake Country, and that Morjin’s men were about to burn their farm to the ground. The two brothers then fell mad. In the ensuing battle, Morjin’s soldiers captured both of them – along with Lord Noldashan’s wife and two daughters. They crucified all of them, and left them for the vultures. Two days later, after Morjin’s army had moved on, a neighbor had found Lord Noldashan’s family nailed to crosses. Miraculously, Sar Jonavar still lived. The neighbor then summoned help to pull Sar Jonavar down from his cross and tend his wounds until Lord Noldashan could return.

As Lord Noldashan finished recounting this terrible story, his raspy voice choked up almost to a whisper. I did not know what to say to him. I did not want to look at him just then.

‘Once they called you the Maitreya,’ he said to me. ‘But can you bring back the dead? Can you keep my remaining son from joining the rest of my family?’

He doubts, I thought, feeling my heart moving inside me like a frightened rabbit, because I doubt – and that is the curse of the valarda. But how can I not doubt?

How could I, I wondered, ever defeat Morjin if I first must accomplish an impossible thing? The most dreadful thing in all the world that I could not quite bring myself to see?

I finally managed to make myself face Lord Noldashan. In the anguish filling up his moist, black eyes, I saw my own life. Then a brightness blazed within me again. In truth, it had never gone out. I remembered how, in Hesperu, in the most terrible of moments, Bemossed had clasped my hand in his and looked deep inside me as if he could behold the brightest light in all the universe.

‘You have spoken of the dead,’ I said to Lord Noldashan. ‘And we have walked with the dead, you and I.’

I looked around at the hall’s stone walls, hung with banners and shields and the heads of various animals that Lord Avijan and his family had hunted: lions, boars and elks with great racks of antlers spreading out like the limbs of a tree. Above an arch of one of the corridors giving out onto the hall, Lord Avijan had mounted the head of a white bear. It looked exactly like the beast whose will Morjin had seized and sent to murder Maram, Master Juwain and me in the pass between Mount Korukel and Mount Raaskel: the great ghul of a bear that I had killed with my old sword.

‘There are the dead, and there are the truly dead,’ I told Lord Noldashan. ‘When Morjin would have turned me into a ghul, the man I call the Maitreya gave me his hand and pulled me back into life. There, I found my mother and grandmother – my brothers, too. And my father, the King.’

I stepped over to him and his son, and I felt his whole being wincing inside even as his back stiffened and he stared at me.

‘So long as we don’t forget,’ I said to him, ‘so long as we live, truly and deeply, with passion, they cannot really die. And neither can we.’

I laid my hand on the gauntlet covering Sar Jonavar’s hand, and eased it off. A circle of reddish scar marred the back of his hand and his palm, which seemed slightly misshapen, as if the bones had been pushed apart. I grasped his hand then, gently, and I felt something warm and bright pass from me into him, and from him into me. He looked at me with tears in his eyes as he said, ‘My apologies for not fighting with you at the Commons. The greatest battle of our time, and I missed it.’

Then I removed his other gauntlet so that he wouldn’t have to hide his shame, which was really no shame at all.

‘Sometimes,’ I said to him, ‘the greatest battle is just to go on living.’

At this, he clasped his other hand around my arm and smiled at me.

I felt the blaze that burned inside me grow even brighter. I looked at the men gathered around me: Lord Harsha, Lord Avijan, Lord Sharad, Sar Jessu and Sar Shivalad and all the others. And they looked at me.

They are afraid, I thought. The greatest warriors in the world, and they are afraid.

I could feel how their dread of Morjin tormented their very bodies and souls. And then, for the first time in my life, I opened my heart to these grave men whom I had always revered. I moved over to Lord Sharad and set my hand upon his chest, where I could feel the hurt of his old wound where an Ishkan lance had once pierced him. I touched Sar Viku Aradam’s shoulder, which I sensed must have been split open, perhaps by an axe or a sword. And then on to grasp the stump below Vishtar Atanu’s elbow and rest my hand on Araj Kharashan’s mangled jaw. And so it went as I walked around the hall to honor other warriors and knights, Sar Barshan and Sar Vikan and Siraj Evar, touching my hand to heads and arms and faces and nearly every other part of a man’s body that could be torn or cut or crushed.

I drew strength from my friends, looking on: from Liljana, who had gazed into the horror of Morjin’s mind, and now could not smile; from Estrella, who could not speak; from Maram, who had been burned to a blackened, oozing crisp in the hell of the Red Desert. And from Atara, who could not look at me with her eyes, but somehow communicated all her wild joy of life despite the most terrible of mutilations.

Then my fear suddenly went away. I knew with an utter certainty of blood and breath that I had something to give these warriors who had come here to honor me. The light inside me flared so hot and brilliant that my heart hurt, and I could not hold it. I did not want to hold it within anymore, but only to pass it on, through my hand as I pressed it against the side of Sar Yardru’s wounded neck, and through my eyes as I looked into old Sar Jurald’s eyes, still haunted by the deaths of his sons at the Culhadosh Commons. And with this splendid light came the promise of brotherhood: that we would never fail each other and would fight side by side to the end of all battles. And that there was no wound or anguish so great that we could not help each other to bear it. And most of all, that we would always remind each other where we had come from and who we were meant to be.

That was the miracle of the valarda: how my love for these noble warriors could pass from me like a flame and set afire something bright and inextinguishable in them. At last, I returned to where Lord Noldashan stood, staring at me. I pressed my hand to his, and felt it come alive with an incendiary heat.

‘I am sorry,’ I told him, ‘for your family.’

For a long time he stood looking at me as if wondering if he could bring himself to say anything. His eyes seemed like bright black jewels melting in the light of some impossibly bright sun. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision, and his breath rasped out: ‘And I am sorry for yours. I should not have said what I said. You are not to blame for what Morjin did to our land. In truth, it is as Sar Jessu has told, that without you, the battle would have been lost. I know this in my heart.’

I squeezed his hand, hard, and held on tightly to keep myself from weeping. I did not succeed. Through the blur of water filling my eyes, I saw Lord Noldashan gazing at me with a terrible, sweet sadness, and so it was with Lord Harsha and Lord Avijan and many others. But within them, too, burned a great dream.

‘You are not to blame for Morjin’s deeds,’ Lord Avijan affirmed, inclining his head to me. ‘As for your own deeds, we shall honor them in the telling and retelling, down to our grandchildren’s grandchildren – and beyond, when our descendants know of Morjin only by the tale of how we Valari vanquished him, leaving to legend only his evil name.’

Sar Vikan then came forward and said to Lord Noldashan, ‘Well, sir, I am certainly to blame for what I said to you. I wish I could unsay it. But I since I cannot, I will ask your forgiveness.’

‘And that you shall have,’ Lord Noldashan said, clasping his hand. ‘As I hope I shall have yours for forgetting that we are brothers in arms.’

At this, Lord Harsha called out his approval, and so did Sar Jessu and dozens of other warriors.

Then Lord Noldashan turned back to me as he laid his arm around Sar Jonavar’s shoulders. ‘Despite my misgivings, I came here tonight because my son has great hope for you. And because I loved your father and Lord Asaru. An oath, too, I gave to Lord Avijan, but he has released me from it. What, then, should I now do?’

‘Only what you must do,’ I told him.

Lord Noldashan continued gazing into my eyes, and then said, ‘My head speaks one thing to me, and my heart another. It is the right of a warrior to stand for one who would be king – or not to stand. But once this one is king, no one may gainsay him.’

I felt something vast and deep move inside Lord Noldashan. Then he glanced at Lord Sharad, before looking back to me and smiling grimly. ‘Very well, then, Lord Elahad, I will follow you past the very end of the earth, to the stars or hell, if that is our fate.’

As he bowed deeply to me, a hundred warriors drummed the hilts of their swords against the tables. Then Lord Avijan stepped forward, and held up his hand. He called for fresh pots of beer to be brought up from his cellar. When everyone’s cup had been filled anew, he raised his cup and cried out: ‘To Lord Valashu Elahad, heir of the Elahads, Guardian of the Lightstone, and the next king of Mesh!’

I sipped my thick, black beer, and I found it sweet and bitter and good. I smiled as Alphanderry came forth and everyone hailed this strange minstrel. Tomorrow, I thought, we must meet in council again to lay our plans for my gaining my father’s throne – and for Morjin’s eventual defeat. But now we had a few moments for camaraderie and cups clinked together, and singing songs of glory and hope far into the night.

4

In that time of year when the wild asparagus growing along the hillsides and roads reached its peak and the lilacs laid their sweet perfume upon fields and gardens, the call for warriors who would support my claim to Mesh’s throne – and perhaps much more – went out into every part of the land. They came to Lord Avijan’s castle, in twos and threes, and sometimes tens and twenties, riding up in full diamond armor and bearing the bright emblems of their families. Most of them lived in the country near the Valley of the Swans and Mount Eluru, but many also arrived from the north, in the mountains near the two Raaswash rivers, and from the southern highlands below Lake Waskaw. Fewer hailed from the hills around Godhra, for there Lord Tanu held sway, as did Lord Tomavar in the Sawash River valley and its three largest cities: Pushku, Lashku and Antu. But a warrior had the right to give his oath to whom he wished, and at least ten men from Pushku had braved Lord Tomavar’s anger by rallying for me. And fifty-two men – led by the long-faced Lord Manthanu – had journeyed all the way from Mount Tarkel above the Diamond River in the far northwest.

Soon the number of warriors overflowing the grounds of Lord Avijan’s castle had swelled to more than one thousand. Lord Avijan’s stewards worried about finding food for this growing army. But as the Valley of the Swans between Silvassu and Lake Waskaw held some of Mesh’s richest farmland, to say nothing of woods full of deer, it seemed that no hour passed without a few wagons full of barley, beef and salted pork rolling up through the pass between Mount Eluru and the sparkling lake below it.

My companions and I kept busy during this period of waiting. While Master Juwain and Liljana tried to further the children’s education, contending with each other as to exactly which subjects they should teach Daj and Estrella, and how, I greeted the arriving warriors one by one. The most distinguished of them joined Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and other great knights in taking council where we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar. Although I asked Maram to attend these meetings, he insisted on attending to the matter of exploring the capaciousness of Lord Avijan’s beer cellars. As he put it, ‘These countrymen of yours drink like an army of parched bulls, and I’d at least like a little taste of beer before it’s all gone.’

Although Master Juwain had practically given up lecturing him about the evils of strong drink, Liljana kept scolding him whenever she had the chance. On the third day of our stay at Lord Avijan’s castle, she took Maram aside and said to him, ‘We all know that bad times are coming. You should spend your days helping Val, as we all try to do – either that or learning more about your firestone.’

Now that Bemossed kept Morjin from using the Lightstone, or so we prayed, those of us possessing gelstei found ourselves free to discover new depths and powers of these ancient crystals.

‘Bad times are coming,’ Maram said to Liljana, ‘and that is exactly the point. The only way to fight the bad is with the good, and right now I can think of nothing better than to fortify myself against the evils of the future with some good Meshian beer.’

He might have added that beautiful young women would have served best of all to drive back his fears, but in the overcrowded castle he never knew when Lord Harsha might come around the corner of some cold stone corridor and take him to task for mocking his professed love for Behira.

Of all of us, I thought, Atara had the hardest work with her gelstei, for the kristei’s deepest virtue was said to be not merely the seeing of the future but its creation. But how could a single woman, through the force of her will alone, contend with Morjin’s great fury to destroy all who defied him, to say nothing of his master, Angra Mainyu?

At one of our councils, after she had told Lord Manthanu of her grandfather, Sajagax’s, strategy to persuade a few Sarni tribes to oppose Morjin, Lord Manthanu asked her to give the assembled warriors a good omen. They had talked that evening of cutting apart Morjin’s best knights with their fearsome kalamas, and their spirits were running high. Atara did not wish to discourage these brave men, but neither would she speak anything but the truth. And so, in her scryer’s way, she told them: ‘Then it will be as you wish, and your swords will cleave the armor of even the best knights of Morjin’s Dragon Guard.’

She did not, however, reveal how many of them might live to fulfill this gruesome prophecy, and they could not bring themselves to ask her.

But it is not the way of fortune to progress in one direction forever: the cresting wave crashes into sand even as day passes into night. On the seventh of Soldru, after a long day of hunting, sword practice, councils and feasting on roasted venison, I retired to the rooms that Lord Avijan had appointed for me in the southern corner of the keep. They gave out into a small garden full of herbs, roses and bushes heavy with lilac blossoms. I sat on one of the stone benches there to listen to the crickets chirping and watch the stars come out. It was the only place in Lord Avijan’s castle where I could find a space of solitude and listen to the whisperings of my soul.

Some time before midnight, with the moon waxing all silvery and full, Liljana found me there walking along the lilac hedges. Although she had brought me some tea, I could tell at once that serving me a soothing drink had little to do with the purpose of her visit. As she set out the pot and cups on one of the tables near the garden’s great sundial, I could almost feel her willing her hand not to tremble. Even so the cups rattled against the hard stone with such force that it seemed they might break.

‘What is wrong?’ I asked her, taking her by her arm and urging her to sit down with me.

‘Does there have to be anything wrong,’ she said, ‘for me to bring you a little fresh chamomile tea?’

‘No, of course not,’ I told her. ‘But something is troubling you, isn’t it?’

She nodded her head as she took out her gelstei. In the light of the moon, I could barely make out the blue tones of this little whale-shaped figurine. And then she said to me, ‘I have terrible tidings.’

Something in her voice pierced me like an icy wind.

‘What tidings?’ I asked her. Without thinking, I grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Are the children all right? Is Master Juwain?’

‘They are fine,’ she told me, ‘but –’

‘Is it Kane, then? Has word come of his death?’

It did not seem possible, I thought, that this invincible warrior who had survived countless wars in every corner of the world over thousands of years had finally gone back to the stars. Nor did I wish to believe that Maram, in a drunken stupor, had stumbled down the stairs after exiting some young woman’s bedchamber and broken his neck. Most of all, I could not bring myself to think of any violence harming even a single hair of Atara’s head.

‘No, we’re all safe here tonight,’ Liljana said to me. ‘But others, in places that we had thought were safe, are not. Or so I think.’

Her round, pretty face could hide a great deal when she wished, and she could hold herself calm and careful even when delivering the most disastrous of news. Such was her training as the Materix of the Maitriche Telu. It occurred to me for the thousandth time how glad I was to have this wise and relentless woman as my companion and not my enemy.

I sat on my hard stone seat breathing deeply and waiting for her to say more. I looked around at the roses and lilacs of the starlit garden for sign of the Ahrim – and then back at Liljana to see if she might tell me that this terrible thing had gained some dreadful new power. I reminded myself that if I would rule over Mesh, I must first and always rule myself.

‘I came to tell you tidings,’ she said to me again as she rotated her little figurine between her fingers, ‘but I cannot tell you with absolute certainty that these tidings are true.’

‘You speak more mysteriously,’ I told her, ‘than does a scryer.’

She would have laughed at this, I thought, if she had been able to laugh. Instead she said to me, ‘Perhaps I should have just spoken of what I know, with my very first breath, but I wanted to prepare you first. I don’t want you to give up hope.’

My heart seemed to be having trouble pushing my blood through my veins. Finally I said to her, ‘Just tell me, then.’

‘All right,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath. ‘I believe that the Brotherhood school has been destroyed.’

I gazed straight at her, trying to make out the black centers of her eyes. I felt as bereft of speech as Estrella.

‘It would have happened around the end of Ashte,’ she told me.

I continued gazing at her, then I finally found the will to say: ‘You mean the Brotherhood school of the Seven, don’t you? But no place in the world is safer! Morjin could not have found it!’

I thought of the magic tunnels through the mountains surrounding the Valley of the Sun, and I shook my head.

‘But he has found it,’ she told me as she covered my hand with hers. ‘Somehow, he has.’

‘But the Seven, and those that came before them, have kept the school a secret for thousands of years. And Bemossed has had scarcely half a year of sanctuary there. How could Morjin suddenly have found it?’

The answer, I thought, was built into the very words of my question. Bemossed, contending with Morjin for mastery of the Lightstone over a distance of a few hundred miles, touching upon the very filth of Morjin’s soul, must somehow have drawn down Morjin upon him.

‘Is he dead, then?’ I asked Liljana. ‘Have you come to tell me that Bemossed is dead?’

‘I came to tell you not to give up hope,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘And so if I knew the Shining One was dead, how could there be hope?’

I considered this for a moment as I looked at her. ‘But you cannot tell me that he is not dead.’

She sighed as she held up her crystal to the lanterns’ light. ‘I cannot tell you very much for certain at all.’

She went on to say more about her personal quest to explore the mysteries of her blue gelstei and gain mastery over it. In the Age of the Mother, she told me, in the great years, the whole continent of Ea had been knitted together by women in every land speaking mind to mind through the power of the blue gelstei. The Order of Brothers and Sisters of the Earth had trained certain sensitive people to attune to the lapis-like crystals, cast into the form of amulets, pendants, pins and figurines. Some had gained the virtue of detecting falseness or veracity in others’ words, and these were called truthsayers. Others found themselves able to speak in strange languages or remember events that had occurred long before their birth or give others great and beautiful dreams. Only the rarest and most adept in the ways of pure consciousness, however, learned to hear the whisperings and thoughts of another’s mind. No one knew why those most talented at mindspeaking had always been women. With the breaking of the Order into the Brotherhood and that secret group of women that became the Maitriche Telu, men had almost completely lost knowledge of the blue gelstei while any woman possessing even a hint of the ability to listen to another’s thoughts was reviled as a witch.

‘I know that the time is coming,’ Liljana said to me, ‘when the whole world will be one as it was in the Age of the Mother. We will make it so: those who still keep the blue gelstei or have the will to try to attune themselves to one, whether they hold the sacred blestei in hand, or not. I have not spoken to you of this, but I have been trying to seek out these women. If we could pass important communications from city to city and land to land at the speed of thought, we would gain a great advantage over Morjin.’

I nodded my head at this, then said, ‘Assuming that he himself does not have this power.’

‘He is a man,’ she huffed out with a wave of her hand as if that said everything.

‘He is a man,’ I said, ‘who somehow managed to control his three droghuls’ every thought and motion from a thousand miles away.’

‘Yes, droghuls,’ she said. ‘Creatures made from his own mind and flesh.’

‘Kane,’ I said to her, ‘believes that Morjin keeps a blue gelstei.’

‘Even if he does, and is able to project his filthy illusions through it, that does not mean that he can speak mind to mind with other men.’

Some deep tension in her throat made me look at her more closely as I said to her, ‘Only men dwelled at the Brotherhood’s school. How, then, did you come by your knowledge of its destruction?’

‘It was Master Storr,’ she told me. ‘I believe he kept a blestei.’

I remembered very well the Brotherhood’s Master Galastei: a stout, old man with fair, liver-spotted skin and wispy white hair. A suspicious man, who spent his life in ferreting out secrets, whether of men and women or ancient crystals forged ages ago.

‘I was casting my thoughts in that direction,’ she continued. ‘I know I touched minds with him – it was only an hour ago! When the full moon rises and the world dreams, that is the best time to try to speak with others far away. Somewhere to the west, on the Wendrush, I think, the moon rose over Abrasax and Master Storr – perhaps the other Masters as well. And, I pray, over Bemossed. They were fleeing.’

She went on to explain that she had only had a moment to make out all that Master Storr wanted to tell her.

‘Somehow Morjin must have learned the secret of the tunnels,’ she said, ‘for he sent a company of Red Knights through one of them – right down through the valley. There was a battle, I think. A slaughter The younger brothers tried to stand before the Red Knights while the Seven escaped.’

I pressed my finger to the warm teapot as I said, ‘But how could they escape? Only one tunnel gives out into the valley – surely the Red Knights would have guarded the entrance.’

‘I can’t say – you know how strange those tunnels were. Perhaps there was another entrance. Or another tunnel.’

I thought about this for a few moments. ‘But did the Red Knights pursue the Seven? And did Bemossed escape with them?’

‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see that in Master Storr’s mind.’

‘But wouldn’t he have wanted to tell you that particular tiding, above all others?’

‘Of course he would have – I think.’ Liljana rubbed at her temple as she looked down at her little blue stone. ‘Speaking with another this way is not like sitting down to table to have a chat with a friend. At least, I don’t think it is. There has been no one to teach me this art, and I’m really like a child playing with matches. And Master Storr is even more artless than I. He is only a man – and a very confused one at that. At least he seemed so when we managed to attune our two gelstei. We had only a moment, you know. A single moment and a flood of images, as in a dream, fire and blood and bewilderment, you see, trying to make sense of it all. To really hear what was in Master Storr’s mind. It was like trying to drink from a raging river. In fact …’

Her voice died off into the sound of the crickets chirping somewhere in the garden. I waited for her to say more, but she only gazed up at the white disk of the moon.

‘In fact,’ she said in a trancelike rush of words, ‘if I am to be completely truthful with you, as I always try to be, I have to consider the possibility that what I touched upon in Master Storr’s mind was a dream.’

‘A nightmare, you mean,’ I said, taking a deep breath of air. I looked at Liljana. ‘Then it is possible that nothing of what you told me actually happened.’

‘No, it happened – of course it did. I know it in my heart.’

Here she pressed her hand to her chest and then reached out to pour the tea into our cups.

‘It might indeed have been a nightmare,’ she told me. ‘But if so, then Master Storr was dreaming of these terrible things that Morjin did to the Brothers and their school.’

‘But how do you know that Master Storr wasn’t just dreaming of that which he most feared would befall?’

‘I don’t know how I know – I just do. There is a difference. It is like the taste of salt versus the description of saltiness. But since I can’t expect you to appreciate this, as a mindspeaker does, I thought that I should tell you all.’

I sat sipping my tea and hoping that the chamomile might drive away the burning ache in my throat. I gazed at the clusters of the lilacs on the bushes along the garden’s wall. It was strange, I thought, that even in the intense light of the moon, their soft purple color had vanished into the darker tones of the night.

‘Have you tried again?’ I said to Liljana as I looked up at the sky. ‘We have hours of moonlight left, don’t we?’

‘I have tried and tried,’ she told me. ‘And then tried thrice more. But Master Storr, I have to tell you, is not much of a mindspeaker – whether or not he dreams or wakes. And neither am I.’

‘Once,’ I told her, ‘you looked into a dragon’s mind. And into Morjin’s.’

‘Yes, into his. But he burned me, Morjin did,’ she said with a terrible sadness.

‘I know he did,’ I told her. ‘But before he did, there was a moment, wasn’t there? When you saw the great Red Dragon, and he saw you. And was afraid of you, as it was with the dragon called Angraboda.’

‘He was afraid,’ she admitted. ‘But I was terrified.’

‘Terrified, perhaps – as much as you ever allow yourself to be. But that has never kept you from looking into dark places, has it? Or going into them.’

Now she took a turn sipping her tea before she finally said to me, ‘I’m not sure I want to know what you mean.’

I reached out and took hold of her hand. I glanced at her gelstei, then asked her, ‘Now that Bemossed has driven back Morjin’s mind from your crystal and given its power back to you, have you ever thought of using it to try to look into Morjin’s mind again?’

She suddenly snapped her hand from my grasp, and covered up her gelstei. She said, ‘But I have promised never to look into a man’s mind without his permission!’

‘Yes, you have,’ I told her. ‘But Morjin is more a beast than a man, or so you have said. You wouldn’t keep that promise for his sake.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she agreed, squeezing her blue stone. ‘But what you suggest is so dangerous.’

Truly, I thought, it was: like a double-edged sword, Liljana’s talent could cut two ways. If she touched minds with Morjin, he could tear from her some essential knowledge or secret as she could from him. And Morjin could again ravage her mind, or do to her even worse things.

Even so, I stared at her through the wan light and said, ‘I have to know, Liljana.’

‘No, no, you don’t,’ she murmured, shaking her head.

‘I have to know if Bemossed still lives,’ I said. ‘And Morjin would know that, if anyone does.’

‘Yes, Morjin,’ she said.

I felt her throat burning as with a desire for revenge, even as her soft eyes filled with pleading, compassion and great hope. I did not pursue my suggestion that she seek out the foul, rat-infested caverns of Morjin’s mind. Although I suspected that she herself might dare to contend with him mind to mind once more, someday, this impulse must come from her, according to her sense of her own power – otherwise Morjin might very well seize her will and make her into a ghul. If I loved her, I thought, how could I violate her soul with any demand that might lead toward such a terrible fate?

‘I’m sure,’ she said, suddenly warming toward me, ‘that I would have felt it in Master Storr’s mind if Bemossed had been killed.’

I did not know if that was true – or if she only wanted it to be true, and so believed it. But I needed her to tell me that Bemossed still lived, and make me believe it. And so she did, and so I loved her, for she was almost like my own mother, who had been able to make me believe in most anything, myself most of all.

‘My apologies,’ I told her, ‘for bringing up the matter of Morjin.’

She waved her hand at this, and looked at me deeply. ‘Don’t give it another thought.’

‘I think about little else. I know it is upon me to face him – someday, somehow. But first, I’m sorry to say, I wanted you to find out where he is the most vulnerable, as it was with Angraboda. Or even to put a little poison in his mind and let it work.’

The look in her eyes grew even warmer and brighter as I said this. She almost smiled, then. That was her magic, I thought, to love me despite my weaknesses and darkest dreams. She was like a tree with very deep roots, and something about her seemed to enfold my life with all the vitality of fresh running sap and a crown of shimmering green leaves.

‘If I were Morjin,’ she said to me, ‘I would not want you as my enemy’

‘If you were Morjin,’ I told her, ‘the world would not need Bemossed to restore it.’

Although she could not smile, she could still frown easily enough, which she now did. ‘The Sisterhood, I should tell you, has always taught that it will be a woman who will bring new life to the world – even as a mother does with a child. I admit that it is strange for me to think of Bemossed as the Maitreya, though I don’t see how he cannot be.’

I couldn’t help smiling at this. Each Maitreya throughout the ages had been a man, as the Saganom Elu had told, and never, I thought, had a man been born into the world as splendid as Bemossed.

‘He will come here’ I told her. ‘If you are right and the Brotherhood school is destroyed, Bemossed will want the Seven to bring him here.’

‘But how do you know that?’

In answer, I drew my sword from its scabbard, which I had set down by the side of the table. Alkaladur’s silver blade shimmered in the light of the stars.

‘I know,’ I told her, echoing the words that she had spoken to me. ‘They will try to make their way here, to these mountains, and so Mesh must be made safe.’

‘Then you will do what you must do to make it so. As you always do. I saw that in you the first time we met.’

I smiled again as I looked up at the stars. To Liljana, I pointed out Valura and Solaru – and then Icesse, Hyanne and the other stars of the Mother’s Necklace, high in the sky in this season of the year.

‘If Alphanderry is right,’ I said, ‘about Damoom’s star conjuncting the earth this fall, we have so little time to accomplish what we must accomplish.’

‘But we do have time, still.’

‘Time,’ I said, gazing at the bright silustria of my sword. ‘Already, a thousand warriors have answered Lord Avijan’s call. And in another six or seven days, there will be a thousand more.’

‘And you will win them as you did the others’ Liljana told me. ‘And then somehow, Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu.’

‘I must win them. Or win against them. Otherwise, Bemossed might as well try to find refuge in Argattha as here.’

‘But what is your plan, Val? You have yet to confide it to me.’

My sword glistered with the lights of the constellations shining above us – and seemed to await the clusters of stars soon to rise. And I said to Liljana, ‘That is because I still don’t know. Ask me again in another week.’

‘All right,’ she said to me, ‘but for now, why don’t you finish your tea and try to sleep? Tomorrow can only bring you better tidings than I did tonight.’

Liljana, though adept at many arts, proved to be no scryer. Late the next morning, a messenger galloped up to the castle bearing tidings that no one wanted to hear: Lord Tanu had assembled his men and had marched out of Godhra along the North Road. Four thousand warriors he had called up to fight for him on foot, while three hundred knights rode beneath his banner. Only yesterday, this army had crossed the Arashar River and passed through Hardu, and was now making its way toward Mount Eluru and Lord Avijan’s castle where many fewer warriors so far had gathered to me.

5

This news set the castle into a fury of activity. Lord Avijan immediately sent out emissaries to speak with Lord Tanu. He ordered the castle’s walls manned and extra provisions brought inside. Then, some hours later when he deemed all was secured, he summoned the greatest lords and knights to a war council in his great hall.

‘Lord Tanu has moved more quickly than even I would have thought possible,’ he told us.

I sat at one end of the great table at the front of the hall facing Lord Avijan at the other. In between us along one side of the table were Lord Harsha, Lord Sharad and Lord Noldashan – Sar Jessu and Sar Vikan, too. My companions took their places along the table’s other side with Lord Manthanu, a thick and jowly man who had arrived only the day before. This great knight regarded me with puzzlement clouding his long face; he pulled at one of the battle ribbons tied to his long gray hair as if wondering if the tides of war would sweep him away so soon.

‘It is upon me,’ Lord Avijan said, looking up the table at me, ‘to see to the defenses of my lands and my castle. As it is upon us to advise you, Lord Elahad. But if you are to be king, in the end you must decide what we should do about Lord Tanu.’

I inclined my head to him, then said, ‘To begin with, we don’t know why Lord Tanu is marching up the North Road.’

‘He isn’t on his way to invade Ishka!’ Sar Vikan called out.

I smiled at this as the others laughed grimly. Then I said, ‘It seems that there is little doubt as to where Lord Tanu is leading his army. But we don’t yet know his intentions.’

‘To raze Lord Avijan’s castle and see you murdered!’ Sar Vikan cried out again. ‘And all of us who support you. That is his intention!’

‘Here, now!’ Lord Harsha said, banging the table with his hand. ‘There’s no need for such talk! Lord Tanu is no murderer, and he is certainly not so stupid as to waste his army trying to take this castle.’

At this, Lord Sharad studied the keep’s thick walls, and said, ‘If not take it, then perhaps lay siege.’

I slowly nodded my head at this as I looked at Lord Avijan. I asked him, ‘How long could you hold out against Lord Tanu’s army?’

‘Not so long as we could have a few days ago,’ Lord Avijan said. He pointed out into the hall, whose many tables would soon be filled with hungry men eating their dinner. ‘A thousand warriors have answered your call, Lord Elahad, and that is a great many to feed. Our stores might last four months.’

‘Four months!’ Sar Jessu said. His thick black eyebrows pulled together. ‘That is a long time to lay siege. Lord Tanu might give up.’

‘He won’t give up,’ Lord Avijan said. ‘No knight in Mesh is more tenacious. You have fought under him, and should know that.’

‘Then even if he doesn’t, anything might happen in the meantime,’ Sar Jessu said. ‘Lord Tomavar might move against Lord Tanu. Or the Waashians might move against all of us.’

Here Sar Jessu turned toward me, and so did Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and everyone else. And I told them, ‘We cannot afford to wait four months – not even one. Whatever we do, we cannot remain holed-up here behind these walls. That is what Lord Tanu wants.’

Sar Vikan, a fiery and impulsive man, called out to me, ‘But you have said that you don’t know his intentions!’

I looked at Atara, whose blindfolded face was like a clear glass giving sight of the future. I looked at Liljana, whose relentless gaze reminded me that I must always try to look into my enemies’ minds and try to think as they did – even as my father had taught me.

‘My apologies for misspeaking,’ I told Sar Vikan. ‘But surely, as Lord Harsha has said, Lord Tanu will not waste his men attacking the castle. Therefore his strategy must be to keep us immobilized here – and to divide Lord Avijan’s forces.’

‘Your forces, now, Lord Elahad,’ Lord Avijan said.

‘We shall see,’ I said, inclining my head to him. ‘Lord Tanu can encamp his army outside the castle and block the pass leading to it. He would keep the rest of your men from joining us. And threaten them. Would they then still keep their oath to you?’

‘Certainly they would!’ Lord Avijan said. ‘They are good men, with true hearts!’

Sar Vikan, who now finally saw the line of my argument, asked Lord Avijan, ‘But if you released them from their oaths, as you released us, in such circumstances, would they then pledge their swords to Lord Elahad?’

At this, Lord Avijan looked down at the table and said nothing – and so said everything.

‘Lord Tanu would divide us,’ Lord Manthanu said to me in his deep, gravely voice. ‘And that might be the end of your chances, Lord Valashu. In my district, many warriors remain unpledged to anyone – as it is throughout Mesh. They wait to see what you will do. A victory of any sort will encourage them. But a defeat …’

He did not finish his sentence, nor did I wish him to. I did not want to think in terms of victory over my own countrymen, if that meant driving them down with swords.

Lord Noldashan rubbed at his tired eyes and said to me with a deep anxiety, ‘If you won’t stand to be besieged, does that mean that you will take the field against Lord Tanu?’

‘If he does,’ Lord Sharad said boldly, ‘Lord Elahad will find a way to outmaneuver our enemy as it was at the Culhadosh Commons!’

‘We’ll cut down any of Lord Tanu’s men who stand against us!’ Sar Vikan called out.

At this, Lord Harsha banged his fist against the table and shouted, ‘Enemy! Cut down! Have none of you listened to what Lord Valashu has been saying these last days? We cannot weaken ourselves so!’

Both Lord Sharad and Sar Vikan looked down in shame. Then I said to them, ‘No one can blame you for letting such great spirit impel you toward battle. But this must not be against Lord Tanu, nor Lord Tomavar – not if we can help it. So long as I am alive, I will not see Meshian slaying Meshian.’

Lord Avijan, perhaps the most intelligent and purposeful of the warriors at the table, asked me, ‘If you won’t stand a siege nor take the field, what will you do?’

At this fundamental question, I noticed Master Juwain looking at me keenly – along with everyone else. And I said, simply, ‘I will talk with Lord Tanu. Tomorrow, I will ride down into the pass, and try to reason with him.’

All during our council, Maram had remained uncharacteristically quiet. I worried that his beer guzzling had finally addled his wits. But now he licked his lips as he looked at me and said, ‘But Lord Tanu will be bringing his whole damn army through that pass! You can’t ride down into that river of swords! It’s too dangerous!’

I smiled at this, and I said, ‘We shall fly a banner of truce, and Lord Tanu will have to respect that. In any case, Sar Maram, I have to know.’

‘Know what…Lord Elahad?’

‘I must know what Lord Tanu truly intends.’ I paused to draw in a breath and look around the table. ‘Is he willing that we should slay each other just so that he might become king?’

Much later, after we had eaten dinner and I finally had a chance to speak with my companions about the destruction of the Brotherhood school, Lord Avijan’s emissaries returned to the castle in the dead of night. They made report of Lord Tanu’s intentions – or rather, his stated purpose in marching toward Mount Eluru. Lord Tanu, they said, had taken it upon himself to ensure Mesh’s safety. And so on the morrow, he would arrive to inspect the soundness of Lord Avijan’s castle, with or without Lord Avijan’s leave.

The next morning, as I had promised, I made ready to go forth and speak with Lord Tanu. I asked my friends to accompany me. Although we would be riding under a banner of truce – along with Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and the other knights who had become my war counselors – I did not want to chance the children’s safety in the midst of many angry men with quick and deadly swords. Daj protested my decision, reminding me of how he had slain the third droghul and taken far greater risks before: ‘Estrella and I rode with you all the way to Hesperu, and back, and you won’t allow us to ride a couple more miles?’

Estrella brushed the curls from her dark, liquid eyes, and she looked at me as if to tell me once more that our lives were bound together, and wherever I went, she must go as well. In her quiet, sweet way, she could be a very willful girl – now almost a young woman. Even so, I had to tell her that she must remain in the castle.

In the cool air blowing off the mountains, we rode out of the castle’s south gate and down the narrow road that cut through the green hills and meadows toward the pass. I took the lead, with Lord Avijan at my one side and Sar Vikan at my other. To this fierce knight, perhaps the most bellicose of all the men in my train, I had appointed the task of holding up the white banner of truce. Just behind him rode Sar Joshu Kadar, who had taken charge of the banner showing the silver swan and seven stars of the Elahads. Then came Lord Harsha, Lord Sharad, Lord Manthanu and Jessu the Lion-Heart – followed by Lord Noldashan and his son, Sar Jonavar. I had asked other five other young knights to join us, too: Sar Shivalad, Viku Aradam, Sar Kanshar, Siraj the Younger and Jurald Evar. My companions kept pace with them only a few yards behind, with Atara pushing her horse to an easy trot in the rear. Although we expected no attack from this direction, nor at all, Atara could whip about in her saddle and fire off an arrow at any pursuer in the blink of an eye.

Our course took us into a long taper of grassy land wedged between the Lake of the Ten Thousand Swans to our right and Mount Eluru to our left. As we moved further into the pass, this taper grew narrower and narrower. Finally, we came to that place where the road cut through a band of grass only ten yards wide. There we came to a halt. We had a nearly perfect day to wait for Lord Tanu and his army. The sky above us shone a deep and dazzling blue, with a few white clouds moving slowly along a cool breeze. This slight wind, however, failed to ripple the lake’s silvery waters, which had fallen as clear and still as a mirror. In its perfect sheen, I saw the reflection of Mount Eluru: a great and nearly symmetrical cone of green, tree-covered slopes, blue rock and white ice pushing straight up into the heavens.

After some time had passed and the sun rose over Mount Eluru’s eastern ridgeline, Maram rode forward to speak with me. As we had no privacy at the head of fourteen diamond-armored knights, we urged on our horses a few dozen more yards, and closer to the lake.

And then Maram held up his firestone to the glaring sunlight, and said, ‘Do you remember the Kul Moroth? A single blast from this, and I filled up that damn pass with enough rocks to stop an army.’

He looked up at the smooth, steep slopes of Mount Eluru above us; they were not so steep, however, that any of the few large rocks or boulders sticking out of the ground could easily be dislodged and rolled down into the pass.

‘I think I see the direction of your worries,’ I said to him.

‘Do you?’ he said, pointing his firestone down the road through the pass. ‘At Khaisham, I used this to set men on fire, like torches. But never again. I won’t use this against men, Val.’

‘You won’t have to,’ I said to him. ‘There will be no violence here today’

‘Oh, no? Why can’t I believe that? I have a bad feeling about you meeting Lord Tanu here.’

I waved my hand at this. ‘You have had other bad feelings before.’

‘Yes, I have,’ he said. ‘And most of them have proved out even worse than I had feared.’

‘It will be all right,’ I told him. ‘I have known Lord Tanu all my life, and he is a man I can reason with.’

‘Is this a day for reason, then?’ He shook his head then gazed at me. ‘I will not summon fire out of this stone, but ever since Liljana told you about Bemossed, you’re practically burning up with this rage to become king. That makes a bad situation urgent. And urgency, in my sad experience, too often leads to violence.’

I laid my hand on the diamonds encrusting his arm. ‘We have faced more urgent situations before.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but one never knows about these things. A mole’s little hole can trip a horse and break a man’s neck. A single match can set a whole grassland on fire. What might a few ill-considered words do? It is all too much, do you see? Alphanderry told us, in effect, that we had until this fall to succeed or fail, once and for all. I’m telling you, Val, that I don’t have it in me to go on any longer than that, as we have gone through one hell after another these past three years.’

My hand tightened around his arm, and I smiled at him. ‘You say that? The man who crossed half the Red Desert by himself to save me?’

‘I do say that!’ he called out as he pulled away from me. He looked at the knights gathered behind us with the flag of truce barely rippling in the soft wind. ‘We could die here today, as easily as anywhere. Your Sar Vikan and Sar Jessu seem eager enough to draw swords.’

‘It will not be a day for swords’ I reassured him as I patted Alkaladur’s scabbard, slung on my back. Then I added, ‘At least, not kalamas.’

‘Well, if it is,’ he said, staring at Jessu the Lion-Heart, ‘I won’t be of much use. Not against Valari knights. And they know that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, your countrymen all see me as a complainer and a coward.’

‘No, you are wrong – it is just the opposite,’ I told him. ‘You have succeeded in two great quests. And taken a second in wrestling at the tournament and a third in archery. And above all, you slew half a dozen Ikurians at the Culhadosh Commons. To my people, you are a true Valari knight. They regard you as a hero, Maram.’

Maram thought about this as he studied Sar Shivalad, Sar Kanshar and Viku Aradam, who sat bunched together and looking back at him. And he muttered, ‘Well, if they don’t see me as a coward, they should. It can’t be long, you know. Today, or tomorrow, or at the next urgent situation, whatever it is, I’ll finally have had enough. I’ll turn my back and flee, as any sane man would, and then your people will finally see what Sar Maram Marshayk is made of.’

‘No, Maram, you are –’

‘It is too much!’ he said to me. ‘Do you understand? Too, too damn much! I don’t want to be anyone’s hero.’

And with that, he wheeled his horse about, and rode slowly back to rejoin the others.

Then I took my place again at the head of the column of knights jammed into the pass. After perhaps a half an hour, I caught sight of a sparkling light ahead of us. Soon the knights of Lord Tanu’s vanguard came closer, and the sun’s reflection off their diamond armor shone with an eye-burning brilliance. I could not, at this distance, make out Lord Tanu’s face, but I could see quite clearly his black, double-headed eagle banner held high and the same emblem emblazoned on his surcoat. As well I made out the charges of his two greatest captains: the red bull of Lord Eldru and Lord Ramjay’s white tiger. I estimated the number of knights riding behind him at three hundred, which accorded with our reports. And behind this mass of mounted men with their long lances and triangular shields marched the rest of Lord Tanu’s warriors, some four thousand strong. I could see practically the whole of the army, strung out around the curve of the lake like a mile-long strand of diamonds.

Lord Tanu, of course, had an equally good view of us. He must have seen Sar Vikan’s white banner clearly enough, for he made no move to deploy his warriors into a battle formation, nor did he change his slow and relentless march toward us. The silver bells tied to the boots of the thousands of warriors that he led sent a high-pitched jingling into the air. This eerie sound, tinkling out with a terrible beat, had often unnerved the enemies of the Valari. And sometimes the Valari themselves. I remembered hearing it before on the battlefield of the Red Mountain in Waas. I reminded myself that we faced no enemy, but only proud Meshian warriors who should be as brothers to us.

I could almost feel Maram sweating in his saddle behind me and the hearts of my companions beating more quickly as Lord Tanu rode forward. For a moment it seemed that he and his entire vanguard might keep on going and try to sweep us from the pass down into the lake. At the last moment, however, at a distance of only ten paces, he stopped his horse and held up his hand to call for a halt. The three hundred knights behind him ceased their march, as did the thousands of warriors behind them.

‘Lord Valashu Elahad,’ he called out to me formally in his sawlike voice, ‘we had heard that you had returned to Mesh, though we hoped you never would.’

Lord Tanu sat on a big horse as he regarded me with his small, black, deep-set eyes. At nearly sixty years of age, he still retained the suppleness and strength of a much younger warrior. Although not large in his body, his fighting spirit and skill at arms had almost always led him to prevail against his foes. He had a tight, sour face that did nothing to hide his irascible temperament. I had known this man all my life. I remembered my father telling me why he had chosen Lord Tanu as one of the two greatest captains of his army: because he was quick of mind and fearless in battle and as steady as a rock. My father also had counted on Lord Tanu always to tell him the blunt and painful truth.

‘It would have been better,’ he said to me, ‘if you had stayed in exile in whatever land you found to give you shelter. Your presence here is only a disturbance. And your purpose is vain – and in vain. We have heard of your call for men to gather to your standard. Promises to defeat the Red Dragon you have given, and people believe you. You remain a firebrand who incites impossible dreams.’

I could feel the knights near me waiting for me to gainsay him. But I did not wish to dispute him word for word and assertion with counter-assertion. And so I said to him, ‘My father always valued your counsel, Lord Tanu, hard though it sometimes might be to hear. But he would not have appreciated your claim to his throne.’

I sensed Lord Tanu’s face flushing with a hot surge of blood as he lowered his eyes in shame. Then, at his right side, Lord Eldru angrily shook his head. Long white hair flowed out from beneath his winged helm, and his stern, wrinkled face showed a great round scar where an enemy spear had pierced his jaw down through his throat and nearly killed him at the Culhadosh Commons. Finally, he spoke for Lord Tanu, saying, ‘Would your father have thought you more worthy of the crown? You, who deserted the castle in defiance of your father’s command?’

Next to him sat the iron-haired and iron-faced Lord Ramjay, and Sar Shagarth, a large master knight sporting a thick mustache and black beard rare among the Valari. They nodded their heads in agreement as Lord Eldru recited the same indictments that had been made against me after the Great Battle: that five years previously, in Waas, I had hesitated in slaying the enemy, and so could not be trusted to lead men. And that two years ago, in Tria, in a fit of wrath, I had slain the innocent Ravik Kirriland, who was not my enemy, and so I should be doubly mistrusted. And that on the Culhadosh Commons, my taking command of Lord Eldru’s reserve and waiting to attack had put the entire army at risk and should be taken as a proof of my recklessness.

‘A year ago,’ Lord Eldru said to me, ‘you left Mesh for lands unknown, and in that time, nothing has changed.’

Because I had previously defended my actions to these men, to little effect, I decided to let the past remain the past. But I must, I thought, at all costs speak for the future.

‘Everything has changed,’ I told them. ‘To begin with, we have found the Maitreya.’

Lord Tanu finally looked at me again as his harsh voice whipped out: ‘So you say, Lord Valashu. As you said once before when you claimed to be the Maitreya.’

‘Every man,’ I told him, ‘deserves a chance to be wrong once in his life. But I am not wrong about Bemossed.’

As I went on to tell of this man who had worked miracles of healing and other wonders, Lord Tanu listened intently. I held nothing back in my description of how Bemossed had given new life to a dying boy and had faced down Morjin’s ghul – and so overcame Morjin himself; I spoke with all the power and truthfulness that I could summon. My love for Bemossed, I thought, if not my words, touched something inside Lord Tanu and cracked open a hidden door. But he immediately tried to slam it shut again.

‘Maitreya or not,’ he said, ‘your claim for your latest quest has little to do with the problems that Mesh faces – nor does it help men to see the way clear to their solution.’

At this, Lord Avijan took umbrage, pointing at the knights behind Lord Tanu and calling out, ‘Is this, then, your solution to a divided realm? That you should march uninvited into my lands at the head of an army?’

‘If I had made request,’ Lord Tanu countered, ‘would you have made invitation?’

I felt the steel inside Lord Avijan heating up, as with a sword plunged into a bed of hot coals. He did not, however, let his anger cause him to misspeak. He merely stared at Lord Tanu and said with an icy calm, ‘You are always welcome in my castle, Lord Tanu. We will always try to keep a room open for you – though I’m sorry to say we cannot accommodate four thousand men.’

‘We heard that you accommodated a thousand easily enough, with more expected,’ Lord Tanu told him. ‘Such a gathering of warriors, so close to Waas, might cause King Sandarkan to worry that you are about to attack him. Indeed, my counselors worry that this might provoke him into attacking you.’

Here he nodded at Lord Eldru and Lord Ramjay, who nodded back.

Then Lord Avijan, forcing down a grim smile, said, ‘One would think that your four thousand warriors pose an even greater provocation.’

‘Perhaps they do. But at least if King Sandarkan is so provoked, we will have the strength to turn him back.’

‘I see,’ Lord Avijan said. ‘Then you marched here unheralded as a show of strength?’

Lord Tanu smiled sourly at this. ‘You understand, then. We must show King Sandarkan that Mesh’s warriors remain ready to march to any part of the realm at a moment’s notice and defend it. And we must know that our castles remain in good repair so that we can mount an effective defense, if need be. Your castle is critical to Mesh’s security.’

‘Then you have my assurance,’ Lord Avijan told him, ‘that my castle is in excellent repair. Her gates are strong, and we’ve plenty of oil to heat up and pour down upon attackers – plenty of arrows, too.’

Lord Tanu nodded at this as he pulled at one of the ribbons tied to his long hair. He looked at Lord Eldru, and then at Lord Ramjay and Sar Shagarth. Finally he turned back to Lord Avijan and told him, ‘Surely you can understand that we must see this for ourselves.’

His insistence angered Sar Vikan, who shook the white banner of truce at him, and shouted, ‘See for yourself then as you stand beneath the battlements and bathe in burning oil!’

I tried to keep my face stern and still as Lord Avijan held up his hand to quiet him. Then Lord Avijan told Lord Tanu: ‘You do not have the right to inspect my lands, or my leave to cross them. And you do not have the right to be king.’

A quiet fell over the knights gathered on the road, and the only sound to be heard was the flapping of a swan’s wings far out on the lake. Then Lord Avijan said that Mesh must have a king who could unite the whole of the realm and then gain victory over the other Valari kingdoms – or win an alliance with them – in order to oppose Morjin.

At this Lord Tanu nodded his head at Lord Avijan, and said, ‘Your arguments are good ones, but it is not Valashu Elahad who should be king. He will only divide the realm further, for the reasons that have already been stated. Also, he is too taken with heroics. And he is too young.’

Lord Harsha, from on top of his horse behind me, barked out, ‘You have known Lord Valashu all his life, and you still don’t know him. And you don’t know yourself, if you think you should be king in his stead.’

‘My failings are many,’ Lord Tanu fired back, ‘and thank you for reminding me. Even as I grieve King Shamesh’s death, I wish that Lord Asaru had lived to wear his father’s ring. Or any of his brothers, save Lord Valashu, I would have wished see as king rather than myself. But fate is fate, and the world turns on. What are we to do? Lord Tomavar, as we all know, is too proud to be king. Too quick to take insult, too eager for glory and he loves war too much. A fine tactician, yes, but he is weak in strategy, and he does not listen to others’ counsel, and so what hope have we that he will lead us to victory in the wars soon to come? And you, Lord Avijan, have too little support to be king. Other claimants have less. Therefore it is upon me to take up a mantle I never sought.’

As the wind rose and bent the grasses along the side of the road, I sensed that he was speaking the truth – at least the truth as he saw it. Lord Tanu had realized all his ambitions as one of Mesh’s most renowned warriors and greatest lords: commander of half of my father’s army. My father had always counted him among the most faithful of his knights. I thought that he had no deep, driving desire to become king. But he was one of those men who reasoned relentlessly and flawlessly from unquestioned premises to reach a perfectly logical result that was dead wrong.

‘Only one man,’ he said, looking at me, ‘can be Mesh’s king.’

Each time he uttered this word, I sensed, he added another iron bar to the prison that he was building for himself.

‘Only one,’ I agreed, gazing back at him. I felt within myself a great power to use the valarda simply to batter down the doors of his will and bend him to my purpose.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Lord Elahad!’ he said to me. ‘As I have the best claim, it is upon me to do whatever must be done to make Mesh safe.’

He shot me a hard, pugnacious look, but I felt a hint of fear burn through him as well. I finally turned my gaze away from him. Battering down doors, I remembered, was Morjin’s way, not mine.

‘Four thousand three hundred warriors,’ I said, pointing behind him, ‘follow you. But five thousand stood for me upon the Culhadosh Commons.’

‘My claim is not solely of numbers. Do not delude yourself into thinking the warriors wish you to be king. Go back into exile, and Mesh will be the better for it.’

‘You speak for the warriors,’ I said, ‘but they have voices of their own. And wills. Release them from their pledges to you, and let them stand for whomever they will, and we shall see who will be king.’

Lord Tanu’s face tightened at this, and he told me, ‘At the Culhadosh Commons, five thousand stood for you – and eight thousand against. They have stood, and that is the law. It is decided.’

‘No law prevents them from standing again.’

‘It is pointless, Lord Elahad.’

‘Let the warriors decide,’ I told him.

Lord Tanu glanced behind me at Master Juwain, Atara and Liljana, and seemed to be looking for Kane, as well. And he said, ‘You keep strange company. You have a strange way about you, and nothing is stranger than the story people tell about you merely looking at the Alonian lord in Tria and somehow causing him to die.’

I gazed at the many knights gathered behind Lord Tanu. ‘I have not returned to Mesh to cause anyone to die – except Morjin and those who follow him. Release your warriors from their pledges to you that they might decide whether or not to follow me against the Red Dragon!’

Lord Tanu slowly shook his head at this like a bull preparing to charge. Then he called out to me: ‘Remove yourself from this road, and leave Mesh.’

I glanced down at the road’s paving stones, and I said, ‘My ancestors built this road, and my father saw to its maintenance. He would have wanted me to inspect it, when the time came. And he would not want me to ride off just because Lord Vishathar Tanu commanded it.’

Now Lord Tanu stared at me, in anger and dread. He pointed along the strip of land behind me, and barked out, ‘Our army marches through this pass!’

‘And here I stand!’

So saying, I dismounted, then gave my horse to the care of Sar Kanshar. I took a few steps toward Lord Tanu, out onto the bare road away from Sar Vikan and Joshu Kadar and the other knights accompanying me. They looked at me as if I had fallen mad, but I felt a great hope surging in them as well.

‘We will march,’ Lord Tanu said to me, ‘whether you stand or fall!’

I feared that I would fall, and soon. If Lord Tanu pressed his knights to move forward, jammed together in the narrow pass, one or more of their horses would inevitably knock me over, and then other horses would trample me to death.

‘If we cannot ride past you,’ Lord Tanu shouted, ‘we shall ride over you! I am not bluffing!’

‘Neither am I!’ I called back to him.

My reason told me that only I could be king of Mesh and find the way to defeat Morjin. But my heart cried out that if I died, I still might pass on the sacred sword of my dreams to others who would carry on the fight. Somehow, in the end, they would prevail. They must prevail, though it seemed impossible. Just as it seemed impossible that Lord Tanu would really command his knights to ride over me. Lord Tanu, though, did not make threats wantonly; I knew that he would let his knights’ horses drive me down to the road’s hard stones.

‘One last time, Lord Elahad, I’ll tell you to get off this road!’

I felt him steeling himself to press his knees against his horse and urge the great beast forward. Just then, from behind me, I heard the slap of boots against stone, as of someone running hard. I turned to see Estrella darting and weaving among the knights gathered behind me as she practically sprinted toward me. Daj followed close at her heels. I was never to learn how these two children found their way out of the castle; it seemed that once they had escaped, however, they had run the whole distance down to the pass. Estrella rushed up to my side, and threw her arms around me as she stood against me gasping for breath. Daj found his way to my other side, and his chest worked so hard to draw in air that it seemed his lungs might tear open. They looked up at Lord Tanu in defiance – and in fear, too.

‘What is this?’ Lord Tanu cried out to me. ‘Some trick of yours?’

In answer, I could only shake my head at him.

‘It is said,’ Lord Tanu cried out, ‘that these children accompanied you on your quest.’

In the way he gazed at Estrella, and then Daj, I wondered if he felt more keenly the loss of his two grandchildren, slaughtered when Morjin’s Red Knights had ravaged my father’s castle.

‘Well, this is no place for children,’ he continued. ‘Get them off the road!’

I moved to take hold of them, for I would not see either of them trampled to death, even for the sake of my dream. But then Daj took hold of my leg even as Estrella tightened her grip around my waist. Then, with a great and heavy sigh, Maram dismounted, too, and came forward to stand by me. So did Liljana, Master Juwain and Atara. At their show of courage, the knights behind me could do no less, and so Lord Avijan took his place on the road, along with Lord Harsha, Joshu Kadar, and everyone else.

‘I will remain with the Elahad!’ Joshu Kadar shouted, staring at Lord Tanu. He had no liking for this old man who had taken his young lady love away from him. ‘You won’t drive us away!’

‘I will remain, too!’ Sar Shivalad called out.

Estrella, locked on to me, gazed at Lord Tanu with no less defiance.

‘What is this?’ Lord Tanu cried out. ‘Must we ride over all of you?’

In the warmth of Estrella’s face pressed against my chest I felt her will to stand and die wherever I stood. So it was with my other companions and the knights who followed me, even Maram, who pressed up behind me and clasped his hand around my arm. Their hearts seemed to beat in unison like a single, great drum. In the immense silence that sounded out along the road above the lake, I gazed at Lord Tanu. And my heart filled with a wild and anguished love of life.

‘Ride, if you must,’ I said to him.

For a long time, he sat on top of his great warhorse staring down at me. He appeared at once sad, fearful and weighed down with a bittersweet longing. My companions drew in closer to me. I felt their élan passing into me and gathering in my eyes with a painful brightness. Lord Tanu stared and stared at me, and at last, a door inside him opened. Then his eyes grew all moist and glassy, like the waters of the lake.

‘I might have been wrong about you,’ he forced out in a harsh, thick voice. ‘I had thought you were vainglorious, like Lord Tomavar.’

He looked from Maram to Atara, and then at Lord Harsha, Lord Avijan and Joshu Kadar, still holding up my banner with the swan and stars. Then he said to me, ‘Too many adventurers are careless of their own lives, and those of others. But it might be that you are more like your father and grandfather. They would gladly have given their lives for the men who followed them – and did.’

I bowed my head at this, then so did Lord Tanu and everyone else. After a few moments, Lord Tanu turned to Lord Eldru and said, ‘Let us not ride any farther up this road today.’

He nodded at Lord Ramjay and Sar Shagarth, who nodded back at him. Then Lord Tanu said to Lord Avijan, standing a few paces from me: ‘We will take your word that your castle is well defended. But you should prepare your warriors to march forth from it within the week.’

‘And why is that?’ Lord Avijan asked him.

‘Because,’ Lord Tanu said, looking at me, ‘we shall call for a gathering of all the warriors in Mesh – even Lord Tomavar’s. Let it be as Valashu Elahad has said: all who have made pledges should be released from them. Let the warriors decide who shall be king!’

At this, Sar Vikan let loose a great cheer, which Jessu the Lion-Heart and Sar Shivalad and the other knights near me picked up and amplified, calling out: ‘Let the warriors decide!’

The knights who had pressed up close behind Lord Tanu must have sympathized with this sentiment, for they too repeated this cry. And then, like a command passed across a battlefield, the warriors drawn up in columns along the road shouted out that they should be allowed to stand for a new king. Their thousands of voices boomed out across the lake like a stroke of thunder.

‘Very well, then,’ Lord Tanu said, bowing his head to me. ‘Until the gathering, Lord Elahad.’

‘Until then, Lord Tanu,’ I said, bowing back to him.

It was no great work for Lord Tanu to call for his captains to turn his army about and begin marching back down the road, with the vanguard following those who marched on foot. We watched them go as they had come, a great mass of men and horses pounding at the road’s stone. When they had disappeared from our sight around the curve of the mountain, I looked down at Estrella, still clinging to me, and I said to her, ‘It was you who led the way out of the castle, wasn’t it?’

At this, she happily nodded her head as if she thought her action should have pleased me. Then Daj spoke for her, saying, ‘We couldn’t let you face Lord Tanu alone. He might have killed you!’

I tried to smile at him as I swallowed against the lump in my throat. Then Maram gazed down into the pass and muttered to me, ‘Do you see how it goes, then? We survive another urgent situation, only to be to be forced into yet another. A gathering of the warriors, indeed! Three armies will be at this gathering – and Lord Tomavar, I think, will be quicker to have his warriors draw swords than to release them from their pledges.’

At this, Sar Vikan stepped up to Maram, and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘If that is the way of things, then I shall have the pleasure of fighting by your side again. Which of Lord Tomavar’s knights can stand against Sar Maram Marshayk?’

As Maram rolled his eyes at this and let out a soft groan, Lord Avijan came over to me. ‘Which of Mesh’s knights will fail to stand for Valashu Elahad as king?’

For a while we remained there above the deep, blue lake feeling very glad for our lives – and not a little amazed that our small force had been able to turn back Lord Tanu’s army without a single sword flying from its scabbard. I thought about Lord Avijan’s words to me. Of all the questions in my life, at that moment, it was the one I most wanted to be answered.

6

It took more than a week for Lord Tanu’s emissaries to ride across Mesh and arrange with Lord Tomavar a time and place for the gathering of the warriors: On the 21st of Soldru we were to converge on a great open meadow to the west of Hardu along the Arashar River. This field, where the Lake Country gave way to the Gorgeland at the very heart of the realm, was almost exactly equidistant from Mount Eluru, Godhra and Lord Tomavar’s stronghold in Pushku. Other claimants to the throne – Lord Ramanu, Lord Bahram and Lord Kharashan – would have to make longer journeys. As they had no hope of becoming king, however, few worried that they might take insult in not being given equal consideration. It had proved hard enough to persuade Lord Tomavar to attend the gathering. In the end, however, his innate character drove him straight toward this historic confrontation. Perhaps he suspected that Lord Tanu and I would join forces against him, and he wanted to forestall such a combination. More likely he simply assumed that he could go among Mesh’s warriors and win them to his banner with his bravura, a few quick smiles and a great show of strength.

As the spring deepened toward summer, warriors who had pledged to Lord Avijan continued riding up to his castle. By the ides of Soldru, almost all of these had arrived. Of course, there would always be a few who would miss the call to gather. As had happened with Sar Jonavar a year before, they might be away on hunting trips or meditation retreats deep in the mountains. These two or three dozen men, though, would not significantly diminish our forces, which Lord Avijan counted at more than twenty-three hundred. In combination with Lord Tanu’s army, I thought, we would slightly outnumber the six thousand warriors said to be pledged to Lord Tomavar.

At dawn on the 18th we finally marched out of the castle and down to the pass. I led forth with Joshu Kadar flying my banner beside me. A hundred and fifty knights on horses came next, followed by more than two thousand warriors stepping along at a good pace. At the rising of the sun, their full diamond armor glittered with a fiery brilliance. My companions had leave to ride where they would, and most of them remained within the vanguard near me, though from time to time, Atara would drop back behind the marching columns to check on the wagons of the baggage train and to look for enemies in that direction. Or perhaps, I thought, she just wanted to gain a few moments of solitude riding behind the whole of our army. Although we had no reason to fear attack, a lifetime of discipline drove me to keep everyone moving in good order. My army, almost ten times the size of the greatest force that I had ever led, needed no extraordinary urging to negotiate the excellent roads leading down to Hardu. My father had always said that half the skill of commanding an army was just to keep men moving from one point to another and then seeing them lined up in good array for battle – but only half, and much the lesser half at that.

Our first day’s march took us down the North Road a good part of the way to Hardu. On the second day we passed through this little city of waterwheels, mills and breweries, and we crossed over the Victory Bridge spanning the fast-flowing Arashar River. There we turned onto a smaller road paralleling it. It led north and west, behind the tree-covered slopes of Mount Vayu, and through some rolling green pastures toward the Gorgeland farther to the north. In the trough between two low hills, we came across acres of grass ablaze with blue and red starflowers. I knew of no other place on earth where these glorious things grew. A few miles farther on, however, where the road led away from the river, the flowers gave way to fields of long-bladed sweetgrass and the many sheep and cattle that grazed upon it.

At the end of the day, in a stretch of country where the hills flattened out a bit, we came upon the place of the gathering. This was a broad meadow perhaps a mile across. Acres of tents dotted the grass. Its center, though, had been kept clear, with many banners of truce flapping in the wind almost like great swans’ wings. According to our agreement with Lord Tanu’s emissaries, everyone was to encamp around a central square. Already Lord Tomavar’s army, marching from Lashku in the west, had settled in to the west of the square, while Lord Tanu’s four thousand men made camp to the south. Fanning out above the square’s northern perimeter I made out the standards of Lord Ramanu, Lord Bahram and Lord Kharashan. They commanded four hundred, two hundred and a hundred and fifty men respectively. Other warriors and knights – those who had not given their pledges to any lord – set up there as well. Most of them had arrived without tents of their own, and so I had a hard time counting their numbers. If Lord Avijan was right, though, more than two thousand of these free warriors, as they called themselves, would assert their right to stand or not for any lord wishing to be king.

We made our way down to the expanse of meadow east of the square, scarcely four hundred yards from the roaring Arashar River. There we set up our camp, with neat lanes at regular intervals running down the lines of our tents. I had inherited my father’s campaign pavilion: a great, billowing expanse of black silk embroidered with the silver swan and stars of our ancestors. My companions would sleep within tents next to mine, as would Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and my other counselors. I did not like being so close to the river. Although we would not have to haul water so far as Lord Tanu’s or Lord Tomavar’s men, everything I knew about strategy warned me against taking a position with a river or lake at my back. If the worst befell and a battle did break out, we would have little room to maneuver against what might prove a much greater force.

‘But I will not let it come to that,’ I promised Maram that evening as we gathered around one of our campfires to eat some roasted lamb. ‘And neither Lord Tanu or Lord Tomavar will break the truce.’

‘No, of course they won’t,’ Maram said between bites of bloody meat. ‘If it becomes obvious that the warriors want you as king, Lord Tomavar will march off beyond the bounds of the truce – and then turn and attack you farther down the river.’

For a while, after dinner, I stood at the edge of our encampment staring out across the square. Lord Tomavar stood with his knights in his encampment, staring back at me. Although the distance was too great to make out the features of his face with any clarity, I could see the black tower of the Tomavars emblazoned on his white surcoat. I sensed his black eyes seeking out my own and warning me not to oppose him.

As we had also agreed, we spent the night in our own encampment, with the warriors ordered to remain near their campfires, and so it was with Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu and their men. Although most of us had friends or kin in the other encampments, we had foes, too, and it wouldn’t do to let a little casual mingling lead to arguments that might very well end in swords drawn and warriors lying dead in pools of blood.

Despite Maram’s gloom, which he assuaged with cups of both beer and brandy, the night passed peacefully, and the next day dawned with clear blue skies and abundant sunshine. Lord Tomavar sent his emissaries across the square to the various encampments to call for an immediate conclave. But Lord Tanu would not be moved from his original plan: tomorrow would be the 21st of Soldru, and we must allow time for the last of the free warriors to arrive. The conclave, he said, must not begin before then.

Already, though, as Liljana pointed out, a sort of informal conclave had gotten underway. The news of the gathering had gone out to every corner of Mesh, and beyond. According to a long tradition, women and boys from Hardu arrived bearing food and drink for the warriors of our armies, and blacksmiths came up from Godhra to shoe horses and repair weapons or armor. Others, from Mir or the Diamond River clear across the realm, merely wished to be present at the choosing of a new king. They joined the throngs who set up little tents or made cookfires on the outskirts, around the warriors’ encampments. By late morning, it seemed a city of Meshians had sprung up overnight from the pasture’s thick grass.

A handful of outlanders also attended the gathering. On a trip down to the river, I saw five merchants from Delu and a dozen evacuees, from Galda and faraway Surrapam, who sought refuge in our land. From the Elyssu came a herbalist searching for rare botanicals, and this adventurous man inevitably found his way to consult with Master Juwain. A traveling troupe from Alonia, Nedu and points farther west decided to seek its fortune in entertaining the waiting warriors. They misjudged, however, the mood prevailing among those who had journeyed to this place: tense, wary and deadly serious. Few, it seemed, wanted to watch a juggler toss colored balls into the air or an acrobat walk across a tightrope – at least not yet.

Late in the afternoon, five warriors of the Manslayer Society arrived asking for the great imakla granddaughter of Sajagax. They rode their steppe ponies from Lord Tanu’s encampment down the rows of tents into ours. Their leader, a stout, ebullient woman named Karimah, I knew from two campaigns across the Wendrush. She could be quick with a drawn knife or a bow and arrow – and even quicker to smile and bandy words, with friend or foe. When Atara came forth to greet them, Karimah laughed out with great gladness and urged her horse forward so that she could kiss Atara’s hands and face. She leaned her head down close to Atara’s and spoke words that I could not hear. Then Atara went to saddle Fire. After leading this beautiful mare up to where I stood with Karimah and the others, she told me, ‘We must hold a conclave of our own. We shall try to be back by dinner.’ Without any further explanation, she rode off with her sister Manslayers. A burning disquiet worked at my throat as I watched them make their way through the many people ringing our encampment. Then they crested the hill to the north above the river, and disappeared.

And so Atara did not witness the miraculous event that stirred warriors in every encampment to break off their sword practice and rush to the edges of the square. From out of the south, along the crowded central lane running through Lord Tanu’s array of tents, a single rider appeared and made his way into the square. His close-cropped white hair gleamed in the sun almost as brightly as a steel helm. The lines of his sun-browned face – at once savage and beautiful and burning with a strange grace – had been set like cracks running through stone. His large, powerful body flowed with the movements of his nearly spent horse. He wore no armor, but only trousers and a torn, tainted shirt. A red arrow stuck out of his back. Whether this color came from the dyes that the Red Knights use to stain their arrows or from the man’s own blood was hard to tell. He seemed to give this deadly shaft of wood no thought, however, but only rode on toward our encampment with a rare ease and unquenchable will. His contempt for pain and what could only be a mortal wound amazed the tough Meshian warriors who looked upon him. Sar Vikan, straining to see at the edge of the square, suddenly cried out, ‘Look! It is Kane! Sar Kane has returned!’

‘Sar Kane!’ someone else shouted. And then half a hundred voices picked up the cry: ‘Sar Kane has returned! Bring a litter for Sar Kane!’

But my old friend would not be carried so long as he had the strength to command his own motions. And strength he still possessed, in an overflowing abundance that stunned those who watched him ride up to me. He sat tall and straight in his saddle, as if some vastly greater hand had sculpted him from a burning rock. Dressed in rags, dirty, bleeding, the air hissing out of the hole torn into his lung, Kane managed to look more regal than either Lord Tanu or Lord Tomavar – or, I imagined, myself.

‘So, Valashu,’ Kane said as he stopped his horse before me. ‘I did not come back too late.’

He dismounted, and I rushed forward to embrace him as best I could without disturbing the broken arrow embedded in him. His large, hard hands, however, thumped against my back without restraint. At last he stood away from me. His bright, black eyes drank in the delight in my eyes. And with a savage smile, he growled out, ‘Ha – but it is good to be back! Let us go somewhere we can talk.’

Just then Master Juwain, followed by Liljana, Maram, Estrella and Daj, pushed through the throngs of knights surrounding us. Master Juwain hurried up to Kane and looked at him gravely. ‘First, I should draw that arrow.’

‘No – the arrow remains where it has been for four hundred miles, and will still be there when you need to go to work on me. But right now, I’ve tidings that must be told.’

I led the way toward my pavilion then, and Sar Vikan, Lord Avijan, Sar Shivalad and others cleared a path forus. Although Kane walked with all the smooth power of a tiger, I could almost feel the agony of the arrow grinding against his ribs and searing his lungs. My companions and I went inside my huge tent, where Alphanderry joined us in a splash of glittering lights. Daj pulled the flaps closed behind us. We sat on one of the carpets there, in a circle, as if gathering around a fire on one of our campaigns. From one of the braziers heaped with hot coals, Master Juwain removed an iron pot full of hot water and prepared Kane a cup of tea that would help keep the blood inside Kane, or so he said.

‘I’ve bad tidings from Galda,’ Kane told us without further ado. ‘The revolt has failed. Gallagerry the Defiant defies no one anymore: the Dragon Guard captured him, and the Red Priests crucified him. His followers are being hunted down. And Morjin …’

Here he paused to take a sip of tea as he grimaced in pain. Then he continued, ‘I was not able to determine if it was Morjin who led the Dragon Guard and the Karabukers into Galda, or only one of his droghuls. I think it was he. All of Galda reeks with his stench. The Galdans are gathering their armies again – exactly why, no one would say. But everywhere I heard soldiers speak of marching forth on a great crusade.’

He took another sip of tea, and stared into the dark liquid of his cup. And he muttered, ‘So, my crusade failed, eh? Everyone except myself captured or killed.’

‘Everyone?’ Maram said, looking at him. ‘Do you mean your knights of the Black Brotherhood?’

In answer, Kane just stared at him in a dark, dreadful silence – and that was answer enough.

‘Then you had to flee,’ Maram prompted him, ‘so that you could tell us this news?’

Kane shook his fearsome head. ‘With my men held captive and Morjin still on the loose, I would not have fled. But there is something that I learned that overruled these considerations.’

Here he looked straight at me, and added, ‘There is something that has been sent to destroy you, Valashu. A dark thing, so damned dark – you cannot know.’

At this, I stared into the corner of the tent, where I could feel an emptiness pulling at me. Then Alphanderry, sitting across from Kane, recounted our battle with the Ahrim in the woods near Lord Harsha’s farm and our speculations as to its nature. He said, ‘It followed us all the way from the Skadarak, and so we thought it must be some part of the Skadarak.’

‘No,’ Kane said, ‘the Ahrimana is something worse – much worse.’

He moved to take another sip of tea, then looked up at the tent’s roof as if his eyes could pierce the black silk to gaze at the heavens.

‘So, it came through the Skadarak,’ he told us. ‘From far, far away it came. The Dark One, Angra Mainyu, sent it from Damoom. It is all his malice and spite, the very shadow of his soul. In a way, his herald.’

‘His herald!’ Maram cried out. ‘But it was so powerful! It nearly killed Val!’

At this, Kane looked at me as he shook his head. ‘This you must know about the Ahrimana: it has no power, of its own. But the power you give it, which it seeks out as a leech does blood, that power can burn you like hellfire and utterly destroy you.’

Upon speaking these words, Kane’s immense strength finally seemed to fail him. Air bubbled out of his back in a sprinkling of bright red blood as if he could no longer will his veins to keep his life’s essence within him. His eyes closed, for a moment, and he seemed ready to topple over.

‘That is enough for today’ Master Juwain said, going over to Kane. He positioned his small body against Kane’s side to prop him up. ‘I don’t know how you learned of what you have told us, or how you could ride four hundred miles with an arrow in your lung. But I’ve got to draw it, now, or even you might be destroyed.’

Kane slowly nodded his head at this. Then I called for a litter, and Kane had to consent to being carried from my pavilion into Master Juwain’s smaller and starkly furnished tent. There, with Liljana’s help and that of two other healers, Master Juwain went to work with his gleaming steel instruments to draw the barbed arrow from deep within Kane’s flesh. This difficult surgery nearly killed the unkillable Kane. Finally, though, with a great spray of blood, Master Juwain pulled free the arrow. He used his green gelstei to stop the ferocious hemorrhaging and heal the terrible wound torn into Kane. Finally, he helped Kane drink a tea that would make him sleep.

‘I shall stay with him the rest of today and tonight,’ Master Juwain told me. He looked over toward his own bed, where Kane rested with his eyes closed. ‘Liljana will stay, too. But there is no need for you to remain here – you must have many things to do.’

I did indeed have matters to attend to, though none so important as seeing Kane restored to himself. I waited by his side all the rest of the afternoon, through dinner and late into the evening. And then as the night deepened and the stars came out, Atara finally returned with news of her own. She stepped into Master Juwain’s tent, and came over to kiss Kane’s forehead. She smiled sadly as if she had looked upon his still form a thousand times. Then she said to me, ‘May I speak with you alone?’

I nodded my head at this. We went outside and walked along the rows of campfires, where warriors gathered drinking beer and telling of deeds at the Culhadosh Commons, and other battles. Joshu Kadar and a few knights kept a vigil outside my pavilion. No one seemed bothered that I should hold council inside alone with Atara. I closed the flaps behind us, and went around this large space lighting the many candles in their stands. They cast little, flickering lights on the long council table and the tent’s walls and ceiling. Atara and I sat facing each other on a red carpet at the center of the tent.

‘We are as alone as we can be,’ I said, gazing at the blindfold that bound her face. ‘What is troubling you?’

Atara cocked her head as if listening for eavesdroppers along the walls. ‘It might be better if we took a walk in the hills.’

I laughed softly at this, and told her, ‘Joshu Kadar and Shivalad, to say nothing of Lord Avijan, would never allow that. Now that the gathering has begun, they look for assassins everywhere. They don’t even like me to walk around our own encampment alone.’

Atara smiled grimly at this, then her deep, dulcet voice grew even lower. ‘It is beginning, Val. At last, this terrible, terrible future that I have seen for too long is upon us.’

I moved even closer to her, and covered her hot, long hand with mine. Outside the tent came the sound of crickets chirping and men chanting out the ancient epics. Inside, it was nearly so quiet that I could hear the drumbeat of Atara’s heart – and my own.

‘Kane,’ I whispered to her, ‘said that in Galda, people spoke of a great crusade. I didn’t think Morjin could be ready to order forth his armies so soon.’

She drew out her scryer’s crystal, and she pressed this sphere of white gelstei against her forehead. ‘I don’t know that he is. But he makes ready something. Out on the Wendrush. Karimah told me that the Zayak have crossed the Blood River, the Janjii, too. It can only be that they have gone to join with the Marituk. From the south, there have come reports that the Tukulak are making common cause with the Danyak and Usark.’

‘Kane always said,’ I murmured, squeezing her hand, ‘that Morjin would try to unite the Sarni before falling against the Nine Kingdoms.’

Atara smiled sadly as she cupped her clear crystal in her free hand. ‘He will never unite all the Sarni – not so long as my grandfather can pull a bow. Sajagax has called for the tribes to join with the Kurmak in alliance against Morjin.’

‘Is this the news that Karimah brought you?’

‘Yes, in part.’

‘Sajagax,’ I said, remembering, ‘is a great man. But most of the tribes favor Morjin, do they not?’

‘Yes, most,’ she told me, nodding her head. ‘But not the Niuriu, nor the central Urtuk. Nor the Adirii, most of the clans, and probably not the Danladi. And then there are the Manslayers.’

At the mention of these most willful of warriors, drawn from every Sarni tribe, I gazed at Atara and waited for her to say more.

‘My sisters,’ she told me, ‘will not keep allegiance with their tribes – this has been decided. The Manslayers are to be a tribe of our own. But what my sisters could not decide when they met at the council rock a year and a half ago was whether to go to war against Morjin. Only a chiefess, my sisters say, can lead them against such an enemy.’

I listened to her deep breathing for a few moments. Then I said, ‘But the Manslayers have no chiefess.’

‘No, they do not – not yet. But there is to be another gathering, in the Niuriu’s lands, where the Diamond River joins with the Poru. We are to choose a chiefess.’

I bowed my head to her. ‘You, then?’

‘That is Karimah’s hope. And Sonjah’s, and Aieela’s – and others.”

I looked over at the long table where my father had once sat at council with his most trusted lords. And I said, ‘For you to be Chiefess of the Manslayers – that would be a great thing.’

‘That is what Karimah tells me,’ Atara said with a sad smile. ‘If the Marituk, with the Zayak and Janjii, attack my grandfather, we could ride to his aid.’

I looked around for a pitcher of water so that I might ease the aching in my throat. And I said to her, ‘Then you have already decided, haven’t you?’

She slowly nodded her head. ‘I cannot allow the Kurmak to be trampled under. We cannot, Val.’

‘I cannot let you go,’ I said, wrapping my hand around her hand even more tightly. ‘I need you here, beside me.’

She brought my hand up to her lips, whose softness seemed to burn against my fingers. Then she told me, ‘I shall stay with you until you become king.’

‘Will I become king, then?’

‘Only you know that. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Does it matter what I want?’ I asked her. I gazed into her gelstei as if I could see within its sparkling clarity not only the shape of future events but the calamities of the past. ‘Once, I wanted nothing more than to climb mountains and play the flute in the company of my family. And to marry you.’

‘And now?’

I blinked against the burning in my eyes, and turned away from her crystal because I could not bear what I saw there. And I said, ‘After Morjin murdered my mother and grandmother, and my brothers, everything seemed to burn away. Everywhere I looked, at myself most of all, I could see only fire. I was this fire, Atara. You know, you must know. I thought only of murdering Morjin, in revenge. As I now think only of destroying him. Everything that he is – even his memory in the hearts and minds of those he has deluded. I can almost hear the wind calling me to do this, and the birds and the wolves and every child that Morjin’s Red Priests have ever nailed to a cross or put to the sword. Sometimes, it seems the very world upon which we sit cries out for me to put my sword into him.’

She positioned her head fully facing me, then she said, ‘Do you remember the lines from the Laws?’

She drew in a breath, and then recited from the twenty-fourth book of the Saganom Elu:

You are what your deep, driving desire is:

As your desire is, so is your will;

As your will is, so is your deed;

As your deed is, so is your destiny

I smiled at this, as Kane might smile at a whirlwind sweeping down upon him. And I asked her, ‘Have you seen my destiny then?’

‘I have seen your desire,’ she said to me, taking hold of my hand again. ‘I have felt it, Val – I can’t tell you how deeply I’ve felt it, this beautiful, beautiful thing that burns me up like the sweetest of fires. It is not to do this terrible deed that you dream of. Not just. A marriage you would make with me, you have said. A child we would make together, I have said. But I will not see him born into this world.’

I stared down by my side where I had set my sword. ‘But what other world is there?’

‘Only the one that you dream of even more than you do Morjin’s death.’

‘Oh, that world,’ I said, smiling. ‘That impossible world.’

She smiled back as if she could really see me. ‘What was it that your father used to say?: “How is it possible that the impossible is not only possible but inevitable?”’

‘He was a wise man,’ I told her. ‘He would have wanted me to believe it is inevitable that I will marry you. That this is not just my own desire, but the will of the world.’

‘That is a beautiful, beautiful thought,’ she told me.

‘But it will never be, will it? Not unless we defeat Morjin. And that will never be if I keep you from aiding Sajagax.’

She held up her clear gelstei before me. ‘Very little of the future is set in stone, but I can tell that you cannot prevail against Morjin alone, without the help of the Sarni tribes.’

I considered this as I drew out the handkerchief that I always kept close to me. I unfolded it, and I gazed at its center, at the single long, coiled, golden hair, no different from any of Atara’s other hairs. And I whispered to her, ‘One chance for victory, you said, as slender as this hair. And one chance only that I will marry you.’

‘One chance,’ she said, squeezing her crystal. ‘And I must make it be. And so must you.’

I felt a stream of fear burn down my throat as if I had swallowed molten silver. And I asked her, ‘Will I ever see you again?’

She smiled in her mysterious way, and said, ‘The better question might be: will I ever see you again? As the king you must be?’

‘Tomorrow will be the test of that,’ I told her.

‘No,’ she said with a wave of her hand, ‘I do not mean King of Mesh, but King of the World. And not this world, as Morjin wishes to rule, but a true king, of starfire and diamond, such as has never been before on Ea.’

I considered this, too, then said, ‘I am not sure I know what you mean.’

‘I am not sure that I do either,’ she said. ‘But I once told you that I can never be the woman I have hoped to be until you become the man you were born to be. The one I have always dreamed of.’

Because her words cut at me, I pressed my fist against my chest. ‘But I am who I am, Atara. And I am just a man.’

‘And that one I have always loved, with all my heart, with all my soul,’ she told me. ‘The man who is just a man – and an angel, too.’

At this, I looked off at the walls of the tent, hoping that no one was listening in on our words. ‘You shouldn’t speak that way of anyone, not even me.’

‘No, I shouldn’t, should I?’ she said. ‘But I can’t help myself, and never have been able to. Most people take too little upon themselves; a few take too much. They look in the mirror and behold a giant, immortal and invincible. I was always afraid of being one of these. I wanted to make everything perfect. Or, at least, to see things come out as they should. And that is why, when I look at my fate, and yours, I want to laugh or cry, and sometimes I don’t know which.’

‘But why, then?’ I said, not fully understanding her.

And she grasped hold of my hand and said, ‘Because that is the strange, strange thing about our lives, Val. It might really be upon us to save the world.’

She started laughing then, and so did I: deep, belly laughs that shook the whole of my body and brought tears to my eyes. I drew Atara closer, and kissed her lips, her forehead and the white band of cloth covering the empty spaces where her eyes used to be. And I whispered in her ear: ‘I will miss you so badly – as the night does the sun.’

‘And I will miss you,’ she told me. ‘Until I see you again in the darkest of places, where it seems there is no sun – only Valashu, the Morning Star.’

She kissed me then, long and deeply, and I didn’t think she would have cared if anyone had heard the murmurs of delight and fear within our throats or had seen us sitting with our arms wrapped around each other for what seemed like hours. At last, though, we broke apart. Atara said that she had to go feed her horse and prepare for a long journey. And I must prepare to meet my fate – or make it – when the sun rose on the morrow.

7

On the twenty-first day of Soldru, early on a morning of blue skies and brilliant sunlight, I put on my diamond armor and girded my sword at my side. When I came out of my pavilion, my companions and counselors stood on the crushed grass of our encampment’s central lane waiting for me. I nodded at Lord Avijan, tall and grave, and resplendent in his blue surcoat emblazoned with its golden boar. Likewise I greeted Lord Harsha, Lord Sharad, Lord Noldashan and others. Maram also had donned a suit of diamond armor, as had Kane. My invincible friend stood between Atara and Liljana as if ready to ride on a pleasant outing in the countryside – or to go to war. His harsh face radiated anticipation, wrath, joy and his fiery will to crush anyone who opposed him. I had thought that he must spend the next few days or weeks recuperating from his dreadful wound. I should have known better. According to what Liljana later told me, Kane had awakened before dawn calling for a haunch of bloody meat. He had drawn great strength from this savage meal, hour by hour regaining his nearly bottomless vitality. With a new adventure now at hand, he seemed ready to battle any or all of Lord Tomavar’s knights on my behalf.

‘So, Val,’ he said to me with a nod of his head, ‘this is the day.’

With Sar Shivalad, Sar Jonavar, Sar Kanshar and Joshu Kadar acting as my guardians, I led forth down the lane and into the square. The two thousand warriors and knights who had originally pledged to Lord Avijan stood drawn up in full battle armor along its eastern side. The sun poured down upon their neat, sparkling ranks. So it was with Lord Tanu’s men and Lord Tomavar’s, at the southern and western edges of the square. Along the northern perimeter, the Lords Ramanu, Bahram and Kharashan had arrayed their smaller forces in three separate groupings, next to a veritable mob of the two thousand free warriors. Into the square’s four corners crowded the women, children, old men and a few outlanders who had come to witness the day’s events. I reminded myself that they must be evacuated from the field at the first sign of trouble.

I walked straight out to the center of the square with my companions, and so it was with the other lords who would be king. I paid little heed to either Lord Bahram or Lord Ramanu, or even Lord Kharashan, a thick, bullnecked old warrior whose square face showed little guile. Lord Tanu stood to my left with Lord Eldru, Sar Shagarth and the grizzled Lord Ramjay slightly behind him. A small, dark, dangerous-looking man, Lord Tanu’s cousin, Lord Manamar, had joined them as well.

Straight across from me waited Lord Tomavar. I had not seen him since the year before at the Culhadosh Commons, and he still looked much the same: very tall, with great broad shoulders and long arms used to swinging a sword. His white surcoat, draped over his heavily-muscled body, showed the black tower of his line. Grief still tormented his long, horsey face, which he positioned facing me square-on as if in challenge. I liked his eyes, for they were deep and quick and shone with a ready courage. My father had valued him greatly as the finest of tacticians and a warrior who inspired his men to fight with a terrible ferocity. And I knew that he had esteemed my father, though it seemed he held only grievance and suspicion toward me.

‘Lord Valashu Elahad,’ he said, greeting me formally, ‘I should like it made known from the beginning of this gathering that you do the warriors great insult in asking them to stand for you again, where they have already stood against you.’

His words, carried by his loud, deep, powerful voice, blasted out into the square. His rage and deep anguish stunned me. So did the fury that darkened his black eyes. He took advantage of my silence to try immediately to preempt my bid to become king.

‘Lord Tanu!’ he called out, turning to his right where Lord Tanu stood with Lord Manamar and his other captains. ‘We have marched in many campaigns and fought in many battles together. Your men trust you, even as King Shamesh did, and all those who know you. If I should be struck down here today by a bolt of lightning, is there anyone in Mesh who would make a better king? It is in recognition of your services to our land and your prowess as the greatest of knights that I would like to honor you. Command your warriors to pledge to me, and I shall make you Lord Protector of Mesh and Lord Commander of my army!’

Lord Tomavar’s captains – Lord Vishand, Sar Jarval and the elegant Lord Arajay Solval – pressed up close behind him as if they could not quite believe what they had just heard. They seemed as surprised as the rest of Lord Tomavar’s warriors, drawn up across the square. It seemed that Lord Tomavar’s offer to Lord Tanu had been an inspiration of the moment, based upon Lord Tomavar’s keen instincts and his reading of Lord Tanu.

‘Lord Protector, you say!’ Lord Tanu cried out. He tried not to let his amazement show on his tight, sour face. ‘And Lord Commander of all the army?’

‘Second only to myself,’ Lord Tomavar told him. ‘The command of all the infantry shall be yours.’

As the infantry in our army outnumbered the cavalry by more than ten to one, it was a magnanimous offer.

‘Command your warriors to pledge to me,’ Lord Tomavar said again, ‘and we can bring an end to this conclave, here and now!’

If Lord Tanu did as Lord Tomavar asked, then more than ten thousand of the nearly sixteen thousand warriors gathered around the square would stand for Lord Tomavar, and he would become king.

‘Val,’ Maram murmured at my shoulder, ‘do something, before it is too late!’

Slightly behind Maram stood Daj, Estrella, Master Juwain, Liljana and Atara. And Kane, who growled out, ‘So, it’s a deal that this Tomavar would make!’

As a tactic, Lord Tomavar’s offer to Lord Tanu was bold and brilliant, and I could feel Lord Tanu nearly burning to incline his head to Lord Tomavar. In the moment before he commanded his muscles to move and changed the future forever, I called out to him: ‘Lord Tanu – you have promised to release your warriors from their pledges so that they may stand for whom they will!’

Lord Tanu, always a thoughtful man, regarded me deeply as the tension flowed down from his jaws into the rest of his compact body. For the moment, it seemed that he could not speak.

‘Lord Tanu,’ Lord Ramjay shouted out in his lord’s stead, ‘has made no such promise! He has said only that he agreed with you that the warriors should be released from their pledges. Well, perhaps they should be, if no solution other than war can decide who should be king. But Lord Tomavar has proposed an honorable way out of our troubles.’

I heard murmurs of assent ripple up and down the lines of men behind Lord Tomavar and then pass even to Lord Tanu’s warriors, drawn up in their ranks ten deep. And then the fiery Sar Vikan, standing with the others in my escort, cried out: ‘You speak of honor, but Lord Tanu has said that the warriors should decide who will be king! By the lake, Lord Ramjay! In front of you and many who are gathered here, Lord Tanu said this thing!’

‘He did say it,’ Lord Ramjay agreed. ‘And it shall be the warriors who will choose our king. They have given their pledges of their own free will, and if Lord Tanu then asks them to stand for Lord Tomavar, that, in the end, is nothing but their will, and is the very essence of honor.’

For a while, various knights and lords gathered in the square bandied words back and forth. And all the while Lord Tanu stared at me as I did him. I felt my heart pushing my blood through my veins up into my hot, hurting face. I felt Lord Tanu’s blood rushing through him, too. I did not want to think that Lord Tanu would equivocate and try to take Lord Ramjay’s ignoble way out of his promise to me. In the end, as my father had said, either one believed in men, or not.

‘Lord Tomavar!’ Lord Tanu finally said, turning to this great lord. ‘Your proposal is fitting, fair and indeed generous.’

He paused to take in a breath of air as he looked up at the grinning Lord Tomavar. Lord Tanu’s face seemed to sour even more, if that were possible. Then he continued, ‘But it comes too late – I have indeed given my word to Lord Elahad that the warriors should be free choose our king.’

‘You have promised that,’ Lord Eldru said, glaring at Lord Ramjay.

‘And the warriors should choose you as king!’ Sar Shagarth said.

‘Lord Tanu for king!’ a hundred warriors standing behind Lord Tanu cried out all at once. ‘Lord Vishathar Tanu for king!’

Lord Manamar Tanu, the father of Lord Tomavar’s abducted wife, cast Lord Tomavar a dark, angry look, and muttered, ‘Why should we, in any case, negotiate with a man who won’t even return a brooch to its rightful owner?’

As a strategy, Lord Tomavar’s offer to Lord Tanu had been a poor one and had ultimately failed. It antagonized not only me and the men whom I led, but many of Lord Tanu’s followers as well. And worse, Lord Tomavar had betrayed his essential weakness: he sought Mesh’s kingship with such desperation that he was willing to stoop to bargaining like a merchant rather than relying on sound arguments and force of character to win the warriors.

‘All right then!’ Lord Tomavar shouted. ‘Do you think I have any cause to fear the judgment of the warriors? Let it be as you have said! Let them stand for a king, here and now!’

Lord Tanu positioned himself like a ram before a furious bull. Even as Lord Tomavar’s face grew darker, hotter and angrier, Lord Tanu stared at him stubbornly as if he had ice in his veins.

‘We all can agree to that,’ Lord Tanu called out to Lord Tomavar. ‘Release your men from their pledges, that they can stand for whom they will!’

But Lord Tomavar only shook his long, heavy head at this. ‘My men gave their pledges of their own will, and so they have already chosen who should be king.’

‘Yes, they chose – but in different circumstances. The times have changed.’

‘The times are as they have always been! And they demand a king, tested in many battles, loved and trusted, who can lead his warriors. To glory and victory!’

As he said this, his warriors behind him let loose a great cheer – though it seemed not so great as Lord Tomavar might have wished.

‘We cannot,’ Lord Tanu said, ‘allow a king to be chosen this way, with two fifths of the warriors pledged to you, and everyone else standing free.’

Lord Tomavar turned to glare at me then. And he shouted, ‘I won’t allow my warriors to stand for this one! They call Morjin the Lord of Lies, but Valashu Elahad deceives men into following him!’

A dark fire leaped in Kane’s eyes at this, and my fearsome friend stepped forward as he grasped the hilt of his sword. And he snarled at Lord Tomavar: ‘Say it to my face, Gorvan Tomavar, that I am a man who has been deceived!’

In horror of what might soon occur, both Master Juwain and Maram grasped one of Kane’s arms and eased him backward. Lord Tomavar tried to ignore the furious Kane. He continued staring down his long nose at me.

‘I won’t let my men stand for the Elahad,’ he reaffirmed. ‘Not this Elahad.’

He whipped about to look at Manamar Tanu and bellowed: ‘And I won’t return the brooch! It belongs to Vareva, and my beloved wife is not dead!’

‘The Red Dragon,’ Lord Manamar said in a venomous voice, ‘took my daughter more than a year ago, and so we must assume that she is dead – or worse. Return the brooch, Lord Tomavar!’

‘You ask me to send diamonds to you,’ Lord Tomavar snapped, ‘when you command your smithies to cease shipments of diamond armor to us?’

‘It is not the same thing – return the brooch!’

‘You may have it,’ Lord Tomavar said, grasping the hilt of his sword, ‘when you pry it from my dead fingers!’

‘I should like nothing better!’ the small, deadly Lord Manamar said. His hand, too, locked onto his sword. ‘Tell me you are willing, and we shall settle this matter here!’

Now it was Lord Tanu’s turn to cool things down. He grasped Lord Manamar’s arm and pulled his bellicose cousin a few paces back from Lord Tomavar. It might have been thought that Lord Tanu would want Lord Manamar to put his sword through Lord Tomavar’s neck, and so remove at least one contender to the throne. And Lord Tanu might

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