The
Lightstone

Part One: The Ninth Kingdom

Book One of the Ea Cycle

DAVID ZINDELL

COPYRIGHT

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperVoyager 2001

Copyright © David Zindell 2001

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006486206

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780007396597

Version: 2018-05-21

DEDICATION

For Justine and Jillian

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

28

Appendices

Heraldry

The Gelstei

The Greater Gelstei

Books Of the Saganom Elu

The Ages Of Ea

The Months of the Year

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Works

About the Publisher

MAP

1

On clear winter nights, I have stood on mountains just to be closer to the stars. Some say that these shimmering lights are the souls of warriors who have died in battle; some say that at the beginning of time, Arwe himself cast an infinite number of diamonds into the sky to shine forever and defeat the darkness of night. But I believe the stars are other suns like our own. They speak along the blood in fiery whisperings of ancient dreams and promises unfulfilled. From there long ago our people came to earth bearing the cup called the Lightstone; to there we would someday return as angels holding light in our hands.

My grandfather believed this, too. It was he who taught me the stories of the Great Bear, the Dragon, the Seven Sisters and the other constellations. It was he who named me after the bright Morning Star, Valashu. He always said that we were born to shine. A Valari warrior, he once told me, should polish first his soul and then his sword. For only then can he see his fate and accept it. Or fight against it if he is one of the few men marked out to make their own fate. Such a man is a glory and gift to the earth. Such a man was my grandfather. But the Ishkans killed him all the same.

Elkasar Elahad would have found it a strange fate indeed that on the same day King Kiritan’s messengers came from Alonia to announce a great quest for the Lightstone, a whole company of knights and nobles from Ishka rode into my father’s castle to negotiate for peace or call for war. It was the first of Ashte in the 2,812th year in that span of centuries that the historians had named the Age of the Dragon. In the warmth of one of the loveliest springs that anyone could remember, with the snows melting from the mountains and wildflowers everywhere abloom, the forests surrounding Silvassu teemed with boar and deer and other animals that might be killed for food. My father’s steward, upon counting the castle’s guests that day, grumbled that the kitchens would require much food if any feast were to be made. And so my brothers and I, along with other knights, were called to go out and hunt for it. After all, even the murderers of a king must eat.

Just after noon I rode down from the hills upon which our ancient city is built with my eldest brother, Lord Asaru. My friend, Maram, and one of my brother’s squires rode with us as well. We were a small hunting party, perhaps the smallest of the many to fill the woods that day. I was glad for such company, for I cared nothing for the sport of hounds yelping and men on snorting horses running down a fear-maddened pig. As for Asaru, he was like our father, King Shamesh: stern, serious and focused on his objective with an astonishing clarity of purpose. His soul had not only been polished but sharpened until it cut like the finest Godhran steel. He had said that we would take a deer, and for that we needed small numbers and stealth. Maram, who would have preferred the pageantry of hunting with the other knights, followed him anyway. In truth, he followed me. As he liked to say, he would never desert his best friend. As he didn’t like to say, he was a coward who had once seen what the razor-like tusks of a boar could do to a man’s groin. It was much safer to hunt a deer.

It was a warm day, and the air smelled of freshly turned earth and lilac blossoms. Every quarter of a mile or so, a stout farmhouse stood out among fields demarcated by lines of low stone walls. There was new barley in the ground, and the golden sun in the sky. As we passed farther into the Valley of the Swans, the farmland gave out onto miles of unbroken forest. At the edge of a field, where the ancient oaks rose up like a wall of green, we drew up and dismounted. Asaru handed the reins of his horse to his young squire, Joshu Kadar, who had the square face and stolid temperament of his father, Lord Kadar. Joshu didn’t like being left to tend the horses, and watched impatiently as Asaru drew out his great yew bow and strung it. For a moment I was tempted to give him my bow and let him hunt the deer while I waited in the sun. I hated hunting almost as much as I did war.

And then Asaru, tall and imperious in his flowing black cloak, handed me my bow and pointed at the forest. He said, ‘Why these woods, Val?’

‘Why not?’ I countered. Asaru, knowing how I felt about slaughtering innocent animals, had given me my choice of where to hunt that day. Although he had remained silent during our ride down from the castle, he must have known where I was leading him. ‘You know why,’ I said more gently, looking at him.

And he looked at me, fearless as all Valari would hope to be. His eyes were those of the Valari kings: deep and mysterious, as black as space and as bright as stars. He had the bold face bones and long hawk’s nose of our ancient line. His skin, burnt brown in the hot spring sun, was like weathered ivory, and he had a great shock of glossy black hair, long and thick and blowing wild in the wind. Although he was very much a man of blood and steel and other elements of the earth, there was something otherworldly about him, too. My father said that we looked enough alike to be twins. But of the seven sons of Shavashar Elahad, he was the firstborn and I was the last. And that made all the difference in the world.

He drew closer and stood silently regarding me. Where I insisted on wearing a leather hunting jacket and a homespun shirt and trousers of a deep forest green, he was resplendent in a cloak and a black tunic embroidered with the silver swan and the seven silver stars of the royal house of Mesh. He would never think to be seen in any other garments. He was the tallest of my brothers, taller than I by half an inch. He seemed to look down at me, and his bright black eyes fell like blazing suns on the scar cut into my forehead above my left eye. It was a unique scar, shaped like a lightning bolt. I think it reminded him of things that he would rather not know.

‘Why do you have to be so wild?’ he said in a quickly exhaled breath.

I stood beneath his gaze listening to the thunder of my heart, but said nothing.

‘Here, now!’ a loud voice boomed out. ‘What’s this? What are you talking about?’

Maram, upon seeing the silent communication flowing between us, came up clutching his bow and making nervous rumbling noises in his throat. Though not as tall as Asaru, he was a big man with a big belly that pushed out ahead of him as if to knock any obstacles or lesser men from his path.

‘What should I know about these woods?’ he asked me.

‘They’re full of deer,’ I said, smiling at him.

‘And other animals,’ Asaru added provocatively.

‘What animals?’ Maram asked. He licked his thick, sensuous lips. He rubbed his thick, brown beard where it curled across his blubbery cheeks.

‘The last time we entered these woods,’ Asaru said, ‘we could hardly move without stepping on a rabbit. And there were squirrels everywhere.’

‘Good, good,’ Maram said, ‘I like squirrels.’

‘So do the foxes,’ Asaru said. ‘So do the wolves.’

Maram coughed to clear his throat, and then swallowed a couple of times. ‘In my country, I’ve only ever seen red foxes – they’re not at all like these huge gray ones of yours that might as well be wolves. And as for our wolves, ah, well, we hunted out most of them long ago.’

Maram was not of Mesh, not even of the Nine Kingdoms of the Valari. Everything about him was an affront to a Valari’s sensibilities. His large brown eyes reminded one of the sugared coffee that the Delians drink, and were given to tears of rage or sentimentality as the situation might demand. He wore jeweled rings on each of the fingers of his hamlike hands; he wore the bright scarlet tunic and trousers of the Delian royalty. He liked red, of course, because it was an outward manifestation of the colors of his fiery heart. And even more he liked standing out and being seen, especially in a wood full of hungry men with bows and arrows. My brothers believed that he had been sent to the Brotherhood school in the mountains above Silvassu as a punishment for his cowardly ways. But the truth was he had been banished from court due to an indiscretion with his father’s favorite concubine.

‘Do not,’ Asaru warned him, ‘hunt wolves in Mesh. It’s bad luck.’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, twanging his bowstring, ‘I won’t hunt them if they won’t hunt me.’

‘Wolves don’t hunt men,’ Asaru assured him. ‘It’s the bears that you have to watch for.’

‘Bears?’

‘This time of year, especially the mothers with their cubs.’

‘I saw one of your bears last year,’ Maram said. ‘I hope I never see another.’

I rubbed my forehead as I caught the heat of Maram’s fear. Of course, Mesh is famed for the ferociousness of its huge, brown bears, which had driven the much gentler black bears into gentler lands such as Delu ages ago.

‘If the Brothers don’t expel you and you stay with us long enough,’ Asaru said, ‘you’ll see plenty of bears.’

‘But I thought the bears kept mostly to the mountains.’

‘Well, where do you think you are?’ Asaru said, sweeping his hand out toward the snow-capped peaks all around us.

In truth, we stood in the Valley of the Swans, largest and loveliest of Mesh’s valleys. Here the Kurash flowed through gentle terrain into Lake Waskaw. Here there were other lakes, too, where the swans came each spring to hatch their young and swim through clear blue waters.

But across the valley twenty miles due east, Mount Eluru stood like a vast pyramid of granite and ice. Beyond it were still greater peaks of the Culhadosh Range, which separates the kingdoms of Waas and Mesh. In the distance to the south forty-five miles as a raven flies, was the hazy wall of the Itarsu in whose narrow passes my ancestors had more than once slaughtered invading Sarni armies from the great gray plains beyond. Behind us above the hills from where we had ridden that day, just to the west of the bear-infested woods that we proposed to enter, were three of the greatest and most beautiful peaks of the Central Range: Telshar, Arakel and Vayu. These were the mountains of my soul; here, I thought, was the heart of the Morning Mountains and possibly of all Ea. As a boy I had played in their forests and sung songs to their silent, stony faces. They rose up like gods just beyond the houses and battlements of Silvassu: the shining Vayu a few miles to the south, Arakel west just across the swift Kurash river, and Telshar the Great on whose lower slopes my grandfather’s grandfathers had built the Elahad castle. Once I had climbed this luminous mountain. From the summit, looking north, I had seen Raaskel and Korukel glittering beyond the Diamond River, and beyond these guardian peaks, the cold white mountains of Ishka. But, of course, all my life I have tried not to look in that direction.

Now Maram followed the line of Asaru’s outstretched hand. He looked into the dark, waiting forest and muttered, ‘Ah, where am I, indeed? Lost, lost, truly lost.’

At that moment, as if in answer to some silent supplication of Maram’s, there came the slow clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. I turned to see a white-haired man leading a draft horse across the field straight toward us. He wore a patch over his right eye and walked with a severe limp as if his knee had been smashed with a mace or a flail. I knew that I had seen this old farmer before, but I couldn’t quite remember where.

‘Hello, lads,’ he said as he drew up to us. ‘It’s a fine day for hunting, isn’t it?’

Maram took in the farmer’s work-stained woolens, which smelled of horse manure and pigs. He wrinkled up his fat nose disdainfully. But Asaru, who had a keener eye, immediately saw the ring glittering on the farmer’s gnarled finger, and so did I. It was a plain silver ring set with four brilliant diamonds: the ring of a warrior and a lord at that.

‘Lord Harsha,’ Asaru said, finally recognizing him, ‘it’s been a long time.’

‘Yes, it has,’ Lord Harsha said. He looked at Asaru’s squire, and then at Maram and me. ‘Who are your friends?’

‘Excuse me,’ Asaru said. ‘May I present Joshu Kadar of Lashku?’

Lord Harsha nodded his head at my brother’s squire and told him, ‘Your father is a fine man. We fought against Waas together.’

Young Joshu bowed deeply as befit his rank, and then stood silently basking in Lord Harsha’s compliment.

‘And this,’ Asaru continued, ‘is Prince Maram Marshayk of Delu. He’s a student of the Brothers.’

Lord Harsha peered out at him with his single eye and said, ‘Isn’t it true that the Brothers don’t hunt animals?’

‘Ah, that is true,’ Maram said, gripping his bow, ‘we hunt knowledge. You see, I’ve come along only to protect my friend in case we run into any bears.’

Now Lord Harsha turned his attention toward me, and looked back and forth between me and my brother. The light of his eye bore into my forehead like the rays of the sun.

‘You must be Valashu Elahad,’ he said.

Just then Maram’s face reddened in anger on my behalf. I knew that he didn’t approve of the Valari system of honors and rank. It must have galled him that an old man of no noble blood, a mere farmer, could outrank a prince.

I looked down at the ring I wore around my finger. In it was set neither the four diamonds of a lord nor the three of a master – nor even the two sparkling stones of a full knight. A single diamond stood out against the silver: the ring of a simple warrior. In truth, I was lucky to have won it. If not for some skills with the sword and bow that my father had taught me, I never would have. What kind of warrior hates war? How is it that a Valari knight – or rather, a man who only dreamed of being a knight – should prefer playing the flute and writing poetry to trials of arms with his brothers and countrymen?

Lord Harsha smiled grimly at me and said, ‘It’s been a long time since you’ve come to these woods, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir, it has,’ I said.

‘Well, you should have paid your respects before trampling over my fields. Young people have no manners these days.’

‘My apologies, sir, but we were in a hurry. You see, we got a late start.’

I didn’t explain that our hunting expedition had been delayed for an hour while I searched the castle for Maram – only to find him in bed with one of my father’s chambermaids.

‘Yes, very late,’ Lord Harsha said, looking up at the sun. ‘The Ishkans have already been here before you.’

“Which Ishkans?’ I asked in alarm. I noticed that Asaru was now staring off into the woods intently.

‘They didn’t stop to present themselves either,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘But there were five of them – I heard them bragging they were going to take a bear.’

At this news, Maram gripped his bow even more tightly. Beads of sweat formed up among the brown curls of hair across his forehead. He said, ‘Well, then – I suppose we should leave these woods to them.’

But Asaru only smiled as if Maram had suggested abandoning all of Mesh to the enemy. He said, ‘The Ishkans like to hunt bears. Well, it’s a big wood, and they’ve had more than an hour to become lost in it.’

‘Please see to it that you don’t become lost as well,’ Lord Harsha said.

‘My brother,’ Asaru said, looking at me strangely, ‘is more at home in the woods than in his own castle. We won’t get lost.’

‘Good. Then good luck hunting.’ Lord Harsha nodded his head at me in a curt bow. ‘Are you after a bear this time, too?’

‘No, a deer,’ I said. ‘As we were the last time we came here.’

‘But you found a bear all the same.’

‘It might be more accurate to say the bear found us.’

Now Maram’s knuckles grew white around his bow, and he looked at me with wide-open eyes. ‘What do you mean a bear found you?’

Because I didn’t want to tell him the story, I stood there looking off into the woods in silence. And so Lord Harsha answered for me.

‘It was ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Lord Asaru had just received his knight’s ring, and Val must have been what – eleven? Ten?’

‘Ten,’ I told him.

‘That’s right,’ Lord Harsha said, nodding his head. ‘And so the lads went into the woods alone after their deer. And then the bear –’

‘Was it a large bear?’ Maram interrupted.

Lord Harsha’s single eye narrowed as he admonished Maram to silence as he might a child. And then he continued the story: ‘And so the bear attacked them. It broke Lord Asaru’s arm and some ribs. And mauled Valashu, as you can see.’

Here he paused to point his old finger at the scar on my forehead.

‘But you told me that you were born with that scar!’ Maram said, turning to me.

‘Yes,’ I said. That’s right.’

Truly, I had been. My mother’s labor in bringing me into the world was so hard and long that everyone had said I wanted to remain inside her in darkness. And so, finally, the midwife had had to use tongs to pull me out. The tongs had cut me, and the wound had healed raggedly, in the shape of a lightning bolt.

‘The bear,’ Asaru explained, ‘opened up the scar again and cut it deeper.’

‘He was lucky the bear didn’t break his skull,’ Lord Harsha said to Maram. ‘And both of them were lucky that my son, may he abide in peace, was walking through the woods that day. He found these lads half-dead in the moss and killed the bear with his spear before it could kill them.’

Andaru Harsha – I knew the name of my rescuer very well. At the Battle of Red Mountain, I had taken a wound in my thigh protecting him from the Waashians’ spears. And later, at the same battle, I had frozen up and been unable to kill one of our enemy who stood shieldless and helpless before me. Because of my hesitation, many still whispered that I was a coward. But Asaru never called me that.

‘Then your son saved their lives,’ Maram said to Lord Harsha.

‘He always said it was the best thing he ever did.’

Maram came up to me and grabbed my arm. ‘And you think to repay the courage of this man’s son by going back into these woods?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said, looking at me with his soft brown eyes. ‘I see.’

And he did see, which was why I loved him. Without being told, he understood that I had come back to these woods today not to seek vengeance by shooting arrows in some strange bear, but only because there are other monsters that must be faced.

‘Well, then,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Enough of bear stories. Would you like a bite to eat before your hunt?’

Due to Maram’s peccadilloes, we had missed lunch and we were all of us hungry. Of course, that wouldn’t have dismayed Asaru, but rejecting Lord Harsha’s hospitality would. And so Asaru, speaking for all of us as if he were already king, bowed his head and said, ‘We’d be honored.’

While Lord Harsha opened his horse’s saddlebags, our horses stamped the earth impatiently and bent their heads to munch the sweet green grass growing between the field’s stone wall and the forest. I glanced off across the field to study Lord Asaru’s house. I liked its square lines and size and the cedar-shingled roof, which was almost as steeply gabled as the chalets you see higher in the mountains. It was built of oak and stone: austere, clean, quietly beautiful – very Valari. I remembered Andaru Harsha bringing me to this house, where I had lain in delirium for half a day while his father tended my wound.

‘Here, now,’ Lord Harsha said as he laid a cloth on the wall. ‘Sit with me, and let’s talk about the war.’

While we took our places along the wall, he set out two loaves of black, barley bread, a tub of goat cheese and some freshly pulled green onions. We cut the bread for sandwiches and ate them. I liked the tang of the onions against the saltiness of the cheese; I liked it even more when Lord Harsha drew out four silver goblets and filled them with brown beer that he poured from a small, wooden cask.

‘This was brewed last fall,’ Lord Harsha said. In turn, he handed goblets to Asaru, me and Joshu. Then he picked up his own goblet. ‘It was a good harvest, and a better brew. Shall we make a toast?’

I saw Maram licking his lips as if he’d been stricken dumb with grief, and I said, ‘Lord Harsha, you’ve forgotten Maram.’

‘Indeed,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you said he’s with the Brothers – hasn’t he taken vows?’

‘Ah, well, yes, I have,’ Maram admitted. ‘I’ve forsworn wine, women and war.’

‘Well, then?’

‘I never vowed not to drink beer.’

‘You quibble, Prince Maram.’

‘Yes, I do, don’t I? But only when vital matters are at stake.’

‘Such as the drinking of beer?’

‘Such as the drinking of Meshian beer, which is known to be the finest in all of Ea.’

This compliment proved too much for Lord Harsha, who laughed and magically produced another goblet from the saddlebags. He picked up the cask and poured forth a stream of beer.

‘Let’s drink to the King,’ he said, raising his goblet. ‘May he abide in the One and find the wisdom to decide on peace or war.’

We all clinked goblets and drank the frothy beer. It tasted of barley and hops and roasted nuts of the talaru tree that grows only in the forests near Mount Arakel. Maram, of course, was the first to finish his beer. He gulped it down like a hound does milk. Then he held out his goblet for Lord Harsha to fill it again and said, ‘Now I would like to propose a toast. To the lords and knights of Mesh who have fought faithfully for their King.’

‘Excellent,’ Lord Harsha said, once more filling Maram’s goblet. ‘Let’s drink to that indeed.’

Again Maram drained his cup. He licked the froth from his mustache. He held the empty cup out yet again and said, ‘And now, ah, to the courage and prowess of the warriors – how do you say it? To flawlessness and fearlessness.’

But Lord Harsha stoppered the cask with a cork, and said, ‘No, that’s enough if you’re going hunting today – we can’t have you young princes shooting arrows at each other, can we?’

‘But, Lord Harsha,’ Maram protested, ‘I was only going to suggest that the courage of your Meshian warriors is an inspiration to those of us who can only hope to –’

‘You’re quite the diplomat,’ Lord Harsha said, laughing as he cut Maram off. ‘Perhaps you should reason with the Ishkans. Perhaps you could talk them out of this war as easily as you talked me out of my beer.’

‘I don’t understand why there has to be a war at all,’ Maram said.

‘Well, there’s bad blood between us,’ Lord Harsha said simply.

‘But it’s the same blood, isn’t it? You’re all Valari, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, the same blood,’ Lord Harsha said, slowly sipping from his goblet. Then he looked at me sadly. ‘But the Ishkans shed it in ways shameful to any Valari. The way they killed Valashu’s grandfather.’

‘But he died in battle, didn’t he? Ah, the Battle of the Diamond River?’

Now Lord Harsha swallowed the last of his beer as if someone had forced him to drink blood. He tapped his eye-patch and said, ‘Yes, it was at the Diamond. Twelve years ago now. That’s where the Ishkans took this eye. That’s where the Ishkans sacrificed five companies just to close with King Elkamesh and kill him.’

‘But that’s war, isn’t it?’ Maram asked.

‘No, that’s dueling. The Ishkans hated King Elkamesh because when he was a young man such as yourself, he killed Lord Dorje in a duel. And so they used the battle as a duel to take their revenge.’

‘Lord Dorje,’ I explained, looking at Maram, ‘was King Hadaru’s oldest brother.’

‘I see,’ Maram said. ‘And this duel took place, ah, fifty years ago? You Valari wait a long time to take your revenge.’

I looked north toward the dark clouds moving in from Ishka’s mountains, and I lost myself in memories of wrongs and hurts that went back more than a hundred times fifty years.

‘Please do not say “we Valari,”’ Lord Harsha told Maram. He rubbed his broken knee and said, ‘Sar Lensu of Waas caught me here with his mace, and that’s war. There’s no vengeance to be taken. They understand that in Waas. They would never have tried to kill King Elkamesh as the Ishkans did.’

While Lord Harsha rose abruptly and shook out the cloth of its crumbs for the sparrows to eat, I clenched my teeth together. And then I said, ‘There was more to it than vengeance.’

At this, Asaru shot me a quick look as if warning me not to divulge family secrets in front of strangers. But I spoke not only for Maram’s benefit, but for Asaru’s and Lord Harsha’s and my own.

‘My grandfather,’ I said, ‘had a dream. He would have united all the Valari against Morjin.’

At the mention of this name, dreadful and ancient, Lord Harsha froze motionless while Joshu Kadar turned to stare at me. I felt fear fluttering in Maram’s belly like a blackbird’s wings. In the sky, the dark, distant clouds seemed to grow even darker.

And then Asaru’s voice grew as cold as steel as it always did when he was angry at me. ‘The Ishkans,’ he said, ‘don’t want the Valari united under our banner. No one does, Val.’

I looked up to see a few crows circling the field in search of carrion or other easy feasts. I said nothing.

‘You have to understand,’ Asaru continued, ‘there’s no need.’

‘No need?’ I half-shouted. ‘Morjin’s armies swallow up half the continent, and you say there’s no need?’

I looked west beyond the white diamond peak of Telshar as I tried to imagine the earthshaking events occurring far away. What little news of Morjin’s acquisitions that had arrived in our isolated country was very bad. From his fastness of Sakai in the White Mountains, this warlock and would-be Lord of Ea had sent armies to conquer Hesperu and lands with strange names such as Uskudar and Karabuk. The enslaved peoples of Acadu, of course, had long since marched beneath the banner of the Red Dragon, while in Surrapam and Yarkona, and even in Eanna, Morjin’s spies and assassins worked to undermine those realms from within. His terror had found its most recent success in Galda. The fall of this mighty kingdom, so near the Morning Mountains and Mesh, had shocked almost all of the free peoples from Delu to Thalu. But not the Meshians. Nor the Ishkans, the Kaashans, nor any of the other Valari.

‘Morjin will never conquer us,’ Asaru said proudly. ‘Never.’

‘He’ll never conquer us if we stand against him,’ I said.

‘No army has ever successfully invaded the Nine Kingdoms.’

‘Not successfully,’ I agreed. ‘But why should we invite an invasion at all?’

‘If anyone invades Mesh,’ Asaru said, ‘we’ll cut them to pieces. The way the Kaashans cut Morjin’s priests to pieces.’

He was referring to the grisly events that had occurred half a year before in Kaash, that most mountainous and rugged of all Valari kingdoms. When King Talanu discovered that two of his most trusted lords had entered Morjin’s secret order of assassin-priests, he had ordered them beheaded and quartered. The pieces of their bodies he had then sent to each of the Nine Kingdoms as a warning against traitors and others who would serve Morjin.

I shuddered as I remembered the day that King Talanu’s messenger had arrived with his grisly trophy in Silvassu. Something sharp stabbed into my chest as I thought of worse things. In Galda, thousands of men and women had been put to the sword. Some few survivors of the massacres there had found their way across the steppes to Mesh, only to be turned away at the passes. Their sufferings were grievous but not unique. The rattle of the chains of all those enslaved by Morjin would have shaken the mountains, if any had ears to hear it. On the Wendrush, it was said, the Sarni tribes were on the move again and roasting their captured enemies alive. From Karabuk had come stories of a terrible new plague and even a rumor that a city had been burned with a firestone. It seemed that all of Ea was going up in flames while here we sat by a small green field drinking beer and talking of yet another war with the Ishkans.

‘There’s more to the world than Mesh,’ I said. I listened to the twittering of the birds in the forest. ‘What of Eanna and Yarkona? What of Alonia? The Elyssu? And Delu?’

At the mention of his homeland, Maram stood up and grabbed his bow. Despite his renunciation of war, he shook it bravely and said, ‘Ah, my friend is right. We defeated Morjin once. And we can defeat him again.’

For a moment I held my breath against the beery vapors wafting out of Maram’s mouth. Defeating Morjin, of course, wasn’t what I had suggested. But uniting against him so that we wouldn’t have to fight at all was.

‘We should send an army of Valari against him,’ Maram bellowed.

I tried not to smile as I noted that in demanding that ‘we’ fight together against our enemy, Maram meant us: the Meshians and the other Valari.

I looked at him and asked, ‘And to where would you send this army that you’ve so bravely assembled in your mind?’

‘Why, to Sakai, of course. We should root out Morjin before he gains too much strength and then destroy him.’

At this Asaru’s face paled, as did Lord Harsha’s and, I imagined, my own. Once, long ago, a Valari army had crossed the Wendrush to join with the Alonians in an assault on Sakai. And at the Battle of Tarshid, Morjin had used firestones and treachery to defeat us utterly. It was said that he had crucified the thousand Valari survivors for twenty miles along the road leading to Sakai; his priests had pierced our warriors’ veins with knives and had drunk their blood. All the histories cited this as the beginning of the War of the Stones.

Of course, no one knew if the Morjin who now ruled in Sakai was the same man who had tortured my ancestors: Morjin, Lord of Lies, the Great Red Dragon, who had stolen the Lightstone and kept it locked away in his underground city of Argattha. Many said that the present Morjin was only a sorcerer or usurper who had taken on the most terrible name in history. But my grandfather had believed that these two Morjins were one and the same. And so did I.

Asaru stood staring at Maram, and said, ‘So then, you want to defeat Morjin – do you hope to recover the Lightstone as well?’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, his face falling red, ‘the Lightstone – now that’s a different matter. It’s been lost for three thousand years. Surely it’s been destroyed.’

‘Surely it has,’ Lord Harsha agreed. The Lightstone, the firestones, most of the other gelstei – they were all destroyed in the War of the Stones.’

‘Of course it was destroyed,’ Asaru said as if that ended the matter.

I wondered if it was possible to destroy the gold gelstei, greatest of all the stones of power, from which the Lightstone was wrought. I was silent as I watched the clouds move down the valley and cover up the sun. I couldn’t help noticing that despite the darkness of these monstrous gray shapes, some small amount of light fought its way through.

‘You don’t agree, do you?’ Asaru said to me.

‘No,’ I said. The Lightstone exists, somewhere.’

‘But three thousand years, Val.’

‘I know it exists – it can’t have been destroyed.’

‘If not destroyed, then lost forever.’

‘King Kiritan doesn’t think so. Otherwise he wouldn’t call a quest for knights to find it.’

Lord Harsha let loose a deep grumbling sound as he packed the uneaten food into his horse’s saddlebags. He turned to me, and his remaining eyed bore into me like a spear. ‘Who knows why foreign kings do what they do? But what would you do, Valashu Elahad, if you suddenly found the Lightstone in your hands?’

I looked north and east toward Anjo, Taron, Athar, Lagash and the other kingdoms of the Valari, and I said simply, ‘End war.’

Lord Harsha shook his head as if he hadn’t heard me correctly. He said, ‘End the wars?’

‘No, war,’ I said. ‘War itself.’

Now both Lord Harsha and Asaru – and Joshu Kadar as well – looked at me in amazement as if I had suggested ending the world itself.

‘Ha!’ Lord Harsha called out. ‘No one but a scryer can see the future, but let’s make this prediction anyway: when next the Ishkans and Meshians line up for battle, you’ll be there at the front of our army.’

I smelled moisture in the air and bloodlust in Lord Harsha’s fiery old heart, but I said nothing.

And then Asaru moved close to me and caught me with his brilliant eyes. He said quietly, ‘You’re too much like Grandfather: you’ve always loved this gold cup that doesn’t exist.’

Did the world itself exist? I wondered. Did the light I saw shining in my brother’s eyes?

‘If it came to it,’ he asked me, ‘would you fight for this Lightstone or would you fight for your people?’

Behind the sadness of his noble face lingered the unspoken question: Would you fight for me?

Just then, as the clouds built even higher overhead and the air grew heavy and still, I felt something warm and bright welling up inside him. How could I not fight for him? I remembered the outing seven years ago when I had broken through the thin spring ice of Lake Waskaw after insisting that we take this dangerous shortcut toward home. Hadn’t he, heedless of his own life, jumped into the black, churning waters to pull me out? How could I ever simply abandon this noble being and let him perish from the earth? Could I imagine the world without tall, straight oak trees or clear mountain streams? Could I imagine the world without the sun?

I looked at my brother, and felt this sun inside me. There were stars there, too. It was strange, I thought, that although he was firstborn and I was last, that although he wore four diamonds in his ring and I only one, it was he who always looked away from me, as he did now.

‘Asaru,’ I said, ‘listen to me.’

The Valari see a man as a diamond to be slowly cut, polished and perfected. Cut it right and you have a perfect jewel; cut it wrong, hit a flaw, and it shatters. Outwardly, Asaru was the hardest and strongest of men. But deep inside him ran a vein of innocence as pure and soft as gold. I always had to be gentle with him lest my words – or even a flicker in my eyes – find this flaw. I had to guard his heart with infinitely more care than I would my own.

‘It may be,’ I told him, ‘that in fighting for the Lightstone, we’d be fighting for our people. For all people. We would be, Asaru.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking at me again.

Someday, I thought, he would be king and therefore the loneliest of men. And so he needed one other man whom he could trust absolutely.

‘At least,’ I said, ‘please consider that our grandfather might not have been a fool. All right?’

He slowly nodded his head and grasped my shoulder. ‘All right.’

‘Good,’ I said, smiling at him. I picked up my bow and nodded toward the woods. Then why don’t we go get your deer?’

After that we helped Lord Harsha put away the remains of our lunch. We slipped on our quivers full of hunting arrows. I said goodbye to Altaru, my fierce, black stallion, who reluctantly allowed Joshu Kadar to tend him in my absence. I thanked Lord Harsha for his hospitality, then turned and led the way into the woods.

2

As soon as we entered this stand of ancient trees, it grew cooler and darker. The forest that filled the Valley of the Swans was mostly of elm, maple and oak with a scattering of the occasional alder or birch. Their great canopies opened out a hundred feet above the forest floor, nearly blocking out the rays of the cloud-shrouded sun. The light was softened by the millions of fluttering leaves, and deepened to a primeval green. I could almost smell this marvelous color as I could the ferns and flowers, the animal droppings and the loamy earth. Through the still air came the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker and the buzzing of bees; I heard a pair of bluebirds calling to each other and the whispering of my own breath.

We walked deeper into the woods across the valley almost due east toward the unseen Mount Eluru. I was as sure of this direction as I was of the beating of my heart. Once a sea captain from the Elyssu, on a visit to our castle, had shown me a little piece of iron called a lodestone that pointed always toward the north. In my wandering of Mesh’s forests and mountains, I had always found my way as if I had millions of tiny lodestones in my blood pointing always toward home. And now I moved steadily through the great trees toward something vast and deep that called to me from the forest farther within. What was calling me, however, I didn’t quite know.

I felt something else there that seemed as out of place as a snow tiger in a jungle or the setting of the sun in the east. The air, dark and heavy, almost screamed with a sense of wrongness that chilled me to the bone. I felt eyes watching me: those of the squirrels and the cawing crows and perhaps others as well. For some reason, I suddenly thought of the lines from The Death of Elahad – Elahad the Great, my distant ancestor, the fabled first king of the Valari who had brought the Lightstone to Ea long, long ago. I shuddered as I thought of how Elahad’s brother, Aryu, had killed Elahad in a dark wood very like this one, and then, ages before Morjin had ever conceived of such a crime, claimed the Lightstone for his own:

The stealing of the gold, The evil knife, the cold – The cold that freezes breath, The nothingness of death.

My breath steamed out into the coolness of the silent trees as I caught a faint, distant scent that disturbed me. The sense of wrongness pervading the woods grew stronger. Perhaps, I thought, I was only dwelling on the wrongness of Elahad’s murder. I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t all killing of men by men wrong? I asked myself.

And what of killing, itself? Men hunted animals, and that was the way the world was. I thought of this as the scar above my eye began to tingle with a burning coldness. I remembered that once, not far from here, I had tried to kill a bear; I remembered that sometimes bears went wrong in their hearts and hunted men just for the sport of it.

I gripped my bow tightly as I listened for a bear or other large animal crashing through the bushes and bracken all about us. I listened to Maram stepping close behind me and to Asaru following him. Maram, curiously, despite his size, could move quietly when he wanted to. And he could shoot straight enough, as the Delian royalty are taught. We Valari, of course, are taught three fundamental things: to wield a sword, to tell the truth, and to abide in the One. But we are also taught to shoot our long yew bows with deadly accuracy, and some of us, as my grandfather had taught me, to move across even broken terrain almost silently. I believe that if we had chanced upon a bear feasting upon wild newberries or honey, we might have stepped up close to him unheard and touched him before being discovered.

That is, we might have done this if not for Maram’s continual comments and complaints. Once, when I had bent low to examine the round, brown pellets left behind by a deer, he leaned up against a tree and grumbled, ‘How much farther do we have to go? Are you sure we’re not lost? Are you sure there are any deer in these wretched woods?’

Asaru’s voice hissed out in a whisper, ‘Shhh – if there are any deer about, you’ll scare them away.’

‘All right,’ Maram muttered as we moved off again. He belched, and a bloom of beer vapor obliterated the perfume of the wildflowers. ‘But don’t go so fast. And watch out for snakes. Any poison ivy.’

I smiled as I tugged gently on the sleeve of his red tunic to get him going again. But I didn’t watch for snakes, for the only deadly ones were the water dragons which hunted mostly along the streams. And the only poison ivy that was to be found in Mesh grew in the mountains beyond the Lower Raaswash near Ishka.

We walked for most of an hour while the clouds built into great black thunderheads high in the sky and seemed to press down through the trees with an almost palpable pressure. Still I felt something calling me, and I moved still deeper into the woods. I saw an old elm shagged with moss, a clear sign that we were approaching a place I remembered very well. And then, as Maram drew in a quick breath, I turned to see him pointing at the exposed, gnarly root of a great oak tree.

‘Look,’ he murmured. “What’s wrong with that squirrel?’

A squirrel, I saw, was lying flat on the root with its arms and legs splayed out. Its dark eye stared out at us but appeared not to see us. Its sides shook with quick, shallow breathing.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could feel the pain where something sharp had punctured the squirrel beneath the fur of its hind leg. It was the sharp, hot pain of infection, which burned up the leg and consumed the squirrel with its fire.

‘Val?’

Something dark and vast had its claws sunk into the squirrel’s fluttering heart, and I could feel this terrible pulling just as surely as I could Maram’s fear of death. This was my gift; this was my glory; this was my curse. What others feel, I feel as well. All my life I had suffered from this unwanted empathy. And I had told only one other person about its terrors and joys.

Asaru moved closer to Maram and pointed at the squirrel as he whispered, Val has always been able to talk to animals.’

It was not Asaru. Although he certainly knew of my love of animals and sometimes looked at me fearfully when I opened my heart to him, he sensed only that I was strange in ways that he could never quite understand. But my grandfather had known, for he had shared my gift; indeed, it was he who gave it to me. I thought that like the color of my eyes, it must have been passed along in my family’s blood – but skipping generations and touching brother and sister capriciously. I thought as well that my grandfather regarded it as truly a gift and not an affliction. But he had died before he could teach me how to bear it.

For a few moments I stared at the squirrel, touching eyes. I suddenly remembered other lines from The Death of Elahad; I remembered that Master Juwain, at the Brotherhood’s school, had never approved of this ancient song, because, as he said, it was full of dread and despair:

And down into the dark,

No eyes, no lips, no spark.

The dying of the light,

The neverness of night.

Maram asked softly, ‘Should we finish him?’

‘No,’ I said, holding up my hand. ‘It will be dead soon enough. Let it be.’

Let it be, I told myself, and so I tried. I closed myself to this dying animal then. To keep out the waves of pain nauseating me, by habit and instinct, I surrounded my heart with walls as high and thick as those of my father’s castle. After a while, even as I watched the light go out of the squirrel’s eye, I felt nothing.

Almost nothing. When I closed my eyes, I remembered for the thousandth time how much I had always hated living inside of castles. As much as fortresses keeping enemies out, they are prisons of cold stone keeping people within.

‘Let’s go,’ I said abruptly.

Where does the light go when the light goes out? I wondered.

Asaru, it seemed, had also tried to distance himself from this little death. He moved off slowly through the woods, and we followed him. Soon, near a patchwork of ferns growing close to the ground, we came upon a splintered elm that had once been struck by lightning. Although the wood of this fallen tree was now brown and crumbling with rot, once it had been white and hard and freshly scorched.

Once, in this very place, I had come upon the bear that Lord Harsha had spoken of. It had been a huge, brown bear, a great-grandfather of the forest. Upon beholding this great being, I had frozen up and been unable to shoot him. Instead, I had lain down my bow and walked up to touch him. I had known the bear wouldn’t hurt me: he had told me this in the rumbling of his well-filled belly and the playfulness of his eyes. But Asaru hadn’t known this. Upon seeing me apparently abandoning all sense, he had panicked, shooting the bear in the chest with an arrow. The astonished bear had then fallen on him with his mighty paws, breaking his arm and smashing his ribs. And I had fallen on the bear. In truth, I had jumped on his back, pulling at his thick, musky fur and stabbing him with my knife in a desperate attempt to keep him from killing Asaru. And then the bear had turned on me as I had turned on him; he had hammered my forehead with his sharp claws. And then I had known only blackness until I awoke to see Andaru Harsha pulling his great hunting spear out of the bear’s back.

Later that night, Asaru had told our father how I had saved his life. It was a story that became widely known – and widely disbelieved. To this day, everyone assumed that Asaru had embellished my role in the bear’s killing to save me from the shame of laying down my weapons in the face of the enemy.

‘Look, Val,’ Asaru whispered, pointing through the trees.

I turned to follow the line of his outstretched finger. Standing some thirty yards away, munching the leaves of a tender fern, was the deer that we had come for. He was a young buck, his new antlers fuzzy with velvet. Miraculously, he hadn’t yet seen us. He kept eating quietly even as we slipped arrows from our quivers and nocked them to our bowstrings.

Asaru, kneeling ten paces to my left, drew his bow along with me, as did Maram who stood slightly behind me and to my right. I felt their excitement heating up their quickly indrawn breaths. I felt my own excitement, too. My mouth watered in anticipation of the coming night’s feast. In truth, I loved the taste of meat as well as any man, even though very often I couldn’t do what I had to do to get it.

‘Abide in peace,’ I whispered.

At that moment, as I pulled back the arrow toward my ear, the buck looked up at me. And I looked at him. His deep, liquid eyes were as full of life as the squirrel’s had been of death. It was hard to kill so great an animal as a deer, much less that infinitely more complex being called man.

Valashu.

There was something about the buck’s sudden awareness of the nearness of death that opened me to the nearness of my own. The light of his eyes was like flame from a firestone melting the granite walls that I hid behind; his booming heart was a battering ram beating open the gates of my heart. More strongly than ever I heard the thunder of that deep and soundless voice that had called me to the woods that day. I heard as well another voice calling my name; it was a voice from the past and future, and it roared with malevolence and murder.

Valashu Elahad.

The buck looked past me suddenly, and his eyes flickered as he tried to tell me something. The wrongness I had sensed in the woods was now very close; I felt it eating into the flesh between my shoulder blades like a mass of twisting, red worms. Instinctively, I moved to escape this terrible sensation.

And then came the moment of death. Arrows flew. They sang from our bows, and burned through the air. Maram’s arrow hit the deer in the side even as I felt a sudden burning pain in my own side; my arrow missed altogether and buried itself in a tree. But Asaru’s arrow drove straight behind the buck’s shoulder into his heart. Although the buck gathered in all his strength for a last, desperate leap into life, I knew that he would be as good as dead before he struck the ground.

And down into the dark …

The fourth arrow, I saw, had nearly killed me. As the sky finally opened and thunderbolts lit up the forest, I looked down in astonishment to see a feathered shaft three feet long sticking out of the side of my torn jacket – its thick leather and the book of poetry in its pocket had entangled the arrow. I was reeling from the buck’s death and something worse, but I still had the good sense to wonder who had shot it.

Val, get down!’

And so did Asaru. Even as he shouted at me to protect myself, he whirled about to scan the forest. And there, more than a hundred yards farther into the forest, a dark, cloaked figure was running through the trees away from us. Asaru, ever the battle lord, tried to follow him, leaping across the bracken even as he drew another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. He got off a good shot, but my would-be murderer found cover behind a tree. And then he started running again with Asaru quickly closing the distance behind him.

Val, behind you!’ Maram called out.

I turned just in time to see another cloaked figure step out from behind a tree some eighty yards behind me. He was drawing back a black arrow aimed at my chest.

I tried to heed the urgency of the moment, but I found that I couldn’t move. The burning in my side from the first assassin’s arrow spread through my body like fire. But strangely, my hands, legs and feet – even my lips and eyes – felt cold.

The cold that freezes breath …

Maram, seeing my helplessness, cursed as he suddenly leaped from behind the tree where he had taken shelter. He cursed again as his fat arms and legs drove him puffing and crashing through the forest. He shot an arrow at the second assassin, but it missed. I heard the arrow skittering off through the leaves of a young oak tree. And then the assassin loosed his arrow, not at Maram, of course, but at me.

Again, just as the arrow was released, I felt in my chest the twisting of the man’s hate. It was my hate, I think, that gave me the strength to turn to the side and pull my shoulders backward. The arrow hissed like a wooden snake only inches from my chin. I felt it slice through the air even as I heard my assassin howl with frustration and rage. And then Maram fell upon him like a fury, and I knew I had to find the strength to move very fast or my fat friend would soon be dead.

I felt Maram’s fear quivering inside my own heart; there, I felt something deeper compelling me to move. It warmed my frozen limbs, and filled my hands with a terrible strength. Suddenly, I found the skill at arms that my father had taught me. With a speed that astonished me, I plucked out the arrow caught in my jacket and fit it to my bowstring.

But now Maram and the assassin whirled about each other as Maram slashed at the air with his dagger and the assassin tried to brain him with an evil-looking mace. I couldn’t shoot lest I hit Maram, so I cast down my bow and started running through the trees toward them. Twigs broke beneath me; even through my boots, rocks bruised my feet. I kept my eyes fixed on the assassin even as he drew back his mace and swung it at Maram’s head.

‘No!’ I cried out.

It was a miracle, I believe, that Maram got his arm up just in time to deflect the full force of the blow. But the mace’s heavy iron head glanced off the side of his skull, knocking him to the ground. The assassin would surely have finished him then if I hadn’t charged him with my dagger drawn and flashing with every lightning bolt that lit the forest.

Valashu Elahad.

The assassin stood back from Maram’s stunned and bleeding form and watched me approach. He was a huge man, thicker even than Maram, though none of his bulk appeared to be fat. His hair was a dirty, tangled, coppery mass, and the skin of his face, pale and pocked with scars, glistened with grease. He was breathing hard with his bristly lips pulled back to reveal huge lower canines that looked more like a boar’s tusks than they did teeth. He regarded me hatefully with small bloodshot eyes full of intelligence and cruelty.

And then, with frightening speed, he charged at me. I hadn’t wanted to close with a man wielding a mace, but before I could check myself, we crashed into each other. I barely managed to catch his arm as his huge hand closed around my arm and twisted savagely to force me to drop my knife. We struggled this way, hands clutching each other’s arms, as we thrashed about the forest floor trying to free our weapons.

Valashu.

I pulled and shifted and raged against this monster of a man trying to kill me. His vast bulk, like a mountain of spasming muscles, surrounded me and almost crushed me under. He grunted like a wild boar, and I smelled his stinking sweat. I felt his fingernails like fire tearing my forearm open. Suddenly I crashed against a tree. My face scraped along its rough bark, shredding off the skin. In my mouth, I tasted the iron-red tang of blood. And all the while, he kept trying to smash the mace against my head.

‘Valashu,’ I heard my father whisper, ‘you must get away or he’ll kill you.’

Somehow then, I managed to turn the point of my knife into his arm. A dark bloom of blood instantly soaked through his dirty woolens. It was a only small wound, but it weakened him enough that I was able to break free. With the force of sudden hate, he pulled back from me at almost the same moment and shook his mace at me as he cried out, ‘Damn you Elahads!’

He clenched the fist of his wounded arm and grimaced at the hurt of it. It hurt me, too. The nerves in my arm felt outraged, stunned. There was no way, I knew, that I could fight another human being and not leave myself open to the violence and pain I inflicted on him.

But I wasn’t wounded in my body, and so I was able take up a good stance and keep a distance between us. I tried to clear my mind and let my will to life run through me like a cleansing river. My father had taught me to fight this way. It was he, the stern king, who had insisted that I train with every possible combination of weapons, even one so unlikely as a mace against a knife. Words and whispers of encouragement began sounding inside me; bits of strategy came to me unbidden. I found myself falling into motions drilled into my limbs by hours of exhausting practice beneath my father’s grim, black eyes. It was vital, I remembered, that I keep outside of the killing arc of the mace, longer than my knife by nearly two feet. Its massive head was of iron cast into the shape of a coiled dragon and rusted red. One good blow from it would crush my skull and send me forever into the land of night.

‘Damn you all!’

The assassin swore as he swung the mace at my head and pressed me back. Big drops of rain splatted against my forehead, nearly blinding me; I was afraid that I would stumble over a tree root or branch and fall helpless beneath this onslaught. The best strategy, I knew, called for me to feint and maneuver and wait for the mace’s momentum to throw my opponent off balance and create an opening. But the assassin was a powerful man, able to check his blow and aim a new one at me almost before the head of the mace swept past me. He came straight at me in full fury, spitting and swearing and swinging his terrible mace.

He might have killed me there in the pouring rain. He had the superior weapon and the skill. But I had skill, too, and something else.

I have said that my talent for feeling what others feel can be a curse. But it is also truly a gift, like a great, shimmering double-edged sword. Even now, as I felt the pounding red pain of his wounded arm, I sensed precisely how he would move almost before his muscles tensed and the mace burned past me.

It wasn’t really like reading his mind. He wanted to frighten me with a feint toward my knife hand, and I felt the fear of it as an icy tingling in my fingers before he even moved; a desire to smash out my eyes formed up inside him, and I felt this sickening emotion as a blinding red pain in my own eyes. He whirled about me now, faster and faster, trying to crush me with his mace. And with each of his movements, I moved too, anticipating him by a breath. It was as if we were locked together hand to hand and eye to eye, dancing a dance of death together in the quickness of iron and steel that flashed like the storm’s brilliant lightning.

And then the assassin aimed a tremendous blow at my face, and the force of it carried the mace whooshing through the air. Just then his foot slipped against a sodden tree root, and I had the opening that I had been waiting for. But I couldn’t take it; I froze up with fear as I had at the Battle of Red Mountain. Instantly, the assassin recovered his balance, and swung the mace back toward my chest. It was a weak blow, but it caught me on the muscle there with a sickening crunch that nearly staved in my ribs. It took all my strength to jump away from him and not let myself fall to the ground screaming in pain.

Val, help me!’ Maram screamed from the glistening bracken deeper in the trees.

I found a moment to watch as he struggled to rise grunting and groaning to his feet. And then I realized that the scream had never left his lips but was only forming up like thunder inside him. As it was inside of me.

‘Val, Val.’

The assassin’s lust to kill was like a black, ravenous, twisted thing. He fairly ached to bash open my brains. I suddenly knew that if I let him do this, he would gleefully finish off Maram. And then lie in wait for Asaru’s return.

‘No, no,’ I cried out, ‘never!’

The assassin came at me again. Hail began to fall, and little pieces of ice pinged off the mace’s iron head. I slipped and skidded over an exposed, muddy expanse of the forest floor; the assassin quickly took advantage of my clumsiness, aiming a vicious blow at me that nearly took off my face. Despite the rain’s bitter cold, I could feel him sweating as he growled and gasped and damned me to a death without end.

I knew that I had to find my courage and close with him, now, before I slipped again. But how could I ever kill him? He might be a swine of a man, a terrible man, evil – but he was still a man. Perhaps he had a woman somewhere who loved him; perhaps he had a child. But certainly he himself was a child of the One, and therefore a spark of the infinite glowed inside him. Who was I to put it out? Who was I to look into his tormented eyes and steal the light?

There is something called the joy of battle. Women don’t like to know about this; most men would rather forget it. Combat with another man this way in the dark woods was truly dirty, ugly, awful – but there was a terrible beauty about it, too. For fighting for life brings one closer to life. I remembered, then, my father telling me that I had been born to fight. All of us were. As the assassin raged at me with his dragon-headed mace, a great surge of life welled up inside me. My hands and heart and every part of me knew that it was good to feel my blood rushing like a river in flood, that it was a miracle simply to be able to draw in one more breath.

‘Asaru,’ I whispered.

Some deep part of me must have realized that this wild joy was really just a love of life. And love of the finest creations of life, such as my brother, Asaru, and even Maram. I felt this beautiful force flowing into me like sunlight; I opened myself to it utterly. In moments, it filled my whole being with a terrible strength.

Maram cried out in pain from the bloody wound on his head. The assassin glanced at him as his pulse leaped in anticipation of an easy kill. Something broke inside me then. My heart swelled with a sudden fury that I feared almost more than any other thing. I found that secret place where love and hate, life and death, were as one. This time, when the mace swept past me, I rushed the assassin. I stepped in close enough to feel the heat steaming off his massive body. I got my arm up to block the return arc of his mace as he snorted in anger and spat into my face. I smelled his fear, with my nostrils as well as with a finer sense. And then I plunged my dagger into the soft spot above his big, hard belly; I angled it upward so that it pierced his heart.

‘Maram!’ I screamed out. ‘Asaru!’

The pain of the assassin’s death was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like lightning striking through my eyes into my spine, like a mace as big as a tree crushing in my chest. As the assassin gasped and spasmed and crumpled to the sodden earth, I fell on top of him. I coughed and gasped for breath; I screamed and raged and wept, all at once. A river of blood spurted out of the wound where I had put my knife. But an entire ocean flowed out of me.

Val – are you hurt?’ I heard Maram’s voice boom like thunder as from far away. I felt him hovering over me as he placed his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. ‘Come on now, get up – you killed him.’

But the assassin wasn’t quite dead. Even in the violence of the pouring rain, I felt his last breath burn against my face. I watched the light die from his eyes. And only then came the darkness.

‘Come on, Val. Here, let me help you.’

But I couldn’t move. I was only dimly aware of Maram grunting and puffing as he rolled me off the assassin’s body. Maram’s frightened face suddenly seemed to thin and grow as insubstantial as smoke. The colors faded from the forest; the blood seeping from his wounded head wasn’t red at all but a dark gray. Everything grew darker then. A terrible cold, centered in my heart, began spreading through my body. It was worse than being caught in a blizzard in one of the mountain passes, worse even than plunging through Lake Waskaw’s broken ice into freezing waters. It was a cosmic cold: vast, empty, indifferent; it was the cold that brings on the neverness of night and the nothingness of death. And I was utterly open to it.

It was as I lay in this half-alive state that Asaru finally returned. He must have sprinted when he saw me – and the dead assassin – stretched out on the forest floor, for he was panting to catch his breath when he reached my side. He knelt over me, and I felt his warm, hard hand pressing gently against my throat as he tested my pulse. To Maram he said, The other one … escaped. They had horses waiting. What happened here?’

Maram quickly explained how I had frozen up after the first assassin’s arrow had stuck in my jacket; his voice swelled with pride as he told of how he had charged the second assassin.

‘Ah, Lord Asaru,’ he said, ‘you should have seen me! A Valari warrior couldn’t have done any better. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that I saved Val’s life.’

Thank you,’ Asaru said dryly. ‘It seems that Val also saved yours.’

He looked down at me and smiled grimly. He said, Val, what’s wrong – why can’t you move?’

‘It’s cold,’ I whispered, looking into the blackness of his eyes. ‘So cold.’

With much grumbling from Maram, they lifted me and carried me over beneath a great elm tree. Maram lay down his cloak and helped Asaru prop me up against the tree’s trunk. Then Asaru ran back through the woods to retrieve our bows that we had cast down. He brought back as well the arrow that the first assassin had shot at me.

This is bad,’ he said, looking at the black arrow. In the flashes of lightning, he scanned the woods to the north, east, south and west. There may be more of them,’ he told us.

‘No,’ I whispered. To be open to death is to be open to life. The hateful presence that I had sensed in the woods that day was now gone. Already, the rain was washing the air dean. There are no more.’

Asaru peered at the arrow and said, They almost killed me. I felt this pass through my hair.’

I looked at Asaru’s long black hair blowing about his shoulders, but I could only gasp silently in pain.

‘Let’s get your shirt off,’ he said. It was one of his rules, I knew, that wounds must be tended as soon as possible.

In a moment they had carefully removed my jacket and shirt. It must have been cold, with the wind whipping raindrops against my suddenly exposed flesh. But all I could feel was a deeper cold that sucked me down into death.

Asaru touched the livid bruise that the assassin’s mace had left on my chest. His fingers gently probed my ribs. ‘You’re lucky – it seems that nothing is broken.’

‘What about that?’ Maram asked, pointing at my side where the arrow had touched me.

‘Why, it’s only a scratch,’ Asaru said. He soaked a cloth with some of the brandy that he carried in a wineskin, and then swabbed it over my skin.

I looked down at my throbbing side. To call the wound left by the arrow a scratch was to exaggerate its seriousness. Truly, no more than the faintest featherstroke of a single red line marked the place where the arrow had nicked the skin. But I could still feel the poison working in my veins.

‘It’s cold,’ I whispered. ‘Everywhere, cold.’

Now Asaru examined the arrow, which was fletched with raven feathers and tipped with a razor-sharp steel head like any common hunting arrow. But the steel, I saw, was enameled with some dark, blue substance. Asaru’s eyes flashed with anger as he showed it to Maram.

He said, They tried to kill me with a poison arrow.’

I blinked my eyes at the cold crushing my skull. But I said nothing against my brother’s prideful assumption that the arrow had been meant for him and not me.

‘Do you think it was the Ishkans?’ Maram asked.

Asaru pointed at the assassin’s body and said, That’s no Ishkan.’

‘Perhaps they hired him.’

They must have,’ Asaru said.

‘Oh, no,’ I murmured. ‘No, no, no.’

Not even the Ishkans, I thought, would ever kill a man with poison. Or would they?

Asaru quickly, but with great care, wrapped my torn and tainted jacket and shirt around the arrow’s head to protect it from the falling rain. Then he took off his cloak and put it on me.

‘Is that better?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, lying to him despite what I had been taught. ‘Much better.’

Although he smiled down at me to encourage me, his face was grave. I didn’t need my gift of empathy to feel his love and concern for me.

This is hard to understand,’ he said. ‘You can’t have taken enough poison to paralyze you this way.’

No, I thought, I couldn’t have. It wasn’t the poison that pinned me to the earth like a thousand arrows of ice. I wanted to explain to him that somehow the poison must have dissolved my shields and left me open to the assassin. But how could I tell my simple, courageous brother what it was like to feel another die? How could I make him understand the terror of a cold as vast and black as the emptiness between the stars?

I turned my head to watch the rain beating down on the assassin’s bloody chest. Who could ever escape the great emptiness? Truly, I thought, the same fate awaited us all.

Asaru placed his warm hand on top of mine and said, ‘If it’s poison, Master Juwain will know a cure. We’ll take you to him as soon as the rain stops.’

My grandfather had once warned me to beware of elms in thunder, but we took shelter beneath that great tree all the same. Its dense foliage protected us from the worst of the rain as we waited out the storm. As Asaru tended Maram’s wounded head, I heard him reassuring Maram that it rains hard in the Morning Mountains, but not long.

As always, he spoke truly. After a while the downpour weakened to a sprinkle and then stopped. The clouds began to break up, and shafts of light drove down through gaps in the forest canopy and touched the rain-sparkled ferns with a deeper radiance. There was something in this golden light that I had never seen before. It seemed to struggle to take form even as I struggled to apprehend it. I somehow knew that I had to open myself to this wondrous thing as I had my brother’s love or the inevitability of my death.

The stealing of the gold …

And then there, floating in the air five feet in front of me, appeared a plain golden cup that would have fit easily into the palm of my hand. Call it a vision; call it a waking dream; call it a derangement of my aching eyes. But I saw it as clearly as I might have a bird or a butterfly.

I was only dimly aware of Asaru kneeling by my side as he touched my throbbing head. Almost all that I could see was this marvelous cup shimmering before me. With my eyes, I drank in its golden light. And almost immediately, a warmth like that of my mother’s honey tea began pouring into me.

‘Do you see it?’ I asked Asaru.

‘See what?’

The Lightstone, I thought. The healing stone.

For this, I thought, Aryu had risen up and killed his brother with a knife even as I had killed the assassin. For this simple cup, men had fought and murdered and made war for more than ten thousand years.

“What is it, Val?’ Asaru asked, gently shaking my shoulder.

But I couldn’t tell him what I saw. After a while, as I leaned back against the solidity and strength of the great elm, the coldness left my body. I prayed then that someday the Lightstone would heal me completely so that the terror of my gift would leave me as well and I would suffer the pain of the world no more.

Although I was still very weak, I managed to press my hands down into the damp earth. And then to Asaru’s and Maram’s astonishment – and my own – I stood up.

Somehow I staggered over to where the assassin lay atop the glistening bracken. While my whole body shook and I gasped with the effort of it, I pulled my knife out of his chest and cleaned it. Then I closed the assassin’s cold blue eyes. In my own eyes, I felt a sudden moist pain, My throat hurt as if I had swallowed a lump of cold iron. Somewhere deeper inside, my belly and being heaved with a sickness that wouldn’t go away. There, I knew, the cold would always wait to freeze my breath and steal my soul. I vowed then that no matter the cause or need, I would never, never kill anyone again.

In the air above me – above the assassin’s still form – the Lightstone poured out a golden radiance that filled the forest. It was the light of love, the light of life, the light of truth. In its shimmering presence, I couldn’t lie to myself: I knew with a bitter certainty that it was my fate to kill many, many men.

And then, suddenly, the cup was gone.

‘What are you staring at?’ Asaru asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘Nothing at all.’

Now a fire burned through me like the poison still in my veins. I struggled to remain standing. Asaru came over to my side. His strong arm wrapped itself around my back to help me.

‘Can you walk now?’ he asked.

I nodded and Asaru smiled in relief. After I had steadied myself, Asaru called Maram over to check his wounded head. He poked his finger into Maram’s big gut and told him, Your head is as hard as your belly is soft. You’ll be all right.’

‘Ah, yes, indeed, I suppose I will – as soon as you bring back the horses.’

For a moment, Asaru looked up through the fluttering leaves at the sun. He looked down at the dead assassin. And then he turned to Maram and told him, ‘No, it’s getting late, and it wouldn’t do to leave either of you alone here. Despite what Val says, there may be others about. We’ll walk out together.’

‘All right then, Lord Asaru,’ Maram said.

Asaru bent down toward the assassin. And then, with a shocking strength, he hoisted the body onto his shoulder and straightened up. He pointed deeper into the woods. ‘You’ll carry back the deer,’ he told Maram.

‘Carry back the deer!’ Maram protested. Asaru might as well have appointed him to bear the whole world on his shoulders. ‘It must be two miles back to the horses!’

Asaru, straining under the great mass of the assassin’s body, looked down at Maram with a sternness that reminded me of my father. He said, You wanted to be a warrior – why don’t you act like one?’

Despite Maram’s protests, beneath all his fear and fat, he was as strong as a bull. As there was no gainsaying my brother when he had decided on an action, Maram grudgingly went to fetch the deer.

You look sick,’ Asaru said as he freed a hand to touch my forehead. ‘But at least the cold is gone.’

No, no, I thought, it will never be gone.

‘Does it still hurt?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, wincing at the pain in my side. ‘It hurts.’

Why, I wondered, had someone tainted an arrow with poison? Why would anyone try to kill me?

I drew in a deep breath as I steeled myself for the walk back through the forest. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the Lightstone shining like a sun.

With Asaru in the lead, we started walking west toward the place where we had left the horses. Maram puffed and grumbled beneath the deer flopped across his shoulders. At least, I thought, we had taken a deer, even as Asaru had said we would. And so we would have something to contribute to that night’s feast with the Ishkans.

3

It was late afternoon by the time we broke free from the forest and rejoined Joshu Kadar at the edge of Lord Harsha’s fields. The young squire blinked his eyes in amazement at the load slung across my brother’s back; he had the good sense, however, not to beleaguer us with questions just then. He kept a grim silence and went to fetch Lord Harsha as my brother bade him.

The horses, however, practiced no such restraint. Joshu had them tied to a couple of saplings beyond the wall surrounding Lord Harsha’s field; at the smell of fresh blood they began whinnying and stomping the ground as they pulled at the trees with almost enough force to uproot them. Maram tried to calm them but couldn’t. They were already skittish from the bolts of lightning that had shaken the earth only an hour before.

I walked over to Altaru and laid my hand on him. His wet fur was pungent with the scent of anger and fear. As I stroked his trembling neck, I pressed my head against his head and then breathed into his huge nostrils. Gradually, he grew quieter. After a while, he looked at me with his soft brown eyes and then gently nudged my side where the arrow had burned me with its poison.

The gentleness of this great animal always touched me even as much as it astonished me. For Altaru stood eighteen hands high and weighed some two thousand pounds of quivering muscle and unyielding bone. He was the fiercest of stallions. He was one of the last of the black war horses who run wild on the plains of Anjo. For a thousand years, the kings of Anjo had bred his line for beauty no less than battle. But after the Sarni wars, when Anjo had broken apart into a dozen contending dukedoms, Altaru’s sires had escaped into the fields surrounding the shattered castles, and Anjo’s great horsebreeding tradition had been lost. From time to time, some brave Anjori would manage to capture one of these magnificent horses only to find him unbreakable. So it had been with Altaru: Duke Gorador had presented him as a gift to my father as if to say, ‘You Meshians think you are the greatest knights of all the Valari; well, we’ll see if you can ride this horse into battle.’

This my father had tried to do. But nothing in his power had persuaded Altaru to accept a bit in his mouth or a saddle on his back.

Five times he had bucked the proud king to the ground before my father gave up and pronounced Altaru incorrigibly wild.

As I knew he truly was. For Altaru had never seen a mare whom he didn’t tremble to cover or another stallion he wouldn’t fight. And he had never known a man whose hand he didn’t want to bite or whose face he didn’t want to crush with a kick from one of his mighty hooves. Except me. When my father, in a rare display of frustration, had finally ordered Altaru gelded, I had rushed into his stall and thrown myself against his side to keep the handlers away from him. Everyone supposed that I had fallen mad and would soon be stomped into pulp. But Altaru had astonished my father and brothers – and myself – by lowering his head to lick my sweating face. He had allowed me to mount him and race him bareback through the forest below Silvassu. And ever since that wild ride through the trees, for five years, we had been the best of friends.

‘It’s all right,’ I reassured him as I stroked his great shoulder, ‘everything will be all right.’

But Altaru, who spoke a language deeper than words, knew that I was lying to him. Again he nuzzled my side and shuddered as if it was he who had been poisoned. The fire in his dark eyes told me that he was ready to kill the man who had wounded me, if only we could find him.

A short time later, Joshu Kadar returned with Lord Harsha. The old man drove a stout, oak wagon, rough-cut and strong like Lord Harsha himself. A few hours had worked a transformation on him. Gone were the muddy workboots and homespun woolens that he wore tending his fields. Now he sported a fine new tunic, and I couldn’t help noticing the sword fastened to his sleek, black belt. After he had stopped the wagon on the other side of the stone wall, he stepped down and smoothed back his freshly washed hair. He gazed for a long moment at the dead deer and the assassin’s body spread out on the earth. Then he said, ‘The king has asked me to contribute the beverage for tonight’s feast. Now it seems we’ll be carrying more than beer in my wagon.’

While Asaru stepped over to him and began telling of what had happened in the woods, Maram peeled back the wagon’s covering tarp to reveal a dozen barrels of beer. His eyes went wide with the greed of thirst, and he eyed the contents of the wagon as if he had discovered a cave full of treasure.

With his fat knuckles, he rapped the barrels one by one. ‘Oh, my beauties – have I ever seen such a beautiful, beautiful sight?’

I was sure that he would have begged Lord Harsha for a bowl of beer right there if not for the grim look on Lord Harsha’s face as he stared at the dead assassin. Maram stared at him, too. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Maram called for Joshu to help him lift the assassin’s body into the wagon. The sweating and puffing Maram moved quickly as with new strength, and then loaded in the deer by himself. Only his anticipation of later helping to drain these barrels, I thought, could have caused him to take such initiative.

Thank you for sparing an old man’s joints,’ Lord Harsha told him, patting his broken knee. ‘Now if you will all accompany me, we’ll collect my daughter and be on our way. She’ll be joining us for the feast.’

So saying, Lord Harsha drove the groaning wagon across his fields while we followed him on horseback to his house. There, a rather plump, pretty woman with raven-dark hair stood in the doorway and watched us draw up. She was dressed in a silk gown and a flowing gray cloak gathered in above her ample breasts with a silver brooch. This was to be her first appearance at my father’s castle, I gathered, and so she naturally wanted to be seen wearing her finest.

Lord Harsha stepped painfully down from his wagon and said, ‘Lord Asaru, may I present my daughter, Behira?’

In turn, he presented this shy young woman to me, Joshu Kadar and Maram. To my dismay, Maram’s face flushed a deep red at the first sight of her. I could almost feel his desire for her leaping like fire along his veins. Gone from him completely, it seemed, was any thought of beer.

‘Oh, Lord, what a beauty!’ he blurted out. ‘Lord Harsha – you certainly have a talent for making beautiful things.’

It might have been thought that Lord Harsha would relish such a compliment. Instead, his single eye glared at Maram like a heated iron. Most likely, I thought, he wished to present Behira at my father’s court to some of the greatest knights of Mesh; he would take advantage of the night’s gathering to make the best match for her that he could – and that certainly wouldn’t be a marriage to some cowardly outland prince who had forsworn wine, women and war.

‘My daughter,’ Lord Harsha coldly informed Maram, ‘is not a thing. But thank you all the same.’

He limped over to his barn then, and returned a short time later leading a huge, gray mare. Despite the pain of his knee, he insisted on riding to my father’s castle with all the dignity that he could command. And so he gritted his teeth as he pulled himself up into the saddle; he sat straight and tall like the battle lord he still was, and led the way down the road followed closely by Asaru, Joshu and myself. Behira seemed happy at being left to drive the wagon, while Maram was very happy lagging behind the rest of us so that he could talk to her.

‘Well, Behira,’ I overheard him say above the clopping of the horses’ hooves, ‘it’s a lovely day for such a lovely woman to attend her first feast. Ah, how old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?’

Behira, holding the reins of the wagon’s horses in her strong, rough hands, looked over at me as if she wished that it was I who was lavishing my attention on her. But women terrified me even more than did war. Their passions were like deep, underground rivers flowing with unstoppable force. If I opened myself to a woman’s love for only a moment, I thought, I would surely be swept away.

‘I’m afraid we have no such women as you in Delu,’ Maram went on. ‘If we did, I never would have left home.’

I looked away from Behira to concentrate on a stand of oak trees by the side of the road. I sensed that, despite herself, she was quite taken by Maram’s flattery. And probably Maram impressed her as well. After Alonia, Delu was the greatest kingdom of Ea, and Maram was Delu’s eldest prince.

‘Well, you should have let a woman tend your wound,’ I heard Behira say to him. I could almost feel her touching the makeshift bandage that my brother had tied around Maram’s head. ‘Perhaps when we get to the castle I could look at it.’

‘Would you? Would you?’

‘Of course,’ she told him. The outlander struck you with a mace, didn’t he?’

‘Ah, yes, a mace,’ Maram said. And then his great, booming voice softened with the seductiveness of recounting his feats. ‘I hope you’re not alarmed by what happened in the woods today. It was quite a little battle, but of course we prevailed. I had the honor of being in a position to help Val at the critical moment.’

According to Maram, not only had he scared off the first assassin and weakened the second, but he had willingly taken a wound to his head in order to save my life. When he caught me smiling at the embellishments of his story – I didn’t want to think of his braggadocio as mere lies – he shot me a quick, wounded look as if to say, ‘Love is difficult, my friend, and wooing a woman calls for any weapon.’

Perhaps it did, I thought, but I didn’t want to watch him bring down this particular quarry. Even as he began speaking of his father’s bejeweled palaces and vast estates in far-off Delu, I nudged Altaru forward so that I might take part in other conversations.

Val,’ Asaru said to me as I pulled alongside him, ‘Lord Harsha has agreed that no one should know about all this until we’ve had a chance to speak with the King.’

I was silent as I looked off at the rolling fields of Lord Harsha’s neighbors. Then I said, ‘And Master Juwain?’

‘Yes. Speak with him while he attends your wound, but no one else,’ Asaru said. ‘All right?’

‘All right,’ I said.

We gave voice then to questions for which we had no answers: Who were these strange men who had shot poisoned arrows at us? Assassins sent by the Ishkans or some vengeful duke or king? How had they crossed the heavily guarded passes into Mesh? How had they picked up our trail and then stalked us so silently through the forest?

And why, I wondered above all else, did they want to kill me?

With this thought came the certainty that it had been my death they had sought and not Asaru’s. Again I felt the wrongness that I had sensed earlier in the woods. It seemed not to emanate from any one direction but rather pervaded the sweet-smelling air itself. All about us were the familiar colors of my father’s kingdom: the white granite farm houses; the greenness of fields rich with oats, rye and barley; the purple mountains of Mesh that soared into the deep blue’ sky. And yet all that I looked upon – even the bright red firebirds fluttering about in the trees – seemed darkened as with some indelible taint.

It touched me as well. I felt it as a poison burning in my blood and a coldness that sucked at my soul. As we rode across this beautiful country, more than once I wanted to call a halt so that I could slip down from my saddle and sleep – either that or sink down into the dark, rain-churned earth and cry out at the terror that had awakened inside me.

And this I might easily have done but for Altaru. Somehow he sensed the hurt of my wounded side and the deeper pain of the death that I had inflicted upon the assassin; somehow he moved with a slow, rhythmic grace that seemed to flow into me and ease my distress rather than aggravate it. The surging of his long muscles and great heart lent me a badly needed strength. The familiar, fermy smell steaming off his body reassured me of the basic goodness of life. I had no need to guide him or even to touch his reins, for he knew well enough where we were going: home, to where the setting sun hung above the mountains like a golden cup overflowing with light.

So it was that we finally came upon my father’s castle. This great heap of stone stood atop a hill which was one of several ‘steps’ forming the lower slope of Telshar. The right branch of the Kurash River cut around the base of this hill, separating the castle from the buildings and streets of Silvassu itself. At least in the spring, the river was a natural moat of raging, icy, brown waters; the defensive advantages of such a site must have been obvious to my ancestors who had entered the Valley of the Swans so long ago.

As I looked out at the castle’s soaring white towers, I couldn’t help remembering the story of the first Shavashar, who was the great-grandson of Elahad himself. It had been he who had led the Valari into the Morning Mountains at the beginning of the Lost Ages. This was in the time after the Hundred Year March when the small Valari tribe had wandered across all of Ea on a futile quest to recover the golden cup that Aryu had stolen. Shavashar had set the stones of the first Elahad castle and had begun the warrior tradition of the Valari, for it was told that the first Valari to come to Ea – like all the Star People – were warriors of the spirit only. It was Shavashar who forged my people into warriors of the sword. It was he who had foretold that the Valari would one day have to fight ‘whole armies and all the demons of hell’ to regain the Lightstone.

And so we had. Thousands of years later, in the year 2292 of the Age of Swords – every child older than five knew this date – the Valari had united under Aramesh’s banner and defeated Morjin at the Battle of Sarburn. Aramesh had wrested the Lightstone from Morjin’s very hands and brought this priceless cup back to the security of my family’s castle. For a long time it had resided there, acting as a beacon that drew pilgrims from across all of Ea. These were the great years of Mesh, during which time Silvassu had grown out into the valley to become a great city.

I heard Asaru’s voice calling me as from far away.

‘Why have you stopped?’

In truth, I hadn’t noticed that I had stopped. Or rather, Altaru, sensing my mood, had pulled up at the edge of the road while I gazed off into the past. Before us farther up the road, along the gentle slope leading up to the castle, fields of barley glistened in the slanting light where once great buildings had stood. I remembered my grandfather telling me of the second great tragedy of my people: that in the time of Godavanni the Glorious, Morjin had again stolen the Lightstone, and its radiance had left the Morning Mountains forever. And so, over the centuries, Silvassu had diminished to little more than a backwoods city in a forgotten kingdom. The stones of its streets and houses had been torn up to build the shield wall that surrounded the castle, for the golden age of Ea had ended and the Age of the Dragon had begun.

‘Look,’ I said to Asaru as I pointed at this great wall. Atop the mural towers protecting it, green pennants fluttered in the wind. This was a signal that the castle had received guests and a feast was to be held.

‘It’s late,’ Asaru said. “We should have been home an hour ago. Shall we go?’

Maram pulled up by my side then as the wagon creaked to a halt behind me. Lord Harsha, still sitting erect in his saddle, rubbed his head above his eye-patch as his mare pawed the muddy road.

And I continued staring at this great edifice of stone that dominated the Valley of the Swans. The shield wall, a hundred feet high, ran along the perimeter of the entire hill almost flush with its steep slopes. Indeed, it seemed to arise out of the hill itself as if the very earth had flung up its hardest parts toward the sky. Higher even than this mighty wall stood the main body of the castle with its many towers: the Swan Tower, the Aramesh Tower with its ancient, crenelated stonework, the Tower of the Stars. The keep was a massive cube of carefully cut rocks as was the adjoining great hall. And all of it – the watchtowers and turrets, the gatehouses and garden walls – had been made of white granite. In the falling sun, the whole of the castle shimmered with a terrible beauty, as even I had to admit. But I knew too well the horrors that waited inside: the catapults and sheaves of arrows tied together like so many stalks of wheat; the pots of sand to be heated red-hot and poured through the overhanging parapets on any enemy who dared to assault the walls. Truly, the castle had been built to keep whole armies out, if not demons from hell. And not, it seemed, the Ishkans. My father had invited them to break bread with us in the castle’s very heart. There, in the great hall, I would find them waiting for me, and perhaps my would-be assassin as well.

‘Yes,’ I finally said to Asaru, ‘let’s go.’

I touched my ankles to Altaru’s side, and the huge horse practically leapt forward as if to battle. We started up the north road that cut through an apple orchard before curving around the edge of Silvassu’s least populated district; its slope was the most gentle of the three roads leading into the castle and therefore the easiest for the horses pulling the heavy wagon to negotiate. A short while later we passed through the two great towers guarding the Aramesh Gate and entered the castle.

In the north courtyard that day there was a riot of activity. Various wagons laden with foodstuffs had pulled up to the storehouses where the cooks’ apprentices rushed to unload them. From the wheelwright’s workshop came the sound of hammered steel, while the chandlers were busy dipping the last of the night’s tapers. Squires such as Joshu ran about completing errands assigned by their lords. We had to ride carefully through the courtyard lest our horses trample them, as well as the children playing with wooden swords or spinning tops along the flagstones. When we reached the stables, we dismounted and gave the tending of the horses over to Joshu. He took Altaru’s reins in his hands as if his life depended on the care with which he handled the great, snorting stallion – as it very well did. There, in front of the stalls smelling of freshly spread straw and even fresher dung, we said our goodbyes. Asaru and Lord Harsha would accompany Behira to the kitchens to unload the wagon before attending to their business with the steward and King. And Maram and I would seek out Master Juwain.

‘But what about your head?’ Behira said to Maram. ‘It needs a proper dressing.’

‘Ah,’ Maram said as his voice swelled with anticipation, ‘perhaps we could meet later in the infirmary.’

At this, Lord Harsha stepped between the wagon and Maram, and stood staring down at him. ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ he said to him. ‘Isn’t your Master Juwain a healer? Well, let him heal you, then.’

Asaru moved closer to me and laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Please give Master Juwain my regards,’ he said.

And then, as his eyes flashed like a dark sky crackling with lightning, he added, Tonight there will be a feast to be remembered.’

Maram and I crossed the courtyard then, and walked through the middle ward which was full of chickens squawking and running for their lives. After passing through the gateway to the west ward, we found the arched doorway to the Adami Tower open. I went inside and fairly raced up the worn steps that wound up through the narrow staircase; Maram, however, puffed along behind me at a slower pace. I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that the stairs spiraled clockwise as they rose to the tower’s upper floors. This allowed a defender to retreat upwards while wielding his sword with his right hand, whereas an attacker would have to lean around the corner in the wrong direction to wield his. I couldn’t help noticing as well the castle’s ever-present smell: rusting iron and sweating stone and the sharpness of burning tallow that over the centuries had coated the walls and ceilings with layers of black smoke.

Master Juwain was in the guest chamber on the highest floor. It was the grandest such room in the castle – indeed, in all of Mesh – and many would argue that it should have been reserved for the Ishkan prince or even King Kiritan’s emissaries. But by tradition, whenever a master of the Brotherhoods was visiting, he took up residence there.

‘Come in,’ Master Juwain’s voice croaked out after I had knocked at the door to his chamber.

I opened this great, iron-shod slab of oak and stepped into a large room. It was well-lit, with the shutters of its eight arched windows thrown open. In most other rooms of the castle, this would have let in gusts of cold air along with sunlight. But the windows here were some of the few to be fitted with glass panes. Even so, the room was rather cool, and Master Juwain had a few logs burning in the fireplace along the far wall. This, I thought, was an extravagance. As were the chamber’s other appointments: the tiled floor, covered with Galdan carpets; the richly-colored tapestries; the shelves of books set into the wall near the great, canopied bed. As far as I knew, there was only one other true bed in the castle, and there my father and mother slept. The whole of the chamber bespoke a comfort at odds with the Brotherhoods’ ideal of restraint and austerity, but the great Elemesh had proclaimed that these teachers of our people should be treated like kings, and so they were.

Valashu Elahad – is that you?’ Master Juwain called out as I entered the room. He was as short and stocky as I remembered, and one of the ugliest men I had ever seen.

‘Sir,’ I said, bowing. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

He was standing by one of the windows and looking up from a large book that he had been reading; he returned my bow politely and then stepped over to me. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s been almost two years.’

To look upon Master Juwain was to be reminded at first of vegetables – and not the most attractive ones at that. His head, large and lumpy like a potato, was shaved smooth, the better to appreciate the puffy ears that stood out like cauliflowers. His nose was a big, brown squash, and of his mouth and lips, it is better not to speak. He clasped me on the shoulder with a hand as tough as old tree roots. Although he was first and foremost a scholar – perhaps the finest in all of Ea – he liked nothing better than working in his garden and keeping close to the earth. Although he might advise kings and teach their sons, I thought he would always be a farmer at heart.

‘To what honor,’ he asked, ‘shall I attribute this visit after being ignored for so long?’

His gaze took in the rain-stained cloak that Asaru had lent me as he looked at me deeply. The saving feature of his face, I thought, were his eyes: they were large and luminous, all silver-gray like the moonlit sea. There was a keen intelligence there and great kindness, too. I have said that he was an ugly man, and ugly he truly was. But he was also one of those rare men transformed by a love of truth into a being of great beauty.

‘My apologies, sir,’ I told him. ‘But it was never my intention to ignore you.’

Just then Maram came wheezing and panting into the room. He bowed to Master Juwain and then said, ‘Please excuse us, sir, but we needed to see you. Something has happened.’

While Master Juwain paced back and forth rubbing his bald head, Maram explained how we had fought for our lives in the woods that afternoon. He conveniently left out the part of the story in which he had shot the deer, but otherwise his account was reasonably accurate. By the time I had spoken as well, the room was growing dark.

‘I see,’ Master Juwain said. His head bowed down in deep thought as he dug his foot into the priceless carpet. Then he moved over to the window and gazed out at Telshar’s white diamond peak. ‘It’s growing late, and I want to get a good look at this arrow you’ve brought me. And your wounds as well. Would you please light the candles, Brother Maram?’

While I tightly gripped the black arrow, still wrapped in my torn shirt, Maram went over to the fireplace where he stuck a long match into the flames to ignite it. Then he went about the room lighting the many candles in their stands. As the soft light of the tapers filled the room, I reflected on the fact that some two thousand candles would be burned throughout the castle before the night was through.

‘Here, now,’ Master Juwain said as his hand closed on Maram’s arm. He pulled him over to the writing table, which was covered with maps, open books and many papers. There he sat him down in the carved, oak chair. ‘We’ll look at your head first.’

He went over to the basin by one of the windows and carefully washed his hands. Then, from beneath the bed, he retrieved two large wooden boxes which he set on the writing table. In the first box, as I saw when he opened it, were many small compartments filled with unguents, bottled medicines and twists of foul-smelling herbs. The second box contained various knives, probes, clamps, scissors and saws – all made of gleaming Godhran steel. I tried not to look into this box as Master Juwain lifted out a roll of clean white cloth and set it on the table.

It didn’t take him very long to clean Maram’s wound and wrap his head with a fresh dressing. But for me, standing by the window and looking out at the night’s first stars as I tried not to listen to Maram’s groans and gasps, it seemed like an hour. And then it was my turn.

After pulling back Asaru’s cloak, I took Maram’s place on the chair. Master Juwain’s hard, gnarly fingers gently probed my bruised chest and then touched my side along the thin red line left by the arrow.

‘It’s hot,’ Master Juwain said. ‘A wound such as this shouldn’t be so hot so soon.’

And with that, he dabbed an unguent on my side. The greenish cream was cool but stank of mold and other substances that I couldn’t identify.

‘All right,’ Master Juwain said, ‘now let’s see the arrow.’

As Maram crowded closer and looked on, I unwrapped the arrow and handed it to Master Juwain. He seemed loath to touch it, as if it were a snake that might at any moment come alive and sink its venomous fangs into him. With great care he held it closer to the stand of candles burning by the table; he gazed at the coated head for a long time as his gray eyes darkened like the sea in a storm.

‘What is it?’ Maram blurted out. ‘Is it truly poison?’

‘You know it is,’ Master Juwain told him.

‘Well, which one?’

Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘That we shall soon see.’

He instructed us to stand off toward the open window, and we did as he bade us. Then, from the second box, he produced a scalpel and a tiny spoon whose bowl was the size of a child’s fingernail. With a meticulousness that I had always found daunting, he used the scalpel to scrape off a bit of the bluish substance that covered the head of the arrow. He caught these evil-looking flakes with a sheet of white paper, then funneled them into the spoon.

‘Hold your breath, now,’ he told us.

I drew in a draft of clean mountain air and watched as Master Juwain covered his nose and mouth with a thick cloth. Then he held the spoon over one of the candles. A moment later, the blue flakes caught fire. But strangely, I saw, they burned with an angry, red flame.

Still holding the cloth over his face, Master Juwain set down the spoon and joined us by the window. I could almost feel him silently counting the seconds to every beat of my heart. By this time, my lungs were burning for air. At last Master Juwain uncovered his mouth and told us, ‘Go ahead and breathe – I think it should be all right now.’

Maram, whose face was red as an apple, gasped at the air streaming in the window, and so did I. Even so, I caught the faintness of a stench that was bitter beyond belief.

‘Well?’ Maram said, turning to Master Juwain, ‘do you know what it is?’

‘Yes, I know,’ Master Juwain said. There was a great sadness in his voice. ‘It’s as I feared – the poison is kirax.’

‘Kirax,’ Maram repeated as if he didn’t like the taste of the word on his tongue. ‘I don’t know about kirax.’

‘Well, you should,’ Master Juwain said. ‘If you weren’t so busy with the chambermaids, then you would.’

I thought Master Juwain was being unfair to him. Maram was studying to become a Master Poet, and so couldn’t be expected to know of every esoteric herb or poison.

‘What is kirax, sir?’ I asked him.

He turned to me and grasped my shoulder. There was a reassuring strength in his hand and tenderness as well. And then he said, ‘It’s a poison used only by Morjin and the Red Priests of the Kallimun. And their assassins.’

He went on to say that kirax was a derivative of the kirque plant, as was the more common drug called kiriol. Kiriol, of course, was known to open certain sensitives to others’ minds – though at great cost to themselves. Kirax was much more dangerous: even a small amount opened its victim to a flood of sensations that overwhelmed and burned out the nerves. Death came quickly and agonizingly as if one’s entire body had been plunged into a vat of boiling oil.

‘You must have absorbed a minuscule amount of it,’ Master Juwain told me. ‘Not enough to kill but quite sufficient to torment you.’

Truly, I thought, enough to torment me even as my gift tormented me. I looked off at the candles’ flickering flames, and it occurred to me that the kirax was a dark, blue, hidden knife cutting at my heart and further opening it to sufferings and secrets that I would rather not know.

‘Do you have the antidote?’ I asked him.

Master Juwain sighed as he looked at his box of medicines. ‘I’m afraid there is no antidote,’ he said. He told Maram and me that the hell of kirax was that once injected, it never left the body.

‘Ah,’ Maram said upon hearing this news, ‘that’s hard, Val – that’s too bad.’

Yes, I thought, trying to close myself from the waves of pity and fear that poured from Maram, it was very bad indeed.

Master Juwain moved back over to the table and gingerly picked up the arrow. ‘This came from Argattha,’ he said.

At the mention of Morjin’s stronghold in the White Mountains, a shudder ran through me. It was said that Argattha was carved out of the rock of a mountain, an entire city built underground where slaves were whipped to work and dreadful rites occurred far from the eyes of civilized men.

‘I would guess,’ Master Juwain told me, ‘that the man you killed was sent from there. He might even be a full priest of the Kallimun.’

I closed my eyes as I recalled the assassin’s fiercely intelligent eyes.

‘I’d like to see the body,’ Master Juwain said.

Maram wiped the sweat from his fat neck as he pointed at the arrow and said, ‘But we don’t know that the assassins are Kallimun priests, do we? Isn’t it also possible that one of the Ishkans has gone over to Morjin?’

Master Juwain suddenly stiffened with anger as he admonished Maram: ‘Please do not call him by that name.’ Then he turned to me. ‘It worries me even more that the Lord of Lies has made traitor one of your own countrymen.’

‘No,’ I said, filling up with a rare anger of my own. ‘No Meshian would ever betray us so.’

‘Perhaps not willfully,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But you don’t know the deceit of the Lord of Lies. You don’t know his power.’

He told us then that all men, even warriors and kings, knew moments of darkness and despair. At such times, when the clouds of doubt shrouded the soul and the stars did not shine, they became more vulnerable to evil, most especially to the Master of Minds himself. Then Morjin might come for them, in their hatred or in their darkest dreams; he would send illusions to confuse them; he would seize the sinews of their will and control them at a distance as with a puppeteer pulling on strings. These soulless men were terrible and very deadly, though fortunately very rare. Master Juwain called them ghuls; he admitted to his fear that a ghul might be waiting in the great hall to take meat with us that very night.

To steady my racing heart, I stepped over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. As a child, I had heard rumors of ghuls, as of werewolves or the dreaded Gray Men who come at night to suck out your soul. But I had never really believed them.

‘But why,’ I asked Master Juwain, ‘would the Lord of Lies send an assassin – or anyone else – to kill me with poison?’

He looked at me strangely, and asked, ‘Are you sure the first assassin was shooting at you and not Asaru?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how could you be sure? Didn’t Asaru say that he felt the arrow pass through his hair?’

Master Juwain’s clear, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of twin moons. How could I tell him about my gift of sensing what lay inside another’s heart? How could I tell him that I had felt the assassin’s intention to murder me as surely as I did the cold wind pouring through the window?

‘There was the angle of the shot,’ I tried to explain. There was something in the assassin’s eyes.’

‘You could see his eyes from a hundred yards away?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And then, ‘No, that is, it wasn’t really like seeing. But there was something about the way he looked at me. The concentration.’

Master Juwain was silent as he stared at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. Then he said, ‘I think there’s something about you, Valashu Elahad. There was something about your grandfather, too.’

In silence I reached out to close the cold pane of glass against the night.

‘I believe,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘that this something might have something to do with why the Lord of Lies is hunting you. If we understood it better, it might provide us with the crucial clue.’

I looked at Master Juwain then and I wanted him to help me understand how I could feel the fire of another’s passions or the unbearable pressure of their longing for the peace of the One. But some things can never be understood. How could one feel the cold light of the stars on a perfect winter night? How could one feel the wind?

‘The Lord of Lies couldn’t know of me,’ I said at last. ‘He’d have no reason to hunt the seventh son of a faraway mountain king.’

‘No reason? Wasn’t it your ancestor, Aramesh, who took the Lightstone from him at the Battle of Sarburn?’

‘Aramesh,’ I said, ‘is the ancestor of many Valari. The Lord of Lies can’t hunt us all.’

‘No? Can he not?’ Master Juwain’s eyebrows suddenly pulled down in anger. ‘I’m afraid he would hunt any and all who oppose him.’

For a moment I stood there rubbing the scar on my forehead. Oppose Morjin? I wanted the Valari to stop fighting among ourselves and unite under one banner so that we wouldn’t have to oppose him. Shouldn’t that, I wondered, be enough?

‘But I don’t oppose him,’ I said.

‘No, you’re too gentle of soul for that,’ Master Juwain told me. There was doubt in his voice, and irony as well. ‘But you needn’t take up arms to be in opposition to the Red Dragon. You oppose him merely in your intelligence and love of freedom. And by seeking all that is beautiful, good and true.’

I looked down at the carpet and bit my lip against the tightness in my throat. It was the Brothers who sought those things, not I.

As if Master Juwain could read my thoughts, he caught my eyes and said, ‘You have a gift, Val. What kind of gift, I’m not yet sure. But you could have been a Meditation Master or Music Master. Or possibly even a Master Healer.’

‘Do you really think so, sir?’ I asked, looking at him.

‘You know I do,’ he said in a voice heavy with accusation. ‘But in the end, you quit.’

Because I couldn’t bear the hurt in his eyes, I turned to stare at the fire, which seemed scarcely less angry and inflamed. Of all my brothers, I had been the only one to attend the Brotherhood school past the age of sixteen. I had wanted to study music, poetry, languages and meditation. With great reluctance my father had agreed to this, so long as I didn’t neglect the art of the sword. And so for two happy years, I had wandered the cloisters and gardens of the Brotherhood’s great sanctuary ten miles up the valley from Silvassu; there I had memorized poems and played my flute and sneaked off into the ash grove to practice fencing with Maram. Though it had never occurred to my father that I might actually want to take vows and join the Brotherhood, for a long time I had nursed just such an ambition.

‘It wasn’t my choice,’ I finally said.

‘Not your choice?’ Master Juwain huffed out. ‘Everything we do, we choose. And you chose to quit.’

‘But the Waashians were killing my friends!’ I protested. ‘Raising spears against my brothers! The king called me to war, and I had to go.’

‘And what have all your wars ever changed?’

‘Please do not call them my wars, sir. Nothing would make me happier than to see war ended forever.’

‘No?’ he said, pointing at the dagger that I wore on my belt. ‘Is that why you bear arms wherever you go? Is that why you answered your father’s call to battle?’

‘But, sir,’ I said, smiling as I thought of the words from one of his favorite books, ‘isn’t all life a battle?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a battle of the heart and soul.’

‘Navsa Adami,’ I said, ‘believed in fighting with other weapons.’

At the mention of the name of the man who had founded the first Brotherhood, Master Juwain grimaced as if he had been forced to drink vinegar. Perhaps I shouldn’t have touched upon the old wound between the Brotherhoods and the Valari. But I had read the history of the Brotherhoods in books collected in their own libraries. In Tria, the Eternal City, in the 2,177th year of the Age of the Mother, which ever after would be called the Dark Year, Navsa Adami had been among those who suffered the first invasion of the Aryans. The sack of Tria had been terrible and swift, for in that most peaceful of ages, the Alonians possessed hoes and spades for digging in their gardens but no true weapons. Navsa Adami had been bound in chains and forced to watch the violation and murder of his own wife on the steps of the Temple of Life. The Aryan warlord had then razed the great Temple and destroyed the Garden of the Earth as the slaughter began. And Navsa Adami, along with fifty priests, had escaped and fled into the Morning Mountains, vowing revenge.

This exile became known as the First Breaking of the Order. For the Order had been founded to use the green gelstei crystals to awaken the lands of Ea to a greater life whereas Navsa Adami now wished to bring about the Aryans’ death. And so, in the mountains of Mesh, he founded the Great White Brotherhood to fight the Aryans by any means the Brothers could find. With him he brought a green gelstei meant to be used for healing and furthering the life forces; Navsa Adami, however, had planned to use it to breed a race of warriors to fight the Aryans and overthrow their reign of terror. But he found in Mesh men who were already warriors; it became his hope to unite the Valari and train us in the mystic arts so that we would one day defeat the Aryans and bring peace to Ea. And this, at the Battle of Sarburn, we had nearly done. As a consequence of this the Brotherhoods, early in the Age of Law, had forever renounced violence and war. They had pleaded with the Valari to do the same. The Valari knights, though, fearing the return of the Dragon, had kept their swords sharpened and close to their hands. And so the bond between the Brotherhoods and the Valari was broken.

I had thought to score a point by invoking the name of Navsa Adami. But Master Juwain let his anger melt away so that only a terrible sadness remained. Then he said softly, ‘If Navsa Adami were alive today, he would be the first to warn you that once the killing begins, it never ends.’

I turned away as his sadness touched my eyes with a deep, hot pain. I suddenly recalled the overpowering wrongness that I had sensed earlier in the woods; now a bit of this wrongness, in the form of kirax and perhaps something worse, would burn forever inside me.

I wanted to look at Master Juwain and tell him that there had to be a way to end the killing. Instead, I looked into myself and said, There’s always a time to fight.’

Master Juwain stepped closer to me and laid his hand on mine. Then he told me, ‘Evil can’t be vanquished with a sword, Val. Darkness can’t be defeated in battle but only by shining a bright enough light.’

He looked at me with a new radiance pouring out of him and said, ‘This is truly a dark time. But it’s always darkest just before the dawn.’

He let go of me suddenly and walked over to his desk. There his hand closed on a large book bound in green leather. I immediately recognized it as the Saganom Elu, many passages of which I had memorized during my years at the Brotherhood’s school.

‘I think it’s time for a little reading lesson,’ he announced, moving back toward Maram and me. His fingers quickly flipped through the yellow, well-worn pages, and then he suddenly dropped the book into Maram’s hands. ‘Brother Maram, would you please read from the Trian Prophecies. Chapter seven, beginning with verse twenty-six.’

Maram, who was as surprised as I was at this sudden call to scholarship, stood there sweating and blinking his eyes. ‘You want me to read now, sir. Ah, shouldn’t we be getting ready for the feast?’

‘Indulge me if you will, please.’

‘But you know I’ve no talent for ancient Ardik,’ Maram grumbled. ‘Now, if you would ask me to read Lorranda, which is the language of love and poetry, why then I would be delighted to –’

‘Please just read us the lines,’ Master Juwain interrupted, ‘or we will miss the feast.’

Maram stood there glowering at him like a child asked to muck out a stable. He asked, ‘Do I have to, sir?’

‘Yes, you do,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘I’m afraid that Val never had the time to learn Ardik as well as you.’

Truly, I had left the Brotherhood’s school before mastering this noblest of languages. And so I waited intently as Maram took a deep breath and ground his finger into the page of the book that Master Juwain had set before him. And then his huge voice rolled out into the room: ‘Songan erathe ad valte kalanath li galdanaan … ah, let me see … Jin Ieldra, song Ieldra –’

‘Very good,’ Master Juwain broke in, ‘but why don’t you translate as you read?’

‘But, sir,’ he said, pointing at a book on the writing table, ‘you already have the translated version there. Why don’t I just read from that?’

Master Juwain tapped the book that Maram was holding and said, ‘Because I asked you to read from this.’

‘Very well, sir,’ Maram said, rolling his eyes. And then he swallowed a mouthful of air and continued, ‘When the earth and stars enter the Golden Band … ah, I think this is right … the darkest age will end and a new age –’

‘That’s very good,’ Master Juwain interrupted again. ‘Your translation is very accurate but …’

Yes, sir?’

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost the flavor of the original. The poetry, as it were. Why don’t you put the words to verse?’

Now sweat began pouring down Maram’s beard and neck. He said, ‘Now, sir? Here?’

‘You’re studying to be a Master Poet, aren’t you? Well, poets make poems.’

‘Yes, yes, I know, but without time to make the music and to find the rhymes, you can’t really expert me to –’

‘Do your best, Brother Maram,’ Master Juwain said with a broad smile. ‘I have faith in you.’

Strangely, this immensely difficult prospect seemed suddenly to please Maram. He stared at the book for quite a long while as if burning its glyphs into his mind. Then he closed his eyes for an even longer time. And suddenly, as if reciting a sonnet to a lover, he looked toward the windows and said:

When earth alights the Golden Band,

The darkest age will pass away;

When angel fire illumes the land,

The stars will show the brightest day.

The deathless day, the Age of Light;

Ieldra’s blaze befalls the earth;

The end of war, the end of night

Awaits the last Maitreya’s birth.

The Cup of Heaven in his hand,

The One’s clear light in heart and eye,

He brings the healing of the land,

And opens colors in the sky.

And there, the stars, the ageless lights

For which we ache and dream and burn,

Upon the deep and dazzling heights –

Our ancient home we shall return.

‘There,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his face as he finished. With a trembling hand, he gave the book back to Master Juwain.

‘Very good,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘We’ll make a Brother of you yet.’

He motioned us over to the window. He pointed up at the stars, and in a voice quavering with excitement, he said, ‘This is the time. The earth entered the Golden Band twenty years ago, and I believe that somewhere on Ea, the Maitreya, the Shining One, has been born.’

I looked out at the Owl constellation and other clusters of stars that shimmered in the dark sky beyond Telshar’s jagged peak. It was said that the earth and all the stars turned about the heavens like a great, diamond-studded wheel. At the center of this cosmic wheel – at the center of all things – dwelt the Ieldra, luminous beings who shone the light of their souls on all of creation. These great, golden beacons streamed out from the cosmic center like rivers of light, and the Brothers called them the Golden Bands. Every few thousand years, the earth would enter one of them and bask in its radiance. At such times the trumpets of doom would sound and mountains would ring; souls would be quickened and Maitreyas would be born as the old ages ended and the new ones began. Although it was impossible to behold this numinous light with one’s eyes, the scryers and certain gifted children could apprehend it as a deep, golden glow that touched all things.

‘This is the time,’ Master Juwain said again as he turned toward me. The time for the ending of war. And perhaps the time that the Lightstone will be found as well. I’m sure that King Kiritan’s messengers have come bearing the news of just such a prophecy.’

I gazed out at the stars and there, too, I felt a rushing of a wind that carried the call of strange and beautiful voices. The leldra, I knew, communicate the Law of the One not just in golden rays of light but in the deepest whisperings of the soul.

‘If the Lightstone is found,’ I said, wondering aloud, ‘who would ever have the wisdom to use it?’

Master Juwain looked up at the stars, too, and I sensed in him the fierce pride that had taken him from the fields of a farm on the Elyssu to a mastership in the greatest of Brotherhoods. I expected him to tell me that only the Brothers had attained the purity of mind necessary to plumb the secrets of the Lightstone. Instead, he turned to me and said, ‘The Maitreya would have such wisdom. It is for him that the Galadin sent the Lightstone to earth.’

Outside the window, high above the castle and the mountains, the stars of the Seven Sisters and other constellations gleamed brightly. Somewhere among them, I thought, the immortal Elijin gazed upon this cosmic glory and dreamed of becoming Galadin, just as the Star People aspired to advancement to the Elijik order. There, too, dwelled Arwe, Ashtoreth and Valoreth, and others of the Galadin. These great, angelic beings had so perfected themselves and mastered the physical realm that they could never be killed. They walked on other worlds even as men did the fields and forests of Mesh; in truth, they walked freely between worlds, though never yet on earth. Scryers had seen visions of them, and I had sensed their great beauty in my longings and dreams. It was Valoreth himself, my grandfather once told me, who had sent Elahad to Ea bearing the Lightstone in his hands.

For a while, as the night deepened and the stars turned through the sky, we stood there talking about the powers of this mysterious golden cup. I said nothing of my seeing it appear before me in the woods earlier that day. Although its splendor now seemed only that of a dream, the warmth that had revived me like a golden elixir was too real to doubt. Could the Lightstone itself, I wondered, truly heal me of the wound that cut through my heart? Or would it take a Maitreya, wielding the Lightstone as I might a sword, to accomplish this miracle?

I believe that I might have found the courage to ask Master Juwain these questions if we hadn’t been interrupted. Just as I was wondering if those of the orders of the Galadin and Elijin had once suffered from the curse of empathy even as I did, footsteps sounded in the hallway and there came a loud knocking at the door.

‘Just a moment,’ Master Juwain called out.

He stepped briskly across the room and opened the door. And there, in the dimly lit archway, stood Joshu Kadar breathing heavily from his long climb up the stairs.

‘It’s time,’ the young squire gasped out. ‘Lord Asaru has asked me to tell you that it’s time for the feast to begin.’

‘Thank you,’ Master Juwain told him. Then he moved back to the desk where he had left the arrow. He carefully wrapped it in my shirt again and asked, ‘Are you ready, Val?’

It seemed that the answers that I sought to the great riddles of life would have to wait. And so, with Joshu in the lead, I followed Maram and Master Juwain out into the cold, dark hallway.

4

We entered the great hall to the blare of trumpets announcing the feast. Along the room’s north wall, hung with a great, black banner emblazoned with the swan and stars of the royal house of Mesh, three heralds stood blowing their brass horns. The sound that reverberated through the huge room and out into the castle was the same that I had twice heard calling the Valari to battle. Indeed, the knights of Mesh – and those of Ishka – crowded through the doorways five abreast and moved toward their various tables as if marching to war.

I found Asaru and my brothers standing by their chairs at my family’s table along the north wall; there, too, my mother and grandmother waited for me to take my place, as did my father. I’m sure that he didn’t like it that I was among the last to arrive. He stood tall and grave in a black tunic that was much like the one that I had hastily fetched from my rooms – only clean and embroidered with a freshly polished silver swan and seven bright, silver stars. As he watched me climb the steps to the dais upon which our table stood, his bright, black eyes blazed like stars; there was reproof in his fierce gaze, but also concern and much else as well. Although Shavashar Elahad was the hardest man I knew, the well of his emotions ran as deep as the sea.

When all the guests had finally found their places, my father pulled out his chair and sat down, and everyone did the same. He took the position of honor at the center of the table, with my mother at his immediate right and my grandmother on his left. And on her left, in order, sat Karshur, Jonathay and Mandru, the fiercest of all my brothers. Where the other Valari knights in the room were content to wear their swords buckled to their waists, Mandru always carried his scabbarded in his three-fingered left hand, ready to draw at a moment’s notice should he need to defend his honor – or his kingdom’s. He sat looking down the table in silent communication with Asaru, who must have told him what had occurred earlier in the woods. Asaru sat to the right of my mother, Elianora wi Solaru, who was tall and regal in her brightly embroidered gown – and said to be the most beautiful woman in the Nine Kingdoms. Her dark, perceptive eyes moved from Asaru to Yarashan, who sat on Asaru’s right, and then down the line of the table from the silent and secretive Ravar to me. As the youngest and least distinguished member of my family, I sat at the far right near the end of the table. There I had hoped to lose myself in the clamor and vastness of the room. But there was no eluding my mother’s strength, goodness and grace. She was the most alive being I had ever known, and the most loyal, too, and she looked at me as if to say that she would gladly lay down her life to protect me should the unknown assassin try to kill me again.

‘Do you see him here?’ Ravar whispered to me. The fox-faced Ravar was older than I by three years and shorter by almost a head. I had to bend low to hear what he was saying.

I looked out at the sea of faces in the room as I tried to identify that of the assassin who had escaped us. At the table nearest the dais, on the right, sat the Brothers who were visiting the castle that night. Master Juwain was there, of course, accompanied by Master Kelem, the Music Master, and Master Tadeo and some twenty other Brothers besides Maram. I knew all of them by name, and I was sure that none of them could have drawn a bow against me.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for King Kiritan’s emissaries, who had taken the next two tables. All of them – the knights and squires, the minstrels and grooms – were strangers to me. Count Dario, the King’s cousin, I recognized only by description and his emblem: he wore the gold caduceus of House Narmada on his blue tunic, and his carefully trimmed hair and goatee seemed like red flames shooting from his head.

At the left of the room, next to the Ishkan tables where I tried not to look, were the first of the Meshian tables. There I saw Lord Harsha beaming proudly at Behira, and Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu talking with their wives. Lansar Raasharu, my father’s seneschal, sat there, too, along with Mesh’s other greatest lords. If any of these old warriors were traitors, I thought, then I couldn’t be sure that the sun would rise in the east the next morning.

As well I had faith in my countrymen in the second tier of tables where the master knights and their ladies waited for my father’s attendants to pour the wine. And so with the many lesser knights sitting at the tables beyond, out to the farthest corners of the hall. There, almost too far away to see clearly, I studied the faces of friends such as Sunjay Navaru and other common warriors at whose sides I had fought. There, I thought, near the great granite pillars holding up the arched roof, I would have sat too but for the happenstance of birth.

I whispered back to Ravar. ‘None of them looks like the one who shot at me.’

‘But what of the Ishkans?’ he asked with a gleam in his eyes. ‘You haven’t even looked at them, have you, Val?’

Of course, I hadn’t. And of course Ravar had noticed that I hadn’t. He had quick, black eyes and an even quicker wit. Mandru and the stolid Karshur often accused him of living in his mind, a battlefield upon which no Valari should dwell for too long. Like me he had no natural liking for war: he preferred fencing with words and ideas. Unlike me, however, he was very good at real war because he saw it as a way of perfecting both his mind and his will. Although there were some who thought him unworthy to wear the three diamonds of a master knight, I had seen him lead a company of men at the Battle of Red Mountain and cast his lance through Sar Manashu’s eye at a distance of twenty yards.

As Ravar began to study the Ishkans, perhaps looking for weaknesses with the same concentration that he had turned on Waas’s army, I did the same. And immediately my eyes fell upon an arrogant man with a great scar running down the side of his face. Although he had a great beak of a nose like an eagle, his father and mother had bestowed upon him scarcely any chin. His eyes, I thought, were like pools of stagnant black water, and seemed to suck me down into the coldness of his heart even as they challenged me. Because I didn’t like the slimy feeling that crept into my belly just then, I gazed instead at his bright red tunic, which bore the great white bear of the Ishkan royalty. I recognized him as Prince Salmelu, King Hadaru’s oldest son. Five years before, at the great tournament in Taron, in a game of chess, I had humiliated him in a crushing defeat that had taken only twenty-three moves. It wasn’t enough that he had won the gold medal in the fencing competition and had acquitted himself honorably in the horsemanship and archery competitions; it seemed he had to be preeminent at everything, for he took insult easily, especially from those who had bested him. It was said that he had fought fifteen men in duels – and left all fifteen dead in pools of blood. One of his brothers, Lord Issur, shared the table with him, along with Lord Mestivan and Lord Nadhru and other prominent Ishkans whom Ravar pointed out to me.

‘Do any of them look like your assassin?’ Ravar asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell – the man’s face was hooded.’

And then, even as I closed my eyes and opened myself to the hum of hundreds of voices, I felt the same taint of wrongness that I had in the woods. The red, twisting worms of someone’s hate began eating their way up my spine. From what man in the hall this dreadful sensation emanated, however, I couldn’t tell.

At last, the wine having been poured, my father lifted up his goblet and stood to make the opening toast. All eyes in the hall turned his way; all voices trailed off and then died into silence as he began to speak.

‘Masters of the Brotherhood,’ he began, ‘princes and lords, ladies and knights, we would like to welcome you to this gathering tonight. It’s a strange chance that brings King Kiritan’s emissaries to Mesh at the same time that King Hadaru sends his eldest son to honor us. But let us hope that it’s a good chance and a sign of good times to come.’

My father, I thought, had a fine, strong voice that rang from the stones of the hall. He fairly shone with strength, both in the inner steel of his soul and in his large, long hands that could still grip a sword with great ferocity. At fifty-four he was just entering the fullest flower of manhood, for the Valari age more slowly than do other peoples – no one knows why. His long black hair, shot with strands of snowy white, flowed out from beneath a silver crown whose points were set with brilliant white diamonds. Five other diamonds, arrayed into the shape of a star, shimmered from a great, silver ring. It was the ring of a king, and someday Asaru would wear it if no one killed him first.

‘And so,’ my father continued, ‘in the hope of finding the way toward the peace that all desire, we invite you to take salt and bread with us – and perhaps a little meat and ale as well.’

My father smiled as he said this, to leaven the stiffness of his formal speech. Then he motioned for the grooms to bring out what he had called a ‘little meat.’ In truth, there were many platters laden with steaming hams and roasted beef, along with elk, venison and other game. There were fowls almost too numerous to count: nicely browned ducks, geese, pheasants and quail – though of course no swans. It seemed that hunters such as Asaru and I had slaughtered whole herds and flocks that day. The grooms served baskets heaped with black barley bread and the softer white breads, aged cheeses, butter, jams, apple pies, honeycomb and pitchers of frothing black beer. There was so much food that the long wooden tables fairly groaned beneath its weight.

Although I was very hungry, my belly seemed a knot of acid and pain, and I could hardly eat. And so I picked at my food as I looked out into the hall. Along the walls were tapestries depicting famous battles that my people had fought and many portraits of my ancestors. The light of hundreds of candles illuminated the faces of Aramesh, Duramesh, and the great Elemesh who had utterly crushed the Sarni at the Battle of the Song River. In their ancient countenances I saw traits that my brothers shared to this day: Yarashan’s pride, Karshur’s strength, Jonathay’s almost unearthly calm and beauty. There was much to admire in these kings, who were a reminder of the debt that we owed to those who give us life.

My brothers seemed all too aware of this debt of blood. Between bites of wild turkey or bread, washed down with drafts of beer, they spoke of their willingness to make war with the Ishkans should it become necessary to fight. They spoke of the causes for this war, too: the killing of the Ishkan crown prince in a duel with my grandfather two generations earlier, and my grandfather’s own death at the Battle of the Diamond River. Yarashan, who fancied himself a student of history (although he had studied only lineages and battles), brought up the War of the Two Stars early in the Age of Law in which Mesh and Ishka had taken opposing sides. The Ishkans had fought my ancestors over the possession of the Lightstone; we had badly defeated them at the Raaswash, where their king, Elsu Maruth, had been killed. It was the greatest of ironies, I thought, that this healing vessel had been the source of woe for so long.

‘The Ishkans will never forget that battle,’ I heard Asaru say to Ravar. ‘But in the end, it will all come down to the mountain.’

Everyone, of course, knew of which mountain he spoke: Mount Korukel, one of the great guardian peaks that stood upon the border between Mesh and Ishka just beyond the feeder streams of the Upper Raaswash River. The Ishkans were pressing their old demand that the border of our two kingdoms should exactly bisect Mount Korukel, while we of the swan and stars claimed the whole mountain as Meshian soil.

‘But Korukel is ours,’ Yarashan said as he used a napkin to neatly wipe the beer from his lips. In his outward form, he was almost as beautiful a man as Jonathay and even prouder than Asaru.

What was half a mile of rock against men’s lives? I wondered. Well, if many of those rocks were diamonds, it was a great deal indeed. For the lives of men – the Valari warriors of each of the Nine Kingdoms – had been connected to the fabulous mineral wealth of the Morning Mountains for thousands of years. From their silver we made our emblems and the gleaming rings with which we pledged our lives; from its iron we made our steel. And from the diamonds we found deep underground and sometimes sparkling in the shallows of clear mountain streams, we made our marvelous suits of armor. In the Age of Swords, before the Brotherhoods had broken with the Valari, it had been the Brothers who had learned to work these hardest and most beautiful of stones; they had discovered the secret of affixing them to corslets of black leather and then taught us this art. While it was not true that this diamond-encrusted armor afforded the Valari invulnerability in battle – an arrow or a well-aimed spear thrust could find a chink between the carefully set diamonds – many were the swords that had broken upon it. The mere sight of a Valari army marching into battle and glittering in their ranks as if raimented with millions of stars had struck terror into our enemies for most of three long ages. They called us the Diamond Warriors, and said that we could never be defeated by force of arms alone, but only through treachery or the fire of the red gelstei.

And recently a great new vein of diamonds had been discovered running through the heart of Mount Korukel. Naturally, the Ishkans wanted to mine it for themselves.

When the last pie had been eaten and nearly everyone’s belly groaned from much more than a little meat, it came time for the rounds of toasting. It would have been more sensible, of course, to hold this drinking fest after discussing the rather serious business that the Alonians and Ishkans had come for. But we Valari honored our traditions, and the end of a meal was the time for paying one’s respects to guests and hosts alike.

The first to stand that day was Count Dario. He was a compact man who moved with quick, deft gestures of his arms and hands. He took up a goblet of black beer and presented it toward my father, saying, ‘To King Shamesh, whose hospitality is overmatched only by his wisdom.’

A clamor of approval rang through the hall, but Prince Salmelu, like the swordsman he was, took advantage of the opening that Count Dario had unwittingly presented him. Like an uncaged bear, he stood, stretched and planted his feet wide apart on the floor. He fingered the many colored battle ribbons tied to his long hair with his right hand before resting it on the hilt of his sword. Then with his left hand, he raised his goblet and said, ‘To King Shamesh. May he find the wisdom to do what we all wish for in walking the road toward peace.’

As I touched my lips to my beer, he flashed me a quick, hard look as if testing me with a feint of his sword.

I knew that I should have thought of an immediate rejoinder to his thinly veiled demand. But the maliciousness in his eyes held me to my chair. Instead, it was my usually unimaginative brother, Karshur, who stood and raised his goblet.

‘To King Shamesh,’ he said in a voice that sounded like boulders rolling down a mountain. He himself was built like an inverted mountain: as if successive slabs of granite had been piled higher and deeper from his thick legs to his massive shoulders and chest. ‘May he find the strength to do what he has to do no matter what others may wish.’

As soon as he had returned to his chair, Jonathay stood up beside him. He had all of our mother’s beauty and much of her grace as well. He was a fatalistic but cheerful man who liked to play at life, most especially at war – though with skillful and deadly effect. He laughed good-naturedly as if enjoying this duel of words. ‘To Queen Elianora, may she always find the patience to endure men’s talk of war.’

All at once, from the tables throughout the hall, the many women there raised their goblets as if by a single hand and called out, ‘Yes, yes, to Queen Elianora!’

As a nervous laughter spread from table to table, my mother stood and smoothed out the folds of her black gown. Then she smiled kindly. Although she directed her words out into the hall, it seemed that she was speaking right at Salmelu.

‘To all our guests this evening,’ she said, ‘thank you for making such long journeys to honor our home. May the food we’ve all shared nourish our bodies, and may the good company we bring open our hearts so that we act out of the true courage of compassion rather than fear.’

So saying, she turned to Salmelu and beamed a smile at him. In her bright eyes there was only an open desire for fellowship. But her natural grace seemed to infuriate Salmelu rather than soothe him. He sat deathly still in his chair gripping the hilt of his sword as his face flushed with blood. Although Salmelu had stood sword to naked sword with fifteen men in the ring of honor, he couldn’t seem to bear the gentleness of my mother’s gaze.

Because it would have been unseemly for him to stand again while others waited to make their toasts, he cast a quick, ferocious look at Lord Nadhru as if to order him to speak in his place. And so Lord Nadhru, a rather angry young man who might have been Salmelu’s twin in his insolent nature if not appearance, sprang up from his chair.

‘To Queen Elianora,’ he said, looking over the rim of his goblet. ‘We thank her for reminding us that we must always act with courage, which we promise to do. And we thank her for welcoming us into her house, even as she was once welcomed herself.’

This, I thought, was the Ishkans’ way of reminding her that she was as much of an outsider in the castle as they were, and therefore that she had no real right to speak for Mesh. But of course this was just pure spite on their part. For Elianora wi Solaru, sister of King Talanu of Kaash, had chosen freely to wed my father and not their greedy, old king.

And so it went, toast after toast, both Ishkans and Meshians casting words back and forth as if they were velvet-covered spears. All this time my father sat as still and grave in his chair as any of our ancestors in the portraits lining the walls. Although he kept most of the fire from his eyes, I could feel a whole stew of emotions boiling up inside him: pride, anger, loyalty, outrage, love. One who didn’t know him better might have thought that at any moment he might lose his patience and silence his attackers with a burst of kingly thunder. But my father practiced self-restraint as others did wielding their swords. No man, I thought, asked more of himself than he. In many ways he embodied the Valari ideal of flowingness, flawlessness and fearlessness. As I, too, struggled to keep my silence, he suddenly looked at me as if say, ‘Never let the enemy know what you’re thinking.’

I believe that my father might have allowed this part of the feast to continue half the night so that he might better have a chance to study the Ishkans – and his own countrymen and sons. But the toasting came to a sudden and unexpected end, from a most unexpected source.

‘My lords and ladies!’ a strong voice suddenly bellowed out from below our table, ‘I would like to propose a toast.’

I turned just in time to see Maram push back his chair and stand away from the Brothers’ table. How Maram had acquired a goblet full of beer in plain sight of his masters was a mystery. And clearly it was not his first glass either, for he used his fat, beer-stained fingers to wipe the dried froth from his mustache as he wobbled on his feet. And then he raised his goblet, spilling even more beer on his stained tunic.

‘To Lord Harsha,’ he said, nodding toward his table. ‘May we all thank him for providing this wonderful drink tonight.’

That was a toast everyone could gladly drink to; all at once hundreds of goblets, both of glass and silver steel, clinked together, and a grateful laughter pealed out into the room. I looked across the hall as Lord Harsha shifted about in his chair. Although he was plainly embarrassed to have been singled out for his generosity, he smiled at Maram all the same. If Maram had left well enough alone and sat back down, he might even have gained Lord Harsha’s favor. But Maram, it seemed, could never leave anything alone.

‘And now I would like to drink to love and beautiful women,’ he said. He turned to Behira, fairly drinking in the sight of her as if the sensibilities of the hundreds of people looking on didn’t matter. ‘Ah, the love of beautiful women – it’s what makes the world turn and the stars shine, is it not?’

Master Juwain looked up at Maram but Maram ignored his icy stare.

‘It’s to the most beautiful woman in the world that I would now like to dedicate this poem, whose words came into my mind like flowers opening the first moment I saw her.’

He raised his goblet toward Behira. Forgetting that he was supposed to wait until after the toast before drinking, he took a huge gulp of beer. And all the while, Behira sat next to her father flushing with embarrassment. But it was clear that Maram’s attentions delighted her, for she smiled back at him, glowing with an almost tangible heat.

‘Brother Maram,’ Lord Harsha suddenly called out in his gravelly old voice, ‘this isn’t the place for your poetry.’

But Maram ignored him, too, and began his poem:

Star of my soul, how you shimmer Beyond the deep blue sky, Whirling and whirling – you and I whisperlessly Spinning sparks of joy into the night.

I stared at the rings glittering from Maram’s fingers and the passion pouring from his eyes. The words of his poem outraged me. For it wasn’t really his poem at all; he had stolen the verse of the great but forgotten Amun Amaduk and was passing it off as his own.

Lord Harsha pushed back his chair and called out even more strongly, ‘Brother Maram!’

Maram would have done well to heed the warning in Lord Harsha’s voice. But by this time he was drunk on his own words (or rather Amun’s), and with childlike abandon began the second stanza of the poem:

From long ago we came across the universe: Lost rays of light, we fell among strange new flowers And searched in fields and forests Until we found each other and remembered.

Now Lord Harsha, gritting his teeth against the pain of his broken knee, suddenly rose to his feet. With surprising speed, he began advancing down the row of tables straight at Maram. And still Maram continued reciting his poem:

Soul of my soul, for how few moments Were we together on this wandering earth In the magic of our love Dancing in the eyelight, breathing as one?

Suddenly, with a sound of fury in his throat, Lord Harsha drew his sword. Its polished steel pointed straight at Maram, who finally closed his mouth as it occurred to him that he had gone too far. And Lord Harsha, I was afraid, had gone too far to stop, too. Almost without thinking, I leaped up from my chair, crossed the dais, and jumped down to the lower level of the guests’ tables. My boots hit the cold stone with a loud slap. Then I stepped in front of Maram just as Lord Harsha closed the distance between them and pointed the tip of his sword at my heart.

‘Lord Harsha,’ I said, ‘will you please excuse my friend? He’s obviously had too much of your fine beer.’

Lord Harsha’s sword lowered perhaps half an inch. I felt his hot breath steaming out of his nostrils. I was afraid that at any moment he might try to get at Maram by pushing his sword through me. Then he growled out, ‘Well, then he should remember his vows, shouldn’t he? Particularly his vow to renounce women!’

Behind me, I heard Maram clear his throat as if to argue with Lord Harsha. And then my father, the King, finally spoke.

‘Lord Harsha, would you please put down your sword? As a favor to me.’

If Maram had been Valari then there would have been a death that night, for he would have had to answer Lord Harsha’s challenge with steel. But Maram was only a Delian and a Brother at that. Because no one could reasonably expect a Brother to fight a duel with a Valari lord, there was yet hope.

Lord Harsha took a deep breath and then another. I felt the heat of his blood begin to cool. Then he nodded his head in a quick bow to my father and said, ‘Sire, as a favor to you, it would be my pleasure.’

Almost as suddenly as he had drawn his sword, he slipped it back into his sheath. When the King asked you to put down your sword – or take it up – there was no choice but to honor his request.

‘Thank you,’ my father called out to him, ‘for your restraint.’

‘Thank you,’ I whispered to him, ‘for sparing my friend.’

Then I turned to look at Maram as I laid my hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down into his chair. From the nearby table of Valari masters and their ladies, I swept up two goblets of beer and gave one to Lord Harsha.

‘To brotherhood among men,’ I said, raising my goblet. I looked from my family’s table to that of Master Juwain, and then back across the room to the table of the Ishkans. ‘In the end, all men are brothers.’

I listened with great hope as echoes of approval rang out to the clinking of many glasses. And then Maram, my stubborn, irrepressible friend, looked up at my father and said, ‘Ah, King Shamesh – I suppose this isn’t the best time to finish my poem?’

My father ignored him. ‘The time for making toasts is at an end. Lord Harsha, would you please take your seat so that we might move on to more important matters?’

Again Lord Harsha bowed, and he walked slowly back through the rows of tables to his chair. He sat down next to his greatly relieved daughter, whom he looked at sternly but with an obvious love. And then a silence fell over the room as all eyes turned toward my father.

‘We have before us tonight the emissaries of two kings,’ he said, nodding his head at Salmelu and then Count Dario. ‘And two requests will be made of us here tonight; we should listen well to both and neither let our hearts shout down the wisdom of our heads nor our heads mock what our hearts know to be true. Why don’t we have Prince Salmelu speak first, for it may be that in deciding upon his request, the answer to Count Dario’s will become obvious.’

Without smiling, he then nodded at Salmelu, who eagerly sprang to his feet.

‘King Shamesh,’ he said in a voice that snapped out like a whip, ‘the request of King Hadaru is simple: that the border of our kingdoms be clearly established according to the agreement of our ancestors. Either that, or the King asks that we set a time and place for battle.’

So, I thought, the ultimatum that we had all been awaiting had finally been set before us. I felt the hands of three hundred Meshian warriors almost aching to grip the hilts of their swords.

‘The border of our kingdoms is established thusly,’ my father told Salmelu. ‘The first Shavashar gave your people all the lands from Mount Korukel to the Aru River.’

This was true. Long, long ago in the Lost Ages before the millennia of recorded history, it was said that the first Shavashar Elahad had claimed most of the lands of the Morning Mountains for his kingdom. But his seventh son, Ishkavar, wanting lands of his own to rule, had despaired of ever coming into this great possession. And so he had rebelled against his own father. Because Shavashar refused to spill the blood of his favorite son, he had given him all the lands from Korukel to the Aru, and from the Culhadosh River to the grassy plains of the Wendrush. Such was the origin of the kingdom that came to be called Ishka.

‘From Mount Korukel,’ Salmelu snapped at my father. “Which you now claim for your own!’

My father stared down at him with a face as cold as stone. Then he said, ‘If a man gives his son all his fields from his house to a river, he has given him only his fields – not the house or the river.’

‘But mountains,’ Salmelu said, repeating the old argument, ‘aren’t houses. There’s no clearly marked boundary where one begins and ends.’

‘This is true,’ my father said. ‘But surely you can’t think a mountain’s boundary should be a line running through the center of its highest peak?’

‘Given the spirit of the agreement, it’s only the way to think.’

‘There are many ways of thinking,’ my father said, ‘and we’re here tonight to determine what is most fair.’

‘You speak of fairness?’ Salmelu half-shouted. ‘You who keep the richest lands of the Morning Mountains for yourselves? You who kept the Lightstone locked in your castle for an entire age when all the Valari should have shared in its possession?’

Some of what he said was true. After the Battle of Sarburn, when the combined might of the Valari had overthrown Morjin and he had been imprisoned in a great fortress on the Isle of Damoom, Aramesh had brought the Lightstone back to Silvassu. And it had resided in my family’s castle for most of the Age of Law. But it had never been locked away. I turned to look at the white granite pedestal against the banner-covered wall behind my father’s chair. There, on this dusty, old stand, now dark and empty, the Lightstone had sat in plain view for nearly three thousand years.

‘All the Valari did share of its radiance,’ my father told Salmelu. ‘Although it was deemed unwise to move it about among the kingdoms, our castle was always open to any and all who came to see it. Especially to the Ishkans.’

‘Yes, and we had to enter your castle as beggars hoping for a glimpse of gold.’

‘Is that why you invaded our lands with no formal declaration and tried to steal the Lightstone from us? If not for the valor of King Yaravar at the Raaswash, who knows how many would have been killed?’

At this, Salmelu’s small mouth set tightly with anger. Then he said, ‘You speak of warriors being killed? As your people killed Elsu Maruth, who was a very great king.’

Although my father kept his face calm, his eyes flashed with fire as he said, ‘Was he a greater king than Elkasar Elahad, whom you killed at the Diamond River twelve years ago?’

At the mention of my grandfather’s name, I stared at Salmelu and the flames of vengeance began eating at me, too.

‘Warriors die,’ Salmelu said, shrugging off my father’s grief with an air of unconcern. ‘And warriors kill – as King Elkamesh killed my uncle, Lord Dorje. Duels are duels, and war is war.’

‘War is war, as you say,’ my father told Salmelu. ‘And murder is murder, is it not?’

Salmelu’s hand moved an inch closer to the hilt of his sword as his fingers began to twitch. Then he called out, ‘Do you make an accusation, King Shamesh?’

‘An accusation?’ my father said. ‘No, merely a statement of truth. There are some who say that my father’s death was planned and call it murder. But you’ll never hear me say this. War is war, and even kings are killed on the field of battle. No matter the intent, this can’t be called murder. But the hunting of a king’s son in his own woods – that is murder.’

For a long time, perhaps as many as twenty beats of my racing heart, my father sat staring at Salmelu. His eyes were like bright swords cutting away at Salmelu’s outward hauteur to reveal the man within. And Salmelu stared at him: with defiance and a jealous hatred coloring his face. While this duel of the eyes took place before hundreds of men and women stunned into silence, I noticed Asaru exchange a brief look with Ravar. Then Asaru nodded toward a groom standing off to the side of the hall near the door that led to the kitchens. The groom bowed back and disappeared through the doorway. And Asaru stood up from the table, causing Salmelu to break eyes with my father and look at him instead.

‘My lords and ladies,’ Asaru called out to the room, ‘it has come to my attention that the cooks have finally prepared a proper ending to the feast. If you’ll abide with me a moment, they have a surprise for you.’

Now my father looked at Asaru with puzzlement furrowing his forehead. As did Lord Harsha, Count Dario, Lord Tomavar, and many others.

‘But what does all this have to do with murder?’ Salmelu demanded.

And Asaru replied, ‘Only this: that all this talk of killing and murder must have made everyone hungry again. It wouldn’t do to end a feast with everyone still hungry.’

Upon these curious words, the doors to the kitchen opened, and four grooms wheeled out one of the great serving carts usually reserved for the display of whole roasted boars or other large game. It seemed that one knight or another must have indeed speared a boar earlier that day in the woods, for a voluminous white cloth was draped over what appeared to be the largest of boars. Apparently it had taken all these many hours to finish cooking. The grooms wheeled the cart right out toward the front of the room, where they left it sitting just in front of the Ishkans’ table.

‘Is that really a boar?’ I heard Maram ask one of the grooms. ‘I haven’t had a taste of a good boar in two years.’

Despite himself, he licked his lips in anticipation of this most succulent of meats. How anyone could still be hungry after all the food consumed earlier, I didn’t know. But if any man could, Maram was certainly that man, and he eyed the bulging white cloth along with Master Tadeo and everyone else in the room.

Asaru came down from the dais and stepped over to the serving cart. He looked straight into Salmelu’s troubled eyes. And then, with a flourish I hadn’t known he possessed, he reached down and whisked the cloth away from the cart.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram gasped out. ‘Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord!’

All at once, many others gasped out with him in astonishment as they stared at the cart. For there, laid out on its bloodstained boards, was the body of the assassin that I had killed in the woods.

5

The man’s face, I saw, was livid with the darkness of death. Although his eyes remained as I had closed them, no one had thought to change his dirty tunic, which was still moist with the blood that I had spilled.

‘What is this?’ Salmelu cried out, jumping to his feet. He rushed over to Asaru and stood facing him across the assassin’s body. ‘Who is this man? Are you saying that I murdered him?’

‘No,’ Asaru said, glancing up at me, ‘no one will say that.’

‘But who is he?’

‘That we would all like to know,’ Asaru said, looking first at my father and then out into the hall.

Salmelu flicked his hand toward the cart. ‘But what did you mean by saying it wouldn’t do to end a feast with everyone still hungry? This is no way to end a feast.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Asaru agreed. ‘Not with all of us still hungry for the truth.’

I thought that my father had no knowledge of this ugly surprise that had been presented to his guests. It had all the markings of something that Asaru and Ravar had cooked up together, so to speak. But my father immediately saw their purpose. And so did I. With his bright eyes glistening, he looked out into the hall to see if anyone might give a sign that he recognized the assassin. I looked too, but with a sense deeper than that of sight. I thought I might detect the pangs of guilt or grief emanating from some knight who would prove to be the second assassin. But all I could feel was a great, spreading wave of revulsion that made me sick.

As all looked upon Asaru, he began telling of how two hooded men had tried to murder him in his father’s own forest. Although he gave a full account of my killing the man upon the cart, it was obvious that he still believed the first assassin’s arrow had been meant for him.

‘If anyone present knows this man,’ he said, pointing at the dead assassin, ‘will he speak and tell us who he is?’

Of course, Asaru must have thought that no one would speak at all. So he was as surprised as everyone else when Count Dario suddenly rose and walked over to the cart.

‘I know this man,’ he announced, looking at the body. ‘His name is Raldu. He joined our party in Ishka, just after we had crossed the Aru River.’

The other emissaries at the Alonian table, including two named Baron Telek and Lord Mingan, all looked at each other and nodded their heads in affirmation of what Count Dario had said.

‘But who is he?’ Asaru asked Count Dario. ‘And how is it that emissaries of a great king came to share fellowship with a murderer?’

Count Dario stood pulling at his bristly red chin hairs; then he fingered the golden wand of the caduceus emblazoned on his blue tunic. He was a cool-headed man, I thought, and he evinced not the slightest sign that my brother’s questions had insulted him.

‘I do not know if this man has a name other than Raldu,’ he said in a calm, measured voice. ‘And so I cannot say who he truly is. He said that he was a knight of Galda who fled that land when it fell to the Lord of Lies. He said that he had been wandering among the kingdoms in hope of finding a way to fight him. When he learned the nature of our mission, he asked to join us. He seemed greatly excited at the prospect of the Lightstone being recovered. As we all are. I apologize that I let this excitement fan the flames of my own. My enthusiasm obviously overwhelmed my judgment. Perhaps I should have questioned him more closely.’

‘Perhaps you should have,’ Asaru said, touching his hair where the arrow had burned through it.

At this my father looked at him sternly. And then, to Count Dario, he said, ‘It was not upon you to seek out the secrets of this Raldu’s heart. He joined you as a free companion only, not as a servant, and so you can’t be held responsible for his actions.’

‘Thank you, King Shamesh,’ Count Dario said, bowing.

My father bowed back to him, then continued, ‘But we must ask you to search your memory deeply now. Did Raldu ever speak against myself or my house? Did he form any close associations with your other companions? Or with anyone while you were in Ishka? Did he ever say anything to indicate who his true lord might be?’

Count Dario moved back over to his table where he conferred with his countrymen for a while. Then he looked up at the King and said, ‘No, none of us had cause to suspect him. On the journey through Ishka, he kept to himself and comported himself well at all times.’

So, I thought, if Count Dario spoke truly, Raldu had used the emissaries as cover to enter Mesh from Ishka. And then used the hunt as an opportunity to try to murder me.

‘So, then,’ my father said, as if echoing my thoughts, ‘it’s clear how Raldu found his way into Mesh. But what was he doing in Ishka? Is it possible that the Ishkans had no knowledge of this man’s presence?’

My father turned to look at Salmelu then. And Salmelu looked back at him as his hand touched his sword and he snarled out, ‘If you think to accuse us of hiring assassins to accomplish what good Ishkan steel has always done quite well, then perhaps we should add that to the list of grievances that only battle can address.’

My father’s hand tightened into a fist, and for a moment it seemed that he might accuse the Ishkans of this very crime. And then Count Dario raised up his voice and said, ‘Mesh and Ishka: the two greatest kingdoms of the Valari. And here you are ready to make war against each other when the Lord of Lies is on the march again. Isn’t there any way I could persuade you of what a tragedy this war will be?’

My father took a deep breath and relaxed his fingers. And then he spoke not just to Count Dario but to all those present in the hall. ‘War,’ he said, ‘has not yet been decided. But it is growing late, and we would like to hear from anyone who would speak for or against war with Ishka.’

As quickly as he could, Lord Harsha rose to his feet. He seemed in a combative mood, probably because he had lost his chance to chastise Maram. He rubbed the patch over his missing eye, then pointed at Raldu’s body and said, ‘We’ll probably never know if the Ishkans hired this man or his friend. But it doesn’t matter if they did. It’s plain that what the Ishkans really want is our diamonds. Well, why don’t we give them a bit of Meshian steel, instead?’

With that, he patted the sheath of his sword, and the cries of many of Mesh’s finest knights suddenly rang out into the hall. As he sat back down, I noticed Salmelu smiling at him.

During the whole time of the feast, my grandmother, sitting six places from me near the center of our family’s table, had been quiet. She was rather small for a Valari and growing old, but once she had been Elkamesh’s beloved Queen. I had never known a more patient or kinder woman. Although she was shrinking in her body as the years fell upon her, a secret light seemed to be gathering in her eyes and growing ever brighter. Everyone loved her for this deep beauty as she loved them. And so when Ayasha Elahad, the Queen Mother, arose to address the knights and ladies of Mesh, everyone fell silent to listen to her speak.

‘It’s been twelve years now since my King was killed in battle with the Ishkans,’ she called out in a voice like aged wine. ‘And many more since my first two sons met a similar fate. Now only King Shamesh remains for me – and my grandsons by him. Must I watch them be taken away as well over a handful of diamonds?’

That was all she said. But as she returned to her chair, she looked at me as if to tell me that it would break her heart if I died before she did.

Then Master Juwain arose and gazed out at the hundreds of warriors with his clear, gray eyes. ‘There have been thirty-three wars,’ he said, ‘over the centuries between Ishka and Mesh. And what has either kingdom gained? Nothing.’

That was all he said, too. He sat back down next to Master Kelem, who sagely nodded his hoary old head.

‘It’s to be expected that Master Juwain would feel thusly,’ Salmelu called out from where he still stood by the cart. ‘The Brothers always side with the women in avoiding matters of honor, don’t they?’

It is one of the tragedies of my people that the other Valari such as the Ishkans, do not esteem the Brotherhoods as do we of Mesh. They suspect them of secret alliances and purposes beyond the teaching of meditation or music – all true. But the Brothers, Maram notwithstanding, have their own honor. I hated Salmelu for implying that they – and noble women whom I loved – might be cowards.

I rose to my feet then. I took a drink of beer to moisten my dry throat. I knew that almost no one would want to hear what I had to say. But the kirax was beating like a hammer in my blood, and I still felt the coldness of Raldu’s body in my own. And so I looked at Salmelu and said, ‘My grandfather once told me that the first Valari were warriors of the spirit only. And that a true warrior would find a way to end war. It takes more courage to live life fully with an open heart than it does to march blindly into battle and die over a heap of dirt. And this is something women understand.’

Salmelu gave me barely enough time to return to my chair before firing his sneering words back at me: ‘Perhaps young Valashu has been spending too much time with the Brothers and the women. And perhaps it’s well that his grandfather is no longer alive to spread the foolishness of myths and old wives’ tales.’

Again, as if I had drunk a cup full of kirax, a wave of hatred came flooding into me. My eyes hurt so badly that I could hardly bear to keep looking at Salmelu. But I couldn’t tell if this poisonous emotion originated from myself or him. Certainly, I thought, he had hated me since the moment I had bested him at chess. How deep did this hate reach? I wondered. Could it be that this prince of Ishka was the man who had shot the arrow at me?

‘You should be careful,’ my father warned Salmelu, ‘of how you speak of a man’s ancestors.’

‘Thank you, King Shamesh, for sharing your wisdom,’ Salmelu said, bowing with exaggerated punctilio. ‘And you should be careful of what decision you make here tonight. The lives of many warriors and women depend on this famous wisdom.’

As my father caught his breath and stared out at the great wooden beams that held up the roof of the hall, I wondered why the Ishkans had really come to our castle. Did they wish to provoke a war, here, this very night? Did they truly believe that they could defeat Mesh in battle? Well, perhaps they could. The Ishkans could field some twelve thousand warriors and knights to our ten, and we couldn’t necessarily count on our greater valor to win the day as we had at the Diamond River. But I thought it more likely that Salmelu and his countrymen were bluffing: trying to cow us into ceding them the mountain by displaying their eagerness to fight. They couldn’t really want war, could they? Who, I wondered, would ever want a war?

My father asked everyone to sit then, and so we did. He called for the council to continue, and various lords and ladies spoke for or against war according to their hearts. Lord Tomavar, a long-faced man with a slow, heavy manner about him, surprised everyone by arguing that the Ishkans should be allowed to keep their part of the mountain. He said that Mesh already had enough diamonds to supply the armorers for the next ten years and that it wouldn’t hurt to give a few of them away. Other lords and knights – and many of the women – agreed with him. But there were many more, such as the fiery Lord Solaru of Mir, who did not.

Finally, after the candles had burned low in their stands and many hours had passed, my father held up his hand to call an end to the debate. He sighed deeply and said, ‘Thank you all for speaking so openly, with reason as well as passion. But now it is upon me to decide what must be done.’

As everyone waited to hear what he would say and the room fell quiet, he took another deep breath and turned toward Salmelu. ‘Do you have sons, Lord Salmelu?’ he asked him.

‘Yes, two,’ he said, cocking his head as if he couldn’t grasp the point of the question.

‘Very well, then as a father you will understand why we are too distraught to call for war at this time.’ Here he paused to look first at Asaru and then at me. ‘Two of my sons were nearly murdered today. And one of the assassins still walks free; perhaps he’s among us in this room even now.’

At this, many troubled voices rumbled out into the hall as men and women cast nervous glances at their neighbors. And then Salmelu rebuked my father, saying, ‘That’s no decision at all!’

‘It’s a decision not to decide at this time,’ my father told him. ‘There’s no need to hurry this war, if war there must be. The snows are not yet fully melted from the passes. And we must determine the extent of the diamond deposits before deciding if we will cede them or not. And an assassin remains to be caught.’

My father went on to say that the end of summer, when the roads were dry, would be soon enough for battle.

‘We’ve come here to bring you King Hadaru’s request,’ Salmelu said, staring at my father, ‘not to be put off.’

‘And we’ve given you our decision,’ my father told him.

‘That you have,’ Salmelu snapped out. ‘And it’s a dangerous decision, King Shamesh. You would do well to reflect upon just how dangerous it might prove to be.’

Truly, I thought, my father was taking a great chance. For thousands of years, the Valari had made war upon each other, but never toward the ends of conquest or the enslavement of the defeated. But if a king tried to avoid a formal war such as the Ishkans had proposed, then he ran a very real risk that a war of ravage, rapine and even annihilation might break out.

‘We live in a world with danger at every turn,’ my father told Salmelu. ‘Who has the wisdom always to see which of many dangers is the greatest or the least?’

‘So be it, then,’ Salmelu snarled out, looking away from him.

‘So be it,’ my father said.

This pronouncement answered the first of the requests asked of him that night. But no one seemed to remember that a second remained to be made. For a long time, various lords and knights looked at their empty goblets while Salmelu stared at Lord Nadhru in the shame of having failed to wrest an immediate decision from my father. I could almost feel the hundreds of hearts of the men and women in the hall beating like so many war drums. And then Count Dario finally stood to address us.

‘King Shamesh,’ he called out, ‘may I speak now?’

‘Please do – it has grown very late.’

Count Dario touched the golden caduceus shining from his tunic, then cast his voice out into the hall. ‘We do live in troubled times with dangers at every turn,’ he said. ‘Earlier today, two princes of Mesh went hunting for deer in a quiet wood only to find someone hunting them instead. And I have watched the noblest lords of Ishka and Mesh nearly come to blows over past grievances that no one can undo. Who has the wisdom to overcome this discord? Who has the power to heal old wounds and bring peace to the lands of Ea? I know of no such man now living, neither king nor Brother nor sage. But it is said that the Lightstone has this power. And that is why, with the Red Dragon uncaged once again, it must be found.’

He paused to take a deep breath and look around the room as my father nodded at him to continue.

‘And it will be found,’ he said. ‘Before the snows of next winter come, men and women will behold the Cup of Heaven as in ancient times. This is the prophecy that the great scryer, Ayondela Kirriland, gave us before she was murdered. It is why King Kiritan has sent messengers into all the free lands.’

Although it was not Salmelu’s place to speak, he looked Count Dario up and down with his dark eyes and snapped out, ‘What are the words of this prophecy, then?’

Count Dario paused as if counting the beats of his heart. I thought that he couldn’t have expected to encounter such rudeness among the Valari. And then, as all eyes turned his way and I held my breath, he told us, ‘Her words are these: “The seven brothers and sisters of the earth with the seven stones will set forth into the darkness. The Lightstone will be found, the Maitreya will come forth, and a new age will begin.”’

A new age, I thought as I gazed at the empty stand behind our table where once the Lightstone had shone. An age without killing or war.

‘My King,’ Count Dario continued, ‘has asked for all knights wishing to fulfill the prophecy to gather in Tria on the seventh day of Soldru. There he will give his blessing to all who vow to make this quest.’

‘Very well,’ my father finally said, looking at him deeply. ‘And a very noble quest this is.’

Count Dario, not knowing my father, took this as a sign of encouragement. He smiled at him and said, ‘King Kiritan has asked that all kings of the free lands send knights to Tria. He would make this request of you, King Shamesh.’

My father nodded his head respectfully then looked across the hall at Lord Harsha, Lord Tomavar and his seneschal, Lansar Raasharu. He said, ‘Very well, but before this decision is made, we would like to hear counsel. Lord Raasharu, what do you have to say?’

Lord Raasharu was a solid, cautious man renowned for his loyalty to my family. He had long, iron-gray hair, which he brushed back from his plain face as he stood and said, ‘Sire, how can we trust the prophecies of foreign scryers? The oracles of Alonia are known to be corrupt. Are we to risk the lives of knights on the words of this Ayondela Kirriland?’

As soon as he had sat back down, Lord Tomavar arose to take his place. In his slow, ponderous voice, he looked at my father and said, ‘Risk the lives of our knights? Wouldn’t it be more like throwing them away? Can we afford to do this at a time when the Ishkans are demanding our diamonds?’

Now Lord Tanu, a fierce, old warrior whose four diamonds flashed brilliantly from his ring, said simply, ‘This quest is a fool’s errand.’

His sentiment seemed to be that of most of the lords and knights in the hall. For perhaps another hour, my countrymen arose one by one to speak against King Kiritan’s request. And nearly all this time, I sat staring at the empty granite stand behind my father’s chair.

‘Enough,’ my father finally said, raising his hand. He turned to address Count Dario. ‘We said earlier that hearing King Hadaru’s request first might help us decide King Kiritan’s request. And so it has. It seems that we of Mesh are all agreed on this, at least.’

He paused a moment and turned to point at the empty stand. ‘Other kings have sent knights to seek the Lightstone – and few of these knights have ever returned to Mesh. The Lightstone is surely lost forever. And so even one knight would be too many to send on this hopeless quest.’

Count Dario listened as many lords and knights rapped their warrior’s rings against the tables in affirmation of my father’s decision. Then his face clouded with puzzlement as he half-shouted, ‘But once your people fought the Lord of Lies himself for the Lightstone! And brought it back to your mountains! I don’t understand you Valari!’

‘It may be that we don’t understand ourselves,’ my father said gravely. ‘But as Lord Tanu has said, we know a fool’s errand when we hear of one.’

All present in the hall fell silent in respect of Count Dario’s obvious disappointment. It was so quiet that I could almost hear the beating of my heart. The candles in their stands near the wall had now burned very low; this changed the angle of the rays of light cast against the great banner there so that the silver swan and the seven silver stars seemed to shimmer with a new radiance.

‘It is not a fool’s errand,’ Count Dario said proudly, ‘but the greatest undertaking of our time.’

‘If my words offended you, please accept my apologies,’ my father said.

‘So, then, you do not believe Ayondela’s prophecy?’

‘Over the ages the scryers have made thousands of prophecies, but how many have ever been fulfilled?’

‘So then, you will send no knights to Tria?’

‘No, no knights will be sent,’ my father said. ‘However, no one who truly wants to go will be kept from going.’

Although I listened to my father speak, I did not really hear him. For on the wall behind our table, scarcely ten feet from my throbbing eyes, the largest of the banner’s seven stars suddenly began gleaming brightly. It cast a stream of light straight toward the surface of the dusty stand. The silvery light touched the white granite, which seemed to glow with a soft, golden radiance. I remembered then the ancient prophecy from the Epics of the Saganom Elu: that the silver would lead to the gold.

I looked at my father as he called out to the many tables below ours: ‘Is there anyone here who would make this quest?’

All at once, the many whispering voices grew quiet, and almost everyone’s gaze pulled down toward the floor. Their lack of interest astonished me. Couldn’t they see the silver star blazing like a great beacon from the center of the banner? What was wrong with them that they were blind to the miracle occurring before their eyes?

I turned back toward the stand then, and my astonishment made my breath stop and my heart catch in my throat. For there, on top of the stand, a golden cup was pouring its light out into the hall. It sat there as clear for all to see as the goblets on the tables before them.

The Lightstone will be found, I heard my heart whisper. A new age will begin.

Ravar, who must have seen me staring at the stand as if drunk with the fire of angels, suddenly began staring, too. But all he said was, ‘What are you looking at, Val? What’s the matter?’

‘Don’t you see it?’ I whispered to him.

‘See what?’

‘The Lightstone,’ I said. ‘The golden cup, there, shining like a star.’

‘You’re drunk,’ he whispered back to me. ‘Either that or you’re dreaming.’

Now Count Dario, who also appeared not to see the Lightstone where it shimmered from its ancient stand, suddenly called out to the knights and nobles in the room: ‘Is there anyone here who will stand tonight and pledge himself to making this quest?’

While Lord Harsha scowled and traded embarrassed looks with Lord Tomavar, most of the knights present, both Ishkan and Meshian, kept staring at the cold floorstones.

‘Lord Asaru,’ Count Dario called out, turning toward my brother, ‘You are the eldest of a long and noble line. Will you at least make the journey to Tria to hear what my King has to say?’

‘No,’ Asaru told him. ‘It’s enough for me to hear what my king has said: that this is no time for hopeless quests.’

Count Dario closed his eyes for a moment as if praying for patience. Then he looked straight at Karshur as he continued his strategy of singling out the sons of Shavashar Elahad.

‘Lord Karshur,’ he said, ‘will you make this journey?’

Karshur, sitting between the Queen Mother and Jonathay, gathered in his great strength as he looked at Count Dario. And then, in a voice that sounded like an iron door closing, he said, ‘No, the Lightstone is lost or destroyed, and not even the most adamant knight will ever find it.’

As Count Dario turned to query Yarashan, to the same result, I looked out toward the far wall at the most recent of my ancestors’ portraits to have been hung there. The bright eyes of my grandfather, Elkamesh, stared back at me out of bold face bones and a mane of flowing white hair. The painter, I thought, had done well in capturing the essence of his character. I couldn’t help being moved by this man’s courage and devotion to truth. And above all, by his gift of compassion. The love that he had always held for me seemed still to live in dried pigments of black and white. If my grandfather were here in the flesh, I thought, he would understand my distress in seeing what no one else could see. If he sat beside me at my family’s table, even as the loyal Jonathay and Ravar did, he would probably see it, too.

‘Sar Mandru,’ I heard Count Dario say to the last of my brothers, ‘will you be in Tria on the seventh day of Soldru?’

‘No,’ Mandru said, gripping fiercely the sheath of his sword in his three fingers, ‘my duty lies elsewhere.’

Now Count Dario paused to take a breath as he looked at me. All of my brothers had refused him, and I, too, felt the pangs of my loyalty to my father pressing at my heart.

‘Valashu,’ he finally asked, ‘what does the last of King Shamesh’s sons say?’

I opened my mouth to tell him that I had my duty as did my brothers, but no words came out. And then, as if seized by a will that I hadn’t known I possessed, I pushed back my chair and rose to my feet. In less than a heartbeat, it seemed, I crossed the ten feet to where the Lightstone gleamed like a golden sun on its ancient stand. I reached out to grasp it with both hands. But my fingers closed upon air, and even as I blinked my eyes in disbelief, the Lightstone vanished into the near-darkness of the hall.

‘Valashu?’

Count Dario, I saw, was looking at me as if I had fallen mad. Asaru had pushed back his chair, and had turned to look at me, too.

‘Will you make the journey to Tria?’ Count Dario said to me.

Along my spine, I suddenly felt the red worms of someone’s hate gnawing at me as I had earlier. I longed to be free of my gift that left me open to such dreadful sensations. And so again I turned to stare at the stand that had held the Lightstone for so many thousands of years and for so few moments that night. But it did not reappear.

‘Valashu Elahad,’ Count Dario asked me formally, ‘will you make this quest?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered to myself, ‘I must.’

‘What? What did you say?’

I took a deep breath and tried to fight back the fear churning in my belly. I touched the lightning-bolt scar on my forehead. And then, in a voice as loud and clear as I could manage, I called out to him and all the men and women in the hall: ‘Yes, I will make the quest.’

Some say that the absence of sound is quiet and peace; but there is a silence that falls upon the world like thunder. For a moment, no one moved. Asaru, I noticed, was staring at me as if he couldn’t believe what I had said, as were Ravar and Karshur and my other brothers. In truth, everyone in the hall was staring at me, my father the most intently of all.

‘Why, Valashu?’ he finally asked me.

I felt the deeper question burning inside him like a heated iron: Why have you disobeyed me?

And I told him, ‘Because the Lightstone must be found, sir.’

My father’s eyes were hard to look at then. But despite his anger, his love for me was no less real or deep than my grandfather’s had been. And I loved him as I did the very sky and wanted very badly to please him. But there is always a greater duty, a higher love.

‘My last born,’ he suddenly called out to the nobles in the hall, ‘has said that he will journey to Tria, and so he must go. It seems that the House of Elahad will be represented in this quest, after all, if only by the youngest and most impulsive of its sons.’

He paused to rub his eyes sadly, and then turned toward Salmelu and said, ‘It would be fitting, would it not, if your house were to send a knight on this quest as well. And so we ask you, Lord Salmelu, will you journey to Tria with him?’

My father was a deep man, and very often he could be cunning. I thought that he wished to weaken the Ishkans – either that or to shame Salmelu in front of the greatest knights and nobles of our two kingdoms. But if Salmelu felt any disgrace in refusing to make the quest that the least of Shamesh’s sons had promised to undertake, he gave no sign of it. Quite the contrary. He sat among his countrymen rubbing his sharp nose as if he didn’t like the scent of my father’s intentions. And then he looked from my father to me and said, ‘No, I will not make this quest. My father has already spoken of his wishes. I would never leave my people without his permission at a time when war threatened.’

My ears burned as I looked into Salmelu’s mocking eyes. It was one of the few times in my life that I was to see my father outmaneuvered by an opponent.

‘However,’ Salmelu went on, smiling at me, ‘let it not be said that Ishka opposes this foolish quest. As our kingdom offers the shortest road to Tria, you have my promise of safe passage through it.’

‘Thank you for your graciousness, Lord Salmelu,’ I said to him, trying to keep the irony from my voice. ‘But the quest is not foolish.’

‘No? Is it not? Do you think you will ever recover what the greatest Valari knights have failed even to find?’ He pointed toward the empty stand behind me. ‘And even if by some miracle you did manage to gain the Lightstone, could you ever keep it? I think not, young Valashu.’

Even more than resenting Mesh’s keeping the Lightstone in this castle for three millennia, the Ishkans reviled us for losing it. The story was still told in low voices over fires late at night: how many centuries ago, King Julumesh had brought the Lightstone from Silvassu to Tria to give into the hands of Godavanni Hastar, the Maitreya born at the end of the Age of Law. But Godavanni had never been able to wield the Lightstone for the good of Ea. For Morjin had broken free from Castle of Damoom, and he managed to slay Godavanni and steal the Cup of Heaven once again. King Julumesh and his men had been killed trying to guard it, and the Ishkans had blamed Mesh ever since.

‘We will not speak of the keeping of that which is yet to be regained,’ my father told Salmelu. ‘It may be that the Lightstone will never be found. But we should at least honor those who attempt to find it.’

So saying he arose from his chair and walked toward me. He was a tall man, taller even than Asaru, and for all his years he stood as straight as a spruce tree.

‘Although Valashu is the wildest of my sons, there is much to honor in him tonight,’ he said. He pointed at Raldu’s body, which still lay stretched out on the cart at the center of the hall. ‘A few hours ago he fought and killed an enemy of Mesh – and this with only a knife against a mace. Possibly he saved my eldest son’s life, and Brother Maram’s as well. We believe that he should be recognized for his service to Mesh. Is there anyone here who would speak against this?’

My father had managed to save face by honoring my rebelliousness instead of chastising it, and it seemed that Salmelu hated him for that. But he sat quietly sulking in his chair all the same. Neither he nor Lord Nadhru nor any of the other Ishkans spoke against me. And, of course, none of my countrymen did either.

‘Very well,’ my father said. He reached inside the pocket of his tunic and removed a silver ring set with two large diamonds. They sparkled like the points of his crown and the five diamonds of his own ring. ‘I won’t have my son going to Tria as a warrior only. Val, come here, please.’

I stood up from my chair and went over to where he waited for me by the banner at the front of the hall. I knelt before him as he bade me. I noticed my mother watching proudly, but with great worry, too. Asaru’s eyes were gleaming. Maram looked on with a huge smile lighting up his face; one would have thought that he congratulated himself for somehow bringing about this honor that no one could have anticipated. And then, before my family and all the men and women in the hall, my father pulled the warrior’s ring from my finger and replaced it with the ring of a full knight. I sensed that he had kept this ring in his pocket for a long time, waiting for just such an occasion.

‘In the name Valoreth,’ he said, ‘we give you this ring.’

My new ring felt cold and strange on my finger. But the heat of my pride was quickly warming it up.

My father then drew his sword from its sheath. It was the marvelous Valari kalama: a razor-sharp, double-edged sword that was light enough and well-enough balanced for a strong man to swing with one hand from horseback, and long and heavy enough to cut mail when wielded with two hands. Such swords had struck terror even into the Sarni tribes and had once defeated the Great Red Dragon. The sword, it is said, is a Valari knight’s soul, and now my father brought this shimmering blade before me. With the point held upward as if to draw down the light of the stars, he pressed the flat of the blade between my eyes. The cold steel sent a thrill of joy straight through me. It made me want to polish my own inner sword and use it only to cut through the darkness that sometimes blinded me.

‘May you always see the true enemy,’ my father told me, repeating the ancient words of our people. ‘May you always have the courage to fight it.’

He suddenly took the sword away from me and lifted it high over his head. ‘Sar Valashu Elahad,’ he said to me, ‘go forth as a knight in the name of the Shining One and never forget from where you came.’

That was all there was to the ceremony of my being knighted. My father embraced me, and signaled to his guests that the feast had come to an end. Immediately Asaru and my brothers gathered close to congratulate me. Although I was glad to receive the honor which they had long since attained, I was dreadfully afraid of where my pledge to recover the Lightstone might take me.

‘Val, congratulations!’ Maram called out to me as he pressed through the circle of my family. He threw his arms around me and pounded my back with his huge hands. ‘Let’s go back to my room and drink to your knighthood!’

‘No, let’s not,’ I told him. ‘It’s very late.’

In truth, it had been the longest day of my life. I had hunted a deer and been wounded with a poison that would always burn inside me. I had killed a man whose death had nearly killed me. And now, before my family and all my friends, I had promised to seek that which could never be found.

‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘you’ll at least come say goodbye to me before you set out on this impossible quest of yours, won’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I told him, smiling as I clasped his arm.

‘Good, good,’ he said. He belched up a bloom of beer and then covered his mouth as he yawned. ‘Ah, I’ve got to find Behira and tell her the rest of the poem before I pass out and forget it. Would you by chance know where she might be quartered in this huge heap of stones of yours?’

‘No,’ I told him, committing my first lie as a knight. I pointed at Lord Harsha as he made his way with his daughter and several lords out of the hall. ‘Perhaps you should ask Lord Harsha.’

‘Ah, perhaps I won’t, not just now,’ Maram said as he stared at Lord Harsha’s sheathed sword. It seemed that he had seen one kalama too many that night. ‘Well, I’ll see you in the morning.’

With that, he joined the stream of people making their way toward the door. Although I was as tired as I had ever been, I lingered a few more moments as I watched the Alonians and Ishkans – and everyone else – file from the hall. Once more I opened myself to see if I could detect the man who had fired the arrow at me. I couldn’t. One last time I turned toward the white granite stand to see if the Lightstone would reappear, but it remained as empty as the air.

6

The next morning, the Ishkans departed our castle in a flurry of pounding hooves and muffled curses – so Asaru later told me. Apparently Salmelu wanted to bring King Hadaru the news of the war’s postponement as quickly as possible. Likewise, the Alonians continued on their journey toward Waas and Kaash, where they would tell King Talanu and my cousins at his court of the great quest. Despite my intention to get an early start on the road to Tria, I slept almost until noon. My father had always upbraided me for liking my bed too well, and so I did. In truth, now that the time had come for me to leave the castle that I had never regarded as home, I was reluctant to do so.

It took me most of the day to make my preparations for the journey. I went from shop to shop among the courtyards as if moving in a dream. It seemed that there were a hundred things to do. Altaru’s hooves needed reshoeing, as did those of our pack horse, Tanar. I had to visit the storerooms in the various cellars to gather rations for myself: cheeses and nuts, dried venison and apples and battle biscuits so hard they would break one’s teeth if they weren’t first dipped in a cupful of brandy or beer. These vital beverages I poured into twelve small oak casks which I carefully balanced on Tanar’s back along with the waterskins. I worried that the weight would be too much for the brown gelding to carry, but Tanar was young and almost as heavily muscled as Altaru himself. He seemed to have no trouble bearing this load of consumables as well as my ground fur, cookware and other equipment that would make sleeping beneath the stars a delight rather than a misery.

He balked only when I strapped onto him my longbow and sheaves of arrows that I would use hunting in the forests between Silvassu and Tria. Once, at the Battle of Red Mountain, he had been struck in the flank by a stray arrow and had never forgotten it. I had to reassure him that we were embarking on a quest to regain a cup that would end such battles forever and not going out to war. But my appearance, unfortunately, belied any soothing words I could offer him. My father had insisted that I set forth as a knight of Mesh, and to honor him, I had gathered up the necessary accouterments. By law, no knight could leave Mesh alone wearing our diamond armor; such displays would be likely to incite the envy and hatred of robbers who would murder for the gain of these priceless gems. So instead, I had donned a mail suit made of silver steel. Over its gleaming rings I had pulled a black surcoat bearing the swan and stars of Mesh. As well I bore a heavy charging lance, five lighter throwing lances, and, of course, the shining kalama that my father had given me on my thirteenth birthday. The massive war helm, with its narrow eye slits and silver wings projecting out from the sides, I would not put on until just before I was ready to leave the castle.

I spent at least two hours of the afternoon saying my farewells. I visited briefly with the master carpenter in his shop full of sawdust and riven wood. He was a thick, jowly man with an easy laugh and skillful hands that had made the frame of my grandfather’s portrait. We talked about my grandfather for a while, the battles he had fought, the dreams he had dreamed. He wished me well and warned me to be careful of the Ishkans. This advice I also received from Lansar Raasharu, my father’s seneschal. This sad-faced man, whom I had always loved as one of my family, told me that I should keep a tighter watch over my own lips than I did even over the enemy.

‘They’re a hotheaded bunch,’ he said, ‘who will fashion your own words into weapons and hurl them back at you toward disastrous ends.’

‘Better that,’ I said, ‘than poison arrows fired in the woods.’

Lord Raasharu rubbed his rugged face and cocked his head, looking at me in surprise. He asked, ‘Hasn’t Lord Asaru spoken to you?’

‘No, not since before the feast.’

‘Well, you should have been told: it can’t be Prince Salmelu who was your assassin. He and his friends crossed my path in the woods down by the Kurash at the time of your trouble.’

‘And you’re sure it was he?’

‘As sure as that you’re Valashu Elahad.’

‘That is good news!’ I said. I hadn’t wanted to believe that Salmelu would have tried to murder me. ‘The Ishkans may be Ishkans, but they’re Valari first.’

‘That’s true,’ Lord Raasharu said. ‘But the Ishkans are still Ishkans, so you be careful once you cross the mountains, all right?’

And with that he clapped his hand across my shoulder hard enough to make the rings of mail jingle, and said goodbye.

It distressed me that I could find neither Maram nor Master Juwain to tell them how much I would miss them. According to Master Tadeo, who still remained in the Brothers’ quarters, both Master Juwain and Maram had left the castle in great haste that morning while I had been sleeping. Apparently, there had been some sort of altercation with Lord Harsha, who had ridden off in a fury with Behira and their wagon before breakfast. But it seemed I had not been forgotten. Master Tadeo handed me a sealed letter that Maram had written; I tucked this square of white paper behind the belt girdling my surcoat, and vowed to read it later.

There remained only the farewells to be made with my family. Asaru insisted on meeting me by the east gate of the castle, as did my mother, my grandmother and my other brothers. In a courtyard full of barking dogs and children playing in the last of the day’s sun, I stood by Altaru to take my leave of them. They each had presents for me, and a word or two of wisdom as well.

Mandru, the fiercest of my brothers, was the first to come forward. As usual, he carried his sword in the three remaining fingers of his left hand. It was rumored, I knew, that he slept holding this sword, and not his young wife, which might have explained his lack of children. For a moment, I thought that he intended to give me this most personal of possessions. And then I noticed that in his right hand, he held something else: his treasured sharpening stone made of pressed diamond dust. He gave this sparkling gray stone to me and said, ‘Keep your sword sharp, Val. Never yield to our enemies.’

After he had embraced me, Ravar next approached to give me his favorite throwing lance. He reminded me always to set my boots in my stirrups before casting it, and then stepped aside to let Jonathay come nearer. With a faraway, dreamy look on his face, this most fatalistic of my brothers presented me with his chess set, the one with the rare ebony and ivory pieces that he loved playing with while on long campaigns. His calm, cheerful smile suggested to me that I play at the game of finding the Lightstone – and win.

Now it was Yarashan’s turn to say goodbye. He strode up to me as if everyone in the castle was watching each of his lithe, powerful motions. He was even prouder than Asaru, I thought, but he lacked Asaru’s kindness, innocence and essential goodness. He was a handsome, dashing man, and was considered the finest knight in Mesh – except for those who said this of Asaru. I thought that he considered he would make a better king than Asaru, although he was much too perceptive and loyal ever to say such a thing. He held in his hand a well-worn copy of the Valkariad, which was his favorite book of the Saganom Elu. He gave it to me and said, ‘Remember the story of Kalkamesh, little brother.’

He, too, embraced me, then stepped aside as Karshur handed me his favorite hunting arrow. I had always envied this solid, simple man because he seemed never to have a doubt as to the right thing to do or the difference between evil and good.

Then I looked up to see Asaru standing between my mother and grandmother. As I listened to the distant sound of hammered iron coming from the blacksmith’s shop, I watched him step over to me.

‘Please take this,’ he said to me. From around his neck, he pulled loose the thong binding the lucky bear claw that he always wore. He draped it over my head and told me, ‘Never lose heart – you have a great heart, Val.’

Although he fell silent as he clapped me on the shoulder, the tears in his eyes said everything else there was to say.

I was sure that he thought I would be killed on some dark road in a strange kingdom far from home. My mother obviously thought this as well. Although she was a strong, brave woman, she too was weeping as she came forward to give me the traveling cloak which I knew she had been weaving as a birthday present. I guessed that she had stayed up all night finishing it; with its thick black wool trimmed out with fine silver embroidery and a magnificent silver brooch with which to fasten it, it was a work of love that would keep me warm on even the stormiest of nights.

‘Come back,’ was all she told me. ‘Whether you find this cup or not, come home when it’s time to come home.’

She kissed me then and fell sobbing against me. It took all of her will and dignity to pry herself loose and stand back so that my grandmother could give me the white, wool scarf that she had knitted for me. Ayasha Elahad, whom I had always called Nona, tied this simple garment around my neck. She stood in the darkening courtyard looking up at me with her bright eyes. Then she pointed at the night’s first stars and told me, ‘Your grandfather would have made this quest, you know. Never forget that he is watching you.’

I hugged her tiny body against the hardness of the mail that encircled mine. Even through this steel armor with its hundreds of interlocked rings, I could feel the beating of her heart. This frail woman, I thought, was the source of love in my family, and I would take this most precious of gifts with me wherever I went.

At last I stood away from her and looked at my family one by one. No one spoke; no one seemed to know any more words to say. I had hoped my father, too, would come to say goodbye, but it seemed that he was still too angry to bear the sight of me. And then, even as I turned to take Altaru’s reins and mount him, I heard footsteps sounding hard against the packed earth. I looked out to see my father emerge from the gateway to the castle’s adjoining middle courtyard. He was dressed in a black and silver tunic, and he bore on his arm a shield embossed with a silver swan and seven stars against a triangular expanse of glossy, black steel.

‘Val,’ he said as he walked up to me, ‘it’s good you haven’t left yet.’

‘No, not yet,’ I said. ‘But it’s time. It seemed you wouldn’t come.’

‘It seemed that way to me, too. But farewells should be said.’

I stared at my father’s sad, deep eyes and said, ‘Thank you, sir. It can’t be easy for you seeing me leave like this.’

‘No, it’s not. But you always went your own way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you always accepted your punishments when you did.’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding my head. ‘And sometimes that was hard; you were hard, sir.’

‘But you never complained.’

‘No – you taught me not to.’

‘And you never apologized, either.’

‘No, that’s true.’

‘Well,’ he said, looking at my war lance and glistening armor, ‘this time the hardships of your journey will be punishment enough.’

‘Very likely they will.’

‘And dangers,’ he continued. There will be dangers aplenty on the road to Tria – and beyond.’

I nodded my head and smiled bravely to show him that I knew there would be. But inside, my belly was fluttering as before a battle.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘it would please me if you would take this shield on your journey.’

He took another step closer to me, all the while keeping a watchful eye upon the snorting Altaru and his great hooves. Not wishing to arouse the ferocious stallion’s protective instincts, he slowly held his shield out to me.

‘But, sir,’ I said, looking at this fine piece of workmanship, ‘this is your war shield! If there’s war with Ishka, you’ll need it.’

‘Please take it all the same,’ he told me.

For a long moment, I gazed at the shield’s swan and silver stars.

‘Would you disobey in this, as well?’

‘No, sir,’ I said at last, taking the shield and thrusting my forearm through its leather straps. It was slightly heavier than my own shield, but somehow seemed to fit me better. ‘Thank you – it’s magnificent.’

He embraced me then, and kissed me, once, on my forehead. He looked at me strangely in a way that I had never seen him look at Karshur or Yarashan – or even Asaru. Then he told me, ‘Always remember who you are.’

I bowed to him, then hoisted myself up onto Altaru’s back. The great beast’s entire body trembled with the excitement of setting out into the world.

I cleared my throat to say my final farewells, but just as I was about to speak, there came the sound of a horse galloping up the road beyond the open gate. A cloaked figure astride a big, panting sorrel came pounding into the courtyard. The rider wore a saber strapped to his thick black belt and bore a lance in his saddle’s holster but seemed otherwise unarmed. His clothes, I saw, as his cloak pulled back, were of bright scarlet, and he wore a jeweled ring on each of the fingers of his two hands. I smiled because it was, of course, Maram.

‘Val!’ he called out to me as he reached forward to stroke and calm his sweating horse. ‘I was afraid I’d have to intercept you on the road.’

I smiled again in appreciation of what must have been a hard ride down from the Brotherhood Sanctuary. My family all looked upon him approvingly for this act of seeming loyalty.

‘Thank you for coming to say goodbye,’ I told him.

‘Say goodbye?’ he called out. ‘No, no – I’ve come to say that I’d like to accompany you on your journey. That is, at least as far as Tria, if you’ll have me.’

This news surprised everyone, except perhaps my father, who gazed at Maram quietly. My mother gazed at him, too, with obvious gratitude that I wouldn’t be setting out at night on a dangerous journey alone.

‘Will I have you?’ I said to him. I felt as if the weight of my unaccustomed armor had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. ‘Gladly. But what’s happened, Maram?’

‘Didn’t you read my letter?’

I patted the square of paper still folded into my belt. ‘No, my apologies, but there wasn’t time.’

‘Well,’ he began, ‘I couldn’t just abandon my best friend to go out questing alone, now could I?’

‘Is that all?’

Maram licked his lips as he glanced from my mother to Asaru, who was eyeing him discreetly. ‘Well, no, it is not all,’ he forced out. ‘I suppose I should tell you the truth: Lord Harsha has threatened to cut off my, ah … head.’

As Maram went on to relate, Lord Harsha had discovered him talking with Behira early that morning and had again drawn his sword. He had chased Maram up and down the women’s guest quarters, but his broken knee and Maram’s greater agility, much quickened by his panic, enabled Maram to evade the threatened decapitation – or worse. After Lord Harsha’s temper had cooled somewhat, he had told Maram to leave Mesh that day or face his sword when they next met. Maram had fled from the castle and returned to the Brotherhood Sanctuary to gather up his belongings. And then returned as quickly as he could to join me.

‘It would be an honor to have you with me,’ I told him. ‘But what about your schooling?’

‘I’ve only taken a leave of absence,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite ready to quit the Brotherhood altogether.’

And, it seemed, the Brotherhood wasn’t ready to quit him. Even as Maram started in his saddle at the sound of more horses coming up to the castle, I looked down the road to see Master Juwain riding another sorrel and leading two pack horses behind him. He made his way through the gateway and came to a halt near Maram. He glanced at the weapons that Maram bore. Maram must have persuaded him that the lance and sword would be used only for their protection and not war. He shook his head sadly at having yet again to bend the Brotherhood’s rules on Maram’s behalf.

Master Juwain quickly explained that the news of the quest had created a great stir among the Brothers. For three long ages they had sought the secrets of the Lightstone. And now, if the prophecy proved true, it seemed that this cup of healing might finally be found. And so the Brothers had decided to send Master Juwain to Tria to determine the veracity of the prophecy. That he also might have other, and more secret, business in the City of Light remained unsaid.

‘Then it isn’t your intention to make this quest?’ my father asked.

‘Not at this time. I’ll accompany Val only as far as Tria, if that’s agreeable with him.’

‘Nothing could please more, sir.’ I smiled, unable to hide my delight. ‘But it’s my intention to take the road through Ishka, and that may not prove entirely safe.’

‘Where can safety be found these days?’ Master Juwain said, looking up at the great iron gate and the castle walls all around us. ‘Lord Salmelu has promised you safe passage, and we’ll have to hope for the best.’

‘Very well, then,’ I told him.

And with that, I turned to look at my brothers one last time. I nodded my head to my grandmother and my mother, who was quietly weeping again. Then I smiled grimly at my father and said, ‘Farewell, sir.’

‘Farewell, Valashu Elahad,’ he said, speaking for the rest of my family. ‘May you always walk in the light of the One.’

At last I put on the great helm, whose hard steel face plates immediately cut out the sight of my weeping mother. I wheeled Altaru about and nudged him forward with a gentle pressure of my heels. Then, with Master Juwain and Maram following, I rode out through the gate toward the long road that led down from the castle. And so my father finally had the satisfaction of seeing me set out as a Valari knight in all his glory.

It was a clear night with the first stars slicing open the blue-black vault of the heavens. To the west, Arakel’s icy peak glowed blood-red in light of the sun lost somewhere beyond the world’s edge. To the east, Mount Eluru was already sunk in darkness. The cool air sifted through the slits in my helm, carrying the scents of forest and earth and almost infinite possibilities. Soon, after perhaps half a mile of such joyous travel, I took off my helm, the better to feel the starlight on my face. I listened to the measured beat of Altaru’s hooves against the hard-packed dirt as I looked out at the wonder of the world.

It seemed almost a foolish thing to begin such a long journey with night falling fast and deep all around us. But I knew that the moon would soon be up, and there would be light enough for riding along the well-made North Road that led toward Ishka. With the wind at my back and visions of golden cups blazing inside me, I thought that I might be able to ride perhaps until midnight. Certainly the seventh day of Soldru would come all too soon, and I wanted very badly to be in Tria with the knights of the free lands when King Kiritan called the great quest. Six hundred miles, as the raven flies, lay between Silvassu and Tria to the northwest. But I – we – would not be traveling as a bird flying free in the sky. There would be mountains to cross and rivers to ford, and the road toward that which the heart most desires is seldom straight.

And so we rode north through the gently rolling country of the Valley of the Swans. After an hour or so, the moon rose over the Culhadosh Range and silvered the fields and trees all about us. We rode in its soft light, which seemed to fill all the valley like a marvelous shimmering liquid. The farmhouses we passed sent plumes of smoke curling up black against the luminous sky. And in the yards of each of those houses, I thought, no matter how tiring the day’s work had been, warriors would be practicing at arms while their wives taught their children the meditative discipline so vital to all that was Valari. Only later would they take their evening meal, perhaps of cheese and apples and black barley bread. It came to me that I would miss these simple foods, grown out of Meshian soil, rich in tastes of the star-touched earth that recalled the deepest dreams of my people. I wondered if I were seeing my homeland for the last time even while strangely beholding it as if for the first time. It came to me as well that a Valari warrior, with sword and shield and a lifetime of discipline drilled into his soul, was much more than a dealer of death. For everything about me – the rocks and earth, the wind and trees and starlight – were just the things of life, and ultimately a warrior existed only to protect life and the land and people that he loved.

We made camp late that night in a fallow field by a small hill off the side of the road. The farmer who owned it, an old man named Yushur Kaldad, came out to greet us with a pot of stew that his wife had made. Although he hadn’t been present at the feast, he had heard of my quest. After giving us permission to make a fire, he wished me well and walked back through the moonlight toward his little stone house.

‘It’s a lovely night,’ I said to Maram as I tied Altaru to the wooden fence by the side of the field. There was thick grass growing all about the fence, which would make the horses happy. ‘We don’t really need a fire.’

Maram, working with Master Juwain, had already spread the sleeping furs across the husks of old barley that covered the cool ground. He moved off toward the rocks at the side of the road, and told me, ‘I’m worried about bears.’

‘But there aren’t many bears in this part of the valley,’ I told him.

‘Not many?’

‘In any case, the bears will leave us alone if we leave them alone.’

‘Yes, and a fire will help encourage them to leave us alone.’

‘Perhaps,’ I told him. ‘But perhaps it would only give them a better light to do their work in case they get really hungry.’

‘Val!’ Maram called out as he stood up with a large rock in either hand. ‘I don’t want to hear any more talk of hungry bears, all right?’

‘All right,’ I said, smiling. ‘But please don’t worry. If a bear comes close, the horses will give us warning.’

In the end, Maram had his way. In the space around which our sleeping furs were laid out, he dug a shallow pit and circled it with rocks. Then he moved off toward the hill where he found some dried twigs and branches among the deadwood beneath the trees and with great care he arrayed the tinder and kindling into a pyramid at the center of the pit. Then from his pocket he produced a flint and steel, and in only a few moments he coaxed the sparks from them into a cone of bright orange flames.

‘You have a talent with fire,’ Master Juwain told him. He dropped his gnarly body onto his sleeping fur and began ladling out the stew into three large bowls. Despite his years, he moved with both strength and suppleness, as if he had practiced his healing arts on himself. ‘Perhaps you should study to be an alchemist.’

Maram’s sensuous lips pulled back in a smile as he held his hands out toward the flames. His large eyes reflected the colors of the fire, and he said, ‘It has always fascinated me. I think I made my first fire when I was four. When I was fourteen, I burned down my father’s hunting lodge, for which he has never forgiven me.’

At this news, Master Juwain rubbed his lumpy face and told him, ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be an alchemist.’

Maram shrugged off his comment with a good-natured smile. He clicked his fire-making stones together, and watched the sparks jump out of them.

‘What is the magic in flint and steel?’ he asked, speaking mostly to himself. ‘Why don’t flint and quartz, for instance, make such little lights? And what is the secret of the flames bound up in wood? How is it that logs will burn but not stone?’

Of course, I had no answers for him. I sat on my furs watching Master Juwain pulling at his jowls in deep thought. To Maram, I said, ‘Perhaps if we find the Lightstone, you’ll solve your mysteries.’

‘Well, there’s one mystery I’d like solved more than any other,’ he confided. ‘And that is this: How is it that when a man and a woman come together, they’re like flint and steel throwing out sparks into the night?’

I smiled and looked straight at him. ‘Isn’t that one of the lines of the poem you recited to Behira?’

‘Ah, Behira, Behira,’ he said as he struck off another round of sparks. ‘Perhaps I should never have gone to her room. But I had to know.’

‘Did you …?’

I started to ask him if he had stolen Behira’s virtue, as Lord Harsha feared, but then decided that it was none of my business.

‘No, no, I swear I didn’t,’ Maram said, understanding me perfectly well. ‘I only wanted to tell her the rest of my poem and –’

‘Your poem, Maram?’ We both knew that he had stolen it from the Book of Songs, and so perhaps did Master Juwain.

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, flushing, ‘I never said outright that I had written it, only that the words came to me the first moment I saw her.’

‘You parse words like a courtier,’ I said to him.

‘Sometimes one must to get at the truth.’

I looked at the stars twinkling in the sky and said, ‘My grandfather taught me that unless one tries to get at the spirit of truth, it’s no truth at all.’

‘And we should honor him for that, for he was a great Valari king.’ He smiled, and his thick beard glistened in the reddish firelight. ‘But I’m not Valari, am I? No, I’m just a simple man, and it’s as a man that I went to Behira’s room. I had to know if she was the one.’

‘What one, Maram?’

The woman with whom I could make the ineffable flame. Ah, the fire that never goes out.’ He turned toward the fire, his eyes gleaming. ‘If ever I held the Lightstone in my hands, I’d use it to discover the place where love blazes eternally like the stars. That’s the secret of the universe.’

For a while, no one spoke as we sat there eating our midnight meal beneath the stars. Yushur had brought us an excellent stew full of succulent lamb, new potatoes, carrots, onions and herbs; we consumed it down to the last drop of gravy, which we mopped up with the fresh bread that Master Juwain had brought down from the Sanctuary. To celebrate our first night together on the road, I had cracked open a cask of beer. Master Juwain had taken only the smallest sip of it, but of course Maram had drunk much more. After his first serving, as his rumbling voice built castles in the air, I rationed the precious black liquid into his cup. But as the time approached for sleeping, it became apparent that I hadn’t measured out the beer carefully enough.

‘I simply must see Tria before I die,’ Maram told me in his rumbling voice. ‘As for the Quest, though, I’m afraid that from there you’ll be on your own, my friend. I’m no Valari knight, after all. Ah, but if I were, and I did gain the Lightstone, there are so many things I might do.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, to begin with, I would return with it to Delu in glory. Then the nobles would have to make me king. Women would flock to me like lambs to sweet grass. I would establish a great harem as did the Delian kings of old. Then famous artists and warriors from all lands would gather in my court.’

I pushed the cork stopper into the half-empty cask as I looked at him and asked, ‘But what about love?’

‘Ah, yes, love,’ he said. He belched then sighed as he rubbed his eyes. ‘The always-elusive dream. As elusive as the Lightstone itself.’

In a voice full of self-pity, he declared that the Lightstone had certainly been destroyed, and that neither he nor anyone else was ever likely to find his heart’s deepest desire.

Master Juwain had so far endured Maram’s drinking spree in silence. But now he fixed him with his clear eyes and said, ‘My heart tells me that the prophecy will prove true. Starlight is elusive, too, but we do not doubt that it exists.’

‘Ah, well, the prophecy,’ Maram muttered. ‘But who are these seven brothers and sisters? And what are these seven stones?’

‘That, at least, should be obvious,’ Master Juwain said. ‘The stones must be the seven greater gelstei.’

He went on to say that although there were hundreds of types of gelstei, there were only seven of the great stones: the white, blue and green, the purple and black, the red firestones and the noble silver. Of course, there was the gold gelstei, but only one, known as the Gelstei, and that was the Lightstone itself.

‘So many have sought the master stone,’ he said.

‘Sought it and died,’ I said. ‘No wonder my mother wept for me.’

I went on to tell him that I would most likely be killed far from home, perhaps brought down by a plunging rock in a mountain pass or felled by a robber’s arrow in some dark woods.

‘Do not speak so,’ Master Juwain chastened me.

‘But this whole business,’ I said, ‘seems such a narrow chance.’

‘Perhaps it is, Val. But even a scryer can’t see all chances. Not even Ashtoreth herself can.’

For a while we fell silent as the wind pushed through the valley and the fire crackled within its circles of stones. I thought of Morjin and his master, Angra Mainyu, one of the fallen Galadin who had once made war with Ashtoreth and the other angels and had been imprisoned on a world named Damoom; I thought of this and I shuddered.

To raise my spirits, Maram began singing the epic of Kalkamesh from the Valkariad of the Saganom Elu. Master Juwain kept time by drumming on one of the logs waiting to be burned. So I brought out my flute and took up the song’s boldly defiant melody. I played to the wind and earth, and to the valor of this legendary being who had walked into the hell of Argattha to wrest the Lightstone from the Lord of Lies himself. It was a fine thing we did together, making music beneath the stars. My thoughts of death – the stillness of Raldu’s body and the coldness of my own – seemed to vanish like the flames of the fire into the night.

We slept soundly after that on the soft soil of Yushur Kaldad’s field. No bears came to disturb us. It was a splendid night, and I lay on top of my furs wrapped only in my new cloak for warmth. When the sun rose over Mount Eluru the next morning to the crowing of Yushur’s cocks, I felt ready to ride to the end of the world.

And ride we did. After breaking camp, we set out through the richest farmland of the valley. It was a fine spring day with blue skies and abundant sunshine. The road along this part of our journey was as straight and well paved as any in the Morning Mountains. Indeed, my father had always said that good roads make good kingdoms, and he had always gone to considerable pains to maintain his. Both Master Juwain and Maram could ride well, and Maram was tougher than he looked. And so we made excellent progress through the wind-rippled fields.

Around noon, after we had paused for a quick meal and the horses had filled up on some of the sweet green grass that grew along the curbs of the road, the country began to change. Toward the northern end of the Valley of the Swans, the terrain grew hillier and the soil more rocky. There were fewer farms and larger stands of trees between them. Here the road wound gently around and through these low hills; it began to rise at an easy grade toward the greater hills and mountains to the north. But still the traveling was easy. By the time the sun had crossed the sky and began dipping down toward the Central Range, we found ourselves at the edge of the forest that blankets the northernmost districts of Mesh. A few more miles would bring us to the town of Ki high in the mountains. And a few miles beyond it, we would cross the pass between Mount Raaskel and Mount Korukel, and go down into Ishka.

We made camp that night above a little stream running down from the mountains. The oak trees above us and the hill behind provided good cover against the wind. Master Juwain, although more knowledgeable than I in most things, allowed me to take the lead in choosing this site. As he admitted, he had little woodcraft or sense of terrain. He was very happy when I returned from the bushes along the stream with many handfuls of raspberries and some mushrooms that I had found. He sliced these last up and layered them with some cheese between slices of bread. Then he roasted the sandwiches over the fire that Maram had made. That night it was much cooler, and we were very glad for the fire as we edged close to it and ate this delicious meal. We listened to the hooting of the owls as they called to each other from the woods, and later, to the wolves howling high in the hills around us. After drinking some of the tea that Master Juwain brewed, we gathered our cloaks around us and fell soundly asleep.

The next morning dawned cloudy and cool. The sun was no more than a pale yellow disk behind sheets of white in the sky. Since I wanted to be well through the pass by nightfall and I was afraid a hard rain might delay us, I encouraged the groggy and lazy Maram to get ready as quickly as he could. The few miles to Ki passed quickly enough, although the road began to rise more steeply as the hills built toward the mountains. Ki itself was a small city of shops, smithies and neat little chalets with steep roofs to keep out the heavy mountain snows that fell all through winter.

One of the feeder streams of the Diamond River ran through the center of the town. Just beyond the bridge across these icy waters, where two large inns stood above the houses, the Kel Road from the east intersected the larger North Road. The Kel Road, as I knew from having traveled it, was one of the marvels of Mesh. It wound through the mountains around the entire perimeter of our kingdom connecting the kel keeps that guarded the passes. There were twenty-two of these high mountain fortresses spaced some twenty miles apart. I had spent a long, lonely winter at one of them watching for an invasion of the Mansurii tribe that never came.

Maram, citing the hard work of the morning (which in truth was mostly the horses’ hard work), argued that we should stop for a few hours and bathe at one of these inns. He grumbled that the two previous nights’ camps had afforded us neither the time nor the opportunity for such vital indulgence. It was almost a sacred ritual that a Valari would wash away the world’s woes at the end of a day, and I wanted a hot bath as badly as he did. But I persuaded him that we should leave Ki behind us as swiftly as possible. Although it was late in the season, it could still snow, as I patiently explained to him. And so, after pausing at the inn only long enough to take a quick meal of fried eggs and porridge, we continued on our journey.

For seven miles between Ki and the kel keep situated near Raaskel and Korukel, the Kel Road ran contiguous with the North Road. Here, as the horses’ hooves strove for purchase against the worn paving stones, the road rose very steeply. Thick walls of oak trees, mixed with elms and birch, pressed the road from either side, forming an archway of green leaves and branches high above it. But after only a few miles, the forest began changing and giving way to stands of aspen and spruce growing at the higher elevations. The mountains rose before us like steps leading to the unseen stars.

In many places, the road cut the sides of these fir-covered foothills like a long, curved scar against the swelling green. I knew that we were drawing close to the pass, although the lower peaks blocked the sight of it. As Maram complained, travel in the mountains was disorienting, and one could easily become lost. He had other fears as well. After I had recounted my conversation with Lansar Raasharu, he wondered aloud who the second assassin might be if he wasn’t one of the Ishkans. Might this unknown man, he asked, stalk us along the road? And if he did, what were we doing venturing into Ishka where he might more easily finish what he had begun in the woods? With every step we took closer to this unfriendly kingdom, these unanswered questions seemed to hang in the air like the cold mist sifting down from the sky.

Around noon, just as we crested a low rise marked with a red standing stone, we had our first clear view of the pass. We stood resting the horses as we gazed out at the masses of Korukel and Raaskel that rose up like great guardian towers only a few miles to the north. The North Road curved closer to Raaskel, the smaller of these two mountains. But with its sheer granite faces and snowfields, I thought, it was forbidding enough. Korukel, whose twin peaks and great humped shoulders gave it the appearance of a two-headed ogre, seemed all too ready to pelt us with spears of ice or roll huge boulders down upon us. If not for the diamonds buried within its bowels, it hardly seemed like a mountain worth fighting for.

‘Oh, my Lord, look!’ Maram said, pointing up the road. ‘The Telemesh Gate. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Few people had. For there, across the barren valley just beyond the massive fortress of the kel keep, cutting the ground between the two mountains, was the great work of my ancestors and one of the wonders of Ea: it seemed that a great piece of mountain a fifth of a mile wide and a mile long had simply been sliced out of the earth as if by the hand of the Galadin themselves. In truth, as Maram seemed to know, King Telemesh had made this rectangular cut between the two mountains with a firestone that he had brought back from the War of the Stones. According to legend, he had stood upon this very hill with his red gelstei and had directed a stream of fire against the earth for most of six days. And when he had finished and the acres of ice, dirt and rock had simply boiled off into the sky, a great corridor between Mesh and Ishka had been opened. Indeed, until Telemesh had made his gate, this ‘pass’ between our two kingdoms had been considered unpassable, at least to armies marching along in their columns or travelers astride their weary horses.

‘It’s too bad the firestones have all perished,’ Maram said wistfully. ‘Else all the kingdoms of Ea might be so connected.’

‘It’s said that Morjin has a firestone,’ I told him. ‘It’s said that he has rediscovered the secret of forging them.’

At this, Master Juwain looked at me sharply and shook his head. Many times he had warned Maram – and me – never to speak the Red Dragon’s true name. And with the utterance of these two simple syllables, the wind off the icy peaks suddenly seemed to rise; either that, or I could feel it cutting me more closely. Again, as I had in the woods with Raldu and later in the castle, I shivered with an eerie sense that something was watching me. It was as if the stones themselves all about us had eyes. It consoled me not at all that my countrymen here in the north called Raaskel and Korukel the Watchers.

For a half a mile we walked our horses down to the kel keep at the center of the valley. Maram wondered why the makers of the fortress hadn’t built it flush with the Gate, as of a wall of stone defending it. I explained to him that it was better sited where it was: on top of a series of springs that could keep the garrison well watered for years. It had never been the purpose of the keeps, I told him, to stop invading armies in the passes. They were intended only to delay the enemy as long as it took for the Meshian king to gather up an army of his own and destroy them in the open field.

We stopped at the keep to pay our respects to Lord Avijan, the garrison’s commander. Lord Avijan, a serious man with a long, windburnt face, was Asaru’s friend and not much older than I. He had been present at the feast, and he congratulated me on my knighthood. After seeing that we were well fed with pork and potatoes brought up from Ki, he told me that Salmelu and the Ishkans had gone up into the pass early that morning.

‘They were riding hard for Ishka,’ Lord Avijan told me. ‘As you had better do if you don’t want to be caught in the pass at nightfall.’

After I had thanked him and he wished me well on my quest, we took his advice. We continued along the North Road where it snaked up the steeply rising slopes of the valley. About two miles from the keep, as we approached the Telemesh Gate, it grew suddenly colder. The air was thick with a moisture that wasn’t quite rain nor mist nor snow. But there was still snow aplenty blanketing the ground. Here, in this bleak mountain tundra where trees wouldn’t grow, the mosses and low shrubs in many places were still covered in snow. Against boulders as large as a house were gathered massive white drifts, a few of which blocked the road. If Lord Avijan hadn’t sent out his warriors to cut a narrow corridor through them, the road would still have been impassable.

‘It’s cold,’ Maram complained as his gelding drove his hooves against the road’s wet stone. ‘Perhaps we should return to the keep and wait for better weather.’

‘No,’ I said, laying my hand on Altaru’s neck. Despite the cold, the hard work in the thin air had made him start sweating. ‘Let’s go on – it will be better on the other side of the pass.’

‘Are you sure?’

I looked off through the gray air at the Telemesh Gate now only a hundred yards farther up the road. It was a dark cut through a wall of rock, an ice-glazed opening into the unknown.

‘Yes, it will be better,’ I reassured him, if not myself. ‘Come on.’

I touched Altaru’s flanks to urge him forward, but he nickered nervously and didn’t move. As Master Juwain came up to join us, the big horse just stood there with his large nostrils opening and closing against the freezing wind.

‘What is it, Val?’ Master Juwain asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders as I scanned the boulders and snowfields all about us. The tundra seemed as barren as it was cold. Not even a marmot or a ptarmigan moved to break the bleakness of the pass.

‘Do you think it could be a bear?’ Maram asked, looking about, too. ‘Maybe he smells a bear.’

‘No, it’s too early for bears to be up this high,’ I told him.

In another month, the snow would be gone, and the slopes around us would teem with wildflowers and berries. But now there seemed little that was alive save for the orange and green patches of lichen that covered the cold stones.

Again, I nudged Altaru forward, and this time he whinnied and shook his head angrily at the opening to the Telemesh Gate. He began pawing at the road with his iron-shod hoof, and the harsh sound of it rang out into the mist-choked air.

‘Altaru, Altaru,’ I whispered to him, ‘what’s the matter?’

There was something, I thought, that he didn’t like about this cut between the mountains. There was something I didn’t like myself. I felt a sudden, deep wrongness entering my bones as from the ground beneath us. It was as if Telemesh, the great king, the grandfather of my grandfathers, in burning off the tissues of the mountain with his firestone, had wounded the land in a way that could never be healed. And now, out of this open wound of fused dirt and blackened rock, it seemed that the earth itself was still screaming in agony. What man or beast, I wondered, would ever be drawn to such a place? Well, perhaps the vultures who batten on the blood of the suffering and dying would feel at home here. And the great Beast who was called the Red Dragon – surely he would find a twisted pleasure in the world’s pain.

He came for me then out of the dark mouth of the fire-scarred Gate. He was, even as Maram feared, a bear. And not merely a Meshian brown bear but one of the rare and very bad-tempered white bears of Ishka. I guessed that he must have wandered through the Gate into Mesh. And now he seemed to guard it, standing up on his stumpy hind legs to a height of ten feet as he sniffed the air and looked straight toward me.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram called out as he tried to steady his horse. ‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’

Now Altaru, seeing the bear at last, began snorting and stomping at the road. I tried to steady him as I said to Maram, ‘Don’t worry, the bear won’t bother us if –’

‘– if we don’t bother him,’ he finished. ‘Well, I hope you’re right, my friend.’

But it seemed that I couldn’t leave the bear alone after all. The wind carried down from the mountain, and I smelled his rank scent which fairly reeked with an illness that I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t help staring at his small, questing eyes as my hand moved almost involuntarily to the hilt of my sword. And all the while, he kept sniffing at me with his wet black nose; I had the strange sense that even though he couldn’t catch my scent, he could smell the kirax in my blood.

And then suddenly, without warning, he fell down onto all fours and charged us.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram cried out again. ‘He’s coming – run for your life!’

True to his instincts, he wheeled his horse about and began galloping down the road. I might have done the same if Altaru hadn’t reared just then, throwing back his head and flashing his hooves in challenge at the bear. This move, which I should have anticipated, caught me off guard. For at that moment, as Altaru rose up with a mighty surge of bunching muscles, I was reaching toward my pack horse for my bow and arrows. I was badly unbalanced, and went flying out of my saddle. Tanar, my screaming pack horse, almost trampled me in his panic to get away from the charging bear. If I hadn’t rolled behind Altaru, his wildly flailing hooves would surely have brained me.

‘Val!’ Master Juwain called to me, ‘get up and draw your sword!’

It is astonishing how quickly a bear can cover a hundred yards, particularly when running downhill. I didn’t have time to draw my sword. Even as Master Juwain tried to get control of his own bucking horse and the two pack horses tied behind him, the bear bounded down the snowy slope straight toward us. Tanar, caught between them and the growling bear, screamed in terror, all the while trying to get out of the way. And then the bear closed with him, and I thought for a moment that he might tear open his throat or break his back with a blow from one of his mighty paws. But it seemed that this stout horse was not intended to be the bear’s prey. The bear only rammed him with his shoulder, knocking him aside in his fury to get at me.

‘Val!’ I heard Maram calling me as from far away. ‘Run, now – oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’

The bear would certainly have fallen upon me then if not for Altaru’s courage. As I struggled to stand and regain my breath, the great horse reared again and struck a glancing blow off the bear’s head. His sharp hoof cut open the bear’s eye, which filled with blood. The stunned bear screamed in outrage and swiped at Altaru with his long black claws. He grunted and brayed and shook his sloping white head at me. I smelled his musty white fur and felt the growls rumbling up from deep in his throat. His good eye fixed on mine like a hook; he opened his jaws to rip me open with his long white teeth.

‘Val, I’m coming!’ Maram cried out to the thunder of hooves against stone. ‘I’m coming!’

The bear finally closed with me, locking his jaws onto my shoulder with a crushing force. He snarled and shook his head furiously and tried to pulp me with his deadly paws. And then Maram closed with him. Unbelievably, he had managed to wheel his horse about yet again and urge him forward in a desperate charge at the bear. He had his lance drawn and couched beneath his arm like a knight. But although trained in arms, he was no knight; the point of the lance caught the bear in the shoulder instead of the throat, and the shock of steel and metal pushing into hard flesh unseated Maram and propelled him from his horse. He hit the ground with an ugly slap and whooshing of breath. But for the moment, at least, he had succeeded in fighting the bear off of me.

‘Val,’ Maram croaked out from the blood-spattered road, ‘help me!’

The bear snarled at Maram and moved to rend him with his claws in his determination to get at me. And in that moment, I finally slid my sword free. The long kalama flashed in the uneven light. I swung it with all my might at the bear’s exposed neck. The kalama’s razor edge, hardened in the forges of Godhra, bit through fur, muscle and bone. I gasped to feel the bear’s bright lifeblood spraying out into the air as his great head went rolling down the road into a drift of snow. I fell to the road in the agony of death, and I hardly noticed the bear’s body falling like an avalanche on top of Maram.

‘Val – get this thing off me!’ I heard Maram call out weakly from beneath the mound of fur.

But as always when I had killed an animal, it took me many moments to return to myself. I slowly stood up and rubbed my throbbing shoulder. If not for my armor and the padding beneath it, I thought, the bear would surely have torn off my arm. Master Juwain, having collected and hobbled the frightened horses, came over then and helped me pull Maram free from the bear. He stood there in the driving sleet checking us for wounds.

‘Oh, my Lord, I’m killed!’ Maram called out when he saw the blood drenching his tunic. But it proved only to be the bear’s blood. In truth, he had suffered nothing worse than having the wind knocked out of him.

‘I think you’ll be all right,’ Master Juwain said as he ran his gnarly hands over him.

‘I will? But what about Val? The bear had half his body in his mouth!’

He turned to ask me how I was. I told him, ‘It hurts. But it seems that nothing is broken.’

Maram looked at me with accusation in his still-frightened eyes. ’You told me that the bear would leave us alone. Well, ‘he didn’t, did he?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’

Strange, I thought, that a bear should fall upon three men and six horses with such ferocious and single-minded purpose. I had never heard of a bear, not even a ravenous one, attacking so boldly.

Master Juwain stepped over to the side of the road and examined the bear’s massive head. He looked at his glassy, dark eye and pulled open his jaws to gaze at his teeth.

‘It’s possible that he was maddened with rabies,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t have the look.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I agreed, examining him as well.

‘What made him attack us then?’ Maram demanded.

Master Juwain’s face fell gray as if he had eaten bad meat. He said, ‘If the bear were a man, I would say his actions were those of a ghul.’

I stared at the bear, and it suddenly came to me that the illness I had sensed in him had been not of the body but the mind.

‘A ghul!’ Maram cried out. ‘Are you saying that Mor … ah, that the Lord of Lies had seized his will? I’ve never heard of an animal ghul.’

No one had. With the wind working at the sweat beneath my armor, a deep shiver ran through me. I wondered if Morjin – or anyone except the Dark One himself, Angra Mainyu – could have gained that much power.

As if in answer to my question, Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘It seems that his skill, if we can call it that, is growing.’

‘Well,’ Maram said, looking about nervously, ‘if he can send one bear to kill Val, he can send another. Or a wolf, or a –’

‘No, I think not,’ Master Juwain interrupted. ‘For a man or a woman to be made a ghul is a rare thing. There must be an opening, through despair or hate, into the darkness. And a certain sympathy of the minds. I would think that an animal ghul, if possible at all, would be even rarer.’

‘But you don’t really know, do you?’ Maram pressed him.

‘No, I don’t,’ Master Juwain said. He suddenly shivered, too, and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘But I do know that we should get down from this pass before it grows dark.’

‘Yes, we should,’ I agreed. With some handfuls of snow, I began cleaning the blood off me, and watched Maram do the same. After retying Tanar to Altaru, I mounted my black stallion and turned him up the road.

‘You’re not thinking of going on?’ Maram asked me. ‘Shouldn’t we return to the keep?’

I pointed at the opening of the Gate. ‘Tria lies that way.’

Maram looked down at the kel keep and the road that led back to the Valley of the Swans. He must have remembered that Lord Harsha was waiting for him there; it occurred to me that he had finally witnessed at first hand the kind of work that a kalama could accomplish, for he rubbed his curly beard worriedly and muttered, ‘No, we can’t go back, can we?’

He mounted his trembling sorrel, as did Master Juwain his. I smiled at Maram and bowed my head to him. ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ I told him.

‘I did save your life, didn’t I?’ he said. He smiled back at me as if I had personally knighted him in front of a thousand nobles. ‘Well, allow me to save it again. Who really wants to go to Tria, anyway? Perhaps it’s time I returned to Delu. We could all go there. You’d be welcomed at my father’s court and –’

‘No,’ I told him. Thank you for such a gracious offer, but my journey lies in another direction. Will you come with me?’

Maram sat on his horse as he looked back and forth between the headless bear and me. He blinked his eyes against the stinging sleet. He licked his lips, then finally said, ‘Will I come with you? Haven’t I said I would? Aren’t you my best friend? Of course I’m coming with you!’

And with that he clasped my arm, and I clasped his. As if Altaru and I were of one will, we started moving up the road together. Maram and Master Juwain followed close behind me. I regretted leaving the bear unburied in a shallow pond of blood, but there was nothing else to do. Tomorrow, perhaps, one of Lord Avijan’s patrols would find him and dispose of him. And so we rode our horses into the dark mouth of the Telemesh Gate and steeled ourselves to go down into Ishka.

7

Our passage through the Gate proved uneventful and quiet save for Maram’s constant exclamations of delight. For, as he discovered, the walls of rock on both sides of us sparkled with diamonds. The fire of Telemesh’s red gelstei, in melting this corridor through the mountain, had exposed many veins of these glittering white crystals. In honor of his great feat, the proud Telemesh had ordered that they never be cut, and they never had. I thought that the beauty of the diamonds somewhat made up for this long wound in the earth. But many visitors to Mesh – the Ishkans foremost among them – complained of such ostentatious displays of my kingdom’s wealth. King Hadaru had often accused my father of mocking him thusly. But my father turned a stony face to his plaints; he would say only that he intended to respect Telemesh’s law even as he would the Law of the One.

‘But can’t we take just one stone?’ Maram asked when we were almost through the Gate. ‘We could sell it for a fortune in Tria.’

Maram, I thought, didn’t know what he was saying. Was anyone more despicable than a diamond seller? Yes – those who sold the bodies of men and women into slavery.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Who would ever know?’

‘We would know, Maram,’ I told him. I looked down at the corridor’s smooth stone floor, which glittered with more than one diamond beneath patches of wind-blown grit and the occasional droppings of horses. ‘Besides, it’s said that any man who steals a stone will himself turn into stone – it’s a very old prophecy.’

For many miles after that – after we debouched from the pass and began our descent into Ishka – Maram gazed at the rock formations by the side of the road as if they had once been thieves making their escape with illicit treasure in their hands. But as dusk approached, his desire for diamonds began to fade with the light. His talk turned to fires crackling in well-tended hearths and hot stew waiting to be ladled out for our evening meal. The sleet, which turned into a driving rain on the heavily wooded lower slopes of the mountain, convinced him that he didn’t want to camp out that night.

It convinced me as well. When we reached the Ishkans’ fortress that guarded their side of the pass, we stopped to ask if there were any inns nearby. The fortress’s commander, Lord Shadru, told us that there were not; he offered his apologies that he couldn’t allow a Meshian knight within the walls of his fortress. But then he directed us to the house of a woodcutter who lived only a mile farther down the road. He wished us well, and we continued plodding on through the icy rain.

A short time later, we turned onto a side road, as Shadru had directed us. And there, in the middle of a stand of trees dripping with water, we found a square chalet no different than ones that dot the mountains of Mesh. Its windows glowed orange with the light of a good fire burning within. The woodcutter, Ludar Narath, came out to greet us. After ascertaining who we were and why we had come to his door on such a stormy night, he offered us fire, bread and salt. He seemed determined that Ishkan hospitality should not suffer when compared to that of Mesh.

And so he invited us to share the spare bedroom that had once belonged to his eldest son, who had been killed in a war with Waas. Ludar’s wife, Masha, served us a small feast. We sat by the fire eating fried trout and a soup made of barley, onions and mushrooms. There was bread and butter, cheese and walnuts, and a stout black beer that tasted little different than the best of Meshian brews. We sat at his huge table with his three daughters and his youngest son, who eyed me with great curiosity. I sensed that the boy wanted to come over to me, perhaps to pull at the rings of my mail or tell me a bad joke. But his forbearance overruled the natural friendliness bubbling up inside him. As it did with Ludar and the rest of his family. It didn’t matter that I had spent my childhood in forests little different than theirs and had listened to the same after-dinner stories told before a warm fire; in the end, I was a knight of Mesh, and someday I might have to face Ludar in battle – and his remaining son as well.

Still, our hosts were as polite and proper as they could be. Masha saw to it that we had a good bath in the huge cedarwood tub that Ludar had made; while we soaked our battered bodies in the hot water that her son kept bringing us, Masha took away our bloodstained garments to clean them. She sent her daughters to lay out our sleeping furs on top of mattresses freshly stuffed with the cleanest of straw. And when we were finally ready for bed, she brought us cups of steaming ginger tea to warm our hearts before sleeping.

We spent a very comfortable night there in those wet woods on the wrong side of the mountains. With morning came the passing of the storm and the rising of the sun against a blue sky. We ate a quick meal of porridge and bacon as we listened to the sparrows chirping in the trees. Then we thanked Ludar and his family for the grace of their house; we saddled our horses and urged them down the path that led to the North Road.

That morning we rode through a misty countryside of high ridges and steep ravines. Although I had never passed this way before, the mountains beyond Raaskel and Korukel seemed strangely familiar to me. By early afternoon we had made our way through the highest part of them; stretching before us to the north, was a succession of green-shrouded hills that would eventually give way to the Tushur River valley. With every mile we put behind us, these hills grew lower and less steep. The road, while not as well paved as any in Mesh, wound mostly downhill, and the horses found the going rather easy. By the time we drew up in a little clearing by a stream to make camp that night, we were all in good spirits.

The next day we awoke early to the birds singing their morning songs. We traveled hard through the rolling hill country which gradually opened out into the broad valley of the Tushur. There, the road curved east through the emerald farmland toward the golden glow of the sun – and toward Loviisa, where King Hadaru held his court. We debated making a cut across this curve and rejoining the road much to the north of the Ishkans’ main city. It seemed wise to avoid the bellicose Salmelu and his friends, as Maram pointed out.

‘What if Salmelu,’ he asked me, ‘hired the assassin who shot at us in the woods?’

‘No, he couldn’t have,’ I said. ‘No Valari would ever dishonor himself so.’

‘But what if the Red Dragon has gotten to him, too? What if he’s been made a ghul?’

I looked off at the gleaming ribbon of the Tushur where it flowed through the valley below us. I wondered for the hundredth time why Morjin might be hunting me.

‘Salmelu,’ I said, ‘is no ghul. If he hates me, it’s of his own will and not the Red Dragon’s.’

‘If he hates you,’ Maram said, ‘shouldn’t we avoid him altogether?’

I smiled grimly and shook my head. I told him, ‘The world is full of hate, and there’s no avoiding it. In front of his own countrymen, Salmelu has promised us safe passage, and he’ll have to keep his word.’

After stopping for a quick meal, we decided that making a straight cut through the farms and forests of Ishka would only delay us and pose its own dangers: there would be the raging waters of the Tushur to cross and perhaps bears in the woods. In the end, it was the prospect of encountering another bear that persuaded Maram that we should ride on to Loviisa, and so we did.

We planned, however, to spend the night in one of Loviisa’s inns; the following morning we would set out as early and with as little fanfare as possible. But others had made other plans for us. It seemed that our passage through Ishka had not gone unnoticed. As night approached and we rode past the farms near the outskirts of the city, a squadron of knights came thundering up the road to greet us. Their leader was Lord Nadhru, whom I recognized by the long scar on his jaw and his dark, volatile eyes. He bowed his head toward me and told me, ‘So, Sar Valashu, we meet again. King Hadaru has sent me to request your presence in his hall tonight.’

At this news, I traded quick looks with both Maram and Master Juwain. There was no need to say anything; when a king ‘requested’ one’s presence, there was nothing else to do except oblige him.

And so we followed Lord Nadhru and his knights through Loviisa, whose winding streets and coal-fired smithies reminded me of Godhra. He led us past a succession of square, stone houses up a steep hill at the north of the city. And there, on a heavily wooded palisade overlooking the icy, blue Tushur, we found King Hadaru’s palace all lit up as if in anticipation of guests. As Ludar Narath had told me, the King disdained living in his family’s ancient castle in the hills nearby. And so instead he had built a palace fronted with flower gardens and fountains. The palace itself was an array of pagodas, exquisitely carved on its several levels out of curving sweeps of various kinds of wood. Indeed, it was famed throughout the Morning Mountains as the Wooden Palace. Ludar himself had cut dozens of rare shatterwood trees to provide the paneling of the main hall. Inside this beautiful building, if the stories proved true, we would find beams of good Anjo cherrywood and ebony columns that had come all the way from the southern forests of Galda. It was said that King Hadaru had paid for his magnificent palace with diamonds from the overworked Ishkan mines, but I did not want to believe such a slander.

We entrusted our horses to the grooms who met us at the entrance to the palace. Then Lord Nadhru led us down a long corridor to the hall where King Hadaru held his court. The four warriors guarding the entrance to this great room asked us to remove our boots before proceeding within, and so we did. They allowed me, of course, to keep my sword sheathed by my side. One might better ask a Valari knight to surrender his soul before his sword.

The Ishkan nobles, Salmelu and Lord Issur foremost among them, stood waiting to welcome us near King Hadaru’s throne. This was a single piece of white oak carved into the shape of a huge bear squatting on its hind legs. King Hadaru seemed almost lost against this massive sculpture, and he was no small man. He sat very straight in the bear’s lap, back against the belly and chest, with the great white head projecting up and out above him. He himself seemed somewhat bearlike, with a large head covered by a mane of snowy white hair that showed ten red ribbons. He had a large, predatory nose like Salmelu’s and eyes all gleaming and black like polished shatterwood. As we walked through the hall, with its massive oak beams arching high above us, his dark eyes never left us.

After Lord Nadhru had presented us, he took his place near Salmelu and Lord Issur, who stood near their father’s throne. Other prominent knights attended the King as well: Lord Mestivan and Lord Solhtar, a proud-seeming man with a heavy black beard that was rare among the Valari. Two of the women present that night were Devora, the King’s sister, and Irisha, a beautiful young woman who seemed about my age. Her hair was raven-black and her skin almost as fair as the oak of King Hadaru’s throne. She was the daughter of Duke Barwan of Adar in Anjo, and it was said that King Hadaru had coerced him into giving her as his bride after his old queen had died. She stood in a bright green gown close to the King’s throne, closer even than Salmelu. It was somewhat barbaric, I thought, that even a queen should be made to stand in the King’s presence, but that was the way of things in Ishka.

‘Sar Valashu Elahad,’ the King said to me in a voice thickened with the bitterness of age. ‘I would like to welcome you to my home.’

He nodded at Maram and Master Juwain, who stood on either side of me, and continued, ‘And you, Prince Maram Marshayk of Delu and Master Juwain of the Great White Brotherhood – you are welcomed, too.’

We thanked him for his hospitality, and then he favored me with a smile as brittle as the glass of the many windows of the hall. He told me, ‘I hope you like your accommodations here better than those of that draughty old castle of yours.’

In truth, I already liked the palace of this sad, old king more than my father’s castle, for it was a splendid thing. The vast roof of the hall, supported by great ebony columns, opened out in sweeping curves high above us like an indoor sky made of some sort of bluish wood. The panels of the walls were of the blackest shatterwood and red cherry, carved with battle scenes of Ishka’s greatest victories. The darkness of these woods would have cast a gloom upon the hall if they hadn’t been waxed and polished to a mirrorlike finish. In their gleaming surfaces was reflected the light of the thousands of candles burning in their stands. As well, I saw thousands of leaping red flames in the deep gloss of the floor, which was of oak unadorned by any carpet. Its grainy whiteness was broken only by a circle some twenty feet across in front of the throne; no one stood upon this disk of red rosewood that must have been cut in Hesperu or Surrapam. I guessed that it symbolized the sun or perhaps one of the stars from which the Valari had come. I couldn’t see a speck of dust upon it, nor on any other surface in the hall, which smelled of lemon oil and other exotic polishes.

‘My cooks are preparing a meal, which we’ll take in the dining room,’ King Hadaru said to me. ‘Now, I would like to know if there is anything you need?’

Maram, I noticed, was concentrating his attention on Irisha with a barely contained heat. I nudged him in the ribs with my elbow, and said to the King, ‘We need only to travel as quickly as possible at first light.’

‘Yes,’ King Hadaru said, ‘I’ve heard that you’ve pledged yourself to making this foolish quest.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, feeling the eyes of everyone near the throne fall upon me.

‘Well, the Lightstone will never be found. Your ancestor gave it to a stranger in Tria when he would have done better to bring it to Loviisa.’

His thin lips pulled together in distaste as if he had eaten a lemon. I could almost feel the resentment burning inside him. It occurred to me then that love frustrated turns to hate; hope defeated becomes the bitterness of despair.

‘But what if the Lightstone were found?’ I asked him.

‘By you?’

‘Yes – why not?’

‘Then I have no doubt that you would bring it back to your castle and lock it away from the world.’

‘No, that would never happen,’ I told him. ‘The Lightstone’s radiance was meant to be shared by everyone. How else could we ever bring peace to the world?’

‘Peace?’ he snarled out. ‘How can there ever be peace when there are those who would claim what is not theirs?’

At this, Salmelu traded sharp looks with Lord Nadhru, and I heard Lord Solhtar murmuring something about Korukel’s diamonds. Lord Mestivan, standing next to him in a bright blue tunic, nodded his head as he touched the red and white battle ribbons tied to his long black hair.

‘Perhaps someday,’ I said, ‘all will know what is rightfully theirs.’

At this, King Hadaru let out a harsh laugh like the growl of a bear. And then he told me, ‘You, Valashu Elahad, are a dreamer – like your grandfather.’

‘Perhaps that’s true,’ I said. ‘But all men have dreams. What is yours, King Hadaru?’

This question caught the King off guard, and his whole body tensed as if in anticipation of a blow. His eyes deepened with a faraway look; he seemed to be gazing through the beautiful woods of his palace out into the nighttime sky. He suffered, I thought, from a stinginess of spirit in place of austerity, a brittle hardness instead of true strength. He strove for a zealous cleanliness when he should have longed for purity. If it came to war, he would fight out of pride of possessiveness rather than the protecting of that which he cherished most. And yet despite these turnings of the Valari virtues, I also sensed in him a secret desire that both he and the world could be different. He might fight against Waas or Mesh with all the cool ferocity for which he was famed, but his greatest battle would always be with himself.

‘Of what do I dream?’ he murmured as he pulled at the ribbons tied to his hair. His eyes seemed to grow brighter as they turned back toward me. ‘I dream of diamonds,’ he finally told me. ‘I dream of the warriors of Ishka shining like ten thousand perfect, polished diamonds as they stand ready to fight for the riches they were born for.’

Now it was my turn to be caught off guard. My grandfather had always said that we were born to stand in the light of the One and feel its radiance growing ever brighter within ourselves, and I had always believed that he had told me the truth.

King Hadaru glanced at Lord Nadhru and asked, ‘And of what do you dream, Lord Nadhru?’

Lord Nadhru fingered the hilt of his sword, and without hesitation, said, ‘Justice, Sire.’

‘And you, Lord Solhtar?’ the King said to the man next to him.

Lord Solhtar fingered his thick beard for a moment before turning to look at the woman on his left. She had the thick bones and brown skin of a Galdan, and I wondered if she had come from that conquered kingdom. Lord Solhtar smiled at her in silent understanding, and then said, ‘I dream that someday we Ishkans may help all peoples regain what is rightfully theirs.’

‘Very good,’ Lord Issur suddenly said. Although he was Salmelu’s brother, he seemed to have little of his pugnaciousness and none of his arrogance. ‘That is a worthy dream.’

King Hadaru must have caught a flash of concern from his young wife, for he suddenly looked at Irisha and said, ‘Do you agree?’

I noticed Maram staring at Irisha intently as she brushed back her long hair and said, ‘Of course it is worthy – worthy of our noblest efforts. But shouldn’t we first look to the safeguarding of our own kingdom?’

This ‘safeguarding,’ I thought, might well mean the eventual incorporation of Anjo into Ishka. Although Irisha’s father might owe allegiance to Anjo’s King Danashu in Sauvo, Danashu was a king in name only. And so Adar, much to Duke Barwan’s shame, had practically become a client state of Ishka. In truth, the only thing that kept Ishka from biting off pieces of Anjo one by one like a hungry bear was fear of Meshian steel.

For a while I listened as these proud nobles talked among themselves. They seemed little different, in their sentiments and concerns, from the lords and knights of Mesh. And yet the Ishkans were different from us in other ways. They wore colors in their clothing and battle ribbons in their hair in a time of peace, something that my dour countrymen would never do. And some of them, at least, had taken foreign-born wives. But worst of all, I thought, was their habit of frequently using the pronoun ‘I’ in their speech, which sounded vulgar and self-glorifying.

I remembered well my father telling me about the perils of using this deceptive word. And wasn’t he right, after all? It is vain. It is a distracting mirror. It shrinks the soul and traps it inside a box of conceits, superficialities and illusions. It keeps us from looking out into the universe and sensing our greater being in the vastness of the infinite and the fiery exhalations of the stars. In Mesh, one used the word in forgetfulness or almost as a curse – or, rarely, in moments of great emotion as when a man might whisper to his wife in the privacy of their house, ‘I love you.’

As it grew closer to the hour appointed for dinner, King Hadaru listened patiently to all that everyone had to say. Then finally, with a heaviness both in his body and spirit, he looked at Salmelu and asked, ‘Of what do you dream, my son?’

Salmelu seemed to have been waiting for this moment. His eyes flared like a fire stoked with fresh coal as he looked at me and said, ‘I dream of war. Isn’t that what a Valari is born for? To stand with his brothers on the battlefield and feel his heart beating as one with theirs, to see his enemies crumble and fall before him – is there anything better than this? How else can a warrior test himself? How else can he know if he is diamond inside or only glass that can be broken and ground beneath another man’s boot, to blow away like dust in the wind?’

I took these words as a challenge. While King Hadaru watched me carefully, I held my knight’s ring up so that it gleamed in the candlelight.

And then I said, ‘All men are diamonds inside. And all life is a series of battles. It’s how we face this war that determines whether we are cut and polished like the diamonds of our rings or broken like bad stones.’

At this, Master Juwain smiled at me approvingly, as did Lord Issur and many of the Ishkans. But Salmelu only stood there glowering at me. I could feel his malice toward me rising inside him like an angry snake.

‘I myself saw your father give you that ring,’ he said. ‘But I can hardly believe what I see now: a Valari warrior who does everything that he can to avoid war.’

I took a deep breath to cool the heat rising through my belly. Then I told him, ‘If it’s war you want so badly, why not unite against the Red Dragon and fight him?’

‘Because I do not fear him as you seem to. No Ishkan does.’

This, I thought, was not quite true. King Hadaru paled a little at the utterance of this evil name. It occurred to me then that he might not, after all, desire a war with Mesh that would weaken his kingdom at a dangerous time. Why wage war when he could gain his heart’s desire through marriage or merely making threats?

‘It’s no shame to be afraid,’ King Hadaru said. True courage is marching into battle in the face of fear.’

At this Salmelu traded quick looks with both Lord Nadhru and Lord Mestivan. I sensed that they were the leaders of the Ishkan faction that campaigned for war.

‘Yes,’ Salmelu said. ‘Marching into battle, not merely banging on our shields and blowing our trumpets.’

‘Whether or not there is a battle with Mesh,’ the King reminded him, ‘is still not decided. As I recall, the emissaries I sent to Silvassu failed to obtain a commitment for battle.’

At this, Salmelu’s face flushed as if he had been burned by the sun. He stared at his father and said, ‘If we failed, it was only because we weren’t empowered to declare war immediately in the face of King Shamesh’s evasions and postponements. If I were King –’

‘Yes?’ King Hadaru said in a voice like steel. ‘What would you do if you were King?’

‘I would march on Mesh immediately, snow or no snow in the passes.’ He glared at me and continued, ‘It’s obvious that the Meshians have no real will toward war.’

‘Then perhaps it is well that you’re not King,’ his father told him. ‘And perhaps it’s well that I haven’t yet named an heir.’

At this, Irisha smiled at King Hadaru as she protectively cupped her hands to cover her belly. Salmelu glared at her with a hatefulness that I had thought he reserved only for me. He must have feared that Irisha would bear his father a new son who would simultaneously push him aside and consolidate the King’s claims on Anjo.

King Hadaru turned to me and said, ‘Please forgive my son. He is hotheaded and does not always consider the effects of his acts.’

Despite my dislike of Salmelu, I felt a rare moment of pity for him. Where my father ruled his sons out of love and respect, his father ruled him out of fear and shame.

‘No offense is taken,’ I told him. ‘It’s clear that Lord Salmelu acts out of what he believes to be Ishka’s best interest.’

‘You speak well, Sar Valashu,’ the King said to me. ‘If you weren’t committed to making this impossible quest of yours, your father would do well to make you an emissary to one of the courts of the Nine Kingdoms.’

‘Thank you, King Hadaru,’ I said.

He sat back against the white wood of his throne, all the while regarding me deeply. And then he said, ‘You have your father’s eyes, you know. But you favor your mother. Elianora wi Solaru – now there is a beautiful woman.’

I sensed that King Hadaru was trying to win me with flattery, toward what end I couldn’t see. But his attentions only embarrassed me. And they enraged Salmelu. He must have recalled that his father had once wooed my mother in vain, and had only married his mother as his second choice.

‘Yes,’ Salmelu choked out, ignoring his father’s last comment. ‘I agree that Sar Valashu should be made an emissary. Since it’s clear that he’s no warrior.’

Maram, standing impatiently next to me, made a rumbling sound in his throat as if he might challenge Salmelu’s insult. But the sight of Salmelu’s kalama sheathed at his side helped him keep his silence. As for me, I looked down at the two diamonds sparkling in my ring, and wondered if Salmelu was right, after all.

Then Salmelu continued, ’I would say that Sar Valashu does favor his father, at least in his avoidance of battle.’

Why, I wondered, was Salmelu now insulting both my father and me in front of the entire Ishkan court? Was he trying to call me out? No, I thought, he couldn’t challenge me to a duel since that would violate his pledge of a safe passage through Ishka.

‘My father,’ I said, breathing deeply, ‘has fought many battles. No one has ever questioned his courage.’

‘Do you think it’s his courage I question?’

‘What do you mean?’

Salmelu’s eyes stabbed into mine like daggers as he said, ‘It seems a noble thing, this pledge of yours to make your quest. But aren’t you really just fleeing from war and the possibility of death in battle?’

I listened as several of the lords near Salmelu drew in quick breaths; I felt my own breath burning inside me as if I had inhaled fire. Was Salmelu trying to provoke me into calling him out? Well, I wouldn’t be provoked. To fight him would be to die, most likely, and that would only aid him in inciting a war that might kill my friends and brothers. I was a diamond, I told myself, a perfect diamond which no words could touch.

And then, despite my intentions, I found myself suddenly gripping the hilt of my sword as I said to him, ‘Are you calling me a coward?’

If he called me a coward, to my face, then that would be a challenge to a duel that I would have to answer.

As my heart beat inside my chest so quickly and hard that I thought it might burst, I felt Master Juwain’s hand grip my arm firmly as if to give me strength. And then Maram finally found his voice; he tried to make a joke of Salmelu’s deadly insult, saying, ‘Val, a coward? Ha, ha – is the sky yellow? Val is the bravest man I know.’

But his attempt to quiet our rising tempers had no effect on Salmelu. He just fixed me with his cold black eyes and said, ‘Did you think I was calling you a coward? Then please excuse me – I was only raising the question.’

‘Salmelu,’ his father said to him sternly.

But Salmelu ignored him, too. ‘All men,’ he said, ‘should question their own courage. Especially kings. Especially kings who allow their sons to run away when battle is threatened.’

‘Salmelu!’ King Hadaru half-shouted at him.

Now I gripped my sword so hard that my fingers hurt. To Salmelu, I said, ‘Are you calling my father a coward, then?’

‘Does a lion beget a lamb?’

These words were like drops of kirax in my eyes, burning me, blinding me. Salmelu’s mocking face almost disappeared into the angry red sea closing in around me.

‘Does an eagle,’ he asked, ‘hatch a rabbit from its eggs?’

The wily Salmelu was twisting his accusations into questions, and thus evading the responsibility for how I might respond. Why? Did he think I would simply impale myself on his sword?

‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘that your grandfather died before he saw what became of his line. Now there was a brave man. It takes true courage to sacrifice those whom we love. Who else would have let a hundred of his warriors die trying to protect him rather than simply defend his honor in a duel?’

As I choked on my wrath and stopped breathing, the whole world seemed to come crushing down upon my chest. I allowed this terrible lie to break me open so that I might know the truth of who Salmelu really was. And in that moment of bitterness and blood, his hate became my hate, and mine fed the fires of his, and almost without knowing what I was doing, I whipped my sword from its sheath and pointed it at him.

‘Val,’ Maram cried out in a horrified voice, ‘put away your sword!’

But there was to be no putting away of swords that night-some things can never be undone. As Salmelu and his fellow Ishkans quickly drew their swords, I stared in silent resignation at this fence of gleaming steel. I had drawn on Salmelu, after all. Despite his taunts, I had done this of my own free will. And according to ancient law that all Valari held sacred, by this very act it had been I who had thus formally challenged him to a duel.

‘Hold! Hold yourselves now, I say!’ King Hadaru’s outraged voice cut through the murmurs of anticipation rippling through the hall. Then he arose from his throne and took a step forward. To Salmelu, he said, ‘I did not want this. I would not have you make this duel tonight – you needn’t accept Sar Valashu’s challenge.’

Salmelu’s sword wavered not an inch as he pointed it toward me. He said, ‘Nevertheless, I do accept it.’

The King stared at him for a long moment, and then sighed deeply. ‘So be it, then,’ he said. ‘A challenge has been made and accepted. You will face Sar Valashu in the ring of honor when you are both ready.’

At this, Salmelu and the other lords slid their swords back into their sheaths, and I did the same. So, I thought, the time of my death has finally come. There was nothing more to say; there was nothing more to do – almost nothing.

Because Valari knights do not fight duels wearing armor, the King excused me for a few minutes so that I might remove my mail. With Maram and Master Juwain following close behind me, I repaired to an anteroom off the side of the hall. It was a small room, whose rosewood paneling had the look and smell of dried blood. I stood staring at yet another battle scene carved into wood as the heavy door banged shut and shook the entire room.

‘Are you mad!’ Maram shouted at me as he smacked his huge fist into the palm of his hand. ‘Have you entirely taken leave of your senses? That man is the best swordsman in Ishka, and you drew on him!’

‘It… couldn’t be helped,’ I said.

‘Couldn’t be helped?’ he shouted. He seemed almost ready to smack his fist into me. ‘Well, why don’t you help it now? Why not just apologize to him and leave here as quickly as we can?’

At that moment, with my legs so weak that I could hardly stand, I wanted nothing more than to run away into the night. But I couldn’t do that. A challenge had been made and accepted. There are some laws too sacred to break.

‘Leave him alone now,’ Master Juwain said as he came over to me. He helped me remove my surcoat, and then began working at the catches to my armor. ‘If you would, Brother Maram, please go out to the horses and bring Val a fresh tunic.’

Maram muttered that he would be back in a few moments, and again the door opened and closed. With trembling hands, I began pulling off my armor. With my mail and underpadding removed, it was cold in that little room. Indeed, the entire palace was cold: out of fear of fire, the King allowed no flame hotter than that of a candle in any of its wooden rooms.

‘Are you afraid?’ Master Juwain asked as he laid his hand on my trembling shoulder.

‘Yes,’ I said, staring at the dreadful, red wall.

‘Brother Maram is an excitable man,’ he said. ‘But he’s right, you know. You could simply walk away from all this.’

‘No, that’s not possible,’ I told him. ‘The shame would be too great. My brothers would make war to expunge it. My father would.’

‘I see,’ Master Juwain said. He rubbed his neck, and then fell quiet.

‘Master Juwain,’ I said, looking at him, ‘in ancient times, the Brothers would help a knight prepare for a duel. Will you help me now?’

Master Juwain began rubbing the back of his bald head as his gray eyes fell upon me. ‘That was long ago, Val, before we forswore violence. If I helped you now, and you killed Salmelu, I would bear part of the blame for his death.’

‘If you don’t help me, and he kills me, you would bear part of the blame for mine.’

For as long as it took for my heart to beat twenty times, Master Juwain stared at me in silence. And then he bowed his head in acceptance of what had to be and said, ‘All right.’

He instructed me to gaze at the stand of candles blazing in the corner of the room. I was to single out the flame of the highest candle and concentrate on its flickering yellow tip. Where did a candle’s flame come from when it was lit? he asked me. Where did it go when it went out?

He steadied my breathing then as he guided me into the ancient death meditation. Its purpose was to take me into a state of zanshin, a deep and timeless calm in the face of extreme danger. Its essence was in bringing me to the realization that I was much more than my body and that therefore I wouldn’t fear its wounding or death.

‘Breathe with me now,’ Master Juwain told me. ‘Concentrate on your awareness of the flame. Concentrate on your awareness, in itself.

Was I afraid? he told me to ask myself. Who was asking the question? If it was I who asked, what was the ‘I’ who was aware of the one who asked? Wasn’t there always a deeper I, a truer self – luminous, flawless, indestructible – that shone more brightly than any diamond and blazed as eternally as any star? What was this one radiant awareness that shone through all things?

For once in my life, my gift was truly a gift. As I opened myself to Master Juwain’s low but powerful voice, his breathing became one with my breathing and his calm became my own. After a while, my hands stopped sweating and I found that I could stand without shaking. Although my heart still beat as quickly as a child’s, the crushing pain I had felt earlier in my chest was gone.

And then suddenly, like thunder breaking through the sky, Maram came back into the room with my tunic, and it was time to go.

‘Are you ready?’ Master Juwain said as I pulled on this simple garment and buckled my sword around my waist.

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling at him. ‘Thank you, sir.’

We returned to the main hall. King Hadaru and his court had gathered in a circle around the disc of rosewood at the center of the room. In Mesh, when a duel was to be fought, the knights and warriors formed the ring of honor at any convenient spot. But then, we did not fight duels nearly so often as did the bloodthirsty Ishkans.

As I made my way toward this red circle, the floor was so cold beneath my bare feet that it seemed I was walking on ice. Salmelu was waiting for me inside the ring of his countrymen. He had his sword drawn, and Lord Issur stood by his side. Although it took me only a few moments to join him there, with Maram acting as my second, it seemed like almost forever. Then we began the rituals that precede any duel. Salmelu handed his sword to Maram, who rubbed its long, gleaming blade with a white cloth soaked in brandy, and I gave Lord Issur mine. After this cleansing was finished and our swords returned, we closed our eyes for a few moments of meditation to cleanse our minds.

‘Very good,’ King Hadaru called out at last. ‘Are the witnesses ready?’

I opened my eyes to see the ring of Ishkans nod their heads and affirm that they were indeed ready. Maram and Master Juwain now stood among them toward the east of the ring, and they both smiled at me grimly.

‘Are the combatants ready?’

Salmelu, standing before me with his sword held in two hands and cocked by the side of his head, smiled confidently and called out, ‘I’m ready, Sire. Sar Valashu was lucky at chess – let’s see how long his luck holds here.’

The King waited for me to speak, then finally said, ‘And you, Valashu Elahad?’

‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘Let’s get this over.’

‘A challenge has been made and accepted,’ King Hadaru said in a sad, heavy voice. ‘You must now fight to defend your honor. In the name of the One and all of our ancestors who have stood on this earth before us, you may begin.’

For a few moments no one moved. So quiet was the ring of knights and nobles around us that it seemed no one even breathed. Some duels lasted no longer than this. A quick rush, a lightning stroke of steel flashing through the air, and as often as not, one of the combatants’ heads would be sent rolling across the floor.

But Salmelu and I faced each other across a few feet of a blood-red circle of wood, taking our time. Asaru had once observed that a true duel between Valari knights resembled nothing so much as a catfight without the hideous screeching and yowling. As if our two bodies were connected by a terrible tension, we began circling each other with an excruciating slowness. After a few moments, we paused to stand utterly still. And then we were moving again, measuring distances, looking for any weakness or hesitation in the other’s eyes. I felt sweat running down my sides and my heart beating like a hammer up through my head; I breathed deeply, trying to keep my muscles relaxed yet ready to explode into motion at the slightest impulse. I circled slowly around Salmelu with my sword held lightly in my hands, waiting, waiting, waiting …

And then there was no time. As if a signal had been given, we suddenly sprang at each other in a flurry of flashing swords. Steel rang against steel, and then we locked for a moment, pushing and straining with all our might against each other, trying to free our blades for a deadly cut. We grunted and gasped, and Salmelu’s hot breath broke in quick bursts against my face. And then we leapt back from each other and whirled about before suddenly closing again. Steel met steel, once, twice, thrice, and then I aimed a blow downward that might have split him in two. But it missed, and his sword burned the air scarcely an inch above my head. And then I heard Salmelu cry out as if in pain; I cried out myself to feel a sudden sharp agony cut through my leg almost down to the bone.

‘Look!’ Lord Mestivan called out in his high, nervous voice. ‘He’s cut! Salmelu has been cut!’

As Salmelu and I stood away from each other for a moment to look for another opening, I noticed a long, red gash splitting the blue silk of his trousers along his thigh. It seemed that my blow hadn’t altogether missed him after all. The gash ran with fresh blood, but it didn’t spurt, so most likely he wasn’t fatally wounded. It was a miracle, I thought, that I had wounded him at all. Asaru had always said that I was very good with the sword if I didn’t let myself become distracted, but I had never believed him.

And clearly the Ishkans suffered from the same disbelief. Gasps of astonishment broke from knights and lords in the ring around me. I heard Lord Nadhru call out, ‘He’s drawn first blood! The Elahad has!’

Standing across the circle from him, Maram let out a sudden, bellowing cheer. He might have hoped that Salmelu and I would put away our swords then, but the duel wouldn’t end until one of us yielded.

Salmelu was determined that this would not be him. The steel I had put in his leg had sent a thrill of fear through him, and his whole body trembled with a panic to destroy me. I felt this dreadful emotion working at me like ice rubbed along my limbs, paralyzing my will to fight. I remembered my vow never to kill again, and I felt the strength bleed away from me. And in my moment of hesitation, Salmelu struck.

He sprang off his good leg straight at me, whirling his sword at my head, all the while snarling and spitting out his malice like a cat. Once again, his hate became my hate, and the madness of it was like a fire burning my eyes. As he cut at me, I barely managed to get my sword up to parry his. Again and again he swung his sword against mine, and the sound of steel against steel rang out into the hall like the beating of a blacksmith’s hammer. Somehow I managed to lock swords with him to forestall this furious onslaught. In breaking free, however, he lunged straight toward my heart. It was only by the miracle of my gift that I felt the point pushing through my breast – and then pulled frantically aside a moment before it actually did so. But the point took me in my side beneath my arm. His sword drove clean through the knotted muscle there and out my back. I cried out for all to hear as he wrenched his sword free; I jumped backward and held my sword in my good hand as I waited for him to come for me again.

‘Second blood to Ishka!’ someone near me called out. ‘The third blood will tell!’

I stood gasping for breath as I watched Salmelu watching me. He took his time circling nearer to me; he moved as if in great pain, careful of his wounded leg. My left arm hung useless by my side; in my right hand, I gripped my long, heavy kalama, the bright blade that my father had given me. Experience should have told me that our respective wounds hampered each of us almost equally. But my fear told me something else. I was almost certain that Salmelu would soon find a way to cut through my feeble defenses. I felt myself almost ready to give up. But the combat, I reminded myself, wouldn’t end until one of us yielded – yielded in death.

Again, Salmelu came at me. His little jaw worked up and down as if he were already chewing open my entrails. He now seemed supremely confident of cutting me open there – or in some other vital place. He had the strength and quickness of wielding his sword with two practiced arms, while my best advantage was in being able to dance about and leap out of his way. But the circle was small, and it seemed inevitable that he would soon catch me up near the edge of it. If I tried to break free from the ring of honor, angry Ishkan hands would push me back, into his sword. If I stood my ground, sword against sword, he would surely kill me. The seeming certainty of my approaching death unnerved me. Despite the fury of the battle, I began sweating and shivering. So badly did my body tremble that I could hardly hold my sword.

It was my gift, I believe, that saved me. It let me feel the intended devastation of his flashing sword and avoid it by a feather’s edge, by a breath. And more, it opened me to much else. I sensed the deep calm of Master Juwain meditating at the edge of the circle, and my hate for Salmelu began dying away. I remembered my mother’s love for me and her plea that I should someday return to Mesh; I remembered my father’s last words to me: that I must always remember who I was. And who was I, really? I suddenly knew that I was not only Valashu Elahad who held a heavy sword in a tired hand, but the one who walked always beside me and would remain standing when I died: watching, waiting, whispering, shining. To this one who watched, the world and all things within it moved with an exquisite slowness: a scything sword no less than an Ishkan lord named Salmelu. I saw his kalama’s steel flash at me then in a long, sweeping arc. There came an immense stillness and clarity. In that timeless moment, I leaned back to avoid the point, which ripped a ragged tear across my tunic. And then, quick as a lightning bolt, I slashed my sword in a counterstroke. As I had intended, it cut through the muscles of both of Salmelu’s arms and across his chest. Blood leapt into the air, and his sword went flying out of his hands. It clanged against the floor even as Salmelu screamed out that I had killed him.

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