Black Jade

Chapter 40

The horses' hooves beat a thudding tattoo against the earth as the trees along the narrow road flew by. I soon saw, however, that Bemossed could not hold this pace. Twice his foot popped out of his stirrup, which confused and angered his usually gentle horse. As we were bounding down a rough, turning stretch of road, he lost the reins altogether and in desperation threw his arms around Littlefoot's neck to hold on for his life. I called for a halt then. I waited while Bemossed collected his senses and his breath. I rode over to help him reposition himself and take up the reins again. Then I set forth at a slower pace.

I heard Maram mutter to Atara, 'Ah, but it's going to be a long day.'

For two hours we rode through the forest, until it gave out onto an expanse of farmland. The road turned toward the northwest; as the Khal Arrak lay to the northeast, we had to ride off the road to find little lanes between the fields and sometimes cut straight across them. More than one farmer shook his hoe at us and shouted curses at us for trampling his cabbages. I worried that we attracted too much attention. I felt our enemy drawing ever closer — even as the pressure inside me built ever more painful, and hotter and hotter.

'We must ride faster,' I turned to tell Bemossed. 'You must try.'

He nodded his head at this and said, 'It still seems wrong to burden this beast this way, but I will try.'

'Your horse is named Littlefoot,' I told him. 'And he is no beast but a great being who is proud to bear you. If you do your part, he will do his.'

He grasped his reins and patted Littlefoot's neck with a new resolve. And for the next hour of the day, beneath the hot noon sun, he managed to hold a canter without once losing his stirrups or reins.

And then we came into a torn, treeless country of poor soil that looked to have been overfarmed. Hesperus sometimes torrential rains had eroded the slopes of the hills rising up toward the mountains. We had to cross many gullies and slips of silt and stones. This demanded skillful horsemanship, but as we were riding over a particularly broken patch of ground, Bemossed clenched his reins too tightly and caused Littlefoot to whinny and rear up. He lost his balance then and flew off onto the ground. Although he took no injury from this fall, he barely managed to roll out of the way in a frantic effort to keep Uttlefoot's driving hooves from crushing him. After that, he did not want to ride anymore. I felt him, however, steeling himself to climb back into his saddle and master this difficult art.

Master Juwain, I saw, was having a hard time of things, too. The work of getting across the gullies caused him to gasp, as if drawing in breath was a strain. This surprised and worried me. He had always seemed to me as tough as tree bark. Even in the heights of the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains, where the air is the thinnest on earth, he had climbed up through a terrible terrain as if he possessed the lungs of a much younger man.

When we stopped by a stream to refill our waterskins, I saw him take out his green gelstei and stare at it. Then I finally understood. I said to him, 'It is Morjin, isn't it?'

He nodded his head, then gasped out, 'He has.. found his way … again… into this crystal.'

Maram came up and looked at it. 'I never felt a fire so terrible as that which came out of your stone when you tried to heal me. Morjin is burning you with it, isn't he?'

'No… it isn't like … that,' Master Juwain said again. He waited to catch his breath. 'The varistei, I think … is making my blood sick. Making it so that it can't… hold the air I breathe in.'

Liljana stepped over to look at the beautiful emerald crystal in his hand. She said, 'Then you must get rid of it.'

'I will,' Master Juwain said, closing his hand around his crystal. 'If things get worse, I will bury it.'

I did not want to pause any longer to hold an argument. None of us, I knew, would readily abandon his gelstei. I told myself that

if we could flee far enough from Morjin, he would lose whatever power he might be gaining over the stones.

'Let us ride,' I said. I looked at the mountains, now standing out sharply in stark gray and white lines perhaps only twenty-five miles away. 'Let us leave this dreadful country behind us.'

We set out again, and the terrain became even worse: rockier along the steeply cut slopes of the hills, and filled with dense vegetation in their troughs. Much grass grew here, and we saw a few herders grazing their sheep and goats upon it. But a tough, rubbery plant called hape also sprouted from the poor soil, in large patches through which the horses had a hard time driving their hooves. Littlefoot stumbled twice here, and I didn't know how Bemossed was able to keep from being thrown. Even Fire, the most surefooted of our horses, nearly broke her leg in a tangle of hape that concealed a rocky hole.

As the sun crossed the sky's zenith and began falling toward the west in a gout of yellow fire, the air grew stiller and hotter. We sweated and prayed for any hint of wind. I wondered if Estrella might be able to summon up a breeze. But this strong, sweet girl worked hard just to keep her horse moving forward. I listened as Master Juwain gasped and wheezed, and our horses snorted out froth into the blazing afternoon. My eyes burned as if someone had pushed me face-first into an oven. My heart burned, too, and my blood which pulsed through my aching veins. And with every mile we put behind us, I felt the hateful thing that pursued us drawing closer.

At the crest of one hape-covered rise, I called for a halt. I scanned the country behind us. A haze of heat and moisture steamed off the broken hills. I could not detect anyone riding over this ground; the only things that moved were a few dozen sheep a mile away. Kane, who had dismounted, lifted up his ear from a rock on the ground, and he shook his head. He murmured, 'Nothing — not yet.'

'Atara?' I said, looking over to where she stood leaning against her horse. 'Can you see anything?'

The sickness that burned through her belly struck deep into my own. I felt smothered in a thick blackness, as if a great hand had pushed me down into a mass of stinking black mud. I saw Atara grasping at the pommel of her saddle with one hand, even as she clutched something close to her body with her other. And then she turned to show me her diamond-clear gelstei. She told me, 'I can see almost nothing — not the land which we ride over, or the hours of the rest of this day. There is only Morjin. He is here, inside this crystal. And he is here, in these hills, somewhere. He comes, Val — how quickly he comes!'

Bemossed moved over to help her mount her horse. I thought it strange that even totally blind, she could ride much more fluidly than he, as if she had become a living part of her fierce, beautiful mare.

We began moving again, north and east toward the break in the mountains called the Khal Arrak. Whenever we came up over a swell of ground, I looked for this pass in the folds and fissures of rock to the north. I could not quite make it out. Even so, I felt certain that we rode more or less straight toward it: my sense of dead-reckoning told me this was so. I tried to assure Maram that we were going the right way, and he made a joke of this, saying, 'I hope you're right, because if you don't reckon correctly, we're all dead.'

A short distance farther on the ground got better, with fewer rocks and hape plants, and more grass for grazing. There should have been many sheep in the hills hereabout, and shepherds, too. For three miles we saw none of these; however, we did come across half a dozen houses, crumbling and obviously abandoned. I wondered why everyone had left them.

Bemossed, exhausted, fairly teetered on top of his horse and said, 'I heard there was war in this district, and plague, too.'

'Oh, excellent!' Maram grumbled. 'A cursed land — and we have to ride straight through it. Is there no other way?'

I looked out at the hot green hills around us. Perhaps ten miles farther on, a band of darker green forest covered the rising ground leading up to the mountains.

'Hmmph, you'll be all right,' Atara said to Maram, joking with him. 'Just don't drink the water here, and try not to breathe the air.'

Liljana, upon hearing this, did not smile. She sat on top of her horse next to Daj as she combed her fingers through his thick hair, checking to see if he might have picked up any ticks or other vermin on our ride. Then she broke off her inspection and said,

'I wish that I did not have to breathe the same air as Morjin, anywhere on earth. He makes everything so foul.'

The unusual shrillness of her voice alarmed me, and I nudged Altaru over to her. We traded knowing looks, and I asked her. 'Has Morjin found his way into your gelstei, too?'

She nodded her head as she brought out her blue whale figurine. She looked at it hatefully. 'He slides himself into my mind, like a tapeworm! He is filth! He is an abomination who never should have been born! I can't tell you what he is saying to me — I can hardly tell myself.'

Her words alarmed not just me, but everyone. Kane rode over to her, and cast his eyes upon the blue gelstei. He shouted, 'Then it must be destroyed!'

'No, not yet,' Liljana murmured, closing her fingers around her crystal. 'I can still bear it.'

'Can you bear giving us away? If Morjin can see what you see, hear what you hear, then — '

'But he can't!'

'How do you know?'

'I just do. He wants only to madden me. He speaks and speaks to me, but he doesn't really know if I can hear him.'

'But how do we know that, eh?'

'How can you ask that? After all we've suffered together? Don't you know me?'

'But what if you're wrong, eh?'

Liljana thrust her hand inside her cloak as she glared at Kane. And she snapped at him, 'You'll just have to trust me!'

'So,' he growled as he glared back at her. 'So.'

Liljana usually spoke with care, so as not to upset the children with things that they didn't need to know. But now she cried out: 'It doesn't matter anyway! Morjin is tracking us, and not by my thoughts. He will run us down, and soon!'

'Did he tell you that?' I asked her.

'Yes!'

I looked up at the mountains, which seemed so close, and yet still too far away. I said to Liljana, 'Then he told you lies — we will escape him, again.'

'You tell yourself lies. We are riding so slowly.'

'Be quiet, woman!' Kane thundered at her. 'You worry more than Maram! And that's just what Morjin wants, eh? It's your damn gelstei! You should throw it away before I do!'

His large hands, it seemed, fairly trembled to rip open the folds of her cloak and seize her gelstei. And so I shouted at him: 'Kane! Morjin wants even more that we should start tearing at each other's throats!'

As I said this, the deep lines cut into his savage face smoothed out, and his eyes cooled, slightly. He turned away from Liljana. Then he brought out his black gelstei and sat on his horse staring at it.

'Damn Morjin!' he muttered. 'Damn his eyes! Damn his blood!'

He made a fist around his dark stone, and lifted his hand back behind his head as if making ready to hurl it from him. And then his whole body seemed to lose its strength. His arm fell to his side as he slumped in his saddle. He put his gelstei away. He turned to me to snarl out, 'Let's ride, damn it, while we still can!'

And so ride we did, trying to keep our hope fixed on the great rocky wall of mountains growing larger and larger in front of us. We pounded around and over grassy hills. Flies came out to bite us. Our sweat, like fire, burned in the little wounds the flies tore in our flesh.

And then we crested a good-sized hill, and the dark blanket of forest we sought for shade from the fierce sun and cover from our pursuers' eyes seemed almost close enough to touch. I thought that we might possibly reach it and vanish into its trees. Then I turned to scan the rolling ground behind us and a flash of white and red brightened the top of one of the hills. I squinted against the sun, and I could just make out a white horse bearing a bronze-armored warrior and his flowing red cape. Lord Mansarian. I remembered, rode a snow-white stallion. I knew this was he. His men galloped right behind him. There must have been at least two hundred knights of these Crimson Companies, pouring down the hillside like a stream of bronze and red. Somewhere in this frightful mass, I thought, rode priests of the Kallimun. I knew that their master rode with them as well — either he or the droghul of Morjin.

Seeing this, Maram sighed out, 'Ah, too many, too close — too bad.'

'No!' I said to him. 'We can escape them yet! Let's ride!'

I urged Altaru to a gallop; it gladdened my heart to see Bemossed push his gelding to match this pace. He and Littlefoot both seemed near to collapse, but they managed to negotiate the easy slope down the backside of the hill. Another and larger hill rose up before us. I led the way around it, through a broad, grassy trough, and I dared to hope that the sight of our enemy would inspire us to a speed great enough to leave them behind.

But it was not to be. Just as I rounded the hill, I came upon a stream cutting through a gully. Altaru jumped across it almost without breaking stride. Just as I turned in my saddle to warn Bemossed of this unexpected obstacle, though, he seized hold of Littlefoots reins in confusion. Littlefoot planted his hooves in the grass, stopping up short of the stream. Bemossed, completely unprepared for his horse's sudden balk, went flying headfirst from his saddle through the air. His momentum carried him clear across the stream, where he struck the ground with a sickening impact. He threw up his hands to protect his head, and I heard bones break. It was something of a miracle that Atara's horse and those of the children, following close behind him, managed to jump the stream without trampling him.

We all gathered around Bemossed near the edge of the gully and dismounted. Bemossed stood up bravely, holding his drooping arm in his hand. He winced in pain as Master Juwain quickly examined it, but did not utter even a murmur of complaint

'Both bones in your forearm are broken,' Master Juwain announced. 'Not badly, I think, but they must be set. and your arm wrapped.'

'Not here!' Kane growled out. 'There is no time!'

'He can't ride like this,' Master Juwain said.

'He can hardly ride as it is,' Kane snapped. 'But ride he must.'

'All right,' I said. 'Then he'll ride with me.'

I mounted Altaru, and then helped Maram and Kane as they fairly flung Bemossed up onto Altaru's back behind me. I told Bemossed to wrap his good arm around my waist and to hold on tightly. Then I whispered to my great, black stallion, 'All right, old friend, you must run quickly now — quicker than you ever have before!'

Altaru, however, although the strongest of horses and a fury of speed over short distances, had never had the wind for long races. With Bemossed's weight added to mine, Altaru sprang forward with a great surge of determination that could not last very long. We galloped for a while over the lumpy, grassy ground. The breath snorted from his huge nostrils, and I felt an agony of fire building within the great, bunching muscles of his flanks and legs. I feared that he would run so hard that his heart might burst. I wanted to weep at the valor of this great-spirited being.

I heard the horses of my companions pounding after us and Bemossed's tormented breath exploding in my ear. I felt his arm tight around my belly, but trembling with the effort to keep holding on. I knew his strength was failing, as was Altaru's. After a couple of miles, my horse's pace slowed to barely a gallop. His whole body seemed to knot and quiver with a burning agony. I did not know how he kept on running.

We came out into a bowl of thick grass surrounded by hills, to its center stood an old cottage, or rather, its ruins. It had no roof and only three good walls: the fourth wall, facing us, had crumbled in places, and its doorway lacked a door. I pointed Altaru straight toward this hole in the wall's mortared stone. And Maram cried out in protest to me: 'What are you doing? The pass lies that way!' He pointed off past the right of the house. 'We won't make it — not this way!' I called back to him. 'We must make a stand, here.'

He didn't argue with me, nor did anyone else. I drew up in front of the cottage and waited as my friends joined me and dismounted. Kane and Maram helped Bemossed down from Altaru's back; then I rode him through the doorway into the cottage. Kane took charge of getting the other horses and everyone inside. I dismounted, too, and began walking around the cottage's single room. Piles of old leaves and bits of stone littered its packed-earth floor. Three of its walls, as I had thought, seemed to be in good enough repair. They stood a good seven feet high. The southern wall, however, had crumbled down to a height of four feet along much of its length. It was no castle that I had chosen for us to defend, but the best protection we could hope to find.

While Master Juwain and Liljana worked to set Bemossed's arm and wrap it, Kane unholstered his bow and began sticking arrows down into the dirt floor. So did I, and so did Maram. He moved with speed but without conviction or hope. I heard him mutter to himself, 'Ah, Maram, my old friend, this is madness — this is surely the end.'

'How many times have you said that?' I asked him, pushing an arrow down into the rain-softened earth.

'I don't know,' he grumbled. 'But sooner or later, I'll be right.'

I looked out over the crumbled section of wall for the approach of our enemy. I said, 'We survived the siege of Khaisham, didn't we?'

'By a miracle, we did. But here we have no escape tunnel.' 'Then we'll have to find a different way to escape.' Behind us, near the cottage's north wall, Estrella tried to quiet the horses. She and Daj had tethered them to an old beam that lay on the floor there; other than it and some splinters from an old window frame, the cottage seemed to have been stripped of wood and all its furnishings.

'This is not so bad a place,' I told Maram. 'Not nearly so bad as Argattha, where we fought off a hundred men.'

'But there we had Ymiru with us, and we wore armor, too. And Atara had her other sight.'

He turned toward Atara, who was busy stringing her great horn bow. She kept her arrows in the quiver slung on her back. I felt her waiting desperately for her second sight to return.

'We will win,' I told Maram.

'Against two hundred knights?'

'Yes,' I said.

'How, Val?'

I looked out over the low section of the wall toward the gap in the hills to the south. And I told him, 'I don't know, but we will win.'

My words did not convince him. I wasn't sure that I could even convince myself. I saw Kane's jaws working with all the tension of a steel trap, and I sensed that even my grim-faced friend had rarely found himself in such a desperate situation.

There came a grinding snap as Master Juwain set the bones of Bemossed's arm. Bemossed gave a gasp, and his face contorted with pain. He said nothing. I saw little hope in his eyes, and I wondered if he regretted coming away with us. I felt a tightness in his throat; a sense of doom seemed to grip him in an ironclad fist. I couldn't help thinking of what Master Matai had said about the Maitreya: that his star would burn brightly but not long.

A few moments later, Lord Mansarian rode his white stallion through the gap in the hills to the south. The green peacock feathers of his shiny bronze helm fluttered in the breeze. Four or five of his companies of Red Capes thundered behind him. Lord Mansarian led them to a point in the grassy bowl about four hundred yards away: just outside the range of our arrows. He drew up his men in long lines facing the cottage. I caught a flash of a white-haired man wearing a red robe, and I knew that this must be one of the Red Priests. Another priest — Salmelu, I guessed — sat on his horse next to a man covered from head to knee with a gray traveling cloak. I could not see if he wore armor beneath it. I could not see his face, but the acid burning my throat told me that this must be Morjin.

'Damn him!' Kane muttered. He stood next to me behind the crumbled section of wall. 'Damn his blood!'

Daj came up to us, and craned his head over the wall to look upon our enemy. He gripped his little sword in his hand, and he said, 'Why do they wait there? Why don't they surround the house?'

'Because,' I told him, 'it is easier to ride down fleeing rats than to face them cornered with no place to run.'

He immediately understood and said, 'They want us to flee. Well, this rat will kill at least one of them as they come over the walls.'

So saying, he pointed his sword at the Red Capes. I remembered how in Argattha he had used a spear to dispatch several of Morjin's wounded soldiers.

Lord Mansarian posted two men on the gentle slopes above the western and eastern sides of the cottage — no doubt to give warning in case we should flee.

Seeing this, Maram said, 'Why don't they just storm us and be done? What are they waiting for?'

They are waiting for our nerve to break, I thought. But I said nothing.

Maram twanged the string of his bow, and said, 'How many do you think that we can hit before they reach the house? Five? Ten?'

'Ten? Hmmph,' Atara said. 'You won't be able to shoot with any accuracy until they come within a hundred yards. And then you'll only have seconds to get off your rounds.'

'And that is my point. Even if by some miracle, we each get five of them, or even ten, that's only thirty men, which will leave — '

'Be quiet!' Kane snapped at him. 'This is no time for arithmetic.'

'Is it not?' Maram turned to look at Master Juwain wrapping Bemossed's arm in the corner as Liljana paid out a length of linen from a large roll.

'Nine of us minus nine leaves zero, which is all that will remain of the great Lightstone Traveling Troupe as soon as the damn Red Capes find their courage and charge us.'

He threw down his bow in disgust and moved over to the horses. It did not take him long to find his brandy bottle and to begin drinking straight from its glassy mouth.

'What are you doing?' Kane shouted at him. 'Get back to your post!'

'Give me a moment, damn you! I just want one more taste of brandy before I die.'

Kane stepped toward him as if intending to seize him by the neck and drag him back to the wall. But I stayed him, and said, 'Let him be.'

'But he'll drink himself senseless!'

'No, he won't,' I said. I didn't add: Who could blame him if he did?

I gazed out across the field at the two hundred Red Capes sitting on their mounts and pointing their spears at us. At the center of their front line, Lord Mansarian seemed to be consulting with the two priests and the gray-cloaked man I took as Morjin.

'Maram is right,' Kane said to me. 'We won't kill very many before they reach this wall.'

'Maybe we'll kill enough to drive them off,' I said.

'No — we won't. They'll come over the wall, and through the doorway,' Kane said grimly.

I gripped the hilt of my sword and said, 'I will kill anyone that tries to come through it.'

'So, you will — but it still won't be enough. Maram and I can't hold this wall by ourselves.'

'But what about me?' Daj said, pointing his sword toward our enemy. 'I can fight!'

I looked down upon this valiant young warrior, and at Atara, who stood next to him gripping her bow. How wrong it was, I thought, that Lord Mansarian and his war-hardened men should have driven to battle a blind woman and a beardless boy.

'There is a way,' I said to Kane. 'There must be a way.'

But I no longer believed this. I looked over at Bemossed, grimacing as Master Juwain fashioned a sling for his arm, and I silently raged that we had found this bright, gentle man only to have to lose him soon to our enemy's spears.

'There is a way!' Kane said to me. His hand shot out to lock upon my forearm, even as his eyes took hold of mine. I saw the old hate flare up inside him, even as he saw it seething in me. 'You know the way!'

'No,' I murmured. 'No.'

'Yes, this is the time — there isn't much time!'

'No, I can't.'

Kane let go of my arm to stab his fngers out toward our enemy. 'You have a sword inside you — use it!'

'I have sworn not to!'

'Use the valarda, damn it! This one time! Strike the Beast! Kill his droghul! Do it, Val!'

I looked out at the lines of mounted men in their gleaming, fish-scaled armor. I stared at the merciless Lord Mansarian and the man in gray who might be Morjin. It was Morjin, I remembered, who had nailed my mother and grandmother to planks of wood. And now he waited to murder my friends, who were the only family I had left.

Hate, the dark, destroying passion, fairly emanated from Lord Mansarian's men likes waves of heat. I felt it working at Lord Mansarian and burning up the man who must be Morjin. It howled like an enraged animal inside of Kane, and most of all, in myself. I could not escape it any more than I could the hot, humid air that hurt my lungs and stung my eyes.

'Valashu,' Bemossed said to me.

He came over and stood with me by the wall. He looked at me with his wise, brilliant eyes. Although I had said almost nothing to him of the valarda and the way that this terrible force of the soul could kill, he seemed to understand even so.

I set down my bow, and took out my sword. I no longer cared that its sacred silustria burned with fire.

There came a movement from the lines of Red Capes, and three knights rode forward to join Lord Mansarian. I guessed that they were captains receiving orders to make ready to charge us. Seeing this, Liljana stepped up to the wall and so did Master Juwain.

'Val,' Liljana said. The essential kindness of her soft, round face melted away before something fearful and furious inside her. 'If ever there was a time to use the valarda as Kane has said, this must be it.'

I stared at this woman who was like a mother to me, but I said nothing.

'Think of all those who have sacrificed so much for you to have come this far,' she said to me. 'Can't you sacrifice your vain attachment to a principle?'

'The only principle that realty matters,' Maram bellowed out to me from across the room, 'is life. But you don't care about that, do you?'

Master Juwain, I thought, wanted to advise me as well. But he stood quietly, and his gray eyes flickered back and forth as.if he was reading a book. He seemed to be searching for.words or the right verse that would reveal the absolute truth in order to guide me — searching and searching. I felt his mind spinning like a steel discus hurled out into space.

'What will be?' Atara said to me. She had put down her bow to re-tie her blindfold so that it wouldn't come loose in battle. Her voice grew as cold as a mountaintop as she said to me, 'What will be left of the world if you don't do what you were born to do?'

Her hatred of Morjin, like ice, seemed to touch even Estrella. She walked over to Atara, and pressed Atara's hand to her face. I felt this lovely girl's dread of what soon must come, and even more, her loathing of the darkness from which none of us seemed able to escape.

'You should wait with the horses,' I said to her, pointing across the room. 'You should try to keep them calm.'

She closed her eyes as if looking inside herself for a place of calm that spears and swords could not touch.

'Valashu,' Bemossed said to me again. He held his hand out toward Alkaladur's angry red flame. 'This cannot be the way.'

I saw in my sword's fire my dead father and my brothers and the thousands of warriors who had fallen upon the Culhadosh Commons. And I shouted, 'It is the way of the world! What does it matter if I slay with a sword forged out of gelstei or the hate in my heart?'

I stared at my sword, and I could not move. I felt its point piercing my hands and my feet — and every other part of me — crucifying me to something worse than death.

And Bemossed told me, 'No good can come of this.'

'Good comes,' I called out, looking across the field, 'when warriors kill those who need killing.'

Bemossed blinked as if he could not hold the moisture filling up his eyes. He said to me, 'Even yourself, Valashu?'

'Can you stop it?' I said to him. 'What is a Maitreya good for?'

Why, I wondered, had fate chosen Bemossed as the Shining One, and not me? The answer burned along the blade that stabbed through the center of my being: because I was damned. Because I was who I was.

There came a shout from across the field, and I looked out to see a third red-robed priest leading a packhorse up between the ranks of knights toward Lord Mansarian. Something seemed to be slung over the horse's back; I hoped it was not a packet of arrows and a bow. It nearly maddened me to have to wait here to see how Lord Mansarian would attack us — and to know what I would do. I felt this uncertainty torturing not just myself, but my friends as well. The battle had not yet begun, but the battle raged as it always had inside each of us.

I felt this most excruciatingly in Estrella. She seemed lost in a dark cavern of pain that had no bottom or end. Her heart beat quickly and agonizingly, as if she were fleeing from a bloodthirsty beast. And then everything inside her grew utterly still as if she had plunged deep into cool waters. An image came into my mind: that of a brilliant silver lake. She opened her eyes then and looked at me. She looked at Bemossed. Her whole being gleamed like a perfect mirror. Bemossed gazed at her in wonder. He stared and stared, deep into the eyes of this glorious girl, but even more at the great shining wonder of himself.

'Look, they move!' Maram cried out. He came hurrying over to the wall to grab up his bow. 'They're coming!'

I turned to see one of Lord Mansarian's warriors ride forward bearing a white banner of truce. Then came Lord Mansarian and a line of six knights. Morjin and the three priests rode behind the knights, using them as a shield in case we should fail to honor the truce and begin shooting arrows at them.

'Why should they even want to parlay?' Kane snarled out. He lifted up his bow. 'So, we'll speak to them with arrows through

their throats!'

'Are we trucebreakers, now?' I shouted at him. 'Must we commit every abomination?'

'The only abomination is in letting Morjin and his creatures live!'

Our enemy rode a dozen yards closer. Kane nocked an arrow to his bowstring, and so did Maram. Just then Alphanderry appeared and stood with us behind the wall.

'Look!' Daj cried out. 'Look at Bemossed!'

As Bemossed stared at Estrella, his face shone in the onstreaming rays of the sun. Everything about him shone: his eyes, his lips, his great, throbbing heart. He stood in a shimmer of glorre. I could hardly believe what I saw. Bemossed took his arm out of his sling and cast down this bit of cloth. He smiled. His eyes grew as bril-liant as the stars. He seemed to behold himself as he had always longed to be.

'Hoy!' Alphanderry sang out. 'La neshama halla!'

Bemossed looked out at our enemy, and I felt in him no fear. He looked at the sky and the earth; he looked at me. He seemed utterly without doubt. A bright, shining hope lit his smile, and more, the sureness of triumph. I knew then that Ea had not just a dark and false king of kings, but a new Lord of Light.

'La neshama halla jai Maitreya!'

In the air in front of him, a plain golden cup appeared. It seemed at once to be as hard as diamond and without true substance, like light. Bemossed reached out with his bandaged arm to grasp this cup. The moment that his fingers closed around it, my sword blazed a bright glorre. Then a dazzling radiance filled up every corner of the cottage, and swelled outward and upward to illuminate the green hills around us and the deep blue of the sky. Strangely, our enemy, riding ever closer, seemed unable to perceive this splendid light.

'The gelstei!' Maram shouted. He seemed stunned as by a hammer blow to his head. He ran over to the horses, and removed his firestone from the waterskin encasing it. He held it up for us all to see. 'My gelstei — look, it cools!'

Liljana and Master Juwain took out their gelstei then,too.

'I won't break the truce,' Maram sighed out, tucking the fire-stone down into the pocket of his trousers. He came back over to me. 'I think you Valari are right, after all. All that really matters is honor — to honor the glory of life. And so if I must die, I must die, too bad.'

Liljana pointed at the gray-cloaked man who rode with the three priests behind Lord Mansarian. 'I doubt if that is really Morjin. He wouldn't trust us to keep the truce. I was wrong, Val. Don't waste the best of yourself on him.'

'I agree,' Master Juwain told me. He seemed able to breathe more easily. 'It is likely some sort of trap.'

Atara moved up next to me, and she reached out blindly to lay her hand on my chest. And she said, 'Do what you were born to do, but not this murder.'

Our enemy came even closer, within the long range of our arrows, and now even Kane put down his bow. He turned to gaze at Bemossed with great dread, and yet with an intense longing, too. I knew that he wanted to weep and laugh and roar out all his wild joy of life, all at once. Finally he said to me, 'Do not use the valarda to slay. Remember the two wolves, Val. Remember who you really are.'

At this, Bemossed smiled. He held out his hand to me.

'Valashu Elahad!' someone called out from far away. The voice sounded raspy, like that of Lord Mansarian. 'Liljana Ashvaran! Maram Marshayk! Atara Ars Narmada! We know that these are your real names!'

And then a deeper, richer voice reverberated across the field. It was bright like silver and as cruel as steel. It rang with a will toward torment and vengeance, and left no doubt who in the body of men riding toward us held command. Too often, in my dreams and in my waking hours, I had trembled with loathing as I listened to the fell, deceptive, deadly voice of Morjin.

'Valashu Elahad!' the man in the gray cloak cried out to me. 'It has been too long — too long since I said farewell to your mother, and to Mesh!'

I turned away from Bemossed then. I could not take his outstretched hand. I noticed Daj staring at my fiery sword.

At a distance of two hundred yards. Lord Mansarian called for a halt and sent the knight bearing the white banner cantering toward us. He rode straight up to the cottage. He drew up in front of our wall, and said to us, 'You are offered a truce, that Lord Mansarian might discuss with you the terms of your surrender.'

'Terms!' I shouted. 'We all know the terms here: our deaths, or yours!'

The knight looked at Bemossed standing next to me. He said, 'Lord Mansarian has asked me to assure you that he will do all he can to spare the life of the Hajarim. Will you speak with him?'

Kane, standing on my other side, snarled in my ear: 'It's a trap!

Don't let that Morjin thing come any closer!'

I fought to quiet the wild pounding of my heart. I remembered how Lord Mansarian had protected Bemossed at our performance for King Arsu — likely at great risk to himself. I said to Kane, 'He might spare him.'

'He won't, damn it! Don't let them close, I say!'

'No,' I whispered. 'I want them all as near as they can be.' I nodded at the knight. 'All right — tell Lord Mansarian that he can approach us, and we will honor the truce.'

But the knight shook his head at this. He sat holding up the white banner, and he said, 'First, put down your bows and come out from behind that wall. My lord will not meet beneath the threat of your arrows.'

'All right,' I said again. 'We will come out — twenty yards only.' I nodded to Kane and Maram, and we began walking toward the door. And the knight pointed at Atara, and said, 'The princess, too.'

'But she is blind!' I said.

'So are bats blind,' the knight said, 'and yet somehow they fly through the air straight as arrows. My orders are clear on this: the princess must put down her bow.'

Atara smiled coldly, and she laid her bow on top of the wall. She, too, moved over toward the door. So did Bemossed. He said to me, 'Let me come with you.'

I looked for the golden cup in his hand, but I could no longer see it. The radiance pouring out of him seemed lost to the hellish glare of the sun. I told him, 'No, you must stay here. It will be all right.'

I told the knight that we would meet with his master, and he turned to gallop back to Lord Mansarian.

I drew in a long, deep breath of burning air. I clamped my fingers around the hilt of my sword, and I tried not to look at Bemossed. Then, with Maram, Kane and Atara close behind me, I stepped through the doorway out into the brilliant sunlight.