The Lightstone

Chapter 25

We traveled all that day toward the west. After retreating a few miles back down the beach, we found a path that led up along the headland over looking the sea. This we followed for many more miles along the coast. It was rough terrain, broken by many cliffs and coves, and we found that we could best traverse it by keeping inland where the ground was somewhat level and covered with elderleaf and pepperbush and other such shrubs. We saw some seals on a rocky beach below us and many birds: cormorants and peregrine falcons and merlins splitting the air with their high-pitched cries. But the entire country seemed empty of people. Where we might find there fishermen or mariners with ships to take us over the ocean, none of us knew. Even so, we rode on in high spirits buoyed up by the bracing wind and our renewed hopes.

'It must be two hundred and fifty miles to Eanna's border,' Kane said as he cast his eyes west toward that old and distant kingdom. 'And again as much to Ivalo. There are galliots and whalers there, if I remember. And smaller ships. One of them would likely take us to this Island of the Swans.'

'Five hundred miles!' Maram complained. 'Well we've come farther than that since Mesh. If we can cross the Vardaloon, we can cross this desolate country – and the sea.'

It was unlike him to be so cheerful, but the salty air and the brilliant waters below us seemed to work a magic upon him. He sat astride his sorrel humming to himself and quite pleased at having abundant sun with which to fill his firestone. More than once, along that windy and open track, he let loose a bolt of fire that incinerated a cluster of goldenrod or fused a patch of sand into glass. He might have aimed his crystal at the sea itself and tried to boil it away if Kane hadn't kept close to him with hit black gelstei at the ready and his even blacker eyes watching him like an eagle.

Because we were all still tired, we didn't get very far that day. The horses were nearly spent and none of us had the heart to push them – or ourselves. And so late in the afternoon, when the ground grew lower and we came upon a mead fairly rippling with long, green grass, we decided to make camp. We picketed the horses along the mead so that they could eat their fill, then spread out our furs on the beach just below it.

After piling up a good deal of driftwood for our fire and doing our other chores, we bathed in the ocean along with the anemones thai floated in the shallows, and the sea lettuce and rockweed and other plants that Master Juwain named. We gathered up whelks and mussels, and sat around our fire pulling them out of their shells to make our evening meal. The gulls watched us closely even as we watched the sandpipers skipping along and making their peetweet cries. Out above the sea, the ospreys glided and swooped and grabbed up fish in their gray talons.

And then, like a cloud that had been building for most of a day, a casual comment cast a shadow on our bright mood.

'I wish we had some of those tomcods,' Liljana said, pointing at a wriggling length of silver that an osprey held. 'I know everyone would like a little fish for dinner.'

'Ah, but how did you know that?' Maram asked, 'None of us spoke of eating fish.'

He studied the blue figurine that she held in her hand, and then eyed her suspiciously.

'Well, you didn't have to. I saw the way you looked at them.'

'You did, did you? Ah, but did you by chance happen to look into our minds?'

Liljana's round, pleasant face reddened as if she had been slapped 'No, Prince Maram Marshayk, I did not!'

It was strange, I thought, that although my friends rather welcomed my being able to sense their emotions, none of them wanted Liljana listening to their thoughts. And neither did I.

'Are you sure you couldn't hear what I was thinking?' Maram asked.

I stood up and walked around the fire past Kane before sitting down between Liljana and Maram. Then I told him, 'If Liljana says that she wasn't listening to your thoughts, you shouldn't doubt her.'

'Oh, shouldn't he?' Liljana said to me. 'And why shouldn't he, young Prince, since you doubt me yourself?'

'Did you hear me say anything about doubting you?' I asked.

'You didn't have to,' Liljana told me. 'Since your eyes say it all.'

Maram cracked opened a whelk with a sudden slap of a rock. 'Do you see, Val, she can hear your thoughts! It's that damn stone of hers.'

Liljana held up her blue gelstei and said, 'I don't need this for that when I have my eyes and nose.'

She turned toward me and said, 'What have I done to make you doubt me so? Do you think I haven't learned from bitter necessity to read the motives of powerful men, Valashu Elahad?' She squeezed the whale-shape figurine. 'Before I ever dreamed of finding this, I knew that your thoughts were turning in one direction.'

'And which direction is that?'

'From the hate in your voice. I would guess toward the Lord of Lies.'

I saw Kane, Atara and Master Juwain looking at me and I said. 'Yes this is true.'

'He's found you in your dreams again, hasn't he?' Liljana asked.

'In my dreams, yes.'

'And this makes you furious, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' I admitted, 'it does.'

'And you're afraid of this terrible fury of yours, aren't you? You think about ways of not being afraid don't you?'

'That's true.' I said, staring out away from the beach.

'And so you think about the Lightstone – all the time.'

In truth, most of my waking hours – and many of my dreams – were spent in looking for the golden glow of the Lightsone inside myself. As I now looked for it above the streaming waters of the sea.

Liljana touched my hand and reassured me, 'I don't think I can go inside anyone's mind unless they let me. I don't think I could hear their thoughts unless they spoke them to me.'

'No, you don't have that power,' I said, looking at her. 'Not yet.'

I thought of the dream that Morjin had sent me. And then Kane, who was no mind reader that I knew, pointed at Liljana's figurine and said. 'It's almost certain that Morjin has a blue gelstei, eh? He's always taken the deepest interest in the witches' stones.'

I noticed the puzzled looks on Atara's and Alphanderry's faces, and so I asked,

'Why do you call it that?'

But Kane clamped his jaws shut as he stared at the gelstei and so Master Juwain answered for him: 'The blue gelstei are known to be both difficult and dangerous to use. You see, it's very dangerous to enter another's mind, few are born with the talent, and fewer still can do so without becoming lost or even maddened.'

He went on to to recount something of the history of the blue gelstei or belstei, as he called these crystals. He said that in the Age of the Mother, a physic made from the blue juice of the kirque plant had been found to aid the power of mindspeaking. But the kiriol, as it was called, was harsh on the body and shortened life. And so the alchemists of the Order of Brothers and Sisters of the Earth, inspired by the green gelstei, had tried to fabricate a blue crystal that would retain and magnify the mind-opening properties of the kiriol without its more deleterious effects.

'It took the alchemists a hundred years,' Master Juwain told us. 'Chule Ataru fabricated the first one – it was the first of the great gelstei made on Ea. He gave it to Rihana Hatar, who used it to speak with other Sisters in other lands – and the Sea People as well. That was the beginning of the great years of the Age of the Mother.'

Over the next century and a half, other such crystals had been made. Those who could use them – as with the scryers, these were mostly women – grew very powerful. But many were maddened by what they saw in others' minds, and men began to fear them. They covered their heads with their cloaks as they muttered protective charms and hurried past them. When the Aryans conquered most of Ea's free lands, they feared these mindspeaking Sisters, too, and called them witches. As many as they could find, they put to the sword. Their gelstei they buried or cast into the sea.

'In 2210 of that age,' Master Juwain said, 'a great conclave was held in Tria. Navsa Adami, foremost of the Brothers, favored arming any who would take up swords and using the blue gelstei to speak with others of like minds in other lands. He called for a rebellion that would cast off the Aryan yoke, almost in a night. But Janin Soli, and many of the Sisters, disagreed with him. She suggested opposing the Aryans by trying to grab hold of their minds and manipulating them from within.'

'That would be a horrible thing,' Maram said, shuddering again'But the witches never succeeded, did they, sir?'

'Don't you remember anything I've taught you?' Master Juwain said.

He told us then of how the Brothers and Sisters had argued violently as to how the blue gelstei should be used. In the end, Navsa Adami had fled from Alonia in great bitterness. He gathered up his followers and made his way to the Morning Mountains where he founded the first of the Brotherhood's schools.

'After that, King Vashrad began a great pogrom against what was left of the Order,'

Master Juwain told us. 'He began killing all the Sisters, not just the mindspeakers, who were always quite few. It's said that he beheaded Janin Soli with his own sword.'

'But Janin had a daughter, didn't she?' Maram asked.

'Oh, you do remember your history, then?' Master Juwain said. ‘Yes, Janin Soli did have a daughter. But a daughter of the spirit, not the blood. Her name was Kalinda Marshan.'

Upon the destruction of the Order, he said, Kalinda had taken upon herself the ancient title of Materix, and had gathered the most advanced Sisters around her.

They met in secret in the catacombs beneath the ruins of the Temple of Life in Tria.

There Kalinda had vowed to avenge her beloved Janin's murder. There she and her other Sisters plotted the overthrow of the Aryan rule and the restoration of all the Temples of Life and Gardens of the Earth and all that was best of the Age of the Mother. And so was founded the very secret Maitriche Teiu.

'So, the witches are still weaving their plots,' Kane said. 'Assassins, they are.

Poisoners of minds. Makers of spells that capture men's souls.'

'But it's not known,' Master Juwain said, 'if the Maitriche Teiu even still exists.'

'Ha, it exists!' Kane barked out. His black eyes flashed toward Liljana as he pointed at her gelstei. 'You should be very careful, Liljana. The Sisters must seek the blue gelstei since theirs have all likely been taken or lost. They'd give much gold for your little stone, eh?'

She nodded her head as if she agreed with him. Then she said, 'I suppose they would if there are any of these dread assassins and poisoners left. But that's not the kind of gold that I seek.'

'You shouldn't make jokes about the Maitriche Telu,' he growled at her. 'They'd kill you for that crystal, you know. If you're to keep it, you must keep it a secret, eh?'

Liljana smiled mysteriously and told us that she was good at keeping secrets; she promised that it would be safe with her. And then Master Juwain said, 'Yes, keep the belstei if you must, but please don't use it. Or else you'll risk falling mad like the ancient Sisters.'

Liljana opened her hand to show us her little blue crystal. Then she said, 'Do you think this came to me not to be used? What have I done that you think I would misuse it?'

'It's not you we doubt, Liljana,' Master Juwain said, 'but only the blue gelstei.'

'And what of the prophecy, then?'

We sat around the fire munching down roasted mussels as we spoke of Ayondela Kirriland's prophecy.

"The seven Brothers and Sisters of the earth,"' Liljana reminded us, ' "with the seven stones will set forth into the darkness." '

'Ah, well, if we are those seven,' Maram said, looking toward the south, 'at least we've already gone into the darkness. What could be darker than the Vardaloon?'

He brought out his red stone and gazed at it as if its fire might reassure him, while Kane turned his black gelstei around and around in his hard, thick fingers. Atara gripped her scyrer's sphere even as Master Juwain studied his varistei and Liljana played with her bit of blue driftglass. And then Liljana said, 'If we are those seven, then we have two more gelstei to gain before the Lightstone can be found.'

'And if those two are of the greater gelstei,' Master Juwain said, 'they must be the purple and the silver.'

'Everyone looked at me and Alphanderry then as if wondering which of us would gain which stone.

'The prophecy,' Alphanderry pointed out, 'said only that seven with the seven stones would set forth and that the Lightstone would be found. But we don't know that it will be found after the seven stones are gained.'

'If we find the Lightstone first,' Maram said, 'what would be the need of gaining the seven gelstei?'

'What would be the need of gaining them,' Liljana said, glancing at her figurine, 'if they are not to be used?'

I thought of how Morjin had used a varistei to make a monster named Meliadus and how the Grays had nearly stolen my soul with Kane's black stone. I said, 'All the gelstei are dangerous, aren't they? Why should we single out Liljana's stone as being especially so?'

'But, Val,' Master Juwain said, 'consider this stone's origins. The blue gelstei captured some of the essence of the kiriol. And kiriol is made from an infusion of kirque juice, as is its more deadly cousin, kirax.'

The mere mention of this word itensified the pain of the poi-son that would always taint my blood. My thoughts turned again toward Morjin, and I feared yet again that the very act of thinking about him connected us heart to heart and mind to mind. As did the kirax.

I looked at Kane and asked, 'You said before that the Lord of Lies must have a blue gelstei – why do you think this?'

For a moment Kane stared into his black stone as if caught by a mirror. Then he looked up and told me, 'The Lord of Illusions has great powers, eh? What could be greater than the power to make others see what is not? But even he can't cast these illusions and nightmares all over Ea. For that he would surely need a blue gelstei.'

'He has seen my mind, then,' I said. 'He has seen me.'

Kane got up and stepped past the fire so that he could grab my arm and shake some courage into me. 'So, he's seen your mind, and that's too bad. But he hasn't seen your soul, I think. That's beyond any of the blue gelstei to reveal, even the most powerful.'

The strength of his hand reassured me a little. But his words disturbed Maram, who said, 'But can he see Val, in his body? See where he is? If he can see him, then he can see us.'

'I don't think he can,' Liljana said. 'So long as Val keeps from speaking to his mind and revealing the details of what he sees about him, I would think that the Lord of Illusions would be able to do nothing more than sense his presence somewhere – but not know where.'

'This accords with what is known of the blue gelstei,' Master Juwain said. 'But we mustn't forget the poison that his man put into Val. I'm afraid that the kirax speaks for Val whether he wills it or not.'

'So, it speaks,' Kane said. 'But speaks how? Surely not to the mind. As we've seen by Val's most recent dream.'

'How so?' Master Juwain asked. 'Aren't dreams of the mind?'

'Ha, the mind!' Kane coughed out. 'I say that dreams are of the soul. But no matter.

Val has been free from Morjin's dreams and illusions since we killed the Grays. Why this sudden dream, then?'

Master Juwain thought for a moment and then said, 'Meliadus.'

'Just so,' Kane said. 'When Meliadus died, the pain of it opened Val up. Morjin felt his son's death – and much else as well. It's the valarda that truly joins Val to Morjin.

This is his greatest vulnerability, eh?'

As the fire sent up sparks into the darkening sky, we sat there speaking of the blue gelstei and the black, the purple and the silver and the gold -as well as the gifts of mindspeaking and the valarda. Finally, Kane held up his hand as if to ward off our most fearful speculations. And then he told us, 'No one knows everything about the Great Beast's powers. But this much we can take courage from: he can be fought.

So, he casts illusions, but not all are maddened by them. He sends terrible dreams, but those there are who refuse to make them their own. He turns men and women into ghuls – but never the strongest, eh? In the end, I have to believe that each of us has the will to turn away from him.'

He went on to say that one's will must be tempered like the toughest of steels and sharpened so that it cut through all fear; it must be polished to a mirrorlike finish so as to cast back to Morjin all his illusions, nightmares and lies.

'Isn't this what I've always said?' Master Juwain asked, turning toward me. 'Have you been doing the exercises I taught you, Val?'

I remembered him telling me how I must create an ally who would watch over me in my sleep and guard me from evil dreams, I shook my head as I told him, 'After the Grays' deaths, there seemed no need.'

'I see,' Master Juwain said. 'Then perhaps it's time for some new lessons.'

'Yes, perhaps it is, sir.'

'And the dreams are the least of it,' he went on. 'While you're awake, you must try to turn your thoughts away from the Lord of Lies.'

I bowed my head in acknowledgement that this was so.

'And so must you, Liljana,' Master Juwain said, pointing at her blue crystal. 'Of all of us save Val, you must be the most careful.'

'Of course I will,' she told him. 'Have you known me to be other-wise?'

Master Juwain sighed as he rubbed the back of his head. 'Will you promise that if you do use your gelstei, you'll refrain from trying to see what is in the Red Dragon's mind?'

'Of course I will,' she said again. 'I think I know too well what is in such men's minds.'

Her offhand dismissal of Morjin as merely a man like any other alarmed me. As it did Atara. During our talk of the blue gelstei and mindspeaking, she had been mostly silent. But now she suddenly looked up from her clear crystal and said, 'Beware, Liljana – on the day you touch Morjin's mind, you'll smile no more, nor will you laugh again.'

And that, I thought, as we said good night to each other and settled down onto our sleeping furs, was a warning that we all should heed.

That night I was touched with dark dreams again, and I awakened long before sunrise to watch the clouds blowing in over the ocean and covering up the moon's feeble light. But then I meditated as Master Juwain had taught me; as I fell asleep again, I tried to remain aware of that part of me that never slept and remained always aware. It must have helped, for after that, I dreamed only of my family, whom I missed more than even the mountains of Mesh. My brothers – and my father, mother and grandmother, too – smiled at me from inside the castle of my soul and urged me to complete my quest and return home soon.

The clouds blew away with the rising of the sun, and we were given a fine, bright day for traveling. As we were saddling the horses, Master Juwain looked out at the ocean and said, 'Unless I've missed my count, today is the first of Marud. That's a good month for crossing the sea.'

'Hoy, it's the best of months,' Alphanderry said. 'But where are we to find a ship to cross it?'

That remained our most pressing problem, and we set out toward the west to solve it. We let the horses walk slowly along the beach for a couple of hours. Even though they had eaten their fill of grass during our camp, they were still sluggish in all their motions. They needed a good feed of oats, I knew, to fatten them up and renew their strength. But oats we had none, and neither in this country of sandy beaches and shrubs were we likely to find barley or rye or any other such grain. Altaru kept up his spirits even so. Twice, when I dismounted to walk beside him and give him a rest, he shook his head and kicked the sand as if offended that I doubted his ability to bear me. He was so great-hearted a beast I thought, that he would have plunged into the sea in an effort to swim us across it. What he would make of a ship if ever we came upon one, I didn't know.

After perhaps ten miles, the shoreline curved toward the northwest, even as Kane and Master luwain had decided it must if we had reached the Bay of Whales. Eanna, of course, lay almost due west of us, and we might have ridden straight toward it in that direction, thus cutting a good chunk of country – and many miles – from our journey. But to do so would have meant re-entering the Vardaloon. And as Maram put it he'd rather ride around the coastline of all Ea than go back into that accursed forest again.

And so we hugged the coast as nearly as we could. But with its many coves, headlands and cliffs, we often found ourselves veering quite a few miles inland where the goldenrod, fleabane and other shrubs gave way to a forest of oaks and tall pines that fairly reeked of pitch. We were all very glad to find few mosquitoes there and no leeches or ticks. The bloodbirds that had tormented the horses so terribly seemed to be creatures of the deeper woods, and the fiercest flying things that we saw were some windcatchers who seemed happy to eat the mosquitoes rather than us.

The next day and the day after that found us still working our way to the northwest along the Bay of Whales. But on our fourth day since our talk about the blue gelstei, we came to a rocky prominence that pointed out toward the Northern Ocean. There the coast turned sharply toward the southwest. A hundred miles across these gray-green waters, Master Juwain said, the many small islands of the Nedu archipelago gave way to the those of the Elyssu. He told us that many ships sailed the sea between those islands and the bit of land upon which we stoodBut that day we saw nothing but a few cormorants hovering over the sea,

'Something is worrying you, sir,' I said to Master Juwain as we gazed out at the ocean. The wind off the water whipped my hair about my head, as it did the horses' manes. But Master Juwain, bald as an egg, was spared this nuisance.

'Worrying me?' he said. 'Worrying, well, yes – I'm afraid there is.'

He turned to point along the coast to our left. 'Unless the old maps no longer show the world as it is, fifty miles from this cape, we'll come to a river. The Ardellan, it used to be called. It drains the whole of the Vardaloon and empties into the ocean.

How are we to cross it?'

It might have vexed me that Master Juwain had waited until we had come so far to voice such doubts. But there was no help for it: he was a man who turned thing? over in his mind so thoroughly that he too often supposed what was obvious to him must be to others as well. As it happened, however, I had already discussed the crossing of the Ardellan with Kane.

'We'll build rafts,' I said, 'and float across it.'

'Rafts is it?' Master Juwain said. 'And how are we to build such things?'

The failings of his knowledge made me smile. He could find a herb in a strange wood that would drive away some mysterious fever or tell of the making of the gelstei thousands of years ago. But the making of a simple raft seemed beyond him.

'We'll cut trees,' I told him, 'and tie them together.'

'Trees, is it? Yes, I see, I see.'

Alter making camp that night near a little stream that ran into the sea, we set out to the southwest along the coast early the next morning. The shoreline here grew straighter and gentler and we found that we could keep to the beaches for many long stretches. Twenty-five miles we made that day at a slow walk, and our progress on the day following that was even more encouraging. By the late afternoon, we had our first signs that we were approaching the great river. We saw a flock of long winged azulenes, and Master Juwain said that they were birds of fresh water, not salt. The horses, sniffing at the air, seemed to smell this water beyond the haze of trees and shoreline ahead of us. And so did Liljana.

'We're close,' she told us, pointing along the beach. Ahead of us some four miles, the coast seemed to take a turn to the south. 'That must be the mouth of the Ardellan.'

We rode straight toward it now at a much quickened walk. The beach narrowed and then disappeared altogether, and we were forced to take to the forest that grew almost down to the sea. The trees here were the usual oaks and pines that found root in the sandy soil along true coast. They formed a thick wall blocking any view of the river that we must certainly be drawing nearer. I was glad for the tarry-smelling pines, for they grew stratghter than the oaks and would be much easier to cut. Just as I was wondering how many it would take to build a raft large enough to bear up two or three of the horses, the woods gave out suddenly onto a line of fields. And just beyond these patches of green. I gasped to see a wailed city built along the banks of the wide, blue river.

'I didn't know there were any cities in this part of the world,' Maram said, speaking for all of us. 'Who are these people?'

'Let's find out,' I said, nudging Altaru forward.

In truth, the city was more of a town, being much smaller than Tria – or even Silvassu. And the wall surrounding it was neither magnificent nor formidable: it was made of poles of wood planted down into the moist earth like a long line of rafts joined together. And most of it we saw as we drew closer, was eaten with wormholes or rotten. The houses and all the buildings beyond it were made of the same rotting pine so that the whole city reeked of decay and the stench of tar and turpentine.

But the wall at least had a gate and a road leading up to it. We made our way down this dirt track past ragged peasants who ran from us as they cried out and covered their faces. They disappeared into their tiny wooden huts and shut the doors behind them.

'Ah, a friendly people,' Maram said as he rode next to me. 'Perhaps we shouldn't take advantage of their hospitality.'

'But they might be able to help us cross the river,' I told him. 'Besides, we should find out what has frightened them so.'

The peasants' cries had alerted the city's guards, who stood along a walkway behind the low walls looking down at us. They each had long blond hair and tangled blond beards. They wore tattered blue tunics emblazoned with crests showing an eagle clutching two crossed swords in its talons. Their iron helmets were pitted with rust, as were the poor, shortish swords they brandished at us.

'Who are you?' demanded one of these blue-eyed guards that I took to be their captain. 'From where do you come?'

We gave them our names and those of our lands; we told them that we needed help in crossing the Ardellan so that we could continue on our journey. After conferring with his fellows for a moment, the captain looked at us with his icy blue eyes and said, 'We know of Alonia and the Elyssu, but there are no kingdoms called Mesh and Delu that we have ever heard.'

'So, it's a big world,' Kane growled at him as he tossed a little stone against the gate.

'If you'll let us in, we'll tell you more about it'

'The King will decide that,' the guard captain said. 'You'll wait here while he is summoned.'

As if to give more weight to his command, the other guards suddenly produced crossbows and aimed them at us. But the iron of their mechanisms seemed worn away, and I doubted if they would fire.

'What kind of king is it,' Maram whispered to me, 'who is summoned to greet us rather than we to him?'

For a while, as we sat on our horses and listened to the wind rattling across the potato fields surrounding the city, we awaited the answer to this question. And then we heard heavy steps behind the rickety old wall as of boots treading up wooden stairs. An old man suddenly showed his white-haired head and wispy white beard. I saw that he must have once been quite tall but was now stooped with age. He wore a faded purple mantle collared with white ermine that had seen better days. Upon his head was a silver crown that seemed to have been hastily polished in a vain effort to rub the tarnish away. The guard captain presented him as King Vakurun. The King looked down upon us with rheumy blue eyes that held no welcome but a great deal of fear.

'Tell us your names again,' he commanded us in a quavering voice. 'Speak up so that we can hear you.'

Again, we gave our names and waited for the gates to be opened.

'How do we know you are who you say?' he asked us.

'Who else could we be?' I replied.

King Vakurun traded a quick look with his captain, then pointed at the trees beyond the fields. 'Only evil things have ever come out of those woods.'

I smiled at Atara and Alphanderry, then called out, 'Do we look evil to you?'

'That which has slain my people,' he told us as he pointed his old finger at Atara, 'is said sometimes to appear as fair as this maiden.'

He went on to say that his realm had been attacked by a succession of enemies: great black bears deeper in the woods; an invincible knight mounted on a great white horse armored in diamonds; a tribe of warrior women; giant men with hideous faces and white fur; long, leechlike worms as big as whales – and other things.

Now it was my turn to trade looks with Kane and the others. Then I looked up at the King and said, 'It would seem that all these enemies were really one enemy. And he has been slain.'

We told of our passage through the Vardaloon and of Meliadus. We assured him that we had put this monster in the earth, from which he would never rise again. Then we told him about the quest and showed him the medallions that King Kiritan had given us.

'We have heard of King Kiritan,' King Vakurun said. The sunlight off the circles of gold we wore around our necks seemed to dazzle his eyes. 'And we have heard that he sent emissaries to all lands to call knights to Tria, though he never sent anyone to our realm.'

His hand swept out toward the fields around his rotting old town.

'And what realm is that?' I asked him.

'Why, Valdalon,' the King said. 'You're in Valdalon, didn't you know?'

He went on to say that he ruled all the lands from Eanna to the Blue Mountains and between the White Mountains and the sea.

'If you really did slay this Meliadus,' he told us, 'then we owe you a debt that must be repaid.' I looked at the points of his crown and saw that the squares of amethyst there had fallen off two of them. I said, 'We ask only a safe passage through your kingdom and help crossing the river, if you can provide it.'

I admitted that we were on way to Ivalo, where we hoped to find a ship that would take us across the sea to the islands south of Thalu.

'If it's a ship you seek,' the King said, 'then perhaps we can help you cross much more than the river. There are two ships in our harbor, and one of them is due to sail for Ivalo this very day.' This news sent a stir of excitement through us, especially Maram who had dreaded the hard work of chopping down trees to build a raft – to say nothing of riding hundreds of miles to Ivalo. After our various travails, we seemed to have been favored with a stroke of good fortune.

King Vakurun called for the gates to be opened then, and we rode into the city – if this assemblage of miserable houses and muddy streets could so be called. Forty of the King's men immediately surrounded us to act as an escort; none of these

'knights,' however, was mounted. It seemed that the King himself possessed the only horse in the city. He pulled himself on top of this sway-backed old gelding, then rode beside me as we made our way through the streets toward the river.

'We'll have to hurry if we wish to catch this ship,' he told us. 'It might be a long while before another sails for the west.'

With a sad look then, he recounted the story of his people. Many of these lined the streets to witness the unprecedented spectacle we must have provided them. All except the graybeards and crones had the same blond hair and blue eyes as our guards. All looked as if they might have been Atara's distant cousins – which indeed they proved to be.

The Valdalonians, King Vakurun said, were descendants of a great warrior named Tarnaran and his followers, who had set out from Thalu some three hundred years before. Tarnaran and his band of adventurers – these were not the King's words but only my understanding of them – claimed the great Bohimir as their ancestor.

Dreaming as they did of regaining the glory of the ancient Aryans, they sought new lands to conquer. But Tarnaran was no Bohimir, and Thalu was long past its time of greatness. There was to be no sailing of the Thousand Ships or sack of Tria by bloodthirsty savages in this age. Five ships only Tarnaran gathered along the coast of the impoverished Thalu. He led them across the Northern Ocean and into the mouth of the Ardellan River. There they built their first city, and Tarnaran was crowned King of Valdalon.

But it was one thing to claim all the land from Eanna to the Blue Mountains, and quite another to subdue it. King Tarnaran had found it easy enough to cow the tribespeople along the coast into paying him a tribute of fish and furs; the tribes of the deeper forest proved more formidable. As did the forest itself. It took the Valdalonians a hundred years to establish towns farther inland along the Ardellan and its tributaries. Fighting the leeches and mosquitoes and thick walls of vegetation was bad enough. But as they tried to extend their power even further through their realm, they were assaulted and killed by the succession of enemies that King Vakurun had told of earlier.

'You can't begin to understand the terror this Meliadus caused my people,' King Vakurun told us. 'if it truly was this beast-man who slayed them.'

Meliadus, the King said, had slain much more than the Valdalonians. Over the second century of their rule, the tribes of the deeper woods began dying, followed by those of the coast. With no one left to pay them tribute, King Vakurun's people grew poorer. Then, one by one, their outposts in the forest came under assault.

Dreadful tales were told: of a young warrior whose wife turned into a she-bear and devoured him; of children who had been stolen from their beds and later found drained of every ounce of blood. The third century of the Valdalonians' rule saw the gradual abandonment of towns along the Ardellan and the realm's other rivers. By the time of King Vakurun's father, King Vakurun said, his people had been reduced to eking out a living behind the walls of their original city.

'These have been bad times, the worst of times,' the King told us as we rode toward the river. 'But it's said that it's always darkest before the dawn. I pray that you'll find this lightstone that you seek. As I do that my people will someday fill all of Vardalon from the White Mountains to the sea.'

His people, I thought, could barely fill the single city that remained to them. Many of the houses about us seemed abandoned or had even fallen in upon themselves.

Aside from the few crops the Valdalonians pulled from the poor, sandy soil around their city and the hunting of the fur seals farther along the coast, they had little to sustain themselves. And so King Vakurun, early in his reign, had built a harbor in the hope of attracting the great ships that sailed the ocean to the south of the Elyssu and Nedu. From the pines that grew so abundantly nearby, his people had pressed forth pitch and turpentine with which to repair these ships. Thus they had been reduced from warriors to being caulkers and carpenters.

The two ships that he had told us about were still anchored at the harbor along the river's edge. Of course, to call four rickety docks sticking out into the river a harbor was something like calling a molehill a mountain. Still, I thought, the ships were impressive enough. One was a gailiot being fitted with new oars while the other Master Juwain called a bilander. This stout, two-masted ship had pulled into the harbor to take on a cargo of furs and was bound for Ivalo.

We rode our horses right down onto the dock to which it was tied. Then King Vakurun called for the captain to come down the gangplank and meet us. The dozen sailors who had stopped their work to look at us made way for him. Captain Kharald, as the King presented him, was a burly man dressed like the men he commanded in a wool shirt, wide black belt and bright blue pantaloons. He had the flaming red hair of a Surrapamer and eyes as green as the sea. His face, burnt red from years of sun and wind, was creased with many lines like an old piece of leather.

When he saw that the King intended us to take passage with him, it lit up with greed.

'Well it's a clear hundred and fifty leagues from here to Ivalo,' he said, looking us over. 'And there are seven of you and eleven horses, two of them heavily laden.'

The captain, I thought, was a man who liked numbers and sums -and calculating profit to the thinnest piece of silver.

Atara started to draw forth the leather purse of coins that she had won at dice in Tria. But King Vakurun stayed her hand with an unexpectedly regal look. To Captain Kharald, he said, 'These people have done us a great service, and it is our wish that they should have passage to wherever they wish. You may take the cost of this from the price of the furs that we have agreed upon.'

I started to protest this largesse, but a look from Liljana silenced me. I saw what she saw: that a king, to be a king, needed opportunities to display his generosity. I saw another thing as well. King Vakurun, it seemed, was only too happy to rid his realm of seven strangers who might prove to be even more dangerous than Meliadus.

After that, we thanked the King and set about boarding the ship. As I had feared, there was some trouble getting the horses up the gangplank and then down into the stables in the ship's hold. Altaru, especially, did not want to be taken down into this dank, darkish place. Three of the sailors assured me that they had shipped horses before, and tried to take his reins from me. This was a mistake. Altaru kicked out at them, missing their heads by inches and almost splintering the topsides above the deck. Captain Kharald's green eyes blazed like a dragon's as he inspected the divots that Altaru's iron-shod hooves had left in the wood. He said nothing, but I could almost hear him tallying up the damage and subtracting it from the price of the furs he would pay to King Vakurun. Finally, I took it upon myself to lead Altaru down the walkway into the hold. Atara and the others did the same with their horses. After making sure that their stables were clean and spread with fresh straw, we fed them oats from the ship's store and then went up to lay out our sleeping furs on the deck.

An hour later, with the ebbing of the tide and the night's first stars pointing our way west, the ship sailed out from the mouth of the Ardellan River into the Great Northern Ocean.