The Lightstone

Chapter 35

And so, that very night, we went up into the mountains. We turned our horses east and picked our way across the rocky slopes of Mount Redruth. We had no track to follow, only the gleam of my sword and the glimmer of the stars. These points of white and blue grew more vivid as we left Khaisham's glowing sky behind us and climbed higher. Bright Solaru of the Swan Constellation gave me hope, as did the brilliant swath of stars called the Sparkling Stairs. They reminded me that there were better places in the One's creation where men did not kill each other with steel and flame.

As the night deepened, it grew cooler, and I surrounded myself in my cloak, which my mother had made of lamb's wool and embroidered with silver. It gave good warmth, as did those of my companions. But not enough to please Kane. His eyes cut through the dark ahead of us, peering out at the ghostly white shapes of the greater mountains rising up to the east. And he said, 'We'll need thicker clothing than this before long.'

'But it's still summer,' Maram said, walking his horse near him.

'In the deeper mountains, it's already fall,' Kane said, pointing ahead of us. 'And in the high mountains, winter. Always winter.'

His words quickened the chill in the air. They brought us back to the dangers all about us. These were numerous and deadly. Pursuit by Cout Ulanu's men was the least of them. Although we listened for the sound of his warriors hurrying after us, it would be morning at the earliest before there would be enough light for them to follow our tracks. More worrisome, at the moment, was losing our way in the dark and plunging off an unexpected cliff. Or having one of the horses break a leg on the jagged rocks of the uncertain ter-rain, and thus being forced make a mercy killing.

Certainly there were bears about, as Maram imagined seeing behind every tree. And we all looked for the shapes of the dreaded Frost Giants lying in wait for us, perhaps just behind the next ridge, or the one behind that.

All that night, however, we saw no sign of these fearsome creatures. Nor did we catch sight of the twinkling form of Flick. This dispirited all of us, not as much as had Alphanderry's death, but enough. Maram supposed that Flick had the good sense not to enter a land guarded by bears and man-eating giants. I wondered if the evil of what had happened in Khaisham had simply driven him away. I was almost ready to say a requiem for him when he suddenly reappeared just before dawn. As the Morning Star showed brightly in the east, he winked into a fiery incandescence that reminded me of the sparks thrown up by the library's burning. I took this as his own manner of saying a requiem -or at least a remembrance of all those who had died that night in the hellish flames.

'Flick, my little friend!' Maram cried out when he saw him spinning through the grayness of the twilight. 'You've come back to us!'

'Maybe he's been with us all along, and we just couldn't see him,' Atara said.

Liljana, leaning against her horse, said, 'It's strange, isn't it, that Alphanderry did see him just before he died? How can that be?'

We looked at each other in puzzlement and wonder; the world was full of mysteries.

'Ah, I'm tired,' Maram yawned. 'Too tired to think about such things now. I think I'd better lie down before I fall down.'

We were all exhausted. We were at the end of our second sleepless night; none of us, except perhaps Kane, could pass another day without at least a few hours of rest. As for myself, my body hurt from a dozen bruises gained in battle. My shoulder, into which the Blue had swung his axe, was the worst of these torments.

With the coolness of the night and the muscles' inevitable stiffening, it ached so badly that Master Juwain had to rig a sling to take up the weight of my arm. And yet it was nothing against the aching I felt in my heart whenever I thought of Alphanderry hanging from his cross and all the Librarians who had died before my eyes. From such ghastly visions, I and all my friends longed for surcease.

And so we found a level place in a hollow between two ridges and set out our sleeping furs for a quick nap. Kane insisted on remaining awake to keep watch over us, and none of us argued with him. I fell off into a sleep troubled with images of fire and terrible screams. And it wasn't Morjin who sent these dreams to me, only the demons of war that had fought their way deep into my mind.

We awoke beneath a bright sun to vistas of icy mountains rising up before us. While Liljana went to work on our breakfast we held a quick council and decided that we had eluded whatever pursuit that Count Ulanu had sent after us – if indeed he had sent anyone at all. Kane thought it possible that the Library had been fired before our escape route through the crypt had been discovered, and Atara agreed. Perhaps, she said, the Library had collapsed into a smoking ruin, forever sealing off access to the escape tunnel and the steel door that guarded it.

'Likely Count Ulanu thinks we're dead,' Atara told us. 'Likely he'll spend many days searching through the ruins for our bodies – and for our gelstei.'

'Well this is a stroke of luck, then!' Maram said. 'Perhaps luck is turning our way.'

Atara said nothing as she stared out at the great mountains before us. We all knew that we would need much more than luck to cross them.

The smell of bubbling porridge wafted into the air. Liljana stood by her little cauldron stirring the oats with a long wooden spoon. Her face told me that she was still unhappy at having had to jettison her cookware on our flight across Yarkona.

She was unhappy, too, that there hadn't been time to gather the necessary supplies for our journey.

'We've enough food for most of a month, if we stretch it,' she told us as we gathered around the little fire to eat. 'How far is it to Argattha?'

'If the old maps are right, two hundred and fifty miles, as the raven flies,' Master Juwain said. Then his face furrowed as he rubbed his bald head. No one knew very much about Sakai, not even the mapmakers.

'Well, then,' Maram said, 'we need make only eight or nine miles per day,'

'So,' Kane said, 'we won't be traveling as the raven flies. And in the mountains, we'll be lucky to make even that.'

While Liljana brewed up the last of our coffee and its sweet, thick aroma steamed out into the air, we sat discussing our route into Sakai. It was unnerving to know so little about the land that we proposed to cross. According to Master Juwain, Sakai was a vast, high plateau entirely ringed by mountains. The White Mountains, he said, rose up like an immense wall from the lake country of Eanna in the northwest and ran for a thousand miles toward the southeast to make up Ea's spine. Somewhere to the east of us, it divided into two great ranges: The Yorgos in the south, and in the north, the Nagarshath, where it was said were the highest mountains on earth. The realm of Sakai lay betwee them. Master Juwain thought that various spurs of these ranges ran north and south across the plateau, but he wasn't sure.

'At least we know that Skartaru lies along the very northern edge of the Nagarshath,' he said. 'It's known that the Black Mountain looks out over the Wendrush.'

'Then we should follow the line of the Nagarshath until we come to it,' I said, glooked at my sword, whose radiance was almost lost in the greater blaze of the sun.

It pointed us east and slightly south – straight along the course I imagined the Nagarshath to run.

'We should follow it,' Kane agreed, 'but follow how? We can't make our way through the range itself. Its mountains are said to be impassable. That leaves a journey across the plateau, keeping the mountains to our left. But there, we'll certainly find Morjin's people – or be found by them.'

'But what other choice do we have?' Liljana asked.

'None that I can see,' Kane said.

We all looked at Atara, who shook her head and told us,'None that I can see, either.'

We were silent as we scannld the mountains about us. Maram stared off behind us, still looking for pursuit, while I gazed ahead at the great, white peaks rising up like impossibly high merlons directly ahead of us.

'How far is it,' I asked Master Juwain, 'until we come to where the two ranges part and the plateau begins?'

'I'm not really sure,' he said. 'Sixty miles. Perhaps seventy.'

I felt my belly tighten. Seventy miles of such mountains as these seemed like seventy thousand. Trying to show a courage that I didn't feel, I pointed my sword east into their heart. Then I said, 'We'll just have to cut straight across them.'

'Ha, straight is it?' Kane laughed out, clapping me on my good shoulder. 'So you say

– and you a man of the mountains.'

I laughed with him. Then Maram pointed out that the only thing] straight about the journey ahead of us was that we were going straight into hell.

That day we had some of the hardest work of our journey. Without any map or track to follow, we had to make our way across the rocky ridiges with little more than intuition to guide us. Twice, my sighting of a possible pass through the rising ground before us proved a dead-end, and we had to turn back to find another route. It was exhausting to lead the horses, up toward the snowline along a slope strewn with boulders and scree; it was even more dispiriting to retreat down these same uncertain steps to seek out another path. Although there was beauty all about us in the gleam of the great mountains and in the sky pilots and other wildflowers that brightened their sides, by the time we made camp that evening, we were all too tired to appreciate it. The thin air cut our throats, and Master Juwain complained of the same dull headache I felt building at the back of my neck. It grew quite cold – and this faint frost of the falling night was only a promise of the ice and bitterness that still lay before us.

Thus for three days we fought our way east. Mostly, the weather held fair, with the air so thin and dry that it seemed it could never hold the slightest particle of moisture. But then, late on the third afternoon, dark clouds appeared as if from nowhere, and we had a few fierce hours of freezing rain. It cut our eyes with lancets of sleet and stung our lips; it coated the rocks with a glaze of ice, making the footing for both man and beast treacherous. As we could find no shelter from this torment, we sat huddled beneath our cloaks waiting for it to end. And end it did as the clouds finally opened to reveal the frigidity of night. As we could neither retreat nor go forward with any degree of safety, we were forced to spend the night high up on the saddle between two great mountains. There Maram knelt with his flint and steel, trying to get a fire out of the wood that the horses had toted up into this barrenness.

'I'm cold; I'm wet; I'm tired,' Maram complained as he struck off another round of sparks into his tinder. His hands shook as he shivered and said, 'Ah, no, the truth is, I'm very cold.'

While Atara and Kane gathered snow to melt and Liljana waited to cook our dinner, I walked over to Maram and placed my hand on the back of his neck to rub the knotted muscles there. Some of the fire that kept me going must have passed into him, for he sighed and said, 'Ah, that's good, that's very good – thank you, Val.'

A tiny flame leaped up from the tinder and spread to the little twigs that Maram had gathered around it. He watched it grow until he had quite a good blaze going.

'Ah,' he said, relaxing beneath the sudden heat, 'you took more blows in the battle than I. And so it is I who should rub your neck.'

The pain at the back of my neck felt as if a mace had broken through the bones there to open up my brain. But I said, 'You took two arrows saving us, Maram. It was a great thing that you did.'

'It was, wasn't it?' he said. He gingerly touched his hindquarters where the arrows had pierced him. 'Still, fair is fair, and I owe you a massage, all right?'

'All right,' I said, smiling at him. He smiled as well proud to have freely taken on such a little debt.

An hour later we gathered around the fire and ate some boiled salt pork and battle biscuits. Master Juwain made us tea and poured it into our mugs, which we rolled between our hands to ddraw in its warmth. It was a time for song, but none of us felt like singing. And so I drew forth my flute and played a melody that my mother had taught me. It was nothing like the music that Alphanderry had made for us, but there was love and hope to it even so.

'Ah, that's very very good,' Maram said as he held his cloak before the fire to dry it.

'Look, Flick is dancing to your song!'

Limned against the starry eastern sky. Flick was spinning about in long, glittering spirals. His fiery pirouettes did seem something like dancing. We all took courage from his presence. Master Juwain pointed at him and said, 'I'm beginning to think that he might be the seventh told of in Ayondela's prophecy.'

It was a strange thought with which to lie against the cold ground and fall off to sleep that night it made me recall with great clar-ity Alphanderry's death and the despair that had gripped my heart afterwards. And through this dark doorway, Morjin came for me. In my dreams, he sent a werewolf who looked like Alphanderry sniffing through the shadows for the scent of my blood. This demon howled in a rage to show me yet another of my deaths, then it sang sweetly that I should join him in the land from which there is no return. It tried to kill me with the terror of what awaited me. Butt that night, I had allies. watching over me and guarding my soul.

Flick, I somehow knew, spun above my sleeping form like a swirl of stars warding off evil. My mother's love, fell in the deep currents of the earth beneath me, enveloped me like a warm and impenetrable cloak. Inside me shone the sword of valor that my father had given me, and outside on the ground with my hand resting on the hilt, was the sword called Alkaladur. It quickened the fires of my being so that I was able to strike out and drive the demon away, it cut through the black smoke of the nightmare realm into the clear air through which shone the worlds bright stars.

And so I was able to awaken beneath the mountains, covered to sweat and shaking but otherwise unharmed.

I opened my eyes to see Atara sitting by my tide and holding my hand. It was just past midnight and her turn to take the watch. On the other side of the fire, with their furs spread on top of the snow, Maram, Liljana and Master Juwain were sleeping.

Kane who lay breathing lightly with his eyes closed was probably sleeping too, but with him it was harder to tell. 'Your dreams are growing darker, aren't they?' Atara said softly.

'Not… darker,' I said struggling for breath I sat up facing her and looked for her eyes through the thickness of the night. 'But they're worse – the Lord of Lies tries to twist the love of a friend into hate.'

She squeezed my hand in hers, while she held her scryer's sphere in her other. I gathered that she had been gazing into this clear crystal when I had cried out in my sleep. 'He sees you, doesn't he?' she asked.

'In a way,' I said. 'But it is more as if he can smell the taint of the kirax in me.

Whatever Count Ulanu has communicated to him as to our deaths, he knows that I'm still alive.'

'He is still seeking you, then?'

'Yes, seeking – but not quite finding. Not as he would like.'

'He mustn't find you,' she said with a quiet urgency in her voice.

'Time is on his side,' I told her. 'It is said that the Lord of lies never sleeps.'

'Do not speak so. You mustn't say such things.'

Of course, she was right. To anticipate one's own defeat is to bring it about with utter certainty.

There was a new fear in her voice when she spoke of Morjin and a new tenderness in her fingers as she stroked my hand. I pointed at the sphere of gelstei she clutched against her breast, and I asked, 'Have you seen him then? In your crystal?'

'I've seen many things,' she said evasively.

I waited for her to say more but she fell into a deep silence.

'Tell me, Atara,' I whispered.

She shook her head and whispered back, 'You're not like Master Juwain. You don't need to know everything about everything.'

'No, not everything,' I agreed.

Maram, snoring loudly on the other side of the fire, rolled over in his sleep as Liljana shifted about against the cold and pulled her cloak more tightly about her neck. I sensed that Atara was afraid of waking them. So it didn't surprise me when she stood up, took my hand and walked with me a few dozen yards across the snowy ground into the darkness surrounding our camp.

'It's so hard for me to tell you, don't you see?' she said softly.

'Is it that bad then? Is it any worse than what I've seen?'

I told her about the thousands of deaths I had died in my dreams. This touched something raw inside her. I felt her seize up as if I had stuck my finger into an open wound.

'What is it?' I asked her.

Her whole body shook as if suddenly stricken with the night's deep cold.

'Please tell me,' I said, holding her against me. 'No, I can't, I shouldn't – I shouldn't have to,' she whispered.

And then she was kissing my hands and eyes, touching the scar on my forehead, kissing that, holding me tightly – and then she collapsed to her knees as she threw her arms around my legs and buried her face against my thighs as she sobbed.

I called to her as I stroked her hair, 'Atara, Atara,'

A little later, with the night's wind cooling her grief, she managed to stand again and look at me. And she told me, 'Almost every time I see Morjin, I see you. I see your death.'

The wind off the icy peaks around us suddenly chilled me to the bone. I smiled grimly at her and asked, 'You said almost every time?'

'Almost, yes,' she said. 'There are other branchings, you see, so few other branchings of your life.'

'Please tell me, then.'

She took a deep breath and said, 'I've seen you kneeling to Morjin -and living.'

'That will never be.'

'I've seen you turning away from Argattha, too. And going far away from him. With me, Val. Hiding.'

'That can't ever be,' I said softly.

'I know,' she whispered through her tears. 'But I want it to be.'

I held her tightly as her heart beat against mine. I whispered in her ear, 'There must be a way. I have to believe that there's always a way.'

'But what if there isn't?'

The star's light reflected from the snow was just, enough for me to behold the terror in her eyes. And I said, 'If you've seen my death in Argattha, you should tell me. So that I might fight against it and make my own fate.'

'You don't understand,' she said, shaking her head.

She went on to tell me something of her gift with which she had been touched. She tried to describe how a scryer's vision was like ascending the branches of an infinite tree. Each moment of time, she said, was like a magical seed quivering with possibilities. Just as a woman lay waiting to blossom inside a child, the whole tree of life was inside the seed. Every leaf, twig or flower that could ever be was there A scryer opened it with her warmth and will with her passion for truth and her tears. To move from the present to the future, as a scryer does, was to find an eternal golden stem breaking out of the seed and dividing into two or ten branches, and each one of these dividing again and again, ten into ten thousand, ten thousand into trillions upon trillions of branches shimmering always just beyond her reach. The tree grew ever higher toward the sun, branching out into infinite possibilities. And the higher the scryer climbed, the brighter became this sun until it grew impossibly bright, as if all the light in the universe were pulling her toward a single, golden moment at the end of time that could never quite be.

'It sounds glorious,' I said to her.

'You still don't understand,' she said sadly. 'Morjin, and his lord, Angra Mainyu – they are poisoning this tree. Darkening even the sun' The higher I climb, the more withered branches and dead leaves.'

The wind in my face seemed to carry the stench of the burning Library in its sharp gusts. For the thousandth time I wondered how many people had died in this terrible conflagration.

'But there must be a branch that is whole,' I said to her. 'Leaves that even he cannot touch.'

'There might be,' she agreed. 'I wish I had the courage to look.'

'What do you mean?'

She put her crystal in her pocket and grasped my hands. She said, 'I'm afraid, Val.'

'You, afraid?'

She nodded her head. The starlight seemed to catch in her hair. Then she told me that the tree of life grew out of a strange, dark land inside her.

'There be dragons there,' she said, looking at me sharply.

My heart ached with a sudden, fierce desire to slay this particular dragon.

'A scryer,' she said, 'a true scryer must never turn back from ascending the tree. But the heights bring her too close to the sun. To the light. After a while, it burns and blinds – blinds her to the things of the world. Her world grows ever brighter. And so she lives more for her visions than for other people. And living thus, she dies a little and grows ugly in her soul. Old, ugly, shriveled. And that is why people grow to hate her.'

I pressed her hand against my wrist so that she could feel the beating of my heart there. I said, 'Do you think I could ever hate you?'

'I'd want to die if you did,' she said.

In the dark I found her eyes as I took a deep breath. I said, 'There must be a way.'

There must be a way that she could stand beneath this brilliant, inner sun and return in all her beauty beajing its light in her hands.

'Atara,' I whispered.

I knew that for me, too, there was a way that the valarda could not only open others' hearts to me, but mine to them.

'Atara,' I said again.

What is it to love a woman? It is just love, as all love is: warm and soft as the down of a quilt yet hard and flawless like a diamond whose sheen can never be dimmed. It is sweeter than honey, more quenching of thirst than the coolest mountain stream.

But it is also a song of praise and exaltation of all the wild joy of life. It makes a man want to fight to the death protecting his beloved just so this one bit of brightness and beauty, like a perfect rose, will remain among the living when he has gone on.

Through the hands and eyes it sings, calling and calling – calling her to open up the bright petals of her soul and be a glory to the earth.

I touched the tears gathering at the corner of Atara's eye and then wiped away my own. I looked at her a long time as she looked at me. She grasped my hand and pressed it against her wet cheek. At last she smiled and said, 'Thank you.'

Then she took the white gelstei out of her pocket She held it so that its polished curves caught the faint light raining down from the sky. Inside it were stars, an infinitude of stars. For a moment, her eyes were full of them as they seemed to grow almost as big as her crystal sphere. And then she disappeared into it as if plunging through an icy lake into a deeper world.

I waited there on the cold snow for her to return to me; I waited a long time. The constellations wheeled slowly about the heavens. The wind fell down from the sky with a keening that cut right through me. It sent icy shivers along my veins and set my heart to beating like a great red drum.

'Atara,' I whispered, but she didn't hear me.

Somewhere behind me, Maram snored and one of the horses nickered softly. These sounds of the earth seemed a million miles away.

'Atara,' I said again, 'please come back'

And at last she did. With a great effort, she ripped her eyes from her crystal to stare at me. There was death all over her beautiful face, now tightening with a sudden, deep anguish. Something worse than death haunted her eyes and set her whole body to trembling. She shook so badly that her fingers opened and the gelstei fell down into the snow.

'Oh, Val!' she sobbed out.

Then she fell weeping against me and I had to hold her up to keep her from collapsing altogether. I was afraid that I would have to carry her back to our camp.

But she was Atara Ars Narmada of the Manslayer Society, after all, and it wasn't in her to allow herself such weakness for very long. After a few moments, she gathered up her dignity and stood away from me. She dried her tears with the edge of her cloak. Then she bent to retrieve her scryer's sphere from the snow.

I waited for her to tell me what she had beheld inside it. But all she said was, 'Do you see? Do you see?'

I saw only that she had been stricken by some terrible vision and was afraid that she was now mutilated in her soul. Whatever this affliction was, I wanted to share it with her.

'Tell me what you saw, then.'

'No… I never will.'

'But you must.'

'No, I must not.'

'Please, tell me.'

She stared out at the snow-white contours of the mountains around us. Then she looked at me and said, 'It's so hard to make you understand. To make you see. Just talking about this one thing can change. everything. There are so many paths, so many futures. But only one that can ever be. We can choose which one. In the end, we always choose. I can, Val. That's what makes this seeing so hard. I blink my eyes just one time, and the world isn't the same. Master Juwain once said that if he had a lever long enough and a place to stand, he could move the world. Well, I've been given this gift, this incredible lever of mine. Shouldn't I want to use it to preserve what is most precious to me and save your life? And yet, how should I use it if in saving you, you are lost? And the world along with you?'

She had told me almost too much; more than this I did not wish to hear. And so I gave voice to what my soul whispered to be true: 'There must be a way.'

'A way,' she said, her voice dying into the bitterness of the wind.

If there was a way she would never tell it to me for fear of what might befall. And yet, I knew that she had found some gleam of hope in the dragon-blackened tree inside her. Her eyes screamed this to me; her pounding heart could not deny it. But it was a terrible hope that was tearing her apart.

'Do you see?' she asked me. 'Do you see why scryers are stoned and driven off to live in the ruins of ancient towers?'

'That is not what I see, Atara.'

She stood before me with a new awareness of life: prouder, deeper, fiercer, more tender, more passionate and devoted to truth – and this was a beauty of a wholly different order. This was her grace, to transform the terrible into a splendor that shone forth from deep inside her. And she, who could see so much, could not see this. And so I showed it to her. With my eyes and with my heart, which was like a mirror wrought of the purest silustria, I showed her this beautiful woman.

'Valashu,' she said to me.

What is it to love a woman? It is this: that if she hurts, you hurt even more to see her in pain. It is your heart stripped of protective tissues and utterly exposed: soft, raw, impossibly tender; if a feather brushed against it, it would be the greatest of agonies.

And yet also the greatest of joys, for this, too, it love: that through its fiery alchemy, what was once two miraculously becomes one.

We gazed at each other through the darkness, locking as we called to each other – calling and calling. My heart fed with fire. swelled like the sun. Suddenly it broke open in a blaze of light. It broke her open, too. She called to me, and we closed the distance between ourselves like two warriors rushing to battle. She flew into my arms, and I into hers. Our mouths met in a fury to breathe in and taste each other's souls; in our haste and artlessness we bruised our lips with our teeth, bit, drew blood. We were like wild animals, clawing and pulling at each other, and yet like angels, too. In the heat of her body was a fierce desire that I tear her open to reveal the beautiful woman she really was. And that I should join her in that secret place inside her. She called me to fill her with light, with love, with burning raindrops of life. Only then could she feel all of the One's glory pouring itself out through her, as well. Only then could we both drive back death.

Valashu.

I felt her hand against my chest, pressing the cold rings of my armor against my heart. She suddenly pulled her lips away from mine. She fought herself away from me, and stood hack a few paces, trembling and sweating and gasping for breath.

'No!' she suddenly sobbed out. 'This can't be!'

I teetered on top of the snow, sweating and trembling too, stunned to find myself suddenly standing alone. There was a terrible pressure inside me that made me want to scream.

'Don't you see?' she said to me as her hands covered her belly. Her eyes, fixed on the emptiness of the night, suddenly found mine. 'Our son, our beautiful son – I can't see him!'

I didn't know what she meant; I didn't want to know what she meant.

'I'm sorry,' she said, taking my hands in hers. 'But this can't be, not yet. Maybe not ever.'

The wind falling down from the sky, chilled my inflamed body. The stars in the blackness above me told me that I must be patient.

'I know that there is hope,' I said to her. 'I know that there is a way.'

She drew herself up to her full height and gazed at me as from far away. Then she asked me. 'And how do you know this?'

'Because,' I said, 'I love you.'

It was a foolish thing to say. What did love have to do with overcoming the world's evil and making things come out all right? My wild words were sheer foolishness, and we both knew this But it made her weep all the same.

'If there is a way,' she said, pressing her hand against the side of her face, 'you'll have to find it. I'm sorry, Val.'

She leaned forward then and kissed me, once, on my lips with great tenderness. And then she turned to walk back toward our camp, leaving me alone beneath the stars.

I didn't sleep the rest of the night – and not because the Lord of Lies sent evil dreams to torment me. The remembrance of the terrible hope that I had seen in Atara's eyes was torment enough. So was the taste of her lips that seemed to linger on mine.

In the morning we made our way down from the saddle between the two mountains into a long, narrow valley. It was a lovely place and heavily wooded, with blue spruce and feather fir and other trees. A sparkling river ran down its center. Its undulating forests hid many birds and animals: bear, marten, elk and deer. Although we were deep in the White Mountains and it was rather cool, the air held none of the bitterness of the high terrain we had just crossed. And so we decided to make tamp by the river and rest that day. The horses' hooves needed tending and so did our sorely worked bodies. Despite our worry about the Frost Giants, Atara went off by herself to hunt, hoping to take a little venison to replace our dwindling stores.

Although we needed the meat badly enough, 1 knew that she mostly just wanted to be alone.

I was not the only one to notice this new inwardness that had come over her. Later that afternoon, as I sat with Maram and Liljana on the rocks by the river washing our clothes, Maram said to me, 'How she looks at you now! How she looks at herself!

What happened between you two last night?'

'That is hard to say,' I told him.

'Well, whatever it is, she's a new woman. Ah, the power of love! As soon as this quest of ours is over, my friend, I'd advise you to marry her.'

And with that he stood up, gathered up his wet clothes and pointed at some dry, high ground above us where he had built up a good fire. 'Well I'm going to take a nap. Please keep an eye out for the Frost Giants. And bears. I don't want to be eaten in my sleep.'

After he had ambled off, I looked at Liljana and said, 'Here we are in the middle of the wildest country on earth and he thinks of marriage.'

Liljana's big breasts swayed beneath her tunic as she beat our soiled garments upon the rocks. She looked up from her work and smiled at me, saying, 'I think you do, too.'

'No,' I said, looking toward the forest to the south where Atara had disappeared,

'this is no time to think of that.'

'With a woman like Atara, how could you think otherwise?'

'No,' I said, 'she's a scryer, and scryers never marry. And she's a warrior who must

– '

'She's a woman,' Liljana said to me as she wrung out one of Master Juwain's small tunics. 'Don't you ever forget that my dear.'

Then she sighed and lowered her voice as if confiding in me a great secret. 'A woman,' she said, 'plays many roles: princess, weaver, mother, warrior, wife. But what she really wishes for, deep in her heart, is to be someone's beloved.'

She looked at me kindly and smiled. Then she, too, gathered up her clothes and left me sitting by the river.

Later that night, over a fine feast of roasted venison, we all sat around the fire discussing the long journey that still lay ahead of us. None of us had forgotten what had happened in the Kul Moroth or in Khaisham. But the meat we devoured filled us with a new life. And something in the gleam of Atara's eyes communicated to us a new hope, as terrible as it might be.

'It's strange,' Maram said, 'that we've come this far and seen no sign of these Frost Giants. Perhaps they don't really exist.'

'Ha!' Kane laughed out, wiping the meat's bloody juices from his chin. 'You might as well hope that bears don't exist.'

'I'd rather meet a bear here than a Frost Giant,' Maram admitted. 'One of the Librarians told me that they use men's skin for their water bags and make a pudding from our blood. And that they grind our bones to make their bread.'

'Perhaps they do – so what? Do you think they're not made of flesh and blood? Do you think steel won't cut them or arrows kill them?'

While Kane and Maram sat debating the terrors of these mysterious creatures, Master Juwain suddenly looked up from the book he was reading. 'If they do exist, then perhaps they make their dwellings only in the higher mountains. Why else would they be called Frost Giants?'

Here he pointed toward the white peaks of the great massif rising up to the east of the valley.

'Well, then,' Maram said, looking about nervously, 'we should keep to the valleys, shouldn't we?'

But, of course, we couldn't do that. The cast of the mountains here was mostly from north to south, with the ridgelines of the peaks and the valleys between them running in those directions. To journey east, as we did, was to have to cut across these great folds in the earth wherever we might find a pass or an unexpected break. And that made a hard journey a nearly impossible one.

The next morning we gathered over a breakfast of venison and porridge to study the lay of this long valley in which we had camped.

We could see no end to it either to the north or south. We had to turn one way or the other, however, for just to the east rose a great jagged wall of peaks that not even a rock goat could have crossed.

'I say we should turn south,' Maram said, looking off into the white haze in that direction. 'That way, it grows warmer, not colder.'

We all looked at Atara, but her eyes held no eagerness to set out in any direction.

She said nothing, staring off toward the sky,

'Perhaps we should go north,' Master Juwain said. 'We wouldn't want to stray too far from the line of the Nagarshath when we come out onto Sakai's plateau.'

'If we go too far north,' Kane said, 'we'll find the country of the Blues.'

'Better they than the Frost Giants,' Maram said.

'I thought you wanted to go south, eh?'

'I don't want to go anywhere,' Maram said. 'Not anywhere but home. Why is it that we have to go to Argattha to find the Lightstone?'

'Because,' I said, 'it must be done, and it is upon us to do it.'

I drew my sword, pointing it east and slightly south as I watched it glow in the cool, clear air. Then I said, 'We've go south.'

And so we did. We packed the horses and rode along the river through the sweet-smelling forest. The trees here were not so high or thick that we couldn't catch glimpses of the great range to the east of us. We rode all that day for twenty miles across gradually ascending ground until we came to a little lake at the bottom of a bowl with mountains all around us. And there, just to the south of these blue waters, was the break in the mountain wall that I had been hoping for. It was only a quarter mile wide and narrowed quickly as its rocky slopes rose toward ridgelines to either side of it But it seemed like a pass, or at least an opening onto other valleys beyond it.

As it was too late to begin our ascent, we made camp by the lake and settled in early for a night of good rest. We ate more venison, sweetened with some pine nuts that Liljana shook out of their cones. We watched the beavers that made their mounded homes on the lake and the geese that swam there, too.

We set out very early, almost at first light. The climb toward the pass was a steep one, with our route following a little stream that wound down from the heights, here cutting through a ravine, there spilling in clear cascades over granite escarpments.

We walked the horses higher and higher, leading them by their halters and taking care that they had good footing on the rocky terrain. By late morning, we had climbed beyond the treeline. There the slope leveled out a little but there was no end of it in sight. To our right was a vast wall of mountain, sharp as the blade of a knife. To our left, a huge pyramid of ice and granite – one of the highest that I had ever seen – turned its stark, uncaring face toward us. These great, jagged peaks seemed to bite the sky itself and tear open the entrails of heaven.

Early that afternoon, we reached the snowline, and there it grew much colder.

Clouds came up and blocked out the sun. The wind rose, too, and drove little particles of ice against the horses' flanks – and into our faces. It was so frigid that it set us to gasping and nearly stole our breath away. We gathered our cloaks around us, and all of us wished for the warmer clothing of which Kane had spoken a few nights before.

'I'm tired and I'm cold,' Maram grumbled as he led Iolo through the snow behind me. Atara and Fire followed him, and then Master Juwain and Liljana with their horses, and finally Kane and his bay. 'I can't see our way out of this miserable pass – can you?'

I listened to the sound of my boots breaking through the crusts of snow, and the horses' hooves crunching ice against rode I peered off through the clouds of spindrift whipping through the pass. It seemed to give out onto lower ground only a half mile ahead of us.

'It can't be much farther,' I said, turning back to look at Maram.

'It better not be,' he said, as he flicked the ice from his mustache. 'My feet are getting numb. And so are my fingers.'

But when we had covered this slight distance, made much longer and nearly unbearable by the thin and bitter air, we found that our way turned along the back side of the sharp ridgeline on our right. And there another long, white slope lay before us. It led up between two crests to an even higher part of the pass.

'It's too high!' Maram called out when he saw this. 'We'll have to turn back!'

Atara came up to us then, and so did the others. We all stood staring up at this distant doorway through the mountains. Liljana, who could calculate distances as readily as the nuances of people's faces, rubbed her wind-reddened hands together and said, 'We can be through it by midafternoon.'

'Perhaps,' Master Juwain said. 'But what will we find on the other side?'

He turned to Atara in hope that she might answer this question. But her eyes flashed, and I knew that she was growing weary of everyone always looking to her to read the terrain of the future. And so she smiled at him and said, 'Likely we'll find the other side of the mountain.'

'But what if we can't easily get down from there?' Maram said. 'Or what if this is really no pass at all? I don't want to spend a night this high up.'

'So, we've wood for a fire,' Kane said. 'And if the worst befalls us we can always burrow into the snow like rabbits. I think we'll survive the night' 'One night, maybe,'

Maram said.

I took his cold hand in mine and blew on his fingertips to warm them. Then I said,

'We have to take some chances Or else well wander here, and that's the worst chance of all. Now why don't we go on while we still have the strength?'

I led forth, and Altaru and 1 broke track through the snow for the others. It was very hard work, even worse for the horses, I thought, than for us. Faggots of wood were slung across their backs, weighing them down heavily. I watched the breath steam from Altaru's nostrils as he leaned his neck forward and drove his great hooves into the snow. But he made no complaint, nor did any of the other horses. I marveled at their trust in us, marching onward at our behest into a snowy waste that seemed to have no end.

A short while later it began to snow. It was not a heavy storm, nor did it feel as if it would be a long one. But the wind caught up the downy flakes and drove them like tiny spears against us. It was hard to see, with bits of ice nearly blinding our eyes.

The snow burned my nose and found its way down my neck. It piled up beneath my boots, making the work of walking upward much harder.

And so we continued our ascent for at least an hour. We all suffered from the cold in near silence, except Maram, who made deep growling sounds in his throat as if this noise might simply drive the storm away. And then the snow lightened, a little, even as we drew near the pass. But we gained no relief, for the wind suddenly rose and grew more bitter. A cloud of snow whirled about us and tore at our flesh. I began shivering and so did the others. My face burned with the sting of the snow, and my nose felt numb and stiff. My fingers were stiff, too. I could hardly feel them, hardly keep my grip on the ice-encrusted leather of Altaru's halter. I bent forward, into the wind, driving my numbed feet into the snow mounding into drifts all around us. I could hardly see; my eyes were nearly frozen shut, and I kept blinking against the biting snow, blinking and blinking as I tried to peer through this blinding white wall ahead to make out the shrouded rock forms at the lip of the pass.

It was there, perhaps a hundred yards from our much-desired objective, that many great white shapes rose up out of the storm as if from nowhere. At first it seemed that the swirls of snow had formed themselves up into ghostly beings that haunted such high places; in truth the snowdrifts themselves seemed to come alive with a will of their own. And then, with the whinnying and stamping of the horses, I saw huge, white-furred beasts descending from the walls of rock around us. And closing iffifrom behind us, too. There were at least twenty of them, and they came for us out of the storm in utter silence, with murderous intent.

'The Frost Giants!' Maram cried out. 'Run for your lives!'

But with this new enemy encircling us, there was nowhere to run, nor did any of us have the strength for flight. The Frost Giants, if such they really were, were advancing upon us with a shocking speed. Their footing through the snow seemed sure and stolid. And they were not beasts at all, I saw, but only huge men nearly eight feet tall. Although they were entirely unclothed, their shaggy white hair was so long and thick that it covered them like gowns of fur. Their furry faces were savage, with ice-blue eyes peering out from beneath browridges as thick as slabs of granite.

There was a keen intelligence in these cold orbs, and death as well. In their hands, they each gripped huge clubs: five-foot lengths of oak shod with spiked iron. A blow from one of these would break a horse's back or crumple even plate armor. What it would do to flesh and bones was too terrible to contemplate.

'Circle!' I cried out. 'Circle the horses!'

I cried out as well, to the Frost Giants, that we were not their enemies, that we wished only to cross their land in peace. But either they didn't understand what I said or didn't care.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram shouted. 'Oh, my Lord!'

We tried to make a wall of the houses; their deadly, kicking hooves, especially Altaru's, might deter even these terrible men. From behind them, we might take up our bows and defend ourselves with a hail of arrows. But the horses were whinnying and stamping, pulling frantically at their halters and would not cooperate. And in any case, there was no time. The Frost Giants were nearly upon us, raising up their great clubs behind their heads as easily as I might have held a chicken leg.

'Val! Val!' Maram cried out. 'Val – my fingers are frozen!'

Mine almost were. I tried to bring forth my bow and string it, but my fingers were too numb for such work. So were Atara's. I saw her behind me attempting to fit an arrow to her bowstring; but she was shivering so badly and her hands were so stiff that she couldn't quite nock it. Kane didn't even bother to try his bow. He drew his sword from its sheath, and a moment later, so did I.

I waited in the blinding snow for the Frost Giants to complete their charge. Then, I was certain, we would fight our last battle before finding one of the numerous deaths that Atara had seen two nights before in her cold, crystal sphere.