Читать книгу The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Val?’

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

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

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

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

And down into the dark,

No eyes, no lips, no spark.

The dying of the light,

The neverness of night.

Maram asked softly, ‘Should we finish him?’

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

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

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

‘Let’s go,’ I said abruptly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Abide in peace,’ I whispered.

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

Valashu.

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

Valashu Elahad.

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

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

And down into the dark …

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

Val, get down!’

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

Val, behind you!’ Maram called out.

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

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

The cold that freezes breath …

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

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

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

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

‘No!’ I cried out.

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

Valashu Elahad.

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

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

Valashu.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Damn you all!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Val, Val.’

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

‘No, no,’ I cried out, ‘never!’

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

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

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

‘Asaru,’ I whispered.

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

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

‘Maram!’ I screamed out. ‘Asaru!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps they hired him.’

They must have,’ Asaru said.

‘Oh, no,’ I murmured. ‘No, no, no.’

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

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

‘Is that better?’ he asked me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stealing of the gold …

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

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

‘Do you see it?’ I asked Asaru.

‘See what?’

The Lightstone, I thought. The healing stone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, suddenly, the cup was gone.

‘What are you staring at?’ Asaru asked.

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

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

‘Can you walk now?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Does it still hurt?’ he asked me.

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

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

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

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