Her voice was as clear and sweet as the music of a fllute, and it seemed to carry out straight toward me. As she smiled at me, I couldn't help remembering how she had taught me to play that most magical of instruments and had sung me songs of Ramsun and Asha, and the other great lovers who had died for each other in ages past.
'It's said that Atara Ars Narmada is very beautiful,' my mother told me. 'With hair as gold as your cup. With eyes as blue as stars.'
'Once they were,' I said bitterly, squeezing the box that I had set by my side. In barely three heartbeats' worth of lime, Morjin had utterly transformed Alara's face from one that was open, bright and alive into something other, for now shadows gathered in the dark hollows beneath her brows, and her lips would have frozen the breath of any man who dared try to kiss her.
It might have been thought that my mother, who was the kindest of women, would have clone anything to avoid a topic that caused me so much pain. Compassion, I thought, should be like a soft, warm blanket wrapped around those we love to comfort them, and hers usually was. But sometimes, it was like a steel needle thhat plunges straight into the heart of a boil to relieve the pressure there. My mother seemed always to know what I needed most.
'You should remember her as she was when you first saw her,' my mother told me. 'Don't you think that is what she would want?'
'Yes . . . she would,' I forced out. And then I added, 'And as she might be again.'
My mother's face softened as she searched for something in mine. 'You've never said much about her, you know.'
'What is there to say, then?'
'Well, nothing, really - nothing that your eyes haven't shouted a hundred times.'
I turned to wipe at my eyes as I remembered the way that Atara had once looked at me. Not so long ago, in the flash of her smile, in beholding the boldness of her gaze, my eyes must have filled with the light of that faraway star that fed the fire of our souls.
My mother's smile reminded me of Alara's in its promise that she would only ever wish all good things for me. She said to me, 'You'd never marry another, would you?'
'Never,' I said, shaking my head.
She turned lo regard my father a moment, and a silent understanding passed between them. My father sighed and said, 'Then King Kurshan will have to look elsewhere if he wants a match for his daughter.'
He spoke of this fierce king from Lagash who would sail the stars - after first marrying off his daughter, Chandria. Then Asaru nodded at my father and asked him, 'Do you wish me lo make marriage with her, sir?'
'Possibly,' my father said to him. 'Do you think you might ever come to love her?'
'Possibly,' Asaru said, smiling at him. 'By the grace of the One.' We Valari do not, as a rule, marry for love. But my grandfather had chosen out my grandmother, a simple woodcutter's daughter, for no other reason. And my father had always said that his love for my mother, and hers for him, was proof of life's essential goodness, for until the moment of his betrothal to Elianora wi Solaru, daughter of King Talanu of Kaash, my father had never set eyes upon her. And now, thirty years later, his heart still leaped with fire whenever he looked her way.
'Well,' he said, taking a sip of brandy, 'we can speak of marriage another time. We have other kings lo worry about now.'
He glanced at Master juwain and said, 'There's an ugly rumor going around that you quarreled with King Waray on your journey to Taron.'
'I'm afraid that is true,' Master Juwain said. His lumpy lace pulled into a frown as he rubbed the back of his bald head. 'I'm afraid I have bad news: King Waray has closed our school outside Nar.'
The story that Master Juwain now told, as the logs in the fireplaces burnt down and we all sipped our brandy, was rather long, for Master luwain strived for completeness in all things. But its essence was this: Master Juwain had indeed gone to Nar lo make researches into the horoscope of an ancient Maitreya, as I had discovered earlier that evening. He had also wanted lo retrieve relics that the Brothers kept in their collection in the Nar sanctuary. These were thought stones, he said, and therefore lesser gelstei - but still of
great value.
'King Waray allowed me to remove a book about the Shining One from the library, as Val will tell,' Master luwain said. 'But he forbade the removal of any thought stone or gelstei.'
'A king's forbiddance does not make a quarrel,' my father said.
'No, it does not,' Master Juwain agreed. 'But when a certain master of the Brotherhoods very testily reminds that king that his realm ends
al the door of the Brotherhood sanctuary, that is the beginning of a
quarrel.'
'Indeed it is, Master Juwain.'
'And when that king orders all the Brothers to leave the sanctuary and the doors to be locked, some would say that is only the quarrel's natural development and should have been anticipated.'
'Some would say that very thing,' my father said, smiling. 'And they would be surprised that such an otherwise reasonable and non-quarrelsome master would risk such, a disaster over some old gelstei.'
'Over a principle, you mean, King Shamesh.'
'Very well, then, but to lose one's temper and court the failure of one's mission over the continuation of what is really an ancient quarrel cannot be counted as the act of a wise man.'
'Did I say I failed?' Master Juwain asked. Now he smiled as he drew out of his pocket a stone the size of a walnut. Us colors of ruby, turquoise and auramine swirled about in the most beguiling of patterns. 'Well, I didn't fail completely. I managed lo spirit this away before King Waray locked the doors.'
'Spirit it away!' Maram called out, leaning over to examine the thought stone. 'You mean, stole it, don't you?'
'Can one steal from one's own house?'
'King Waray,' my father said, 'might feel that since it was his ancestors who built the sanctuary and his knights who defend it still, that the house is his - or al least the treasures gathered inside.'
'You do not feel that way, King Shamesh. You have always honored the ancient laws.'
This was true. My father would never have thought to act as tyrannically as had King Waray. In truth, he honored the Brotherhood even as he did old laws that others had long since repudiated. And so half a year before, when Master Juwain had returned with me bearing the Lightstone, my father had ordered a new building to be raised up at the Brotherhood's sanctuary in the mountains outside our castle. Master Juwain - and the other masters - were to gather gelstei from across Ea that they might be studied. Master Juwain must have seen that King Waray's envy of Mesh and the much greater treasure in my father's hall was the deeper reason that he had closed the sanctuary in Nar.
'Knowledge must be honored before pride of possession,' my father said. His bright eyes fixed on the thought stone. 'Let us hope that this gelslei holds knowledge that justifies incurring King Waray's ill will.'
'I believe it to hold knowledge about the Lightstone,' Master Juwain said. 'And possibly about the Maitreya.'
My father's eyes grew even brighter - and so, I imagine, did mine.
Everyone except my grandmother now turned toward Master Juwain to regard the little stone in his hand.
'You believe it to hold this knowledge?' my father said. 'Then you haven't - what is the right word - opened it?'
'Not yet,' Master Juwain said. 'You see, there are difficulties.' What I knew about the thought stones was little: they belonged to the same family of gelstei as did the song stones and the touch stones. It was said that a thought stone, upon the closing of a man's hand, could absorb and hold the contents of his mind as a sponge does water. It was also said that in ages past, the stones could be opened and 'read' by anyone trained in their use. But few now possessed this art.
'One would have thought that a master of the Brotherhood would have overcome any difficulties,' my father said to Master Juwain.
'One would have thought so,' Master Juwain agreed with a sigh. 'But you see, this is not just any thought stone.'
He went on to sa
y that in the Age of Law, the ancients had used the Lightstone to fill certain thought stones with a rarefied knowledge: that of the secrets of the Lightstone itself.
'If this stone contains such knowledge,' Master Juwain said to my father, holding up his opalescent little marble, 'it may be that the only way to open it would be with the aid of the Lightstone.'
'Do you wish my permission to use the Lightstone this way?'
Master Juwain's face tightened with dismay 'I'm afraid I don't know how. Perhaps no one now living does.'
My father swirled the brandy around in his glass and watched the little waves of the amber liquor break against the clear crystal. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, 'Then you need the Lightstone to open the thought stone, and the thought stone to understand the secrets of how the Lightstone might be used. I low are we lo solve this conundrum?'
'I had hoped,' Master Juwain said, 'that if I stood before the Lightstone, the answer might come to me.'
He turned toward me and added, 'I had hoped, too, that the thought stone might tell us more about the Maitreya. About how he is to be recognized and how he might use the Lightstone.'
Now I, too, looked down at the swirls of brandy in my glass. For a long few moments, I said nothing - and neither did anyone else.
And then my father said to Master Juwain, 'You may certainly make your trial whenever you wish. It's too bad that you brought back only one such stone. But you say that others remain in Nar?' 'Hundreds of others, King Shamesh.'
My father smiled at him reassuringly and then nodded at Asaru. He said to him, 'Do you still plan to journey to the tournament?'
'If that is still your wish, sir,' Asaru said. 'Yarashan will accompany me to Nar next week.'
'Very good. Then perhaps you can prevail upon King Waray to reopen the Brotherhood's school.'
'Can one prevail upon the sun to shine at night?'
'Does the task daunt you?'
'No more than Master Juwain's conundrum must daunt him,' Asaru said, shrugging his shoulders. 'In either case, there must be a solution.'
'Good,' my father said, smiling at him. 'Problems we'll always have many, and solutions loo few. But there's always a way.'
His gaze now fell upon me, and I couldn't help feeling that he regarded me as both a puzzle to be solved and its solution.
'Always a way,' I said lo him, thinking of my own conundrum. 'Sometimes that is hard to believe, sir.'
My father's gaze grew brighter and harder lo bear as he said, 'But we must believe it. For believing in a thing, we make it be. As you, of all men, must believe this now.'
Strangely, what had happened earlier in the hall with Ballasar had so far gone unremarked, like some family secret or crime, instead of the miracle that Lansar Raasharu proclaimed it to be. But my family and friends knew me too well. Master Juwain and Maram, on our quest, had seen me sweat and weep and bleed. When I was a child, my mother had wiped the milk from my chin, and once, my father had pulled me off Yarashan when I had tried to bite off his ear in one of our brotherly scuffles. They might or might not believe that I was the Maitreya of ancient legend and prophecy - but it was clear that they did not intend lo speak of me in hushed tones or to forget that whatever mantle I might claim, I would always remain Valashu Elahad.
'It is not upon me,' my father said, 'to determine if you are this Shining One that many hope you to be. But you are my son, and that is my concern. The brightest flower is the one that is most often picked; the elk with the greatest rack of antlers draws the most arrows. You are a target now, Valashu. Even before this thing passed between you and Baltasar, it was so. Consider the way that the traitor nearly brought about your doom - and my own.'
The quiet of the room was broken only by the hissing from the fireplace and my father's measured words. We all listened to him tell of what a great tragedy it would have been for Mesh if I had murdered Salmelu. For then my father would have been laced with an excruci-ating choice: either for the king himself to break the law of the land in sparing my life or to order the death of that which gave his life purpose - and the death of one who might possibly be the Maitreya. 'The Red Dragon,' he said, 'set a terrible trap for us. By the grace of the One, we found a way out. You did, Valashu. A way - there's always a way.'
'I . . . hated Salmelu as I've only hated one other,' I said. I picked up the box containing the two broken windows to Atara's soul, and gripped it so hard that it hurl my hand. 'And when he gave me this, the hale, like fire in my eyes, like madness . . . this is what Morjin must have calculated would make me kill Salmelu. But how could Morjin have been sure?'
'Go on,' my father said as everyone looked at me.
'This trap of Morjin's - it wouldn't have caught another. And it shouldn't have caught me.'
'No, it shouldn't have,' my father agreed. 'And from this, what do
you conclude?'
'That there will be other traps that we haven't yet seen.'
Across the circle from me, my mother's breath seemed to have been Choked-off as if by an invisible hand. I heard Maram muttering in his brandy, even as my father nodded his head and said, 'Yes, just so. This is why we've all been kept from our beds tonight, that we might see these other traps before it's too late.'
Asaru, it seemed, had been making calculations of his own. He eyed the familiar chess set for a moment before turning to my lather. The Red Dragon was willing to ihrovv away Salmelu's life, like a pawn.'
'No, rather like a knight that must be sacrificed to checkmate an opponent,' my father said.
'Very well, a knight, then. But did Salmelu know that he was to be
sacrificed?'
My father smiled grimly and shook his head. 'Few men have such
devotion for their king.'
'Morjin is no king,' I said, thinking of the whips I had heard cracking in the darkened tunnels of Argattha. 'Men do not follow him out of love.'
'Then shouldn't we consider the Galdan scryer's prophecy?' Asaru
asked. 'She spoke of a ghul, didn't she?'
Could Salmelu truly be a ghul, I wondered? Had he given up his soul to Morjin so that Morjin breathed his fell words into Salmelu's mouth and moved his lips and limbs from afar like a puppeteer pulling on strings? The living-dead, ghuls were called: they who were as corpses inside and were forced to think the very thoughts of their masters.
'No,' I said at last, 'Salmelu is no ghul.'
'But, Val, how can you be sure?'
Because the flames of his being burn with different colors than do Morjin's.
I stared off at the candles in their stands as I said, 'In Salmelu and Morjin, so much malice, so much hate. But the fire that eats away at Salmelu is different from that which consumes Morjin. Its source is different. I . . . can feel Salmelu's will to destroy me. It's as unique to him as a knight's emblem or a man's face.'
Asaru thought about this for a moment as a sudden dread came over him. 'But, Val, if Salmelu isn't this ghul, who is?'
Master Juwain, now sitting utterly still, cleared his throat and said, 'A scryer's prophecies are famously difficult to interpret, even those that prove true. Hut we should all give much thought to this one.'
His large, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of worlds as he continued, 'We see at least one of the Red Dragon's traps within the trap: if Salmelu had failed to goad you into murder, what he brought here out of Argattha could not have failed to make you want to murder him.'
'Many wish to murder Morjin,' I said. 'And his priests.'
'But do they wish it as you do, Val? A fire, you spoke of, a raging fire that blinded you - like one of his illusions.'
'In Argattha,' I said, 'the Lord of Lies lost the power to make me behold his illusions.'
'Yes, but il seems he still has the power to make you hate.'
The brandy in my glass burned my tongue as I sipped it. 'Are you saying, then, that Morjin is trying to make me into a ghul?'
'Trying, yes, with all his might. But your heart is free. And
your soul is the gift of the One. It can never be taken, only surrendered.'
'That,' I said, 'will never happen.'
'No, the Lord of Lies has no power to seize your will directly. But how much of your will do you think will remain if you destroy your sell with this terrible hate?'
I had no answer for him. I knew that he was right. For a few moments, I tried to practise one of the light meditations that he had once taught me. But the two blackened orbs inside the box that Salmelu had given me darkened my eyes; and the letter that I had placed down inside my armor was like a crushing weight upon my heart.
I finally brought forth this thick square of folded paper. I held it up toward the candles in their stand. No ray of light pierced the bone-white envelope to show what words Morjin might have written to me. It was sealed with red wax bearing the stamp of the Dragon.
'Is this, then,' I asked, 'another of Morjin's traps?'
'I'm afraid it is,' Master Juwain said.
'Then the trap must be sprung.'
I drew my knife to open it, but Master Juwain held out his hand and shook his head. 'No, do not - burn it instead.'
'But the letter must be read. If Morjin has set traps for me, then his words might betray what these are.'
'I'm afraid his words are the trap. Like the kirax, Val. Only this poison will work at your mind.'
'My father,' I said, looking across the circle at the great man who had sired me, 'taught me that an enemy's mind must be studied and known.'
'Not this enemy,' Master Juwain said. 'Liljana merged minds with the Dragon in Argattha. It nearly destroyed her.'
I thought of this brave woman with her round, pleasant face and her will of steel. Atara had once warned her that the day she looked into Morjin's mind would be the last day she ever smiled. And yet, if she hadn't dared this dreadful feat, none of us would have escaped from Argattha and the Lightstone would remain in Morjin's possession.
I squeezed the letter between my fingers, and said to Master Juwain, ' ''Lord of Light,'' everyone called me. If this is true, how, then, should this Dark Lord called Morjin have power over me with his words?' 'Is this the pride of a prince?'
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