The Lightstone

Chapter 13

A few moments later, Atara and Master Juwain, with Maram puffing close behind them, came running into the clearing by the stream. Atara held her strung bow in her hand, and Maram brandished his sword; Master Juwain had a copy of the Saganom Elu that he had been reading, but nothing more. The thought of him reciting passages or throwing his book at a man such as Morjin made me want to laugh wildly.

'What is it?' he asked me. 'We heard you cry out.'

Maram, who was more blunt, added, 'Ah, we heard you talking to yourself and shouting. Who were you shouting at, Val?'

'At Morjin,' I said. 'Or perhaps it was just an illusion – it's hard to say.'

I looked at the steel gleaming along the length of my sword, and I wondered how it had been remade.

'Morjin was here?' Atara asked. 'How could he be? Where did he go?'

I pointed toward the faint glow of the sun rising in the east. Then I pointed at the woods, north, west and south. Finally I flung my hand up toward the sky.

'Take Val back to camp,' Atara said to Master Juwain. She nodded at Maram, too, as if issuing a command. Then she started off toward the woods.

'Where are you going?' -I asked her.

'To see,' she said simply.

'No, you mustn't!' I told her. I took a step toward her to stop her, but my body felt as if it had been drained of blood. I stumbled, and was only saved from failing by Maram, who wrapped his thick arm around me.

Take him back to camp!' Atara said again. And then she moved off into the trees and was gone.

With my arms thrown across Maram's and Master Juwain's shoulders, they dragged me back to camp as if I were a drunkard. They sat me down by the fire, and Maram covered me with his cloak. While he rubbed the back of my neck and my cold hands, Master Juwain found a reddish herb in his wooden chest. He made me a tea that tasted like iron and bitter berries. It brought a little warmth back into my limbs. But the icy nothingness with which Morjin had touched my soul still remained.

'At least your fever is gone,' Maram told me.

'Yes,' I said, 'it's much better to die of the cold.'

'But you're not dying, Val! Are you? What did Morjin do to you?'

I tried to tell both Maram and Master Juwain something of my dream – and what had happened by the stream afterwards. But words failed me. It was impossible to describe a terror that had no bottom or end. And I found that I didn't want to.

After a while, with the hot tea trickling down my throat, my head began to clear and I came fully awake. Dawn began to brighten into morning as the sun's light touched the trees around us. I listened to the shureet shuroo of a scarlet tanager piping out his song from the branch of. an oak; I gazed at the starlike white sepals of some goldthread growing in the shade of a birch tree. The world seemed marvelously and miracu-lously real, and my senses drank in every sight, sound and smell.

Just as I was steeling myself to strap on my sword and go look for Atara, she suddenly returned. She stepped out from behind the cover of the trees as silently as a doe. In the waxing light, her face was ashen. She came over and sat beside me by the fire.

'Well?' Maram asked her. 'What did you see?'

'Men,' Atara said. With a trembling hand, she reached for a mug of tea that Master Juwain handed her. 'Gray men.'

'What do you mean, gray men?' Maram said.

'There were nine of them,' Atara said. 'Or perhaps more. They were dressed all in gray; their horses were gray, too. Their faces were hideous: their flesh seemed as gray as slate.'

She paused to take a sip of tea as beads of sweat formed upon Maram's brow.

'It was hard to see,' Atara said. 'Perhaps their faces were only colored by the grayness of the dawn. But I don't think so. There was something about them that didn't seem human.'

Master Juwain knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. He told her, 'Please go on.'

'One of them looked at me,' she said. 'He had no eyes – no eyes like those of any man I've ever seen. They were all gray as if covered with cataracts. But he wasn't blind. The way that he looked at me. It was as if I was naked, like he could see everything about me.'

She took another sip of tea, then grasped my hand to keep her hand from shaking.

'I shouldn't have looked into his eyes,' she said. 'It was like looking into nothing. So empty, so cold – I felt the cold freezing my body. I felt his intention to do things to me. I… have no words for it. It was worse than the hill-men. Death I can face.

Perhaps even torture, too. But this man – it was like he wanted to kill me forever and suck out my soul.'

We were all silent as we looked at her. And then Maram asked, 'What did you do?'

'I tried to draw on him,' she said. 'But it was as if my arms were frozen. It took all my will to pull my bow and sight on him. But it was too late – he rode off to join the others.'

'Oh, excellent!' Maram said, wiping his face. 'It seems that Val was right after all.

Men are after us – gray men with no souls.'

As the sun rose higher, we sat by the fire debating who these men might be. Maram worried that the man who had faced down Atara might be Morjin himself- how else to explain the terrible dream and illusion I had suffered? Master Juwain held that they might be only in Morjin's employ; as he told us: 'The Lord of Lies has many servants, and none so terrible as those who have surrendered to him their souls.' I wondered if Kane might have hired them to murder me; I wondered if he was waiting for me farther along the road with a company of stone-faced assassins.

'But if they wanted to kill you,' Maram said, 'why didn't they just ride you down by the stream?'

I had no answer for him; neither could I say why the gray man and his companions hadn't charged Atara.

'Well, whoever they are,' Maram said, 'they know where we are. What are we going to do, Val?'

I thought for a moment and said, 'So long as we keep to the road, we'll be easy prey.'

'Ah, do you mind, my friend, if you don't refer to us as prey?'

'My apologies,' I said, smiling. 'But perhaps we should take to the forest again.'

I said that according to a map I had studied before leaving Mesh, the Nar Road curved north between the gap in the Shoshan Range and Suma, where the great forest ended and the more civilized reaches of

Alonia began.

'We could cut through the forest straight for Suma,' I said. 'There will be hills to hide us and streams in which to lose our tracks.'

'You mean rivers to drown us. Hills to hide them.' Maram thought a moment as he stroked his thick beard. Then he said, 'It worries me that the road should curve to the north. Why does it? Did the old Alonians built it so as to avoid something? What if the forest hides another Black | Bog – or something worse?'

'Take heart, my friend,' I said, smiling again. 'Nothing could be worse than the Black Bog.'

On this point Master Juwain, Maram and I were all agreed. After some further argument, we also agreed – as did Atara – that the cut through the forest offered our best hope.

Soon after that we broke camp and set out through the trees. We moved away from the road, bearing toward the west. I guessed that Suma must lie some thirty or forty miles to the northwest. If we journeyed too far in our new direction, we would pass by It much to the south. Thin prospect didn't discourage me, however, for we could always turn back north and cut the Nar Road when we were sure that we had eluded the men hunting us. In truth, I wanted to get as far away from the road as I could, and the deeper the woods through which we rode the better. As the day warmed toward noon, the ground rose away from the stream. The trees grew less thickly, though they seemed taller, with the oaks predominating over the poplars and chestnuts. I could find no track through them. Still, the traveling wasn't difficult., for the undergrowth was mostly of lady fern and maidenhair, and the horses had no trouble finding footing. We rode in near-silence beneath the great, leafed archways of the trees. I took the lead followed by Master Juwain and the two remaining pack horses. Maram and Atara brought up the rear. All of us – except Master Juwain – rode with bows strung and swords close at hand.

We saw a few deer munching on leaves, and many squirrels, but no sign at all of the Stonefaces, as Maram named the gray men. I never doubted that they were somehow tracking us through the woods. With the sun high above the world, my fever came raging back, and my blood felt heavy as molten iron. It seemed that someone was aiming arrows of hate at me, for I could almost feel a succession of razor-sharp points driving into my forehead.

'I'm sorry I have no cure for what ails you,' Master Juwain said as he rode up beside me. He watched me rubbing my head, and looked at tne with great concern.

'Perhaps there is no cure,' I told him. Then I said, 'The Red Dragon is so evil – how can anyone be this evil?'

'Only out of blindness,' Master Juwain said, 'so that he can t see the difference between evil or good. Or only out of the delusion that he is doing good when actually bringing about the opposite.'

The Red Dragon, he said, was certainly not evil by his own lights.

No one was. But I wasn't as sure of this. Something in Morjin's voice seemed to delight in darkness, and this still haunted me.

'He spoke to me,' I told Master Juwain. 'And listened to him. Now his words won't leave my head.'

How, I asked myself, could I know what was the truth and what was a lie if I didn't listen?

To the rough walking gait of his horse, Master Juwain began thumbing rhythmically through the pages of the Saganom Elu. When he had found the passage he wanted, he cleared his throat and read from the Healings.

'I would advise you to meditate, if you can,' he told me. 'Do you remember the Second Light Meditation? It used to be your favorite.'

I nodded my head painfully because I remembered it well enough: I was to close my eyes and dwell on the dread brought on by the fall of night. And then, after gazing upon the blackness of the sky there as long as I could, I was to envision the Morning Star suddenly blazing as brightly as the sun. This fiery-light I would then hold inside me as I would the promise that day would always follow night.

'It's hard,' I told him after some long moments of trying to practice this meditation.

'The Lord of Illusions has made light seem like darkness and darkness light.'

'The worst lie,' Master Juwain said, 'is that which misuses truth to make falseness.

You'll have to look very hard for the truth now, Val.'

'You mean now that I've listened to Morjin's lies?'

'Please don't say his name,' he reminded me. 'And yes, I do mean that You had to test your courage, didn't you? But you must never listen to him, not even in your dreams.'

'Are my dreams mine to make, then? Or are they his?'

'Your dreams are always your dreams,' he told me. 'But you must fight to keep them for yourself even more fiercely than you would to keep an enemy's sword from piercing your heart.'

'How, then?'

'By learning to be awake and aware in your dreams.'

'Is that possible?'

'Of course it is. Even in your dream, you weren't completely without will, were you?'

'No – or else the Red Dragon would have kept me in his room.'

Master Juwain nodded his head and smiled. 'You see, it's our will to life that quickens awareness. And our awareness that seeks our awakening. There are exercises in the dreamwork that you would have been taught if you hadn't left our school.'

'Can you teach me them now?'

'I can try, Val. But the art of dreaming at will take, a long time to learn.'

As we rode deeper into the woods, he explained some of the funda-mentals of this ancient art. Every night while falling asleep, I was to resolve to remain aware of my dreams. And more, I was to create for myself an ally, a sort of dream self who would remain awake and watch over me while I slept.

'Do you remember the zanshin meditation I taught you before your duel with Lord Salmelu?'

'Yes – it's impossible to forget.'

'You may make use of that, then,' he said. 'The key is in the self looking at the self.

You must continually ask yourself the question: Who am I? When you think you know, ask yourself, who is doing the knowing? This "who," this one who knows – this is your ally. It is he who remains always beside you, and is awake even as you sleep.'

He suggested that I practice an ancient exercise that could be found in the Meditations. I was to visualize in my throat a beautiful, soft lotus flower. The lotus should have light-pink petals which curled slightly inwards, and in the center there should be a luminous red-orange flame. He told me to visualize the top of the flame as long as possible, for the flame represented consciousness and the whole lotus was a symbol of awakening the consciousness of the self.

'Ultimately,' he explained, 'you'll learn to control and shape your own dreams even as they unfold.'

'Even if the Lord of Illusions is attacking me?'

'Especially then. Your dreams are sacred, Val; you must never let anyone steal your dreams.'

That night we made camp on a hill beneath the tall oaks. There was little enough cover to hide us – nothing more than some thickets of laurel and virburn – but at least we would have a more or less clear line of sight should the gray men try to charge at us up the hill. I fell asleep with Master Juwain's lotus blazing inside me. His exercises did me little good, however, for I had terrible dreams all night long. My cries kept the others awake. They were true allies, of flesh and blood, and they kept watch over me where Master Juwain's more ethereal ally did not

Our next day's journey took us farther into the forest to the west We covered only a few miles, though, because we spent most of me day attempting to elude our pursuers. We walked ourhorses or hours in shallow streams to leave no hoofprints; we walked them in circles around the tops of hills to confound anyone trying to read our tracks. We rode through blackberry thickets with sharp thorns. More than once, we doubled back across our track. But if the sharp pain piercing my head was any sign, ail such tactics failed.

'Whoever is following us,' Master Juwain said, 'is very likely reading more than the tracks that we leave in the mud.'

'Who are these Stonefaces, then?' Maram asked.

'Who knows?' Atara said. 'But if we can't escape them, then we should find a place to face them and kill them with arrows.'

'As you faced them by the stream?' Maram said to her. 'As you killed their leader with your arrow that you couldn't shoot?'

It was his revenge for her mocking his archery skills during the battle with the hill-men. Atara, whose freezing-up at the sight of the gray men still shamed her, looked off at the gray-green shapes of the sumac bushes hiding deeper in the woods.

Then she said, 'I don't understand these Stonefaces. If they are many and we are few, why don't they just attack us and be done with it?'

'Have you never seen a bear-baiting?' Maram asked her. 'The hounds harry the bear and wear it down before it is killed.'

All that day, in the moist woods full of amanita and destroying angels and other poisonous mushrooms, I felt a mailed fist pounding at my head and trying to wear me down. I slept fitfully that night by a stream that gurgled like an opened throat There the others – Atara and Maram – joined me in nightmare. Only Master Juwain seemed shielded against the terrible images that Morjin sent to rob us of sanity and sleep. But even he awoke the next morning with a fever and a fierce headache. As did Maram and Atara. Maram wondered if we had managed to drink some tainted water, perhaps from a stream poisoned by a dead animal who had eaten some of the overly abundant mushrooms. But Master Juwain doubted this possibility. He stood by his horse rubbing his bald head as he told him, 'This is no taint of rotten flesh or the poisoning of plants. No, Brother Maram, I'm afraid your hounds are getting bolder.'

To inspirit Maram, who groaned from fright as much as the fever in him, I said, 'If they are growing bolder, then so must we.'

'What do you intend to do?'

'Ride,' I told him. 'As fast and hard as we can. If the Stonefaces are wearing down our spirits, then at least we can try to wear down their bodies.'

'But, Val,' he said. They're wearing down our spirits and our bodies. Why should we help them?'

'Because,' I said, 'there's nothing else to do. Now let's get the horses ready.'

We rode all that morning across the gently rolling ground of the forest. to places, where the trees grew less densely and the spaces between them were free of undergrowth, we pressed the horses to a fast canter, and twice, to a gallop. They wheezed and sweated at the effort of it, and so did we. It pained me to see the froth building up along Altaru's jaw. However, he made little complaint; he just charged on through the moss-hung trees hour after hour, driving at the earth with his great hooves. Maram's and Master luwain's horses had a harder time of it And Atara's horse was no mount at all. By the end of the afternoon, Tanar was near exhaustion, and it was only Atara's determination and skill that kept him moving.

'I'll have to whip him if you want any more work out of him today,' she said as we paused by a small river to water the horses. She stood by Tanar with a braided leather quirt in her hand. I had heard that the Sarni sometimes whipped their horses bloody, but Atara was obviously reluctant to follow this cruel custom.

'No, please don't,' I said. The horses' flanks were already scratched and bleeding from the blackberry brambles. I looked at Master Juwain, who stood leaning against his horse as if his shaking legs might buckle at any moment. Maram had already buckled. He lay by the riverbank holding a wet cloth against his head and moaning softly. I told him, 'We're all exhausted. We'll make camp and rest here.'

'Bless you, my friend. But, rest? I think I'm too tired to rest My head feels as if your big, fat horse has been stepping on it all day. Please kill me now and save the Stonefaces the trouble.' 'We came far today,' I said. 'It may be that we lost them.'

But my dreams that night told me otherwise. And more than once, Atara's sharp cries startled me out of my sleep. I lay next to her by the little fire for hours listening to Maram's pitiful groaning and to the insects of the night: the katydids and the crickets in the bushes and the whining mosquitoes that came to suck our blood. I couldn't decide whether sleep on sleeplessness drained me more. If this was rest, I thought, we would do better to stumble about the forest and ride all night.

The next morning – I guessed it was the 28th of Ashte – dawned cloudy and cool.

We all had trouble getting on our horses, even Master Juwain who had slept soundly enough when it hadn't been his watch. I remembered my father telling me that on long campaigns, even the doughtiest of warriors will weaken without good food and rest. We had had neither. The day before, we had eaten in the saddle: some moldy battle biscuits and walnuts that had gone rancid. I had been too exhausted to take dinner. Even Maram, when offered a bit ot beer, complained that he had no head for it; he turned down as well the leathery dried antelope that Atara offered him. He had no strength to chew it, he had said, and just wanted to sleep.

None of us had any strength that morning. We had been on the road for most of a month. The journey had worn the flesh off our bodies, and by his own ample standards even Maram was looking gaunt. We were dirty, our clothes torn by thorns and stained with mud. The hard riding of the previous day had reopened the wound in my side; beneath my armor, I felt the dampness of blood. Even so, I wanted to press Altaru to a canter. But the other horses had no heart for anything more than a quick walk. As the day dragged on, they gradually slowed their pace. Sometime after noon – it was hard to measure the hour when we couldn't see the sun – I fell asleep in my saddle. A sudden splashing as Altaru stepped through a stream startled me awake. But after that I found myself frequently drifting off. Once, I swooned altogether and nearly fell to the ground. It was hard to keep Altaru to our course, which was now mostly to the northwest. At each of my lapses in consciousness, I found him turning toward the south as if he might find better browse or water in that direction.

'We're lost, aren't' we?' Maram asked as he looked around at the walls of trees on all sides. 'We're moving in circles.' 'No, not circles,' I reassured him. 'We're still on course.' 'Are you sure? Perhaps Master Juwain should take the lead for a while. He's the only one who can stay awake.'

But Master Juwain had little sense of direction, and even Atara seemed lost. With the sky hidden by the thick canopies of the trees and the even thicker gray clouds, we couldn't see the sun to read east or west And no one except myself had enough woodcraft to read the moss on the elms or the lie of the flowers in the shadows of the birches. I knew well enough how to find our way; all I had to do was to keep from falling asleep.

As we moved off again, I resolved to let the pain in my side spur me to wakefulness.

But very soon my eyes dosed, for how long I couldn't say. When I finally opened them, I saw that Altaru had drifted again toward the south. I sensed in him a fierce desire to move in that direction; it was as if he could smell a mare deeper in the woods, and every muscle in his body trembled to find her. It was only by his instincts, I remembered, that we had escaped from the Black Bog. Perhaps his instincts might now help us escape the Stonefaces; certainly all my stratagems had failed in this. And so, without telling the others what was happening, I let Altaru go where he wished.

Thus we traveled quite a few miles due south. I sensed a gradual change in the air, and I thought that the trees here grew taller. Their great, green crowns towered over the forest floor perhaps as high as a hundred and twenty feet. From somewhere in their spreading branches I and fluttering leaves, I heard the voice of an unfamiliar bird: his cry was something like the raaark of a raven, but was deeper and harsher and seemed to warn us away. Other things warned us away as well. I had a disquieting sense that I was crossing an invisible larder into a forbidden realm.

Whenever I tried to peer through the woods to see what might be drawing Altaru, however, it seemed that a will greater than my own caused me to become distracted and look away. It was as if the earth itself here was guarded by some sentinel whom I could not see. But strangely, I was never quite conscious that some being or entity might be watching these woods. At precisely those moments when I tried to bring these sensations into full awareness, I found myself touching my wounded side or gazing at the blood on my hand – of thinking of how I had fallen in love with Atara. It was as if my mind had slipped off the surface of a gleaming mirror to behold only myself.

I knew that the others, too, sensed something strange about these woods. I felt Atara's reluctance to go any farther and Maram's doubt pounding in him like a heartbeat that seemed to say: Go back; go back; go back. Even Master Juwain's great curiosity about the woods seemed blunted by his fear of them.

And then, after perhaps a couple of miles, the soft breeze grew suddenly cooler and cleaner. The sweet scent of the numinous seemed to hang in the air. I found that I could breathe more easily, and I gasped to behold the heights of the trees, for here the giant oaks grew very high above us, at least two hundred feet. The forest floor was mostly free of debris, being covered by carpet of golden leaves. But there were flowers, too violets and goldthread and others that I had never seen before. One of these had many red, pointed petals that erupted from its center like flames. I called it a fireflower; but its fragrance filled me as if I had drunk from a sparkling stream. I felt my fever cooling and then leaving me altogether. My head pain vanished as well.

All my senses seemed to grow keener and deeper. I could almost see the folds in the silvery bark of an oak three hundred yards away and hear the sap streaming through its mighty trunk.

How far we rode into these great trees I couldn't tell. In the abiding peace of the oaks, both distance and direction seemed to take on a new depth of dimension.

Something about the earth itself here seemed o dissolve each moment into the next so that the whole forest opened onto a secret realm as timeless as the stars. I might have been walking these same woods a million years in the past – or a million years hence. 'What is this place?' Maram wondered as he stopped his horse to took up at the leaves fluttering high above us.

I climbed down from Altaru to give him a rest and stretch my legs I reached down to touch a starflower growing out of a little plant. Its five white petals shone as if from a light within.

'My headache is gone,' Maram said. 'My fever, as well.'

Atara and Master Juwain admitted that they, too, had been miracu -lously restored.

Along with Maram, they climbed off their horses and joined me on the forest floor.

Then Master Juwain said, 'There are places of great power on the earth. Healing places – this must be one of them.'

'Why haven't I heard of these places?' Maram asked.

'Yes, indeed, why haven't you, Brother Maram? Do you not remember the Book of Ages where it tells of the vilds?'

'No, I'm sorry, I don't. Do you remember the passage, sir?'

Master Juwain nodded his head and then recited:

There is a place tween earth and time,

In some forgotten misty clime

Of woods and brooks and vernal glades,

Whose healing magic never fades.

An island in the greenest sea,

Abode of deeper greenery

Where giant trees and emeralds grow,

Where leaves and grass and flowers glow.

And there no bitter bloom of spite

To blight the forest's living light,

No sword, no spear, no axe, no knife

To tear the sweetest sprigs of life.

The deeper life for which we yearn,

Immortal flame that doesn't burn,

The sacred sparks, ablaze, unseen -

The children of the Galadin.

Beneath the trees they gloze and gleam, And whirl and play and dance and dream Of wider woods beyond the sea Where they shall dwell eternally.

After he had finished, Maram rubbed his beard and said, 'I thought that was just a myth from the Lost Ages.'

'I hope not,' Master Juwain said.

'Well, wherever we are, it seems that we've finally lost the Stonefaces. Val, what do you think?'

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to feel for the snake wrapping its coils around my spi^But my whole being seemed suddenly free from any wrongness. Even the burning of the kirax was cooled by the breeze blowing through the woods.

'We might have lost them,' I agreed. All around us grew fireflowers and starflowers and violets. In the trees, a flock of blue birds like none I had ever seen trilling out the sweetest of songs. I had only ever dreamed a place that felt so alive as this. 'Perhaps they lost our scent.'

'Well, then,' Maram said, 'why don't we celebrate? Why don't we break out some of your father's fine brandy that we've been toting all the way from Mesh?'

We all agreed that this was a good idea; even Master Juwain consented to breaking his vows this one time. Atara, who might have chided him for going against his principles, seemed happy at the moment to honor the greater principle of celebrating life. After Maram had cracked the cask and filled our cups with some brandy, she eagerly held her nose over the smoky liquid as if drawing in its perfume. Master Juwain- touched his tongue to it and grimaced; one might have thought he was touching fire. Then Maram raised his cup and called out, 'To our escape from the Stonefaces. Surely these woods won't abide any evil.'

Just as he was about to fasten his thick lips around the rim of his cup, a lilting voice called back to him from somewhere in the trees: 'Surely they won't, Hairface.'

A man suddenly stepped from behind a tree thirty yards away. He was short and slight, with curly brown hair, pale skin and leaf-green eyes. Except for a skirt woven of some silvery substance, he was naked. In his little hands he held a little bow and a flint-tipped arrow.

The unexpected sight of him so startled Maram that he spilled his brandy over his beard and chest. Then he managed to splutter, 'Who are you? We didn't know anyone lived here. We mean you no harm, little man.'

Quick as a wink, the man drew his arrow straight at Maram and piped out, 'Sad to say, we mean you harm big man. So sad, too bad.'

And with that, even as Maram, Atara and I reached for our weapons, the little man let loose a high-pitched whistle that sounded like tne trilling of the blue birds.

Immediately, others of his kind appeared from behind trees in a great circle around us two hundred yards across. There were hundreds of them, and they each held a little bow fitted with an arrow.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram cried out. 'Val, what shall we do?'

So, I thought, this was why the Stonefaces hadn't followed us here: we had ridden from one danger into a far greater one. I decided that the woodcraft of these little men must be very great for them to have stolen upon us unheard and unseen. But why, I wondered, hadn't I sensed them stalking me? Surely it was because in trying to close myself to the Stonefaces, I had also closed myself to them.

'Put down your weapons,' the man said as I drew my sword. 'Please, please don't move.'

At another of his whistles, the circle of little people began to close around us as both men and women approached us through the trees. It occurred to me that their strategy wasn't the best, for many of them stood in each other's line of fire should they loose their arrows at us and miss their marks. And then, after watching the graceful motions of their leader as he stalked me, it occurred to me that they wouldn't miss their marks. There was nothing to do except put down our weapons as he had said.

'Come, come,' he told me from in front of a tree where he had stopped ten yards away. The others had now closed their circle some twenty yards around us. 'Now stand away from your beasts, please – we don't want to pierce them.'

'Val!' Maram called to me. 'They mean to murder us – I really think they do!'

So did I think this. Or rather, I sensed that they intended to execute us for the crime of violating their woods. It was sad, I thought, that after facing seeming worse dangers together, we should have to die like cornered prey in this strange and beautiful wood.

'Come, come,' the man said again, 'stand away. It's sad to die, and bad to die like this – but it will be worse the longer we put it off.'

There was nothing to do, I thought, but die as he had said. For each of us, a time comes to say farewell to the earth and return to the stars. Now, at the sight of two hundred arrows pointing at our hearts, each of us faced his coming death in his own way. Master Juwain began chanting the words to the First Light Meditation. Maram covered his eyes with his forearm, as if blocking out the sight of the fierce little people might make them go away. He cried out that he was a prince of Delu and I a prince of Mesh. He promised them gold and diamonds if they would put down their bows; he told them, to no effect, that we were seekers of the Lightstone and that they would be cursed if they harmed us. Atara calmly reached back into her quiver for an arrow. She obviously intended to slay at least one more man and end her life in a joyous fight. I did not. It was bad enough that I should feel the great nothingness pulling me down into the dark; why, I wondered, should I inflict this terrible cold on men and women who sought only to protect their forest kingdom? And so, at last, I stood away from Altaru. I stood as tall and straight as I could. I lifted my hand from the hilt of my sword to brush back my hair, which my sweat had plastered to the side of my face. Then I looked at the man with the leaf-green eyes and waited.

For a moment – the longest of my life – the little man stood regarding me strangely.

Then his drawn bow wavered; he relaxed the pull on his bowstring and pointed straight at my forehead. To the other men and women behind and all around him he said, 'Look, look – it's the mark!'

A murmur of astonishment rippled around the circle of little people. I noticed then that on each of their bows was burned a jagged mark like that of a lightning bolt.

'How did you come by the mark?' the man asked me.

'It was there from my birth,' I told him truthfully.

'Then you are blessed,' he said. 'And I am glad, so glad, for there will be no killing today.'

Maram let out a cry of thanksgiving while Atara still held her arrow nocked on her bowstring. The man asked her if she would consent to putting it away; otherwise, he said, his people would have to shoot their arrows into her arms and legs.

'Please, Atara,' I said to her.

Although obviously hating to disarm herself, Atara put her arrow back into her quiver and stowed her bow in the holster strapped to her horse.

'Too bad that we must bind you now,' the man said. 'But you understand the need for it, don't you? You big people are so quick with your weapons.'

So saying, he whistled again, and several women came forward with braided cords to bind our hands behind our backs. When they were finished, the man said, 'My name is Danali. We will take you to a place where you can rest.'

After presenting myself and each of the others in turn, I asked him,

'What is this place? And what is the name of your people?'

'This is the Forest,' he said simply. 'And we are the Lokilani.' And with that he turned to lead us deeper into the woods.