The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Read online

  ‘No, a deer,’ I said. ‘As we were the last time we came here.’

  ‘But you found a bear all the same.’

  ‘It might be more accurate to say the bear found us.’

  Now Maram’s knuckles grew white around his bow, and he looked at me with wide-open eyes. ‘What do you mean a bear found you?’

  Because I didn’t want to tell him the story, I stood there looking off into the woods in silence. And so Lord Harsha answered for me.

  ‘It was ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Lord Asaru had just received his knight’s ring, and Val must have been what – eleven? Ten?’

  ‘Ten,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s right,’ Lord Harsha said, nodding his head. ‘And so the lads went into the woods alone after their deer. And then the bear –’

  ‘Was it a large bear?’ Maram interrupted.

  Lord Harsha’s single eye narrowed as he admonished Maram to silence as he might a child. And then he continued the story: ‘And so the bear attacked them. It broke Lord Asaru’s arm and some ribs. And mauled Valashu, as you can see.’

  Here he paused to point his old finger at the scar on my forehead.

  ‘But you told me that you were born with that scar!’ Maram said, turning to me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. That’s right.’

  Truly, I had been. My mother’s labor in bringing me into the world was so hard and long that everyone had said I wanted to remain inside her in darkness. And so, finally, the midwife had had to use tongs to pull me out. The tongs had cut me, and the wound had healed raggedly, in the shape of a lightning bolt.

  ‘The bear,’ Asaru explained, ‘opened up the scar again and cut it deeper.’

  ‘He was lucky the bear didn’t break his skull,’ Lord Harsha said to Maram. ‘And both of them were lucky that my son, may he abide in peace, was walking through the woods that day. He found these lads half-dead in the moss and killed the bear with his spear before it could kill them.’

  Andaru Harsha – I knew the name of my rescuer very well. At the Battle of Red Mountain, I had taken a wound in my thigh protecting him from the Waashians’ spears. And later, at the same battle, I had frozen up and been unable to kill one of our enemy who stood shieldless and helpless before me. Because of my hesitation, many still whispered that I was a coward. But Asaru never called me that.

  ‘Then your son saved their lives,’ Maram said to Lord Harsha.

  ‘He always said it was the best thing he ever did.’

  Maram came up to me and grabbed my arm. ‘And you think to repay the courage of this man’s son by going back into these woods?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, looking at me with his soft brown eyes. ‘I see.’

  And he did see, which was why I loved him. Without being told, he understood that I had come back to these woods today not to seek vengeance by shooting arrows in some strange bear, but only because there are other monsters that must be faced.

  ‘Well, then,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Enough of bear stories. Would you like a bite to eat before your hunt?’

  Due to Maram’s peccadilloes, we had missed lunch and we were all of us hungry. Of course, that wouldn’t have dismayed Asaru, but rejecting Lord Harsha’s hospitality would. And so Asaru, speaking for all of us as if he were already king, bowed his head and said, ‘We’d be honored.’

  While Lord Harsha opened his horse’s saddlebags, our horses stamped the earth impatiently and bent their heads to munch the sweet green grass growing between the field’s stone wall and the forest. I glanced off across the field to study Lord Asaru’s house. I liked its square lines and size and the cedar-shingled roof, which was almost as steeply gabled as the chalets you see higher in the mountains. It was built of oak and stone: austere, clean, quietly beautiful – very Valari. I remembered Andaru Harsha bringing me to this house, where I had lain in delirium for half a day while his father tended my wound.

  ‘Here, now,’ Lord Harsha said as he laid a cloth on the wall. ‘Sit with me, and let’s talk about the war.’

  While we took our places along the wall, he set out two loaves of black, barley bread, a tub of goat cheese and some freshly pulled green onions. We cut the bread for sandwiches and ate them. I liked the tang of the onions against the saltiness of the cheese; I liked it even more when Lord Harsha drew out four silver goblets and filled them with brown beer that he poured from a small, wooden cask.

  ‘This was brewed last fall,’ Lord Harsha said. In turn, he handed goblets to Asaru, me and Joshu. Then he picked up his own goblet. ‘It was a good harvest, and a better brew. Shall we make a toast?’

  I saw Maram licking his lips as if he’d been stricken dumb with grief, and I said, ‘Lord Harsha, you’ve forgotten Maram.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you said he’s with the Brothers – hasn’t he taken vows?’

  ‘Ah, well, yes, I have,’ Maram admitted. ‘I’ve forsworn wine, women and war.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I never vowed not to drink beer.’

  ‘You quibble, Prince Maram.’

  ‘Yes, I do, don’t I? But only when vital matters are at stake.’

  ‘Such as the drinking of beer?’

  ‘Such as the drinking of Meshian beer, which is known to be the finest in all of Ea.’

  This compliment proved too much for Lord Harsha, who laughed and magically produced another goblet from the saddlebags. He picked up the cask and poured forth a stream of beer.

  ‘Let’s drink to the King,’ he said, raising his goblet. ‘May he abide in the One and find the wisdom to decide on peace or war.’

  We all clinked goblets and drank the frothy beer. It tasted of barley and hops and roasted nuts of the talaru tree that grows only in the forests near Mount Arakel. Maram, of course, was the first to finish his beer. He gulped it down like a hound does milk. Then he held out his goblet for Lord Harsha to fill it again and said, ‘Now I would like to propose a toast. To the lords and knights of Mesh who have fought faithfully for their King.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Lord Harsha said, once more filling Maram’s goblet. ‘Let’s drink to that indeed.’

  Again Maram drained his cup. He licked the froth from his mustache. He held the empty cup out yet again and said, ‘And now, ah, to the courage and prowess of the warriors – how do you say it? To flawlessness and fearlessness.’

  But Lord Harsha stoppered the cask with a cork, and said, ‘No, that’s enough if you’re going hunting today – we can’t have you young princes shooting arrows at each other, can we?’

  ‘But, Lord Harsha,’ Maram protested, ‘I was only going to suggest that the courage of your Meshian warriors is an inspiration to those of us who can only hope to –’

  ‘You’re quite the diplomat,’ Lord Harsha said, laughing as he cut Maram off. ‘Perhaps you should reason with the Ishkans. Perhaps you could talk them out of this war as easily as you talked me out of my beer.’

  ‘I don’t understand why there has to be a war at all,’ Maram said.

  ‘Well, there’s bad blood between us,’ Lord Harsha said simply.

  ‘But it’s the same blood, isn’t it? You’re all Valari, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, the same blood,’ Lord Harsha said, slowly sipping from his goblet. Then he looked at me sadly. ‘But the Ishkans shed it in ways shameful to any Valari. The way they killed Valashu’s grandfather.’

  ‘But he died in battle, didn’t he? Ah, the Battle of the Diamond River?’

  Now Lord Harsha swallowed the last of his beer as if someone had forced him to drink blood. He tapped his eye-patch and said, ‘Yes, it was at the Diamond. Twelve years ago now. That’s where the Ishkans took this eye. That’s where the Ishkans sacrificed five companies just to close with King Elkamesh and kill him.’

  ‘But that’s war, isn’t it?’ Maram asked.

  ‘No, that’s dueling. The Ishkans hated King Elkamesh because when he was a young man such as yourself, he kille
d Lord Dorje in a duel. And so they used the battle as a duel to take their revenge.’

  ‘Lord Dorje,’ I explained, looking at Maram, ‘was King Hadaru’s oldest brother.’

  ‘I see,’ Maram said. ‘And this duel took place, ah, fifty years ago? You Valari wait a long time to take your revenge.’

  I looked north toward the dark clouds moving in from Ishka’s mountains, and I lost myself in memories of wrongs and hurts that went back more than a hundred times fifty years.

  ‘Please do not say “we Valari,”’ Lord Harsha told Maram. He rubbed his broken knee and said, ‘Sar Lensu of Waas caught me here with his mace, and that’s war. There’s no vengeance to be taken. They understand that in Waas. They would never have tried to kill King Elkamesh as the Ishkans did.’

  While Lord Harsha rose abruptly and shook out the cloth of its crumbs for the sparrows to eat, I clenched my teeth together. And then I said, ‘There was more to it than vengeance.’

  At this, Asaru shot me a quick look as if warning me not to divulge family secrets in front of strangers. But I spoke not only for Maram’s benefit, but for Asaru’s and Lord Harsha’s and my own.

  ‘My grandfather,’ I said, ‘had a dream. He would have united all the Valari against Morjin.’

  At the mention of this name, dreadful and ancient, Lord Harsha froze motionless while Joshu Kadar turned to stare at me. I felt fear fluttering in Maram’s belly like a blackbird’s wings. In the sky, the dark, distant clouds seemed to grow even darker.

  And then Asaru’s voice grew as cold as steel as it always did when he was angry at me. ‘The Ishkans,’ he said, ‘don’t want the Valari united under our banner. No one does, Val.’

  I looked up to see a few crows circling the field in search of carrion or other easy feasts. I said nothing.

  ‘You have to understand,’ Asaru continued, ‘there’s no need.’

  ‘No need?’ I half-shouted. ‘Morjin’s armies swallow up half the continent, and you say there’s no need?’

  I looked west beyond the white diamond peak of Telshar as I tried to imagine the earthshaking events occurring far away. What little news of Morjin’s acquisitions that had arrived in our isolated country was very bad. From his fastness of Sakai in the White Mountains, this warlock and would-be Lord of Ea had sent armies to conquer Hesperu and lands with strange names such as Uskudar and Karabuk. The enslaved peoples of Acadu, of course, had long since marched beneath the banner of the Red Dragon, while in Surrapam and Yarkona, and even in Eanna, Morjin’s spies and assassins worked to undermine those realms from within. His terror had found its most recent success in Galda. The fall of this mighty kingdom, so near the Morning Mountains and Mesh, had shocked almost all of the free peoples from Delu to Thalu. But not the Meshians. Nor the Ishkans, the Kaashans, nor any of the other Valari.

  ‘Morjin will never conquer us,’ Asaru said proudly. ‘Never.’

  ‘He’ll never conquer us if we stand against him,’ I said.

  ‘No army has ever successfully invaded the Nine Kingdoms.’

  ‘Not successfully,’ I agreed. ‘But why should we invite an invasion at all?’

  ‘If anyone invades Mesh,’ Asaru said, ‘we’ll cut them to pieces. The way the Kaashans cut Morjin’s priests to pieces.’

  He was referring to the grisly events that had occurred half a year before in Kaash, that most mountainous and rugged of all Valari kingdoms. When King Talanu discovered that two of his most trusted lords had entered Morjin’s secret order of assassin-priests, he had ordered them beheaded and quartered. The pieces of their bodies he had then sent to each of the Nine Kingdoms as a warning against traitors and others who would serve Morjin.

  I shuddered as I remembered the day that King Talanu’s messenger had arrived with his grisly trophy in Silvassu. Something sharp stabbed into my chest as I thought of worse things. In Galda, thousands of men and women had been put to the sword. Some few survivors of the massacres there had found their way across the steppes to Mesh, only to be turned away at the passes. Their sufferings were grievous but not unique. The rattle of the chains of all those enslaved by Morjin would have shaken the mountains, if any had ears to hear it. On the Wendrush, it was said, the Sarni tribes were on the move again and roasting their captured enemies alive. From Karabuk had come stories of a terrible new plague and even a rumor that a city had been burned with a firestone. It seemed that all of Ea was going up in flames while here we sat by a small green field drinking beer and talking of yet another war with the Ishkans.

  ‘There’s more to the world than Mesh,’ I said. I listened to the twittering of the birds in the forest. ‘What of Eanna and Yarkona? What of Alonia? The Elyssu? And Delu?’

  At the mention of his homeland, Maram stood up and grabbed his bow. Despite his renunciation of war, he shook it bravely and said, ‘Ah, my friend is right. We defeated Morjin once. And we can defeat him again.’

  For a moment I held my breath against the beery vapors wafting out of Maram’s mouth. Defeating Morjin, of course, wasn’t what I had suggested. But uniting against him so that we wouldn’t have to fight at all was.

  ‘We should send an army of Valari against him,’ Maram bellowed.

  I tried not to smile as I noted that in demanding that ‘we’ fight together against our enemy, Maram meant us: the Meshians and the other Valari.

  I looked at him and asked, ‘And to where would you send this army that you’ve so bravely assembled in your mind?’

  ‘Why, to Sakai, of course. We should root out Morjin before he gains too much strength and then destroy him.’

  At this Asaru’s face paled, as did Lord Harsha’s and, I imagined, my own. Once, long ago, a Valari army had crossed the Wendrush to join with the Alonians in an assault on Sakai. And at the Battle of Tarshid, Morjin had used firestones and treachery to defeat us utterly. It was said that he had crucified the thousand Valari survivors for twenty miles along the road leading to Sakai; his priests had pierced our warriors’ veins with knives and had drunk their blood. All the histories cited this as the beginning of the War of the Stones.

  Of course, no one knew if the Morjin who now ruled in Sakai was the same man who had tortured my ancestors: Morjin, Lord of Lies, the Great Red Dragon, who had stolen the Lightstone and kept it locked away in his underground city of Argattha. Many said that the present Morjin was only a sorcerer or usurper who had taken on the most terrible name in history. But my grandfather had believed that these two Morjins were one and the same. And so did I.

  Asaru stood staring at Maram, and said, ‘So then, you want to defeat Morjin – do you hope to recover the Lightstone as well?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, his face falling red, ‘the Lightstone – now that’s a different matter. It’s been lost for three thousand years. Surely it’s been destroyed.’

  ‘Surely it has,’ Lord Harsha agreed. The Lightstone, the firestones, most of the other gelstei – they were all destroyed in the War of the Stones.’

  ‘Of course it was destroyed,’ Asaru said as if that ended the matter.

  I wondered if it was possible to destroy the gold gelstei, greatest of all the stones of power, from which the Lightstone was wrought. I was silent as I watched the clouds move down the valley and cover up the sun. I couldn’t help noticing that despite the darkness of these monstrous gray shapes, some small amount of light fought its way through.

  ‘You don’t agree, do you?’ Asaru said to me.

  ‘No,’ I said. The Lightstone exists, somewhere.’

  ‘But three thousand years, Val.’

  ‘I know it exists – it can’t have been destroyed.’

  ‘If not destroyed, then lost forever.’

  ‘King Kiritan doesn’t think so. Otherwise he wouldn’t call a quest for knights to find it.’

  Lord Harsha let loose a deep grumbling sound as he packed the uneaten food into his horse’s saddlebags. He turned to me, and his remaining eyed bore into me like a spear. ‘Who knows why foreign kings do wha
t they do? But what would you do, Valashu Elahad, if you suddenly found the Lightstone in your hands?’

  I looked north and east toward Anjo, Taron, Athar, Lagash and the other kingdoms of the Valari, and I said simply, ‘End war.’

  Lord Harsha shook his head as if he hadn’t heard me correctly. He said, ‘End the wars?’

  ‘No, war,’ I said. ‘War itself.’

  Now both Lord Harsha and Asaru – and Joshu Kadar as well – looked at me in amazement as if I had suggested ending the world itself.

  ‘Ha!’ Lord Harsha called out. ‘No one but a scryer can see the future, but let’s make this prediction anyway: when next the Ishkans and Meshians line up for battle, you’ll be there at the front of our army.’

  I smelled moisture in the air and bloodlust in Lord Harsha’s fiery old heart, but I said nothing.

  And then Asaru moved close to me and caught me with his brilliant eyes. He said quietly, ‘You’re too much like Grandfather: you’ve always loved this gold cup that doesn’t exist.’

  Did the world itself exist? I wondered. Did the light I saw shining in my brother’s eyes?

  ‘If it came to it,’ he asked me, ‘would you fight for this Lightstone or would you fight for your people?’

  Behind the sadness of his noble face lingered the unspoken question: Would you fight for me?

  Just then, as the clouds built even higher overhead and the air grew heavy and still, I felt something warm and bright welling up inside him. How could I not fight for him? I remembered the outing seven years ago when I had broken through the thin spring ice of Lake Waskaw after insisting that we take this dangerous shortcut toward home. Hadn’t he, heedless of his own life, jumped into the black, churning waters to pull me out? How could I ever simply abandon this noble being and let him perish from the earth? Could I imagine the world without tall, straight oak trees or clear mountain streams? Could I imagine the world without the sun?

  I looked at my brother, and felt this sun inside me. There were stars there, too. It was strange, I thought, that although he was firstborn and I was last, that although he wore four diamonds in his ring and I only one, it was he who always looked away from me, as he did now.