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  And so I played, and each note was a step taking the music higher; my breath was the wind carrying this wish up into the sky. After a while, played other songs even as Atara put away her arrow and looked at me. | her eyes danced the dark lights of the fire and much else. I couldn t help thinking of the words that Maram had called out some days before. Her eyes are windows to the stars. He had forgotten the lines of his new poem even more quickly than he had Duke Gorador's wife. But I hadn't Neither had I forgotten the verse that he had recited the night of the feast in my father's hall:

  Star of my soul, how you shimmer

  Beyond the deep blue sky

  Whirling and whirling - you and I whisperlessly Spinning sparks of joy into the night.

  Even as the crackling fire sent its own sparks spinning into the darkness, I was overwhelmed with a strange sense that Atara and I had once come from this nameless star. In truth, whenever she looked at me it seemed that we returned there.

  As we did now. For an age, it seemed, we sat there on our rock beneath the ancient constellations as the world turned and the stars whirled. Almost forever, I looked into her eyes. What was there? Only light. How, I wondered, even if she should miraculously fulfill her vow, could 1 ever hold it? Could I drink in the sea and all the oceans of stars?

  Wordlessly, she reached out her hand and grasped mine. Her touch was like lightning splitting me open. All of her incredible sadness came flooding into me; but all of her wild joy of life came, too. In the warmth of her fingers against mine there was no assurance of passion or marriage, but only a promise that we would always be kind to each other and that we wouldn't fail each other. And that we would always remind each other where we had come from and who we were meant to be. It was the most sacred vow I had ever made, and I knew that both Atara and I would keep it.

  It was good to be certain of at least one thing in a world where men tried to twist truth into lies. In the quiet of the night we lost ourselves in each other's eyes and breathed as one.

  And so for a few hours, I was happier than I had ever been. But when a door to a closed room is finally opened, not only does light stream in, that which was confined in the darkness is free to leap howling out. In my soaring hope, in my great gladness of Atara's company, I didn't dare see that my heart was wide open to the greatest of terrors.

  Chapter 12

  Early the next morning my nightmares began again. I came screaming out of sleep convinced that the ground beneath my sleeping furs had opened up and I was plunging into a black and bottomless abyss. My cries of terror awoke myself and everyone else. Master Juwain came over to where I lay by the fire's glowing embers and rested his hand on my forehead. 'Your fever has returned,' he told me. 'I'll make you some tea.' While he went off to fetch some water and prepare his bitter brew, Atara soaked a cloth in the cool water of the stream and returned to press it against my head. Her fingers - callused from years of pulling a bowstring - were incredibly gentle as she brushed back my sweat-soaked hair. She was quiet, her full lips pressed together with her concern.

  'Do you think his wound is infected?' Maram said to Master Juwain. 'I thought it was getting better.'

  'Let's see,' Master Juwain said as the water for the tea was heating. 'Let's get your mail off, Val.'

  They helped strip me bare to the waist, and then Master Juwain removed my bandage to examine my wound. He probed it gently, and pronounced that it was healing again and looked clean enough. After bandaging my side and helping me dress, he sat by his pot of boiling water and looked at me in puzzlement. 'Do you think it's the kirax?' Maram asked.

  'I don't think so,' Master Juwain said. 'But it's possible.' 'And what,' Atara asked, 'is kirax?'

  Master Juwain turned to me as if wondering how much he should tell her. In answer, I nodded my head. 'It's a poison,' Master Juwain said. 'A terrible poison.'

  He went on to recount how an assassin's arrow had wounded me in the woods outside Silvassu. He explained how the priests of the Kallimun sometimes used kirax to slay horribly at Morjin's bidding.

  'Oh, but you make evil enemies, don't you?' Atara said to me. 'It would seem so,' I said. Then I smiled at Master Juwain, Maram

  and her. 'But; also the best of friends.' Atara returned my smile then asked, 'But why should Morjin wish

  you dead?'

  That was one of the questions of my life I most wanted answered. Because I had nothing to say, I shrugged my shoulders and stared off at the glow of the dawn in the east.

  'Well, if he does wish you dead and this man Kane is the one he has sent after you, I have a present for him.' So saying, Atara drew forth an arrow from her quiver and pointed it west toward Argattha. 'Morjin's assassins aren't the only ones who can shoot arrows, you know.'

  After that I drank my tea and ate a little breakfast. Although my fever faded with the coming of the day, a dull headache remained to torment me. Some big, dark clouds moved over the land from the north, and I could almost feel the pressure of them smothering the forest. Before we could even put away our cooking pots and break camp, it started to rain a steady drumming of cold drops that drove down through the trees and beat against my head. Matter Juwain pointed out that we would stay drier in the woods than on the open road, he suggested remaining these another day in order to recover our strength. 'No,' I said. 'We can rest when we get to Tria.'

  Master Juwain, who could sometimes be cunning, shook his head at me and said,

  'You're tired, Val. So are the horses.'

  In the end it was the condition of the horses that decided me. We had pressed them hard for many miles, and they hadn't had a good feed of grain since Duke Gorador's castle. Although they had found grass along our way, this wasn't enough to keep them fat and happy - especially Altaru, who needed some oats in his belly to keep his huge body driving forward. I realized that for a couple of days, he had been telling me that he was hungry, but I hadn't been listening And so I consented to Master Juwain's suggestion. Against Maram's protests, I led him and the other horses most of the oats that we had been reserving far our morning porridge. As I reminded Maram, we still had some cheese and nuts, and quite a few battle biscuits.

  And so we remained there for the rest of the day. The rain seemed only to come down harder with each passing hour. We sat huddled beneath the meager shelter of the trees listening to its patter against the leaves. I was very grateful for the cloak that my mother had made for me, I kept it wrapped tightly about me. as I did the white wool scarf my grandmother had knitted. To pass, the time, I took out Jonathay's chess set, I played some games with Maram and then Atara. It surprised me that she beat me every time, for I hadn't known the Sarni studied such civilized games. I might have blamed my poor play on my throbbing head, but I didn't want to diminish Atara's victory.

  'Would you like to play me?' Atara asked Maram after I had lost my fourth game.

  'You've been sitting out a while.'

  'No, thank you,' Maram said. 'It's more fun watching Val lose.'

  Atara began setting up the pieces for a new game as Maram shivered miserably beneath his red cloak and said, 'I'm cold, I'm weary, I'm wet. But at least this rain should keep the bears holed up. There hasn't been any sign of them - has there?'

  'No,' I said to encourage him. 'The bears don't like rain.'

  'And there's been no sign of Kane or anyone else - has anyone seen any sign?'

  Both Master Juwain and Atara reassured him that, except for the rain, the woods had been as silent as they were wet. I wanted to reassure him as well. But I couldn't - nor could I comfort myself. For ever since I had awakened from my nightmare, I'd had a gnawing sensation in my belly that some beast was hunting for me, sniffing at the air and trying to catch my scent through the pouring rain. As the grayness of the afternoon deepened, this sensation grew stronger. And so I resolved to. break camp and travel hard at first light no matter rain or fever or the tiredness of the horses.

  That night I had worse nightmares. My fever returned, and Master Juwain's tea did
little to cool it But as I had promised myself, in the morning we set out on the road.

  It was grim work plodding over the drenched paving stones through the rain. The whole world narrowed to this tunnel of stone cutting east through the dark green woods and the even darker gray sky. Master Juwain said that in Alonia, it sometimes rained like this for days without end. Maram wondered aloud how it was that the sky could hold whole oceans among its cold currents of air. Atara said that on the Wendrush, it rained fiercely but rarely so steadily as this. Then, to cheer us, she began singing a song meant to charm the rain away.

  Just before dusk, as we were making camp in the dripping woods, the rain finally broke. My fever didn't. It seemed to be centered in my head, searing all my senses, cooking my brain. I had no evil dreams that night only because I couldn't sleep. I lay awake on the cold, sodden earth toss-ing and turning and hoping that the sky might clear and the stars would come out. But the clouds remained thick and heavy long past midnight; through the long hours of darkness, the sky seemed lower than it should be. Morning's thin light showed a gray mist lying over the tops of the trees. It was a bad day for travel, I thought, but travel we must.

  'You're still hot,' Master Juwain told me as he tested my head. 'And you're so pale, Val - I'm afraid you're growing weaker.'

  In truth, I was so weak that I could hardly hold the mug of tea that Maram gave me or move my mouth to speak. But I had to warn them of my feeling of being followed because it was growing ever stronger. 'Someone is coming for us,' I said. 'Maybe Kane - maybe others.' This news alarmed Maram almost as much as it surprised Atara. Her blonde eyebrows arched as she asked, 'But we've seen no sign of anyone since the hills. Why should you think someone is pursuing us?' 'Val has a sense about such things,' Master Juwain tried to explain. Atara cast me a long, penetrating look and then nodded her head as if she understood. She seemed to see me as no one ever had before; she both believed me and believed in me, and I loved her for that.

  'Someone is coming for us, you say,' Maram muttered as he stood by the fire scanning the woods. 'Why didn't you tell us, Val?'

  I, too, stood staring off through the woods; I hadn't told them anything because I had doubted what I had sensed, even as I doubted it now. Only two days before, in my joy at rinding Atara, I had opened myself to the whole world and had been stricken by the beauty of the sun and the sky, by the sweetness of the flowers and the trees and the wind. But what if my gift, quickened by the kirax in my blood, had also opened me to other things? What if I were picking up on every fox in the forest stalking the many rabbits and voles? What if I could somehow sense the killing instinct of every bear, racoon and weasel - as well as every fly-catching frog and worm-hunting bird and all the other creatures around us? Might I not have mistaken this flood of natural urges for a feeling that someone was hunting me? And yet it was the sheer unnaturalness of what I now felt that filled me with dread. Something slimy and unclean seemed to want to fasten itself to the back of my neck and suck the fluids from my spine; something like a clot of worms gnawed continually at my belly.

  I was afraid that if I let them, they would eat their way up through my heart and head and bleed away my very life. And so, because I was afraid that this horrible thing might be coming for Atara and the others, too, I decided that it was long past time that I warned them of the danger.

  'My apologies for not telling you sooner,' I said to Maram. 'But I had to be sure.

  There is a wrongness here.'

  Maram, who remembered very well our near-death at the Telemesh Gate, drew in a quick breath and asked, 'Do you think it's another

  bear?'

  'No this is different. No beast could make me feel this way.' 'No beast except the Red Dragon,' he muttered.

  'If its men who are pursuing us,' Master Juwain said, 'then shouldn't we be on our way as soon as possible?'

  'If it is men,' Atara said, slinging on her quiver, 'then as soon as they show themselves, my arrows will pursue them.'

  She wondered if we shouldn't find a place of concealment by the side of the road and simply wait for whoever might be riding after us. But I couldn't countenance shooting at men from behind trees as my would-be assassin had shot at me. And I couldn't bear more killing in any case. Because our pursuers might still be untold miles away, it seemed the safest course to ride west as quickly as we could.

  And ride we did For most of the first hour what day's journey, we moved along at a swift canter. Our horses' hooves struck the road in a three-beat rhythm of iron against stone, clop-clip-clop, again and again. When they grew tired, we slowed to a trot. At last we broke for a rest as Atara dismounted and pressed her ear to road to listen for the sound of other hooves.

  'Do you hear anything?' Maram called to her from the side of the road. 'What do you hear?'

  'Nothing except you,' Atara told him. 'Now please be quiet.'

  But after a few moments, she stood up and slowly shook her head.

  'Let's ride, then,' Maram said. 'I don't like the look of this wood.'

  I smiled then because I thought it wasn't the trees or any growing thing that disturbed him. Some miles back, we had entered a hilly country again - but nothing so rugged or high as the tors along the gap of the Shoshan Range. Here the hills were low and rounded, and were covered in chestnut yellow poplar, black ash and oak. In the broad valley through which we rode grew stands of beech, walnut, sycamore, elm and silver maple. Many of these giants of the forest were clothed in honeysuckle and wild grape. In truth, it was a lovely wood, sweet with fruits and singing birds, and I lamented that only man could bring any evil into it.

  We rode through the rest of the day. Around noon, the sun boiled away the last of the mist, and the sky cleared to a hazy blue. It grew quite hot, and humid, too, with the earth's moisture flavoring the air like a fermy soup. I was hot from a fever that had now spread from my head into the rest of my body. Beneath my layers of surcoat, mail and underpadding, I began to sweat. For a long while, 1 suffered this torment as I had been taught. But then the worms in my belly seemed to ignite like writhing tendrils of flame; my skin felt like a tunic soaked in oil and set on fire. I wanted to pull off this wrapping of burning flesh, along with all my clothing and armor, and jump into the stream that ran by the roadside. Instead, I fixed my gaze on the white blister or the

  sun as it slowly made its way toward the west. I might have screamed at the agony of it all if I hadn't remembered that Valari warriors are not allowed to give voice to such pain.

  We made camp that night in a grove of elms by a stream half a mile from the road.

  We risked no fire until it grew dark and the smoke from the damp wood we found would not be seen. Our meal that evening was as cold and cheerless as it was sparse: upon opening our food bags, we found that half our biscuits and all our cheese had grown a thick, green fur of mold. Although Master Juwain cut away as much of it as he could, neither Atara nor Maram had much appetite for what remained.

  And I had none. Since I didn't have the strength to chew the leathery dried meat that Atara urged upon me, I sat back against a tree drinking some cool water. Although I insisted on staying awake to take the first watch - and perhaps the other watches as well - I almost immediately fell asleep. I never felt my friends' hands lifting me onto my bed of furs by the small fire.

  I was vaguely aware that I was writhing and sweating there on the ground for most of the night. At times I must have dreamed. And then suddenly I found myself somehow awakening many miles away in a large room with rich furnishings. I stood by a magnificently canopied bed marveling at the gilded chests and wardrobes along the walls. There I saw three long mirrors, framed in ornate gold as well. The ceiling was like a chessboard, with squares of finely carved white wood alternating with the blackest ebony; an intricately woven carpet showing the shapes of many animals and men covered the floor. I couldn't find any window or door. I stood sweating in fear because I couldn't imagine how I had come to be there.

  And then the mirror oppos
ite me began rippling like still water into which someone had thrown a stone. A man stepped out of it. He was slightly above average height slim and well-muscled, with skin as fair as snow. His short hair shone like spun gold, and the fine features of his face radiated an almost unearthly beauty. I gasped to behold his eyes, for they were all golden, too. He was elegantly dressed, in a golden tunic trimmed with black fur. Across the chest the tunic was embroidered with an emblem that drew my eyes and held them fast: it was the coiled shape of a large and ferocious red

  dragon.

  You're standing on my head,' he told me in a strong, deep voice. 'Please get your muddy boots off it.'

  I looked down to see that I was indeed standing on the eyes of a red dragon woven into the wool at the center of the carpet. I instantly found myself moving backward. No king I ad ever known – neither King Hadaru nor even my father - spoke with such command as did

  this beautiful man.

  'Do you know who I am?' he asked me.

  'Yes,' I said. I was sweating fiercely now; I wanted to close my eyes and scream, but I couldn't look away from him. 'You're the Red Dragon.' 'I have a name,' he said.

  'You know what it is - say it.'

  'No,' I told him. 'I won't.'

  'Say it now!'

  'Morjin,' I said, despite my resolve. 'Your name is Morjin.' 'Lord Morjin, you should call me. And you are Valashu Elahad. Son of Shavashar Elahad, who is of the line of Elemesh, Aramesh and Telemesh. Do you know what these men did to me?'

  'Yes - they defeated you.'

  'Defeated? Do I look defeated?' Morjin positioned himself by one of his mirrors as he adjusted the folds of his tunic. He stood very straight, and his face took on a fierce and implacable countenance. It seemed that he was searching for fire and iron there and finding both in abundance. He looked into his own golden eyes for a long time. And then he turned to me and said, 'No, in the end, it was I who defeated them.