Lord of Lies

he tires of being a Valari knight, he can always find work as a spy.'

She smiled at this, then took my hand. 'It's cold, here, Val. Why don't you come in out of the rain and sit by the fire?'

I shook my head as I pointed at the mat of dripping ferns spread across the ground. 'This is the spot where the bear nearly killed me He nearly killed Asaru, too. All my life, Asaru told everyone that I'd saved his life.'

She said nothing as she oriented her head facing the place that I had pointed out. I wondered if she could 'see' me as a young boy plunging my knife into the huge, brown bear's back in a frantic effort to keep the beast from mauling Asaru.

'Where the Ikurians were upon me,' I said to her, 'he gave me back my life. But not in repayment. Only. . in love. You should have seen the look in his eyes, just before he died. He didn't care that he would have made a better king than I.'

Her hand tightened around mine, and its warmth flowed into me.

'I can't believe I'll never talk to him again,' I said. 'My mother, my father, all of them — I can't believe they're really gone.'

Atara's blindfold, I saw, was wet with rain, if not tears. I thought it cruel that she could never weep again, just as Liljana could not laugh.

'What was the point of us going to Argattha,' I asked her, 'if it all came to this?'

'I don't know, Val.'

'But you're suppose to see everything.'

'I wish I could.'

'So many dead,' I murmured. 'And in the end, we only succeeded in giving the Lightstone back to Morjin. I did.'

'You mustn't blame yourself.'

'Who should I blame then? Kane, for not seeing all of Morjin's plots and perfidies? You? The One for creating the world?'

'Please, do — blame us, if that would be easier for you.'

I squeezed her hand, and pressed it to my forehead. 'I'm sorry,' I told her.

'And I'm sorry, too,' she said. 'But not even a scryer can make out all ends. Something good may yet come of what has happened in a way that we can't see.'

'Something good,' I said, shaking my head. 'I should have done better to have claimed the Lightstone from the very beginning.'

'Please, don't say that.'

'Why not? If I had come forth as the Maitreya, that day with Baltasar in my father's hall, I might have united the Valari without even going to Tria. Morjin would never have attacked Mesh, and the Lightstone would be mine.'

'And what then?' she asked me. 'You know the prophecy. Would they come to call you the Great Silver Swan? Would you have that name become a curse, like the Red Dragon?'

'At least,' I told her, 'my people would still be alive.'

'There are some things more terrible than death,' she said, rubbing at her blindfold. 'Do you doubt that you could become as Morjin — or worse?'

I recalled the look on Ravik Kirriland's face as I had struck him down. I sat there in silence, listening to the rain.

'You would have brought great evil to the world,' she said to me. 'Great destruction and death.'

'Could the suffering that entailed have been any worse?'

'I don't know. I don't know how to measure such a thing. Do you?'

I pressed my fingers against her wrist, where I could feel her heart sending out pulses of blood like an anguished and savage thing. I said, 'There's no end to suffering.'

'No, perhaps not,' she said. 'But I must believe it has a purpose.'

I smiled grimly as I recalled Morjin's letter, and said, 'To torment us into hating the One so that we might become as angels?'

She smiled, too, as she shook her head. 'No, Val. But there is some-thing strange about suffering. It carves the soul, hollows it out — and in the end leaves room for it to hold more joy.'

'You say that?'

I stared at her blindfold, and I wondered what the hollows beneath it held inside their scoops of darkness?

'I do say that,' she told me. 'I have to make myself believe that there is still hope for all of us.'

'Have you been talking to Maram, then?'

She let go of my hand and brought out her scryer's sphere. Drops of rain broke against the white gelstei, and ran in streaks down the curves of the crystal.

'Have you seen these joys with which you hope we'll be blessed?' I asked her.

She smiled as she- shivered against the cold of the rain. And then she told me, 'Many believe that the kristei was forged to show visions of the future. But its true power is to create it.'

That was all she said to me, then. She stood up to make the short journey back to Lord Marsha's house. She left me sitting on my soggy log; she left me to wonder how a little ball of dear crystal — no less a man — could create anything good at all.

The next day the rain deepened, and I spent most of it in the barn, hunched beneath my cloak and brooding upon things to come, late in the afternoon, the peace of Lord Harsha's farm was broken when a rider dressed all in black came galloping up the road. I hurried out of the barn to see Kane emerge from the house and walk up to confer with this stranger. That he was no Valari I could tell immediately: he was rather short and thick, and his broad face and dense black beard reminded me of the Ikurians, But his eyes were bright blue, and his skin was fair, and I could not guess what land he called home. An air of danger and darkness surrounded him. I was sure that he was a master of the mysterious Black Brotherhood.

Kane, however, did not present this man to me — or to any of us. The tension in Kane's brutal body and flashing black eyes warned us away. The rider did not remain to partake of Lord Harsha's hospitality. As soon as he had finished his business, without a word of greeting to any us, he pulled his horse about and rode off again into the rain.

That evening, like a king issuing a summons, Kane insisted that I come inside the house to take dinner with everyone else. My curiosity overcame my moroseness. I sat at Lord Harsha's long table with my friends, and feasted on roasted pork, peas and potatoes. I forced myself to eat the apple pie and cheese that Behira served for desert. Then, when we were all full. Lord Harsha called us into his great room to sit by the fire. On the andirons were piled several logs throwing out flames and a comforting heat above the fire, many cups rested on the cracked oak of the mantle. Lord Harsha informed us that his wife, Sarai, had made them from good Meshian clay. He invited us to sit on the floor, which was covered with bearskins and cushions. His eye gleamed as he began filling the cups from a bottle of old brandy. Two cups, of course, would have been enough for him and Behira, but once his house had held many more: his three sons, killed in various battles, a daughter taken by a fever before her fifth birthday, and another daughter who had died with Sarai in childbirth. Lord Harsha's mother and aunt, too, were long gone, but he took pride in displaying on the walls the bright tapestries they had once woven from the wool of the sheep that he kept on his north pasture. He was a prideful man, and the toast that he proposed as we all raised our cups was both a proud and a poignant one: 'May our land always be blessed with sons as valorous as those who fought and fell at the Culhadosh Commons, and with daughters strong and wise enough in spirit to raise up true Valari warriors.'

He sighed and sipped his brandy as he patted Behira's hand. Then he looked across the bearskins at Maram and said, 'loj is gone and Valte is racing by. The months pass almost as quickly as the years. And still we're no nearer to setting a date for the wedding, are we?'

'Ah, no, sir, I have to say we're not,' Maram choked out. He nodded at Behira as he smiled his most sheepish smile. 'And now, with all that's happened. . well, you see, I couldn't take vows with the whole world turned upside