Black Jade

'Kill the summoner?' a third Green cried out. 'Didn't you see how he called down the hawk? Would you have him call down a dragon upon us?'

Berkuar ignored them and continued to regard me strangely. At last he said to me quietly, 'That hawk's heart was as true as my own, and I cannot think that such a bird would have given his trust to our enemy. I believe you. And I believe your story, incredible as it is, though it seems that I haven't heard the tenth part of it.'

So saying, he motioned for his fellow woodsmen to lower their bows, then stepped straight toward me within reach of my sword. He paid this terrible weapon no heed. Then he embraced me, clasping me to his hard, hairy body with all the strength of a bear. His lips pulled back to show his barbark-stained teeth. It was the first time I had seen him smile.

After that, I persuaded Kane to help me tear open our wooden fence, and we invited the thirty Greens to share breakfast with us. Most of these grim men remained wary of us, though they were inclined to accept my friendship with the hawk as a powerful — and good — sign. Then Berkuar told them of what had befallen in Gladwater and of our part in the battle at the longhouse; they hadn't known of this for they ranged the wild lands west, of the Tir. A few of them had wives and children in Gladwater, though, and were overjoyed to learn from Berkuar that they still lived. They came up to me and clasped my hand in thanks. They even thanked Kane for his savage knifework in the grove behind the longhouse. They appreciated prowess with the knife almost as much as with the bow and arrows.

And so on that misty morning we made together a small feast. Fires were lit from the wood of our fortifications. Venison was roasted, and stories were told. Berkuar respected the need to keep at least part of our past and our present quest a secret. Who knew better than this embattled Acadian how even the hardest of men might break and betray his friends if nailed to a cross or threatened with seeing his children tortured?

Between bites of blackened deer meat Berkuar said, 'These are the worst of times, and strange, too. There are bad things in the deep woods. I've heard stories of woodcutters whose minds the Crucificr has seized and forced like puppets to his will so that they chop down friends and family with their axes — and I believe them. There are the ones you call the Grays. They freeze men's blood like winter does water, and steal children from their beds. Something, in the woods to the far west, turns men to stone. And then there is the Skadarak.'

I shivered to hear Berkuar say this word. Seeing this, he went on.

'It is,' he said, 'a bad, bad place. There, the trees grow black and twisted, and the animals devour their own young. Pass nearby it, and it draws you without your knowing you are being drawn. Take the wrong path through the forest, and it will capture you like a fly in a spider's web. And then the Dark Thing will devour you.'

'But what it this 'Dark Thing'?' Maram asked him.

'It is the Skadarak,' Berkuar said simply, staring at Maram. 'Haven't you listened to what I've said?'

He went on to explain that in the Skadarak, the forest itself was like an living entity: ancient, powerful and malevolent.

'We've been advised,' I said to Berkuar, 'to avoid this place.'

'And good advice that is. But if you're journeying west to the Red Desert, it won't be so easy to avoid.'

'Why not? Do you not know where it lies? Can't we bypass it?'

'I know where it lies,' Berkuar said. 'But how will you bypass it? To the north of the Skadarak, in the hills, you'll find the mineworks. There the Red Priests and the soldiers are as thick as flies on a flayed ewe. To the south, for a hundred miles, are the Cold Marshes. And to the south of that lie the lands around Varkeva, where the armies of Urwin the Lame and cadres of Red Priests, the Grays, too, would likely discover you — and likely blame you when the news of what happened at Gladwater gets out.'

I thought about this as I took a bite of deer meat, which was charred black on the outside and bloody red inside, the way the Greens liked to eat it. And I said, 'But you who wear the green must range your land freely, if you're to fight your enemies as you do. How would you cross Acadu then?'

Pittock, the tall, angular man I had noticed earlier, answered for Berkuar, saying, 'If we were journeying west, we would cross the mine lands where the hills are most broken, or pass south of the Cold Marshes. But we do not journey as you do.'

'What do you mean?' Maram asked him.

'We can climb walls of bare rock where we have to. We've no horses to whinny and snort, and leave tracks in the ground as deep as a pond,' he explained. Then he looked pointedly at Maram. 'And we don't trample the bracken as loudly as an ox — we go on foot, as silent as deer and nearly as invisible as weryan.'

'Weryan?' Maram said. 'What is that — I've never heard of such an animal?'

'That is because no one has ever seen one,' Pittock said mysteriously — and maddeningly.

Berkuar was no help in telling anything more about these 'invisible', and probably fantastical, beasts. But then, as his jaw set and he seemed to come to a decision, I looked upon him as a guiding angel, for he said, 'There is a way through the wild woods, north of the Cold Marshes yet just south of the Skadarak. A narrow way. I know I can find a path through it.'

'Are you sure?' Maram asked him. 'We were warned not to go near that place, and this doesn't seem very much like avoiding it.'

Berkuar shrugged his shoulders then spat into the fire. 'You have your choice then: the likelihood of keeping an arm's distance from the Skadarak against the near certainty of being discovered by the Red Priests.'

'Oh, excellent!' Maram said, looking up past the branches of the trees toward the sky. 'Why am I always so fortunate as to be given such wonderful choices?'

I tried not to laugh as I looked at Berkuar. 'If you would guide us past the Skadarak, we would be fortunate indeed.'

'I will guide you past it,' Berkuar said, 'all the way to the mountains where Acadu comes to an end.'

He smiled at me as we clasped hands to set the seal of our new fellowship. Then he choose out Gorman, Pittock and a dark, hard-looking man named Jastor to accompany us as well.

'But what of the rest of you?' Maram asked as his hand swept out toward the thirty other Greens eating their breakfasts around the other fires. 'Whatever dangers we'll find between here and the mountains would be better met with thirty extras archers than with three.'

'Perhaps they would,' Berkuar said to him. 'But we've dangers of our own to deal with. And vengeance to be meted.'

Here he looked at a lean, gray-haired man named Tarl, whom I took to be one of the Greens' captains. A series of whistles, like that of two singing larks, passed between them. Then Berkuar said, 'My men have the survivors of Gladwater to look after. And the enemy to look for. The Red Priest called Edric sent Harwell and the Crucifiers into the woods near Gladwater. He'll be hunted down and killed like the snake he is.'

So, I thought, as I sipped from a mug of tea that Liljana had brewed for us, one or more of the Greens would find Edric, perhaps leading a company of Crucifiers through the woods against Riversong or some other village along the Tir. They would surprise him through the trees and kill him with arrows. And then Arch Yatin would send other Red Priests and soldiers, in greater numbers, to crucify and slay in vengeance of their own, and the cycle of death would grow only greater and would go on and on. Who was I to stop it? I, who had brought so much death and destruction down upon my countrymen and those whom I most loved? Truly, I hated war as I hated Morjin himself, but there would be no end to it until the Shining One was found and claimed mastery of the Lightstone. Toward this single purpose I must direct all my will, for I could see no other hope.

And so I swallowed my bitter tea, and looked at Tarl and the other Greens in silence. In an hour, after breakfast, they would journey on east to seek their fate, while my friends and I, led by Berkuar and his three fellow woodsmen, would try to force our way deeper into the darkest of woods.

Chapter 13

We moved at a good speed through the woods all that day. A few miles farther on, we forded the Iskand, as Berkuar had promised, and came out into more open woods again. Many people lived in this part of Acadu, spread out between the Iskand and the great Ea River, and Berkuar and his men knew many of them. But they chose paths that led around and away from the villages and even the small farms breaking the forest. Although we might have