Diamond Warriors

who know you. There can't be many in this district who will fail to acclaim you when the time comes.'

'No, perhaps not many.'

'And there can't be any who have gone over to the Red Dragon, despite what that barbarian chieftain said. Surely it will be safe to show ourselves here. After all, we don't have to give out our names.'

I only smiled at this. Even in the best of times. Mesh saw few strangers from other lands. Maram and my other friends would stand out here like rubies and sapphires in a tapestry woven of diamonds. The Valari are a tall people, with long, straight black hair, angular faces like the planes of cut stone, dark ivory skin and bright black eyes. None of us looked anything like that — none of us, of course, except myself.

'As soon as we show ourselves,' I told Maram, 'the word will spread that Valashu Elahad and his companions have returned to Mesh. We should hear what Lord Harsha advises before that moment comes.'

We rode on for a while, into a small clearing, and then Bstrella, who was good at finding things, espied a bush near its edge bearing ripe, red raspberries. She nudged her horse over to it, then dismounted. Her joyful smile seemed an invitation for all of us to join her in a midafternoon refreshment. And so the rest of us dismounted as well, and began plucking the soft, little fruits.

'These,' Maram said, as he filled his mouth with a handful of raspberries, 'would make a good meal for any bear.'

'And you,' I said, poking his big belly with a smile, 'would make a better one.'

Master Juwain, a short man with a large head as bald as a walnut, stepped over to me. His face, I thought, with his large gray eyes, had always seemed as luminous as the moonlit sea. He looked at me deeply, then said, 'We are close to the place that the bear attacked you, aren't we?'

'Yes, close,' I said, staring off through the elms. Then I turned back to smile at him. 'But you aren't afraid of bears, too, are you, sir?'

'I'm afraid of you, Valashu Elahad. That is, afraid for you.' He pointed a gnarly finger at me as he fixed me with a deep, knowing look. 'Most of us flee from that which torments us, but you must always seek out the thing you most dread and go poking it with a stick.'

I only laughed at this as I reached back to grip the hilt of my sword, slung over my shoulder. I said, 'But, sir, I have no stick — only this blade. And I'm sure I won't have to use it today against any bear.'

Daj, munching on some raspberries, returned my smile in confidence that I had spoken the truth, and so did Estrella. They pressed in close to me, not to take comfort from the protection of my sword — not just — but because such nearness gladdened all our hearts. Then I noticed Atara standing next to the raspberry bush as she held her bow in one hand and her scryer's sphere of clear, white gelstei with her other. The sun's light poured down upon her in a bright shower. Her beautiful face, as perfectly proportioned as the sculptures of the angels, turned toward me. She smiled at me, too: but coldly, as if she had seen some terrible future that she did not wish to share. All she said to me was: 'The only bear you'll find here today is the one that nearly killed you years ago. It still lives, doesn't it?'

Yes, I thought, as my fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword, the bear called out from somewhere inside me — and in some strange way, from somewhere in these woods. Even as Asaru, who had saved me from the bear, still lived on as well. My mother and grandmother, and all my murdered family, seemed to take on life anew in the stems of the wildflowers and in the breath of the leaves of the new maple trees. My father, I knew, would always stand beside me like the mountains of the land that t loved.

Liljana, who could not smile, came up to me and grasped my hand. Her iron-gray hair framed her pretty lace, which too often fell stern and forbidding. But despite her relentless and domineering manner she could be the kindest of women, and the wisest, too. She said to me, 'You've always been drawn to these woods, haven't you?'

Her calm, hazel eyes filled with understanding. She didn't need to call on the power of her blue gelstei to read my mind — or rather, to know what grieved my heart.

Across the clearing through the shadowed gloom of the elms, I heard a tanager trilling out notes that sounded much like a robins song shureet, shuroo. I looked for this bird but I could not see it. It seemed that this wood, above all other places, held answers to the secret of my past and the puzzle of my future. There dwelled a power here that called to me like a song of fire racing along my blood.

'Drawn, yes,' I said to Liljana. I felt a nameless dread working at my insides like ice water. 'And repelled, too.'

'Well.' Maram said, wiping a bit of raspberry juice from his lip, 'I wish you had been repelled a little more that day Salmelu shot you with his filthy arrow. But who would have thought a Valari prince would go over to the Dragon and hire out as one of his assassins? And use the filthiest of poisons? Does it still burn you, my friend?'

I pressed my hand to my side in remembrance of that day when Salmelu's poisoned arrow had come streaking out of the tree — not so very far from here. The scratch that it had left in my skin had long since healed but I would forever feel the kirax poison like a heated iron sizzling deep into every fiber of my body.

'Yes, it burns,' I said to him.

'Well, then perhaps we should take greater care here. If a prince of Ishka can turn traitor, then I suppose a Meshian can — though I've always thought your countrymen preserved the soul of the Valari, so to speak.'

I suddenly recalled Lansar Raasharu, my father's greatest lord who had lost his soul and his very humanity to Morjin through a hate and a leaf that I knew only too well.

And I said, 'No one is immune from evil.'

'No one except you.'

I felt my throat tighten in anger as I said 'Myself least of all Maram. You should know that.'

'I know what I saw during this last Journey of ours. Who else but you could have led us out of the Skadarak?'

I did not need to close my eyes to feel the blighted forest called the Skadarak pulling me down into an icy cold blackness that had no bottom. Sometimes, when I looked into the black centers of Maram's eyes — or my own — I felt myself hurtling down through empty space again.

'Do not,' I told him, 'speak of that place.'

'But you kept yourself from falling — and all of us as well! And then, at the farmhouse with Morjin, when everything was so impossibly dark, he might have seized your will and made you into a filthy ghul. But as you always do, you found that brightness inside yourself that he couldn't stand against, and you — '

'It is one thing to keep from falling into evil,' I told him. 'And it is another to succeed in accomplishing good. Why don't we try to keep our sight on the task ahead of us?'

'Ah, this impossible task,' Maram muttered, shaking his head.

'Don't you speak that way!' Lilian a scolded him with a wag of her finger. 'The more you doubt, the harder you make it for Val to become king.'

'It's not his kingship that I doubt,' Maram said. 'At least, I don't doubt it on my good days. But even supposing that Val can win Mesh's warriors and knights where he couldn't before, what then? That is the question I've asked myself for a thousand miles.'

So had I asked myself this question. And I said to Maram simply, 'Then Morjin must be defeated.'

'Defeated? Well, I suppose he must, yes, but defeated how?'

Master Juwain rubbed at the back of his brown-skinned head, then sighed out: 'The closer that we have come to our journey's end, the more sure I have become of what our course should be. I told this to Val years ago: that evil cannot be vanquished with a sword, and darkness cannot be defeated in battle but only by shining a bright enough light. And now. the brightest of lights has come into the world.'

He spoke, of course, of Bemossed: a slave whom we had rescued out of Hesperu on the darkest of all our journeys. A simple slave — and perhaps the great Maitreya and Lord of light long prophesied for Ea and all the other worlds of Eluru, I couldn't help smiling in joy whenever I thought of this man whom I loved as a brother.

It gladdened my heart to know that he was well-hidden in the fastness of the White Mountains — in the