Diamond Warriors

and question you.'

Now Lord Harsha's face filled with a choler of its own. He rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, which he too had leaned against the edge of the table. He said, 'I have taken steel, wood and iron through my body in service of your father and grandfather, and have never betrayed anyone!'

I said to Lord Harsha: 'My apologies, sir. But you know what the Red Dragon and the Prince of Ishka did to my mother and grandmother. Don't be so sure you would be able to keep your silence if he did the same to your daughter.'

Lord Harsha removed his hand from his sword and made a fist. He looked at it a moment, before saying to me 'No, my apologies. Lord Valashu. These are hard, bad times You did

what you had to do, as we have done. And it's good that we're gathered here together, for this is a family matter, and you and your friends are like family to Sar Maram. And so you should advise him on what our course should be.'

'What can our course be?' Maram said. 'Other than this: you promised Behira to me first! And promises must be kept!'

Lord Harsha pressed his hand against his eye patch as if he could still feel the piercing pain of the arrow that long ago had half-blinded him. And he said to Maram, 'On the field of the Raaswash more than two years ago, you promised to wed my daughter, and I still see no ring upon her finger.'

Now it was Behira's turn to make a fist as she set her right hand over her left.

'But I had duties!' Maram said to Lord Harsha. 'There were quests to be undertaken, journeys to be made, to Tria, across the Wendrush — and beyond. And the battles we fought were — '

'Excuses,' Lord Harsha snapped out. 'For three years, you've been making excuses and putting my daughter off. Well, now it's too late.'

'But I love Behira!' Maram half-shouted.

At this, Behira lifted up her head and turned to gaze down the table at Maram. Her face brightened with hope and longing. It was the first time, I thought, that either she or any of us had heard Maram announce his affection for her so openly.

'Love,' Lord Harsha said to Maram, 'is the fire that lights the stars, and we should all surrender up our deepest love to the One that created them. And a father loves his daughter, which is why I promised Behira to you in the first place, for every hour I had to bear my daughter's talk of loving you. But everyone knows that such love matches often end unhappily. That kind of love is only for the stars, not for men and women, for it quickly bums out.'

At this, I reached over and took hold of Atara's hand. The warmth of her fingers squeezing mine reminded me of that bright and beautiful star to which our souls would always return. I did not believe that it could ever die.

'Are you saying,' Maram asked Lord Harsha, 'that a man should not love his wife?'

On the wall above the table hung a bright tapestry that Lord Harsha's dead wife had once woven. He gazed at it with an obvious fondness, and he said, 'Of course a man should come to love his wife. But it is best if marriage comes first, and so then a man does not let love sweep away his reason so that he loses sight of the more important things.'

'But what could be more important than love?' Maram asked.

And Lord Harsha told him, 'Honor, above all else.'

'But I had to honor my duty to Val, didn't I?'

Lord Harsha nodded his head. 'Certainly you did. But before you went off with him, you might have married my daughter and given her your name.'

'But I -

'Too, you might have given her your estates, such as they are, and most important of all, a child.'

As the look of longing lighting up Behira's face grew even brighter, Maram closed his mouth, for he seemed to have run out of objections. And then he said, 'But our journeys were dangerous! You can't imagine! I didn't want to leave behind a fatherless child.' Lord Harsha sighed at this, then said, 'In our land, since the Great Battle, there are many fatherless children. And too few men to be husbands to all the widows and maidens.'

All my life, I had heard of the ancient Battle of the Sarburn referred to in this way, but it seemed strange for Lord Harsha to give the recent Battle of the Culhadosh Commons that name as well.

'Sar Joshu himself,' Lord Harsha continued, 'lost his father and both his brothers there.'

Joshu looked straight at me then, and I felt in him the pain of a loss that was scarcely less than my own. I remembered that his mother had died giving him birth, while his two older sisters had been married off. Joshu had inherited his family's rich farm lands only a few miles from here, and who could blame Lord Harsha for wanting to join estates and take this orphan into his own family?

'Sar Joshu,' I said, looking down the table. I studied the two diamonds set into the silver ring that encircled his finger. 'Before the battle, my brother gave you your warrior's ring. And now you wear that of a knight?'

Sar Joshu bowed his head at this, but seemed too modest to say anything. And so Lord Harsha told us of his deeds: 'You came late, Lord Valashu, to the fight with the Ikurians, and so you did not witness Sar Joshu's slaying of two knights in defense of Lord Asaru. Nor the lance wound through his lung that unhorsed him and nearly killed him. In reward for his valor. Lord Sharad, Lord Avijan and myself agreed that he should be knighted.'

Now I could only bow my head to Joshu. 'Then Mesh has another fine knight to help make up for those who have fallen.'

'Nothing,' Joshu said, 'can ever replace those who fell at the Great Battle.'

I thought of my father and my six brothers, and I said, 'No, of course not. But as I have had to learn, life still must go on.'

'And that,' Lord Harsha said, 'is exactly the point I have been trying to make. Morjin's cursed armies cut down a whole forest of warriors and knights. It's time new seeds were planted and new trees were grown.'

I considered this as I studied the way that Joshu looked at Behira. I sensed in him a burning passion — but not for her.

'Sar Joshu,' I asked, 'have you ever been in love?'

He looked down at his hands, and he said simply, 'Yes, Lord Valashu.'

As Behira took charge of finally passing around the roasted chickens, blueberry muffins, mashed potatoes and asparagus that she had prepared for dinner, it came out that Joshu had indeed known the kind of all-consuming love that makes the very stars weep — and he still did. It seemed that he had been smitten by a young woman named Sarai Garvar, of the Lake Country Garvars. But a great lord had married her instead.

'My father was to have spoken with her father, Lord Garvar, after the battle,' Joshu told us. Although he shrugged his shoulders, I felt his throat tighten with a great sadness. 'But my father died, my brothers, too, and so it nearly was with me. And so I lost her to another. Everyone knows how bitter Lord Tanu was when the enemy killed his wife during the sack of the Elahad castle. So who can blame him for wanting to take a new wife? And who can blame Lord Garvar for wanting to make a match with one of Mesh's greatest lords?'

Lord Tanu, of course, had been not only my father's second-in-command but held large estates around Godhra, and his family owned many of the smithies there. As Joshu had said, who could blame any father for wanting to join fortunes with such a man?

'But Lord Tanu is old!' Behira suddenly called out as she banged a spoonful of potatoes against her plate. She seemed outraged less for Joshu's sake than for Lord Tanu's new wife. 'And Sarai is only my age!'

'Here, now!' Lord Harsha said, laying his hand upon her arm. 'Mind the crockery, will you? Your mother made it herself out of good clay before you were born!'

Behira looked down at the disk of plain earthenware before her, and she fell into a silence, And I said to Joshu, 'Then if any man should appreciate Maram's feelings in this matter, it is you.'

'I do,' he agreed, nodding his head sadly to Maram. 'But Lord Harsha is right: how can any man's feelings count at a time such as this?'

Although I sensed his sympathy for Maram, there was steel in him too, and great stubbornness. I knew that, having lost one prospective bride, he would not easily surrender what Lord Harsha had rightly deemed as a good match.

For a while we busted ourselves eating the hearty food that Behira had prepared us* For dessert, she