'But, dear child, this is our gift to you. If you really hope to find the Cup of Heaven, you'll need this more than I.'
The sunlight glazing off the crystal was so bright that it dazzled all of our eyes. For a moment, it seemed that Atara might disappear through its sparkling surface. And then she said, 'No, this is too much.'
'Please take it,' Mithuna insisted. 'It's time the kristei passed on.'
Atara continued staring at the stone. At last she said. 'Thank you.'
This made Mithuna smile. She cast a long, sad look at the broken Tower and told us. 'It's said that when the Lightstone is found, the kristei will come into its true power, which is not merely to see the future but to create it. Then the Tur-Solonu will be raised up again. Then a new age will begin: the Age of Light we have all seen and yet feared could never come in be.'
With that, she leaned forward and kissed Atara upon the forehead. She told us that she and the other scryers would come to say goodbye to us the next morning, and then she walked off with them into the mountains.
For a while as the sun dropped down toward their rounded peaks, we all stood staring at Atara's crystal sphere. There I saw the reflection of the ruined Tower. But there, too in the shimmering substance of the white gelstei, in my deepest dreams, flickered the form of the Tower as it had once been and might be again: tall and straight and standing like an unbroken pillar beneath the brilliant stars.
Chapter 22
The next morning we packed up the horses and gathered by the river. It was a cool day of big, puffy clouds that drifted slowly past the sun. As promised, Mithuna arrived with the other scryers to say goodbye. They brought cheeses and fresh bread to sustain us on our journey. Although we were grateful for their gift, we needed oats for the horses even more, and this they could not provide. Where we would be going, I thought, we would find no grain and precious little grass.
'The Vardaloon,' Maram said, shaking his head as he adjusted the sad-dle of his sorrel. 'I can't believe we're setting out to cross the Vardaloon.' We might, of course, have retraced our path back through Iviunn and then proceeded north through Jerolin, hugging the mountains until we reached the sea. And there, we might have kept to the oast as we skirted along the edge of the great forest, all the way to the Bay of Whales. But Jerolin was said to be a Kallimun stronghold. And such a course would also be much longer, and might not even bring us to the end of our Quest. After the emptiness of the Tower, I feared dangers that fired up the spirit less than the discouragement of a journey that might seem to have no end.
'There are dangers in the great forest,' Mithuna whispered to me as I stroked Altaru's neck. 'There is something in there.' 'What is it, then?' I whispered back.
'I don't know,' Mithuna said, looking at Ayanna and the other scryers. 'We've never quite been able to see it – it's too dark.'
A shudder rippled through my belly then, and I told her, 'Please say nothing of this to my friends.'
But Maram needed no fell words from Mithuna to feed the flames pf his already vivid imagination. He looked off toward the mountains to the west as he muttered,
'Ah, well, if any bears come for us, we've cold steel to give them. And if the forest grows too deep, we can always burn our way through the trees.'
Here he held up his firestone, which gleamed a dull red in the weak morning light.
Mithuna came over to him and pointed at the crystal. While the other scryers gathered around, and Kane and my friends looked on from where they stood by their horses, Mithuna's sad voice flowed out above the rushing of the river: 'You have a great fire in your heart, and now a great gelstei to hold it. But you must use it only in pursuit of the Lightstone -not for burning trees or against any living thing, if you can help it. This we have all seen.'
To our astonishment, Maram's most of all, she leaned forward and kissed him full upon the lips. Then she laughed out, 'I hope you won't mind leaving me with a little of this fire.' After that, she pointed out a path along the river that led up into the woods surrounding the Tur-Solonu. 'If you follow this west, it will take you over the mountains into the Vardaloon.'
'And then?' Maram asked.
'And then we don't know,' Mithuna said. 'Farther than that none of us has ever been.
I'm afraid you'll have to find your own way through the forest.'
We went among Mithuna and he sister scryers, embracing them and making our final farewell. Then we mounted our horses and lined up in the same order as we had left Tria: I led forth and Kane rode warily at the rear. We left the scryers standing almost in the shadow of the Tur-Solonu as they watched us with cold, clear eyes that seemed as old as time.
For a few miles, we wound our way along the river through the rising woods. Then the path veered off to the right, where the trees grew thickest in an unbroken swath of gleaming leaves. It was a good path that Mithuna had shown us: wide enough for the horses to keep their footing, if a little overgrown. Its pitch was long and low, cutting as it did along the gende slopes of one of the long, low Blue Mountains. High passes such as we had crossed from Mesh into Ishka we would not find here. Nor were there jagged escarpments ready to hurl down boulders upon us or biting cold.
Our greatest obstacle, I thought, would be the forest itself, for it grew thickly all around us, the elms and chestnuts rising up through mats of oak fern and other bracken. Shrubs such as virburn and brambles made for low, green walls between the trees. If the path hadn't cut through this dense vegetation, we would have had to cut through it with our sword. Or burn through it with the firestone that Mithuna had said we must not use.
We traveled all that day through the peaceful mountains. It was quiet in the woodls, with little more to listen to than the tapping of a woodpecker or the calls of the occasional thrush or tanager. And we were quiet as we picked our way along the path; our failure to gain the Lightstone drove all of us inside ourselves, there to ask our souls if we really had the courage to keep on seeking unless illness, wounds or death struck us down first. It was one thing, I thought, to make such a vow in the splendor of King Ki titan's hall, with thousands of shouting | people, each of whom was convinced that he was the one destined to find the golden cup. And it was quite another to continue on through unknown lands after suffering great disappointment and the mud and cold of an already long journey.
And yet we all rode along toward the west in good spirits. We had cause for much faith. Atara's newly found gift and her vision of the Sea People gave us to hope that she might see our way through to the end of our quest. And we had not left the Tur-Solonu with empty hands. Maram had his firestone and Atara her kristei; with Kane's black stone and Master Juwain's healing crystal, that made four of the seven gelstei told of in Ayondela's prophecy. Was this nothing more than the rarest of chances? Or could it be that we were the ones destined to set forth into the darkness and win the Lightstone?
Of course, we all knew that it was not enough simply to have gained these four gelstei. Somehow we must learn how to use them. Toward that end, Master Juwain continued his own private quest of moving the dwelling of his soul from his head to his heart. Often, as we rode through the thick greenery, he would take out his green crystal and hold it up to the swaying leaves as if trying to capture their life-fire and hold it within himself. There, where his blood sang to the music of the birds and all living things, he would find a forest deeper and darker than a thousand Vardaloons.
And with the aid of the gelstei he held in his hand, he must find his own way through it.
Atara had her own paths to negotiate. For her, scrying was a most difficult journey.
Standing beneath the stars at night to unlock time's mysteries came unnaturally to her, for she was a creature of sun and wind and water rushing over open plains. Her temperament inclined her to want to look out upon all things with open eyes and go among the fields and flowers like a wild mare running tree. And to leave all peoples or places she came across better for her passing. This was her will, to work her dreams upon the world. But now she had to call upon all her will to enter the otherworld of dreams of the future. And so, as she rode along behind me though the mountains, she brought forth her crystal sphere and fixed her bright eyes upon it.
She turned inward into that dark place that she hated to go. And there brought what light she could.
As for Maram, he regarded his firestone as might a child who has been given a long-desired birthday present. Even while guiding his sorrel down the steepest segments of the path, he kept his crystal always at hand, now
