brown hair, the dolphins gathered offshore as if holding a council of their own.
'How did you know the Sea People were here?' Maram asked Liljana after she dressed herself and rejoined us. 'Did you really smell them?'
'Yes, doubtful Prince,' she said, 'in a way, I did.'
She cast a quick look at the squeaking dolphins, and so did we.
'Did they speak to you?' I asked her.
'Yes, they did,' she said. Her hazel eyes fell sad and dreamy. Then she continued,
'But I'm afraid I didn't understand them.'
'So it's been for thousands of years,' Kane said. 'No one can speak to the Sea People anymore.'
Liljana looked out to where Flick spun like a silver wheel over the water in the direction of the dolphins. Then she said, 'They want to speak with us. I know they do.'
'Ha – why should the Sea People speak with us?' Kane asked. 'It's said that ever since the Age of Swords, men have hunted them like fishes.'
'We have much to tell each other,' Liljana said wistfully. 'I know we do.'
We stood on the beach for quite a while staring out at the immense barrier of water that separated us from the whales. Then Alphanderry suddenly stuck out his arm and said, 'Look, they're swimming away!'
Indeed, the whole dolphin tribe was now swimming slowly parallel to the shore toward the west. Liljana slowly nodded her head, watching them. And then she said,
'They want us to follow them.'
'But how do you know?' I asked her.
'I just know,' she told me.
'But where are they leading us, then?'
'Wherever they will,' she said, looking at me sternly. My doubt seemed to wound her, and she said, 'Have I asked you, young Prince, where you've been leading us all these long days?'
'But it's been clear that we've been heading toward the Bay of Whales.'
'And now we're here,' she said. She kept her voice calm and controlled, but I could feel a great excitement inside her. 'Will you help me discover what these people want from us?'
Her soft, searching eyes called to mind all the kindnesses she had done for me on our journey and suggested that I would be churlish to refuse her. Without waiting for me to answer, she began walking quickly down the beach, all the while keeping her gaze fixed upon the dolphins. It was left to me to gather up the others and break camp as quickly as we could.
We caught up with her about three miles down the beach. While Maram and Master Juwain took charge of the pack horses and Liljana's gelding, Alphanderry and traced our horses with Kane's and Atara's along the water's edge. After the clutching vegetation of the Vardaloon, it was good to move over open country again. Altaru snorted and shook with a joyous power as I gave him his head. His hooves pounded against the wet, hardpacked sand leaving great holes in it. But although he was the strongest of the horses and faster than even Atara's very fast Fire, he could not quite keep up with Alphanderry as he sang to Iolo and urged his white Tervolan forward.
What the dolphins made of us as we galloped clear past Liljana before wheeling about was impossible to say. For they just kept swimming a few hundred yards offshore as if they had all the time in the world to lead us toward some secret place.
'Perhaps they know where the Lightstone is,' Maram said as he and Master Juwain also caught up with Liljana. He handed Liljana the reins of her horse. 'Perhaps Sartan Odinan fled north from Argattha with the Gelstei and was stopped here by the ocean. Perhaps he died on this forsaken shore, and all knowledge of the Lightstone with him.'
What Maram had suggested seemed unlikely – but no more so than any other speculation as to the Lightstone's fate. We grew silent after that, each of us holding inside the image of this sacred golden cup. Our hopes fairly floated in the air like the puffy white clouds above the Bay. We were all a little excited, and we rode our horses at a bone-jarring trot as we tried to keep pace with the dolphins.
For hours, as the sun crossed the sky to the south, we made our way along the beach. The dunes gradually gave way to a headland of water-eaten limestone while the beach narrowed to a ribbon of rocky sand scarcely twenty yards wide. The horses hurt their hooves on this rough shingle. If we pressed them much harder, I thought, they would pull up lame. As it was, they were still weak from what the Vardaloon had taken from them and could not continue this way for long.
And then, just as I feared the beach would vanish to nothing between the headland to our left and the crashing surf, we came upon a cove cut into the stark, white cliffs.
Great rocks broke from the shallows and the sand. There was little beach there, and most of it was covered with driftwood, pebbles and great heaps of shells. I did not think we could take the horses across it, not even if we dismounted and led them on foot. It seemed that we could follow the dolphins no further. And then I saw Liljana looking out to sea, and I looked, too. The dolphins had ceased their tireless swimming and were now gathered together in the rippling water. They whistled and clicked at us with great urgency. And all of their long, smiling faces were pointed straight toward the cove.
Liljana, of course, needed no further encouragement to dismount and begin searching along the beach. And neither did the rest of us. After we had tied the horses to a couple of great logs, we walked among the piles of shells, crunching them with our boots. Here and there, upon catching a glimpse of a pretty pebble or a golden shell, we would pause and drop to our knees as we dug at the beach. With every passing moment, as our breaths rushed in and out and the surf pounded wildly, it seemed more and more likely that Sartan Odinan had died here after all.
Time and the relentless wash of the waves, we supposed, had buried his bones beneath layers of shells and sand. If we dug in the right place, we might find his remains – and the Lightstone.
All that long afternoon we searched there. Twice I thought I'd caught a glimpse of it.
But we found no golden cup nor any other thing made by the hand of man – or the angels. We might have given up if the dolphins had swum away. And then at last, with the sun falling down toward the ocean like a flaming arrow, Liljana let out a little cry. She bent down and plucked something from the carpet of shells. She held it up in the slanting light for us all to see.
'What is it?' Maram asked, stepping over to her. 'It looks like glass.'
'Driftglass,' Master Juwain said, looking at it. 'I used to collect such things when I was a boy.'
The driftglass, if that it truly was, was deep blue in color and about the size of Liljana's thumb. It was old and chipped and scoured smooth by the sea.
'It looks like a whale,' Maram said. 'Don't you think?'
As Liljana turned it over and over in her tapering fingers, we saw that it was cast into a little figurine shaped like a whale. What it had been used for or how it had come here, no one could say.
And then Liljana suddenly made a fist around the glass and pressed it against the side of her head. Her eyes glazed as they stared out at the dolphins and then closed altogether.
'Liljana,' Master Juwain said to her, 'are you all right?'
But she didn't answer him. She just stood there utterly still facing the sea. Strangely, the dolphins also fell silent. The only sounds about us were the cries of the seagulls along the cliffs and the ocean's long, dark roar. We were all concerned for Liljana, but we knew not to speak lest the spell be broken. And so we gathered around her, breathing in the smells of seaweed and the salty spray thrown up by the crash of the water against the rocks.
At last Liljana opened her eyes and smiled as she nodded her head She looked down at the figurine gleaming dark blue in the palm of her hand. And then she said, 'This is no driftglass.'
Master Juwain bent his bald head down to get a better look at the figurine. He asked,
'May I see it?'
Liijana rather reluctantly gave it to him, and he turned it beneath his sparkling gray eyes.
'It's a gelstei,' Liljana said. 'Surely it is a gelstei.'
Master Juwain's bushy eyebrows pulled together as he looked at the figurine more closely.
'I spoke with the Sea People,' Liljana said. 'I could hear their words inside me.'
The blue gelstei, I recalled as I looked at the figurine, were the stones of truthsaying, languages and dreams. In certain gifted people, they also quickened the power of speaking mind to mind.
'I see, I see,' Master Juwain said, giving back the figurine. 'I believe it is a blue gelstei.'
