Swans. As the fiery liquor warned my throat and the sun warmed the world, I looked down at the silver swan shining from my surcoat. The Old Ones' revelation about the island, I sensed, was a great, good omen. For the swan was not only sacred to the Valari but a sign of bright things to come.
Chapter 25
We traveled all that day toward the west. After retreating a few miles back down the beach, we found a path that led up along the headland over looking the sea. This we followed for many more miles along the coast. It was rough terrain, broken by many cliffs and coves, and we found that we could best traverse it by keeping inland where the ground was somewhat level and covered with elderleaf and pepperbush and other such shrubs. We saw some seals on a rocky beach below us and many birds: cormorants and peregrine falcons and merlins splitting the air with their high-pitched cries. But the entire country seemed empty of people. Where we might find there fishermen or mariners with ships to take us over the ocean, none of us knew. Even so, we rode on in high spirits buoyed up by the bracing wind and our renewed hopes.
'It must be two hundred and fifty miles to Eanna's border,' Kane said as he cast his eyes west toward that old and distant kingdom. 'And again as much to Ivalo. There are galliots and whalers there, if I remember. And smaller ships. One of them would likely take us to this Island of the Swans.'
'Five hundred miles!' Maram complained. 'Well we've come farther than that since Mesh. If we can cross the Vardaloon, we can cross this desolate country – and the sea.'
It was unlike him to be so cheerful, but the salty air and the brilliant waters below us seemed to work a magic upon him. He sat astride his sorrel humming to himself and quite pleased at having abundant sun with which to fill his firestone. More than once, along that windy and open track, he let loose a bolt of fire that incinerated a cluster of goldenrod or fused a patch of sand into glass. He might have aimed his crystal at the sea itself and tried to boil it away if Kane hadn't kept close to him with hit black gelstei at the ready and his even blacker eyes watching him like an eagle.
Because we were all still tired, we didn't get very far that day. The horses were nearly spent and none of us had the heart to push them – or ourselves. And so late in the afternoon, when the ground grew lower and we came upon a mead fairly rippling with long, green grass, we decided to make camp. We picketed the horses along the mead so that they could eat their fill, then spread out our furs on the beach just below it.
After piling up a good deal of driftwood for our fire and doing our other chores, we bathed in the ocean along with the anemones thai floated in the shallows, and the sea lettuce and rockweed and other plants that Master Juwain named. We gathered up whelks and mussels, and sat around our fire pulling them out of their shells to make our evening meal. The gulls watched us closely even as we watched the sandpipers skipping along and making their peetweet cries. Out above the sea, the ospreys glided and swooped and grabbed up fish in their gray talons.
And then, like a cloud that had been building for most of a day, a casual comment cast a shadow on our bright mood.
'I wish we had some of those tomcods,' Liljana said, pointing at a wriggling length of silver that an osprey held. 'I know everyone would like a little fish for dinner.'
'Ah, but how did you know that?' Maram asked, 'None of us spoke of eating fish.'
He studied the blue figurine that she held in her hand, and then eyed her suspiciously.
'Well, you didn't have to. I saw the way you looked at them.'
'You did, did you? Ah, but did you by chance happen to look into our minds?'
Liljana's round, pleasant face reddened as if she had been slapped 'No, Prince Maram Marshayk, I did not!'
It was strange, I thought, that although my friends rather welcomed my being able to sense their emotions, none of them wanted Liljana listening to their thoughts. And neither did I.
'Are you sure you couldn't hear what I was thinking?' Maram asked.
I stood up and walked around the fire past Kane before sitting down between Liljana and Maram. Then I told him, 'If Liljana says that she wasn't listening to your thoughts, you shouldn't doubt her.'
'Oh, shouldn't he?' Liljana said to me. 'And why shouldn't he, young Prince, since you doubt me yourself?'
'Did you hear me say anything about doubting you?' I asked.
'You didn't have to,' Liljana told me. 'Since your eyes say it all.'
Maram cracked opened a whelk with a sudden slap of a rock. 'Do you see, Val, she can hear your thoughts! It's that damn stone of hers.'
Liljana held up her blue gelstei and said, 'I don't need this for that when I have my eyes and nose.'
She turned toward me and said, 'What have I done to make you doubt me so? Do you think I haven't learned from bitter necessity to read the motives of powerful men, Valashu Elahad?' She squeezed the whale-shape figurine. 'Before I ever dreamed of finding this, I knew that your thoughts were turning in one direction.'
'And which direction is that?'
'From the hate in your voice. I would guess toward the Lord of Lies.'
I saw Kane, Atara and Master Juwain looking at me and I said. 'Yes this is true.'
'He's found you in your dreams again, hasn't he?' Liljana asked.
'In my dreams, yes.'
'And this makes you furious, doesn't it?'
'Yes,' I admitted, 'it does.'
'And you're afraid of this terrible fury of yours, aren't you? You think about ways of not being afraid don't you?'
'That's true.' I said, staring out away from the beach.
'And so you think about the Lightstone – all the time.'
In truth, most of my waking hours – and many of my dreams – were spent in looking for the golden glow of the Lightsone inside myself. As I now looked for it above the streaming waters of the sea.
Liljana touched my hand and reassured me, 'I don't think I can go inside anyone's mind unless they let me. I don't think I could hear their thoughts unless they spoke them to me.'
'No, you don't have that power,' I said, looking at her. 'Not yet.'
I thought of the dream that Morjin had sent me. And then Kane, who was no mind reader that I knew, pointed at Liljana's figurine and said. 'It's almost certain that Morjin has a blue gelstei, eh? He's always taken the deepest interest in the witches' stones.'
I noticed the puzzled looks on Atara's and Alphanderry's faces, and so I asked,
'Why do you call it that?'
But Kane clamped his jaws shut as he stared at the gelstei and so Master Juwain answered for him: 'The blue gelstei are known to be both difficult and dangerous to use. You see, it's very dangerous to enter another's mind, few are born with the talent, and fewer still can do so without becoming lost or even maddened.'
He went on to to recount something of the history of the blue gelstei or belstei, as he called these crystals. He said that in the Age of the Mother, a physic made from the blue juice of the kirque plant had been found to aid the power of mindspeaking. But the kiriol, as it was called, was harsh on the body and shortened life. And so the alchemists of the Order of Brothers and Sisters of the Earth, inspired by the green gelstei, had tried to fabricate a blue crystal that would retain and magnify the mind-opening properties of the kiriol without its more deleterious effects.
'It took the alchemists a hundred years,' Master Juwain told us. 'Chule Ataru fabricated the first one – it was the first of the great gelstei made on Ea. He gave it to Rihana Hatar, who used it to speak with other Sisters in other lands – and the Sea People as well. That was the beginning of the great years of the Age of the Mother.'
Over the next century and a half, other such crystals had been made. Those who could use them – as with the scryers, these were mostly women – grew very powerful. But many were maddened by what they saw in others' minds, and men began to fear them. They covered their heads with their cloaks as they muttered protective charms and hurried past them. When the Aryans conquered most of Ea's free lands, they feared these mindspeaking Sisters, too, and called them witches. As many as they could find, they put to the sword. Their gelstei
