his hand on my forehead. 'Your fever has returned,' he told me. 'I'll make you some tea.' While he went off to fetch some water and prepare his bitter brew, Atara soaked a cloth in the cool water of the stream and returned to press it against my head. Her fingers – callused from years of pulling a bowstring – were incredibly gentle as she brushed back my sweat-soaked hair. She was quiet, her full lips pressed together with her concern.
'Do you think his wound is infected?' Maram said to Master Juwain. 'I thought it was getting better.'
'Let's see,' Master Juwain said as the water for the tea was heating. 'Let's get your mail off, Val.'
They helped strip me bare to the waist, and then Master Juwain removed my bandage to examine my wound. He probed it gently, and pronounced that it was healing again and looked clean enough. After bandaging my side and helping me dress, he sat by his pot of boiling water and looked at me in puzzlement. 'Do you think it's the kirax?' Maram asked.
'I don't think so,' Master Juwain said. 'But it's possible.' 'And what,' Atara asked, 'is kirax?'
Master Juwain turned to me as if wondering how much he should tell her. In answer, I nodded my head. 'It's a poison,' Master Juwain said. 'A terrible poison.'
He went on to recount how an assassin's arrow had wounded me in the woods outside Silvassu. He explained how the priests of the Kallimun sometimes used kirax to slay horribly at Morjin's bidding.
'Oh, but you make evil enemies, don't you?' Atara said to me. 'It would seem so,' I said. Then I smiled at Master Juwain, Maram and her. 'But; also the best of friends.' Atara returned my smile then asked, 'But why should Morjin wish you dead?'
That was one of the questions of my life I most wanted answered. Because I had nothing to say, I shrugged my shoulders and stared off at the glow of the dawn in the east.
'Well, if he does wish you dead and this man Kane is the one he has sent after you, I have a present for him.' So saying, Atara drew forth an arrow from her quiver and pointed it west toward Argattha. 'Morjin's assassins aren't the only ones who can shoot arrows, you know.'
After that I drank my tea and ate a little breakfast. Although my fever faded with the coming of the day, a dull headache remained to torment me. Some big, dark clouds moved over the land from the north, and I could almost feel the pressure of them smothering the forest. Before we could even put away our cooking pots and break camp, it started to rain a steady drumming of cold drops that drove down through the trees and beat against my head. Matter Juwain pointed out that we would stay drier in the woods than on the open road, he suggested remaining these another day in order to recover our strength. 'No,' I said. 'We can rest when we get to Tria.'
Master Juwain, who could sometimes be cunning, shook his head at me and said,
'You're tired, Val. So are the horses.'
In the end it was the condition of the horses that decided me. We had pressed them hard for many miles, and they hadn't had a good feed of grain since Duke Gorador's castle. Although they had found grass along our way, this wasn't enough to keep them fat and happy – especially Altaru, who needed some oats in his belly to keep his huge body driving forward. I realized that for a couple of days, he had been telling me that he was hungry, but I hadn't been listening And so I consented to Master Juwain's suggestion. Against Maram's protests, I led him and the other horses most of the oats that we had been reserving far our morning porridge. As I reminded Maram, we still had some cheese and nuts, and quite a few battle biscuits.
And so we remained there for the rest of the day. The rain seemed only to come down harder with each passing hour. We sat huddled beneath the meager shelter of the trees listening to its patter against the leaves. I was very grateful for the cloak that my mother had made for me, I kept it wrapped tightly about me. as I did the white wool scarf my grandmother had knitted. To pass, the time, I took out Jonathay's chess set, I played some games with Maram and then Atara. It surprised me that she beat me every time, for I hadn't known the Sarni studied such civilized games. I might have blamed my poor play on my throbbing head, but I didn't want to diminish Atara's victory.
'Would you like to play me?' Atara asked Maram after I had lost my fourth game.
'You've been sitting out a while.'
'No, thank you,' Maram said. 'It's more fun watching Val lose.'
Atara began setting up the pieces for a new game as Maram shivered miserably beneath his red cloak and said, 'I'm cold, I'm weary, I'm wet. But at least this rain should keep the bears holed up. There hasn't been any sign of them – has there?'
'No,' I said to encourage him. 'The bears don't like rain.'
'And there's been no sign of Kane or anyone else – has anyone seen any sign?'
Both Master Juwain and Atara reassured him that, except for the rain, the woods had been as silent as they were wet. I wanted to reassure him as well. But I couldn't – nor could I comfort myself. For ever since I had awakened from my nightmare, I'd had a gnawing sensation in my belly that some beast was hunting for me, sniffing at the air and trying to catch my scent through the pouring rain. As the grayness of the afternoon deepened, this sensation grew stronger. And so I resolved to. break camp and travel hard at first light no matter rain or fever or the tiredness of the horses.
That night I had worse nightmares. My fever returned, and Master Juwain's tea did little to cool it But as I had promised myself, in the morning we set out on the road.
It was grim work plodding over the drenched paving stones through the rain. The whole world narrowed to this tunnel of stone cutting east through the dark green woods and the even darker gray sky. Master Juwain said that in Alonia, it sometimes rained like this for days without end. Maram wondered aloud how it was that the sky could hold whole oceans among its cold currents of air. Atara said that on the Wendrush, it rained fiercely but rarely so steadily as this. Then, to cheer us, she began singing a song meant to charm the rain away.
Just before dusk, as we were making camp in the dripping woods, the rain finally broke. My fever didn't. It seemed to be centered in my head, searing all my senses, cooking my brain. I had no evil dreams that night only because I couldn't sleep. I lay awake on the cold, sodden earth toss-ing and turning and hoping that the sky might clear and the stars would come out. But the clouds remained thick and heavy long past midnight; through the long hours of darkness, the sky seemed lower than it should be. Morning's thin light showed a gray mist lying over the tops of the trees. It was a bad day for travel, I thought, but travel we must.
'You're still hot,' Master Juwain told me as he tested my head. 'And you're so pale, Val – I'm afraid you're growing weaker.'
In truth, I was so weak that I could hardly hold the mug of tea that Maram gave me or move my mouth to speak. But I had to warn them of my feeling of being followed because it was growing ever stronger. 'Someone is coming for us,' I said. 'Maybe Kane – maybe others.' This news alarmed Maram almost as much as it surprised Atara. Her blonde eyebrows arched as she asked, 'But we've seen no sign of anyone since the hills. Why should you think someone is pursuing us?' 'Val has a sense about such things,' Master Juwain tried to explain. Atara cast me a long, penetrating look and then nodded her head as if she understood. She seemed to see me as no one ever had before; she both believed me and believed in me, and I loved her for that.
'Someone is coming for us, you say,' Maram muttered as he stood by the fire scanning the woods. 'Why didn't you tell us, Val?'
I, too, stood staring off through the woods; I hadn't told them anything because I had doubted what I had sensed, even as I doubted it now. Only two days before, in my joy at rinding Atara, I had opened myself to the whole world and had been stricken by the beauty of the sun and the sky, by the sweetness of the flowers and the trees and the wind. But what if my gift, quickened by the kirax in my blood, had also opened me to other things? What if I were picking up on every fox in the forest stalking the many rabbits and voles? What if I could somehow sense the killing instinct of every bear, racoon and weasel – as well as every fly-catching frog and worm-hunting bird and all the other creatures around us? Might I not have mistaken this flood of natural urges for a feeling that someone was hunting me? And yet it was the sheer unnaturalness of what I now felt that filled me with dread. Something slimy and unclean seemed to want to fasten itself to the back of my neck and suck the fluids from my spine; something like a clot of worms gnawed continually at my belly.
I was afraid that if I let them, they would eat their way up through my heart and head and bleed away my very life. And so, because I was afraid that this horrible thing might be coming for Atara and the others, too, I decided that it was long past time that I warned them of the danger.
'My apologies for not telling you sooner,' I said to Maram. 'But I had to be sure.
There is a wrongness here.'
Maram, who remembered very well our near-death at the Telemesh Gate, drew in a quick breath and asked,
