'No,' I said, holding up my hand. 'It will be dead soon enough. Let it be.'
Let it be, I told myself, and so I tried. I closed myself to this dying animal then. To keep out the waves of pain nauseating me, by habit and instinct, I surrounded my heart with walls as high and thick as those of my father's castle. After a while, even as I watched the light go out of the squirrel's eye, I felt nothing.
Almost nothing. When I closed my eyes, I remembered for the thousandth time how much I had always hated living inside of castles. As much as fortresses keeping enemies out, they are prisons of cold stone keeping people within.
'Let's go,' I said abruptly.
Where does the light go when the light goes out, I wondered?
Asaru, it seemed, had also tried to distance himself from this little death. He moved off slowly through the woods, and we followed him. Soon, near a patchwork of ferns growing close to the ground, we came upon a splintered elm that had once been struck by lightning. Although the wood of this fallen tree was now brown and crumbling with rot, once it had been white and hard and freshly scorched.
Once, in this very place, I had come upon the bear that Lord Harsha had spoken of.
It had been a huge, brown bear, a great-grandfather of the forest. Upon beholding this great being, I had frozen up and been unable to shoot him. Instead, I had lain down my bow and walked up to touch him. I had known the bear wouldn't hurt me: he had told me this in the rumbling of his well-filled belly and the playfulness of his eyes. But Asaru hadn't known this. Upon seeing me apparently abandoning all sense, he had panicked, shooting the bear in the chest with an arrow. The astonished bear had then fallen on him with his mighty paws, breaking his arm and smashing his ribs.
And I had fallen on the bear, hi truth, I had jumped on his back, pulling at his thick, musky fur and stabbing him with my knife in a desperate attempt to keep him from killing Asaru. And then the bear had turned on me as I had turned on him; he had hammered my forehead with his sharp daws. And then I had known only blackness until I awoke to see Andaru Harsha pulling his great hunting spear out of the bear's back.
Later that night, Asaru had told our father how I had -saved his life. It was a story that became widely known – and widely disbelieved. To this day, everyone assumed that Asaru had embellished my role iiifhe bear's killing to save me from the shame of laying down my weapons in the face of the enemy.
'Look, Val,' Asaru whispered, pointing through the trees. I turned to follow the line of his outstretched finger. Standing some thirty yards away, munching the leaves of a tender fern, was the deer that we had come for. He was a young buck, his new antlers fuzzy with velvet. Miraculously, he hadn't yet seen us. He kept eating quietly even as we slipped arrows from our quivers and nocked them to our bowstrings.
Asaru, kneeling ten paces to my left, drew his bow along with me, as did Maram who stood slightly behind me and to my right. I felt their excitement heating up their quickly indrawn breaths. I felt my own excitement, too. My mouth watered in anticipation of the coming night's feast In truth, I loved the taste of meat as well as any man, even though very often I couldn't do what I had to do to get it. 'Abide in peace,' I whispered.
At that moment, as I pulled back the arrow toward my ear, the buck looked up at me. And I looked at him. His deep, liquid eyes were as full of life as the squirrel's had been of death. It was hard to kill so great an animal as a deer, much less that infinigsly more complex being called man.
Valashu.
There was something about the buck's sudden awareness of the nearness of death that opened me to the nearness of my own. The light of his eyes was like flame from a firestone melting the granite walls that I hid behind; his booming heart was a battering ram beating open the gates of my heart. More strongly than ever I heard the thunder of that deep and soundless voice that had called me to the woods that day. I heard as well another voice calling my name; it was a voice from the past and future, and it roared with malevolence and murder.
Valashu Elahad.
The buck looked past me suddenly, and his eyes flickered as he tried to tell me something. The wrongness I had sensed in the woods was now very close; I felt it eating into the flesh between ray shoulder blades like a mass of twisting, red worms.
Instinctively, I moved to escape this terrible sensation. And then came the moment of death. Arrows flew. They sang from our bows, and burned throughfce air.
Maram's arrow hit the deer-in the side even as I felt a sudden burning pain in my own side; my arrow missed altogether and buried itself in a tree. But Asaru's arrow drove straight behind the buck's shoulder into his heart Although the buck gathered in all his strength for a last, desperate leap into life, I knew that he would be as good as dead before he struck the ground.
And down into the dark…
The fourth arrow, I saw, had nearly killed me. As the sky finally opened and thunderbolts lit up the forest, I looked down in astonishment to see a feathered shaft three feet long sticking out of the side of my torn jacket – its thick leather and the book of poetry in its pocket had entangled the arrow. I was reeling from the buck's death and something worse, but I still had the good sense to wonder who had shot it.
'Val, get down!'
And so did Asaru. Even as he shouted at me to protect myself, he whirled about to scan the forest. And there, more than a hundred yards farther into the forest, a dark, cloaked figure was running through the trees away from us. Asaru, ever the battle lord, tried to follow him, leaping across the bracken even as he drew another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. He got off a good shot, but my would-be murderer found cover behind a tree. And then he started running again with Asaru quickly closing the distance behind him.
'Val, behind you!' Maram called out.
I turned just in time to see another cloaked figure step out from behind a tree some eighty yards behind me. He was drawing back a black arrow aimed at my chest I tried to heed the urgency of the moment, but I found that I couldn't move. The burning in my side from the first assasSps arrow spread through my body like fire.
Buratrangely, my hands, legs and feet – even my lips and eyes – felt cold.
The cold that freezes breath…
Maram, seeing my helplessness, cursed as he suddenly leaped from behind the tree where he had taken shelteiJpe cursed again as his fat arms and legs drove him puffing and crashing through the forest. He shot an arrow at the second assassin, but it missed. I heard the arrow skittering off through the leaves of a young oak tree.
And then the assassin loosed his arrow, not at Maram, of course, but at me.
Again, just as the arrow was released, I felt in my chest the twisting of the man's hate. It was my hate, I think, that gave me the strength to turn to the side and pull my shoulders backward. The arrow hissed like a wooden snake only inches from my chin. I felt it slice through the air even as I heard my assassin howl with frustration and rage. And then Maram fell upon him like a fury, and I knew I had to find the strength to move very fast or my fat friend would soon be dead.
I felt Maram's fear quivering inside my own heart; there, I felt something deeper compelling me to move. It warmed my frozen limbs, and filled my hands with a terrible strength. Suddenly, I found the skill at arms that my father had taught me.
With a speed that astonished me, I plucked out the arrow caught in my jacket and fit it to my bowstring.
But now Maram and the assassin whirled about each other as Maram slashed at the air with his dagger and the assassin tried to brain him with an evil-looking mace. I couldn't shoot lest I hit Maram, so I cast down my bow and started running through the trees toward them. Twigs broke beneath me; even through my boots, rocks bruised my feet I kept my eyes fixed on the assassin even as he drew back his mace and swung it at Maram's head.
'No!' I cried out.
It was a miracle, I believe, that Maram got his arm up just in time to deflect the full force of the blow. But the mace's heavy iron head glanced off the side of his skull knocking him to the ground. The assassin would surely have finished him then if I hadn't charged him with my dagger drawn and flashing with every lightning bolt that lit the forest.
Valashu Elahad.
The assassin stood back from Maram's stunned and bleeding form and watched me approach. He was a huge man, thicker even than Maram, though none of his bulk appeared to be fat. His hair was a dirty, tangled, coppery mass, and the skin of his face, pale and pocked with scars, glistened with grease. He was breathing hard with his
