The Lightstone

I looked at Atara a long moment before she answered him. 'After I ate the timana,' she said, 'I saw the Timpum almost immediately. It was like a flash of fire. It was so beautiful that I wanted to hold it forever – but can one hold the sun? I felt myself burning up like a leaf caught in the flames. And then I couldn't breathe, and I thought I was dying. Everything was so cold. It was like I had been buried alive in a crystal cave, so cold and hard, and every-thing growing darker. I would have died if Val hadn't come to take me back.'

'And how did he do that?' Master Juwain asked.

Again, Atara looked at me, and she said, 'I'm still not sure. Somehow I felt what he felt for me. All his love, his life – I felt it breaking open the cave like lightning and burning into me.'

Now Master Juwain and Maram looked at me, too, as the bluebirds sang and the Timpum glittered all about us. And Master Juwain said, 'That sounds like the valarda.'

Master Juwain's use of this word, utterly unexpected, fell out of the air like lightning and nearly broke me open. How did he know the name of my gift that Morjin had spoken to me? For many miles, I had wondered about this strange name, as I wondered about Master Juwain now. But he just smiled at me in his kindly but proud way, as if he knew almost everything there was to know.

It seemed that the time had finally come to explain about my gift, which they had already suspected lay behind my sensing of the Stonefaces and the other strangenesses of my life. And so I told them everything about it. I said that I had been born breathing in others' sufferings and their joys as well. I revealed my dream of Morjin and how he had prophesied that one day I would use my gift to make others feel my pain.

'It would appear,' Master Juwain said, looking from Atara to me, 'that you also have the power to make people feel much else.'

'Perhaps,' I said. 'But this is the first time this has happened. It's hard to know if it could ever happen again.'

'You say you are able to close yourself to others' emotions. Then surely it follows that you should be able to open them to yours.'

'Perhaps,' I said again. I didn't tell him that in order to do this, first I would have to open myself to the passions that blazed inside me, and that this was more terrifying than facing a naked sword.

'You should have come to us long ago,' Master Juwain told me. 'I'm sure we would have been able to help you.'

'Do you really think so?'

The Brotherhoods taught meditation and music, herbology and heal-ing and many other things, but so far as I knew they knew nothing of this sense that both blessed and tormented me.

'Your gift is very rare, Val, but not unique. I read about it in a book years ago. I'm sure that there must be other books that could instruct you in its development and use.'

'Does one learn to play the flute from a book?' I asked him. I shook my head and smiled sadly. 'No, unless there is another who shares my affliction, there is only one thing that can help me.'

'You mean the Lights'tone, don't you?'

'Yes, the Lightstone – it's said to be the cup of healing.'

If I could feel the fires that burned wide others and touch them with my own, then surely that meant there was a wound in my soul that allowed these sacred and very private flames to pass back and forth. This one time, perhaps, they had touched Atara and brought her back from the darkness. But what if the next time, through rage or hate, whatever was inside me flashed like real lightning and struck her dead?

Maram, who always understood so much without being told, came up to me and placed his hand above my heart. 'I think that this gift of yours must be like living with a hole in your chest. But Pualani healed you of the wound that Salmelu made.

Perhaps she can heal this wound, too.'

Later that day, I went to Pualani's house to ask her about this. And there, inside a long door garlanded with white and purple flowers, she took my hand and told me,

'In the world, there are many sights that are hard to bear. Would you wish to be healed of the holes in your eyes so that you didn't have to see them?'

She went on to say that my wound, as I thought of it, was surely the gift of the Ellama. I must learn to use it, she said, as I would my eyes, my ears, my nose or any other part of me. If finding the Lightstone would help me in this, then I should seek it with all my heart.

That night in our house, I told Maram and Master Juwain that I must leave for Tria the next day.

'There will be knights from all the free kingdoms there,' I explained. 'Scryers and minstrels, too. One of them might tell of a crucial clue that would lead to the Lightstone.'

'I agree,' Atara said. 'In any case, King Kiritan will call all the questers to make vows together, and we should be there to receive his blessings.'

Master Juwain saw the sense of both these arguments, and agreed that we should all continue on to Tria together. Maram, when he saw that our minds were made up, reluctantly said that he would come with us as well.

'If you go without me,' he said, 'I'll never find either the strength or courage to leave these woods.' 'But what about Iolana?' I asked him. 'Don't you love her?' 'Ah, of course I do,' he said. 'I love the wine that the Lokilani serve, too. But there are many fine wines in the world, if you know what I mean.'

Maram's fickleness obviously vexed Atara, who said, 'I know little of wines. But there can't be another fruit on all of Ea like the timana.'

'And that is my point exactly,' Maram said. 'When I find the one wine that is to lesser vintages as the timana is to the more common fruits, I shall drink it and no other.'

The next morning I put on my cold armor and told Pualani that we would be leaving.

After we had burdened the pack horses with a good load of fruit and freshly baked nutbread that the Lokilani provided us, we saddled Altaru and our other mounts.

And then there, in the apple grove where they were tethered, the whole Lokilani village turned out to bid us farewell.

'It's sad to say goodbye,' Pualani told us. She stood beneath a blossom-laden bough with Elan, Danali and Iolana, who was weeping. Around them stood hundreds of men, women and children, and around all the Lokilani – everywhere in the grove – flickered the forms of the Timpum. 'And yet maybe some day you'll return to us as we all hope you will.'

From the pocket of her skirt, she removed a green jewel about the size of a child's finger. She pressed it into Master Juwain's gnarly old hand and said, 'You're a Master Healer of your Brotherhood. And emeralds are the stones of healing; they have power over all the growing things of the earth. If you should take wounds or illness, from the Earthkillers or any others, please use this emerald to heal yourselves.'

Master Juwain looked down at the gleaming emerald as if mystified Then Pualani touched him lightly on his chest and said, 'There's no book that tells of this. To use it, you must open your heart. It has no resonance with the head.'

Master Juwain's bald head gleamed like a huge nut as he bowed and thanked her for her gift. Then she kissed him goodbye, and all the Lokilani, one by one, filed past us to touch our hands and kiss us as well.

'Farewell,' Pualani told us. 'May the light of the Ellama shine always upon you.'

Danali, with twenty or so of the Lokilani, had prepared an escort for us. As before, they each carried bows and arrows, but this time no one spoke of binding our hands. Because I thought it would be unseemly to mount our horses and sit so high above them when we already towered over them merely as we stood, we agreed to walk our horses through the Forest. Danali and the Lokilani led off while I followed holding Altaru's reins in my hand. Master Juwain and Maram came next, trailing both their sorrels and the pack horses. Atara walked next to Tanar in the rear.

It was a lovely morning, and the canopies of the astors shone above us like a dome of gold. The air smelled of fruits and flowers and the leaf-covered earth. Many birds were singing; their music seemed to pipe out in perfect time with the tinkling of the little stream that Danali followed. I thought that he was leading us west, but in the Forest I found my sense of direction dulled as if I had drunk too much wine.

We walked as quietly as we could in the silence of the great trees. No one spoke, not even to make little conversation or remark the beauty of some butterflies fluttering around a blackberry bush with their many-colored wings. An air of sadness hung over the woods, and we breathed its bittersweet fragrance with every step we took