counted the beats of my heart even as I looked for Flick in the dying flames of the fire or above me in the darkness, twinkling like a lone constellation of stars. I didn't know whether to resent or rejoice in his presence. For he was a very poignant reminder of a brighter place, where the great trees connected the earth to the sky and I had felt fully and truly alive.
During our next day's journey, we all suffered the sadness of leaving the Forest. As Pualani had warned us, the woods here seemed almost dead. And that was strange, because they were nearly the same woods through which I had walked as a child in Mesh and had loved. The maples still showed their three-pointed leaves, and the same gray squirrels ran up and down them clicking their claws against the silver-gray bark. The horned owls who hunted them were familiar to me, as were the robins singing their rising and falling song: cheery-up, cheery-me. Perhaps everything – the birds and the badgers, the thistles and the flowers – were too familiar. Against my memory of the Forest's splendor, the trees here were ashen and stunted, and the animals all moved about in their same pointless patterns, dully and Listlessly, as if drained of blood.
As we rode through the long day, we, too, began moving with a measured heaviness.
It grew cloudy, and then rained for a while. The constant drumming of the large drops against our heads did little to lift our spirits. The whole world seemed wet and gray, and it smelled of the iron with which my armor had been made. The trees went on mile after mile, unbroken by any path and oppressive in their thick swaths of grayish-green that blocked out the sun.
Our camp that night was cheerless and cold. It rained so hard for a while that not even Maram could get a fire going. We all huddled beneath our cloaks, trying in our turns to sleep against our shivering. During my watch, I waited in vain for the sky to clear and the stars to come out. I looked for Flick, too. But in the dark, dripping woods, I couldn't find the faintest glint of light. By the time I fell off to sleep, I was sure that he was dead.
When dawn came, however, Atara espied him nestled down in my hair. It was the only brightness that any of us could find in that cool, gray morning. After a quick meal of some soggy nutbread and blackberries rimed with newly-grown mold, we set out into the rainy woods. The horses' hooves made rhythmic sucking sounds against the sodden forest floor. We listened for the more cheery piping of the bluebirds or even the whistles of the thrushes, but the trees were empty of any song.
The woods seemed endless, as if we might ride all that day and for ten thousand days all the way around the world and never see the end of them. We all knew in our heads that if our course were true, we must eventually cut the Nar Road. But our hearts told us that we were lost, moving in circles. We each began to worry that our food would run out or some disaster befall us long before we reached the road.
That afternoon the rain stopped, and the sun made a brief appearance. But it brought only a little thin light and no joy. As the day deepened toward dusk, even this glimmer began to weaken and fade. And so did our spirits weaken. Maram told us that he would have been better off letting Lord Harsha run him through with his sword, thus saving him from death by starvation in a trackless -wilderness. Master Juwain sat astride his swaying horse staring at his book as if he couldn't decide which passage to read. Atara, whose courage never flagged, sang songs to cheer herself and us. But in the gloom of the woods, the notes she struck sounded hollow and false. I sensed her anger at herself for failing to uplift us: it was cold, hard and black as an iron arrowpoint. Compassion for other beings she might have in abundance, but for herself she spared no pity.
My despair was possibly the deepest for having the least excuse: I knew that we were moving in the right direction but allowed myself to doubt whether we would ever see the Nar Road or Tria. In my openness to my friends' forebodings, I allowed their doubts to become my own.
What is despair, really? It is a dark night of the soul and the remembrance of brighter things. It is a silent calling out to them. But the call comes from the darkest of places and is often heard by dark things instead.
That night as we camped beneath an old elm tree, we had dreams of dreadful things.
Creatures of the dark came to devour us: we felt worms eating at our insides, bats biting us open and mosquitoes smothering us in thick black clouds and sucking out our blood. Gray shapes that looked like corpses torn from graves came to take our hands and pull us down into the ground. Even Master Juwain moaned in a tormented sleep, his meditations and allies having finally failed him. When morning came, all misty and gray, we spoke of our nightmares and discovered that they were very much the same.
'It's the Stonefaces, isn't it?' Maram said. 'They've found us again.'
'Yes,' I said, giving voice to what we all knew to be true. 'But have they found us in the flesh or only in our dreams?'
'You tell us, Val.'
I stood up from my bearskin and pulled my cloak around me. The woods in every direction seemed all the same. The oaks and elms were shagged with mosses, and a heavy mist lay over them – and over the dogwood and ferns and lesser vegetation as well. Everything smelled moist: of mushrooms and rotting wood. I had an unsettling sense that men were smelling me as from many miles away. I couldn't tell, however, how far they might be or whether they stalked the woods to the east or west north or south. I knew only that they were hunting me and that their shapes were as gray as stone.
'We can't be far from the Nar Road,' I said. 'If we ride hard for it, we should reach it by dusk.'
'You're guessing, my friend, aren't you?'
In truth, I was guessing, but I thought it to be a good one. I was almost certain that the road couldn't lie much more than a day's journey to the north, or possibly two.
'What if the Stonefaces are waiting for us on the road?' Maram asked.
'No – they left the road to follow us through the forest Probably they're as lost as you seem to think that we are.'
'Probably? Would you bet our lives on probably?'
'We can't wander these woods forever,' I said. 'Sooner or later, we'll have to return to the road.'
'We could return to the Forest, couldn't we?'
'Yes,' I said, 'if we could find it again. But likely the Stonefaces would find us first.'
Over the embers of the fire that had burned through the night, we held council as to what we should do. Atara said that all paths before us were perilous; since we couldn't see the safest, we should choose the one that led directly to Tria, which meant making straight for the Nar Road.
'In any case,' she said, 'none of us set out on this journey with the end of dying peacefully in our sleep. We should decide whether it's the Lightstone or safety that we seek.'
She pointed out that we must be nearing the civilized parts of Alonia; if we did reach the road, she said, likely we would find it patrolled by King Kiritan's men.
'We must have come as far west as Suma,' she said. 'The Stonefaces, whoever they are, would have to be very daring to ride openly against us there. It's said that King Kiritan hangs brigands and outlaws.'
Maram grumbled that, for a warrior of the Kurmak, she seemed to know a lot about Alonia. He doubted that King Kiritan kept his roads as safe as she said. But in the end, he agreed that we should strike for the road, and so he set to breaking camp with a resigned weariness.
We were all tired that morning as we rode through the woods. As well, we all had headaches, which grew worse with the constant pounding of the horses' hooves.
Twice, I changed our course, to the east and due west through some elderberry thickets, to see if that might blunt the attack against us. But both times, my sense of someone hunting us did not diminish, and neither did our suffering. It was as if the sky, heavily laden with clouds, was slowly pressing at us and crushing our skulls against the earth.
By noon, however, the clouds burned away, and the sun came out. We all hoped to take a little cheer from its unexpected radiance. But the blazing orb drove arrows of fire into the forest, and it grew stifling hot The sultry air choked us; gray vapors steamed up from the sodden earth. In the flatness of the land here, we could find no brook or stream, and so we had to content ourselves with the warm water in our canteens to slake our raging thirsts.
As we made our way north, the woods in many places broke upon abandoned fields on which grew highbush blackberry, sumac and other shrubs. Twice we found the remains of houses rotting among the meadow flowers. I took this as a sign that we were indeed approaching the civilized parts of Alonia that Atara had told of. We all hoped to find the Nar Road just a little farther on, after perhaps only a few more miles. And so we rode hard all that afternoon through forest and fields burning in the hot Soldru sun.
We came upon the road without warning just before dusk. As we were riding through a copse of mulberry,
