there, would likewise be avoided by anyone making the quest. With knights journeying to every other oracle on Ea to find clues as to where the Lightstone was hidden, no one -especially not Morjin's priests or spies – would suspect our objective. And it was as good a place to start as any.
Atara, whose eyes took on the faraway glister of the stars, spoke the name of the Tur-Solonu in a strange voice. She looked to me for affirmation that we should journey there. But I hesitated a long time while I listened to the wind sweeping above the lawn's soft grasses.
'If we can't decide,' Maram said, 'perhaps we should take a vote.'
'No, there's to be none of that on this quest,' Kane said. 'We must agree, as one company, what we should do. And if we can't all agree, then one of our company must set our course.'
He proposed then that I lead us. It was I, he said, who had set out for Tria alone only to draw everyone else to me. It was I whom Morjin sought and would first be killed if he found us. And it was I who bore the markof Valoreth. To my surprise everyone agreed with him. At first I protested this decision, for it seemed to me that as elders, either Kane, Liljana or Master Juwain should more properly bear the burden of leadership. But something inside me whispered that perhaps Kane was right after all. I had a strange sense that if I did as he said, I would be completing a pattern woven of gold and silver threads and as ancient as the stars. And so I reluctantly bowed my head to my she friends and accepted their charge. And then we set the rules for our company. These were simple and few. I was not to command as would a ship's captain or a lord. At all times, I was to ask the counsel of my friends in reaching any decision that must be made. And at any juncture in our journey, either along roads winding through dense forests or the even darker paths that lead down through the soul, any of us would be allowed to leave the company at any time, lor freely we had come together as brothers and sisters, and freely we must all follow our hearts.
With my friends all looking at me to decide where we should go, I searched my heart for a long while. And then I drew in a breath and said, 'We'll journey to the Tur-Solonu, then. Liljana is right: it is as good a place to begin as any.'
We then agreed on our most important rule: that whoever first saw and laid hands upon the lightstone, either at the Tur-Solonu or some other place, would be its guardian and decide what should be done with it.
We were among the last to leave the palace grounds that night. By the time we said goodbye to Sar Yarwan and the other Valari knights, and Atara bade her father and mother farewell the sky in the east was brightening to a deep shade of blue. We might have remained as guests in one of the palace's many rooms, hut Atara didn't want to sleep beneath her father's roof, and neither did any of the rest of us.
'Let's get away from here,' Kane whispered to me. He said that even inside the walled palace of a walled city protected by the armies of Trias greatest king, I had nearly been killed. 'I know an inn down by the docks where we can stay and no one will ask our business.'
Maram, who knew something of cities, wrinkled his thick brows and asked, 'But is that safe?'
'Safer?' Kane said. 'Ha – no place on Ea is safe for us now.'
We retrieved our horses and made the short journey through Tria's deserted streets to the inn that Kane had suggested. It was called the Inn of the Seven Delights, and there we found large, clean rooms, hot baths and good food, if not the other delights promised by the inn's brightly painted sign. We stayed inside resting all that day and night. And then the following morning we began preparing for our journey to the Tur-Solonu.
There was much to do. Atara went off with Kane to the horse market just north of the Eluli Bridge, where she purchased a fine roan mare to replace the mount that she had lost fighting the hill-men. Inspired by the red hairs of the mare's flowing mane, she named her Fire. As Well, she and Kane bargained for four more sturdy packhorses. These would bear the supplies we would need to reach the Blue Mountains.
Kane insisted that we travel lightly, and spoke against burdening the horses with tents or any unnecessary gear. But he also insisted that we pack as much weaponry as possible. Atara, of course, agreed with him. Arrows especially we might lose along the way, and so she went with him to an arrowmaker's shop, and they laid in a great store of long, feathered shafts. Kane said that Master Juwain, Liljana and Alphanderry should be able to defend themselves at close quarters, and toward that end, he went to the swordmaker's and selected three cutlasses that they might find easy to wield. Master Juwain, upon beholding his gleaming yard of steel, shook his head sadly and informed us that he would keep his vow to renounce war.
Alphanderry said that he would rather sing than fight; but to please Kane, he strapped on his sword all the same. Liljana, too, seemed chagrined at Kane's gift.
She stood holding her cutlass as she might a snake and then said a strange thing:
'Am I a pirate that I should begin carrying a pirate's sword? Well, perhaps we're all pirates, off to take the Lightstone by force. And this age, whatever men may call it, is still the Age of Swords.'
After that she went about Tria's streets with her cutlass concealed beneath a long, gray traveling cloak. It was she, with Maram's help, who took charge of laying in the food and drink for our journey. During the next two days they visited various shops near the river and gathered up dried apples, dried beef and dried salt cod as thin and hard as wooden planks. As well they bought casks of flour to be used to make hotcakes or to bake into bread. There were the inevitable battle biscuits wrapped in wax paper, and walnuts and almonds that had come from Karabuk. And much else.
Since we would be traveling through a country of rivers and streams, there was no need for the horses to carry water. But Maram, from his own pocket, bought casks of other liquids to set upon their backs: brown beer from a little brewery near the docks and some good Galdan brandy. Such spirits, he said, would warm our hearts on cold nights, and I agreed with him. To my surprise, Kane and the others -even Master Juwain – did, too.
Our brief stay in the inn was marked by one ugly incident: on our second night there, Kane and I found Atara in the common room winning at dice, which proved to be one of the inn's seven delights. Her luck had been suspiciously good, and she had turned her few remaining coins into a considerable pile of gold. The men from whom she had won it – big, blond-haired sailors from Thalu who wore their cutlasses openly – didn't want to let her leave the table with so much of their money. They might have fought her over it but for a wild look that flashed in Kane's dark eyes, and, I supposed, in my own. As Kane put it it was far better to warn men off before drawing bright steel from beneath our cloaks. Of course, we couldn't always hope for such men to back down before us and so keep ourselves concealed. Therefore, he said, we should leave Tria as soon as possible.
We completed our preparations on the evening of the tenth of Soldru. Although Kane thought it likely that we had evaded any Kallimun priests or others set to spy us out, we couldn't know this for certain.
'This inn may be watched even now,' he said as we gathered in the larger of our two rooms. 'So – it's certain that the Kallimun will have the gates watched. That will make it hard to leave the city, won't it?'
He proposed going down to the docks and renting a boat that might carry us out into the Bay. of Belen; thus we might simply sail around Tria and her great walls. But Atara had another plan.
'The gates may be watched,' she said, 'but certainly not at night when they are shut.'
'If they are closed, how are we to pass through them?' Maram asked. 'That's simple: we'll open them,' she said. 'You see, I have the key.' And with that, she drew forth her purse and hefted the clinking gold coins in her hand. Kane smiled at her, and so did I. None of us had really wanted to embark upon a strange boat anyway.
We waited until midnight and then assembled the horses on the empty street outside the inn's stable. The nearby shops – that of the sailmaker and the sawyer – were quiet and dark. I greeted Altaru by touching the white star at the middle of his forehead, then pulled myself onto his back. Atara, astride Fire, rode next to me while Master Juwain and Maram with their sorrels took up behind her. Behind them, they trailed the new packhorses, two by two, with Tanar behind them. Liljana and Alphanderry rode near the rear. Liljana's horse was a chestnut gelding a little past his prime; Alphanderry rode one of the magnificent Tervolan whites, which were famed for their fine heads and proud, arching necks. He called him by the strange name of Iolo.
Kane, scanning the street left and right from atop his big bay, took up the point of greatest danger at the very rear.
And so we set out for the Tur-Solonu. In the stillness of the night we made our way toward the city's walls, now gleaming eerily in the light of the moon. The dopping of our horses' hooves against the cobblestones seemed overloud; it reassured us that we heard no other such sounds, nor even the footfalls of furtive boots in the darkened alleys that we passed. In this poorer section of the city, few people were about: a band of drunken sailors returning to their ships; a street cleaner shoveling up horses' dung; and the beggars who slept beneath the bridges. None of them paid us much notice or followed us. We made our way north by narrow streets paralleling the much greater River Road. Here, the buildings around us seemed ten thousand years old – and perhaps some of them were. Just
