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There is something called the joy of battle. Women don’t like to know about this; most men would rather forget it. Combat with another man this way in the dark woods was truly dirty, ugly, awful – but there was a terrible beauty about it, too. For fighting for life brings one closer to life. I remembered, then, my father telling me that I had been born to fight. All of us were. As the assassin raged at me with his dragon-headed mace, a great surge of life welled up inside me. My hands and heart and every part of me knew that it was good to feel my blood rushing like a river in flood, that it was a miracle simply to be able to draw in one more breath.
‘Asaru,’ I whispered.
Some deep part of me must have realized that this wild joy was really just a love of life. And love of the finest creations of life, such as my brother, Asaru, and even Maram. I felt this beautiful force flowing into me like sunlight; I opened myself to it utterly. In moments, it filled my whole being with a terrible strength.
Maram cried out in pain from the bloody wound on his head. The assassin glanced at him as his pulse leaped in anticipation of an easy kill. Something broke inside me then. My heart swelled with a sudden fury that I feared almost more than any other thing. I found that secret place where love and hate, life and death, were as one. This time, when the mace swept past me, I rushed the assassin. I stepped in close enough to feel the heat steaming off his massive body. I got my arm up to block the return arc of his mace as he snorted in anger and spat into my face. I smelled his fear, with my nostrils as well as with a finer sense. And then I plunged my dagger into the soft spot above his big, hard belly; I angled it upward so that it pierced his heart.
‘Maram!’ I screamed out. ‘Asaru!’
The pain of the assassin’s death was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like lightning striking through my eyes into my spine, like a mace as big as a tree crushing in my chest. As the assassin gasped and spasmed and crumpled to the sodden earth, I fell on top of him. I coughed and gasped for breath; I screamed and raged and wept, all at once. A river of blood spurted out of the wound where I had put my knife. But an entire ocean flowed out of me.
Val – are you hurt?’ I heard Maram’s voice boom like thunder as from far away. I felt him hovering over me as he placed his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. ‘Come on now, get up – you killed him.’
But the assassin wasn’t quite dead. Even in the violence of the pouring rain, I felt his last breath burn against my face. I watched the light die from his eyes. And only then came the darkness.
‘Come on, Val. Here, let me help you.’
But I couldn’t move. I was only dimly aware of Maram grunting and puffing as he rolled me off the assassin’s body. Maram’s frightened face suddenly seemed to thin and grow as insubstantial as smoke. The colors faded from the forest; the blood seeping from his wounded head wasn’t red at all but a dark gray. Everything grew darker then. A terrible cold, centered in my heart, began spreading through my body. It was worse than being caught in a blizzard in one of the mountain passes, worse even than plunging through Lake Waskaw’s broken ice into freezing waters. It was a cosmic cold: vast, empty, indifferent; it was the cold that brings on the neverness of night and the nothingness of death. And I was utterly open to it.
It was as I lay in this half-alive state that Asaru finally returned. He must have sprinted when he saw me – and the dead assassin – stretched out on the forest floor, for he was panting to catch his breath when he reached my side. He knelt over me, and I felt his warm, hard hand pressing gently against my throat as he tested my pulse. To Maram he said, The other one … escaped. They had horses waiting. What happened here?’
Maram quickly explained how I had frozen up after the first assassin’s arrow had stuck in my jacket; his voice swelled with pride as he told of how he had charged the second assassin.
‘Ah, Lord Asaru,’ he said, ‘you should have seen me! A Valari warrior couldn’t have done any better. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that I saved Val’s life.’
Thank you,’ Asaru said dryly. ‘It seems that Val also saved yours.’
He looked down at me and smiled grimly. He said, Val, what’s wrong – why can’t you move?’
‘It’s cold,’ I whispered, looking into the blackness of his eyes. ‘So cold.’
With much grumbling from Maram, they lifted me and carried me over beneath a great elm tree. Maram lay down his cloak and helped Asaru prop me up against the tree’s trunk. Then Asaru ran back through the woods to retrieve our bows that we had cast down. He brought back as well the arrow that the first assassin had shot at me.
This is bad,’ he said, looking at the black arrow. In the flashes of lightning, he scanned the woods to the north, east, south and west. There may be more of them,’ he told us.
‘No,’ I whispered. To be open to death is to be open to life. The hateful presence that I had sensed in the woods that day was now gone. Already, the rain was washing the air dean. There are no more.’
Asaru peered at the arrow and said, They almost killed me. I felt this pass through my hair.’
I looked at Asaru’s long black hair blowing about his shoulders, but I could only gasp silently in pain.
‘Let’s get your shirt off,’ he said. It was one of his rules, I knew, that wounds must be tended as soon as possible.
In a moment they had carefully removed my jacket and shirt. It must have been cold, with the wind whipping raindrops against my suddenly exposed flesh. But all I could feel was a deeper cold that sucked me down into death.
Asaru touched the livid bruise that the assassin’s mace had left on my chest. His fingers gently probed my ribs. ‘You’re lucky – it seems that nothing is broken.’
‘What about that?’ Maram asked, pointing at my side where the arrow had touched me.
‘Why, it’s only a scratch,’ Asaru said. He soaked a cloth with some of the brandy that he carried in a wineskin, and then swabbed it over my skin.
I looked down at my throbbing side. To call the wound left by the arrow a scratch was to exaggerate its seriousness. Truly, no more than the faintest featherstroke of a single red line marked the place where the arrow had nicked the skin. But I could still feel the poison working in my veins.
‘It’s cold,’ I whispered. ‘Everywhere, cold.’
Now Asaru examined the arrow, which was fletched with raven feathers and tipped with a razor-sharp steel head like any common hunting arrow. But the steel, I saw, was enameled with some dark, blue substance. Asaru’s eyes flashed with anger as he showed it to Maram.
He said, They tried to kill me with a poison arrow.’
I blinked my eyes at the cold crushing my skull. But I said nothing against my brother’s prideful assumption that the arrow had been meant for him and not me.
‘Do you think it was the Ishkans?’ Maram asked.
Asaru pointed at the assassin’s body and said, That’s no Ishkan.’
‘Perhaps they hired him.’
They must have,’ Asaru said.
‘Oh, no,’ I murmured. ‘No, no, no.’
Not even the Ishkans, I thought, would ever kill a man with poison. Or would they?
Asaru quickly, but with great care, wrapped my torn and tainted jacket and shirt around the arrow’s head to protect it from the falling rain. Then he took off his cloak and put it on me.
‘Is that better?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said, lying to him despite what I had been taught. ‘Much better.’
Although he smiled down at me to encourage me, his face was grave. I didn’t need my gift of empathy to feel his love and concern for me.
This is hard to understand,’ he said. ‘You can’t have taken enough poison to paralyze you this way.’
No, I thought, I couldn’t have. It wasn’t the poison that pinned me to the earth like a thousand arrows of ice. I wanted to explain to him that somehow the poison must have dissolved my shields and left me open to the assassin. But how could I tell my simple, courageous brother what it was like to feel another die? How could I make him understand the terror of a cold as vast and black as the emptiness between the stars?
I turned my head to watch the rain beating down on the assassin’s bloody chest. Who could ever escape the great emptiness? Truly, I thought, the same fate awaited us all.
Asaru placed his warm hand on top of mine and said, ‘If it’s poison, Master Juwain will know a cure. We’ll take you to him as soon as the rain stops.’
My grandfather had once warned me to beware of elms in thunder, but we took shelter beneath that great tree all the same. Its dense foliage protected us from the worst of the rain as we waited out the storm. As Asaru tended Maram’s wounded head, I heard him reassuring Maram that it rains hard in the Morning Mountains, but not long.
As always, he spoke truly. After a while the downpour weakened to a sprinkle and then stopped. The clouds began to break up, and shafts of light drove down through gaps in the forest canopy and touched the rain-sparkled ferns with a deeper radiance. There was something in this golden light that I had never seen before. It seemed to struggle to take form even as I struggled to apprehend it. I somehow knew that I had to open myself to this wondrous thing as I had my brother’s love or the inevitability of my death.
The stealing of the gold …
And then there, floating in the air five feet in front of me, appeared a plain golden cup that would have fit easily into the palm of my hand. Call it a vision; call it a waking dream; call it a derangement of my aching eyes. But I saw it as clearly as I might have a bird or a butterfly.
I was only dimly aware of Asaru kneeling by my side as he touched my throbbing head. Almost all that I could see was this marvelous cup shimmering before me. With my eyes, I drank in its golden light. And almost immediately, a warmth like that of my mother’s honey tea began pouring into me.
‘Do you see it?’ I asked Asaru.
‘See what?’
The Lightstone, I thought. The healing stone.
For this, I thought, Aryu had risen up and killed his brother with a knife even as I had killed the assassin. For this simple cup, men had fought and murdered and made war for more than ten thousand years.
“What is it, Val?’ Asaru asked, gently shaking my shoulder.
But I couldn’t tell him what I saw. After a while, as I leaned back against the solidity and strength of the great elm, the coldness left my body. I prayed then that someday the Lightstone would heal me completely so that the terror of my gift would leave me as well and I would suffer the pain of the world no more.
Although I was still very weak, I managed to press my hands down into the damp earth. And then to Asaru’s and Maram’s astonishment – and my own – I stood up.
Somehow I staggered over to where the assassin lay atop the glistening bracken. While my whole body shook and I gasped with the effort of it, I pulled my knife out of his chest and cleaned it. Then I closed the assassin’s cold blue eyes. In my own eyes, I felt a sudden moist pain, My throat hurt as if I had swallowed a lump of cold iron. Somewhere deeper inside, my belly and being heaved with a sickness that wouldn’t go away. There, I knew, the cold would always wait to freeze my breath and steal my soul. I vowed then that no matter the cause or need, I would never, never kill anyone again.
In the air above me – above the assassin’s still form – the Lightstone poured out a golden radiance that filled the forest. It was the light of love, the light of life, the light of truth. In its shimmering presence, I couldn’t lie to myself: I knew with a bitter certainty that it was my fate to kill many, many men.
And then, suddenly, the cup was gone.
‘What are you staring at?’ Asaru asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘Nothing at all.’
Now a fire burned through me like the poison still in my veins. I struggled to remain standing. Asaru came over to my side. His strong arm wrapped itself around my back to help me.
‘Can you walk now?’ he asked.
I nodded and Asaru smiled in relief. After I had steadied myself, Asaru called Maram over to check his wounded head. He poked his finger into Maram’s big gut and told him, Your head is as hard as your belly is soft. You’ll be all right.’
‘Ah, yes, indeed, I suppose I will – as soon as you bring back the horses.’
For a moment, Asaru looked up through the fluttering leaves at the sun. He looked down at the dead assassin. And then he turned to Maram and told him, ‘No, it’s getting late, and it wouldn’t do to leave either of you alone here. Despite what Val says, there may be others about. We’ll walk out together.’
‘All right then, Lord Asaru,’ Maram said.
Asaru bent down toward the assassin. And then, with a shocking strength, he hoisted the body onto his shoulder and straightened up. He pointed deeper into the woods. ‘You’ll carry back the deer,’ he told Maram.
‘Carry back the deer!’ Maram protested. Asaru might as well have appointed him to bear the whole world on his shoulders. ‘It must be two miles back to the horses!’
Asaru, straining under the great mass of the assassin’s body, looked down at Maram with a sternness that reminded me of my father. He said, You wanted to be a warrior – why don’t you act like one?’
Despite Maram’s protests, beneath all his fear and fat, he was as strong as a bull. As there was no gainsaying my brother when he had decided on an action, Maram grudgingly went to fetch the deer.
You look sick,’ Asaru said as he freed a hand to touch my forehead. ‘But at least the cold is gone.’
No, no, I thought, it will never be gone.
‘Does it still hurt?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said, wincing at the pain in my side. ‘It hurts.’
Why, I wondered, had someone tainted an arrow with poison? Why would anyone try to kill me?
I drew in a deep breath as I steeled myself for the walk back through the forest. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the Lightstone shining like a sun.
With Asaru in the lead, we started walking west toward the place where we had left the horses. Maram puffed and grumbled beneath the deer flopped across his shoulders. At least, I thought, we had taken a deer, even as Asaru had said we would. And so we would have something to contribute to that night’s feast with the Ishkans.
3
It was late afternoon by the time we broke free from the forest and rejoined Joshu Kadar at the edge of Lord Harsha’s fields. The young squire blinked his eyes in amazement at the load slung across my brother’s back; he had the good sense, however, not to beleaguer us with questions just then. He kept a grim silence and went to fetch Lord Harsha as my brother bade him.
The horses, however, practiced no such restraint. Joshu had them tied to a couple of saplings beyond the wall surrounding Lord Harsha’s field; at the smell of fresh blood they began whinnying and stomping the ground as they pulled at the trees with almost enough force to uproot them. Maram tried to calm them but couldn’t. They were already skittish from the bolts of lightning that had shaken the earth only an hour before.
I walked over to Altaru and laid my hand on him. His wet fur was pungent with the scent of anger and fear. As I stroked his trembling neck, I pressed my head against his head and then breathed into his huge nostrils. Gradually, he grew quieter. After a while, he looked at me with his soft brown eyes and then gently nudged my side where the arrow had burned me with its poison.
The gentleness of this great animal always touched me even as much as it astonished me. For Altaru stood eighteen hands high and weighed some two thousand pounds of quivering muscle and unyielding bone. He was the fiercest of stallions. He was one of the last of the black war horses who run wild on the plains of Anjo. For a thousand years, the kings of Anjo had bred his line for beauty no less than battle. But after the Sarni wars, when Anjo had broken apart into a dozen contending dukedoms, Altaru’s sires had escaped into the fields surrounding the shattered castles, and Anjo’s great horsebreeding tradition had been lost. From time to time, some brave Anjori would manage to capture one of these magnificent horses only to find him unbreakable. So it had been with Altaru: Duke Gorador had presented him as a gift to my father as if to say, ‘You Meshians think you are the greatest knights of all the Valari; well, we’ll see if you can ride this horse into battle.’
This my father had tried to do. But nothing in his power had persuaded Altaru to accept a bit in his mouth or a saddle on his back.
Five times he had bucked the proud king to the ground before my father gave up and pronounced Altaru incorrigibly wild.
As I knew he truly was. For Altaru had never seen a mare whom he didn’t tremble to cover or another stallion he wouldn’t fight. And he had never known a man whose hand he didn’t want to bite or whose face he didn’t want to crush with a kick from one of his mighty hooves. Except me. When my father, in a rare display of frustration, had finally ordered Altaru gelded, I had rushed into his stall and thrown myself against his side to keep the handlers away from him. Everyone supposed that I had fallen mad and would soon be stomped into pulp. But Altaru had astonished my father and brothers – and myself – by lowering his head to lick my sweating face. He had allowed me to mount him and race him bareback through the forest below Silvassu. And ever since that wild ride through the trees, for five years, we had been the best of friends.
‘It’s all right,’ I reassured him as I stroked his great shoulder, ‘everything will be all right.’
But Altaru, who spoke a language deeper than words, knew that I was lying to him. Again he nuzzled my side and shuddered as if it was he who had been poisoned. The fire in his dark eyes told me that he was ready to kill the man who had wounded me, if only we could find him.
A short time later, Joshu Kadar returned with Lord Harsha. The old man drove a stout, oak wagon, rough-cut and strong like Lord Harsha himself. A few hours had worked a transformation on him. Gone were the muddy workboots and homespun woolens that he wore tending his fields. Now he sported a fine new tunic, and I couldn’t help noticing the sword fastened to his sleek, black belt. After he had stopped the wagon on the other side of the stone wall, he stepped down and smoothed back his freshly washed hair. He gazed for a long moment at the dead deer and the assassin’s body spread out on the earth. Then he said, ‘The king has asked me to contribute the beverage for tonight’s feast. Now it seems we’ll be carrying more than beer in my wagon.’
While Asaru stepped over to him and began telling of what had happened in the woods, Maram peeled back the wagon’s covering tarp to reveal a dozen barrels of beer. His eyes went wide with the greed of thirst, and he eyed the contents of the wagon as if he had discovered a cave full of treasure.
With his fat knuckles, he rapped the barrels one by one. ‘Oh, my beauties – have I ever seen such a beautiful, beautiful sight?’
I was sure that he would have begged Lord Harsha for a bowl of beer right there if not for the grim look on Lord Harsha’s face as he stared at the dead assassin. Maram stared at him, too. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Maram called for Joshu to help him lift the assassin’s body into the wagon. The sweating and puffing Maram moved quickly as with new strength, and then loaded in the deer by himself. Only his anticipation of later helping to drain these barrels, I thought, could have caused him to take such initiative.
Thank you for sparing an old man’s joints,’ Lord Harsha told him, patting his broken knee. ‘Now if you will all accompany me, we’ll collect my daughter and be on our way. She’ll be joining us for the feast.’
So saying, Lord Harsha drove the groaning wagon across his fields while we followed him on horseback to his house. There, a rather plump, pretty woman with raven-dark hair stood in the doorway and watched us draw up. She was dressed in a silk gown and a flowing gray cloak gathered in above her ample breasts with a silver brooch. This was to be her first appearance at my father’s castle, I gathered, and so she naturally wanted to be seen wearing her finest.
Lord Harsha stepped painfully down from his wagon and said, ‘Lord Asaru, may I present my daughter, Behira?’
In turn, he presented this shy young woman to me, Joshu Kadar and Maram. To my dismay, Maram’s face flushed a deep red at the first sight of her. I could almost feel his desire for her leaping like fire along his veins. Gone from him completely, it seemed, was any thought of beer.
‘Oh, Lord, what a beauty!’ he blurted out. ‘Lord Harsha – you certainly have a talent for making beautiful things.’
It might have been thought that Lord Harsha would relish such a compliment. Instead, his single eye glared at Maram like a heated iron. Most likely, I thought, he wished to present Behira at my father’s court to some of the greatest knights of Mesh; he would take advantage of the night’s gathering to make the best match for her that he could – and that certainly wouldn’t be a marriage to some cowardly outland prince who had forsworn wine, women and war.
‘My daughter,’ Lord Harsha coldly informed Maram, ‘is not a thing. But thank you all the same.’
He limped over to his barn then, and returned a short time later leading a huge, gray mare. Despite the pain of his knee, he insisted on riding to my father’s castle with all the dignity that he could command. And so he gritted his teeth as he pulled himself up into the saddle; he sat straight and tall like the battle lord he still was, and led the way down the road followed closely by Asaru, Joshu and myself. Behira seemed happy at being left to drive the wagon, while Maram was very happy lagging behind the rest of us so that he could talk to her.
‘Well, Behira,’ I overheard him say above the clopping of the horses’ hooves, ‘it’s a lovely day for such a lovely woman to attend her first feast. Ah, how old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?’
Behira, holding the reins of the wagon’s horses in her strong, rough hands, looked over at me as if she wished that it was I who was lavishing my attention on her. But women terrified me even more than did war. Their passions were like deep, underground rivers flowing with unstoppable force. If I opened myself to a woman’s love for only a moment, I thought, I would surely be swept away.
‘I’m afraid we have no such women as you in Delu,’ Maram went on. ‘If we did, I never would have left home.’
I looked away from Behira to concentrate on a stand of oak trees by the side of the road. I sensed that, despite herself, she was quite taken by Maram’s flattery. And probably Maram impressed her as well. After Alonia, Delu was the greatest kingdom of Ea, and Maram was Delu’s eldest prince.
‘Well, you should have let a woman tend your wound,’ I heard Behira say to him. I could almost feel her touching the makeshift bandage that my brother had tied around Maram’s head. ‘Perhaps when we get to the castle I could look at it.’
‘Would you? Would you?’
‘Of course,’ she told him. The outlander struck you with a mace, didn’t he?’
‘Ah, yes, a mace,’ Maram said. And then his great, booming voice softened with the seductiveness of recounting his feats. ‘I hope you’re not alarmed by what happened in the woods today. It was quite a little battle, but of course we prevailed. I had the honor of being in a position to help Val at the critical moment.’
According to Maram, not only had he scared off the first assassin and weakened the second, but he had willingly taken a wound to his head in order to save my life. When he caught me smiling at the embellishments of his story – I didn’t want to think of his braggadocio as mere lies – he shot me a quick, wounded look as if to say, ‘Love is difficult, my friend, and wooing a woman calls for any weapon.’
Perhaps it did, I thought, but I didn’t want to watch him bring down this particular quarry. Even as he began speaking of his father’s bejeweled palaces and vast estates in far-off Delu, I nudged Altaru forward so that I might take part in other conversations.
Val,’ Asaru said to me as I pulled alongside him, ‘Lord Harsha has agreed that no one should know about all this until we’ve had a chance to speak with the King.’
I was silent as I looked off at the rolling fields of Lord Harsha’s neighbors. Then I said, ‘And Master Juwain?’
‘Yes. Speak with him while he attends your wound, but no one else,’ Asaru said. ‘All right?’
‘All right,’ I said.
We gave voice then to questions for which we had no answers: Who were these strange men who had shot poisoned arrows at us? Assassins sent by the Ishkans or some vengeful duke or king? How had they crossed the heavily guarded passes into Mesh? How had they picked up our trail and then stalked us so silently through the forest?
And why, I wondered above all else, did they want to kill me?
With this thought came the certainty that it had been my death they had sought and not Asaru’s. Again I felt the wrongness that I had sensed earlier in the woods. It seemed not to emanate from any one direction but rather pervaded the sweet-smelling air itself. All about us were the familiar colors of my father’s kingdom: the white granite farm houses; the greenness of fields rich with oats, rye and barley; the purple mountains of Mesh that soared into the deep blue’ sky. And yet all that I looked upon – even the bright red firebirds fluttering about in the trees – seemed darkened as with some indelible taint.
It touched me as well. I felt it as a poison burning in my blood and a coldness that sucked at my soul. As we rode across this beautiful country, more than once I wanted to call a halt so that I could slip down from my saddle and sleep – either that or sink down into the dark, rain-churned earth and cry out at the terror that had awakened inside me.
And this I might easily have done but for Altaru. Somehow he sensed the hurt of my wounded side and the deeper pain of the death that I had inflicted upon the assassin; somehow he moved with a slow, rhythmic grace that seemed to flow into me and ease my distress rather than aggravate it. The surging of his long muscles and great heart lent me a badly needed strength. The familiar, fermy smell steaming off his body reassured me of the basic goodness of life. I had no need to guide him or even to touch his reins, for he knew well enough where we were going: home, to where the setting sun hung above the mountains like a golden cup overflowing with light.
So it was that we finally came upon my father’s castle. This great heap of stone stood atop a hill which was one of several ‘steps’ forming the lower slope of Telshar. The right branch of the Kurash River cut around the base of this hill, separating the castle from the buildings and streets of Silvassu itself. At least in the spring, the river was a natural moat of raging, icy, brown waters; the defensive advantages of such a site must have been obvious to my ancestors who had entered the Valley of the Swans so long ago.
As I looked out at the castle’s soaring white towers, I couldn’t help remembering the story of the first Shavashar, who was the great-grandson of Elahad himself. It had been he who had led the Valari into the Morning Mountains at the beginning of the Lost Ages. This was in the time after the Hundred Year March when the small Valari tribe had wandered across all of Ea on a futile quest to recover the golden cup that Aryu had stolen. Shavashar had set the stones of the first Elahad castle and had begun the warrior tradition of the Valari, for it was told that the first Valari to come to Ea – like all the Star People – were warriors of the spirit only. It was Shavashar who forged my people into warriors of the sword. It was he who had foretold that the Valari would one day have to fight ‘whole armies and all the demons of hell’ to regain the Lightstone.
And so we had. Thousands of years later, in the year 2292 of the Age of Swords – every child older than five knew this date – the Valari had united under Aramesh’s banner and defeated Morjin at the Battle of Sarburn. Aramesh had wrested the Lightstone from Morjin’s very hands and brought this priceless cup back to the security of my family’s castle. For a long time it had resided there, acting as a beacon that drew pilgrims from across all of Ea. These were the great years of Mesh, during which time Silvassu had grown out into the valley to become a great city.
I heard Asaru’s voice calling me as from far away.
‘Why have you stopped?’
In truth, I hadn’t noticed that I had stopped. Or rather, Altaru, sensing my mood, had pulled up at the edge of the road while I gazed off into the past. Before us farther up the road, along the gentle slope leading up to the castle, fields of barley glistened in the slanting light where once great buildings had stood. I remembered my grandfather telling me of the second great tragedy of my people: that in the time of Godavanni the Glorious, Morjin had again stolen the Lightstone, and its radiance had left the Morning Mountains forever. And so, over the centuries, Silvassu had diminished to little more than a backwoods city in a forgotten kingdom. The stones of its streets and houses had been torn up to build the shield wall that surrounded the castle, for the golden age of Ea had ended and the Age of the Dragon had begun.
‘Look,’ I said to Asaru as I pointed at this great wall. Atop the mural towers protecting it, green pennants fluttered in the wind. This was a signal that the castle had received guests and a feast was to be held.
