Lord of Lies

We made camp that night in well-drained meadow above the road. After Estrella’s riding lesson, I held council in my tent with Maram and Master Juwain – and with my brothers, too. I told them of my misgivings. And Maram immediately sighed out, ‘Oh, no, not the Stonefaces! I’d rather face Morjin himself again than them. If it is them, too bad for us.’

‘It will be all right,’ I said to him. I remembered too well the unclean sense of how the Grays wanted to suck out my soul and torment me. ‘This didn’t feel like them.’

‘Well, what did it feel like?’

‘Like someone behind me wanted to murder me.’

Yarashan, who had little liking for the new Guardians, didn’t hesitate to say, ‘One of the Ishkans, then?’

‘It can’t be,’ I said. ‘Whoever is pursuing me, in his wish to slay … there is so much power.’

Yarashan shook his handsome head skeptically. This strange gift I had of sensing others’ emotions disturbed him, the more so because he seemed to lack it. ‘It could be one of the Ishkans, Val. King Hadaru chose them himself, didn’t he? What if he’s set one of them to murder you?’

He went on to say that King Hadaru could not want me to be the Maitreya. Even though King Hadaru had spoken nobly about uniting the Valari, very likely he himself wished to be the one to lead an alliance against Morjin. If I were killed, then King Hadaru might contrive a way to use the new Guardians to give him control of the Lightstone.

‘You’ve a keen mind for plots and strategies,’ I said to Yarashan. My brother beamed as if he had just beaten me in another game of chess and was proud to explicate my mistakes. ‘What you say makes good sense – except for one thing.’

‘And what is that?’

‘King Hadaru is no murderer who would set an assassin upon me.’

‘Can you be sure of that?’

‘As sure as I am of Ianashu and the new Guardians. As sure as I am of Skyshan and Sunjay and the Guardians that I chose myself.’

Yarashan looked at Asaru as if in frustration of my naivete. And Asaru said, ‘There is another possibility. The ghul may have followed us from Mesh.’

I shuddered at this suggestion as I looked out the flap of my tent at the darkening hills around us. If a ghul was hiding in the pastures or woods nearby, I could not sense him.

‘We should post extra guards tonight,’ Asaru continued. ‘And we should post guards around your tent, Val. Men we can trust beyond doubt in case one of the Ishkans is an assassin.’

Each night, since we had set out on the road, it had become our custom that the Lightstone return to my hand and be kept in my tent at the center of our camp.

‘No, there will be no guards around my tent,’ I told Asaru. ‘What would we tell them? That we mistrust the Ishkans, who are now their companions? And what would the Ishkans think of their calling as Guardians when they discovered that we of Mesh sought to guard ourselves against them?’

Master Juwain, who had been silent until now, sighed as he rubbed the back of his head. ‘Very well, then, since the rain has stopped, I’ll sit outside my tent as if taking a bit of fresh air. If anyone approaches your