That afternoon Valentine rested alone for a while in the huge master suite that Nitikkimal had turned over to him, before going to the municipal meeting-hall to speak with the citizens of the district. A thick packet of dispatches from the east had caught up with him here. Hissune, he learned, was deep within Metamorph country, somewhere in the vicinity of the Steiche, searching for New Velalisier, as the rebel capital was known. Valentine wondered if Hissune would have better luck than he himself had had in his quest for the wandering city of Ilirivoyne. And Divvis had assembled a second and even greater army to raid the Piurivar lands from the other side. The thought of a warlike man like Divvis in those jungles troubled Valentine. This is not what I had intended, he thought—sending armies marching into Piurifayne.
This was what I had hoped to avoid. But of course it had become unavoidable, he knew. And the times called for Divvises and Hissunes, not for Valentines: he would play his proper role, and they would play theirs, and—the Divine willing—the wounds of the world would someday begin to heal.
He looked through the other dispatches. News from Castle Mount: Stasilaine was Regent now, toiling over the routine tasks of government. Valentine pitied him. Stasilaine the splendid, Stasilaine the agile, sitting now at that desk scribbling his name on pieces of paper—how time undoes us all! Valentine thought. We who thought life on Castle Mount was all hunting and frolic, bowed now under responsibilities, holding up the poor tottering world with our backs. How far away the Castle seemed, how far away all the joys of that time when the world apparently governed itself, and it was springtime all the year round!
Dispatches from Tunigorn, too—moving through Zimroel not far behind Valentine, handling the day-by-day chores of relief activities: the distribution of food, the conservation of remaining resources, the burial of the dead, and all the other various anti-famine and anti-plague measures. Tunigorn the archer, Tunigorn the famous slayer of game—now did he justify, now do we all justify, Valentine thought, the ease and comfort of our playful boyhoods on the Mount!
He shoved the dispatches away. From the case in which he kept it, now, he drew forth the dragon's tooth that the woman Millilain had so strangely put into his hand as he entered Khyntor. From his first moment of contact with it he had known that it was something more than a mere bizarre trinket, an amulet for the blindly superstitious. But it was only as the days unfolded, as he devoted time to comprehending its meaning and uses—secretly, always secretly, not letting even Carabella see what he was doing—that Valentine had come to realize what kind of thing it was that Millilain had given him.
Lightly he touched its shining surface. It was a delicate-looking thing, so thin as to be nearly translucent.
But it was as hard as the hardest stone, and its tapered edges were sharp as fine-honed steel. It was cool in his hand, but yet it seemed to him there was a core of fire within it.