Season of Fire

by Lisa Tawn Bergren

  “We will rest here for a time. Regain our strength. Our focus. It’s important. When we are exhausted, facing foes such as Sethos and Keallach … you’ve seen for yourself how they use every single crack in our armor to their advantage. Physically, emotionally, spiritually.”

  The way he said that, I wondered if the two had abused him before they ever reached the coast and ran across me.

  “Can I tell you something?” I paused to take a deep breath. “Keallach seemed … good to me. As if he only sought to connect with me, not hurt me. I think it’s Sethos. Sethos is the one we need to destroy. He is the one who drags Keallach down.”

  Niero looked me. “Or is that exactly what he wished you to think?” He shook his head dismissively. “No, Keallach is as fallen as his guardian. Only far more clever in disguising his true nature.”

  I frowned and stared at the water.

  “We must become stronger. On our own. And as a collective,” he said. “We will need to rely on one another in the days to come.” He jumped off the rock and winced, the first sign that he felt any pain at all. Slowly, he straightened, but avoided my gaze.

  “Did they hurt you horribly?” I asked softly.

  “I’ve experienced far more horrible things than what they heaped upon me.”

  I sensed an almost-explanation for some of his scars, tantalizing me, teasing me, but intuitively knew he wouldn’t elaborate on the deep past. I only had a chance at what had just occured. “How’d you escape, Niero?” I tried, as he pulled on his dry shirt.

  “They grew tired of their efforts, especially once Keallach and Sethos left. I escaped a lazy guard,” he said with a shrug, and I knew there was no possible way it had been as easy as he wanted me to believe. But I said nothing more.

  We stared at the river together for a long while then. He cast a sidelong glance at me. “Did they hurt you, Dri?” he said. “Aboard the ship?”

  “Not in any way you can see,” I said. I frowned. “But Niero, Keallach … I honestly think there is good in him yet,” I said, rushing now, feeling the guilt and betrayal of my words in coming to the defense of our supposed enemy. “I think he could be turned. Redeemed. Brought into our circle.”

  Niero glowered up at me, and for once, I could read him clearly. Frustration and fury. “He is a deceiver, Andriana.”

  “He has traveled with Sethos for these past seasons. Sethos has influenced him greatly, for certain. Keallach made him his knight after his own died, Niero. There’s little wonder how the man has infiltrated his mind and heart. But it doesn’t mean that at his core there isn’t something worth redeeming.”

  That brought his head up, and his lips clamped shut. His dark eyes scanned the water, as if trying to see into the world of Pacifica and with it the twins’ past.

  “There is darkness within him, and it’s muddled and bewildering,” I went on, shaking my head. “I admit that he might be a master at confusing me, slipping in bits of doubt when I don’t see it coming. But there’s also good in him. I felt that too, Niero. A longing, a hope. For us. For the Maker.”

  “He made his choice,” he bit out. “Do you know what happened to his knight? And Kapriel’s?”

  I tried to swallow, but found my mouth dry. “They died,” I whispered.

  “They killed each other, each fighting to save their Remnant.” He closed his eyes and it was a mask of pain. Then he opened them, his brows quirking with urgency. “Do you see what a waste that was? How wrong? It is not the Maker’s way. And it was Keallach’s decisions that brought them to it.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, sharing the pain, the understanding. “He made terrible decisions. Horrific decisions. But Niero, are you certain you are not blocking Keallach’s return to us? Stopping him from restoration? Yes, I admit, it sounds like madness. But think of it, Niero. Think of it. You saw for yourself — ​Kapriel’s power, mingled with Keallach’s, both in their infancy yet, before the armband ceremony. What if they were working together, instead of battling?”

  “It’s impossible, Andriana,” he said in disgust, turning to go. He paused and said over his stiff shoulder, “Get it out of your mind now. Keallach is using your empathy as a means to infiltrate us and bring us down. He has chosen his lot. He is against us. Lost to the dark.”

  He left me then, moving down the path, back toward the village as if he feared more that I might say, and I sighed in frustration.

  I watched as the boys at the bend in the river moved into the woods too, their nets full of shimmering fish. My mouth watered at the thought of the silver scales, sizzling in pans over the open fire, and the pink flesh below, hot on my fingers, filling my empty belly.

  But first I had to wash. My skin felt dry and brittle with the layer of sea salt still covering it. And my mind and heart felt much the same, especially after my tense conversation with Niero. It made me want to cry again.

  Without another thought, I disrobed, dropping the heavy pelt to the rock, warming in the morning sun, with nothing on but the Pacifican sheath, still bloody, wishing I could shed it too. Then I dived into the cold, fresh water, staying under, remembering the mountain rivers of my youth.

  Of my father, swimming beside me. Of laughter.

  And of a time with few tears at all.

  RONAN

  I awakened with a start and sat up, then clenched my eyes against the pounding ache behind them. Breathing slowly and steadily, I waited for a moment until the pain became a dull throb and I could look again. She was gone, as I knew as soon as I awakened.

  I tried to stand using my bad arm and sucked in my breath as stars danced across my vision and I almost blacked out. Once again I paused, calmed my breathing, then rose using my good arm. I shifted slowly, testing my range of motion. I hoped Tressa’s prayers and the Aravander healer’s herbal poultice would help my wound heal faster. Because the thought of a bum sword arm was enough to make me blind with panic.

  Bending low, I exited the warm hut and felt the chill of the morning on my skin. Where had she gone? My eyes searched the huts, but few were up at this hour. There were two young boys hauling jugs of water for their mothers. Another stirring the embers of a small cook fire and placing a small log atop it. Four girls burst through a copse of aspen, giggled and whispered when they saw the boy. They raced off and took to four separate trunks, using a long strap that formed a loop around their narrow backs and the massive girth of the trees. Utilizing it as leverage, they pushed back with bare feet and swiftly rose up and up until they were among the branches. Moments later, four boys descended, their eyes red-rimmed, their skin pale with weariness. Lookouts, I decided. Is this how the Aravanders had survived so long without capture?

  Tressa emerged from the hut beside me, Killian right beside her. At least he hadn’t let his Remnant slip away while he slumbered. But they didn’t pause beside me. Instead, she was moving toward Latonia’s hut, right across from ours. It was then that I heard the woman cry from within. A great, wrenching cry that made me wince.

  Niero was coming up the river path with Chaza’el, deep in conversation, but both men looked straight at Tressa when we heard Latonia cry again. With one nod, I knew she’d been called to some sort of healing. But what sort of healing did a birthing woman need? I shuddered at the thought.

  Now more agitated than ever, I walked over to Niero. “Did either of you see Andriana?”

  “She’s down at the river,” Niero said. There was something guarded in his eyes. Had they been together? A stab of jealousy went through me, but I looked away so he couldn’t see it in my eyes.

  “She’s in labor,” the village healer said, emerging from Latonia’s hut. He shook his head, and I noticed how wan he was.

  “I’ll be back with Dri,” I muttered over my shoulder and quickly moved toward the path. “If Tressa’s called, it’s best if you have all the Remnants here, right?”

  Niero nodded slowly, looking at me as if trying to figure out what I was hiding. Sometimes I hated that he seemed t
o know all of us better than we knew ourselves.

  A bird called in the far-off distance, and then another a bit away. Chaza’el’s head whipped up, looking to the branches. So did a man exiting another hut. Even as a newcomer, I recognized the covert, hushed alarm disguised as birds. The call went from tree to tree, closer and closer, until the four girls I’d seen rise to the canopy were repeating it down to us.

  The village erupted in a frenzy of activity. Children emerged from all corners, dragging tree limbs back across the paths that had been cleared, dousing fires with jugs of water, then dirt to smother the smoky telltale tendrils. A woman ran by, hurriedly putting her wailing baby to her breast right in front of me in her desperation to silence him. A small child ran behind her, thumb in his mouth.

  My eyes met Niero’s, and I could almost hear him say her name, even though his lips did not move.

  Dri.

  And then I ran.

  CHAPTER

  9

  ANDRIANA

  I swam hard, against the slow current, until I spied three tiny, pale lavender flowers of Sweet William among the greenery of the bank. I eased over the slippery rocks and edged aside a thorny brush to grab the treasured leaves that would create a bathing lather. Careful not to drop them, I shivered in the morning shadows, wishing I could swim back out into the sun, but I was intent on not losing the only soap I could find. Later, I’d come back to collect more and boil them to create a proper soap, but it was all I had for now.

  I ripped up the tiny leaves and crushed them in one palm until I had the tiniest bit of a lather, then worked that through my long hair. Then I reached up and took the sparse suds from my hair again and again to clean my body. As I did so, I listened to the sounds of the river along the bank, and the birds above me. It was hardly the best bath I’d ever had, I thought, but at least I’d be free of the brine that had made me itch all night.

  It was the birds falling silent that drew my attention first.

  And then it was the call echoed through the forest, an eruption of bird chatter, from tree to tree. Lookouts. A warning call.

  My eyes scanned the length of the river, worried the boys fishing might return to the beach, and then down at my body, my white underdress that would draw undue attention against the dark greenery of the riverbank.

  “Dri, that rock, just upstream,” urged a man’s voice above me, from among the trees.

  Ronan. It shouldn’t have surprised me that my knight had found me, but it did. And his presence comforted me.

  We could hear the whine of a tiny engine, then. And a second.

  “My robe,” I whispered over my shoulder, anxiety filling me. If they saw the robe of pelts, strewn across the boulder — ​

  “I have it,” he growled. “Go now!”

  I was already moving, the foreign whining, whirring sound setting my heart to pounding. I couldn’t betray the village by letting their enemies find me. I waded back into the water, submerging as fast as I could to my waist, to my shoulders, then under. When I took a breath, still several strokes away from the outcrop of rock that Ronan had seen, I spotted the first mechanical bird round the bend of the river, low above the water and coming fast. I went under and kicked and pulled back my arms as hard as I could, again and again. The current was stronger here, in the deep, and it took everything in me not to rise for a breath. I stroked forward, wondering if the spy bird was above me now, able to somehow see the white of my underclothes beneath the ripples of the green river water, or if it was already past.

  I finally reached the boulder and the current released its grip on me. I touched the rock and then willed myself to rise slowly, barely creating a break in the surface, as our trainer had taught us in survival exercises. Back home in the Valley, he had made us submerge in a deep pool for as long as we could, then rise, letting the water fill around our foreheads, eye sockets, nostrils, lips, chin, neck, as if we were a creature of the water rather than of the earth. His lessons rang through my head as I fought to do it again, instead of breaking the surface and gulping in the breath my lungs screamed for.

  The outcropping was barely large enough to cover me and it was a struggle to keep my footing, rather than drifting out with the current. It was too deep to stand.

  But the spy bird was close. A hovering machine about the size of a small child, covered in faux feathers, but with no wings. It hovered over the boulder on which I’d stood with Raniero, then slowly moved along the bank toward me. A second later it was on the other side of the rock that shielded me. I prayed that there were no footprints visible, no rocks that looked dislodged. I hurriedly inhaled and exhaled, catching my breath in case I needed to submerge again.

  The spy bird suddenly banked and moved out to the river, and I drew a sharp breath. As if it had heard me, it paused, and I went under then, all the way under, abandoning my plan to sink my face halfway, allowing my nostrils to remain clear. I dived down and grabbed hold of several huge, rounded rocks, drawing my legs in and trying to stay still, thankful for the anchoring. I prayed to the Maker to shield me and tried to count rather than think about my aching lungs.

  When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I rose slowly beneath the outcropping and allowed myself to pant for breath when I noted the whine of the small engines were in the distance.

  Ronan peeked out from beside a large tree. “Nicely done,” he said quietly, his low voice just audible over the river. “Let’s give it another minute to make certain they’re gone.”

  I nodded, thankful he was with me. Always with me. So faithful. So true. I studied him freely as he stared upriver. I could see that the swelling had gone down around his eye, though the white of it was still bloodshot and angry, and the skin around it was turning a sickly green-purple. But to me, he was handsome, rugged and strong, even with the bruises.

  He gave me a small, tender smile, recognizing the look on my face as clearly as I was reading the love and care in his heart. He loved me as I loved him. But if Raniero discovered the depth of our feelings, what would he do? We were expressly forbidden to have any relationship beyond our Ailith bond. The bond was already intense enough to have such a clear draw to one another, strong enough to sense when others were about. But then to fall in love?

  And yet, to me, it seemed like the only possible outcome, if one was physically and emotionally drawn to their knight as I was. Apparently, Vidar wasn’t drawn to Bellona — ​they were more like brother and sister. Killian … I was certain he loved Tressa beyond kinship. It was she who kept him at arm’s length. But with Ronan, well, neither of us could seem to stay away from the other. He drew me as strongly as the moon drew the tide.

  “Okay,” he said, edging farther out. “You must be like ice, in that water for so long. Come out on the other side of the rock. There’s a small path there.”

  I nodded, my teeth now chattering, my limbs so numb now they felt oddly warm. I swam around the edge of the boulder and then scrambled over the rocks, wincing as their sharp edges dug into my feet.

  Ronan was waiting at the top of the hill, his eyes averted, with my robe stretched out and ready to wrap around me. I edged back against the soft hide and pulled it around, then turned to him.

  He drew me in close, until my head was nestled beneath his chin, and moved to kiss it. “Dri, that was far too close.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was scared too. Thank you for coming after me. And for thinking to grab my robe.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Chaza’el knew they were coming. I think. Those mechanical birds.”

  “Drones from Pacifica,” he said. ”The chief told me they carry small cameras in them. They probably operate off a boat in the ocean. The Pacificans have been scouting every river for decades, trying to find these people. Periodically, they’re found, killed, enslaved, or escape.”

  “But we’re here now,” I said, my heart picking up its pace. “If they send Sheolite scouts bent on flushing us out, we might expose them. No matter how hard we migh
t try …”

  “Which probably means we can’t stay for long. A few days at the most.”

  I nodded and wrapped my arms around him, relishing this moment alone.

  “You smell good,” he murmured, pulling me closer too. “You found some Sweet William?”

  “A few leaves,” I said, happy that he’d noticed.

  He looked down at me and I could feel the wave of desire in him. But it merely echoed my own. He bent his head and kissed me then, slowly, softly. It was our first kiss since the tree village in the mountains, a half of a moon cycle before. And I wanted more. I reached up, tangling my fingers in the back of his dark, shoulder-length hair, for once not tied with its customary leather strap. Had he just awakened?

  He moved one arm across my robe, his big hand settling on my lower back, strong and sure, pulling me close, our kiss deepening.

  “Stop,” said a voice behind him.

  We sprang apart, knowing instantly who it was.

  Raniero.

  He strode through the woods, his face like a visible snarl, and grabbed my hand. With my other, I hurriedly drew the robe tight around me like a shield. I knew I was blushing furiously — ​was my entire face as red as a berry?

  Ronan was rubbing the back of his neck, spots of color spreading across his own cheeks, the other hand reaching out to our leader. “Niero —”

  “No,” Niero cut him off. “There’s nothing to say. You’ve crossed the line.” He dropped my hand and paced a little, hands on hips, then gestured angrily at us. “Don’t you see? The Ailith bond is strong enough without this going on,” he said, waving between me and Ronan. “Our enemies, given the opportunity, will use the love we share for one another against us. But if you two share the love of a man and a woman …” He shook his head as if in agony and looked to the sky. “It simply cannot happen. You must trust me.”

  We stared at him. “But what if …” I swallowed, losing my nerve.

  “What if it’s already happened?” Ronan finished, glaring at him. “What if I love Dri and she loves me?” The muscles in his jaw clenched and his hands drew into fists. “It’s not like we can stop it, Raniero. It’s beyond us.”