“A gift of the Night Lord, one could say,” Ceth said. “Or a gift from Ray Valour. I wonder what he said to you. What knowledge did he give you that compels you to seek witches in the woods of your homeland where none would dare venture even in the Bright Days?”
Ceth scanned the low-hanging canopy, his gray eyes roving over the branches, bark and crumpling leaves as if he expected to fall into a spell at any moment. Iyana swallowed. She heard Beast pawing the ground farther up the path and knew that Kenta was close enough to hear even if he had passed out of sight.
It took her a moment to recognize the name Ceth intoned.
“I have ever known him as the Eastern Dark,” Iyana said, fighting past her own hypocrisy. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way. Our association, brief as it was, was an accident. I learned nothing from him, but I saw what he saw. I saw what’s coming, and if we’re to stop it, I need to see more.”
Iyana only noticed her knuckles were squeezed tightly when Ceth glanced down at them and took a half step back. His face underwent a chaotic transformation as he seemed to fight the urge to argue and settled on that familiar mask. She sighed and his look seemed to soften some.
“I don’t wield dark songs and I don’t make slaves of men,” Iyana said, even if they had both witnessed her power firsthand. Even if they both knew she could do something similar, could compel men against their will, could become their will in a way the charlatans of the sands never could. “I saw the World Apart, Ceth, and I saw what it harbors. They are coming, and I can find out when, and where. We have champions out on the farthest roads to the east and north even now. If I can get past the fear that keeps me from doing it, perhaps I can reach them, as well. Perhaps I can help them, or learn something that may help us.”
Ceth looked as if he wanted to ask her of those champions. Instead, he pursed his lips and gave the slightest of nods, and Iyana exhaled.
“My teacher is gone, Ceth,” she said, low enough so that Kenta would not be able to hear without straining. “She was so much more to me, just as Pevah was to you.” His face nearly broke. “She is gone, Ceth, but her teachers remain.”
She held out her hands and turned them over, nodded toward his own. “I have a power I can’t unravel. I don’t know where it begins or ends. It’s Sight mixed in with life and death and everything in between. It frightens me, as I know your power frightens you. I need help if I’m to be of any use.”
He regarded her steadily for a space of time that should have grown uncomfortable. It didn’t. Iyana left it and turned to continue on the path.
“You were of use,” Ceth said, his voice halting and—she thought—near to breaking. “In the end …” He trailed off, and she didn’t let him see the ghost of a smile that graced her face as she rounded the bend.
“If my memory serves,” Kenta said as if nothing had happened, “the way opens up ahead. It should grow lighter for a time. There are streams and mossy beds, and at night the way is lit by lichen and mushrooms that glow like magic.”
Iyana moved up beside him, giving him a smirk. “You know more of the place than you’ve let on, Kenta Griyen.”
His face was somewhat wistful, she thought. “I got lost as a youth.”
“Lost, was it?” Iyana asked, searching him. “And for how long?” He frowned as she felt her eyes brighten, and she pushed the greenfire down so as not to reach for his emotions absent invitation. Still, she could tell plenty from his face.
“Long enough to miss it,” he said, moving ahead and leaving her with Beast, who nuzzled into her shoulder affectionately. She watched Ceth pass and then guided the charger onto the path.
It did grow wider ahead, just as Kenta promised, and she let her mind drift as she wondered how long Kenta had spent in the Eastern Woods, and with whom.
The men in cloaks with armor beneath had fashioned a trio of sleds upon which they piled the frozen bodies of their brethren and the wounded Landkist of the north. The sounds of the wood dragging through the crusted ice was more company than talk as they walked through the night. It was a grating sound, and it was pregnant with the tension both companies must have felt. Kole kept from looking too closely at the Blue Knight, whom he had burned. He did not think the wounds were grave, and already the man had struggled to rise before being forced back down by his fellows. Still, burning was never a clean thing unless it resulted in death, absolution.
What sort of gift was that? Kole wondered this as he watched Linn walk ahead of them, silver bow bobbing along with a brown tail that had grown long in the weeks since leaving their Valley home. He supposed Jenk and Misha must feel the same. Both had used their fire liberally during the brief, violent clash with their new companions—or was it captors? Still, neither seemed to linger on hot deeds as Kole did. He supposed that was a good thing, taken the right way.
Shifa, usually intent on knowing the scents of all who traveled under her charge, kept a close border around Kole and the others.
Kole had counted the cloaked soldiers—there were just under a score—and noted how the bearded leader walked closest to them while the others kept their distance. He also noted how the Blue Knights in their golden armor walked ahead, far enough to appear brazen in the company of Embers from the south. Kole saw Misha gritting her teeth as she eyed them, but eventually she gave it up.
The first light of the east illuminated a blue sky free of all but the barest wisp of white clouds. When the yellow disc first crested the distance, it took Kole’s breath. He heard the sharp inhalations of the others—even Baas—as the icy plane was lit in all its shattering brilliance. It was like a field of diamonds stretching until it came up against a sheer wall of blue that may as well have been the World’s ending. Between the long patches of white, deep blue lines broke up the plains in the distance, and Kole squinted to see if he could catch the movement of the passing streams beneath.
He moved up beside Linn and nudged her on the arm, nodding ahead. “Are those rivers, there?” he asked. She was smiling wide before she answered.
“Blue stone, I think,” she said, shaking her head slowly, as if in awe. “Like veins running through the waste.”
“Not so.” The speaker was the bearded man clad in fur and thick armor with jagged spikes beneath. He drifted close in the light and gave Kole a smile as Jenk and Misha moved up to shadow him. Baas left them to it, content to walk along the edges. “The plains out in the distance there,” the man pointed at the place they looked, “that is the Eastern Sea. There was a time when it was not so cold as it is now. When I was a boy, the Bright Days would thaw the place enough to bring those veins to life. It was like a land of white islands stretching far as the eye could see. Now, it’s frozen through.”
“How deep?” Jenk asked, sounding nervous.
“Don’t worry, Ember,” the man said. “Even with your heat, you’ll not risk falling through until we’re well beyond the palace, where the waves stand tall as small mountains.”
“Palace …” Misha said, sounding dubious.
The man shrugged. “Been there far longer than any of us. Less crowded than it was a few years back. Far less than a few centuries ago.”
Kole shook his head and saw his companions display similar looks. No matter how strange, full and twisted the lands of Center were, they were wilds, and all lands had them. But to hear talk of palaces and crystal towers, frozen seas and armored knights … it seemed as if the truth of the wider World outstripped even the most fanciful of Doh’Rah’s tales. And yet, as Kole searched from north to east and south, he saw little but for the glittering, rolling flats. Whatever majesty had ruled these lands once upon a time, it was little more than a pale shadow now.
He wondered if this queen was more of the same, or if she truly was someone worth championing as these storybook knights did; as these rough men and women clad in furs did.
What Kole at first took for a trick of the clouds and sky in the north eventually resolved into mountains like those they had left behind. They
broke up the space from white to blue with slate gray, springing up from the earth like the fangs of a silver lion. They were taller and more violent in the center before tumbling farther east, where the land dropped away to a series of dips and eddies that might have been the waves their guide spoke of. And at the easternmost tip of the range was a light that shone like the brightest moon in the midst of day. Kole had to shield his eyes to look upon it, and motioned for Linn to as well. She came away wincing and looked askance at the cloaked man.
He only nodded, and the smile he wore seemed proud before Kole caught a bit of tightness beneath it.
“The jewel of the east,” he said.
“What is your name?” Kole asked, and the man inclined his head. His beard was frosted more with ice than the snow of age. He was younger than Kole had at first thought.
“Fen,” the man said. It was a soft-sounding name given the gruff exterior. Fen shrugged and looked ahead, his pale eyes shifting quickly over the armored knights, who pretended to look to the borders of the company while their eyes sought out the Landkist at their backs, or the hound behind their knees. “Short for Fennick,” he added, as if that made it better. Kole laughed and Fen joined him in the effort. “How much is in a name, truly?” he asked. “Not a name for a hero, perhaps. But maybe for the friend of one.”
“Got any of those here?” Misha asked, her tone showing what she thought of it. Fen’s face went tight, and the smile that came to it on a delay was forced. He didn’t answer.
Kole looked beyond him, trying to find the glittering palace in the north, but the land was deceptive, pitching and rolling like a ship at sea. It was temporarily lost to his sight. He would have continued to search for the place, but there was a nearer sight that came up unbidden.
“What is that?”
“The Quartz Tower,” Fen said.
The white plains dropped away into a shallow valley where the first blue veins began to break up the land, and at the bottom a single spire rose like a statement. The base seemed made of white stone that had been polished by wind and weather more than human hands. It was irregular and seemingly natural. The body was cut sheer, with sharp edges angling southeast and northeast. At the top, the spire rose to a split fork, two knife’s edges with a clutch of watchers standing in the center. Kole could see the glint of silver as an eyeglass was turned their way.
The Blue Knights did not slow as they started down into the basin, but Kole, Linn, Misha, Jenk and Baas Taldis did, and Fen and his soldiers—natives to this great land, Kole guessed—watched them as they admired the carven spear.
“They say the whole coast used to be made up of them,” Fen said, pointing beyond the tower to where the land stretched and stretched before disappearing over another rise. “The Quartz Towers of the Eastern Sea, and with the Blue Knights guarding each and every one against the soldiers of Balon Rael.”
Kole winced at the name and eyed Linn, who swallowed.
“Ah, yes,” Fennick said as his company started down, the sleds scraping as the sun had turned the hill on which they stood into a mound of melt and slush that would freeze when night fell once more. “You fought with him.” Kole nodded. “And his great brutes with their borrowed strength?” Another nod.
“Were there more of you, when you fought him?” Fennick said it without expectation, looking them over.
“We were joined by Maro of the Emerald Road,” Linn said. “And his Willows.”
The terms seemed to spark only the vaguest sort of recognition in Fennick. “Despite the demeanor of my fellows,” he nodded down at the mix of golden armor and fur-lined cloaks, “we would thank you for disposing of that one. We’ve faced down his legions only once in my time, and more in the time of my father. Long has he held a grudge against our queen, even though our lands are empty as they’ve ever been. Most live within the mountain’s walls these days.”
“Why is that?” Jenk asked.
Fennick turned to regard him. “The cold,” the man said simply. “It isn’t a thing for life and love. It kills and displays its trophies for passers-by. Often, the bodies here are too hard-frozen for even bears to get much out of.”
He paused. “There is soil beneath this mess,” he said, pushing some of the snow aside to reveal more beneath. It was hard-packed and Kole thought it unlikely it would thaw anytime soon. “But the years have grown colder and the sea closer. It moves beneath the ice, crushing the land with each passing year and growing harder and more permanent during the Dark Months. The queen says it is a cycle, and one she has seen before—that, one day, the green you saw below the shelves to the west will return to the highlands once more, and the frozen waves will take back their motion and crash against this tower again.”
“And what do you say?”
Kole turned, surprised to see Baas staring unblinking at the man, who looked unsteady under that gray gaze. Kole looked askance at him, but the Riverman was never one to mince words. “You said your queen claimed it. What about you?”
Fennick swallowed and glanced down at the clutch of soldiers below the slope. The great, golden brute known as Tundra had removed his jewel-encrusted helm and stared up at them with unconcealed suspicion. His eyes, even from a distance, were darker than the others, without the same gold and brown specks within the amber.
“The war has been difficult on all of us,” Fennick said, choosing his words carefully. “In all lands, I’m sure.”
“The War of Sages, you mean,” Linn said and Fennick nodded. “That may be so, Commander, but for us, the true war is one we’ve been fighting since we were old enough to bear arms. Younger, even.” He frowned at her. “The war against the night, and the things it brings with it.”
“An effect of the same,” Kole said before he had given thought to speak. Linn only stared at him. He thought she gave the slightest nod, but it seemed more a dismissal than a confirmation. Fennick looked from one to the other as Shifa slid between them, losing her footing in the melt. She began to complain and dodged Kole’s attempts to reach for her.
“The World Apart, you mean,” Fennick said, frowning. He didn’t say it doubtfully, though Kole had half expected him to. The wider World was still new to them, and the truth they had been forced to endure and had railed against for the better part of their lives was still a lie to most places, with nothing but the errant Dark Kind—perhaps a rare Sentinel—slipping through the rifts between worlds. Now, a greater darkness was coming, and on the backs of the Sages’ seemingly unending strife. Still, a few were dead … and few remained. Kole found himself licking his lips at the prospect of adding to one number and subtracting from the other.
Fennick looked suddenly like a boy coming face to face with bedtime stories, same as them. Kole had never given much thought to the fact that the Emberfolk had been fighting the stuff of nightmare—the stuff most could only imagine. Still, as Fennick began his stalking slide down the steep and slippery slope, Kole looked out over the vast open; the vast empty.
“They’ve had their own nightmare, here,” he said, and while he earned a few strange glances from his close companions, none asked what he meant. None needed to.
They had seen what the folk of the Emerald Road had been up against: the Willows and the Raiths, the Sage of Balon Rael and all his forged hate they had done nothing to earn and everything to survive. These folk seemed fewer and more spread out, but no less strong because of it. Kole traced the blue and white flatness to the south, trying to imagine the gray stone towers and looming keeps that made the land up—a land that was likely in the midst of a chaos all its own now their Sage was dead and gone and the great and deadly Asha buried beneath the roots of Center.
Baas allowed his weight to carry him down to the base of the slope and the others followed, Linn doing her best to avoid the track the Embers formed as their auras caused the slush to turn into rivers.
At the bottom, a woman with piercing blue eyes and skin lined with age and turned reddish-brown by the reflected sun met them with
a steely grace.
“Landkist of the south,” she said, nodding. Jenk reached his hand forward, but she did not so much as twitch in his direction and he stepped back, rubbing the back of his head. The Blue Knights had moved ahead, twisting around the quartz base of the tower. Now that they were close, Kole could see that the sides of the structure bore facets that seemed carved, the sunken lines and raised ridges throwing off the rays of the afternoon sun.
“We won’t be spending the night,” Fennick said, coming back from the small row of sleds they had deposited in the shade of the tower.
“No?”
“The Frostfire Sage wishes to see them, and they wish to see her.”
“Is that so?” She turned back to them, eyed them up and down. She appraised Baas longest and gave him a smirk that Kole took for something other than the Riverman did.
“We’ve come a long way,” Kole said. “Your Sage will want to know what we know. Hear what we’ve seen.”
“The Eastern Dark comes,” the woman said plainly. She did not seem cowed by the prospect, and Kole examined her surreptitiously. She wore chainmail like some of the soldiers of Balon Rael had beneath their black suits, and she showed as much skin as fur—a strange combination that Linn frowned at him noticing.
“And in the company of an Ember the likes of which you’ve never seen before,” Misha said, bristling. The blue eyes swiveled her way and held her, and the woman’s demeanor fully passed from rigid to amused.
“We have never seen any Ember in the far north and east, along the salt mountains of the Endless Sea.” She dabbed sweat that had begun to bead on her brow and gave Jenk a wink. “For what it’s worth, I’m impressed at your heat. You’re like rays of welcome sunshine in the shade.”
“Somehow,” Jenk said with a smile and a blush, “I don’t quite believe you.”
She turned and they followed, Misha elbowing Jenk in the side as she made to follow. Kole felt the wind pick up and eyed Linn, thinking she was trying to warn him of something, but she looked around same as him, searching. Fine white powder blew on the swift currents, and Kole tasted salt on the tip of his tongue. He crouched in the shadow of the Quartz Tower and touched his bare hand to the ice, which hissed and retreated at his attention. He raised his fingers and licked the tips as the others watched him. Shifa padded close, tail wagging excitedly. She licked the ground and regretted it, wiping the taste of the sea on Kole’s black armor.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 22