“We come to the Eastern Woods to honor one of yours,” Iyana said. She gestured back at the charger and the wrapped bundle on the patch of moss behind him, and for the first time, Shek and her hunters looked beyond them. “Sen,” she said, color coming to her face. Where before the air had felt cool and soothing on the edges of the rushing river, now it felt close and stifling.
Shek’s face seemed to pale at the proclamation. Her lips formed a tight line, and for a moment, she looked as if she might respond, but the taller male beside her stepped forward, brushing by Iyana and ignoring Kenta and Ceth. He walked right up to Beast and Iyana turned to watch him. The Faey bowed his head as he recognized the wrapped form of Sen. When he turned back to his companions, he did so with a grave expression.
“Three of the Faeykin were training with our own,” the man said without turning. “What became of Sen’s companions? Those from the Scattered Villages?”
Iyana felt a pang for not knowing Verna and Courlis were not of Hearth. She knew most of the Scattered Villages were to the west, but there were some in the northeast, very close to the Faey tribes.
“They fell on the same road,” Iyana said. “We burned them at Hearth.”
He nodded, but made no move to speak again. Not for some time. Iyana watched those on the borders. Some bowed their heads in apparent mourning, while others looked aloof. The majority, it seemed, did not know how they should feel, caught between looking at Shek and the tall hunter who might be their leader.
“My name is Tirruhn,” he said. “And I welcome you to the East, to lands you have never been before. You are blessed by the Valley, Iyana Ve’Ran. We will not turn you away, no matter how much Shek might wish it so.
“Come,” he said, turning from Beast. “Sunrise is not so far away. Let us move while the path is lit.” He would have shouldered Shek out of the way had she not moved aside. She looked shamed for a moment, until she felt Iyana’s eyes on her.
The others began to move off. They were reluctant at first, with more than one casting lingering stares toward Ceth, who remained rooted next to Iyana, waiting on her to make a move. She looked to Kenta, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug before following Tirruhn onto the northernmost path, which straddled the riverside. He took Beast with him and Ceth followed after when Iyana smiled to let him know she was fine.
Shek waited for Iyana to pass her by. When she did, she took up her wake. She walked very close to Iyana as they began their trek. Closer than was comfortable, and Iyana felt her stare as a steady smolder.
“You have the hair all right,” Shek said, going so far as to brush its edges with the tips of her fingers. “My people call it moonsilk, but I’ve always thought it looks more like starlight.”
Iyana felt strange under Shek’s attention, but she could see by Ceth’s bearing that he was listening to every word. At least, as best he could.
Iyana turned toward Shek, but came up empty when she went to speak. Shek took the opportunity. “Even without the hair, though,” she said, “I’d have known you had the gift of my people by the way those emeralds shone.”
She stopped in her tracks and hooked Iyana by the elbow. Iyana stopped as well, doing her best not to call out for Ceth or Kenta, who had disappeared around the next bend in the thickening undergrowth.
“Had you so much as brushed against my tether, young one,” Shek said, running two fingers along Iyana’s bangs, “I’d have cut your throat with an arrowhead.” She even smiled as she said it, as if it were an afterthought and not a threat to kill. Her eyes went stony as she ended her examination of Iyana’s hair and looked her dead on.
Iyana felt the fear grip her, but beneath the fear was that ever-present stone of Ve’Ran. It was the same stone her father had, and it was that which Linn had inherited most strongly. But around the stone, burning enough to scald the edges and smooth them in her young years, was a fire that could only come from one born of the Emberfolk. It was the same fire that had awoken in Kole, Jenk and Kaya Ferrahl. It had just chosen to manifest in other ways for her.
She slapped Shek’s hand away and braced herself for an attack that did not come. Instead, Shek’s alien face—large eyes, a narrow nose and a sharp chin that could cut bark—contorted, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing from one so seemingly small.
“I am the living legacy of the Faey Mother,” Iyana said. “And I am Faeykin. Both of these things are true.” She did not have to fight to keep her voice level, and some part of her took pleasure in seeing it shock this woman of the Eastern Woods. “But I am also Iyana Ve’Ran of Last Lake.”
There was hardly any space between them, but Iyana took a half step toward Shek anyway, filling in the narrow gap. “You are young, Shek,” Iyana said. “And unburdened by the abilities of the Landkist. Your Valley did not think to bless you or curse you as it has done me. Blessed to heal hurts and see the lives of others as threads to be tugged, pulled … or cut entirely.” Shek swallowed. “Cursed to feel their hurt as your own, their fear more so.” Iyana looked from one dark blue eye to the other and did not have to light her own to get the desired effect.
“Do not pretend to know anything of who I am. Do not pretend to know why I have come.”
Iyana finished and left Shek standing beneath the starry specks of blue and lavender that hung from the vines and furry creepers. When she moved around the bend, she nearly collided with Ceth’s chest. The Landkist was standing in the center of the glowing trail. Iyana looked up at him, and he frowned in confusion at the smirk she still wore. She wiped it away and craned around him to see Kenta standing alongside Beast. Tirruhn stood off to the side. He smiled disarmingly at her and looked away when Shek streaked past her without a word or backward glance, her coldness now anything but indifferent.
Mollified that nothing untoward would occur now that the two had had it out, at least for now, Ceth allowed Iyana to pass, taking up the rear. When she passed by Tirruhn, the tall warrior fell into step beside her and just behind Kenta and Beast, whose oily black tail swished at the buzzing fireflies. Iyana could still see Shek up ahead. She was not so far as to be out of earshot.
Tirruhn saw her looking.
“Ninyeva was a friend to us,” he said. “She did much to bring peace back to the Valley core.”
Hearing him, Kenta broke off from a short, clipped exchange with Shek and handed Beast’s reins to her. Much to Iyana’s surprise, she accepted the charge without a backward glance, and Kenta slowed his pace to fall in beside them.
“Some would say she also brought war,” Kenta said.
“Can’t have one without the other,” Ceth said from behind.
Iyana bristled at Kenta but he raised a hand in a placating gesture. “Ninyeva was of the desert caravan,” he said. “Before our coming, and before the Rivermen followed the River F’Rust down out of the north, the Faey held this Valley alone.”
“And am I to believe that the Faey never had war with one another?” Iyana asked. Tirruhn merely shrugged.
“All peoples war,” he said.
Kenta, it seemed, was more interested in defending the Faey than Tirruhn was. “War requires opposing sides, Iyana. All peoples are capable of violence, just as all birds, beasts and flitting insects are. But war.” He looked distant. “War is something else entirely. There is an intent to the practice, and one wolves and lions are incapable of mimicking.”
Iyana shifted her attention back to the trail as she mulled it over. “Tirruhn,” she started and the tall Faey warrior looked down at her. “Do you take offense to being compared to wolves and silver lions?”
“What is there to take offense to?” he asked. Now that the threat of violence had passed, Iyana noticed the accent he bore. It was covered, and not nearly as potent as she might have expected, but it was there.
“War is something done between men,” Kenta concluded with a short nod. “And no matter how it starts or why, it takes two sides to keep a thing like that going.”
“We’re
beyond that, now,” Iyana said.
The trail was closer than those they had passed through on the river’s edge. She could still hear the water rushing by, could still feel the mist drifting through the foliage and coating her arms and neck in a thin film that was pleasant without soaking.
Tirruhn left them to their own company, and, near as Iyana could tell, left no hunters behind to shadow their steps. It seemed the Faey had taken them at their word, or at least had taken Kenta at his.
“Shek recognized my power immediately,” Iyana said to Kenta. She tossed a glance back at Ceth, but the stoic warrior was transfixed by the sight of the bright life all around. The deserts had seemed full to him compared to the windswept red cliffs in the far north. How teeming must this Valley seem? How strange?
“Of course she did,” Kenta said. “For the Faey, the only Landkist they knew directly were their own.”
Iyana found herself watching Shek as she walked alongside Beast up ahead. Despite her prickly demeanor, she guided the charger gently and patiently over the unfamiliar and sometimes dim terrain.
“Of course,” Kenta said, “they don’t call them the same thing we do.”
Iyana looked at him as if he were daft, and when she saw his straightforward expression, she felt a fool for not thinking of it sooner.
“What do they call them?” she asked. The question had never entered her mind before. She had never thought to question the term ‘Faeykin,’ but, seeing where they were and whom they walked among, and given the way Shek and some of the others had reacted to her, Iyana didn’t much feel like their kin.
Kenta shrugged and smiled wistfully. “I would say that nobody apart from them knows, but I wouldn’t know if I was lying or not. I’ve always suspected Mother Ninyeva knew. The Rivermen used to call them Greenseers,” he said and then grimaced slightly. “At least, when they were feeling cordial. My mother called them Knitters. A simple name, perhaps, but certainly apt. For a time, all the Emberfolk of the Valley knew of the Faey was rumor. Tribesmen in the trees. Peaceful and aloof, if a little strange. Each land has them, so why not ours?”
Iyana saw a shadow pass across his face. He saw her looking and seemed to do his best to bury the look and replace it with a lighter one.
“Of course,” he said, “you’re starting to learn just how many ways their gifts can turn, and after I’d seen the things the Landkist of the Eastern Woods could do, ‘Knitters’ seemed nothing if not morbidly ironic.”
“Still true,” Iyana said. “A Everwood blade can be used to kill just as easily as it can be used to protect.”
“Even to heal,” Kenta said, earning a laugh from Iyana that had Tirruhn’s horizontal ears twitching up ahead. Kenta did not laugh, however. “The greenfire can do the deepest healing, no doubt,” he clarified. “But,” he drew a line across his chest and Iyana wondered if he was referring to himself or simply painting an example, “but some wounds are too wide for anything but flame to close.” He wrinkled his nose. “Nasty business. Loud and painful. But it’s the smell that put me off it. I once saw Larren Holspahr close a gash on his thigh you could have threaded a spear through.”
Iyana shook her head. She tried to remember the Second Keeper of Last Lake and whether or not he had borne a limp. Her memory came up wanting.
“It’s strange,” Iyana said with another shake, “knowing what I know now of my gifts. Knowing how quickly they can turn. Being Faeykin—or whatever we are—”
“You are exactly what the Faey Mother believed you to be,” Kenta interrupted. “And you are just as worthy or unworthy of being it as any of the Valley Landkist born among the Faey, the Emberfolk or the Rivermen. Do not let the conventions of naming disavow you of that notion.” He nodded up at Shek, to all of their hosts, who moved like dreaming shadows in the blurry light. “Do not let them tell you otherwise. Ninyeva certainly never did.”
“I think I would like to meet her,” Ceth said and they both turned to regard him. “This Ninyeva. She was your teacher, yes?” Iyana nodded, and he opened his mouth to speak before closing it and considering.
“Speak,” she said. “Say what you mean, Ceth. You needn’t keep secrets from me.”
“She is gone,” Ceth said the obvious, but Iyana nodded again to confirm it. “She died of age?”
Iyana swallowed and Ceth clearly regretted his question immediately. She forced a smile to put him more at ease. “She died a hero,” she said. “She died fighting the nightmare the White Crest had become.”
Ceth’s eyes widened. He looked in the moment like a child told a tale almost too tall to believe. “A mighty foe, that one,” Ceth said. “Pevah told me of his brother to the south.” He looked down at his hands as he walked but kept from calling up his power. Iyana felt a swelling in the atmosphere anyway, as if from his intent alone. “A true lord of the skies, he said. A being who could call a storm on command. Whose spears were lightning bolts and whose shield was the wind.”
Iyana was taken back to that rain-soaked day in Ninyeva’s leaning tower, which had finally shattered in a storm it could not weather. She remembered the splinters that had carved the air like arrows and the blood that had run from Rusul’s hands, dying the tiny rivers that flowed among the dockside homes along the shore. More so, she remembered Ninyeva standing in the midst of a maelstrom that was as bright of light as it was dark of intent.
“She stood before a dragon of the skies,” Iyana said, shaking her head slowly as she considered the poise and bravery her teacher had shown, an old woman. Oldest in the Valley core. Oldest, wisest, and strongest. “And it was in her defeat that Kole, Linn and the others found their victory.”
“Someday, you will have to tell me the tale,” said Ceth.
Iyana turned her smile to the front. “Kole will,” she said. “Or perhaps Jenk Ganmeer. He’s always been more of a talker. He will tell you of the battle in the peaks when they return from their eastern road.”
“A good tale, I am sure,” Ceth said. “But not the one I mean.” Iyana frowned but did not turn around. “I would hear of Ninyeva’s stand against the dragon, and I would hear it from you.”
They walked in relative silence for a time, listening to all the strange animal sounds of a land that was so close to that which she had grown up in, and yet seemed so very different. The insects’ songs were longer and lower, and the frogs trilled like songbirds rather than croaking like sick dogs. The leaves overhead did not blow in the wind or rustle in the night, but rather thrummed with that pulsing glow that attracted the flap and flutter of moths’ wings.
“You know Shek,” Iyana said. Kenta blinked up from his private contemplations. “How?”
“I told you,” Kenta said. “I have been here before.”
Iyana made as if to speak, but Kenta continued.
“She was just a small child when last I was here. Young for the Faey, who do not have children often.” He nodded up at Tirruhn’s back. “I remember his face, but not the name. Come to think of it, I don’t think any of the others lent me their names during my time—”
He stopped and swallowed, and Iyana had to resist the urge not to flash into her greensight to follow his emotions more directly, trace them down to their roots. Perhaps if she refrained, showed restraint, then he would let her do just that in the future. Or perhaps it was a bittersweet memory, and one best kept for him alone. She looked ahead and tried to see Shek with fresh eyes. Kenta must have seen the direction of her gaze.
“We all have our reasons for being as we are,” he said.
Iyana could not help but watch the wrapped bundle as it bounced along with Beast’s steady gait. She shook the images that came with it and tried instead to concentrate on the land that passed them by. Once she looked, it was not so difficult to let her mind wander and her heart wonder.
The narrow trail widened and fell, and the roots underfoot were soon invisible but for the impressions they left in the thickening, glowing moss that coated them. The land sloped downward more sharply tha
n it had before, and Iyana’s breath was taken as she seemed to float down a still river of blue and green light. It was so bright in places and took up so much of her view that she stumbled on more than one occasion. The forest’s bright fur coated the sides of the tree-laden bowl with its luminous light. There were few flowers in the canyon, and Beast seemed to struggle with perceiving the best spots to place his hooves so that Shek had to walk directly in front of him.
“Some place,” Kenta said as much as asked, and Iyana made a sound of awe as they crested the slope on the other side of the miniature, magical valley.
Ahead, the ground leveled out and the trees grew thicker, more like those they saw in the Western Woods, along the edges of the Untamed Hills. The river was far away, now, so that Iyana could barely discern the sound of its carving through the dirt, roots and rocks, and so the moss that thrived in the mist it sent along the forest floor dried up, to be replaced by thick grass that bore only the slightest hint of light.
At first, Iyana thought the trees were adorned with lanterns, until she recognized tulips and enclosed flowers that shone with yellow and deep amber light, splashing the black bark beneath. Now that the woods were not so choked with growth, she could see other Faey spilling up from the trails that had bordered their own. They walked beneath the natural lanterns and ran their fingers along the ferns that sprouted along the bases, their bows and buckles and blades picking up the light and illuminating them in a way that only made them seem more alien than they already did.
They continued on for a little while, until the sun began to light the eastern sky, which was now visible through the threadbare canopy. As the sky’s light spilled down through the branches, the glow of the forest lost its war and was muted, and Iyana noticed that the flowers and bulbs sprouting from the trees she passed were not colored, but translucent white. She broke off from Kenta and Ceth and approach one, brushing her fingers along the edges, which were smooth as milk and fragile as wings. Inside, she could see a seed that looked to be as large as one of the Faey’s eyes. There was a pink one and a blue, but most were yellow like the sun overhead.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 31