“After you,” Kole said, tossing his head toward the gap.
The male’s eyebrows turned down. His eyes bore the same melted amber-and-gold hue as the rest, though there was a bit of sickly red in their midst, like dripping wax.
“After. You.”
Kole said it slowly, his eyes not moving from the Blue Knight’s. He felt his heat begin to grow, flowing out from the stretched valves of his heart and threading its way into his veins. When it reached his fingertips, he closed his eyes for a brief spell and tried to suppress the tingling feeling. When he opened them, the Blue Knight’s own look twitched. No doubt Kole’s eyes had lit with some of the Ember fire he’d called without meaning to.
It did the trick, and Kole smiled at the Blue Knights’ armored backs as they led the way into the black rocky trench. He thought of Creyath Mit’Ahn’s orange gaze and wondered if his own had grown bright enough to scare.
The way was not so far as Kole had expected. The north-facing wall of Nevermelt rose to their right, but the trench went deeper, sinking until he had to crane his neck and tilt his chin skyward to see the base of the white walls. Kole marveled at the way the towers glowed in the daylight without so much as glistening with a hint of melt.
He was so taken with the sight that he nearly flared his blades to life without drawing as a weight pressed into his chest with the force of a punch. One of the female knights had caught him, stopping him from walking out into open air as the trench ended on the edge of a sheer cliff. The cliff was carved in the midst of the halved mountain on which the palace had been built. Below it, tucked into a natural-seeming jagged bowl, was a flat expanse of red clay that leered up like a blood moon sunken into the earth. There was a pathway cut to the east, wide enough for two to walk abreast. It curled down beneath the palace until it ended on the edges of the oval bowl, and Kole could see the others gathered on the red edges at the bottom.
He saw a figure clad in silver armor that looked dull in the shadows of the bowl, like blackened metal. She had long, white hair and Kole could imagine her strange smile even from here, and she stood in the bowl’s center. He saw a sword at her side and felt a lump form in his throat.
“Quite a place,” he breathed, and the Blue Knight released him without a word of warning, leaving him to catch himself with a jolted step that broke a small sliver of stone off the edge and sent it tumbling down onto the clay, sending up a tiny plume of bloody dust.
The Blue Knight smirked at him in a way that was more playful than cruel, and Kole followed on her heels.
“Your name?” he asked.
The Blue Knight began to turn toward him but caught herself as her fellows reached the bottom and looked up toward them.
“Your name, friend,” Kole said. “You saved me from suffering a nasty bruise.”
She let out a barking laugh. “More than a bruise, I’d say.”
“Why do you say that?” Kole asked, eager to engage in conversation with one of the seemingly silent sentinels. If they were to be allies in the coming fight, it paid to be more friendly than not, in his experience.
“A fall like that would kill most, Landkist or otherwise,” she said.
Kole smirked. “You don’t know much about Embers, then.”
“No.” Now she did turn enough for Kole to catch the pulled corner of her mouth. “Perhaps you’ll show me.”
Kole felt his face flush, unsure how she meant it. When he reached the bottom and saw the tension in the stance of the others as the queen approached, silver sword drawn in that half-gauntleted hand, he thought she might have been more literal than he had guessed. He looked back at the Blue Knight, who showed him an innocent smile.
“At least one of you has a sense of humor,” he said before moving ahead to join the others. His heat had dissipated some on the walk, but now he felt it building again. He didn’t try to stop it this time, and as he stepped past Shifa and her fluffed tail and spiked back, he felt the warm auras of Jenk and Misha mixing with his. It was enough to make Baas wrinkle his nose and Linn wipe a bead of sweat from her brow.
They stood in a loose group facing the slender armored Sage. She looked somewhat childlike, Kole thought. She was small—scarcely taller than Iyana—and her frame looked twice as brittle. Of course, he guessed her magic had formed the glittering structure behind and above them out of little more than her will and whatever art she had taken from the secrets the Sages had uncovered, in their world and beyond. Still, it was difficult to feel the same threat from her that Tundra put off with such ease.
“Welcome,” she said, shining fingers splayed as she stretched her arms out—one of which grasped the silver-and-black hilt of the most brilliant sword Kole had ever seen. It was a masterwork of carved metal made to look like cherrywood with silver fingers curled around its edges. Kole admired the grooves he could see in the blade and the sheen its downward edge gave off, though he thought of Captain Talmir Caru’s sword and thought that one gave off the brighter white. More pure.
“What’s this, then?” Kole asked, and he could tell by their steady stares that his companions echoed the question. Shifa began to growl, and the Sage placed her left hand over the dark-stained silver armor above her heart as she looked at the hound.
“The Red Bowl,” she said, as if they should know it.
Kole smiled fondly and Misha actually let loose a small laugh that helped to break up some of the mounting tension.
“We have one of our own,” the Third Keeper of Hearth said. She said it proudly.
“Do you, now?” the Sage asked. She made a show of twisting around, one hand out, fingers gliding through the air, pointing at the obsidian edges as the blade she held—too loosely in Kole’s mind—spun with her in a silver-white blur. Misha grimaced and Jenk tossed a look at Linn, who returned it. Linn opened her mouth to speak but held it as the Sage continued to spin, dancing like a child in a meadow, heedless of their presence or impatience. Her feet, Kole noticed, never threatened to slide or tip, and though her bare fingers along the hilt of her sword waved in the air like warning flags, the armored thumb and lead finger were still as stone, gripping the weapon with a measure of surety that belied her poise.
She stopped her spin, and now the look she wore was mischievous. She was entirely uninterested in what Misha had said, and waited for another question. Jenk obliged her.
“And why are we here?” he asked.
“To fight, of course.”
Jenk smiled, thinking it was a joke. It should have been a joke, said as crass as it was. As unflinching and direct. The Sage merely stared at him, long and unblinking, and Jenk’s smile faded away, to be replaced by a hardened look. Kole had grown up thinking of Jenk as something of a rival at best and a pompous would-be hero at worst. But he had seen the man fight on the walls of Last Lake. He’d seen him forge into the gap before the trees without a thought to his own protection. More recently, he’d seen him fight the vicious, formidable Raiths of Center, and atop the black shelves to the west, just a few days before, it had been the bold, yellow-bladed Ember who had first laid one of the Blue Knights low.
“Oh.” The Frostfire Sage held up a hand to her lips in mock surprise. “You did not think I meant to the death, I hope?” She laughed, but they only stared, Jenk hardest of all. He was not impressed.
The would-be queen sighed at their grim visages. “We are to be allies, are we not?” she asked, her voice growing more solid and more earnest. “Are we not?”
“That’s up to you,” Kole said. He spared a glance at Tundra, who stood closest, and at the Blue Knights behind him. The brute’s expression was predictably unreadable, but the others fidgeted behind him, especially the one Kole had spoken with on the walk.
“Ray Valour is coming,” the Sage said. “You have seen him, but you have never fought with him.”
“We have fought with the man he has become,” Kole said evenly. “We have faced T’Alon Rane in combat.”
“Your Ember king.” The Sage actually spa
t on the ground. No dust came up. A gust of wind found its way into the sheltered bowl at the mountain’s base and Kole took a step closer to Linn, wondering if it was her. Her eyes were fixed on the Sage, and when the Sage found hers, her own bearing loosened, as if she had remembered herself.
“Excuse my play,” she said, inclining her head toward Jenk. “Truly. And excuse my direct approach. You are children to me. You must know this. It is not a thing said to make you feel lesser or I greater. It is a thing you should know. You have fought Sages, and through a combination of your own prowess, power, and no small amount of happenstance—”
“Luck,” Misha said. “You think it was luck that saw us triumph over the White Crest, the Emerald Blade and the Sage of Balon Rael?” She crossed her arms. “Quite a run of luck, then. Maybe it’ll keep going.”
“Call it what you will,” the Sage said, her voice growing more firm and unyielding with every word. Her grip tightened on that silver sword, and her black-and-silver boots slid and ground into the hardened rock and clay beneath them. “The fact remains: you have never faced Ray Valour. You have never faced the Eastern Dark. No doubt your stories of him portray a snake, slithering in the shadows and hiding in the bogs. There is truth to every tale, but I ask you, why do you think a power like his retreated into the south? Why do you think he traveled in shadows and through them rather than walking the world’s ways?”
“Because of you, I’m to guess?” Kole said.
“Because of me.” The Sage straightened. There wasn’t a hint of bragging in her tone. She believed what she said. She knew it. “And yet, he is coming. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Because he must,” Linn offered.
“Desperation is the word,” the Sage said. Her considering eyes slipped down to fall on Shifa. “A desperate wolf is the most deadly of things. Even more than a silver lion with cubs. If Valour is anything, he is a wolf.”
She blinked away whatever scenes of the past had begun to close in and refocused on them.
“So,” she said. “Who gets the first try at my champions?”
Jenk stepped forward. “Not your champions,” the Ember said. “You.”
The queen smiled. It was a wicked, playful thing, and to his credit, Jenk matched it.
Jenk flared his Everwood blade to life, the wood crackling in the cold. Jenk’s blade was usually bright yellow and bold, soft like the morning sun. It didn’t burn quite as hot or quite as quickly as Kole’s or Misha’s, but Jenk could wield his own flame longer.
Today, Kole winced at the color of Jenk’s flame, and at the heat it held. To anyone else—even Linn and Baas—it might seem the same as any other time, but Kole could tell it was different. He could see the worms of amber crawling in the flickering yolk, could hear the crackle of the black wood and char that should have subsided already. Kole glanced at Misha and saw that she was already looking his way, her expression concerned and then guarded as she remembered herself.
Something about this Sage had Jenk more excited—more perturbed—than even the Raiths of Center, or the beast who wore Larren Holspahr’s skin in the Valley peaks not so long ago. Kole thought to step in, to warn Jenk away from the foolhardy path of challenging a Sage, especially one they were to consider an ally, if not a friend.
But then, it wasn’t him that dragged the lot of them down into a sheltered cove of clay and brown-black rock, hidden from the wind and prying eyes. It wasn’t Jenk who had first brandished fire or steel.
Besides, Jenk Ganmeer had acquitted himself well against two Sages, now. Kole had to admit to himself that he was eager to see how he would fare against a third. Assuming, of course, that the Frostfire Sage accepted.
“Well?” Jenk asked. “What say you?” He levelled his sword directly at the queen, who regarded him coolly, unflinching.
Tundra took a step toward Jenk and Baas matched him. The three Blue Knights behind the brute dropped their hands to their sides, fingers stretched out and separated. Kole turned toward them, fingers twitching in anticipation as he watched for the faint distortions in the air that would precede the growth of their Nevermelt blades.
“Stop.”
All eyes turned to the queen. She held her left hand up without turning, her eyes fixed on Jenk. The three Blue Knights relaxed and stepped back toward the ridged borders of the bowl. Tundra growled like a dog and Shifa echoed the sentiment, but when the queen’s head twitched in his direction, the warrior pulled back, all reluctance.
Linn, whose attention had been fixed on the tense exchange between Jenk and the queen, turned to face Kole, swallowing her concern.
“I gladly accept your bold address,” the queen said, dropping her hand back to her side and raising her own blade with the other, point facing Jenk’s neck. Kole thought it was a disconcerting look, more macabre than playful, and Jenk’s grimace seemed to show that he felt the same way. “It has been some time since I’ve been called upon to brandish steel in my own court.”
“We’re not in your court,” Jenk said.
“We are in the north,” the queen said without hesitation. “Everything around you, from the mountain ridges to the windblown flats, every grain of salt and shard of ice, melting or eternal, is a part of my court. Now,” she did not take her eyes from Jenk’s, “please ask your less bold companions to step aside.”
Jenk opened his mouth to do just that, but Linn was having none of it.
“Remember—” she started but the queen cut in.
“Worry not, my dear. We are all friends in this fight, but surely you folk have been raised in a theater of war, however far away. In times of strife, the line between battle and games of the same begin to blur. I would see what the great Embers of the south are capable of with my own eyes, and against my own aged hands. I would see if they are worthy of the legacy of the flame. The legacy of Mena’Tch himself.”
Kole blinked at the mention. He’d heard the name before. A hero of the western sands who might even have existed in a time before the Sages. He thought Mother Ninyeva had spoken of him, perhaps had even compared Kole to him … or was it his mother, Sarise?
Of course, many of the Emberfolk believed the Landkist had come about as a result of the Sages’ meddling, either directly or through some ethereal reaction from the world itself, seeking to protect Her children from the corruption they would wreak. Still, some believed the Landkist had always been, in one time or another. That they were part of a cycle scarcely younger than the stars, and that they would come again long after the Sages were dead and gone, and long after the last Ember of Kole’s generation was little more than scattered ashes.
Linn looked as if she would say more, but Jenk’s pale blue eyes slid toward her and she relented with a forced sigh. The four of them—five, when Shifa followed—stepped back beneath the shade of the cliff that jutted out from the base on which the pale, golden-lit citadel sat.
“He’ll be fine,” Kole whispered, leaning into Linn’s shoulder as she stroked her tension into the back of Shifa’s neck. “This is the same man who fought the ghost of Larren Holspahr. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”
“I’m not worried about Jenk,” Linn said a little too quickly. Kole looked at her and she swallowed without turning to meet him. “I am. I only mean,” she glanced toward Tundra and his Blue Knights, who watched the silent and still exchange between Jenk and their queen like frothing hounds on chains, “our alliance is not yet fully formed. I’d hate to see it spoiled over little more than a glorified spar.”
Kole couldn’t say he agreed. In truth, he had been allowing Linn to do the leading when the whole group—Linn included—seemed to think of him as their captain, their fearless, unerring directioner. The idea of helping one Sage against another still did not sit well with him, and he had to admit he was pleased to see that he was not the only one in their company who thought less than the world of their new acquaintance. This northern queen was twitchy and vain, more concerned with her glittering towers an
d shining knights than she was with the safety and wellbeing of those who counted these lands their own, scraped a living from rock and clay and the salted, frozen shore.
Still, he could not deny that she counted the Eastern Dark an enemy, and he could not deny that, while a great part of him looked forward to his eventual clash with that beast, another was concerned that he, Linn, Baas, Misha and Jenk would not be up to the task. Not alone.
“She thinks she is the one taking our measure,” Kole said, “and perhaps she is.” Jenk began to slide his rear foot toward his lead one, slow and soft as it scraped over the red granules beneath them. “But she isn’t the only one.”
“Fair,” Linn said, her own attention now fully focused on the pair before them.
Jenk did not wear the same black, scaled armor that Kole and Misha had been gifted by the smithies of Hearth. Instead, he wore the lighter stuff in keeping with the fishing hulls of Last Lake. A leather vest, many-scarred but not yet torn, which covered a cotton shirt their months of travel had stained a tallow yellow. His pants were loose-fitting, shifting with the flames along the edges of his blade as small gusts of wind curled down into the bowl, and his hands—lighter than the rest of them—bore red scars around the knuckles.
Kole might have been faster and Misha stronger, but Jenk had always been, if nothing else, deliberate. He was a thinking fighter in the tradition of Tu’Ren Kadeh and—as far as Kole knew—Talmir Caru.
When Jenk’s rear boot toe brushed the heel of his front, he flew into motion. He lunged forward, not with his blade but rather with his fire, sending a yellow jet flashing toward the queen.
The queen, to her credit, was ready. She leaned back, bending at the waist impossibly quickly, her white hair rushing up in a slow dance before falling in a quick cascade to frame wide eyes. She had fallen into Jenk’s first trap. The Ember had used the flare to take the queen’s sight—Kole shuddered to think what would have happened if he had done so literally—and disguise his true attack. He planted with his rear foot and lanced his lead leg forward, angling his foot down into a blade.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 44