There was a yell and Linn looked to her left. She saw the long, narrow shard Gwenithil had held follow a low, shallow arc, moving with frightening speed toward Kole. The Ember showed no signs of slowing, and for a moment, Linn held an image of him impaled on the end of the missile. At the last second, he spun, the bolt scoring a silver streak into one of the ribs of his black armor. On he charged.
Gwenithil, however, was far from done. Before Kole reached her, Ember blades bared and burning, she shot to the north, running faster than the other Blue Knights had. Kole skidded to a halt before the queen, tossed her a wild, suspicious look that she only regarded with dispassion. He planted himself on the balls of his feet and one hand, fingers splayed in the clay, before streaking toward the Blue Knight. She greeted his pursuit with another shaft that he dodged, and another, and another. Soon, the field of clay was littered with translucent spikes that appeared like icicles sticking from the earth and growing in reverse.
Linn saw it all happening. She saw the Blue Knight retreating, legs churning beneath her. She saw her hands working, rising up and beginning their forward path before the shafts had even been called into being. She conjured spear after spear, and Kole was using all the speed he had, his blades dimming as he concentrated the heat into the blood and fiber of his legs, bunching them and making them stronger, quicker. The air was hazy around him, leaving behind a wavering veil that looked like a clear river passing through the air, as if from another realm. He would reach the Landkist, Linn knew. But would he do it before one of those bolts found their mark?
She heard Baas grunting with effort and saw that Tundra was trying to rip the stone shield from his grasp. The Riverman looked as if he might give, and Linn swung her bow in the direction of the struggling pair. She didn’t have a clear shot at the Blue Knight. A torrent of wind would blanket them both, and she didn’t dare call down a lightning strike with Baas in the way.
As it turned out, she didn’t need to. Not yet, anyway. Just as he seemed about to give completely, Baas slipped the hold of his shield from his left hand to his right. With the other, he reached down, gripped Tundra by the heel, scooped and heaved. The Blue Knight fell with a boom, and Linn heard Misha give a cheer from her vantage.
Baas followed the move by raising his shield high above his head, bathing Tundra in a doom-filled shadow, and Linn swallowed and sent her cloak of wind and clay into a faster spin, thinking she might have to strike Baas after all. But Tundra was faster than he looked. Much like Baas, his bulk belied his dexterity, and his muscles, though large and knotted, moved with a quickness of reflex that tricked the eyes to witness. He rolled and kicked at one of Baas’s planted legs, and the Riverman went down.
Tundra followed him, leaping atop him and wasting no time in bringing those armored fists down in a hail that beat upon Baas’s stone shield like harbingers. Linn thought to take her chance, but a shouted warning called her eyes back to the front. She gasped and rolled to her left as a blue-white flash streaked past her with a trailing roar. It sounded like the wind of a blizzard, and as Linn tracked its path behind her, she saw the cone strike the black rock at the base of the mountains with a hollow, ghostly sound. It plastered a swath of the stone with a frosted sheen inches thick. It was rough and not at all perfect like the Nevermelt of the queen’s palace above. It was a wild thing and full of all the rage of the north. The true north.
Linn looked up and saw the Frostfire Sage standing with one palm stretched out, facing the place Linn had been standing. Her face, which had been blank, was now stretched into a smile that suggested a private thrill, and her eyes found Linn’s, unblinking.
“So be it,” Linn whispered.
She regained her feet and turned her bow on the Sage, trying to ignore the flashes of amber light as Kole carved razor bolts from the sky or smashed through the growing field of Nevermelt blades that littered the bowl. Baas bashed his forehead into Tundra’s and rolled the Blue Knight off him, and the two gained their feet and began to exchange blows—Baas with his shield and Tundra with his coated fists—that shook the ground and made the loose gravel dance.
Linn called to the wind again and found it eager to heed her. It whipped around her body and she bent her back leg, letting her knee rest on the giving ground. She kept her front foot planted and let the tail of wind scoop up as much of the grit and gravel as it would before she pulled the string back, feeling the torrent pause for the briefest spell and follow her hand, like the inhalation before the unleashing of a hurricane.
“Go.”
She released the string and lost the sound of its thrum to the rush and then the howl of the shaft. It was as long as the queen’s beam had been, and just as fast. Linn stood and swung her bow down to her side, clenching her fist around the silver wood as she watched the impending clash.
The Sage’s eyebrows raised as the shaft of wind and gathered earth neared. She swung her open palm over and Linn saw another blue-white flash as the Frostfire Sage called another beam of what could only be her namesake to greet Linn’s assault. The torrent of wind met the space just before the Sage’s glowing hand with a fury. It parted around the Sage. Linn could see its path because of the mist of clay it had donned as a skin.
The queen gritted her teeth, giving Linn some small measure of satisfaction at having made her work, but it wasn’t enough, and as soon as Linn’s blast ended, the Sage stepped forward quick as could be and struck her other palm forward, sending another jet of ice and magic in her direction.
Linn couldn’t help but yell as she dove again, hitting the soft clay hard and feeling it crack beneath her as she rolled. She heard the beam strike the spot where she had stood, and then heard the strange crackle coming closer. She sucked in a breath as the Sage kept this beam fed and swung it toward her, and Linn ran as if her life depended on it. She heard the sheet of frost coating the ground with a sound that reminded her of splitting coals in a fire.
Frostfire.
Linn could hear it getting closer, could feel the sting of it through her breeches as she sprinted. Just a matter of months ago, despite battling the monsters of the World Apart, Linn would not have believed a thing like frostfire existed, never mind the Sage who wielded it. The Sages were figures from stories and tales. They were the gods of the world, so detached, so seemingly apart, that they could just as readily be falsehoods as amalgamations of all the great heroes and mighty villains of old. Stories with which parents explained the dark and bloody ways of the world to their children. Stories with faces indistinct and indifferent. Faces of passionate rage and unearthly wiles.
But Linn was at the heart of those stories, now. She was a part of one. As she ran in the grip of fear from an immortal being she had dared to call ally, she saw the brilliant blue-and-orange battle between Landkist directly before her. She shot into the field of tall, Nevermelt blades and heard them shatter behind her just as she heard them shatter ahead as Kole batted them aside or broke them with his burning blades as much as his aura of heat. She saw him leap skyward and come down like a comet in the place Gwenithil had been, and saw the fear in the knight’s eyes as she began to realize what it was like to face an Ember of the Valley. The mightiest Ember of all.
A fear Linn understood well as she watched Kole’s eyes burning brighter with every stride, saw the milky haze around him turn seemingly permanent shafts of ice and magic to pools that soaked the clay and turned it to a sticky paste. The sound of rushing, burning and cracking ceased behind her and Linn skidded to a halt and spun to face her attacker.
She marveled, seeing that the Sage hadn’t moved from her place. Linn focused her eyes, felt the ache as they strained ahead. She had run nearly to the northern edge of the bowl, but using her keen sight, she could see the Sage smiling that calm, infuriating smile. It filled her with a bit of the fire Kole must have felt.
There was a trail of white frost with crystalline ridges, like a submerged drake’s tail, covering a wide swath from where she had been all the way to the field of g
littering spikes she stood among now. A shadow passed over her, making Kole’s fire burn all the brighter as his own fight took him to the west. Linn thought it was the coming of night even sooner than she had expected, and then she heard—felt—the rumble of thunder as if it had come from her. She looked up into the sky and saw a black cloud with blue streaks, ever-shifting, ever-changing.
Charged and waiting, and for her.
When she looked back toward the Frostfire Sage, she saw that her palms were glowing once more. Instead of sending another beam toward Linn, she raised them up above her head and conjured great, jagged spheres. They swirled and flickered with that blue light, but they were encased with frosted spikes, like the heads of flails.
Linn felt that stab of fear rekindled, but then she saw Baas send Tundra sprawling with a well-placed blow. She saw Tundra rise and shoot forward, leveling the Riverman across the jaw. Baas hit the ground and slammed the side of his fist down, stopping the charging Landkist in his tracks and sending him up—higher than Linn could have thought—as the ground itself rose like a miniature plateau and sent him with it.
“Thank you,” she said to Baas, though the Riverman couldn’t hear her.
As the queen sent those blue, frost-covered suns ahead, Linn abandoned all thoughts of flight. She saw the southern bowl light up as Jenk and Misha stood and brandished their Everwood sword and spear, fearing what the duel had become. They couldn’t reach her in time. Linn was on her own.
She dropped her bow with a dull and dusty thud and called to the wind and storm. She felt a violent torrent strike her in full and then bore her up. Linn put her rage into the swell and the storm responded, the wind crackling with its blue and building charge—a charge it needed to unleash. A charge that Linn needed to free.
As she rose and then sped forward in a bowed arc, Linn stretched her arms out to her sides, palms up, fingers splayed. She felt the wind that wasn’t bolstering her rush past her and hit the clay she had left behind. She heard a sound like chimes as the wind met the glittering shafts Gwenithil had conjured, then heard the ripping sounds as they tore free.
It all happened so slowly, Linn’s eyes seeing it all in vivid, striking detail. She saw Baas standing over a prone Tundra, shield poised. The Riverman was looking up at Linn as if she were some sort of demon. She saw Kole out of the corner of her eye. He had caught up with the Blue Knight and had cowed her into a kneel with little more than the threat of immolation, one flickering amber blade pointed toward her throat. He, too, was looking skyward. They all were.
It almost seemed as if someone else were doing it; as if the White Crest still lived, and she was nothing but a vessel. No. Not a vessel. Linn wanted this. Linn intended this. An heir, then. An heir to the wind and lightning. An heir to the skies.
An heir to the storm.
Everything sped up as she collapsed into the moment. Linn streaked up above the roiling meteors of Frostfire and watched them pass her by, heard them shatter some of the spikes she pulled along in her wake and then bury themselves with a flash that touched the bottoms of the black clouds above. But there were many more.
Linn reached the zenith of her arc and found some small measure of satisfaction in the look of awe and even ecstasy on the face of the Frostfire Sage as she hung there, suspended like a falcon between gusts, as if the sky was an ocean and she its minder.
She pushed her palms down and heard the tinging like brass mugs raised in toast as the Nevermelt spikes she had pulled up started downward, slow at first and then with startling speed. The queen marveled as long as she could, then called upon the dancing footwork she had employed against Jenk and spun between the hail of bolts.
One scraped against her armor just as it had against Kole’s and caused her to lose her footing, and Linn felt her heart skip a beat as her murderous bolts of silver-blue arced toward the prone queen.
She should have known better. The Sage held a palm up toward the violent rain and a white circle painted itself around her. Just before the sickles struck, a dome of rough Nevermelt encircled her and the sharp hail shattered where it struck the unyielding surface.
Linn began to float, and then to fall. Her head felt like it was going to burst. Blue light sprang from her palms and traced the outlines of her fingers, sparks leaping from one to the other. She wrapped herself in a tight hug, gritting her teeth against the pain as she fell from the sky, the wind she had gathered only sparing her the worst sort of fall as she struck the clay with a jarring jolt.
“Linn!” She heard Kole calling out to her but couldn’t see him. Heard Shifa barking but couldn’t orient herself. Her body was racked with painful spasms. She opened her eyes and saw the black clouds looming like witnesses. It felt as if their entire storm was in her, threatening to tear her apart.
“Impressive.”
She heard the queen’s voice, muffled, as if it was coming from a distance. She heard something shatter and heard the metal-booted footsteps and the crunch of frost underfoot as the Sage began to walk toward her, having dismissed her shielded dome.
“I would have thought you Uhtren himself,” she said, her voice and her mockery doing nothing to ease Linn’s pain or dispel the growing anger. “But you must not try to master that which has no master. You may ride the windy currents, Linn Ve’Ran. You may even call the lightning. But to hold the storm itself is to court a most violent death.”
“Help her!” She heard Jenk shouting. She heard footsteps as her friends broke from their private contests and ran toward her.
No.
She thought it but couldn’t give voice to the word.
“No,” she whispered between jolts. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
“Poor girl,” the queen said, closest of all. “Let it go. Let the storm go, or it will consume you.”
Linn listened to the words. She tried to guide the burning blue fire that ricocheted off the walls of her veins and beat against the bones in her chest. She tried to harness it, to raise her shaking arms and send it back into the wanting sky. She was done with it.
“Let it go,” the queen said, firm and without pity. “Fool! Let it go!”
Linn did just that. She screamed and rolled onto her side, facing the direction of the Sage before she knew what she was doing. She locked her arms and fingers, rigid and unyielding, and felt the storm of light pass through her, blinding her too-keen eyes for a spell.
She heard Gwenithil scream and Tundra roar, and even heard the Frostfire Sage gasp before the bolt—the hail of bolts—struck.
The world went white for a long blink, and thunder followed that shook the bowl and echoed from the surrounding ridges. All else was quiet in comparison.
When Linn’s vision cleared, she saw a black, burnt path atop the clay that mirrored the jagged spine of frost. Ahead, a section of the wall of black stone below the crystal palace had crumbled into ruin, a crescent cut from the base twice again the height of Baas. The Riverman, along with Jenk, Misha, Cress and Pirrahn, stared at the lightning’s path, shocked.
Tundra was looking toward Linn. Or, not toward her, but to her left. Linn blinked and turned, halting, in that direction, expecting to see their host burned to a crisp.
Instead, she saw Kole. Rather, she saw his discarded black blades, smoking atop the clay. He stood before them, one hand balled into a fist at his side, the other tight around the throat of the Frostfire Sage. He had lifted her from her feet, and Linn could see her hands glowing with that blue-white light as she squeezed his forearm. Where his bare hand met the pale skin of her slender neck, Linn saw that light as well, but she saw an amber light to match it as Kole called upon that fell, heat-sapping power he had first used on the Emerald Road.
“Kole!”
He dropped the queen and stumbled away from her. She did not cough or wheeze, but rather touched a hand to her throat, which was red where Kole had held her. She looked up at the Ember with uncovered fear mixed with what Linn could only describe as fascination.
“
Enough,” Kole said. He did not meet the Sage’s eyes or Linn’s, as if he was afraid of what he might see there. He sounded on the verge of breaking, and Linn had only just gathered her wits enough to question how he had covered the distance between his own private duel and the madness hers had become.
He paused and snatched his Everwood knives from the scorched clay. Linn and Queen Elanil watched him as he sheathed them in the straps across his back and moved off, the hiss of hot air trailing him as the scales of his black armor remained open despite his dissipating heat. Linn looked toward the Sage, fearing what she would see, but the eyes she met were kinder than she had expected. It made her angry to see control like that.
“Well done,” Queen Elanil said. “Well done indeed.”
It was Jenk who came to fetch her. The light-haired Ember watched the queen suspiciously as she moved back over to her weary knights. He helped Linn to her feet.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” she said, almost not believing it herself. “Somehow.”
“That was too much,” he said, still following the Sage’s retreat.
“I’m sorry,” Linn said, feeling ashamed.
Jenk swung his head back to her, frowning. “Not you, Linn. I don’t know what she was playing at. I don’t know if I much care. But this went too far. It went too far from the moment it started.”
“Well,” Linn said with a heavy, tired sigh, “now we know what our friends can do.”
“And they know what we can do,” Jenk returned, sounding uneasy.
“I’ll take the trade,” Linn said. She watched Kole’s retreating form. “Besides, I’m not so sure the last is entirely true.”
Kole walked right between Baas and Tundra, the only two combatants in the bowl who seemed willing—even curious—to renew their recent acquaintance. He didn’t flinch or spare a glance at either of the hulking men. Baas swung his great shield over his back and nodded curtly at the Blue Knight, who couldn’t hide his relief as he let the coating on his fists melt and splash the clay. That strange semi-darkness Linn imagined around him like some sort of fell aura was nowhere to be seen.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 47