“His power is of the world?” Iyana asked. “Our world, I mean?”
Falkin nodded and blew out a sigh. “I fear most forgot, before the end. Some were bright and merciful,” he said. “Some were just. But these are words meant for rulers and kings, and with power like theirs, they should never have …” He trailed off, lost in old memories or stories of the past.
To think that the Sages might have been Landkist, once. That they had very likely started out that way. It was difficult for Iyana to fathom. She shook her head, but the thought wouldn’t give. It made too much sense. Of course they had been Landkist, or something like it.
“Cycles,” Falkin said, speaking almost to himself. “Cycles. On and on it goes. But they broke that cycle. They wanted more. At least, a few among them did, until they realized where it took them. Immortality is a lonely throne to sit upon, with few courtiers to know you.” He smiled wistfully. “Their war was as inevitable as the moontides. Their arguments couldn’t help but spill over and mix with the affairs of men, and those lowly Landkist they used to count themselves among.” Their eyes met, and Iyana’s heart stilled.
“Valour might have started us on the path we’re on,” he said, “but it was he who first sensed the threat, tried to rally the others to his cause. The Sage of Center, whose name has been lost to the leaves and the wind between them, beckoned them to his modest kingdom on the Emerald Road. There, he called on them to discard their shields and draw whatever sword was close at hand, and to plunge the blades into their own breasts, believing that would stop the coming darkness and spare the world.”
Iyana was enraptured. She had no way of knowing if anything Falkin said was true, but it had the feel of it. Staring into his shifting, spinning green facets around that yellow core, she felt that she could see it. They weren’t his memories, but they were true, told to him by one who had stood among them, arguing among the branches and the shining moss carpet underfoot. There were soldiers clad in armor made of bark, black and brown and red in places. And there were archers, thin but strong, wearing little. Their eyes were colorless and they looked at nothing in particular, though their heads shifted with every sound those in the circle could not be bothered enough to hear.
“Another shouted him down,” Falkin continued. “’Why do we not fight to protect our children?’ he said. ‘What if it is too late? How will they fight a thing like that?’” Falkin paused. “Valour called on them to set aside their centuries-long argument, to join their forces together, to marshal defenses. But others were not as trusting of the Sage. Among the long-lived, old wounds seldom close without scarring, and no matter how wise, the future always seems a long way off to them in the face of a present slight.”
Ceth was leaning forward, and Iyana wondered if he was thinking the same thing as her. That the Sage who had challenged on behalf of his people had been none other than Pevah, the Red Fox. It was impossible to know.
“They might have turned it around on that day,” Falkin said. “But they didn’t, and whatever thoughts of unity Valour had brought with him into that emerald meeting place were dashed. It was then that he turned his thoughts to self-preservation, to marshalling his forces. He turned his red gaze on the World Apart, coaxing more of its power out, drawing it ever closer, hastening its path, or the path of whatever drove it. And then he fixed his eyes on the Landkist none of the other Sages held dominion over. That none of the others could control.”
“The Embers,” Iyana said.
“Bright and bold and burning,” Falkin said. “Dauntless and mighty. The perfect warriors with which to fight the coming darkness.” He took a sip of a drink that had long since cooled. “The days grew shorter and the nights longer. The Dark Months became darker, and rips began to appear in the fabric of our world as the Dark Kind found their way in. Not so many. Not at first.”
Iyana picked up the thread. “And then there was the battle in the deserts,” she said. “When the Red Waste and the White Crest fought him to protect the Embers.”
“And to protect themselves, no doubt,” Falkin said. “Yes. The Night Lords were called, Uhtren was wounded, and the game changed.”
“Uhtren …”
“The White Crest,” Falkin said.
Iyana shook her head slowly. “The White Crest told you all of this?”
“He did,” Falkin said. “Not so long ago. He caught me soaring in the Between, taking roads best left to those more mighty. It was before the battle in the passes, and Uhtren was at the peak of his arrogance. He did not think Valour would come for him there. He was part right. He only sent his Night Lords in. Even they were not enough, but the corruption took our guardian anyway, set him into his throne like a pretender more than a protector. That is when the roads of Sight grew darker for us, more muddled. Even Ninyeva had difficulty learning what was what, and so she turned her intent inward, to the Valley and its people. She left all thoughts of the Sages’ conflict behind, and thought how best to survive the premature night the beasts had set upon her children.”
He sighed and even smiled.
“Not everyone believes that story,” he said. “After all, why not reach out to the White Crest again, if I had met him the once?” His eyes took on a glaze of the past. Regret hung over him like a pall. “Darkness had taken him, and I was not strong enough or brave enough to forge a path through it. Perhaps I could have found him again, before he was taken completely.”
Iyana thought to say something, but came up wanting. Falkin shook himself out of his daze.
“In the end,” he said, “little separates us from the Sages but time. Time and intent.”
“Why?” Iyana asked. So many questions swirled, but she settled on the one that bubbled to the surface. “Why did they seek out more power than they already had? More than the world—more than She had blessed them with?”
“Who can say?” Falkin shrugged. “Sometimes the darkest of roads begin with the brightest of intentions.”
“Valour,” Iyana said. “If you truly believe I should seek him out, surely you can tell me of him.”
Falkin looked at Ceth as if trying to confirm Iyana’s words.
“My child,” he said. “All I can tell you about the vast ocean that is Ray Valour concerns the surface. It will avail you little to know that he was once like us—”
“One of the Kin?” Iyana asked, not knowing why she felt so desperate to know, to absorb every detail of a man whose name had come to mean wickedness and spite and slow corruption.
“Could be,” Falkin said. “All I have are stories, passed down so long even among my kind that they will do us little good now. The Ray Valour my ancestors knew—or knew of—might have possessed the same soul as the one walking the ways of the world now, but he had a different heart.”
“Maybe he’s just forgotten where he came from,” Iyana said, as if she needed to believe it. She wasn’t afraid of the Eastern Dark. Not anymore. Somehow, she thought that knowing his name had stolen some of that fear away. But what had it been replaced with?
“Maybe.” Falkin did not seem so sure. “But the Kin of Faeyr and their northern cousins are no better than the Emberfolk, the Rivermen or the people of the Red Cliffs.” Ceth straightened a bit in his chair. “Long lives do not exempt us from sin. We pride ourselves on peace and poise, but as much as the Kin know how to create, we have quite perfected how to destroy. The blood doesn’t wash from our hands any easier than the rest.”
He rubbed his fingers together as if feeling old crust beneath the nails.
“I don’t know which of the Landkist among the Kin first discovered that our gifts of healing could be turned around,” he said. “That the tethers of life could as easily be mended as twisted and destroyed. I am sure he regretted it, just as I am sure another would have found out soon enough.”
When Falkin met her eyes once more, he did so with finality.
“You are a Weaver, Iyana Ve’Ran,” he said. “And an Unweaver. Ours is a great and terrible burden. But t
his fight is not yours; this fight in the north, where your Embers and your sister tread. If it comes to a battle against the last Sages, it is better left to them. But you have come here to find answers, and all I’ve done is raise questions.”
“You’ve done plenty more than that,” Iyana said, nodding as her resolve began to form around that stone that always nested at her core. The stone of Ve’Ran. She knew now why Falkin’s eyes seemed brighter than hers. He had led her, reading her thoughts and emotions with such a deftness of touch that she hadn’t felt them. He hadn’t manipulated her, she understood. He had led her to the answer she had already known.
“I have to find him,” she said, feeling it as a certainty. “I have to know if there is a way to stop what’s coming, to tell Linn and Kole. And if not, how to survive it. There is plenty of fire left in the Valley. Plenty more than they think.”
Ceth cleared his throat. He shifted in his chair, looking nervously between them.
“What is it, my boy?” Falkin asked.
“I cannot follow her there,” Ceth said without meeting Iyana’s eyes. “I cannot help her if he should … if he—”
“No,” Falkin said. “No, no. You cannot.” He switched to Iyana, reached out and took her hand in his. “But I can. There should be enough left of whatever Valour once was to recognize one of the Kin, and to be on his best behavior.”
“Right,” Iyana said. She was already losing some of the effect of the mixture Falkin had given her.
Falkin moved to fill her cup once more. The mix had cooled and thickened, but Iyana drank it down, fighting past the nausea it had begun to call up.
“I’m going to invade the dreams of a Sage,” Iyana said. She said it matter-of-factly, nearly laughing at the absurdity of it. “If Braden Taldis had a trap set and waiting for wandering Faeykin … what could the Eastern Dark himself have in store?”
“I wouldn’t worry too hard on it,” Falkin said. “After all, he’s got plenty to occupy his mind as it is.” He scooted his chair across the dirty, knotted rug that covered the balding ground between them. “Stay close, Ceth, my boy. Stay steady.”
Iyana stared into Falkin’s eyes but began to see through him, beyond him. The room melted away as she let her senses wander. It was like having two minds at first, and it was the most difficult aspect of going through the change, passing between realms. She was both here and there, nowhere and anywhere she chose. She felt the rhythmic swaying, though her body did not move, and when she closed her eyes, she saw the pathways lit like beams of glowing water, green and blue and bright white, though they were surrounded by a thick and watchful darkness, red-hued in places, like curdled blood.
“I am here, Iyana,” she heard Falkin say. His voice felt as if it was a long way off, but she felt him close, felt his hand on hers, though she had no body in this place.
“Which way?”
“How did you find your sister?” Falkin asked. “Bring him into your mind’s eye. Fill it with his shape, his eyes, his wicked smile. Find his thoughts and follow them. He is, after all, a beacon brighter than most.”
Iyana sighed and felt it escape her chest without parting her lips. She oriented herself and dispelled the darkness, the crossing beams of many-colored lights and the waiting red glow in the corners, dismissing them like unwanted visitors. She had control here, in the Between. She was the master, the lord of place and time.
She called an image of the Valley and it rushed beneath her, freezing with a speed that was jarring. She was floating high above the thick canopy that covered the Eastern Woods. To the north, she saw the black peaks that no longer frightened her to look upon. They seemed somehow empty of the threat they had once held, and their glittering golden pools stood out like wells of fire warding off the coming night.
And the night was coming.
Iyana looked to the east, where the sky had blackened. It was not the smoky pall that had hung over the Valley during the siege of Hearth. This was a darkness made of night. The stars shimmered on the horizon, but above, they were lost to a deeper black that verged closer to purple. Iyana did not wish to go there. Instead, she angled her intent and made a body out of nothing, one replete with airy wings that gathered great swaths of air beneath her and shot her toward the place where the clouds met the edge of land.
The world hurtled beneath her, and since she did not know it this far from home, the landscape began to lose its form. Gone were the whorls in the branches that passed below her. Absent were the animal trails, the frothing rivers and turbulent peaks. Now, there was only a gray rushing blur. Ahead, she saw the ground turn cold, a blue-white covering of frost burying it in an icy grip.
He was there. She felt him below, like a needle that pierced her chest and squeezed her heart cold.
“Iyana …”
“What?” She whirled in place. Falkin’s voice sounded as if it was coming from far away.
“Here … afraid.”
He was struggling to find her. She concentrated on him, on the hand that gripped her own back in the hut in the sheltered glade.
“I am here, Iyana,” she heard him as he spoke in that hot room as the fire crackled at his back. “We are here. Do not be afraid. Have you found him?”
“I think so.”
“Go.” His voice took on an edge of warning. “You cannot linger. Go to him, and I will guide you back.”
Iyana refocused on her swirling, ethereal surroundings. She was in a cyclone of spinning clouds, encroaching dark and dying sun. When she looked down, she saw a blue cave, and on the outskirts, standing on a shining sheet of ice in an otherwise gray land, she saw a figure dressed in black armor with red spikes. His hair was long, and though his ears bore the now-familiar angle of the Faey, his skin was darker, more aligned with the Emberfolk than the man she knew him to be.
She flitted lower, thinking she had misjudged. There was a black figure sitting on the ruins of a crumbled structure that looked to be made of crystal or ice. She didn’t seem to notice her, so Iyana crept closer, feeling like a leaf on the wind.
As she neared the figure she thought was Ray Valour, Iyana’s heart nearly leapt into her throat. This man was not the same as the one she sought, and yet he was. His purple eyes clashed with his swarthy features. His hard jaw did not recall the slender taper she had seen before. He looked younger than the figure who had left them on the white, melted sands in the west, and yet his armor was scarred in a thousand places.
“The King of Ember,” she breathed. “You have taken him.”
“Clever thing.”
Shadow perked up from her seat on the ruined tower. Valour had been sitting beside her just a few minutes earlier, but some new thought had come to him. He had walked out a little farther onto the ice, his armor lit in the dying red rays of the sun. This time, the direction of his gaze was not northeast, toward the Witch’s palace, but rather … directionless.
“What’s clever?” Shadow asked, but a gust of wind stole her voice and carried it back toward the blue cave. She grimaced as she glanced in that direction. It was cold and miserable out on the ice, but she would much rather face a frozen waste than the company of half a dozen creatures made more of bone than flesh.
The Shadow Kings were unsettling to look upon and even more so to speak with. Where Alistair lived up to his name, smiling through his teeth whenever he spoke to her, Shadow knew he was false. Knew it in her bones. Myriel was more direct. She could respect that. Her blue eyes were the color of a sunlit sea, almost sickly so. She was hungry to find the Frostfire Sage and rip out her throat, and for reasons less virtuous—Shadow guessed—than what any of them said.
There was Martyr, who had yet to say a word. He was smaller than the rest and watchful. Thehn was the largest and perhaps the most powerful. He had spent most of his time in their world sleeping, as if the very act of existing within its borders put such a strain on him that it might kill him to walk. Shadow hadn’t bothered to learn the names of the other two. They were twins, by the l
ooks of it. Though the lot of them had the same bone armor covering their forms and the same bone blades jutting from their elbows, she could see glimpses beneath their wide, ashen faces of what they might have looked like before, in their own realm.
“The World Apart,” Shadow sneered, tossing a shard of ice toward the eastern sunset and watching it slide with a scrape across the frozen ripples.
She slid her bored, curious eyes back to Valour and saw his lips moving. He looked more like Rane than she remembered. Perhaps there was something to it—some battle taking place beneath the flesh and blood. Perhaps the king wasn’t as gone as he had appeared.
“Who are you talking to?” Shadow called over, but the Sage just kept on speaking into the northern wind.
Shadow felt her ire rising. She was bored, and boredom was a dangerous thing for her to have. Dangerous for those around her. Trouble was, she was in company far more formidable than she was used to, and far less forgiving. T’Alon and Brega had never liked her, but they would not have killed her unless in response to some dire affront. It would take less for Valour to do the same, and she did not want to think of what the Shadow Kings might attempt were he not here.
Still, boredom made her impatient, and impatience made her rash and reckless.
The light was low, and it made her vaporous skin tingle as the blue shadows slid over it. She found a shadow that was thicker than the others and closed her eyes, easing herself into its cold embrace like a welcome lover. She climbed out of its cousin just behind the place where the Sage stood in the warrior’s armor he hadn’t earned. She pulled herself up out of the half-world and felt the heat of his dark, fiery aura wash over her.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked again, leaving her usual purring behind in favor of a more direct approach. Still he did not respond.
It was strange, Shadow thought, walking a cautious path around him. Valour spoke, or appeared to, but no sound escaped his pale lips. He stared out over the flats but did not seem to see her passing before him. Did not so much as twitch in her direction. His eyes looked a bit redder than before.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 51