Linn sat with her back to one of the white trees in the queen’s courtyard. She liked it out here despite the cold. She liked to see the stars, feel the air passing through her hair, coaxing her to pick it up, twist it, turn it around and use it in whatever way she chose.
There would be plenty of time for that in the battle to come, and while Kole no doubt had his mind fixated on the prospect, Linn wanted nothing more than to forget it until there was nothing left to do.
“No sign of them, still.” Kole tried to keep the bitterness from his voice as he approached from the southern arch, but Linn knew him better. She turned to take in his mood and saw the air shimmering around him. It was a slight effect, probably too subtle for any but her to see, but it was there, and growing stronger by the hour.
“How is our queen’s mood?” Linn asked, scooting over as Kole sat next to her on the stonework surrounding the tree. The leaves curled and cracked above them and the frost atop the Nevermelt below their boots ran in rivulets that sparkled like morning dew in the starlight. Kole seemed oblivious to his effect on their small patch of the world, and Linn wondered how far that went.
“Hungry,” he said after a time, settling on a word Linn might have assigned to him in any other circumstance.
“And the others?”
“Tundra’s not one for talking.” Kole shrugged. “Baas is a poet next to him.”
Linn smiled. “The ones we brought, I meant.”
“Misha is atop the walls, last I heard. She grew frustrated trying to wring every last drop of information out of the old veteran, Guyy. Jenk and Baas are in the caves with Captain Fennick. I haven’t seen Shifa since this morning, when she struck off toward the deeper tunnels.”
“She’s as foolhardy and curious as you,” Linn said. Kole smiled, but it was forced. She laid a hand on his armored shoulder. Armor he seemed rarely to take off these days. She pulled her hand back sharply as a pocket of hot air escaped from one of the open grooves.
“Sorry,” he said, seeming shamed.
“Don’t be. I suppose we’re all restless.”
“Most of us,” Kole said. Linn felt his eyes on her longer than they should have been. She met them, the steady ambers burning like his namesake. She was supposed to be the one with the strongest eyes in the Valley, even before the changes she had experienced after the Field of Suns, as the Emberfolk had taken to calling their victory above the Steps. Still, Kole had always had a way with his own. It wasn’t just the Ember fire that lit them with that eternal spark. It was the way he seemed to be looking through her, seeing into parts of her she could not see herself, or else chose to look away from.
“Linn,” Kole said, drawing it out. She blinked at him. “What’s the matter? The spar was two days ago. You’ve been … quiet since then.”
Linn swallowed, but Kole’s prompting brought all her questions, doubts and the revolting mix of anger and fear she had tried to keep buried boiling to the surface. The branches danced above them as her quick change stirred the salted nighttime breeze, and several of the blood-red petals flitted to the glasslike surface below them. A surface that held a secret that should not have been Linn’s, and one she had kept from her closest friends, Kole included.
“If that was a spar,” Linn started, veritably spitting, “then I don’t know the difference between that and whatever it is we’ve been calling war all these years.”
Kole watched her for a while. She made to answer his continued stare, but drew her mouth into a tight line. It reminded her of Iyana, and she pushed that thought back down with the rest of it lest it shatter her.
He turned to look across the sparkling blue surface of the courtyard, eyes tracing the branches of the other tree and noticing the snowy owls perched in the thicker center for the first time.
“Yes, you do.”
“What?” Linn shook her head.
“You know the difference,” Kole said. “Sparring between Landkist is not the same as it is for … everyone else. We’re stronger. We’re faster. We’re more resistant to hurt.” He shrugged. “Nobody wants to say it. Men and women don’t want to give voice to their lack of power, and most Landkist—good ones—don’t want to feel like gods, despite what many believe. But there’s no getting around it. In matters of war, men make corpses. Landkist leave scars upon the land itself, marks that will fuel memories by which future generations will measure the old.”
Linn took it in, but she wasn’t ready to answer. She knew where he was going. She knew he was getting to it, and there wasn’t any diverting him.
“You’ve always known me well, Linn,” Kole said. His voice was calm, even serene. His heat had dipped by small degrees until it was a pleasant, flickering warmth like that Jenk put off. “But now, after what happened in that clay bowl, and after the things you’ve done at Center, I think you know me more than you’d like.”
“Spit it out,” Linn said with a dramatic sigh, leaning her head back to land a hollow knock upon the white bark of the tree.
Kole smiled. “And you wonder where she got it from.”
Linn made a show of rolling her eyes. “I’ve never wondered, Kole. I’d just been loath to admit it.”
Kole swallowed, clearly uncomfortable at the prospect of saying something she wouldn’t like. Something that would hurt her. Make her afraid. In another life, it would have made her angry. Now, as he said, she understood. It was like they had always held the missing pieces to one another, but hadn’t been able to find a way to make them fit.
“Fear of the self, Linn. That’s what you’ve been building along with your power. Your ‘gifts,’ as others will call them. Fear is the purest emotion there is, and there’s no fear more inescapable and more earned than the one that’s got its hooks in you now.”
If he expected it to make her feel better, it did not. Still, Linn couldn’t deny the truth of the words.
“Anger could be a close thing,” she offered, and he didn’t argue.
“Love, Iyana would say.”
“Do you think she’s wrong?”
Kole paused as if truly considering it.
“I don’t want to think it.”
She knew exactly what he meant, which just made it all feel that much worse.
She leaned forward, brushing the tips of her boots on the glassy surface. She saw her own reflection looking back at her. Long, black hair that had grown longer, spilling down in a tangled knot over her right side. Beneath it, her arms were largely bare, her chest and core covered by little more than cloth and the same leather vest she’d worn for years atop the timber walls of Last Lake. It was strange not seeing the bow she’d been carrying for months. She’d left it in her chambers, and though she cherished it as one of the last things she’d taken from home before setting out on her fool’s quest, a part of her knew it would change nothing if she left it leaning by the mirror in the chambers Queen Elanil had granted her. She didn’t need the thing to unleash the power within her. She didn’t need it to focus a bolt from the sky, nor to call a legion of thunderous horses’ hooves out of the inky black swells over the darkest parts of the farthest oceans.
This was power, and Linn couldn’t help but laugh at the undeserving visage of the one it belonged to.
“Right, then,” she said, not taking her eyes from their images in the floor. “What do I do with it?”
“With what?”
“The fear,” she said. “Or is there nothing to be done?” She felt an unsettling disgust at the prospect. Felt it mounting the longer Kole took to respond.
“You don’t want to do anything with it, Linn,” he said. It was starting to bother her how he was speaking. She tried to swallow it down. When he met her eyes again, the feeling went away. He spoke from the heart, as he always did. There was no harm intended, just advice offered freely, to be done with what she would.
“It’s something you’ll have to bear, I suppose,” Kole said. “As I have. I used to think myself cursed for carrying it. I tried to drown the fear in
anger until I realized—too late, some would say—that the two formed opposite sides of the same coin. Ever since that night, my life has been defined by one or the other, with little left along the polished wooden edges for something else. For my father. For you and Iyana.”
“Kole …” Linn started, reaching for him again. He did not recoil, but winced, and Linn let her hand drop back to the cold stonework.
“I used to think myself cursed for carrying that fear, Linn,” he repeated. “Now I know it’s the biggest blessing I’ve ever had, apart from those who’ve shown it to me in ways they could never know. To fear oneself is to know oneself. That is what separates us from these …” He looked up at the crystal spires, his eyes alighting on each in turn, tracing their glittering, dreamlike edges and marking the ghosts of frost that shifted with the changing of the wind.
He never finished the thought, but Linn thought she understood.
“There’s nothing more important,” Kole said. “Nothing more painful to bear. No weapon more righteous in the right hands, more deadly in the wrong.”
“And how do we know which one we are?”
Kole smiled softly at her. “Ask, I suppose.”
“Ask ourselves?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I would guess T’Alon Rane asked himself the same right up until the end, and look at where it got him. To trust oneself implicitly must be the height of arrogance. Take all the varied, many-colored sins of the world and all its powers, great and small, through the centuries, through the millennia, and I think you’d find the truth of that. It’s what got my mother killed in the passes.”
It was shocking to hear him say it, so much so that Linn didn’t know how to react. She looked away, afraid he expected her to say something.
“We need to ask each other,” Kole continued. “Even if we do it in other ways. I saw you fight at the Valley peaks, Linn. I saw you call down a bolt at Center that frightened an Ember king, and I saw you blast the Sage of Balon Rael through a ring of fire with the same power.” He paused. “I was in the same bowl as you, here in the north, so far from home, and I saw you do things I’ve never imagined. You, Linn, and not the thing you fear you’ve become.”
The words felt like the warmest balm Linn could have imagined, sliding over her like the most true and tight embrace. She imagined it must be true, if she felt it so strongly. She imagined it did not matter, as long as she believed it to be so. And though she didn’t say it and later regretted it, the look she turned on Kole was meant to tell him that she felt the same way about him. That he was not a monster. That he was the man she had known all her life. That she loved him, in all the complicated ways he loved her, if not more.
She supposed the kiss did enough on that account.
His lips were even hotter than she would have thought if she’d spared a moment to do so. They stung as they met her own, and when he reached out and gathered her in his arms, his heat enveloped her completely. She made a sound, low in her throat, in her chest, and leaned into him, the leaves shaking above, curling in his heat and ripping free from their desperate holds in the wake of the wind she called without meaning to.
She imagined them climbing to the top of one of those glittering towers, sliding beneath the richest furs like a prince and princess from so long ago, and joining together in a way they had only once before, on the mossy banks of the southern Valley, when they were too foolish to know better and too wise to carry the cares and worries they later would.
An image flashed in her mind’s eye of the sleeping form far below their feet. The white-blond prince in his brilliant armor, his eyelids flickering as the dead orbs beneath were lost to some black dream from which he could never wake. She didn’t know if she pulled away or if Kole did, but the result was the same.
Cold. It felt cold in the icy courtyard. Colder than it had before, with the sweat clinging to her neck and plastering her dark bangs to her brow, from the steam rising from Kole’s skin, and from the threads of his breeches, ankles and the hands that had just held her in any way but in friendship.
“Kole …” she started and then stopped. She wanted to tell him of the prince in his dark vault and of the queen’s plan to call him back from whatever sleep gripped him. She wanted to join with him in whatever path he would choose.
But she did not, and though the truth was bitter to swallow, Linn knew it was because she feared he would decide wrong—that he would march in a fury into the queen’s throne room and call up all of his fire and the allies he had around him—herself included—who couldn’t help but rise to it and join with him, for better or ill.
Despite all that, she was about to. She was about to damn it all and confide in him what she knew, even on the eve of a battle with the Eastern Dark and his allies, one that might decide the fate of the world. To tell him would be to fracture the fragile alliance they had formed with the only being yet left in the world who could stand against that agent of darkness, against their always enemy, the Eastern Dark.
“You’re right,” he said. He wore a look of such profound hurt that he covered with a smile that never reached his eyes, and Linn felt her heart break, though she did not know what to blame it on. Kole edged back from her, leaving an extra stone on the short wall. The wind Linn had called out of reflex fell like a skirt, sweeping the gathered and curled red leaves away like the sound of sparrows’ claws.
“No,” Linn started, but Kole shook his head.
“Do you trust her?”
Linn blinked, caught in the space between all of her warring thoughts and the things left unsaid.
“Queen Elanil,” Kole said. “Do you trust her?”
Linn felt disappointment, and that, too, she could not attribute to any one thing in particular.
“I trust her in one way above all others,” Linn said. Her voice had gone soft, and Kole frowned, his eyes switching between her own, searching for the reason why.
“What’s that?”
“That her enemy is our own,” Linn said. “That she is the greatest power left in the world that we might count a friend, apart from our own company.” She glanced back down at the Nevermelt. “I trust that her reasons are pure, if … personal.”
Kole took it all in. For an instant, she feared he would say something different. Instead, he nodded. “I think the same.” He actually smiled. “I don’t know how I know it, but despite my earlier misgivings, I think she has her heart in this, if nothing else.”
He had no idea how right he was. She would tell him as soon as the Eastern Dark was vanquished on the morrow. She would make the queen tell him herself, so that they might stop the coming of the World Apart by joining their powers to the prince and princess out of place and time.
“I don’t know why I’ve had so much trouble trusting any of them,” Kole said.
Linn laughed. “Most of them have done nothing but give us good reason not to.”
“True,” Kole said. “But it isn’t in the deed where the greatest sin lies—”
“But in intent,” Linn finished. “You were listening to Doh’Rah’s stories.”
“Ninyeva was the storyteller,” Kole said, smiling fondly at the memory before a grimace wiped it away. “Doh’Rah gave us lectures in the place of tales, but I’d never pretend there was nothing of substance in them.”
He sighed as he looked up into the same blue-black canvas she had. There was a streak of dark red across it that looked like a shooting star frozen in time, or a ribbon of blood. Linn frowned at it. She hadn’t noticed it before. Kole didn’t seem to.
“It’s control,” he said. It seemed like he was talking to himself more than her. “Control is what I never thought they could have. But then, if power was the root of evil, we’d have Ember kings far less virtuous than the stories from the desert days. We’d have Faeykin installing themselves as lords in the Valley if any approached the power of Mother Ninyeva in the long years of that place. The Sages are fallible, yes,” he said, “but maybe that’s because they are
just what I’ve never been able to see them as before now.”
“What’s that?” Linn asked, fascinated.
“Us,” Kole said. “Just us, albeit older and with longer memories weighing on longer minds.”
Whether he meant Landkist or people, or whether it mattered either way, Kole did not say and Linn did not ask.
“It all seems too easy, in a way,” Linn said.
“How do you mean?”
“That the Eastern Dark has come here, to the edge of the world, just where we are. That we’ve found allies so powerful, albeit proud … alright,” she nodded to his knowing look, “insufferable, more like, but no less potent because of it.”
“We followed him here.” Kole shrugged.
“We followed Rane,” Linn said with a shake of her head. “We followed plans half laid and less followed. And yet, we ended up just where we wanted.”
“And where is that?”
“At the place where we’ll decide it. All of it.”
Kole took in a deep breath, filling his chest. It was almost comical, seeing him weigh the effect of her words, and Linn hoped the effect was intentional.
“Remind me how easy it was once we’ve done it,” Kole said. “Remind me once the Eastern Dark lies frozen on the salted wastes, and when his allies are no more. Remind me when the World Apart is beaten back by whatever power the queen has hidden here.” He looked around, and Linn felt that a part of him knew of the dead prince, like a shadow that slipped away as he turned to catch it.
“I will,” Linn said. She surprised herself by meaning it.
Kole nodded, seeming distracted. “I’ve meant to ask her,” he said.
“Ask her what?”
“How she means to do it. Stop the World Apart. We’re assuming she’s right and he’s wrong, and that it really can be stopped without her dying right alongside him. The Sages are tied to its coming. Of that there can be no doubt.”
“They must be tied to its undoing, then,” Linn reasoned, hoping to be right. It was a dangerous way to think, but what choice did they have? What if they did burn them both away, only to be left clinging to windblown ashes and powers without the ancient knowledge behind them to face off against the full might of another world and whatever it held?
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 54