Linn had heard stories of the northern drakes, those that had flown in the red-blasted skies beyond the deserts of their ancestors. They had been titanic beasts, and it was said that their voices carried from one horizon to the next, fast as the day’s sun that arced across the sky. They had been too great and too few to last, and they had never involved themselves in the affairs of men.
Linn did not know if the stories were true. None lived who had ever seen a drake. None lived who remembered one who had. But as she heard the sound the Sages’ final clash made, Linn believed that things like that had lived. She felt foolish for ever doubting it.
And then the world went white. White that shifted to black. Linn felt the cold ground beneath her. The roaring went away, to be replaced by the howl of the eastern wind and the long, low complaints of the frozen sea. She tried to calm herself as she blinked. She saw her hands first, planted beneath her. She saw the ice between her fingers, cracked but no longer cracking.
When she looked up, she expected to see an explosion of power that would break the land into a thousand pieces, and her into a thousand thousand. Instead, she saw Queen Elanil standing just a few strides ahead of Baas, shoulders heaving. Her hands hung at her sides, trailing white smoke. Across from her, the Eastern Dark stood with one hand at his side, the other extended, palm open and fingers curled, stretching out over the breach.
The hand was black. Not burned, nor seeming dyed in ink. It was a hand made of night, and it reminded Linn of the Shadow girl with violet eyes. It thrummed and blurred, shaking all the way up to the shoulder, and Linn saw that the Sage’s face was tight with what seemed to be pain.
“He absorbed the blast,” Misha breathed from behind. Linn looked to her, and saw her helping Jenk to rise. They looked at the Eastern Dark like he was something out of legend.
Linn hadn’t seen him do it, but as she looked back at the dark Sage, she thought Misha must be right. The blackness around his hand began to throb, the light around his entire form contorting sharply and sickly. He grimaced and bared his teeth, though Linn thought he looked to be fighting some private battle.
“There is some left of you, after all,” the queen breathed as she regarded her adversary.
Elanil tried to raise her palms toward him once more, but the Eastern Dark’s other hand shot up and ignited molten red. He sent a jet of shadowfire forward that did not seem to burn so much as push. It struck the Frostfire Sage hard enough for her to make a harsh gasping sound as she landed hard, the back of her head cracking off the hard ice. She went tumbling, and Linn ran to her.
The queen twitched, her eyes looking up into the stormy skies. The ice began to turn red beneath her, her hair staining and going dark. Linn thought her surely dead, but those golden eyes twitched toward her as she stood over her. She reached one quivering hand, the silver half glove falling away to strike the ice like a bell, and Linn bent to gather her up.
She lifted her with ease, though her chest and side rebelled at the effort, and Linn was reminded how small and slender the queen truly was. She felt like a child in her arms, and Linn cradled her. Jenk sheathed his Everwood sword and moved over to take the queen from Linn as she swept her gaze across the ice, searching for her discarded silver bow.
Much good it would do them.
The land was broken. But then, it should not have been still for so long.
The waves had shattered for a league all around, coming down like broken mountains. Tumbles of jagged stones of ice littered the plains, and the salt had been swept away, making the land translucent. The sky had gone purple in the dying of the sun and the presence of the storm clouds, and the effect made the frozen lands look like a portal to another world, all dark blue and black. There was a groaning sound as the plates and plateaus of ice and water moved beneath them, and Linn thought it would be a long time before it ceased.
Linn looked to the trench. There, the living ocean had quelled its fury, sinking back down into depths that yearned to see the sun once more, to have ships part its living waves and to reflect images of the white wings of the gulls wheeling overhead.
“He is gone, Elanil.”
The Eastern Dark’s voice quivered. It had a strange echo, and as he spoke, Linn saw the darkness around his right arm throbbing.
“The man you love is not coming back.”
He looked beyond them—past Baas, Linn, the Embers and the hound, and Queen Elanil herself. His eyes—one purple fire and the other orange and red—found the crystal palace. Linn followed his gaze.
The palace had a red tint to it in the strange light of dusk. It reminded her of blood. On its walls, she could see glinting spears, and in the gaps between the parapets made of Nevermelt, she saw caches of fire burning. Tundra and Gwenithil must be back by now. They would have mustered the defenses alongside Captain Fennick, who would have pulled his reserves from the mountain’s heart.
Linn wanted to soar up into the skies, to make her voice as loud as she could and to tell them to hide, to flee into the deepest, darkest tunnels, to find new lands in the bowels of the earth within which to wait out the storm that had come. The last storm.
She knew it was futile, so she said nothing, only turned back toward the Eastern Dark and stepped into the path his palm pointed—a path that led directly to the crystal palace.
“You do not know the company you keep,” he told her, and Linn actually laughed. His eyes seemed to change on hearing it. They lost some of their light and perhaps a bit of their fury.
“Right or wrong,” Linn said, “we chose our side less based on what it stood for, and more based on what it opposed. There are people in that palace. Many of them, and many of them good. There are children in the mountain beyond it, the one you will bring down upon their heads.”
“She would bring Him here …” The Eastern Dark’s voice turned into a growl. Linn didn’t think it was anger or frustration, but effort. It was taking him all he had to hold the power he had absorbed at bay, to keep it from ripping his body apart from the inside. “There aren’t any strong enough to stop it. And she,” his glowing eyes seized on the limp and semi-conscious form Jenk held, “cannot control it. She has been used, as I was used, to draw the worlds closer together. To make the path between them easy to cross, like looking through the surface of a still pond.”
His next expression gave Linn pause. She did not know how to describe it, other than to say pleading.
“Do you not see it?”
“I have seen plenty, Dark Sage,” Linn said. “I have seen more than you know, enemy of the world. Do not think us folk of the far Valley simply slaves to any will you mistakenly believe to be stronger. We have braved the wild ways of Center. We have crossed the barren black shelves. We have fought with a warrior of legend and killed the Sage of Balon Rael. We turned on our once-protector, the lord of the skies themselves, when he turned on us. We are Landkist, and we will decide our fate. Just as we will decide yours. As for the world,” she shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, “I think it will get on just as well without you.”
“Even if it ends?”
“Even if it ends.”
Linn was not breathing heavily when she finished. She was calm. Too calm, even for her liking. Did she truly not care if the world ended? Should they not listen to him, and let him do what he thought he must?
“It comes down to trust,” she said after a time. “You stand there accusing, spreading the very same fear of a thing you helped to sow. Perhaps you’re right. Maybe the World Apart is coming to kill us all. Maybe it will come down to a game of who can last longest.” She smiled at him. “If it does, we’ve got a knack for it.”
There was a pause the wind filled.
“Where is Kole?” Linn asked, her voice going flat. She felt the wind tickling the backs of her hands, ready to join her once more, even after all of that.
The Eastern Dark didn’t answer. His face had grown tight. It only resembled T’Alon Rane’s in shape, now, and not in constitution. White spark
s leapt from his black arm.
“Where—” she started to growl, but the Eastern Dark let out a scream that sounded more human than anything she had seen or heard from him yet.
It was a scream of pain, but also of madness, and Linn’s eyes darted to his arm, which had begun to spark and shimmer. Baas slid in front of her, shield braced, but Linn knew the beam would unmake him and continue on through her. There was too much power in it to be stopped, but she worked to gather enough of the air around to give a response, even if it was little more than a strangled gasp. She saw a flash of orange to the south; Misha’s spear reignited. Shifa let out a howl that sounded stronger than the hound looked.
Instead of smiting them and a thousand souls in the lands behind them, the Eastern Dark raised his palm up to the skies. The darkness and the white sparks crawled up his arm, revealing the red-and-black armor of the King of Ember he wore beneath. When it reached his palm, he let it out, eyes squeezed tightly as he did.
The expulsion was too loud to make sound. It was silent, a perfect jet of many-colored light—black, white, blue and all the shades fire could make—and it lanced up into the clouds like a shaft of judgment. It was radiant and terrible, and as Linn’s eyes flashed with its reflection, she thought it was beautiful, as well.
The dark clouds parted and fled, racing away to separate corners of the world, and high above, into the blue-black curtain, the beam flickered and curled, a shooting star that could have been seen from the Valley basin.
The Eastern Dark fell to his knees when it was done, his hand shaking. When he lifted his eyes to look at them, they were only violet.
“That is the last of it …”
The voice belonged to Queen Elanil, whom Linn had thought beyond them. She lay curled in Jenk’s arms, staring up into the stars.
“That was the last of your power, Ray. The last of you.”
Linn turned back to see what the Eastern Dark had to say. He only looked down at his hand. He did not deny it.
“And so it ends,” Baas rumbled. “Linn.” The Riverman swung his shield down and started toward the gap. He walked, and then he ran, and then he leapt, the shelf breaking apart under the force of it.
Linn’s heart caught in her throat as Baas hurled his bulk up over the chasm. Without sparing a thought to do it, she stepped forward and brought her arms in front of her, sending a blast of cold wind after him. It caught the Riverman at the zenith of his climb and pushed him just a little higher. Just enough to clear the gap.
If the Eastern Dark knew death had started down on its frightening path to meet him, he didn’t show it. Linn saw the shadows deepen around him. She feared it was the work of his magic, again. That the queen was wrong, and that he would blast Baas out of the sky with a mortal blow.
And then she saw those violet midnight eyes, and the slender black hands curl around the red-tipped armor of her liege lord. The Shadow girl embraced him like a lover, and still he did not react.
Linn glared at her, and those mischievous purple eyes left a fading afterimage as she pulled the Sage into the pocket she’d carved out of the horizon.
“Where is he?” Linn screamed it across the gap just as Baas landed in the pocket of blackness where the Sage had been. His shield led the way, and the crash was as loud as a peal of thunder. Linn worried for a moment that the shelf might break with him kneeling atop it, but the Riverman rose and pulled his shield from the ice as the blackness melted away below him.
There was a pregnant silence broken only by the howl of the wind over the ice and the guttering of Misha’s spear. She let it burn out, plunging them into the darkness of twilight. They turned toward the western sky, which was now a gash of red and purple that sank below the mountains. Linn looked to the south, seeing the remnants of the Quartz Tower shine like windblown coals.
“Too much,” Queen Elanil whispered, either to herself or for those close enough to listen.
Linn felt a crash just behind her that nearly took her from her feet and made her heart burst from her chest. She spun to see Baas dusting the frost from his breeches, his shield already secure on its hooks over his back.
“You could have made it on your own?” Linn asked him, bewildered.
Baas shrugged. “Seems I could. Better safe than sorry, though.”
Linn didn’t have the energy to tell him how little sense that made. Instead, she moved to stand beside Jenk, Misha coming to join them. Shifa padded over, whining softly, her eyes still fixed on the place where the Sage had vanished.
“Too much what?” Jenk asked.
“Power,” the Sage said. She grimaced as the first waves of pain came over her. “We used too much power, here. It will be close now. Close enough to get it done.”
“Get what—” Jenk started.
“Please.” The queen pulled at his vest. “Take me back. It is almost close enough. We cannot miss this chance, else …”
“Or else what?” Misha asked, annoyed at being ordered.
Linn swallowed when they turned their eyes on her. Misha looked particularly suspicious.
“Convergence,” the queen whispered, as if saying the word aloud might make it so.
“Whatever’s happening now is beyond us,” Linn said to their continued staring. How quickly it fell on her in Kole’s absence. Did they not understand that Kole had never had much in the way of a plan in the first place? That his entire aim had been to get them here, and to see where to aim his blades when they arrived?
She sighed, feeling a pang of guilt for thinking in such a way when he was missing, and—if Shifa’s grisly find was any indication—in dire need of help. Still, she had taken something from the Shadow girl’s look, and even from the Eastern Dark’s. Perhaps it was a vain hope, but there it was.
Kole was alive. She knew it in her bones. And the sooner the Frostfire Sage got what she wanted, the sooner they could set out with enough power to find him, and bring him back.
Whatever reckoning was to come. Whatever convergence. They would face it down together.
“I hope your prince is worth it,” Linn said as she walked past Jenk, heading in the direction of the torchlit walls of the palace, the mountains rising like the spine of a coiled beast behind it. They likely exchanged their glances at her back, but the others followed after, their boots no longer crunching in the salt and frost their private war had swept away.
There was a difference between dreams and portents, and Iyana had always had more of the latter than the former.
Dreams were the work of the subconscious mind; figments of imagination that combined deep-rooted fears with desires so deeply buried one didn’t speak them into the cold solitude of the darkest nights.
Iyana did not like visions and portents. She didn’t like the responsibility they granted, or the feeling of the real they called up. She didn’t like having knowledge that should have been reserved for those who were older, wiser and less riddled with doubt.
She hated dreams more.
Dreams, Ninyeva had always said, told more truth than visions, but they did it in the guise of lies. Dreams were made up of the past, and Iyana’s past—though it possessed bright, burning cores of sisterhood and friendship—was riddled with hurt. The only music her mind made when she slept deeply enough to dream were screams. The screams of the dead and dying. Mostly, the screams of those she had been unable to save in the long, dark months spent huddled in the Long Hall with the wounded and their caregivers.
But this dream was different, along with the scream that accompanied it. It was familiar, and though she knew she was not in the Between, she could not help but feel that she had stumbled onto something in the dark. Some warning. A cry for help, and from one whom she loved.
Iyana sat bolt upright in the thin, creaking cot. She was sweating profusely, and threw the thick blankets off as if they were trying to suffocate her. The fire had burned out in the hearth, and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the gloom of the cabin that lay on the edge of the town, bat
hed in the shadows of the great black ring of trees.
The Eastern Woods were cool, and as Iyana swung her legs over the side of the bed, she tensed for the shock as her bare feet touched the wood of the floorboards.
Ceth was nowhere to be found, the small clutch of threadbare covers he had used the previous night having been tossed aside, close enough to threaten catching on the edges of the burning coals.
Iyana sighed and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the dream. Where visions were always vivid, pressing themselves into the backs of her eyelids, her dreams were as fleeting as any other’s. She couldn’t remember what she had seen. Darkness and fire. Ice.
She tried to call up that voice again, and heard it like the faintest echo. It was not a cry of anguish or of tragedy, and though it carried a twinge of pain, Iyana did not think that was at its root. It was a cry of rage. An animal rage that could only belong to a beast, or a man brought low enough or driven hard enough to think as one.
The voice belonged to Kole.
It should have meant less than nothing to her. Iyana had railed against Falkin after their shared trek to the east, where she had come face-to-face with the Eastern Dark, the greatest and darkest power the world had yet known, and the one that had plagued her people longest. She had gone to sleep upset by the ensuing exchange with her newest teacher, and she had done so on the back of concern for her sister and for Kole and those who traveled alongside them.
It stood to reason that she would have dreams that preyed on that fear and turned it around, but even after she stood, dressed and made for the door at the front of the cabin, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. That Kole had been screaming, and that by some trick of her own strange, growing powers or by some fault in a world skidding ever closer to its doom, she had heard him.
Fresh air allowed Iyana to think best, and when she stole out into the night, she found it less full of stars than the previous one had been. She looked up into the sky, where the encroaching limbs of the encircling trees appeared as reaching hands with sharp talons, and tried to count them. There were no clouds to speak of. The sky should have been deep blue, not gray and black. It was as if the whole of it was sick, growing sicker.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 64