She looked up, and her heart skipped a beat as she saw a blur of silver and gray descend.
Ceth landed in the glade with a thud that, while strong enough to shake the leaves and make her toes tingle in their shoes, was far softer than should have been possible. The Landkist landed in a crouch with his back to her, his silver hair falling on a delay. When he stood up to his full height, his form seemed to shimmer, that translucent glow that looked like the beating of moths’ wings blanketing him. His own private storm.
When he turned to her, Iyana saw water gathered in the wells of his steel-colored eyes.
Iyana parted her lips. She felt the need to say something. Felt that Ceth needed her to or wanted her to. Instead, she looked up. There were wisps of clouds above, faint trails of vapor below the deeper color of the night she hadn’t seen before.
When her eyes fell back down to meet Ceth’s, he looked different. His eyes no longer watered, and she thought that she had been wrong. It was cold in the high places of the world, and Ceth could go higher than most. Perhaps the wind had stung him and wrung the tears from him, or perhaps he had been looking north, seeking the sands he had left behind.
“What can you see?” Iyana asked. The question sounded foolish, but Ceth never made her feel that way. He looked up.
“Your Valley is a beautiful place,” Ceth said.
Iyana felt a twinge at the way he said it. She thought he meant it, but there was something in his tone that made her sad. She moved closer to him.
“It’s your Valley, too,” Iyana said, swallowing. “It can be.”
Ceth met her eyes and it took all she had not to look away. No matter his words and no matter the outer calm, there was always an intensity about his stare that Iyana found took her by surprise. Still, it didn’t unsettle her, as it once did.
“Can you be of a place you were not born?” Ceth asked.
“You weren’t born below the desert sands,” Iyana answered. “But you called it home.”
Ceth frowned as if he disagreed. “My charge was in the deserts,” he said. “By Pevah’s side.”
“You confuse place with purpose. If you know one, you know the other.”
Ceth looked down at his hands. They still had that blur hanging about them, and the closer Iyana got, the more she could feel it teasing the hairs on her arms and tickling the worn fabric of her shirt. She had dressed quickly, and loosely. She should have felt immodest, but she didn’t.
“What is my purpose, then?” Ceth asked. He almost sounded bitter, as if he needed direction, and Iyana felt like an imposter for thinking she was the one to give it. “Power will mean little in the war to come, if what you fear is true. Little more than a delay. I can’t stop it. I have brought my people here, to this land of grass and plenty, only to bury them, or to watch them swallowed by a darkness that will consume the world.”
Iyana went to lay a hand on Ceth’s. As it neared his wrist, she felt the pull stronger, as if the limb had been taken by a rushing current. There was a shock at the contact, but it was nothing compared to the feeling she got when his eyes met hers again. They were very close.
Iyana’s heart beat faster. She felt her body tensing in response to her proximity to Ceth and the pull about him. A pull he had not thought to relinquish, and seemed no closer to doing so now.
“A delay is time,” she whispered. “Time with your people. Time with the land. Time with …”
She trailed off, her eyes moving to Ceth’s lips. They looked softer than she would have imagined. His skin was softer than she would have imagined, for one who came from barren heights.
Now that she was here, and now that they were, it seemed to Iyana that she had taken Ceth for granted. His stony presence. His steady calm.
Iyana flashed into her greensight without thinking, seeing the glow reflected off Ceth’s unblinking eyes. She saw the blur around his form pulse and move, like smoke. It took on a ghostly light that was alluring to look upon. She did not concentrate on his tether, which shone above them, brighter than the moonlight that fought its way down through the enclosing dark. She felt her own tether brush against it, felt her body press against his, faster than she had intended.
She should have released her Sight, which allowed her to feel as he felt. But Ceth didn’t ask her to, and she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to ask if he wanted her. Needed her. She felt it, and it reflected her need. She felt his surprise at recognizing his own desire.
She kissed him, her lips tingling with the shock, as if he was a bottled storm. She felt his hands slip beneath the folds of her shirt where she had neglected to button it, and felt her core contract as she felt the charge.
It wasn’t a hungry feeling, nor a desperate one, as they fell in a tangle in the glade, the bright flowers and whizzing lights making up the borders of the forest at night. When she was naked, she felt clothed in the warmth Ceth’s body provided. She enveloped him and he enveloped her, and she didn’t give much thought to who was pulling whom, only that neither was pushing away.
That night, in a world gone dark and soon to grow darker, they seized what control they could by letting go, and giving in.
T’Alon had been in darkness before, when he had first failed against the Eastern Dark, the enemy of his people. The enemy of the world.
He had struck out along with Uhtren of the mountains, the Sage who would come to be known as the White Crest. Together, they could have stopped the Eastern Dark, and all the doom that followed. Together, they could have ended things, put things right.
T’Alon had been a fool for thinking it.
The White Crest had betrayed him, left him on the Eastern Dark’s mountain doorstep, bleeding and afraid. Not for himself. Rane had never married. He had never fathered children. His bond was to the Emberfolk. His people were his children. He was afraid for them. He knew that the Eastern Dark had long coveted the power of the desert Landkist, and though he guessed it had something to do with the World Apart, he could not have known the extent of it.
But the Eastern Dark had not killed him. Instead, he had shown him pain. He had shown him solitude. He isolated him from the world and from his own mind until finally, mercifully, the trickster, the charlatan had come to bargain. He reached into the deepest recesses of T’Alon’s mind, preying on the fear he saw. The fear for his people. It was a wise thing to exploit, and exploit it the Eastern Dark did.
He showed T’Alon the horrors to come. He showed him the truth of the World Apart, and even the part he had played in its discovery.
That other realm was coming closer every year, the Eastern Dark feared. He was a madman, raving in the southeast. He had shut himself away from the rest of his kind because he had stumbled upon a truth that frightened him even more than the Dark Kind, the Sentinels and the Night Lords combined—powers he would commit the hypocrisy of courting to serve his own ends. The Eastern Dark believed that the Sages had to die to stop the end from coming. All of them … but for him.
T’Alon had raged against the Sage in that well of impenetrable blackness. He had wielded the fire at his core—the fire that had no true power here—and the Sage had watched until he burned himself out.
And then T’Alon had listened. He came to see the truth of what the Eastern Dark said. The Sages were bright beacons, their very auras trailing bright tethers, like hanging ropes, that were bound to the inky black coming from a void even deeper than the one T’Alon had found himself relegated to.
He saw the horror of the World Apart and the beings that made it up, just as he saw the futility of trying to stop them, though the Eastern Dark had made his long, paranoid preparations to do just that. He was right. The Sages had to die. T’Alon had always felt it, though he had made grudging allies of one and had even come close enough to calling another friend.
The Sages’ very essence was bound in sin. The original sin of the world, and one T’Alon had always believed the Landkist had been born to thwart.
He believed the Eastern Dark, on e
very count but for the final one.
T’Alon would help him hunt the Sages in the wider world. He would do anything in his power to bring them down, no matter their seeming virtue or grace. He would lead the Eastern Dark’s chosen, the Dark Landkist he would come to hate, to guide … and in one case, even to love. And at the end of that dark and bloody path, he would come back to the Sage who had started it all, and burn him away.
T’Alon had duped the Sage by allowing him to believe that he had him, body and soul. He remembered himself, even when he was made brighter, stronger by the dark magic from that other realm. The magic the Sage had stolen, and the very same magic he now feared. T’Alon had been changed, but he had kept the core burning, the bright nugget that made him up, the truth of what he was.
Or so he had thought.
T’Alon woke up in the same startling well of blackness he remembered from so long ago. At first, he thought he had been transported back to the time of his first meeting with the dark Sage. He panicked, believing that the whole of his journey since that day—the long century since leaving the Valley, hunting the Sages, loving Resh—had been a lie. The latest and the longest in a string of unique mental tortures the spider had dreamed up.
And then he remembered the rest. He remembered the faces of his companions. He remembered the fight in the Valley, where he had burned the Corrupted shell Uhtren had become away like ash on the wind, and where he had witnessed a girl receive his gifts, and the most powerful Ember he had yet seen in the World. More so than he.
He remembered the muggy forest and close-sheltered trees of Center, and the bold, cunning warrior who had wielded the Emerald Blade. He pictured the timber fortress that the Sage of Balon Rael had crawled out of his stone towers in the east to erect in a land not his own, just as he remembered the way the armored Sage had died.
T’Alon actually laughed when he remembered the way it had felt when the Eastern Dark came to claim him. There was a shadow on his heart, or behind it. T’Alon had assumed it a figment of his imagination—a manifestation of his accumulated guilt. He should have known a being as vain, clever and afraid as Ray Valour would have laid plans upon plans.
There were other images, too, but these were less clear. He saw a crystal palace he had seen once before, long ago. He saw the Frostfire Sage, glowing white, though a darkness hung about her that hadn’t been there before. There was a great sphere of fire, shadow and blinding cold, and then there had been darkness once more.
T’Alon stood on the black floor of the void. There was a faint glow to it, as if moonlight shone from far away. He saw his own hands, saw his body naked beneath him, all the scars in the right places.
He flexed his core and saw the glow begin in his chest before tracing the veins of his shoulders and arms, pooling with light into his waiting palms. He clenched his fist and then opened it, somewhat surprised when a small flicker started just above the lines and crags. He closed his eyes and called to it, nurtured it, made it feel safe. The flame responded, growing alongside his will.
When he opened his eyes, he held a burgeoning blaze. He smiled, knowing he had managed to secrete a bit of himself away after all. The smile didn’t last. He felt those violet eyes on him that had none of the mischief of Shadow and all of the malice.
T’Alon jutted his palm out to the side and sent a jet that illuminated the emptiness all around him. The fire formed a great, roaring tail that carved its way through the inky black, striking nothing. He pulled his burning hand back and watched the orange star fade into the distance.
“I have come to bargain.”
T’Alon wanted to laugh. He almost did.
He heard a sound behind him, his ear twitching, and spun in that direction, supporting his glowing hand with the other and sending another jet toward the spot. This one was brighter, faster and more in keeping with his usual self.
“Playing along, are we?” T’Alon spoke into the ether as the brightness from his latest attack faded away, leaving him in a small pocket lit by the flickering torchlight he still held.
“I have not come to fight, Rane.”
“You said that already.”
T’Alon frowned in annoyance when no answer came. “Show yourself. This is your prison. You’ve nothing to fear from me in here.”
Still no response, and T’Alon’s mood flashed over anger before settling back on curiosity.
“I need your word that you will keep those flames to yourself, T’Alon.”
T’Alon chuffed and started to work up the lather to spit. He stopped, mind working. “What’s going on, Valour? Not in the mood to play? Or is it something else? What’s got into you?”
A long pause, and T’Alon nearly broke the silence with another roaring, crackling blaze, but the Sage spoke up. “Your word.”
“Granted,” T’Alon said without thinking. It was a wonder how impatient he felt, given the seeming eternity he had already spent lost in the Sage’s spell. “For now.”
He watched the blackness in front of him. He heard footsteps approaching, the tapping of leather boots of strong make. He saw a tall figure approaching out of the gloom, and his burning hand shook with the need to target him. The figure halted suddenly, nothing visible but for the purple gaze T’Alon had grown to hate.
T’Alon nearly growled as he lowered his hand and pulled the flames back. He kept the glow beneath his skin so as to see his surroundings, and the beast who approached.
The Sage stepped into the small pocket of flame lit black. The man who stood before T’Alon looked unlike any he had seen before. He recalled the Faey of the southern Valley. Though this man was taller, broader of shoulder and more square-featured, he had the same canted eyes and the same overlarge ears that stretched back behind his temples. His pale forehead was covered by silky black bangs, and his eyebrows were severe and angled, his lips small and tightly pursed.
His clothing was rich: a heavy robe that reached to his ankles. It was fastened by a silver belt and silver threads that interwove over the fabric to form the branches of a sort of tree T’Alon had never seen. He had rings on his fingers, each set with a different jewel, and all of them dark, the colors of blood and poison. There was a white bone hilt jutting up from his right hip, and T’Alon smiled at it as he looked him in the eyes.
He knew those eyes. Knew them well, even if the rest of the story had changed.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been acquainted with your true form, Valour,” T’Alon said. “I assume this is it. Or you’re more vain than I had ever imagined.”
The Sage grimaced. “No form is a true form, T’Alon. Not to us.”
“You’re no god, Sage,” T’Alon said. “You’ve got more tricks than me, maybe more than the rest combined, but it doesn’t change much, not in the end.”
The Eastern Dark shrugged. It was a strangely human gesture. “Hear what I have to say before you decide whether or not to strike.”
T’Alon’s eyebrows rose of their own volition.
“What happened in the west, Valour?” he asked. “What happened that forced you to … take me the way you did? What has you so unsure of yourself?” He paused as he examined the Sage in closer detail. One eyelid twitched along with the lead finger on one hand. His breathing was forced calm, but T’Alon could hear his heart beating in the close, echoing confines of the void.
“Much has happened,” the Sage answered. “Some of it no doubt a cause for celebration for your kind, but much more of it decidedly not. That I can promise you.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t burn you up on the spot,” T’Alon growled. He expected the Sage to laugh at him, or else to attack him and lay him low. He expected tendrils of blackness to form in the ether and hold him in place. Anything but for the small, pitiful sigh the Sage released. A sigh that told T’Alon the man who stood before him was exactly that: a man. Physical. Solid. Mortal.
“If you strike me down,” Valour said, “the rifts cannot be closed.”
T’Alon felt hi
s palm tensing. He smelled his own ozone as the sweat that pooled on the surface of his skin evaporated into a fine, sizzling mist. The Eastern Dark wrinkled his nose and took half a step back. Not nearly enough to be safe.
“You have my attention, Sage,” T’Alon said. “Keep it. What rifts do you speak of? Are the Dark Months upon us already?”
“Nearly so,” Valour nodded, “but that is not why I have come. Princess Elanil has done what I once intended.”
T’Alon’s mind worked over the implications. Some of it came back, and as T’Alon spoke, the rest began to rush in.
“How desperate have you made her?”
Valour swallowed. T’Alon did not know if he could sweat, but he looked as if he was about to.
“She has grown … stronger than I anticipated,” he said, as if it were some bold confession.
“You fought her,” T’Alon said as much as asked. “It didn’t go well for you.”
“Better for me than for her,” Valour said quickly. “Though it could have gone much better had I had my full abilities at my disposal.”
“Mine, you mean.”
“Mine,” Valour reiterated. “I lost them in the west. That much is true.” T’Alon wanted to stop him and make him tell him exactly how. He remembered the power of the Eastern Dark. Aside from his dark magics, his mightiest gift had been one he held close to the chest. It was a power of unmaking, or undoing, and enemies never knew it until they had struck a near-fatal blow. One that the Eastern Dark would reverse, send back.
It had made a Sage who appeared weakest among the rest the one the others feared the most. How did you kill a thing you could not strike out of fear of harming yourself?
“The Valley Landkist,” T’Alon said, his voice sounding like recognition dawning. He crinkled his brow. He remembered Kole, Linn and the Embers on the Emerald Road, and he remembered the warrior known as Baas Taldis, the one he had fought against and alongside just before the end.
“Not the ones you know,” Valour said. He looked as if he might tell him more, and his eyes glazed over for a brief moment. It was a moment long enough for T’Alon to have exploited. He could have struck him down, burned him up, and rid the world of its greatest evil.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 66