Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  “Fire showed himself?” was the first thing she said. Abruptly, Arvid remembered that Lamb’s grandmother had been a traveling barber who had made her way to the Plantation from the far south.

  “You knew of Fire?” he asked. He tried to make his voice calm, but she knew him well, and flicked him a glance of sudden concern.

  “I—” She hesitated. “All the women of my family go to the altar at Equinox,” she said finally. “It’s a women’s tradition. I thought… a woman’s secret, nothing more.”

  Women, Arvid thought bitterly. But he nodded as though he accepted that pitiful excuse, and Lamb relaxed. He called a maidservant and she escorted Lamb to the hall, while he waited for the other council members to arrive.

  Some wouldn’t be there until the next day, but that afternoon four more came; women and men trusted by their towns or regions, elected by their people to represent them. Some were officers, most were not. Domain Councils had no real power separate from the warlord—their advice was simply advice, not law, and the warlord could disregard it if he chose. But in the thirty years Arvid had worked with a council, they had never come to outright disagreement. Negotiation, mutual understanding, mutual respect, that was the key. Other warlords, he knew, routinely ignored their councils, but that was a way to breed discontent and rebellion. He had invested his council with some of his own power—in the regions they represented they could judge minor crimes, decide what matters of policy needed to come before their fellow council members, even settle the smaller tax disputes in their area.

  In two, perhaps three generations, Arvid thought, warlords would have returned to their oldest function—the leaders in battle—and ruling, lawmaking, dispensing justice, all would have descended to the councils. He wished fervently that that had happened before he was born.

  The council members straggled in over the next day; some would be unable to come for days, but they would have enough to make decisions. What decisions, he had no idea. He walked into the hall unsure of what he was going to say.

  When the council met, there was no glass table set on a dais for officers and lower tables for everyone else. Just one large board, made of four tables moved together, and everyone, not just the officers, was served their wine in the precious glass goblets. Arvid sat, as he always did, in the middle of one long side. There were gaps where the councillors from farthest out usually sat, but he saw most of the faces he expected: Sage, Elver, Lamb, the three officers from Long River, Brown Hill and Waterfall, and the Voices from the larger towns.

  “I welcome you to Palisade,” he said, the formal greeting. Then he paused, took a breath, and leaned back a little. Only honesty would do here. “Well, this is a shagging mess, isn’t it?”

  Laughter circled the table, and they plunged straight into planning: how to keep their people safe and fed and prosperous, how to survive.

  It was wonderful. For the first time since the Fire, Arvid put Martine and Ember right out of his mind and concentrated on something else entirely.

  Dinner that night was outside, tables set up in the cold twilight so they could all at least see what they were eating without starting the meal early. Martine presided as she always had, and the councillors reacted to her as they always had, with respect and affection and a little awe.

  The council separated the next morning, right after the dawn ritual, all of them eager to get back to their families. Lamb paused before she mounted the sway-backed gelding she unaccountably loved so much.

  “Your Lady has our best interests at heart, my lord,” she said, and then left hurriedly, before he could reply.

  He stood, glaring after her, fists clenched by his side. His groom took one look at his face and veered off to Lily’s smithy. Just as well. How dare she. How dare anyone speak to him of his wife.

  Behind him, the fire flared up, sending sparks high into the sky. He hoped it was his imagination that it was laughing at him.

  “Ice?” Arvid echoed, frowning. “That’s why it’s so cold?”

  “Fire is gone,” Mam said. Her voice was distant, as though she were Seeing things, but her eyes were sharper even than usual, and Elva wondered what had been happening here while she had been gone.

  “Fire is gone,” Elva confirmed. “So we are open to attack from Ice.”

  “Are you saying,” Arvid said slowly, “that this—this Fire has been protecting us?”

  Elva simply nodded.

  “For how long?”

  Mam Martine spoke, and this time her eyes were clouded with Sight.

  “A thousand years,” she said. “They have battled for a thousand years.”

  Arvid sat down in his chair, the old workworn chair at his desk that he refused to have replaced. It had been his great-grandfather’s, Elva knew, and was one of the oldest objects in the Last Domain, having been brought from the south when the land was first claimed.

  A thousand years was beyond his understanding.

  “Ember,” Arvid said. “Ember is caught up in this—battle?”

  Martine had her hand up under her breasts, as though trying to still her heart. Elva knew that feeling. Her boys were out there, too, as well as her little sister. Even though they hadn’t grown up together, Ember was family, dear and beloved. So young, just like Ash and Cedar. Against Powers, what chance did they have?

  The gods spoke to her gently, Together, they may prevail. Ice has no defense against love. She repeated the words as they came into her mind, the voices of the gods speaking through her, turning her own voice dark and deep, rasping. It was always a surprise to her, that sound. A stranger’s voice.

  Mam and Arvid looked up with hope blazing. With the gods in her head, Elva could see them so clearly; they were unhappy, driven, half-crazed with worry and something else that she didn’t fully recognize.

  Ice comes, the gods said through her. Arvid flinched, standing up as though to meet the threat head-on; but Mam sat down and clenched her hands in her lap, as though Seeing too much.

  We must work together, you and I and the other humans, Elva said to the gods.

  They hesitated. She shared with them everything that Sealmother had taught her, and felt them stream away from her to consider it. They would make their decision in their own time, as they always did, but she had to be ready—they all had to be ready—to work with them when they came back. If they came back. No use worrying about that.

  “There is a lot we need to do,” Elva said briskly. “If we’re going to hold off this Ice.”

  The Last Domain

  Poppy’s head came up like a sheepdog’s hearing its master’s whistle.

  That was what she felt like. She’d heard—something. Her mother’s voice, it had seemed. She looked again at the black rock altar. The dawn ritual was almost over. Despite the clawing cold, almost all of the inhabitants of this little town had come out to greet the gods. When danger threatens, her mother had said many times, people start praying.

  If she was going to hear her mother’s voice anywhere, it would be here, Poppy thought.

  It had sounded like her mother had said: “There is a lot we need to do, if we’re going to hold off this Ice.”

  The ritual finished and the people began to drift away, many looking up at the clear sky with worried faces. Poppy went closer to the altar, reached out to touch it.

  “Gods of field and stream, hear your daughter,” she said softly. Bringing out her belt knife, she cut off a lock of her hair and laid it down on the altar. “Gods of fire and storm, of earth and stone, of sky and wind, hear your daughter. Give me my mother’s wisdom, give me my mother’s guidance.”

  A breeze stirred, making her eyes water. When she blinked the tears away, the hair had gone. The gods had accepted her offering. She waited, and gradually found herself becoming afraid. Afraid of the cold. Shivering, shuddering with cold, although she could see from Larch’s manner that it was not truly any colder than before. Then her mother spoke into her mind, clear and achingly familiar.

  We mu
st bind ourselves into one, she said. Like this.

  A cascade of images flooded Poppy’s mind; a song, a movement, a sense of many needs plaited, woven into one strong strand—no, a fence, a wall, a woven barrier as solid as steel. And her mother in the middle, the weaver.

  “When?” she whispered, and the gods said to her: We will tell you. Go, prepare the others. Ice comes.

  Salt was the nearest big town, and they had the mines—safety for everyone while the battle was being fought. She just had to convince everyone to go there.

  Hah! No one would listen to her, a farmer’s daughter. They wouldn’t even listen to Larch. But Poppy had lived all her life with gods and prophets and seers, and she knew what she needed. Stonecasters.

  Starkling

  Cedar had signaled to Ash that he would take the first shift. It was a breach of protocol, no doubt, to set guards within a warlord’s residence, if you could describe a tree village that way, but Ash was taking no chances. He would take second shift, and let Curlew and Tern have an uninterrupted rest. Tern needed it, he thought. The young one had been quiet ever since he had come down out of the trees—ashamed of his fear, no doubt, and worried about Curlew to boot. He’d be better for a good night’s sleep. He should find a time tomorrow to talk to Tern, reassure him that everyone met something they couldn’t handle, sooner or later. There was no shame in reaching your limit.

  At midnight, Ash slid out of his sleeping pocket, feeling his way to the stair. The moon had set and the starlight came only faintly through the leaves. Ember was a slightly darker shape, breathing evenly. Dancing with butterflies! he thought. I would have liked to have seen that.

  Quiet voices drifted up as he negotiated the staircase. Cedar and someone else. Elgir?

  They were sitting to one side of the tree, on an old log. Curlew and Tern were asleep, Curlew buttressed on either side by the dogs. Holdfast raised her head as he went by and he signaled her to stay where she was.

  The two men looked up as he walked toward them and nodded with almost identical motions. Something worried him about that. Were they so alike, these two? He waved them to go on talking, and sat down at Cedar’s feet, his back against the cool wood. He’d clearly come into the middle of a conversation.

  “Are all your people shapechangers, my lord?” Cedar asked.

  “Many,” Elgir said readily.

  A dark shape moved in the shade of the trees and Ash sprang to his feet, but Elgir said, “It’s all right.” The shape came forward—the huge bull elk from the day before. Elgir rose and flung an arm over its shoulder. “This is my brother, Durst,” he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “He’s one of those who only change once, and then stay that way. He prefers it.”

  The elk lowered its head until it could butt Elgir in the shoulder affectionately. Ash kept silent. These were matters beyond him. He wished his mother were there. She was the one who understood strangeness. She and Grammer Martine.

  “Greetings, Durst,” Cedar said. “What about you, my lord? Do you change?”

  Elgir hesitated. “I change rarely… My duties do not permit me more.”

  There was definite regret in his voice.

  “But why are there so many here, when they are the stuff of legend in the rest of the Domains?” Cedar asked.

  “That story goes back a long way. You may have noticed, there are no altars here.”

  Ash had noticed. His father had brought them up to honor the local gods. At home, the family went to the altar every dawn for the morning prayers. Except his mother, Elva. He had always thought it odd that the gods’ own prophet would care so little about the forms of worship, but Elva just shrugged. “If they want me to know something, they’ll tell me,” she’d say. “And this way breakfast is ready when you get back.”

  He’d missed the morning ritual on this trip, and he’d looked for an altar as they came through Elgir’s lands, but had seen none.

  “Yes,” Cedar said, “I’d wondered about that.”

  “The black rocks fell from the sky a long time ago, long before Acton’s people came over the mountains. The largest was at Obsidian Lake, in your domain.”

  Obsidian Lake was in the Last Domain, not in the Western Mountains where they were from, but better to let Elgir believe that he and Cedar were Arvid’s men. Less complicated that way.

  “Other rocks fell south, but none here. I don’t know why. Just chance, perhaps. The black rocks…” Elgir hesitated. “It is hard to say whether the rocks gave the local gods power, or whether they simply attracted the gods and, coming together, they found they had more power than when they acted separately. In any case, the rocks changed things. Humans turned away from the Powers, who were so vast, so far removed from them, to worship the local gods, who knew their lands.”

  “Gods of field and stream…” Cedar murmured. It was the beginning of the morning prayer.

  “Exactly,” Elgir said.

  A slight breeze lifted Ash’s hair, but didn’t seem to rustle the leaves around them. An owl hooted; small animals scurried in the undergrowth. A normal night, and Elgir was welcoming, yet he felt ill at ease here. He had liked it better on the high platforms of the cedars. At least there he could see the mountains. He shifted so he could see beyond the treetops. The stars were bright and high, with no clouds to mar them. His own local gods seemed very far away.

  “But what does that have to do with shapechangers?”

  “The local gods are uncomfortable with beings which are two things at once. Maintaining the divide between life and death is their main task, and I think all divisions are—sacred is the wrong word. Reassuring to them, may be? They suppress that kind of power around them. So wherever there is an altar, shapechangers do not change. They yearn. They dream. But they never discover their true kind.”

  Elgir sat back down again and his brother began to graze.

  “This is the only settled place in the Domains where the world is as it was before the black rocks fell, and shapechangers can transform. And so it is my task, the task of the warlords of this domain, to find them and bring them here. It is my main duty… I scry for the young ones and talk to them in their dreams. Come north, I say. Come to where you will be happy. My predecessor four generations ago began it. He was a bear, they say.” He seemed to think it was all very normal. Ash felt as if he were in a dream—the night, the distant stars, the man with his brother elk…

  “It comes down in the blood,” Elgir continued. “So most children born here now have some of the ability. Some are mostly human, others mostly not. All have a place.”

  Cedar was fascinated, Ash could see in his face.

  “Do your children have the—ability?” Cedar asked.

  “I have none, yet. There was a prophecy that I should choose an heir, rather than beget one. I have looked a long time. I was beginning to think he would never come and I should have to go out into the world to find him.”

  He looked straight at Cedar. The hairs on Ash’s neck rose in alarm. Cedar? No, no, not Cedar!

  “Me?” Cedar said. He was astonished—and flattered. Ash got up and stood in front of Elgir, planting his feet firmly.

  “You’re inviting my brother to be your heir?” he demanded.

  “He has the power,” Elgir said. “I could teach him the enchantments which keep this place safe.”

  Cedar’s eyes lit up at the thought of learning spells. “I’m not a shapechanger,” he said slowly.

  “Are you not?” Elgir asked, smiling. “That power is in you, too, in all of your blood, I suspect.” He flicked a glance at Ash, then focused back on Cedar. “Your mother gave you more than Sight, son.”

  “He’s no son of yours,” Ash stated.

  Cedar ignored him. “What would I be?” he asked. “What animal?”

  Elgir smiled. “I cannot know that until you change. But you know in your heart which form calls to you.”

  Cedar looked down at the ground, flushing. Oh gods! Ash was dismayed. Don’
t do it, brer. Deny him. But he didn’t say it out loud. Cedar’s choice.

  Cedar looked at him and then up at the tree above, and his own expression changed, the excitement dying out, replaced by resignation.

  “I must go with Ember,” he said. “She needs me.”

  Ash felt relief sweep through him, followed by a kind of sadness. That was a sacrifice Cedar was making.

  “Yes, of course!” Elgir said. “But afterward… your home is here, and your inheritance, if you wish to claim it.”

  Cedar looked into his eyes. They were alike, Ash could see. Creatures of ideas and thought. Cedar could be the son of Elgir’s heart and mind, if not of his body. A warlord’s son.

  “Why don’t you have children?” Ash demanded suddenly. “Is there a curse or something else Cedar should know?”

  Elgir paused, still looking at Cedar. “Yes. Yes, it is true. No lord of this domain has ever had children of his body. Each one must find his successor, and train him, knowing that there will be no children.”

  “And when were you going to tell him that? When it was too late?”

  Elgir looked at the ground. “It won’t matter to Cedar,” he said gently, as if he broke bad news. “For people like us, it never matters. We are seduced by the enchantments so deeply that nothing else compares.”

  Cedar was nodding, slowly. Ash took his arm. “Be careful,” he said. “He is asking you to give up everything you know, every one you know, as well as the possibility of a family. Of—of love.” They were brothers, and never spoke much about feelings, but he had to make the case as persuasively as he could. “Don’t you want a family of your own? To live with people you care about?”

  Cedar’s eyes held tears, but they were calm.

  “Not the way you do,” he said. “Now I know I can learn—all this—” his arm made a wide gesture, taking in the tree towers, the water meadows with their grazing animals, the high ridge crowned with trees, “how can I turn my back on it?”

  Elgir nodded. “You will come back, and I will welcome you,” he said simply. Cedar put out his hand and they clasped forearms, a gesture of equals.