Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  They were memories so pure as to be agonizing, and her fondness for them scared her so much that she had hidden them away. She wondered if they both had, and if it was best that way. Still, they cared for each other deeper than knowing.

  It was a sad thing that killing had first brought her and Kole together, and it was killing that bound them together now. It was killing out of necessity, but she envied those in the Valley that found ways to avoid it. She passed them on the streets and they thanked her for it with their looks and glances—thanked her for taking the bloody burden. A part of her hated them for it, but it was a small part. It was the part of her that railed silently against the world, and the part she had buried beneath the same hill as her parents.

  The truth was that she and Kole knew each other better in those moments than in all the quiet ones in between, the cold efficiency of her work painting a stark contrast to the firestorm that consumed him when his blades were lit. There was a trust at the center of it—a trust she was betraying now.

  But she had to protect him. She had to protect Iyana. She would protect them all, Landkist or not.

  Linn thought of the difference between secrets and lies as she came to a green door and rapped.

  While the homes near the wall were newer, built primarily of wood and thatch, the structures further down the slope took on a more permanent shape. The cobbled streets were overgrown with moss and weeds, wending their way through the market and around the wells before giving way to the gravel where the fishermen kept their cabins.

  Although many of these hovels were ramshackle in appearance, they were the oldest at the Lake, having been put up before there was even a true settlement along its banks. Back then, there had been no need for walls; in fact, it was the very decision by the Merchant Council of Hearth to build their own gaudy white barriers that prompted the Emberfolk to fracture, with a great number coming south to the salt and spurs. The strategic advantages provided by the land around Last Lake were more of a happy accident than any genius in engineering. The settlement was protected on three sides by water and rock, and on the fourth by a thick timber wall manned by some of the stoutest warriors in the Valley.

  Ninyeva considered how all she now saw before her would have been swept away long ago if not for those warriors—if not for Tu’Ren and his Embers, Landkist much more useful than she.

  She rapped gnarled knuckles on the mahogany rail of her leaning tower, looking out over the docks below, the Long Hall a stone’s throw away. These had been her chambers for as long as she had made the Lake her home, which was near as long as any save for Doh’Rah, the man that had convinced her to come in the first place.

  What if she had stayed out among the Faey? What more could she have learned from the other Landkist blessed as she was blessed?

  But her people had needed her, she supposed. Or thought they needed her, which was as near a thing. Ninyeva was the oldest of the Emberfolk in the Valley and the first to be Landkist by it. To the young and leaderless, this made her wise. For a long time, she felt wise, when the killing and dying had been done on human terms—meaningless conflicts between the three tribes of the Valley. Quelling those conflicts took doing. For Ninyeva, it was all a matter of listening and getting the right ears to listen back.

  The Dark Kind had no ears for mercy and no hearts for forgiveness. There was no wisdom could stop a thing like them. They were as inevitable as the Dark Months themselves. The Valley had made her people soft. Try as she might, she could not remember the sting of the sand in her eyes or the sun on her back.

  Of course, it was the young and leaderless that guarded them now. They were made of stronger stuff than any that had entered the Valley in the legendary caravan of which Ninyeva was a part. But it was not enough to stop the inevitable.

  There was a chill in the room, and if there was one in the Valley who dealt with chills even worse than she, it was Doh’Rah. Ninyeva sighed and turned away from the railing, moving to the threaded carpet in the center. She lifted the blackened grate and slid another stack of scented oak into the sloped pit beneath it, fanning the eager flames back to life. Her thoughts continued to tumble around as she waited—thoughts and their cousin doubts.

  Doh’Rah would have news from Hearth and the Scattered Villages. He might even have word from the Rivermen at the Fork. He was well known and respected, if not entirely liked. Ninyeva held the hearts of the Emberfolk of the Lake, but he held their minds.

  In the distant past, Ninyeva might have been anxious at his approach. In the not-so-distant past, she would be excited to match wits. Now, she felt neither frayed nerves nor the swell of anticipation. The Dark Kind had come for them every year for the last generation, and they had lost many of their best and most of their brightest. Together, they shared the burden of leadership, whatever good it did their people.

  Ninyeva was sitting cross-legged before the flames when he entered. They nodded a greeting, and he took the cup she proffered out of habit, setting it down without sipping. Doh’Rah looked past her, marking the path of the half-sun as it moved across the surface of the lake.

  “Still calculating, exhausted as you are,” Ninyeva said sternly.

  “No harm in knowing the time.”

  “Now, then,” she said. “What news?”

  Doh’Rah spoke, and while he said nothing altogether concerning or untoward, his tone was forlorn. It was a tone he might have affected once only in the company of his late wife, now reserved for her alone. Not even Tu’Ren saw his father like this.

  “Villagers from the Western Wood have been pouring into Hearth—scores each day. If Karin’s reports of the refugees are accurate, we should count ourselves lucky to have lost so few.”

  Ninyeva flinched, her green eyes flickering.

  “The day we count any loss as lucky will be a dark one indeed.”

  Doh’Rah grunted his agreement.

  “Our cousins in Hearth experienced no losses in the attack?”

  “They never do,” he said, an edge of bitterness in his voice that made him blush when he caught it.

  “Rah,” she said, locking him in place with that unyielding stare. “There’s something else.”

  He took a drink and coughed a bit, unable to take his eyes from hers. He broke the trance with a shiver.

  “I hate it when you do that.”

  “Sorry,” Ninyeva said, blinking. She meant it. It was so easy for her to feel his emotions; they were like a thread she wanted to pull at to unravel the thoughts beneath.

  “No matter,” he feigned indifference. “Just the odd talk of dark men in the woods— demons and the like.” He waved his hand dismissively. “If I’ve learned anything in my considerable time in this Valley, it’s that the only folk more tall in their tales than the Rivermen are our own.”

  Ninyeva smirked, but his words had her feeling paler than she must look.

  “What did they say of these dark men?”

  “Nothing of note.”

  “Rah.”

  He grumbled, but she caught him in those greens again, and he blubbered what words were swirling just behind his tongue.

  “They are blacker than night,” he said. “Unclothed and with eyes shining blood-red with a ruby glint.”

  “Sentinels.”

  “No!” he nearly shouted before coming back to himself. He wiped the sweat from his brow and took another drink. “The White Crest slew him. Why would he wait this long? What could he want?”

  “The same thing he’s always wanted,” Ninyeva said, hazy with memories of the tales her father told her of the Eastern Dark as a child. “It must be, Doh’Rah. The Dark Kind have ever been a scourge on the World, coming in through their rifts, but these attacks are coming too regular and too direct. A Night Lord died within our walls.”

  “It was no Night—

  “An approximation of one, then. And now the Sentinels? They are being guided now as they were then.”

  “And you mean to send one of the last Embers we have o
ut into the passes to see?”

  Ninyeva paused.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that we will not endure if we stay here. When the Dark Months end, we need to see the state of the World. It’s been generations.”

  Doh’Rah was silent. He settled back, imploring her to speak.

  “When we first came to this Valley,” she said, “we were a pragmatic people. Our home was in the deep deserts. Sand and wind were no strangers to us, and we were warmed in the bosom of the buried mountains.”

  Ninyeva was never sure how Doh’Rah would respond to stories from the past. He had been born in the Valley, his memories of the desert false things implanted by those who had come from there. He seemed at once both eager and afraid to dwell on what had come before, uncertain or unwilling to consider what had been taken or what had been lost. The buried cities that should have been his home warred with the Valley he knew and loved.

  “To my grandsires,” she continued, “the fire flowing within their veins was as natural and as common as the snakes carving their crooked paths across the dunes. It was not a matter of if, but when your flames would emerge, since those were the early Ember days. We lost much when we left the deserts. My father used to say that we never knew how full the desert was until we left it.”

  She smiled fondly.

  “Lately, I keep hearing those words in my dreams. They follow me into waking. Doh’Rah,” she looked intent. “The Ember blood was never our birthright. It was never a part of us. It was a gift of the sun and fire, of the beating heart beneath the sands and the black rock that held it all up. The Embers of the Valley are weak. Only the oldest among them—your son, Larren, Garos Balsheer and Creyath Mit’Ahn of Hearth—hold a candle to the old flames. The young show flashes, but nothing more than burning ash on the wind, soon to be snuffed out entirely.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I am Landkist by the Valley. I am blessed by pine, oak, ash and yew. But I am no Ember, nor is Iyana. The Landkist of the Faey and the Rivermen cannot stop the coming tide. Our Embers are burning out. When that happens, our children die. All of them. And he wins.”

  “He wants their power,” Doh’Rah said, speaking slowly. “That is what he has always coveted, according to the stories.”

  “Then he will take them and pervert them,” she said. “He is ready to make his war on the other Sages, if he hasn’t already.”

  “He already did more than a generation ago, against our own.”

  “That was a retaliation for the attack the White Crest and the King of Ember launched against him.”

  “That was a hundred years ago. Why did he wait so long to confront the White Crest? And why did he wait so long to send his Night Lords and his Sentinels—supposing that is what they are?”

  Ninyeva sighed, shaking her head.

  “The World Apart cannot be controlled,” she said. “Only guided, aimed.”

  Doh’Rah was silent for a time. He looked tired, and she was sorry for it.

  “Do you really think our Sage could be alive?” he asked with the naïve hope of a child.

  “Kole Reyna is scarred by a poisonous mix of dreams and memories from that night.”

  “The night Sarise made for the passes,” Doh’Rah said. “He said you saw it as well. What did he mean by that?”

  Ninyeva looked away. It was a rare enough thing, and one he caught.

  “I don’t know,” she said in a whisper. “But I saw the White Crest, Rah. I saw him as a girl, standing with the King of Ember, his great silver wings shining on the cliffs. I felt his eyes on me, and later came to learn that everyone who passed under him that day had felt them, intent and unflinching. He was to be our protector, our guardian, and a rock to break what waves might come from the wars without his lands. These lands.”

  “These lands,” he repeated, seizing on them like a vice. “These are the lands we must look to, the lands we have always known and the lands that have sheltered us.”

  “They will be our burial grounds.”

  “They already are!” Doh’Rah shouted. “But so are the lands beyond, more so. They are rent apart, broken in the Sages’ private war. That is why we left. That is why you left.”

  They both fell silent.

  Doh’Rah pressed a palm to his face and attempted to drag the anger away, leaving fatigue in its place. He looked like defeat. She was not sure which version of him she preferred.

  “The truth,” he said quietly, lifting his cup a final time. He drained it in a swig and placed it back by the grate, rising to his feet and smoothing the folds from his red-brown robes. “The truth, Faey Mother, is that we have no idea what lies beyond the mountains. Maybe you did, once. Whatever horrors may come, they pale in comparison to what we’ll find out there.”

  He took her hand and gently helped her to rise, kissing it lightly, all his bluster having blown out with the breeze from the balcony. He turned for the door and Ninyeva emptied her own cup and moved back to the rail. The day was cool, and the night was coming fast, the sun nothing but an amber jewel on a sapphire horizon. She heard the door open behind her as Doh’Rah readied himself to leave.

  “Who are we to bid them stay?” she asked, more to herself than him.

  “Even Reyna does not truly want to leave, Ninyeva,” he said. “He wants to save us all. The trouble is, he’s one man—an Ember, yes—but one man regardless. We can’t send him out to die.”

  “Then I suppose I’d better see what I can find,” she said, turning with a smirk that eased some of the tension.

  “You’re a little old for a trek through the Deep Lands, over the Steps and into the peaks,” Doh’Rah said with a laugh.

  “I learned much in my time with the Faeykin,” Ninyeva said. “There are many paths in this world. Not all of them require walking.”

  He closed the door, and the odd look on his face before he left did little to bolster her confidence. The Between was a road perhaps more dangerous than those in the north of the Valley itself. And she had never travelled far. But night was coming, and all the terrors with it.

  If not her, then whom?

  Kole had spent a day and the following night’s watch ruminating on the difference between dreams and visions. Karin used to tell him that the two were like cousins: any mixture could not be trusted. He knew what haunted his son every night because the same thing haunted him.

  The Faeykin, Landkist of the Valley, had visions. They saw them as paths to walk and waters to swim. Ninyeva knew their ways. She knew how to navigate them, but Kole did not go to the Faey Mother. He wondered if Iyana had been taught how to wend her way between worlds, but he did not think so. Now more than ever, the healing abilities of the Faeykin were in higher demand than sleepwalkers.

  The lake still boiled and frothed in his mind’s eye, the trees whipping violently under the black gales. He still heard his own primal screams rending the forest. There was anger there with a touch of fear just below the surface. It was at once repulsing and intoxicating.

  There had been something else, and the more he meditated on it, the more certain he became: something had been watching him from the trees.

  At first, he had dismissed the feeling as a byproduct brought on by the fog of sleep, but the closer he drew to the woods, the more he felt it, like a nagging tickle on the nape of his neck.

  He thought of going to Linn or Nathen for help, taking them with him into the woods. But they would have convinced him not to go, and besides, he would not deprive Last Lake of any more of its defenders than necessary. No, Kole would not risk them. But that did not mean he had to go alone.

  Kole crossed the road well before the torches that lined the path to the half-built gate. Progress was quick, the timber supports already laced with rope and doubled with angular frames of stout oak. This was not the first time the builders of Last Lake had been forced into quick action, and it would not be the last.

  The kennels were sprawling and unguarded, the hounds trusted more implicitly by
the people here than their own children.. There were no gates or latches to keep these soldiers in; they were free to come and go as they pleased. Though they could not take up residence with humans, attachments formed, especially among the fighters of both species.

  Kole reached into his belt to produce an old standby. He snapped the end off a carrot with a wet crack, and heard the telltale sounds of claws in the gravel almost immediately.

  Shifa greeted the carrot first, crunching hungrily before finding the courtesy to reward Kole with a lick. She walked a circle around him, sniffing as she went, both to reacquaint herself and—he suspected—to ensure he was not further burdened with orange vegetables.

  “That’s my girl,” he whispered, scratching behind a white-tipped ear. The other hounds looked on from their places beneath the thatch-covered slats, unimpressed.

  Together, they moved around the back of the wood barracks, skirting the edge of the wall to the west, Shifa following Kole’s lead and mimicking him as he avoided the pools of orange light that marked the braziers’ glow. He chose the section of wall nearest Kaya to scale.

  Shifa was a wall hound of the Lake, fleet of foot and cunning as a sharpened blade. The hounds here had to be, since it was their prodding and feigned retreats that helped to corral the attacking Dark Kind during assaults. The Emberfolk of Last Lake did not have the great white walls of Hearth to hide behind, so they worked with what tools nature gave them.

  Kole sat the hound down in a darkened bend in the wall. He motioned with two fingers and she was up and over with a bound and scratch so faint one could be forgiven for thinking it a squirrel. He waited a short spell and then followed her over, finding her sitting and waiting, ears perked and matching tail wagging. They took off into the woods, and if there was a small part of him that felt foolish for following his flights of fancy, there was a keener part intent on discovering the source of that constant prickle, which was now a steady burn at his temples.