Summoner's Bond (The Endless War Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

  The next attack struck her head again, and finally the light faded, leaving her in nothing but blackness.

  11

  Shade

  Jasn managed to succeed in infiltrating the barracks, but his hatred for the draasin made him a danger. There was much I could learn having Jasn there, but I feared he would not share once he understood the purpose of the barracks, at least as Cheneth saw it. It was a risk I had to take.

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  Shade stood in the shadows of the trees, holding onto the fallen girl. Only a girl, not a woman like he’d been led to believe, but already she’d proven herself a challenge. There had been several reports that she had managed to defy the fools who thought to serve the darkness, and Shade had decided he needed to find her. Power like that, especially in one so young, had to be harnessed. And he was the only one capable of doing so.

  It would take breaking her before he could rebuild her.

  “Where is the other?” Shade snapped. He hadn’t known that the shapers of Ter had a woman who spoke to the draasin. Such surprises here. Had he come alone, he might not have survived. As it was, this one almost overwhelmed him.

  “Gone. She disappeared when you grabbed her,” Haj said, pointing to the girl. “Are you sure it was worth exposing ourselves for her?”

  Shade scooped the girl up. She was lighter than he expected, or perhaps it was the summons of earth that he maintained that only made it seem that way. “We have already been exposed, or haven’t you heard about Atenas?”

  “Atenas was never ours.”

  Shade turned to Sevn, ignoring the wind summoning that poured off him. Of all the refugees from Hyaln, Sevn might be the most potent, which was why Shade needed him. If he made a misstep, Sevn would overtake his leadership, and it had taken nearly a decade for him to reach the point that he had.

  “Atenas was ours. We had the entire council.”

  “But not the Commander,” Sevn said.

  Shade’s eyes clouded. Not him, as much as he wanted to claim him. He still didn’t know where Lachen’s allegiances lay. Not entirely with Ter, or he wouldn’t have run off as often as he did. It was bad enough that the man was so damned capable. It was worse that they couldn’t determine which side he played.

  “We will convince him to join us in time,” Shade said.

  Haj glanced from Shade to Sevn, not speaking. Haj had the wisdom to remain silent, even though Shade knew him to have a sharp mind. But even the sharpest mind didn’t have the most dexterous fingers, and Sevn and Shade were known as two of the most skilled summoners. Shade had an additional edge with his shaping ability. Even Sevn didn’t possess much skill there.

  “What do you intend to do now that you’ve captured her?” Sevn asked.

  Shade glanced at the sky. It was a perfect night, with few stars and enough clouds to obscure their travels. Amusing how the people of this land had begun to fear the night, as if there were anything to fear about a source of such power. “I intend to turn her.”

  “Turn her. Do you think that she can be turned?” Sevn asked. “She’s already begun to learn the summons.”

  “She doesn’t know what she knows. And soon, she won’t remember what she doesn’t know.”

  Shade touched his hand to her temples, rubbing the index fingers in steady circles along the side of her head. Such a summoning would obscure her thoughts, one of the many benefits of summoning the night.

  “I still think this is a mistake,” Sevn countered. “We have enough trouble without adding this one to it.”

  Shade considered the girl. The other two had been completely overwhelmed between one shaper of Ter and this girl. It had been him who had managed to subdue her. He had seen the way that she used the spear—a j’na to her people, a nod to a lost art that he doubted she even understood. How could he choose not to find a way to use her?

  “She will be my responsibility. My project,” he said.

  Sevn and Haj watched him, but neither spoke.

  It was good that they didn’t. He had enough from both of them and had no interest in countering their weak arguments any longer. Besides, once he demonstrated the control that he could exert over this girl, they would want to work with summoners of their own.

  Shade started his summons, a call to fire and the draasin they had discovered within the forest. Probably the same beast that the shaper spoke to. Draasin were simple creatures once you understood them, and forcing her to follow him was no more difficult than forcing the wind to blow, or the earth to rumble. All it took was strength of will.

  And as this girl would soon learn, Shade had a will stronger than steel.

  12

  Alena

  Death comes to us all. Shapers live long lives but are mortal the same as any other. I have tried to forge a connection between the elementals and Atenas, but none have shown any talent for communication, other than those Cheneth claimed.

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  Alena brushed herself off, rolling to the side, her body throbbing from the attack. Her ears rang, and she wasn’t sure whether it was from the explosion that had carried the attackers away, or if it came from them hitting her. It no longer mattered. Ciara was gone.

  The clearing was a mess of cracked trees and singed and burning grasses. How had they been surprised so easily? The attackers… they had used something like what Ciara could do, only with much more control.

  Cheneth had to know.

  She tried to move, but her body ached, throbbing in ways that she had never experienced before, at least not since she first came to the barracks to train. This was a brutal pain, one that left her barely able to move. But she had to. Reaching Ciara required that she had to move. That girl had helped them when she had no other reason to do so, no reason other than hatred for Ter, given the war between their people. And she had been the reason that they had survived more than they should have been able to survive. The creator knew that she was the only reason Alena was still alive.

  Reaching for the draasin, she felt the sense of the hatchling in her mind. Thankfully that wasn’t gone. She reached for Sashi, to ask her help in finding Ciara. Sashi had a connection to Ciara, even if the draasin would never admit it. But Sashi was gone.

  Alena crawled to her knees. She had been in the clearing before the attack. Where had she gone?

  Slowly, she managed to make it to her feet and stagger toward the trees. Her head spun, and each step sent throbbing agony through her. But she had to continue on. For Ciara, she had to find a way to reach Cheneth.

  Blast him from sending Volth away! As much as she hated to admit it, that man had the best chance of helping them reach her.

  There was movement in the edge of the trees.

  Alena held her breath and reached for her sword but realized that it had been knocked from her hand during the attack. She attempted a shaping, but the pain throbbing in her mind made that impossible.

  “Alena?”

  It was Cheneth’s voice.

  “Here,” she said.

  Three people appeared out of the darkness, Cheneth leading with a soft glowing light in his palm. The blasted man had more shaping ability than he’d ever let on. How much would he share now that they had need of his knowledge? He’d been keeping so much close, shielding it from the rest, and it was time that he stopped.

  “What happened? I felt the—” Cheneth cut off and looked around him. “What happened here?”

  “Attack,” she managed to say. Her tongue felt as if she’d bit it, making it thick. “Three of them.”

  “Shapers?” This was Ifrit. What was she doing here with Cheneth? Damn woman had betrayed them too many times, siding with Calan with his blasted hunt. But she had returned to the barracks with Eldridge. The two of them had brought Bayan back.

  “Not shapers.”

  “This looks like shapers attacked here,” Ifrit said. “Look at the blast marks. Fire and earth were used here.�
�

  And wind, Alena wanted to say, but it didn’t matter.

  Cheneth stopped close to her and handed her sword back over. Alena took it and slipped it into the sheath, wishing that she’d been capable enough to withstand the attack so that she could have helped Ciara better, but she had failed. What price would they pay for losing her?

  There was little doubt in Alena’s mind that they would have to pay some price. Ciara had proven herself to be a valuable ally against Tenebeth, and without her, how would they withstand another attack from him?

  “Was it them?” Cheneth asked.

  “The draasin thought it was, but I don’t think so,” she answered. The ringing in her ears had started to ease, and she managed to get control of the pain throbbing through her, as if her body already began to heal. Since the strange shaping that Volth had used on her, she had recovered more quickly than usual. She hadn’t taken the time to consider what that might mean, and now wasn’t the time either. “Three men. They carried staffs, sort of like what Ciara has. They were able to move enormous power, Cheneth. They brushed off my shaping like it was nothing.”

  In the pale light of his shaping, she saw him blanch.

  “You recognize them, don’t you?” she said.

  “Not them, perhaps, but what you describe.” He motioned to Ifrit and Bayan, who made a slow circuit around the clearing. “You’re sure this wasn’t shaped?”

  “I’m sure. I would have detected shaping.”

  He tipped his head. “Are you certain? Do you detect my shaping?”

  She focused on the ball of fire in his palm and shook her head. “No. Not yours. But it wasn’t shaping. They did the same sort of tapping dance that Ciara does, only theirs didn’t call on bright white light at the end of their spears. They had something like a sickly green.”

  Cheneth swore softly under his breath. “I had hoped we would have more time.”

  “More time for what?”

  “To get ready. So much is progressing, and I am underprepared.”

  Alena laughed. “If you’re underprepared, then what about the rest of us?”

  Cheneth shook his head. “You’ll continue to learn, and I think the connection to the elementals will prove valuable.”

  “But what is this? You said it’s not Tenebeth,” Bayan said as she approached. “There was power here, but I can’t tell what it was.”

  From anyone else, such a statement would have been odd, but this came from Bayan, a woman with the ability to detect the use of shapings and to know details of them unlike anyone she’d ever known. For Bayan to be unable to detect what happened here meant that Alena had been right.

  “That’s what I said,” Alena told her. “This wasn’t shaped.”

  Cheneth whispered something softly, and the wind began to blow. Alena detected no shaping from him, but he knew how to shield his shaping.

  Bayan watched him, her eyes growing wider. “There’s no shaping,” she said, leaning into Alena.

  Cheneth turned to her. “Good. You can tell the difference.”

  “What difference?”

  “There is no shaping because I was not shaping. This was a summons to the elementals.”

  “Like what Ciara does?” Alena asked.

  “Not like Ciara. There is a reason that I struggled to teach her,” Cheneth said.

  Alena gripped the hilt of her sword, wishing that Cheneth would stop being so obtuse with them. They needed answers, not more questions. “Damn it, Cheneth. Can you not just tell us something straight? We’ve seen what we face, and we need to know what we’re dealing with.”

  A smile pulled on his lips. “You’ve seen the answer, Alena, even if you didn’t know what it was. Ciara summons with her spear, what they call a j’na. In some ways, I am responsible for what she’s able to do. I trained her father, and others like him, using the spears to learn to summon the elementals, to try and draw them out of the damned war. And even that isn’t enough.”

  “What is?”

  “The light,” he said, staring at the sky. “The elementals are safest when they’re drawn to the light. Ciara is the embodiment of that. She can call on the light itself. You’ve seen it when the end of her spear glows. It’s because of her light that she’s able to dismiss Tenebeth.”

  “And you don’t summon the light?”

  Cheneth smiled sadly. “Not the light. I can shape, and I can summon the elementals—that’s how I managed to teach her father—but I’m not able to call on the light. Or the dark.”

  He said it so casually that Alena wasn’t sure what to make of it. “The dark. You mean Tenebeth.”

  “I mean the dark.” He sighed. “It took me a while to understand why we never heard of Tenebeth before, but I think I do now. There are those within Hyaln who are responsible. They thought to study it, thinking they could control the darkness, that they can control that power.”

  “They think to control Tenebeth?”

  Cheneth sighed again. “They don’t consider him the same way. They don’t view him as Tenebeth. They view the darkness as a means to power the same as they view light as a means to power.”

  “How is it that you know of this?” Alena asked.

  Cheneth met her eyes. “When I left recently, I returned to Atenas. A friend called on me, asking that I come.”

  “You have friends in Atenas?”

  Cheneth smiled slightly. “Perhaps not me, but Eldridge, and I answered on his behalf. While he searched for Bayan, I went to Atenas.”

  “Who called for you?” This was Ifrit. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest. Alena still feared that Ifrit sided with Calan and that placed them in danger, especially if she intended to hunt the draasin. How would Alena and the others prove to Ifrit that hunting the draasin was not what they needed to do?

  Even more than that, how would they prove to others in Ter that they couldn’t hunt the draasin?

  But if Tenebeth tainted them, how could they not?

  “There’s a healer there,” Cheneth started, and Alena already knew who he meant. “One who saw that the fight has spread.”

  “What fight?” Bayan asked.

  Cheneth took a deep breath and looked around the clearing. His eyes seemed to catch the starlight. “The one that I will need your help in fighting,” he said. “Or we will lose. We will all lose.”

  13

  Jasn

  Losing Katya changed Jasn and drove him insane. The healer became the warrior, and what a warrior he was. Stories of the Wrecker of Rens traveled well beyond the border of the battleground, as did stories of his exploits. How does a man survive when no others can? That was the question I sought to understand.

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  “You’re quiet,” Katya said. She sat on a rock at the edge of the shore. Every time that she spoke to him, she did so outside, letting the sound of the waves cover their conversations, almost as if she feared someone overhearing them.

  And maybe she did. In the time that he’d been here, he had spent little time in the castle itself. Most of it was along the rock, or on the ledge with Rehnar. Never in the castle, other than to eat and to sleep.

  He interacted with few other people as well. There was that concern that Katya had of others overhearing, and then there was the concern about how Hyaln had been fractured, but Jasn saw no evidence of it. In fact, he saw nothing of anyone else.

  “I’ve watched you as you train. Did you know that?”

  Jasn shook his head. How would he have done had he known that she watched? He still had that flutter in his stomach every time that he saw her, though it lessened the longer that he was here. How could he ever get used to the fact that she was supposed to be dead? And how would he ever get used to the fact that she had lied to him for so long?

  Maybe he wouldn’t.

  “You have grown in your skill,” Katya told him.

  Jasn tried not to let the compliment sway him, but this was still Katya. In many ways, he
doubted that he would ever be over her, even though in the week that he had been here, she had shown no interest in rekindling the romance that they once shared. A closeness, perhaps, but she had remained reserved around him.

  “Rehnar gives me little choice,” Jasn said. The old man reminded him of Wyath in some ways, skilled with shaping but unrelenting.

  “He was the same with me,” she admitted.

  Jasn sighed and shook his head. “How long have you been here? How long has Hyaln been your home?”

  “I came when I was young. Brought here really, by someone with incredible power. They claimed that I would be able to control the elements. At that age, such things were compelling.”

  Jasn smiled. They were compelling to him even now. “I never realized how much more I could shape,” he said.

  Katya nodded, her face serious. “There is much that Atenas does not understand. There are those who try, but they cannot reach what they need.”

  “The scholars?” he asked.

  “The College of Scholars seeks understanding, but they have no real talent. Atenas made a mistake separating the two.”

  “I didn’t realize that it was a conscious choice.”

  “Jasn, you were in Atenas long enough to know that the Order trains shapers of power. Especially over the last few years where they have wanted nothing more than to destroy Rens.”

  “I don’t think that is all that Atenas wants.”

  A troubled look crossed her face. “No. That is what I suspect as well.”

  “Does Hyaln have anything to do with it?”

  “I would have said no, but then…”

  “Then you went to the barracks.”

  The hadn’t spoken much about what had happened with her when she left the barracks, nothing other than his accusation when he first arrived in Hyaln, and that served no purpose other than to make him feel better, which it did not. He couldn’t change the fact that he’d thought her dead and that he’d been willing to die, willing to sacrifice himself in Rens for a woman who had only pretended to care about him.