Summoner's Bond (The Endless War Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Bayan stiffened, and then the darkness cleared.

  Damn this place and whoever thought to attack!

  She grabbed Bayan by the hand and wrapped herself in a shaping. With a quiet explosion of lightning and thunder, she carried them away.

  Alena hung in the air for a moment. Fingers of the darkness trailed toward her, streaming as if trying to climb the sky and reach her. She pressed through the spirit stick, pushing against them, uncertain whether it would even work.

  The rod glowed softly in her hand. It hadn’t done that before, but then, Alena hadn’t forced nearly as much shaped element energy into it before. Fear had a way of pushing her and convinced her to take risks that she wouldn’t have otherwise.

  She forced a shaping through the spirit stick, and it began to grow warmer, the soft glowing from it strengthening.

  As the shadows stretched near enough that she could feel the cold radiating from them, she unleashed the shaping.

  It slipped from the spirit stick, colliding with the shadows.

  Alena held her breath. If this worked, they might have a way to face these shadows without relying on Ciara. If it didn’t, then she would need to shape herself and Bayan away from here as quickly as she could or run the risk of it attacking her.

  Where the shadows met the warm light coming from the spirit stick, they melted away.

  Alena laughed aloud. “Blast you!” she whispered and shifted direction, plunging toward the darkness. As she did, she held onto her shaping, pulling more and more through the spirit stick.

  The light pressed against the shadows, melting it away wherever it touched.

  Alena considered taking the fight toward the tower. Then she noticed that the shadows began to crawl around her, attempting to close in on all sides. Bayan struggled against her, her hand growing cold.

  She glanced over. The woman’s eyes had gone distant again. The strange shaping had begun again, the soft call to the darkness and the night.

  If Alena stayed here, not only would Bayan let herself be twisted again, she might be the reason that they got caught.

  As the darkness began to collapse around them, Alena streaked upward, moving free of the inky shadows that rolled around them like some sort of malevolent fog, stopping only when she was nearly as high as the top of the tower. Bayan stopped her shaping and had fallen still again.

  Looking down, the fog looked nothing like what it had when she’d been down in it. But she remembered the way that it had pulled on her. The spirit stick worked against the fog, but either it wasn’t strong enough or she wasn’t strong enough.

  And if she wasn’t, who would be?

  36

  Ciara

  I have observed Hyaln and am impressed with how quickly Jasn grows. As I have said, he might be more skilled than I ever gave him credit.

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  “You’ve suddenly become more hesitant,” Shade told her.

  Ciara held her hands at her sides. Her fingers were numb again today, and she couldn’t work wind the way that she knew that she should. Ever since returning back inside the tower and sharing with Shade that she’d gone beyond the walls, daring to ask where they were, her fingers had felt numb, as if she couldn’t use them quite as well as she should. Her legs felt heavy as well, like weights were attached to them. When she asked Shade about that, he suggested that she was only tired, that training had that effect over time.

  “I’m…” She almost said that she wasn’t hesitant, but that wasn’t exactly true. Since coming back inside the tower, the truth was that she had felt some hesitation about what she was asked to do. Not because she didn’t want to reach the elementals, but because she wasn’t sure how much longer she would be here. With each passing day, it seemed like it was time to return and still Shade had not demonstrated the way to summon the night.

  “It’s my fingers,” she said, rubbing them together. “I think you were right that I’m getting tired. They feel…” She didn’t know exactly how her fingers felt, only that it didn’t feel quite right. She couldn’t form the complicated shapes she needed for the subtler summoning that Shade had been teaching, only the blunter forms. There was less power in them, and less control.

  “You should rest then,” he suggested. “We’ve been pushing hard. I thought you could handle it, but perhaps it has been more than what you’re ready for.”

  She shook her wrists, driving the blood flow back into them. With the faint water sensing she possessed, she was able to detect the blood going into her arms and tried to wake her fingers. If it was only fatigue, then she should be able to wake them up and get past that.

  “I am able to handle it, Shade,” she snapped. “Is that not what I’ve been doing this entire time?”

  “Is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that you went exploring when we were to be working, and you damaged the doors to the tower in the process.”

  So he knew what she’d done. Was he angry? She couldn’t tell from his tone, but recognized a hint of disappointment. Since coming to the tower, she hated the idea that she would disappoint him, not wanting to do anything that would prevent his willingness to teach. More than anything, she wanted to continue to learn from him. Each day, he managed to teach her something new.

  “I’m sorry, Shade.”

  “If you are ready to return to your village, ala’shin, I will see that it happens.” He watched her, as if gauging the effect of his words.

  Ciara considered the offer. Or was it a threat? Either way, she wanted to return. That was the point of all of this, wasn’t it? For her to learn enough to be useful to her people, and then she could take those learnings and return.

  But there was still more Shade could teach. She sensed that he held back, that he withheld something from her that she could master, if only he were willing to demonstrate it. When she learned that—when she learned to master control over the night—then she would be ready to return. Until then… she would stay. Her father would understand.

  Watching Shade, she knew she would have to do better if she were to stay. She couldn’t go wandering throughout the tower, risking her lessons to catch a glimpse of the sun. There would be time enough for that once she learned what she had come here to learn.

  “I’m not ready,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you to teach me about the night, but you continue to withhold.”

  “What you ask is dangerous, ala’shin.”

  In all the time that she’d been here, he continued to call her ala’shin, and she continued to call him Shade. One of these days, she expected him to ask her real name, but now she wasn’t sure whether she would even give it to him. The more that he called her by the title, the more she began to identify with it. Were she in the village, she would have no claim to it. It was one that her father had earned. But here, in this place, what harm was there in considering herself ala’shin?

  “You don’t think I’m ready?”

  She squeezed her hands, forcing feeling back into them. For the first time in several days, she had something close to normal sensation in her fingers. If only she could get her legs to work right, then she would feel like she could continue to learn the summons that Shade intended.

  “I think you have potential, but you have been distracted lately. You have such promise, but you have to focus on what you learn here and forget the fears and other things that you allow to distract you.”

  Ciara realized he was right. She had been allowing distractions to get the best of her. Were it not for those distractions, she wouldn’t have attempted to go outside the tower, to use a summons to break open the door, damaging it so that others would have to repair it.

  “I’m ready to focus,” she said.

  He watched her for a moment, staring at her with the piercing way that he did, his gaze heavy as it hung on her. Ciara refused to turn her gaze down, regardless of how much she might want to.

  A tight smile spread
across his lips. “Perhaps you are. Go and eat. Have a glass of wine. And rest tonight. Tomorrow you will begin to summon the night.”

  37

  Ciara

  He shows strength in summoning, more so than what I possess. My strength is earth and wind, and do not have the same connection to fire or water. I can shape them strongly, but not as I do the others. Earth is my greatest asset, lending physical strength. That mattered when I deposed Nolan

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  Ciara stood with Shade on top of the tower once more, this time with the promise of reaching the night. Black clouds hung heavy in the sky, carrying with them the threat of rain. The air had none of the dampness that she associated with a coming storm, nothing more than a weighted stillness to the air, a quality that she hoped to learn to capture and command. That was what Shade promised her.

  She needed something to distract her from the dreams that had been plaguing her. The last few days, they had been worse, flashes of impossible visions coming to her, none of them real—there was no way that they could be real. Ciara had to force them from her mind, to ignore them, especially the one vision that threatened to intrude most frequently.

  As she took a few deep breaths, she expected thunder to fill the night, but there was none. There was no light, nothing but a faint shimmery greenish sheen that somehow gave light to the sky.

  “This is a good night to begin. There are no distractions for you, nothing that will prevent you from reaching what you need.” He hesitated, studying her for a moment before nodding. “What do you sense?”

  “I sense the same as I told you before. There’s a stillness to the night. Is that what you want me to sense?”

  He tapped his j’na, but the sound was muted. The end flashed briefly. Before it faded, it carried with it the reflection of the strange green she saw in the sky. Something about the color triggered a memory, but then that faded, too.

  “It is not about what I want you to sense, ala’shin; this is about what you can sense. You must let the night fill you. More than any of the elements, harnessing the night is about control. For you to have control, you must understand the way night feels.”

  She waited for him to say more—there were times when Shade would explain in much detail what he expected of her, but this was not one of them. Closing her eyes, she let her mind drift, listening for the sounds of the night, for anything that would be a sign of what she could sense, but there was nothing here.

  The air was still around her, and heavy in a way that reminded her of her legs when they’d been tired. She took a few breaths, and even the sounds of her breathing were muted. Nothing moved in the night, a stark difference to the nights in Rens. There, the nights could be dangerous, a place where she dared not wander.

  Only… she had wandered in the night. She must have, to have such vivid memories of it. She remembered darkness much like this, but drier and hotter, with thirst plaguing her and Fas… Fas… Had he been sick?

  Ciara pushed the thoughts away. Shade wanted her to focus on the present, not on the past. There was nothing in the past for her, nothing but memories and dreams that were not memories, that could not be, or else she really had met a lizard that watched her with intelligent eyes—not only watched, but spoke to her.

  “What do you detect, ala’shin?”

  Ala’shin. Ciara had wanted to be nya’shin, to have her j’na, to be able to seek water with the others if they would only let her.

  But they had… and hadn’t she been given a j’na?

  She remembered it in her dreams, but it had been so real she believed she actually had held it. Letters and patterns carved into the shaft, and the end fitted with something other than osidan, though the dreams did not tell her what that might be.

  “I detect…” she began, struggling for words. In the darkness, she didn’t know what she detected. “Nothing,” she finally said. And that was the problem. She detected nothing, and she knew that would displease Shade.

  Instead, he smiled. “As you should not. There is nothing, not on a night like tonight. That nothingness is what you will summon.”

  “Why? What purpose does summoning nothing serve?”

  Shade’s forehead pinched in a frown. Ciara had seen it often enough that she recognized irritation, even if he didn’t let that irritation creep into his voice. “Let it fill you first, then you will understand. Accept the darkness. Accept the night.”

  “I thought I had to control it? Isn’t that what I do with the others?”

  “You control night differently. You must show a willingness to work with it, and then you can control it.”

  Ciara hid a frown but didn’t want to question Shade, not on this. This was what she’d been asking him to teach her for the last few days—maybe longer. When she mastered this, when she was finally strong enough to control the night, then she thought she might be strong enough to return to the village and protect her people.

  She closed her eyes again, focusing on the emptiness around her. For some reason, that was the easiest way for her to reach the night. By shutting her eyes and shutting out everything else around her, she was able to let the emptiness enter her.

  Cold gripped her heart, and she shivered. She hadn’t known such cold before. Had she? One of the dreams carried memories of such cold, but that couldn’t be real, much like the memories of crossing the waste. The people of her village knew to stay away from the waste and understood that attempting to cross was insanity.

  With her eyes squeezed closed, she had another vision of the blasted lizard she’d been seeing in her dreams for the last few weeks. The thing practically stared at her, burning into her mind. It called to her, almost as if it knew her name, and she knew it. But lizards had no names.

  “What do you sense?” Shade asked.

  Ciara didn’t answer for a while, trying to regain connection to the night. Each time she tried, she had another vision of the lizard, as if it perched just out of view. She opened her eyes and stepped up to the edge of the tower, looking out over the edge. She stared into the night, searching for evidence of the lizard, but there was nothing.

  “I don’t sense anything.”

  Shade breathed out slowly and then nodded. He expressed nothing else, but she could tell that she disappointed him, that her failure disappointed him. After all the time that she’d spent here, she didn’t need for him to say anything to know.

  “We will try again tomorrow. Go and rest.”

  Ciara made her way off the tower, leaving Shade standing alone and staring out at the night. As she departed, she saw the way he moved his fingers, working them in a small circle. It was a summons she hadn’t learned, and she thought he had taught her almost as many as he knew. Was it possible that she saw him summoning night?

  She considered attempting it on her own, but she’d learned the dangers involved in summoning when she didn’t understand the pattern or the proper way to infuse intent into the summons, especially with the need to control. And with night, Shade had made clear it would be different than the other elementals, and that the summons required a different focus.

  As she made her way down the darkened steps, only a few scattered lanterns lighting her way, she wondered if she would not be able to summon the night. She thought she had the ability, but what if that were wrong? What would happen to her?

  Shade would be disappointed. Ciara could tell he expected her to reach the night. But more than that, would she be forced to return to her village? Was she ready? She had spent so much time here, a time where she hadn’t wanted for water, and food had been plentiful—as well as wine—that now she wasn’t sure she was ready.

  But… she needed to return to Rens. That was the only reason that she was here.

  Ciara closed the door to her room and lowered herself onto the hard mattress set onto the stone. She closed her eyes, trying to rest as Shade had instructed, but rest wouldn’t come, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted it to. Sleep mean
t dreams, and the dreams she had been having plagued her. They were snatches of things that she thought she should remember, things like the time before she came to the tower, but all that she had were vague bits of memory laced with more specifics.

  What could she remember?

  She thought of her father—she always remembered him, even though she hadn’t seen him in a while. And Fas. If—when—she returned, she hoped that her father would see Fas as a suitable match. That had always been what she wanted. And Eshan… he was a skilled nya’shin, a man she had learned much from, but hard, much like the rest of Rens.

  There were others in the village who came to mind, but she struggled with faces. Not names. They drifted through her mind: Usal, Syat, Fas, Eshan…

  They were the reason that she was here. She would protect them from Ter, from the shapers… only in her dreams, the shapers of Ter she had met had not wanted to harm her. They had worked with her, fighting against something else.

  She shivered. Why should she be having such strange and vivid dreams?

  Perhaps she should ask Shade. Maybe it was something in the wine that gave her hallucinations. There were flowers in Rens that would do the same, but this didn’t feel anything like that. These felt real, as if she had lived them, as if she had stood among them, learning to summon elementals, facing the threat of darkness like the night she had helped with the hatching of the draasin…

  Her heart hammered.

  What was that? She had something like a waking dream, a vision that had come to her, one so vivid she would swear it was real. She could not have seen a draasin birth. None had ever seen that.

  Now she knew with certainty that she needed to find Shade and share with him what she had seen. Maybe he could help explain it, and maybe these visions were the reason that she struggled with reaching the night.