The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

Valour’s eyes tracked her. “Do I look like light to you?” he asked. “I have taken from the World Apart, yes. But I no longer attract it. Not like the Witch.”

  “What is she driving at?” Shadow asked.

  “Ah,” Valour said, smiling. “That is the question. What is my sister doing, out there beyond the steppes? What is she searching for?”

  “Who says she’s searching at all?”

  “I do,” he said. He turned to look north.

  “Beacons and lights,” he said, coming back to himself and seeming to settle some. Shadow had the dreadful impression that he was set to resume his bored introspection. He closed his eyes and she sighed.

  He was afraid, whether he would admit it or not. He was afraid he had been wrong about the World Apart—about the reasons for its coming. What if he had been hunting his brother and sister Sages—or setting his Dark Landkist to do the same—when it had not been them the World Apart was after in the first place? The demons Shadow had glimpsed beyond that shimmering veil, whose like she knew no Landkist could stand against for long. What if it was always coming? Who would stop it, if not the Sages? If not the champions he’d killed or helped to die?

  He had gone looking where the others forbade him. He’d pulled a thread, and now it was pulling back.

  “We’ll need friends,” Shadow said through another sigh. She didn’t look at the Sage but heard him shift. “You’re running low on bodies, unless you plan to call up the ghost of Brega Cohr for help. Or Resh.”

  She glanced his way out of the corner of her eye to see what effect the name might have. Nothing but for the odd twitch of a dark eyebrow.

  “What do you think I’ve been doing in the nights?” he surprised her by saying. “Do you think I need the rest?”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “You Sages are as fickle as any other gods, I’d guess.”

  “We’ll have our friends soon enough.” She didn’t like the way he said this. Shadow only liked secrets if she was the one keeping them. “One benefit of all this madness—they are not as far as they once were.”

  “The Landkist are hunting us,” she said. “I doubt they’ll join you as readily as they joined with Rane.”

  “The Landkist are the champions of this World,” the Sage said. “I’m speaking of the other.”

  “Landkist?” Shadow sounded dubious. “In the World Apart?”

  “Something of the like,” he said and trailed off. Shadow waited for him to continue, to tell her who he was communing with in the space between worlds and what lies they might be feeding him.

  She feigned sleep for a time. She did that often, just to see if it would take. It never did. Instead, she stretched and broke into an exaggerated yawn that saw her topple over onto her side like a dog. She watched the Sage, sitting there with his hands clasped as if in prayer. The only hint of movement was the slight switching of his lips, as if he spoke with an inner voice to shadows less real than she.

  Shadow stood and paced around him. She thought about parting his head from his shoulders but gave it up as quick as she always did. The Sage knew it, most likely. Perhaps she’d simply burst the moment she tried for it, anyway. Perhaps it would be worth an attempt sooner or later, just to see.

  Curiosity was not a trait to her. It was a calling. It made her up.

  Eventually, she left him to his silent swaying and retraced their steps some distance behind. She ringed the base of a great tree that was thicker than the rest. She touched her hand to the bark and traced her fingertips along its rough edges, walking a slow circle and tossing quick, innocuous glances back toward the dirt bowl the Sage sat in.

  When she was sure he wasn’t looking, she pressed her black hand into the bark and squeezed her eyes shut, exhaling in a shivering shock of pain. She withdrew it and marveled for a moment at the whiteness of the pale skin beneath the black shell she’d left behind. She turned it over just as a gray cloud passed to admit a sliver of that hated globe overhead that only lit the flesh more.

  The black rushed back in to cover it up, and Shadow felt a longing to see the rest of her unsheathed and uncovered. Before she turned back toward the Sage, she examined the place she’d pressed into the bark and smirked at the black print she’d left behind. She looked back toward the south and the dark paths they’d crossed and listened for a while.

  Nothing. Yet.

  “Keep up, now,” she said with a lilt, twirling back toward the lonely Sage, delighting in her betrayal and not bothering to ask herself why she did it, or what it might come to in the end.

  “Another,” Jenk said, running his fingers over the rough, ash-gray bark of the thick trunk.

  Shifa twined around the Ember’s legs for a moment before moving off. She had caught something on the breeze, and Kole and the others had been working to keep up with the hound for the better part of two days.

  Kole moved up beside Jenk and shook his head. Baas came up behind them and spat into the mercifully dry earth. The Rockbled’s mood had improved considerably since emerging from the cold and muggy swamps and onto the harder-packed stuff, but any hint of magic had him suppressing shivers and stamping in strange patterns, an irony not lost on any of them.

  “Bastards,” Misha said. She watched Shifa as the dog loped between the widely-spaced trunks and dug at the scrub in between. The Third Keeper of Hearth turned toward Kole and the rest, red hair shocking in the gray dawn light. “Think they’re toying with us?”

  “Could be,” Jenk said, and Kole caught something strange in his tone. He met Jenk’s light blue eyes and frowned.

  “What do you think?” Kole asked.

  “It’s certainly the work of the Shadow girl,” Jenk said, fingering the rough blond stubble that sprouted from his chin. Baas spat again and kicked his boots against the thick roots of the tree. Great clods of stinking mud came loose like horse droppings. He spat on those too, and Kole bit his tongue.

  They were all of them roughshod and unclean. Kole had taken Linn’s knife to his own beard just the day before. He still sported a thin, crusted line where he’d cut himself on the edge.

  “Why?” Kole wondered aloud. He nearly pressed his hand into the shallow depression of black where the Shadow girl had left her palm print and then thought better of it. “Why leave a trail?”

  “It’s not like we need it,” Misha said, nodding toward the next rise, which was covered with the same red nettles that formed a blanket over the woods of the southern Valley before the Dark Months came back to claim them, though never so early as this. “Your hound’s got near as good a nose as me, and that Sage—Ember, whatever he is—must carry quite a stench to her. They can’t hide from us. Only run. And we’ll catch them soon enough.”

  “I don’t think they mean to avoid us,” Jenk said, an odd lilt to his voice. Misha shot him a look that he ignored, and Kole stepped between them to dispel the tension that was ever threatening to boil over. One day it seemed as if the two were close to coming to blows. The next Kole thought they might bear each other down into the soft bed of the forest floor and settle things in a more pleasurable way.

  In either event, Kole had no time for it. None of them did.

  He felt a strange foreboding at the thought of the Shadow girl leaving signs for them on her path to the northeast. He couldn’t see the end of their road, but knew it was coming, and then he felt a momentary panic as he remembered the sixth member of their company.

  “Where is Linn?” he asked, whirling toward the path they’d taken in the night. The trees were closer together there, the ground more treacherous.

  “Quit your worrying,” Misha said. “Where do you think she is?” Kole wasn’t in the mood for her teasing, and his look let her know it. She sighed and pointed upward with as little effort as she could manage. Kole traced the direction of the Everwood spear tip that jutted from the tangle of straps across her back and peered into the sudden bri
ght of the sparse canopy.

  He squinted and breathed in, smelling the scent of fresh pine and feeling the chill that came with it. His eyes roved from branch to branch, hollow to nook, and he was about to give it up when he caught Linn’s profile on a thick bridge between two trunks that were too tightly bound to sway. Kole saw the ends of her bow jutting from the top of one shoulder and the bottom of the opposite hip. No more arrows in the quiver but for what she’d form out of wind and light. Her eyes were ahead, peering northward. She was still as the stone that made her up. The stone of Ve’Ran, they called it in the Valley.

  The rest of them milled beneath for a time before sitting and leaning their tired backs against the gray-barked giants. The air was pleasant here; not as close and stifling as the Emerald Road had been, nor as full of things that stung and bit and hunted.

  They had left Maro and the Willows at least a week before, if not two, and though the jungle had slowly transformed into a swamp that was now giving way to a forest, Kole was still amazed at how far it stretched, and this only in the one direction. He had caught himself wondering more than once during their mindless, dizzying trek if all the World was trees and the spaces in between, the living things crawling and loving and fighting beneath just fertile stuff for their roots.

  Kole only realized how exhausted he was when a snapping twig shocked him awake. He tried to scramble back and felt the bark scrape against his dented black armor, reached up for his Everwood knives until he felt a hand grip his shoulder tightly. The murky image before him resolved into Linn’s stern features as she knelt before him. She looked concerned.

  “I told you we should have rested when last we came upon solid ground,” she warned, and Kole smiled despite the quickening of his heart. He craned to look around her and saw that Misha had fallen asleep in much the same position he had against a trunk across the way. Baas stood leaning against another, but the rhythmic rise and fall of the dull spikes on his shoulders signaled restfulness. Of Jenk, there was no sign, but Kole could still feel his heat close by. He could feel all of them, now. It seemed the more he was called upon to use his own fire in battle, the more he could feel it in those around him.

  “Kole,” Linn said. He blinked. She wore frowns like others wore dresses and jewels—one for every mood and occasion, and though he had known her longer than any, he still marveled that he hadn’t seen them all yet.

  “What did you see?” he asked, ignoring her concern. Her frown deepened, but she gave the slightest shake of her head and moved past it.

  “An end to all this, for a start,” she said, her eyes roving over the gray trunks and red nettles.

  Kole felt a swell at the revelation, and he saw Misha’s brow quirk up behind Linn. He thought the lot of them might do well never to see a tree or green chute again—even Shifa.

  “But?” he asked, seeing that her look had not changed.

  “We’ll be exposed out there,” she said. “The land slopes down. There is frost at the northern edges of a great plain, and then it seems the whole World begins to climb, first on grass-scrubbed shelves and then in a tangle of boulders and dark earth. Eventually, it all stops at the suggestion of a great wall, or a mountain plateau.” She shook her head. “I can’t see through the fog or snow.”

  “Snow,” Kole said, the boy in him screaming to see it even as he knew it to be a dangerous thing to any who didn’t run as hot as him. How cold would it be? How much energy would they need to use to keep from freezing?

  “Fuel?” Kole asked. “Timber?”

  “Not much that I could see,” Linn said. She sighed. “No sign of Rane or—”

  “Not Rane,” Kole said with a sharpness he had not intended. He cleared his throat as she fixed him with a hard stare. “It’s not him,” he said, voice low and earnest. “Not anymore.”

  Linn’s brows rose in a way that made him feel decidedly young and doubly foolish.

  “Either way,” Linn said, “we don’t know what power he’s capable of now, with his mind and Rane’s heat.”

  “I doubt if he can wield the flame,” Kole said derisively.

  “Maybe not,” Linn allowed. “But the Sage seemed set on something. I doubt he took Rane without having a damn good reason to. At least in his own mind.”

  “The Witch of the North,” Kole said, looking past Linn and peering into the misty curtain that muddled the gaps between the trees. “The last Sage.”

  Linn looked as if she wanted to speak, but something held her back. Kole touched her hand without thinking and gave it a warm squeeze. She smiled.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She turned to check the others weren’t looking or listening. When she met Kole’s eyes again, he saw fear there that made his own chest tighten.

  “What are we doing out here, Kole?” she asked. Now it was his turn to frown. “We found Rane,” she said, waving her hand at nothing. “And we lost him just as quick. We know what the Eastern Dark intends, or at least part of it, and from where I’m sitting, it seems pretty close to what you wanted in the first place.”

  Kole swallowed. “I was right about the White Crest,” he said.

  “In a way,” Linn didn’t let him off easy. “The guardian of the Valley was what he was, but he only became what he became with help. Specifically, with that one’s help.” She nodded toward the north and the roads they had yet to travel—or not, if she got her way. “Do you still believe they have to fall? Are we now in common cause with the Eastern Dark?”

  It was all too much, which was precisely Linn’s point. Kole released her hand and she recoiled. He felt a pang seeing it and regathered her cooling fingers, though he couldn’t quite find the words he wanted to say.

  Linn closed her eyes and blew out a sigh that seemed to deflate her. The next breath was long and slow. Kole’s heart nearly broke watching her; he thought he knew the cause for her growing panic, and cursed himself a fool for not seeing it earlier.

  “You’re worried about Iyana,” Kole said. He said it without inflection, and Linn didn’t meet his searching gaze directly, which said all it needed to. “Linn, we don’t even know what the Sage meant—”

  Now she did look at him. It was a hard look.

  “He made reference to the deserts,” she said. “He made reference to the Landkist there. To the Sage.”

  “He didn’t say what happened,” Kole said. “Only that it left him with no other choice than to take Rane as his vessel. He was wounded, Linn. He was changed, somehow. Whatever happened, it seems he got the worst of it.”

  “Except he came away with his life,” she said, sounding desperate. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, seeming as much a result of frustration as worry. “We don’t know what it cost him.”

  “The life of a Sage,” Kole said. “The one from the west. The one who sent us south to the Valley core in the first place.” Kole shook his head. “We don’t know what sort of loss that is, if any.”

  Linn parted her lips. They quivered, though she had regained some modicum of her former composure. “Yani was there, Kole.”

  “She still is,” Kole said, feeling it to be true even if he couldn’t know it. “Linn, she still is, or else she’s gone back south. Back home. She had my father with her, and Creyath Mit’Ahn. She had Talmir Caru. Deaths like theirs would have left an impression, and knowing the Eastern Dark like we do, he wouldn’t have missed that, nor the opportunity to inform us if it had gone his way.”

  He said it with a certainty he could see Linn wanted desperately to believe. He felt like a liar as she nodded, but as he searched his own feelings out, he thought he believed it, too.

  “We would have felt it,” Kole said. He shook his head and tried to find a way to say it, but Linn only nodded.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We would have.” She looked up into the branches and Kole thought they began to sway more quickly than they had
before, the twisted knots groaning and complaining like the planks in one of Bali Swell’s fishing boats, or like the pegs beneath the Long Hall.

  “Still,” Linn said with the ghost of a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, “I wish she’d find another firefly to tell me.” Kole frowned in confusion until he remembered the story of how Iyana had found Linn, Jenk and Nathen in the Deep Lands by tethering herself to a glowing insect.

  “I’m sure she would if she could,” Kole said. “But we’re a long way from home, Linn. A long way, but still in good company.”

  She nodded and when next she looked at him, it seemed she didn’t have to work to bring the smile through. He felt warmer seeing it. He felt refreshed. Their eyes met and he realized dimly that he was still holding her hand. She leaned into him, and he closed his eyes for a long blink and saw them sitting that way long ago, on the banks of a woodland stream. She had been fingering flecks of gold from the evergreen moss as Kole ran his fingers through her hair.

  It had only been a few times, and then the attacks had come more frequent and more fierce. Their thoughts had turned to training, to protecting. To surviving. There wasn’t time for anything else. Perhaps someday they’d be through killing. Perhaps their road had an end that wasn’t quite so dire as the rest seemed.

  “Sages,” she said, shaking her head as if she were cursing mites or biting fleas. She stood and pulled Kole up with her. He dusted himself off.

  “We’ll see their ends soon enough,” Kole said. “Or their endings.”

  “Aye.”

  A short bark followed by the clear, bold sound of Jenk’s voice had Misha scrambling to get up. Kole and Linn suppressed laughter as the Ember nearly tripped over the haft of her own spear and came up with hair a-tangle.

  She shot them a hateful glare as she righted herself and half walked, half stumbled away from the tree she had rested against, following Baas’s slow, silent steps toward the sound of the Ember and the hound.

  “Looks like our brave leader has found something,” Linn said, following after.