The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  She knew he didn’t really consider them to be heirs of the desert. It annoyed her even as she understood why, seeing that Ceth himself was not originally from the desert tribes. He hailed from the northern peaks, where the wind was faster and more harsh and where most of its sparse people were dead, their bones scattered among the cold and barren shelves.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will be welcome.”

  He nodded as if it was all he needed to hear, and then he scanned the company, his eyes hovering over the children as they passed from one minder to the next, willing or otherwise. They had taken a particular liking to Stav the merchant, whose only trinkets and treasures had been taken from the Valley, and who was bringing nothing back but tales he might never have the heart to tell. They rooted through his chests and satchels and examined his carvings and beads. He watched them, and Iyana saw the ghost of a smile grace his face as he drifted off to sleep against the sack beside the wagon wheel.

  Martah took some time to settle. The yellow-haired Northwoman scanned the eastern horizon as night fell, looking for signs of ambush, or for the return of the runners. Eventually, Talmir coaxed her into a sense of tense relaxation, and she settled for leaning against the wagon and watching the fresh-lit flames dance in the cool night.

  None of them looked to the west, Iyana noticed. At first, she thought it was the excitement of new lands and new stories. For the children, perhaps it was, but the longer she watched Ceth as his eyes went from alert to tired glass, the more she recognized it as hurt too fresh to revisit. No matter who he had been born to, Ceth had watched his father die out among the dunes. She had watched him die, too; the memory left her with a bare shadow of the deep hurt she had felt on seeing it for the first time amidst the glassy shards the Sages’ duel and Ember’s death had made of that land.

  “He died so you could live,” Iyana said, and she only knew she had passed partway into the Between when she saw the emerald light of her eyes reflected off his pale, windblown cheek. He did not turn toward her, only closed his eyes and kept the pain behind them, though it touched his lips and brought a sliding swallow to his throat.

  She thought to say more, to smooth the hurt or help it along, but then she saw Talmir sitting on the opposite side of the stream that glowed red and golden in the reflected light of the fire. She left them to it and thought of the road ahead. She thought of the Valley. She thought of home.

  Talmir slept, or tried to.

  It was cool in the night, but he was sweating. His skin where the witches’ knives had pieced him had been stitched, his blood dried, his muscles, though weary, given some respite after the grueling trials in the west. But he did not feel rested.

  He thought perhaps he would find comfort closer to home, but as he tossed and turned beneath the wheeling stars that would soon be lost to the returned darkness, Talmir felt like a fly caught in a web between worlds. Between homes—the old one and the new, with no way to know which was which.

  There was a drum beat he knew as a heart. It was coming from the wagon, and though there were several bodies tucked inside—including the Faeykin, Nica and some of the soldiers they had lost far from the Valley—Talmir knew the sound.

  He saw himself lying atop a bedroll by the low-burning flames. The others were asleep. Even the sentries were still at their posts, the strange Landkist known as Ceth frozen like a bit of Pevah’s borrowed time. It may as well have been a painting, and it was what clued Talmir in to the strangeness and the realization that he was not awake.

  The drumming picked up, and with each rhythmic strike on the tight leather, he felt his gaze drawn to the wagon. Its planks were thick and its wheels crusted with dried mud that reminded him of blood. But it was the red coal burning at its center that he felt both drawn to and repulsed by. He moved closer and then forced himself away, turning from the guilt to look toward the eastern sky.

  Instead, he saw the Midnight Dunes come crashing down all over again. Saw the sights and heard the sounds and smelled the blood and ozone that had mixed beneath that haunting melody out on the white sands. He witnessed the duel between Ember and Night Lord, and though he knew its ending and wept for it anew, he thought perhaps he could join in this time.

  Perhaps this was real, in a manner of thought. Perhaps Pevah had managed to conjure some small pocket of the time these foul and heroic things had lived within.

  Talmir felt a heat in his chest. Something bright glowed beneath his cotton shirt. He pulled on the chain as the Night Lord roared and spit forth its lavender fire against the Ember of Hearth, who parted it like a brilliant sea.

  The Bronze Star glowed like a miniature sun that could never be mistaken for fire. Talmir gripped it until his knuckles blanched. He felt the edges break the skin of his palm and though the metal burned him, it also filled him with a steadying weight. He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut tight, and when he opened them, he saw more clearly.

  Creyath stood with his back to him, his outline breaking the space from black earth to blue sky. Talmir walked toward him, and then the walk became a run, but he could not get any closer, try as he might. He fell to his knees and clawed stones from the soil and hurled them at the image that was too far to touch. He screamed for Creyath to turn.

  And then that, too, was gone, and Talmir was left alone. He shrank into himself and looked down at his stained and bloody hands. The Bronze Star lost its glow, but something else glinted in the soil beneath the starlight.

  Talmir parted the ash and dirt. He dug until he leaned into the pit with effort, until his fingers brushed something sharp and silver. He pulled free his father’s sword, which slid from the earth like a god’s weapon from an oiled scabbard, and brushed the surface clean.

  His own blue eyes regarded him, but they did not move in time with his own, and Talmir realized with a clutching certainty that his father looked back at him through the blade.

  “Father,” he said, his voice pleading. The wind picked up, and he could see the stars reflected in the perfect mirrored surface of the blade. They shimmered like diamonds, or like the crystals beneath the deserts of the west.

  His father might have nodded, but his eyes gave away nothing. They were unlined and unwavering, with little of the harsh love Talmir remembered as a boy.

  “Ember born,” his father’s voice said, and Talmir seized on the sound, though it did not fill him with the warmth he had expected. “Ember gone.” He saw Sarise A’zu, though he had never known her well in life, and then he saw Larren Holspahr and Kaya Ferrahl.

  “Ember born.”

  An image of Creyath Mit’Ahn, the first and oldest friend Talmir had known. He remembered the strange boy coming out of the western woods of the Valley. Creyath’s mother had sent him to Hearth to train under the mighty Vennil Cross and beside the unmighty Talmir Caru after Creyath had slain a beast in the Deep Lands.

  Talmir remembered asking him why he had gone there, and Creyath had looked at him with the same burning amber gaze he saw reflected in his father’s blade now. The boy whose Ember power had only just awoken had turned to him as if he were daft. He said, “Because my father has died. And I carried justice to his killer.”

  Talmir smiled, and then that familiar visage faded, and the words he knew were coming surfaced.

  “Ember gone.”

  The sword began to show him another face, and before the image could resolve fully—black bangs covering harsh features reminiscent of Karin—Talmir stood and hurled the sword into the eastern sky.

  Into it and through it.

  He stumbled back as the blade flashed and tore a jagged gash in the ethereal curtain, and the blackness it left behind was deeper than any night he had yet known. Darker than the smoky skin the Sentinels had worn and more sinister than anything Talmir had seen in the west. The bright, winking stars on the edges were pulled in, drawn like water and flotsam into the whirlpool left behind by a pulled stopper, a
nd Talmir felt himself drawn forward, his boots making furrows in the fertile soil as he wavered.

  Talmir screamed into the void. It was a sound of rage. He screamed and screamed, emptying his lungs. He screamed so hard he had to close his eyes to keep them from falling out. When he had no breath left, he opened his eyes and saw the World much as it had been when he had first laid down to rest.

  He felt lines of sand beneath his eyes and wiped away the salt that had crusted there. He looked down into the shallow pit he’d dug and saw nothing but uneven ground, with no evidence of his trials, though his hands were still black and crusted, his nails scored and trapping blood beneath.

  There was a new, softer light when next he looked up, and now the sight took his breath in a new way. He saw a bright green ribbon sweep across the blue-black sky. It rolled like a wave and slithered like a serpent, and when it passed overhead, Talmir felt a rush of bliss. In its wake, the wave deposited the stars Talmir had doomed to darkness and death.

  He sighed and nearly laughed, and as he fell backward, he woke with a start beside the shallow stream, his heart racing even as he recognized the madness of his recent visions as little more than the work of grief and anger on a tired mind.

  Mial saw him out of the corner of his eye. The old man was standing framed against the western flats, comforting Creyath’s black charger. He gave a slight nod to show that he saw Talmir wake but made no move to approach. Talmir was thankful for it, just as he was thankful not to have drawn the attention of others in the company, most of whom dozed about him.

  He turned, feeling a pleasant pop and twist, and saw a shade of the brilliant light he had glimpsed in the sky of his dreaming. Iyana regarded him with an odd expression. He stood and approached, brushing some of the loose dirt he had picked up in his thrashing. He felt the scabbard that housed his father’s sword—now his—slap against his outer thigh, and ignored it as he squatted beside her bedroll and met her at eye level.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, for what he did not know. His look showed it. “For prying. It’s just,” she cast about. Her hair was disheveled and he guessed she had woken not long before him. “I heard you thrashing. Heard you scream.”

  Talmir raised his eyebrows and scanned the makeshift camp, eyes sweeping over the smoldering coals in their pit and the starlit ribbon of water that bisected the company. None stirred but for those who were meant to be stirring.

  “Not aloud,” she added, seeing his confusion and the fresh color that rose to his cheeks. He didn’t much like the sound of crying in his sleep in a camp full of men and women he had led and meant to lead again, should they let him.

  “Your light,” he said, nodding toward the eastern sky, past the place Ceth stood alongside Ket, desert cloaks drifting lazily in the open breeze. “I saw it in the sky.” It wasn’t there now, but Talmir could picture it.

  He turned back and was surprised to see Iyana frowning.

  “I reached out to you,” she said. “I tried to soothe your dreaming, to smooth your hurt.” She shook her head. “But …”

  Talmir shook his head and gave a mild shrug. “The work of a tired mind, then,” he said. “Still,” he glanced back toward the east. It was flat for leagues unchallenged. “It looked so real. So vivid. I wonder if I have something of premonition in me as well.”

  He meant it as a jest, but Iyana looked earnest, serious … even afraid. It nearly called back to the fore the feeling of panic her strange caress had only just dispelled, so Talmir smiled for them both, even if he did not know what to say.

  “What did you see?” Iyana asked, her tone forbidding. Her eyes traced down below his chin and focused on his shirt. Talmir felt the warm chain that held the cut of bronze that was always warmer than the skin beneath, as if it radiated with some inner fire, like an Ember’s brazier.

  “It was just a dream, Iyana,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm, though his heart beat a little faster than it had before.

  “No,” she said.

  “I saw Creyath,” he said, glancing toward the place the Ember had been standing in his dream and half expecting to see him there again. “I saw my father’s sword.” He touched his belt. “This sword. I dug it from the ground just over there. I saw things in its reflection. I heard warnings, or taunts. About the Embers, mostly.” He felt foolish for rambling, but she still seemed to be searching him, intent on some nugget of truth she felt but had not yet heard. Talmir laughed a sardonic laugh and wiped the sleep sweat from his brow. “I threw the blade into the eastern sky and … tore it.”

  Her eyes flashed with that unnatural light.

  “Tore it,” she prompted.

  Talmir waved his hand in a meaningless gesture toward the horizon. The dark blue was beginning to turn a bit lighter, like a suggestion of frost at the bottom. The sun was approaching, and with it a day that would hopefully wash away the feeling of dread that hovered around him. The feeling of closure left unclosed.

  “The sky,” he said. “The horizon. The space in between. Whatever it was, the sword left a gash. It was like a bottomless pit, or a black mouth with blacker teeth.” He paused, the image coming back to him. “It was like a scar in the fabric of the World itself.” He met her eyes and felt his own face drain of blood and color until it must have come close to matching hers. “It pulled the stars in.”

  Iyana nodded along with him. It seemed the more his words sounded like nonsense and dreamstuff to him, the more they confirmed the direction of her own thoughts.

  “A scar in the World itself,” she repeated, her voice low and sonorous. “Did you see beyond it?”

  Talmir swallowed. “There was nothing to see,” he said. She frowned at that, as if she expected a different answer. “Iyana, what did you see when you tangled with the Eastern Dark?” The pains of their travels and their sorry triumphs were still so fresh, he hadn’t thought to ask. Now it seemed a rather important thing to note.

  Now it was her turn to swallow. “The World Apart,” she said, the inflection of her tone saying more than the words ever could. She had truly seen it, then, in all its dark glory. In all its cold and burning inevitability.

  Talmir forced a smile as he heard those closest to them beginning to stir in their bedrolls. A soldier cursed as her foot dipped into the cold stream and shocked her into an irritated wakefulness.

  “I suppose you don’t think we can stop its coming,” he said in a little above a whisper. She didn’t nod, nor did she shake her head, but he took the answer clear enough. “Well, then. I suppose we’d better prepare to fight it off.” He stood and pulled her up with him. She seemed hesitant. “Same as we always have.”

  She looked as if she wanted to speak, to tell him this time would not be the same as it had ever been before. That there would be no escape and no enduring. No victory, and nothing close to what men might fathom as defeat. This was a different sort of fight, and Iyana had seen something close to its ending.

  Still, Talmir had ever been more stubborn than he let on. Perhaps that was no secret. No hiding from it now. No hiding from anything, least of all the man he wanted to be. The one they took him for, even if it was a shadow of the truth.

  Talmir turned toward the west, meaning to signal Mial to get the caravan moving again, when the lurching silhouette of a man coming up out of the predawn haze nearly had him grabbing for the hilt of his sword. He thought it one of the Bloody Screamers, here to take revenge having dogged them from the black caves to the north, or perhaps some shadow from the World Apart his dreaming had awoken.

  Karin’s face was illuminated by the first soft, filtered rays of the rising sun, and Talmir blew out a sigh. He felt Iyana’s concerned gaze on him and did his best to ignore it, wiping the sleep from his eyes. Karin was chastising Mial for not marking his approach. Talmir liked to see the discipline the First Runner was attempting to instill in his new disciples, however old they might be, and however i
mpossible the task of finding Karin Reyna when he did not want to be found.

  Talmir hopped over the narrow stream as the soldiers roused along with the merchants. The children continued to doze, and the red- and gray-sashes still seemed put off by the strange sense of panic and motion mornings among the Valleyfolk on the open road took on. Things were slower in the deserts. One didn’t expend energy frivolously, but they weren’t in the west anymore. They were in the south. The Valley peaks held their own dangers, and the Deep Lands lay beyond. No Valley child would cross them absent a healthy dose of fear. No Valley captain would approach them absent care.

  Talmir caught Karin by the crook of the arm and guided him away from Mial, nodding at Jes to help the old scout get the horses arranged and the guard positions manned.

  “Make sure—” Talmir started as she turned away, but she waved him off.

  “Make sure the nomads feel included,” she said his next words for him, and he blushed at her bluntness and her volume.

  “She really needs to stop calling them that,” Karin said. “They’re no more nomads than we are.”

  “That cave wasn’t a permanent home,” Talmir argued without meaning to.

  “Neither was the Valley, once,” Karin said.

  Talmir shrugged it off and met the First Runner’s dark eyes.

  “Nothing,” Karin said.

  “How far did you range?”

  “Far,” Karin said. “I covered half the distance in the night we did during the day.” Talmir looked back over the cracked yellow plains. Karin laid a hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “We are not followed, Captain. We are nearly home.”

  Talmir forced a smile. He couldn’t help but note the new scars the First Runner had picked up from their fight in the cave. The massacre they had led, and would again under circumstances half as dire. Karin caught the look and winced, then nodded at Talmir’s loose shirt.