“And where will this reckoning come?” Garos asked, dubious and frustrated. “Out at the edges of the World?”
“Probably,” Talmir said, unfazed. “Wherever it is, you can be sure Kole, Linn, Misha and the others will be a part of it. Even T’Alon Rane.”
Garos spat.
“They’re going to need to do their part,” Talmir allowed. “There’s nothing to be done about it, Garos. We can’t reach them. There’s not much we could do, even if we could.”
“Speak for yourself, Caru,” Garos said and Talmir accepted the rebuke in his stride. Shades of those disagreements long ago. Shades of that early strife between them before blood and fire had patched it all up, sealed it away and buried it until the heat had gone out of it. “I’d like to get a crack at those damn Sages. I’d like to get a crack at the Night Lords, show them Mit’Ahn’s not the only one they need to reckon with.”
“And what would become of our people then?” Talmir asked, fighting to keep his tone level. “What then becomes of Hearth? Of Last Lake? What becomes of the Valley when the next rifts open, and when the whole of the World Apart comes through?”
Garos was about to wave the notion away, but then he froze and seemed to hear the earlier words Talmir had spoken as if for the first time. His face tightened.
“This is what Iyana saw?” Garos asked. “What the Eastern Dark showed her?” He frowned at the latter. He did not want to believe it, and Talmir understood why.
Talmir only nodded. “A piece of it, in any event.” He placed his hand back on the Ember’s shoulder and this time would not allow it to be shaken off easily. “One last fight, Garos. One last time of darkness before the World Apart takes us, or we burn it away.”
“Sounds like more of enduring to me,” Garos said, but Talmir saw that mix behind his eyes that only fighters could understand. It was fear merged with excitement. It was the heart of fire, and it was the only thing that might see them through what was to come.
“One last season,” Talmir said. “The worst we’ve ever known. The worst we’ll ever know.”
“One last season,” Garos repeated, coming into it. “One last season.” He searched Talmir’s eyes and found them steady, unmoving. “I’ll take it from you, Captain Caru,” he said, “even if you’ll take it from one of them green-eyed wanderers, and one of the Sages she took it from.”
Talmir didn’t correct him, except to say, “She is one of us, Garos. She always has been, just as Mother Ninyeva was before her.”
Garos nodded. He knew it to be true, but he was what the World had made him, that look seemed to say.
“The World Apart, eh?” Garos said. Talmir let his hand drop to his side and walked to the corner to retrieve his sword. He felt a twinge as he lifted it and saw an image of the black scar in the sky and the green light that had followed. Or had it preceded it? Had it been a herald?
The First Keeper stood there, working it over in his mind, playing it out as Talmir strapped on his scabbard and bent to splash a bit more of the scented water onto his neck.
“One last fight,” Garos said. He was talking to himself, Talmir knew. Working over the possibilities. How many times had they thrown back the Dark Kind? How bitterly had they fought the Corrupted the White Crest had sent against them using power that was not his own? “And against the real thing. The final thing.”
“You up for it?” Talmir said, feeling less confident than he had before, now that Garos put it how he did.
“I am First Keeper of Hearth,” Garos said. “I am Garos Balsheer.” He might’ve meant it as a joke, and surely he’d have laughed if Talmir had, but Talmir didn’t laugh. “If it’s truly to be the last, I say let them come.”
“May the legacies of Reyna, Ve’Ran, Ve’Gah, Ganmeer and Taldis do their best to make it so,” Talmir said. He wasn’t sure how much they could accomplish on their own, so far removed from the ebb and flow, crest and crash of the true events that would decide the fate of their World and everything in it. Very little, he supposed. Still, it made things a lot simpler. They were fighters, after all. The Emberfolk were survivors.
“The only thing more deadly than a people with nothing to lose,” Garos said, “is one with everything to lose.”
Talmir turned it over. He smiled. “I’ve never found your battlefield speeches to be near as inspiring as others,” he said, trying to ignore the jab he received that would bruise his arm for a week. “But I daresay you’ve hit on something there.”
Garos extended his hand. Talmir eyed it and swallowed before reaching out. The two clasped one another around the wrist. Talmir didn’t wince at the heat Garos put into the exchange. He reveled in it.
“I suppose we’d best get to work, then,” Garos said. “Preparing for the end of the World takes some doing.”
“Bah,” Talmir laughed, “we’ve done it a dozen times before.” He pulled his hand back and frowned. He’d have kept the words to himself if Garos didn’t ask to hear them. “I was just thinking, is all,” Talmir said. He let loose a small, sardonic laugh and shook his head, placing his hands on his hips. “I suppose we should thank him, after all. The Eastern Dark, that is.”
Garos watched him.
“Who better to prepare us for the World’s ending than the one who put it all in motion in the first place?” Talmir asked. Garos’s face didn’t so much as twitch for a long minute. When it broke, Talmir was relieved to see it break the right way, all teeth and wicked fighting grin.
“You’re not near as convincing as you’d like to think,” Garos said, but he ended it with a reluctant shrug. “Least you could’ve done was bring that damn Sage back with you.” He waved his hand in the air. “The other one.”
“Pevah,” Talmir said with a fondness that seemed to give Garos pause. The Ember regarded him. Talmir let the rest go, for now. “I would have,” he said. “We weren’t the only ones to lose out there.” Another longing look out of the sole window. “We did bring the man he called his knight, however.”
“Knight,” Garos tested the word. “An eastern term, no? From the old days.”
Talmir shrugged. “The Sages are old. Were old.”
Now he was stalling and he knew it. Garos shifted from foot to foot, and Talmir wished they stood on floorboards rather than stone, the better to cover his dalliance with a sound.
“Guess we should see the thing done, Caru,” Garos said when Talmir didn’t.
Talmir nodded, once. “I suppose they’ll want words.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure—”
“We don’t need words to remember Creyath Mit’Ahn,” Garos said, firm and unmoving.
Talmir gave a final nod and turned toward the door, but Garos stopped him. Talmir did not turn toward him, but his ears twitched to listen.
“It isn’t yours to carry,” Garos said. “Remember that, Caru.”
Talmir pulled hard and the door came unstuck. He took the stairs slower than he should have, but Garos didn’t rush him.
The streets were near empty when they exited the barracks, but Talmir still felt they were impossibly full compared to the deserts. There were boxes and crates, chickens and goats, old folks too busy or tired to be bothered with burning dead heroes beneath the cliffs. Jakub was nowhere to be seen, and Talmir felt a pang as he realized the boy had already grown more independent than he had been when they’d set out for the sands.
They walked in silence that began the mourning, taking a more winding path between the leaning, ramshackle towers that never lost their charm despite their gaudy appearance and their mismatched colors. The cobbles were clean from a fresh rain that must have preceded their arrival, and the shutters swung lightly in an uncommon wind. The sun had retreated into the western sky, but as they opened up onto the wider roads and white brickways of the northern sector, the fiery orb still cast a golden glow over the fountains and pools that made the place up.
&n
bsp; There wasn’t the usual sound of a milling crowd, only the eerie quiet as dusk descended, and the drifting smell of pitch as young soldiers prepared the pyre they could only just begin to see over the bridge and beyond the crowd that had swallowed the whole of the green. The wooden platform still stood at the base of the quartz cliffs, and Talmir remembered the day he had stood atop it and convinced a people not to miss their protectors—their captain and some of their brightest stars—as he took them on paths no memories left in the Valley could retrace.
There would be no grand address now. Talmir wouldn’t give it and the Emberfolk did not want it. They took the bowed bridge and Talmir breathed in the errant spray of the sloshing river beneath him, the familiar sound his boots made on the slick stone. A few heads turned in their direction, but blessedly few. The rest were turned inward.
Talmir and Garos threaded their way through the gathering and Talmir found himself angling for the place where the red- and gray-sashes clustered. He spotted Iyana and Tu’Ren Kadeh, and saw Karin perched on the roof of the wagon along with Ceth, Martah and the desert children, who scanned the crowds, pointing and explaining in loud children’s whispers. They ignored the bodies that had been placed on the pyre, just as Talmir wanted to ignore them.
He stood beside Iyana and tried not to meet her gaze lest he see his own hurt reflected back at him, and doubly potent. He picked a spot in the short grass in front of his boots and traced it upward, letting his eyes climb from layer to layer until they fixed on those resting atop the relative flat of the stand.
Three Faeykin, with their desert-stained sashes that were not so different from those the Northmen wore. He focused on each of them in turn and ignored the fresh-struck sparks and the first flicker of orange as the pyre was lit. He hesitated over Sen, and smiled despite himself as he saw the ghost of the same look on the dead man’s lips. Talmir bowed his head once each as he passed over Nica and Juun, and then raised his chin too high and stared too straight as the fire obscured the dark features of Creyath Mit’Ahn, Second Keeper of Hearth and the first friend Talmir had ever known.
He felt the tears rolling and though it was not the first time he had wished for the Ember fire in his blood, it was the first time he had wished for it for so paltry a reason as to hide his grief.
Talmir did not withdraw as he was normally wont to do. He didn’t hide. Not this time. Now, he watched Creyath’s face and watched the very flames that made him up begin to take him back, just as they took everything back, unmade it, perhaps to be remade in a new image and in a new land and time.
When the flames rose too high and grew too bright to see beyond them but for the tighter bundles they made around the cloaked forms at its center, Talmir allowed his eyes to rove across the first few rows of those gathered.
He saw Taei Kane, Ember of Last Lake, standing beside his sister Fihn perhaps the best sword in the Valley other than Talmir himself. He saw the purple pointed hat of Yush Tri’Az and noticed the merchant captain’s eyes flick away from him with what he could only recognize as a mix of blame and the shame that came along with having felt it. He saw Sister Gretti clutching the arm of Kenta Griyen, whose eyes never wavered from the bright blaze that grew brighter as the sun sank below the walls.
The crowd parted directly across the way and Talmir squinted over the orange-and-red blur. He saw Sister Piell move to the fore, slow but more steady than he had seen her on other days. She walked close enough to the pyre that some of the younger hands twitched toward her, as if they feared she might throw herself atop it, or else burn herself at its borders. Her milky eyes focused in on Creyath and hovered there longest, and then they switched to Talmir, and he felt others follow. It felt like a shaft to the heart like the one that had killed Sen, but the look below the eyes softened and Talmir let out a shuddering breath as the oldest woman in the Valley moved over to take Tu’Ren’s place on the other side of Iyana.
The only sound other than cleared noses was the lonely howl of the evening wind that spilled in from the northeast and set to its task of smoothing the jagged cliffs, as it had for centuries—long before the Sages, even.
Talmir felt someone grip his hand. He thought it was Iyana until he felt a weight on his shoulder and felt the softness of hair fill the place between his shoulder, neck and ear. He closed his eyes, squeezed that hand and breathed in the smell of her as she did him. He could feel her lips smile as she took him in, even as he felt the wetness of her tears as they passed through the cotton of his loose-fitting shirt.
Those at the edges of the gathering filtered out first, passing across the water. They went back to their homes and back to the lives Creyath and the others fought to protect, died to make better.
That’s what they told themselves, in any event—men like Talmir. He laughed as he thought of how Creyath had believed it. Rain looked at him but thought better of inquiring.
Soon enough, only a handful of them stood around the pyre. Sister Piell swayed like Iyana swayed when she used her Sight, though the old woman was not Landkist.
Talmir remembered the Bronze Star she had given him and clutched it through his shirt. It had picked up the warmth from the blaze, and he tried to think it might have taken a bit of Creyath’s heat to remember him by.
“He saw right through me,” Talmir said, surprising himself. He watched the pyre as it began to collapse into just another fire. “He saw my training, my blood, sweat and tears and knew them to be the work of a man seeking approval. Seeking glory, no matter what I told myself. No matter what my father wanted or chose to see in his son.”
Rain gave his hand a squeeze, but Talmir shook his head. He didn’t feel bitter, and the heartache was already giving way to something less painful and more pure.
“He believed it,” Talmir said. “He believed in me and he believed in us. Creyath Mit’Ahn did a thing because he believed in it. He didn’t need Seers or legends or even an Ember’s fiery charge to do it. He only needed that will that made him up.” Talmir paused and glanced sidelong at Garos, who smiled softly. It seemed he had words to say, after all.
“Thank you,” Talmir said. “Thank you all.” He pictured Sen and the others, and the thought had him looking back toward the wagon, and toward those the dead Emberfolk had fallen to help protect. He knew they had lost theirs, those they had wrapped, burned and buried beneath the crags and sliding dunes. They did not need to say it to know they felt it—that same gratitude as him.
When the pyre had died down enough to light little more than the edges of scorched grass around it, Rain told Ket and Jes where to take the desert nomads. Talmir gave Ceth a nod and caught him before he followed them back across the river.
“You’re as much a part of things as you want to be, Ceth,” he said. “I’ll find you on the morrow.”
Ceth nodded and seemed to settle, and Talmir turned back to the glowing coals. Sister Piell still stood alongside Iyana. He started to approach but caught a piece of their drifting exchange and left them to it for a time, instead standing with Rain and delighting in the warmth she brought that was of a different sort than their Ember keepers.
“It seems strange, in a way,” Rain said, and Talmir felt a flutter at her voice that he laughed at inwardly. How much like that young boy in the yard was he still? “The fire consumes him just the same as the others.” It could have sounded crass or morbid, but Talmir only nodded and thought on it.
“We’re all the same in the end, I suppose,” Talmir said.
“No,” Rain said, and Talmir regarded her curiously. “We’re not all the same.” She smiled at him and her dark eyes shone in the filtered moonlight that was beginning to win its battle with the amber glow.
When Iyana turned and left the edges of the glowing ring, she wore a strange expression. Talmir thought to stop her, but Rain gave his arm a squeeze and he let her go.
“Go on,” Talmir said to Rain as Talmir, Garos and Tu’Ren follo
wed. “I’ll be after shortly.”
“I expect you will,” she said with mock haughtiness, and he felt that old familiar stirring at it.
Sister Piell stood awaiting his approach. He didn’t keep her long.
“She seems upset,” Talmir said. “Iyana, that is. What did you say to her?”
“That’s her concern, Caru,” the old woman said. “I said what I thought she needed to hear, no cast bones or entrails used to guide me. Just a life lived long. Just a life lived here, in this Valley.” She looked out over the walls and past the cliffs, the bloody purple of the western sky tinting the whites on the edges of her eyes.
She looked him up and down, even as he wondered how much she could see. She seemed to pause on the space above his heart and Talmir clutched the Bronze Star and brought it out from behind the fold.
“This saved me,” he said, feeling foolish and not knowing why. “But … I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“An heirloom,” Piell said without inflection. “I won’t pretend to know its ways, only that it is old and has a long memory. Something the Seers made, I think, back before they turned to the things you fought. The crones that cut you so.”
Talmir stared hard at her. “How—”
“I am every bit the old fool I look, Talmir Caru,” she said. “Any wisdom I’ve stumbled upon in my long years has fallen into my lap, just as that there cut of metal did. You are our captain, and you are mine. Make your preparations. Prepare our men and women to push back the coming tide.”
Talmir nodded, but Piell’s tight look softened.
“But prepare also for the other possibility, Talmir,” she said. She reached out and touched his face, and he recalled his mother’s face for the first time in a long time, another buried hurt. “We all must.”
She left him with that, and Talmir did not know what to feel as he watched the light slowly lose its battle in both the sky and the pile before him. He felt Rain standing like a bright shadow across the river and tore himself with effort from the spot.
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