The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  Tu’Ren followed the direction of her gaze. His tone was flat and full of dread when he spoke. “Trouble I have to see to?” he asked.

  Iyana turned on him with a wide-eyed swiftness and he raised one of his eyebrows.

  “No,” she said a little loudly. And then, softer, just a hair above a whisper, “No. That’s Ket, one of the young soldiers who came with us. He’s a good man.”

  “Boy, you mean,” Tu’Ren said. He seemed unimpressed, but gave it up anyway, taking another pull on his copper mug as he watched her closely.

  Iyana knew the way Ket looked at her. She only noticed his attentions in the desert in hindsight. It seemed the road back had made him bolder, or perhaps their trials beneath the judging moon and above the bloody sands just stopped him caring. It was innocent, in the end. Ket wouldn’t make an advance toward her and she didn’t think she wanted him to.

  “He is brave, Tu’Ren,” Iyana said, her tone forlorn. “Braver than he should have to be.”

  The First Keeper seemed to regard her with fresh eyes, then. He nodded, once, and then pushed the wooden bowl toward her. Iyana leaned back in her creaking chair, wrinkling her nose as the sharpness of pepper stung her eyes and the tang of orange peel made her mouth water.

  “Come, Yani,” he said. “You’ve had a long road. Have a drink with me.”

  “I’ve never much liked hotwine,” she said, pulling the smooth bowl closer. “Always reminded me of blood.”

  “Grape blood, maybe,” he said. “This may be a dusty little hovel—” Again, he made no attempt to lower his voice much. “But it’s one of the few said to take its grapes from the Faey.”

  “The Faey drink?” she asked.

  “Where do you think they get all their visions and tales from?” he asked, working in vain to keep his face serious and aghast. Already his cheeks were beginning to redden under the effects of the ale, which he’d apparently finished.

  He went to take another drink and noticed his conundrum. He tried to push his chair back from the table, not realizing he sat on a bench against the wall until he had slid the table and Iyana several feet across the floor. He stood, made a mumbled apology and patted her on the shoulder as he made for the bar once more.

  “Try a sip,” he said as he left her to rearrange the table, apologizing to those he disturbed along the way.

  She listened to Tu’Ren’s voice as he started up some conversation with the barkeep and his wife and watched the candle flames’ reflection dance in the rocking liquid. It didn’t look so much like blood to her, now. She saw the specks of black pepper floating there, traced the whorls of oily silver as the small fires overhead flashed yellow.

  Iyana took a drink. A small one at first, and then a longer pull. The hotwine burned pleasantly as it ran down her throat like a hot spring, and just when she thought she had erred, noticing the first small explosions of fire from the spice, the citrus stormed in to smooth it all over. It tasted like a battle on her tongue and below the roof of her mouth, and by the time Tu’Ren returned—carrying two sloshing mugs this time—Iyana had a pleasant buzz that made her forget the stifling warmth and settle into the thin, soft gown she wore and the rough, grooved wood she sat on.

  They spoke of little things and of nothing much at first. Iyana asked about the state of the Lake and Tu’Ren complained about the fishermen leaving their chores to their women, which in turn meant leaving chores for him, Taei, Fihn and the would-be protectors of Last Lake.

  “They don’t need protection in the Bright Days,” Iyana said, shrugging at his flat expression.

  The first spark to their exchange came when Tu’Ren returned to the subject of Karin. “I don’t see the need for it,” he said. “Taking them out into the Hills. He’s as like to scare up some slumbering behemoth than teach them anything worth knowing. The time for runners is over, Yani. I won’t dare say it to him, given what he’s gone through and what he’s done for us in the Valley Wars, but I’ll say it to you.” His cheeks were beet red, but his words were clear. “What use have we for some of our fittest skipping over fallen trees in the dark when we could use every sword, bow and sharp edge behind one wall or the other—timber or fancy white stone?”

  “I always wondered why we only had one runner, though he was called ‘First,’” she said.

  “Used to be more,” Tu’Ren said gruffly, waving his hand at nothing. “Reyna didn’t want the burden of starting them again, given what he’s seen. Given what happened to the rest.” He took another pull and swallowed too quickly, which sent him into a fit of coughing. “Wasn’t his fault. That much I know, but didn’t change a thing far as that one’s concerned. You can’t tell him what to do. Karin Reyna is his own man, which is fine right up until it isn’t.”

  Iyana shrugged again. “You never know when you’ll need a runner,” she said. “No harm in having more.” She didn’t mean it in any other way than plain, but as she said it, she remembered Karin in the deserts. She remembered him and Captain Talmir rushing toward the bloody caves in the north, and only knew the barest hints of what they had done there, though she knew its effects in full.

  Tu’Ren cleared his throat and set to launch into another tirade. Seeing her look stilled him, quieted him. He blew out a weary sigh and started on the mug that was still full to the brim, slowing his swallows to better match her own.

  Iyana didn’t look up from the half-drained bowl for some time. When she did, she saw Tu’Ren staring at her with a sober look that clashed with his consumption. His eyes were moist as wishing wells, and the candlelight flickered in their centers.

  She smiled at him, but she knew he could see through it easier than even Kole and Linn.

  “Maybe so,” Tu’Ren said, voice subdued compared to what it had been moments before. “He’s been through a lot, same as the rest of us. Still, perhaps Reyna’s been through more. Suppose I should let it lie.”

  Iyana nodded, but Tu’Ren was only just coming around to asking, the ale doing its work to smooth his inhibitions and the hotwine opening more of the heart she had covered up without realizing on the way back to the Valley.

  “What happened out there, Yani?” he asked, leaning forward. Now he did lower his voice. Iyana made as if to answer, but the scraping of chairs and tinging of copper mugs had her looking back toward the front. The soldiers of Hearth set their mugs in a haphazard line on the bar and said their rosy goodbyes to the fine establishment while Ket waited at the moonlit door and its sectioned window. He saw her looking his way and gave a sad smile before passing out into the night with his fellows on his tail. She knew the look because she felt it. She knew what he would see when he went to sleep because she would see it, too.

  Iyana sighed and shook her head as she turned back to face Tu’Ren, who watched her closely.

  “We’ve grown up fast, in this Valley of ours,” she said. “We’ve been fighting the Dark Kind since I was a girl. Fighting them or healing those who do the fighting. It’s messy work and it’s dark work, but …” She formed her lips into a tight line as she searched for the right way to say it.

  “It’s familiar,” Tu’Ren said. Iyana nodded emphatically and took a quick drink that sent sticky red streams down her chin. Tu’Ren pulled a kerchief from his pocket and offered it and Iyana dabbed at the mess.

  “Familiar,” she agreed. “The Dark Kind are horrid creatures,” she said. “But I’d imagine killing them doesn’t feel much like killing, does it?” She asked in earnest and Tu’Ren frowned.

  “No,” he said after thinking it over. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

  “But killing men, or things that used to be them.” She shivered at the thought and saw some of the red fade from Tu’Ren’s dark cheeks. “That’s different.”

  “Aye,” he said, rocking back until his broad shoulders and the buckles of the leather armor he never went without scraped small lines into the dry plaster of the wall
. “I suppose it is.”

  Iyana felt the beginnings of guilt well up as she watched his reaction, watched all his former good humor evaporate. “I’m sorry—”

  “Whatever was done out there in the sands,” Tu’Ren said, “and whoever it was done to, you’ll have to make your peace with that, Iyana. Or you’ll have to make your peace with not having it.” He tilted his head toward the door he couldn’t see past the barrier. “That lad there’ll have to make his peace with it. I’d imagine he’ll be a more capable hand on the wall that guards this place, now. I’d imagine all the swords and arrows you took into the sands will. Not because of what they’ve done, but who they’ve done it to.” He took another drink and set the mug down with an emphatic thud. “Fighting monsters has a certain appeal after fighting men. Killing monsters makes you appreciate having a place to aim the blade that doesn’t have much beyond a beating heart. No thoughts, no desires. No family. No future.”

  His eyes glazed over as he was taken back on roads and through trials Iyana couldn’t begin to guess at. She had followed one of his memories not long ago, tracing the paths as he fought and killed to keep the peace following the Valley Wars. If the aftermath had been as bad as what she’d seen, how had it been before? Some part of her knew those conflicts had been responsible for turning the Emberfolk more grave and less spirited—warriors like Larren Holspahr and his ilk. Still, she always thought fighters like Kole and Linn had faced worse, and at a younger age. There might be truth to it, still, but now she thought she knew why killing was not a uniform thing. It was a coiling serpent that shifted on the back of its wielder’s intent and in the heart of wherever it was aimed.

  “Iyana?” he asked, and not for the first time. He reached a scarred hand across the rough grain of the table and laid it on her own. “What happened out there? What did you see that has you so bothered? That has Karin racing along the forest paths to the south even now, and that has the Captain of Hearth thinking of the coming fight even at the burning of his best friend?”

  Iyana let out a breathless laugh that must make her look pitiful.

  “You can tell me,” Tu’Ren said.

  “I know I can,” she said and meant it. “But I don’t know if I’ve been driven mad, or if I’ve been tricked by some Sage’s spell.” She shook some of the haze from her mind.

  “Tricked by the Eastern Dark, you mean,” Tu’Ren said, his voice level. “Iyana, I know you found him, or he found you. What did he show you? What did you see?”

  “He has a name,” she said, ignoring his question for now. “The Eastern Dark has a name.”

  Tu’Ren straightened again and pulled his hand back. “I’m not as old as my father yet, Iyana,” he said. “But I’m old enough to want some things to stay the same. There’s nothing I can gain by knowing it. There’s nothing it will change.”

  Iyana shook her head. “He’s not the faceless evil we’ve been brought up on all this time,” she said, and when the color began to return to the First Keeper’s face, she rushed to stamp it back down. “He is our enemy,” she clarified. “Or was. But Tu’Ren, he has an aim, and it’s not us. Not anymore.”

  “Too few of us Embers left to trouble him, now?” he asked, his tone thick with a bitterness he hadn’t taken from the ale. “Too few to use in his wars to come? How many Sages is that done, now? How many dead by his hand?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Iyana said, and her eyes flashed bright enough for her to see them reflected back in his as she keyed in on his growing anger and pushed it down on instinct. She leaned back and her eyes dimmed. “Tu’Ren,” she started. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry, Iyana,” he said. “I was letting my anger get the best of me.” He seemed unsettled by what she had done. Mother Ninyeva never used her power to force the emotions she could better control by the respect she wielded. Iyana eyed the wine she had yet to finish and pushed it away.

  “During that last battle,” she said, her voice inflecting the calm she wanted desperately to feel, “when the Red Waste clashed with the Eastern Dark, I was at its center. Something happened, Tu’Ren. When time broke and the sand turned to glass, when it seemed like the Eastern Dark would win, I seized on his tether.”

  Tu’Ren frowned at her words but she moved past them, continuing on lest she lose the thread.

  “I traced it back to its source.” Her eyes widened as she remembered more clearly, more vividly with each passing thought. “I saw the place from where his power had come, or some of it. I was there.” She met his brown eyes and held them steady. There was no fighting with the truth of her words. No doubting her conviction. “I’ve been to the World Apart. I’ve seen it.”

  Judging by his look, Tu’Ren feared she might plunge back into it at any moment. The candles guttered as an errant breeze blew in with a new arrival, and she saw the First Keeper—the most powerful man in the Valley core—flinch at its portent.

  “How did you escape?” he asked. He did not ask what it looked like or what she saw. He did not ask to hear about the black rivers or clouds, or the smoke that poured from cracks in the hard crust far below. He didn’t ask who ruled those lands, how many of the famed titanic Night Lords stood or sat in their jagged obsidian thrones in a mountain spur that recalled the Valley’s own.

  “The Sage pulled me out,” she said. “The one I followed there, and not the one we fought to protect and who fought to protect us out at the Midnight Dunes.” She swallowed and pushed on, despite her own misgivings. “Ray Valour pulled me out and dropped me back into my body and my form. When I met his stare, I saw fear, Tu’Ren. I saw fear in the Eastern Dark.”

  “All things fear,” Tu’Ren said, grimacing at the name she’d said and then moving past it, never to return. “Especially those that inspire fear in other things.”

  “It wasn’t me he feared,” she said, shaking her head slow and deliberate. “It wasn’t even the World Apart. Not really.” She frowned and reached back into those memories, knowing they couldn’t hurt her now, even as another part of her told her not to. She ignored the warnings and pressed on, reached back. “There is another he fears, and it’s the same who called him there in the first place. There is a voice there that does not belong to the Night Lords but rather controls them. Something far beyond the Landkist. Far beyond the most powerful of the Sages. Someone is coming, Tu’Ren. Someone old, and someone more powerful than we could possibly imagine.”

  “And someone the Eastern Dark means to stop,” Tu’Ren finished for her. He went to cross his arms over his chest, saw her eyes fix on them and caught himself. He sighed, heavy and full.

  For a while, Tu’Ren said nothing. He had finished his ale and did not look to be in the mood for another. Iyana pulled her bowl back over and drained the last of it, wincing as the soggy pepper and peel at the bottom made a pungent mix of the dregs.

  “Then I suppose the captain is right to fear,” Tu’Ren said, “if what you say is true, and anyone who’s anyone in this Valley knows to trust the legacy of the Faey Mother.”

  She laughed, humorless and self-deprecating. Tu’Ren didn’t appreciate it.

  “You’re far more than you know, Ve’Ran,” he said. “If everything you fear comes to pass—if our wayward heroes don’t find a way to stop it, and if the greatest enemy we’ve ever known is powerless to stop another—you’d better start acting like it if we’ve any chance of making it through the coming storm.”

  But we don’t have a chance.

  That was what Iyana thought. That was what she felt, deep in her bones and at her core. She thought it must be obvious from her demeanor. But then, how many times had Tu’Ren Kadeh thought the swarm too great? How many times had he ordered the children and elders loaded onto the fishing boats while he stayed back with the other defenders and resolved to fight to the last? How many times had Talmir Caru stood atop the white shell that surrounded his people and fought against a horde
without end and without mercy, believing it all to be for naught?

  They might be made of stronger stuff than she, but it didn’t have to be that way. Iyana nodded. It was an affirmation meant for her and not for any other, and Tu’Ren raised his chin as he caught it.

  “You’ve got that look of purpose to you,” he said. “You’ve always had it. You’ve always wanted to make a difference. While your sister just wanted to protect us—to protect you and Kole—from the horrors of this World, you wanted to protect them all, every leaf and root and all the things that lived among them.” He smiled fondly, but Iyana thought he looked sad. “You’ve got a taste of the bigger picture out there in the wider World. You’ve even had a taste of our dark neighbor. And you want more of it.”

  “I have no choice,” Iyana said. “We’re a part of the big picture now, Tu’Ren. I think we always have been.”

  “Not always,” he said. He didn’t mean to say more, but she compelled him to without dipping into the light of the Between to do it. She still had plenty of fire in her stare without the gifts this land had given her. “Us,” he said, “you and I, our parents and their parents before them? Yes. We’ve been a part of it. Even our ancestors, back before the First Keeper—the true one—first awoke in the deserts and before Mena’Tch burned the legions that challenged the desert tribes. We’ve been a part of it a long time. But it wasn’t always the way.”

  Tu’Ren leaned forward and Iyana frowned as she listened.

  “I’m old and I’m close enough to a fool to be counted among them,” he said. “You’ve already seen more of the World than I’m ever like to. But Iyana, stories come from somewhere, and though you’ve now met two of the Sages and know more of them than most will ever have the pleasure or the misfortune to, the rest of us know enough. The Sages took their power, Iyana. Maybe we’ve got the details wrong. Maybe it wasn’t our World they took it from. But the Sages took their power, and all the rest has followed. All the rest, and the World Apart, whose demons and dark things never had a place in the oldest tales—the tales before men wielded flames and wizards battled upon mountaintops. Whatever the Sages are squabbling to save themselves from now—perhaps to save us from by some happy coincidence—is the same fate they doomed us to in the first place. Don’t forget that.”