The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  He leaned back, his eyes following the barkeep’s wife as she made her aching way through the back room, sweeping up. It seemed dimmer than it had been before, and Iyana realized she hadn’t heard the clink of washing glasses and tin and copper mugs for some time, now. Her point made, the woman left them to their exchange, but not without a pointed look in Tu’Ren’s direction.

  “Something great and terrible comes for us,” Tu’Ren said.

  “The last thing,” Iyana said. She tilted her head in the way a cat or dog might, catching an impression in the words that had come unbidden to her. Perhaps an effect of the wine. She cleared her throat and refocused. “I just need to find out what it is, exactly. And how we can stop it.” When he opened his mouth to speak, she cut in. “How we can survive it, I mean. I know, Tu’Ren. We won’t be going out into the World. Not now.” She looked toward the moonlit door, which was darker than it had been, clouds having come in to claim a part of the night sky that had been so clear before.

  “Maybe the others will stop it,” she said absently.

  “Sounds like they’ll only ensure it, should they find the Eastern Dark,” Tu’Ren said, surprising her with the statement. “If what you say is true. If he is trying to save himself, interfering with him can only make things worse.”

  She nodded, feeling a new grip of fear for her wayward family. Not for what Kole and Linn might have to face, but what they might do once they’d faced it.

  Tu’Ren smiled as her face screwed up with fresh worry.

  “Ah,” he started. “Now that’s a look I know well. I think you’ve borrowed it from me, and I from my father before me.” He interlaced his fingers with hers once more. “If I can lend advice I’ve never followed myself, but always wanted to: worry about the things you hold sway over. I’d say the World will still be here in the morning, but it sounds like that might no longer be apt.” He laughed at her reaction. “I didn’t think white could get any paler.” He patted her hand and stood with a long and creaking stretch. “Still, the point stands.”

  Iyana gathered her wits as best she could and stood, bracing herself on the tabletop as the room drifted like the looser docks of the lakeshore.

  Tu’Ren laid the embossed woodcoins on the counter. He left them plenty to make the trip worthwhile, and the barkeep nodded his thanks as he swept them into his apron. Iyana had always wondered how it worked in the old times, when the great cities of the World circulated bits of iron, silver and gold—an endless system of calculation, borrowing and debt. That was not the way of things in the Valley, nor in the deserts. In these places, things were offered freely and things given in turn. They were stronger together than they ever could be apart.

  “Yani?” Tu’Ren stood holding the door open and Iyana remembered herself and followed, bracing herself for the cool blast as she hugged her arms about her thin clothing. The air outside had grown sticky with the promise of rain.

  “How will you find your answers, Iyana?” he asked as they stood just below the landing on Hearth’s cobbled streets, gazing up into the clouded night sky. “You’re the only true Seer we’ve got left. I know your lessons with Ninyeva were never finished. I know, too,” he looked down at her and she returned the stare, “that those strange roads you frequent can be as dangerous as any that require boots and swords.”

  “There’s more I need to know,” Iyana said, her tone brooking no argument. “It’s one thing to say a bad thing is coming. It’s another to know when. To know where. We’ll need to be together in this,” she said, then paused as a pair of merchants trundled by with their grease-stained grills. “It could be that it’s better to let one city stand empty as we muster our full might in the other.” He frowned but made no move to argue.

  “The question remains the same,” he pressed. “Surely not Rusul and her sisters. Piell, perhaps?”

  Iyana shook her head. “Their sight is limited to this World, I think. I don’t know how I know, but I believe it. No,” she considered as they struck off toward Kenta’s abode. “I thought of seeking council with Braden Taldis.” Tu’Ren looked at her quizzically. “He has a wisdom about him, but likely little in the way of true Sight.”

  She swallowed and fought past the nervousness that assailed her and hated that it did.

  “There are others who could help,” she said. “Others who helped the one who taught me.”

  Tu’Ren stopped in his tracks. “The Faey may have come back into our lives after the last season and the darkest we’ve yet known,” he said, “but they’re hardly the welcoming type.”

  “They take in the Faeykin,” she said. “They have ever since Ninyeva made them take her in.”

  “I see she’s never told you much of her time with them,” he said, but there wasn’t much fight in him. “For all their talk of healing…”

  “I know,” Iyana said, and something in her tone gave him pause. He bit off whatever he was going to say next.

  When they reached the door, Iyana half expected to feel the first rays of the new day greet the nape of her neck, but there was still some night left. The days were growing shorter, and at a clip that made the gooseflesh raise on her arms. Without the White Crest wielding his corruption through the Dark Hearts in the northern peaks, it was unlikely they would have to contend with the Dark Kind in their usual number. Perhaps not at all.

  Maybe they had time.

  “The people will follow you, Iyana,” Tu’Ren said as he pushed the door open and settled down with a creak and groan onto the cushioned chair before the cold, soot-stained hearth.

  “I need you to follow me, Tu’Ren,” she said. “The rest will come around.”

  He dipped a mock bow from where he sat. “Your wish is my command, Princess Ve’Ran.” She shot him a withering look, which he ignored. “Truth be told, it’s Captain Talmir I worry about. He’ll have a hard enough time convincing those damn vultures to seal the walls and stop the summer trading. It’s the high point in the season, but there’s already a chill in the air.”

  Iyana didn’t disavow him of the notion. The sooner they were nested behind one wall or another, the safer they would be.

  “I know you won’t have me along with you,” Tu’Ren started as she turned for the bedroom door. “I’ve defenses to look to and a First Runner to corral. But you’re taking someone, Iyana.” His look brooked less argument than hers ever could.

  She nodded once and began turning it over as she went back to her room. Karin was already on his way to the Lake, if he hadn’t struck out for the Untamed Hills with Jes and Mial already. Captain Talmir was out of the question, and Tu’Ren for reasons he’d just illuminated. She didn’t know Taei or Fihn Kane very well, and wanted to set out as soon as possible, with no detours to the home she dearly missed but that felt empty without Linn there waiting for her.

  She retired to her room and plopped down onto the covers without wrapping herself up in them, and sat awake for a while, daring the sun to rise as she thought over the possibilities. She left a small, high window cracked, and a gust of wind blew in from the east and from the trees she would soon be beneath. It blew a strand of her own silver hair over her eyes, and she thought of how similar it looked to Ceth’s.

  The going was difficult for Shifa, and she had lost the scent. It was all the loyal hound could do to keep from slipping with each leap from ladder to shelf. Kole reached for her and nearly earned an annoyed nip for his effort. She had lost the scent, and would not be turned back until she found it again.

  They had followed what small semblance of a trail they could find up to a sheer cliff that broke the bottom of gray clouds they had seen from the southwest. Baas had managed to make another jagged, tumbled stair, but once they hit the stinging mist of the storm’s afterthought—the more violent gusts had come before, when they were mercifully out of reach—it was each to his own.

  Kole was forced to put more fire in his legs than he
had since he had raced through the woods of the Valley, chasing a Sentinel or fleeing through the fields of Hearth in the midst of a siege. He was tired, and judging by the haggard looks of Jenk and Misha, who leapt up and paused beside him to catch their breath, they felt the same.

  “Linn?” Kole asked, and Jenk shook his head. He was lighter of skin than the rest of them, but now he looked almost pale. Misha craned her neck to look back over the drop while Shifa made for a nearby trench, finding the sheltered footholds easier to scale and knowing the Embers would catch up soon enough.

  “I don’t see—” Misha started and then yelped, falling back with a shock and landing in the foot-deep snow that began to hiss and run on contact with her bare arms.

  Kole and Jenk squared themselves into protective stances before the Third Keeper of Hearth and watched the open air just before the shelf while Misha worked to right herself. The wind changed direction of a sudden and Linn shot up before them as if she’d been fired from the very silver bow that stretched out like a pair of wings across her back. She angled straight up and Kole’s heart clutched in his chest when he thought she had misjudged her trajectory.

  Her momentum slowed as she reached a height in the airy winds, her brown hair whipping, and then she stopped, hovering for half a breath before she began to flit back down like a leaf in a trickling brook. She held her hands out to her sides, and Kole thought her eyes looked the color of snow with no centers. She landed before the three Embers and exhaled, and the wind she had gathered swept the edge of the shelf clean, exposing the black rock beneath.

  Kole smiled and Linn returned the look. She was growing more and more comfortable with her gifts. That could only be counted a good thing. Misha, on the other hand, blew a wet red bang from the corner of her lip and turned on her heel, and Linn gave Jenk an apologetic wink.

  “Take care a stray gust doesn’t blow you all the way back to Center,” Kole said, nodding up at the gray sky as Linn slid between him and Jenk and rubbed a bit of warmth into the cloth wrappings on her arms. She had stripped them from the silver bow—a trick meant to stop it from catching errant rays and turning them back like mirrors that could alert enemies.

  “I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it,” she said, following the direction of Kole’s gaze. “The storm has quieted some. I think I know its temper and its mood.” Kole and Jenk exchanged looks and Linn caught the end of it. “I don’t know how else to describe it.” She shrugged and Jenk mirrored her.

  “Works for me,” the Ember said. “I’ve never quite been able to explain how it feels to light this blade, nor to make the fire dance in the hearth, slow or speed up in the pit. Some things just are.”

  “Well put,” Kole said.

  “Speaking of things that just are,” Linn started. “Where is Baas? I thought he’d surely beat me up here.”

  Seemingly on command, they felt a rumble like thunder. Kole followed the tremors north and shielded his eyes as the wind carried part of a drift down to burn up on his brow.

  In the distance, he saw a hulking figure that appeared like a gray brute come stalking out of the haze, the great oval shield on his back making him appear even larger than his already considerable bulk.

  “Took you long enough,” Jenk teased as the Riverman came closer, pausing before them and releasing little more than a short-held breath to bely his effort.

  Baas fixed eyes the color and persuasion of stone on the Ember and shrugged. “I could have taken a more direct route,” he said, glancing to the side and leaning out over the edge where Linn had flown up. “But I feared I might bring this whole shelf down.” He looked back at Jenk, who held up his hands in a placating gesture.

  “We thank you for sparing us,” Linn said with a smile.

  “I heard Shifa barking up this way,” he said without hesitation. “I did not want to bury her by mistake.” With that, he adjusted the straps over his back that held the hooks his shield rested on and moved off, leaving Kole, Jenk and Linn to see who could look most unsettled by his macabre tone.

  “Either our Riverman has the subtlest of humors about him,” Jenk said, leaning in conspiratorially, “or he wouldn’t bat an eyelid to see us all dead.”

  “Could be both,” Kole said, his own tone making it difficult to read.

  “Come on,” Misha called from behind them. She was already midway through her climb, though the true height of the next ridge was difficult to guess. Kole swallowed as he scanned the space from base to thick-settled fog and looked in the direction Shifa had gone, hoping the hound would be able to find enough footholds and jagged chutes to meet them at the top. The land was a maze of trenches and plateaus, like a series of lily pads or black mushrooms stacked one atop the next—a mountain of smaller mountains.

  “Does it ever end?” Kole asked, speaking more to himself than the others.

  “I could check for us,” Linn said, looking up, “but then I truly might be swept away, as you feared.”

  “That,” Kole said, “or you could fly head-first into the bottom of some high shelf even these clouds drift below. There seems no end to them.”

  “There’s an end to everything,” Linn said, moving off after Jenk. “Only need to find it.”

  Kole frowned after her, turning the words over. With Linn, he could never be sure what was said in innocence and what carried some lesson or another she meant him to take. Even out here, at the far edges of the World and beyond anything they had ever thought to experience, she acted as his ward, perhaps his guardian.

  Kole followed, pulling some of the heat back from his legs and putting it into his arms now that they were set to do more climbing than leaping. At least the jagged ridges tended to slope away rather than toward. Find the right path up the gray and black walls, and it was a near enough thing to climbing a staircase.

  Kole measured his breathing as he followed the others, keeping below Linn, Jenk and Misha and to the side of Baas, who surprised him by foregoing his usual destruction and opting to climb alongside them with surprising dexterity. Then again, there was little about the Riverman that was not surprising.

  Focusing on his companions and on their path kept the darker thoughts at bay, but as he caught the flashes of reflection in the mirrored, earth-cut surface of the wall, Kole saw his own face and with it, his worries and his fears laid bare and open as a gaping wound.

  What were they doing out here?

  He knew what had brought them. He knew they followed T’Alon Rane to the northwestern wastes they now found themselves in, just as they had followed him to the choked labyrinth of Center. They had even caught up to him on more than one occasion, but Kole had found what answers the former King of Ember offered only called up more questions. Questions about his past, and questions about the Sage he served and those he hunted as Kole had always wanted to hunt them, ever since he had lost his mother to magic that—even if it wasn’t theirs entirely—could surely be blamed on their folly. On their arrogance.

  Now, the Eastern Dark held sway over whatever was left of the man who had led their people out of the dunes in the west and into the vast and close Valley. Two more Sages had fallen in the remnants of Balon Rael’s timber fortress—one from the shattering of the blade he had trapped himself within and the other on its edges. If the Eastern Dark was to be believed—and he had no immediate or apparent reason to lie—a third had fallen in the west, where Iyana had gone with Captain Talmir Caru of Hearth. Where Kole’s father had gone. Kole did not know what had become of them, though he felt in his heart of hearts that they still lived, that they had made it back to the Valley core.

  Kole felt at once like hunter and led prey. The Eastern Dark meant for them to follow—or his Shadow creature did, and that one did nothing without the designs of her master in mind. Without his ends. Perhaps there was something left of Rane in those swimming depths, just as Kole had been lost in the depths of the Sentinel’s blac
k void before Iyana and the Faey Mother had come to trawl its waters.

  What would he do once he found him? It was clear the Sage they had only ever counted an enemy had some grand purpose in mind, and no matter how simple Kole wanted the answer to be, he could not deny the many ways it seemed to turn, the many lives it had caught up in its considerable wake and the many ends its paths could lead to. Did not he and the Eastern Dark want the same thing? Did they not both want to see the Sages fall and the World brought back into a balance that might free them from the dreadful inevitability of the World Apart, coming closer with each lengthening night, spreading more of its cracks and fissures into the fabric of their World with each passing year, each shortened season?

  Kole looked up and saw that he could no longer see the others. They had passed above the gray clouds that he still hung in the guts of. He put some heat into his numbing hands and climbed faster, pulling himself up with effort. Soon enough, his hand found empty air and then planted in a shallow drift of snow, and Kole waited for the inevitable splash of melt that plastered his bangs over his eyes.

  He sighed and steadied himself, but caught one last glimpse of his reflection in the wet surface of the rock he scaled. His amber eyes burned brighter than they should and his muscles tensed and rippled where they weren’t covered by black scales and ridges. He could see his very veins pumping, and he knew it was not due to effort alone.

  Kole feared himself above all else. He feared his power and he feared what it could do on the back of the wrong intent. If he was truly out to rid the World of the Sages’ influence and sway, then why was Linn exempt? She was one of them now, in all the ways that counted and in none.