The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

And then the beam was gone, leaving behind a cold Kole hadn’t noticed before. He opened his eyes to see the queen staring at him, considering.

  “As you can see,” she smiled, “I keep the tower opaque lest I burn any visitors away. It seems you are not the only ones with fire.”

  “The walls,” Kole said, stepping forward. He felt like a boy prattling on about some new wonder he’d seen. “It’s ice, isn’t it?”

  The queen nodded. “Nevermelt.”

  “Nevermelt,” Linn said. She sounded doubtful, and the queen turned toward her.

  “Nevermelt,” she said again, as if teaching a small child. “I daresay you three could put that to the test.” She again met the Embers’ eyes one after the other. “Though I hope that you will have the decency not to do so in this palace, lest you heat the walls enough to burn away those in the upper chambers.” She smiled again and clapped her hands together, the half-formed gauntlets ringing sharply as she did. “It is a power I have learned by watching my own champions: Tundra and the Blue Knights. They fashion weapons from the stuff. Weapons that are difficult to shatter and that put enemies into a state of shock and bewilderment when they strike. Then again, it is only as apt a name as, say, Everwood.”

  Kole’s eyes widened at that, and he saw Misha and Jenk were similarly surprised.

  “You know of it?” he asked, hesitant.

  The queen laughed, long and loud, and Kole noted Baas frowning at the display, as if he was insulted on Kole’s behalf.

  “I may appear young and vibrant,” she said, turning her shoulder in a sultry way and fluttering her lashes behind it. Kole saw Jenk’s knees quiver. “But I am old. Very old. I have known Embers in my day. I have known one in particular.”

  Her voice changed at the last, and the mood changed with it. She seemed to sense it, and tried another smile to lighten their moods.

  “But then, you are weary,” she said. “I do not mean to pry, but you are in my lands, now. You are, it seems, in my war, and while I like the look of you and sense the purity in your hearts, I require answers of thee.”

  “We could say the same,” Kole said. “We have come a long way. And, truth willing, we have come to help you.”

  She regarded him coldly at first, and then the ice began to thaw. Just a bit, but enough to wash away some of her easy manner and replace it with a more steady presence. Jenk swallowed as she transformed from the flitting, flirtatious host to one with a royal air and a strong bearing.

  “You will want my name and I will want yours,” she said, moving past them. She paused before Linn and even stepped close to her, so that she was staring up over her chin into those hawk’s eyes. “But then,” her voice dropped, “what shall I call you, young Sageling?”

  Linn leaned back as if trying to avoid the truth of the words. She set her jaw. “I am no Sage.”

  “You have my brother’s dusty smell on you,” she said, sniffing for effect. “The White Crest, was he calling himself? The minder of your Valley. The keeper of Valour’s bright treasures. A foolish scheme, all told.”

  Kole didn’t understand the references, nor did he appreciate the tone, but challenging the queen outright was not something he was prepared to do. He hoped Linn felt the same way. They had to play this right if they were to find the answers they sought. This was the first Sage, after all, that they had met in peaceful circumstances.

  “The White Crest was our protector,” Linn said evenly. “Was,” she said again, anticipating the argument. The queen switched from one eye to the other. It seemed as if she were trying to gauge Linn’s belief.

  “Perhaps he was after all,” she said with a sigh. She stepped back from Linn. “I am sorry. Truly. I counted Uhtren a friend, once. I counted them all friends. Close enough to call them brother, each in turn. He was a strange one, and private. Not made for fighting but powerful enough to threaten anyone.” She glanced back up at Linn. “How much of his gift got in you? I have never known a Sage to grant his power to a mortal. Not since the Green Beast of Center, and even he made himself into a sword with which his followers could fight by proxy. He grew tired of the war my dark brother and your oldest enemy began.”

  “I,” Linn started, seemingly reluctant. “I do not know. I can’t fully explain it.”

  “But you do have it,” the queen said. “You used it to split the armor of one of my knights.” Kole looked toward Tundra, who veritably growled.

  Linn nodded and the queen released her from her attention. She climbed the tiered dais at the nose of the chamber and rotated before the bone-white throne.

  “What name do you have for me, these days?” she asked. “If you have one at all. I am far from your cloistered Valley, after all. Perhaps word of my deeds has not reached you. Perhaps word of the wrong kind has.”

  Kole stepped forward. He looked at the others, even Shifa, all of whom gave him warning looks that mixed fear with uncertainty.

  “The Witch of the North,” he said. “They call you the Witch of the North in all the lands we’ve been to, which is to say, few enough.”

  Her faint smile twitched slightly at hearing it, and Kole thought it might crack, shattering the thin veneer and exposing the name he’d uttered as the truth.

  “Not bad,” she said. “And not entirely unearned.” Kole was surprised to hear her say it, and it seemed the others were as well. They closed in on Kole, and he saw Baas casting sideways looks at Tundra and the shadowed corners, as if he expected an attack at any instant.

  “I am called the Frostfire Sage by my own.” She nodded to Tundra, who dipped a bow. “My oldest name has been lost, once even by me. I do not use it anymore, because the one who used it most and spoke it clearest and most true is lost to me. Taken.”

  “I am Kole Reyna,” Kole said. He swept his hand out to encompass the rest. “This is Linn Ve’Ran, Misha Ve’Gah, Jenk Ganmeer and Baas Taldis of the Fork.” Shifa gave a bark. She was lying at the base of the dais, unconcerned with the impropriety. “And Shifa, Wall Hound of Last Lake.”

  The queen regarded Shifa longest, and her smile seemed true, amusement boring into the armor of her presence.

  “This war of ours has been raging so long, it is easy to forget the little things that get drawn up into it,” she said, her gaze rising over them and looking to the past.

  Kole felt a kernel of fire sprout in his belly.

  “Little things,” he said, “meaning us?”

  “No,” the queen said. “Not you. You are Landkist, or blessed enough to be called the same.” She nodded to Linn. “You are chosen of the World, and the World rarely chooses wrong, in my experience.”

  “And what of the rest?” Kole asked the question they were all thinking. “What of the smaller folk? The less powerful. The dead and dying.”

  “A tragedy,” the queen said, her voice turning harsh. “And one I intend to stop, and have intended to stop for longer than your tales stretch.”

  Kole swallowed, bit his tongue and fought down the acid. The queen saw his struggle and her face went softer. Soft enough to be believed, which was precisely why Kole did not.

  “Why did the fighting start?”

  Misha asked the question. She asked it in earnest, and in a manner Kole never would have expected. He watched her. Her eyes had a glassy sheen. Where he suppressed anger that threatened to boil, the fiery Misha Ve’Gah suppressed tears.

  “The War of Sages began with sin,” the queen said. She looked like a figure from legend, and as she spoke, she sounded like one as well. Kole fought the feeling that he was in a dream, that the answers to questions so simple and so large that he had held since childhood were now before him, contained in the form and mind of a would-be god. A destroyer. A protector of realms. “We went where we should not have gone. We spoke words that the World gave to us in dreaming, and wove them, split them apart and put them back together again. We found a power nested
in the darkness and realized too late it had a mind.”

  She paused and swallowed and Kole nearly shuddered to see a Sage fear.

  “But,” she gazed wistfully out as the sun sank, the semicircle of amber sunset passing in through the west-facing walls, refracted like a river of lanterns. “The World … woke up as we withdrew. It granted us power. It granted us strength with which to fight the coming tide. But the tide was a long time in coming. So long that we forgot about it. So long that thoughts turned to the use of power for other ends.”

  The queen shook her head.

  “I can only speak for myself … and perhaps the man who would become my lover. Northwind, they called him. But I knew him by his other name. He was wise where I was not. He thought we should withdraw as Uhtren had done while the others fought their war by proxy; while the nations and tribes they had sought to guide and protect, to steer away from conflict, only hastened it, ran toward it. You mortals.” She shook her head. “Though I once stood among you, I began to wonder why you have such a desire to fling yourself into the jaws of death, to shatter peace wherever it grows, to rip it out root and stem and smash it underfoot.”

  She sighed.

  “Unfair, I know. Balon Rael was the first to declare war on behalf of his chosen, who became his subjects. The Sage of Center rose to challenge him and his Gray People. It was a bitter conflict, and a bloody one. Soon after …” She paused. “There were rumors of new powers in the west, in the sands the Red Fox controlled. People with the power of flame. Embers. The Sages tried to recruit them. There was Veshi of the Dunes. He failed. And there were many more after him, but the Embers would not fight for a Sage or against one. They would not fight at all. A waste of a precious gift, we thought, for we did not know what it was truly for.”

  Kole almost interjected, but the queen was not done.

  “All the while we were fighting, with the cause shifting as swiftly as the intent, the Eastern Dark, whose name has never changed apart from what he was given at birth, and in these lands here … he continued digging, delving. He woke things in the World Apart that might never have come otherwise. The rifts began to open, and the Landkist were born in greater number to throw them back. My own,” she indicated Tundra, “have been with me a long time. They are some of the oldest, and they are true. My Blue Knights, my Azuran Guard, whom you tangled with on the Shelves.”

  “We hear you lost one,” Linn said. “Your captain.”

  The queen’s face was difficult to read. “Captain Saphyr,” she said with a nod. “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem upset,” Linn said. “Not as upset as you should be, having lost one of your champions. And perhaps your greatest.”

  “Saphyr did not accept Tundra’s aid,” she said, “when I sensed movement to the west, fast and black and trailing shadows out of Center. Saphyr is gone, but we remain, and we will learn from her mistakes.”

  The queen leaned forward and met each of their eyes in turn. “I often hear that you believe your power to be a gift, that the Sages took their magic and you were blessed by it.” She leaned back and snorted, a bitter, doubtful sound. “All magic is borrowed. All power is temporary. We cannot undo old sins, but some of us have changed our ways. Some of us have tried. Uhtren and the Emerald Blade. Even the Red Fox, I hear … may he rest eternally.”

  She leaned back, her hands with their silver-armored fingers tapping on the rounded bone with its strange faces. She questioned them about their war in the Valley, their battles with the Dark Kind. She asked of the rifts, of the Corrupted, and of the fight with the White Crest at his broken citadel in the peaks. She asked of Center and their trials there, of the Raiths and the Willows and the Emerald Blade. She reveled in the telling of how the Sage of Balon Rael had fallen, killed by the very weapon he sought to wield against the rest, and she frowned and pondered as they told her of the Eastern Dark’s arrival, and his possession of T’Alon Rane.

  “He was always under his sway,” the queen said dismissively, steepling her fingers under her chin. “Rane, that is. The Dark Landkist, we called them. The Eastern Dark’s champions, meant to wipe us out, one by one. Exterminate us like bad weeds in a garden.” She smirked, catching something in Kole’s look. “Yes, they succeeded far more than we thought they might. They killed many. They killed one in particular, and for that, they cannot be forgiven, though only a pair remains, it seems.”

  She sounded hungry, and Kole wondered what he would see if T’Alon Rane were here, and the Shadow girl beside him.

  “So many names,” she said, her tone soft and melodic. “So many names to remember.” She looked to Linn. “Perhaps you will have a few, before your time is done.”

  Linn didn’t seem to like the sound of that. “Will you suffer me to live?” she asked, sardonic. “Or will I be on your list of enemies as well?”

  “My list is short these days,” the queen said without skipping a beat. “Very short, and I do not intend to make it longer.” Her stare went static, as if the golden pools she held for eyes suddenly stilled, froze over. “In truth, my dear, it depends entirely on you.”

  Linn looked to Kole, who bristled.

  “The Eastern Dark is coming to kill you,” he said. “He wants to kill you to win a war you claim not to be fighting any longer. He has no nation. He has no champions. Not anymore, aside from the very form he carries as a vessel. He is a force unto himself. Why does he hunt you so?”

  “Because he believes my death will bring an end to the great threat this World faces,” she said evenly, measuring Kole’s reaction. Measuring them all, as if daring them to take his claim as the truth.

  “Will it?”

  Baas asked it, and Jenk slapped his palm to his brow in frustration. Misha stepped before the Riverman, her hand sliding back toward her bow. The queen held up a hand to stay Tundra, and Kole heard boots scuffing the floor not far behind.

  “Will it end the war?” Baas asked again, his expression flat. “The true war, I mean. The war against the dark, and not your conflict of blood and pride and false majesty.”

  Kole was as dumbstruck by Baas’s bold and reckless address as he was by the words and the way he said them.

  “The World Apart is coming,” she said. “It is nearly here.

  “But first,” she said, sweeping over them and settling on Tundra, “we must deal with Ray Valour. As long as he stands, I am threatened. And no matter what you come to think of me in our time together, if I fall, the World does as well. You are powerful, yes, but you are young. You cannot stop the coming tide, but I can be a breaker against those black waves. And perhaps, with the help of the fire of the west, we can send it back, or snuff it out entirely.” She leaned forward, her knuckles going from misty blue to white, like snow. “Ray Valour is coming. Ray Valour must die.”

  Kole heard the name. He heard it several times, but it wasn’t getting through. It was like a worm burrowing its way in through his ear, or like a stinging wasp at his temple. The Eastern Dark. The enemy of the Emberfolk and of the World. A thing like that could not have a name. She had said it herself.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, willing it away. The queen saw it.

  “Valour has always had a flair for the dramatic,” she said, and something in the way she said it gave Kole pause. “He named himself, you know. ‘The Eastern Dark,’” she spat, a crass and crude gesture from one so regal. “The others were named by you and yours, myself included. Gods are named and we should not have been, but what were we to do? I’ve grown into mine like dresses, or suits of armor. Each name serves a purpose, but he has only ever held the one, to ward you off. To keep hidden. To keep his dark designs to himself. He doomed you. He doomed you all.”

  “You knew him,” Kole said. Linn gave him a strange look, and Kole pushed through the doubt it cast upon him. “You knew—”

  “Of course I knew him,” she interrupted, her mood shifting sharply and her t
one with it. “I knew them all.”

  “No,” Kole said, meeting her eyes and holding them, “you knew him, long ago. Knew him well. I can see it in the way you speak of him. There is a hatred there that cannot be born of strife alone.” He felt some of that fire welling in his gut and knew the effect it had when it reached his eyes. Linn might see farthest, might command the skies and all their fiery bolts, but there was something to an Ember’s stare. Something of the sun, and burning. Something of death.

  “And what sort of hatred would that be, Ember of the south?” the Sage asked. “The Eastern Dark took from you. He stole the things you loved by calling to the World Apart, by letting it in, little by little, like a leak in a thatched roof. He stole from me as well. He stole my love and my liege. He stole my heart. What more, then, could he have done to earn a blacker sort of hate? What thing could he have done to have you judge me so for feeling it, for nurturing it like a coal left too long in the ash?”

  “Betrayal,” Kole said.

  The queen’s face broke, then. She looked wild, and more lines appeared than had been there before. She looked alien, different. She looked like the stories of the Faey from the Valley Wars—the fighters that were as swift as they were ruthless. The room grew colder, the air misting over with falling frost, and Kole felt his group’s aura of ever-present heat contract. The scales in the black armor Kole and Misha wore shifted, letting pockets of hot air escape with faint whistles, and Linn tested the air, moving it around them like a blanket of calm in the midst of a coming storm. There was a buzzing underfoot, as if the ground were speaking, and Kole glanced sidelong at Baas, who didn’t move.

  Tundra took a step forward and Kole flinched toward his blade, and then the air cleared and the queen’s face lost its tightness. She settled back and even smiled, wide and, Kole thought, true. Tundra ceased his advance, but it was a little longer before the Embers cooled and Linn’s wind stopped swirling. Kole shifted and stood a little taller. He could still feel the buzzing underfoot.

  “No matter our history,” she said, calm, “we are on the same side, you and I. You will come to see it. He is a servant of the darkness he seeks to wield, just as your Ember king is a servant of the same, willing or not.”