The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “We never said we weren’t,” Kole said. “On your side, that is.”

  “Killing me won’t undo his sins,” she said. “Killing me will not stop what’s coming.” She spoke as if she feared Kole. As if she feared the lot of them, and as if she was still considering killing them then and there. As if she wondered if she could.

  She did not say what killing them both would do, but Kole left that to the side. It was a piece of his younger self that was not so young. Just a few months before, he had set out to claim answers from a Sage. In truth, he had set out to kill him. They all knew it, Linn most of all. And the more Kole had seen and the more he heard, the less he doubted. The less he felt deterred.

  “You are tired,” the queen said. Her voice was melted gold. “Take rest and take food. We’ll have it brought to you. We are new friends, but we will become fast. You will see it. I have taken the measure of you and found you noble. Your misgivings,” she switched to Kole, “are understandable. But in times such as these, we must give chances. We must afford trust if any of us are to survive.”

  Kole had his armor up, but he heard her. He gave a slight nod as a great cracking sound echoed throughout the chamber. They looked to the north, where the sheer glass wall parted to reveal the white stair with milky swirls.

  Misha moved first, eager to be out of the chamber, and the rest followed, Shifa taking up the rear. Linn walked close to Kole, eyeing Tundra as he watched them pass.

  “None of us trust her, Kole,” she whispered. “You could at least pretend.”

  “Friends trust,” he said with a smile and a steady gait. “We’ll come to see the truth of her sooner if we’re honest. If she is an enemy, and not just an enemy to ours, I’d rather know it sooner than later. Besides,” he said as they rounded the staircase, a momentary panic stabbing him in the chest as he imagined the walls closing in to crush the lot of them, “there’s a faint smell beneath all this ice and snow. And it’s a familiar one.”

  “Aye,” Baas said from behind them. “The World Apart.”

  “Or something of it.”

  “The Dark Months are coming,” Jenk said by way of explanation.

  “The dark is here,” Kole said, unerring. “And it may not be our new queen. But we’d do well to root it out before it stabs us.”

  “Who better?” Misha asked, sarcastic and annoyed.

  Who better?

  “You look rested, Captain. When you first arrived, we thought you might collapse as soon as you passed beneath the arch. You are well, I take it?”

  The speaker was Sister Gretti. She sat in the corner closest to the fire, which was lit ahead of its season. There was a chill in the room that wasn’t normally there, even in the depths of the Dark Months of seasons past. She watched him with dark eyes set into darker features, but where he usually read spite from the would-be Seer he called charlatan, now he saw only interest, if not concern.

  “I am as well as I can be,” Talmir said, dipping his chin. He chose to stand while the others sat around a rectangular table in the center of the room. He usually stood. He told himself it was not to cast a shadow on those gathered, to lift himself up and look his station, but he knew that to be a lie. A comfortable one he had grown into and accepted.

  There was Piell, sitting beside Gretti. Her milk-white eyes hovered in their hollow sockets. She looked as though she saw little and heard less, but Talmir knew better. She looked old. Older than she had when they had departed for the deserts. Talmir felt a pang as he considered her impending mortality. And then it was swallowed by the knowledge that the rest of them could follow at any time—might follow soon.

  Rain took the head of the table. She was recently washed, and her hair was still damp and untied. She wore it that way to entice Talmir or to tease him. It worked. Her expression was easy in the most dire of circumstances, a shell in youth that had become an armor with age, impregnable to all the shrewdest minds and fingers of Hearth, the chief of which sat diagonal to Rain and had to turn his chair off-kilter to take in Talmir.

  Yush Tri’Az had foregone one of his plumed hats for the first time Talmir could remember. He was a small man, but he looked larger without the ridiculous accoutrement that bobbed and floated with its feathered tail like a fifth appendage. His head was balding in patches and he looked as tired as Talmir felt. He almost lamented the exhausted tone with which he addressed Talmir, a far cry from his usual vitriol.

  “The city has been … disquieted since you’ve been gone,” the merchant captain said. Talmir usually looked to Kenta Griyen when the man spoke, but he had gone east with Iyana and Ceth. He chanced a look into the shadowed alcove where Creyath usually lounged.

  “You missed me, in other words,” Talmir said, smiling at the merchant captain. Yush began to sputter almost immediately, his face turning crimson.

  “What I mean to ask—” Yush started, recovering some of his tired decorum, but Talmir interjected.

  “You mean to ask if it was worth it,” Talmir said. “This trek to the northwest, to the deserts of our ancestors. You mean to ask what I’ve brought back, and to inquire about what I left behind.”

  “Yes,” Yush said without pause. He did not say it with the inflection of an accusation. Talmir knew his tones well. He quirked an eyebrow at the continued lack of aggression from a man he considered as reprehensible as he was diminutive. “That is what we ask.”

  Yush looked around the table. Those gathered, Rain included, dipped their heads slightly in acknowledgement. Even Piell’s moon eyes roved his way, quivering as they took in the hint of his presence, as if she were regarding his aura rather than his physical form.

  So Talmir told them.

  He told them of the march through the Red Gap and the fight with the spitting drakes in their wide earthen bowl. Of the ambush by the Bloody Screamers and their meeting with the northern Landkist they came to know as Ceth. He spoke of the Red Waste and used the name he had come to know him by, and as he spoke of Pevah and his desert children who could have been theirs, scraping a living of peace and white light and radiance beneath the swaying, spilling desert dunes, he felt a painful longing to go back.

  And then he remembered the Pale Men, driven like rabid wolves by the Witches’ song. He remembered the fight by the underground lake, and the way the pillar had shed its illuminating brilliance over a scene of such blood, gore and devastation he had not witnessed since the Valley Wars, when the trenches without Hearth had been slick with red.

  Of the trek to the west and the ensuing fight with the Bloody Seers, he spared the details, but told them he and Karin had slain them, one and all, and ended their macabre song, though it availed them little in the end.

  “No doubt it is a good thing they are gone,” Yush surprised him by saying. The merchant captain swallowed and fidgeted under the sudden attention of the rest. “Continue, Captain Caru.”

  “The Night Lord came,” he said, remembering the way the ground had shaken and dunes near as tall as the lowest peaks of the Valley had broken apart, shattered like the melted plain of glass the titan’s purple fire made of the land. Talmir had seen it even from a league to the north, where he and Karin had finished their fell and noble deed. “Creyath Mit’Ahn took it upon himself to fight the beast, with Ceth beside him. It was … a mighty and terrible thing to see.”

  Talmir paused and swallowed. His eyes flicked to Rain, whose brows were drawn together in a look of such sympathy it nearly broke him all over again.

  “The Second Keeper acquitted himself well,” Talmir said, managing to stop his voice from cracking.

  “And the rest of you,” Rain said. “Those who did not fight the beast—”

  “Were occupied by another.”

  “The Eastern Dark,” Gretti said, and even Piell’s eyes widened at that. Seeing Talmir’s look, Gretti knew it to be true. She leaned forward, the fire framing her outline and turning her
black as a silhouette. “So it is true. You fought him.”

  “Not I,” Talmir said. “Iyana Ve’Ran and the Sage of the Red Waste. They matched him blow for blow.”

  “He was not defeated,” Piell said, slowly, as if she were remembering, “but he did not lay you low.”

  “No,” Talmir said, shaking his head slowly. “I only know what I was told. I was fighting with the Sentinels he called in. The ones that possessed the Faeykin Sen, whom they bring to the east now for burial.” He paused, tracing the whorls and rivers in the carved and grainy wood of the table as if they held the memories. “He came with a purpose,” he said. “The Eastern Dark. He came with a purpose and left with the same.”

  He looked up, finally hearing the words Iyana had told him as if for the first time. As if the truth had formed a burning shaft to clear away his fog of grief and reach his mind.

  “He believes he is right to hunt the others,” Talmir said.

  Yush chortled sarcastically. There was an edge to his tone that Talmir understood well. Though greedy and selfish, Yush was of the Emberfolk, and the Emberfolk could not easily suffer the Eastern Dark’s name to pass over their tongues free of scorn.

  “They all believe themselves to be right in this war of theirs,” Rain said, waving her hand dismissively. She picked up a half-drained glass of riverwine and took a long pull, watching Talmir, waiting for him to get to a more salient point. None preferred to discuss Sages and their ends.

  “I saw him wounded,” Talmir said. “Something in the exchange, either with Pevah or with Ve’Ran … it laid him low, or near enough to show fear.” Piell followed him closely, her eyes narrowing as he spoke. “She spoke with him, melded with him in the strange way the Faeykin do. And if she did, it means he has emotions, like a man. He thinks like a man. He is—was—a man, or something like enough to feel righteousness and rage.”

  They regarded him as if he’d gone mad—even Rain, who set her glass down on the oaken table with a hollow sound that echoed in the close and dusky confines. There was a lone window behind her, small, circular and crossed with timbers, and as the sun sank low enough for the teeth of the black peaks to obscure it, it shed an amber light on the table that began to move with the passing of time. Piell, however, looked at him differently.

  “You believe the Eastern Dark has a point,” she said, her voice more clear than it was usually wont to be. More purposeful. “That he may have some role to play in all this, for good or ill.”

  “I do not know what I believe,” Talmir said. He kicked errantly at a strip of wood that pulled loose from the planks of the floor. “I only know that, whatever happened, Iyana saw something in him to give her pause. Enough to make her seek answers for the coming darkness away from him.”

  Talmir sighed, trying to orient his thoughts.

  “For as long as any of us can remember, we have blamed the Eastern Dark for opening the door to the World Apart,” Talmir said. “For admitting the beasts of that fell realm and setting them on us. But what if it was folly and not intent?” He saw the looks they shared, though Piell continued to stare straight at him. “It does not erase his sin, but it does change our aim, does it not? It should change the direction of our thought and our action. If we are to survive, we must know the cause of the Dark Months and all they bring. And the cause, much as we may be loath to admit it, may not rest with the Sage we’ve counted our enemy longer than any other.”

  Rain settled back in her chair. The drink had warmed her enough to relax in the present company, but she looked troubled by Talmir’s words. Gretti looked to Piell, who continued to stare at Talmir, or toward him—her eyes had lost a bit of their steadiness. Yush narrowed his eyes as he regarded Talmir, and it was he who broke the silence.

  “Do you doubt the tales from the desert, Captain?” Yush asked. Again, his tone held no hint of accusation, but Talmir narrowed his own gaze, mistrustful of the direction the merchant captain took. “Do you doubt that the Eastern Dark came west as soon as he learned of the Ember fire? That he sought to use them, to corrupt them and turn them to his own ends, to turn them on the rest of his kind and any who opposed him, just as he did with our Ember king? Just as he did with T’Alon Rane?”

  Talmir thought on it awhile. A while longer than he had any right to, given what he had seen, what he had known as the truth since the day he was old enough to grasp its opposite.

  “No,” he said, and said it with a confidence that surprised him. “No, I do not doubt them. But—” he said before Yush could speak, “that still begs the most important question. The only question.”

  “Why?”

  Rain asked it, and the others turned to face her. She had propped her elbows on the dark wood and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. Her eyes were far away, but her thoughts were close and filled to the point of bursting.

  “Why would he do it in the first place?” she asked. “Why would he need to seek the Ember fire? To fight against the powers that had once been his fellows, if not his kin?”

  “To fight against the very thing he had brought into the World, unwittingly,” Piell said. She said it as if confirming a long-held suspicion, and Talmir could only shrug as the others turned his way. As if he knew. As if he had anything apart from questions.

  “The Eastern Dark will never be a friend to us,” Talmir said. “Nor will he earn forgiveness for whatever part he’s played in laying a darkness upon us that has yet to reach the World without this Valley of ours—”

  He saw eyes widen at that, and thought how strange it was that they would never give thought to the rest of the World. That they would never think to ask if the Dark Kind brought their gnashing teeth and black razor claws out of rifts and tears in the lands of Center, or beneath the towers in the east, or in the sandy bowls between the dunes in the north.

  “We must look to the cause,” Talmir said. “To the true threat. The World Apart is coming. Iyana saw it. No more rifts. No more errant floods, and no Corrupted army sent by a Sage turned crazed by powers beyond his control. The source is the thing we must fear, and the thing we must fight against. The thing our wayward champions hope to stop before it comes. But we cannot rely on that. We must prepare, as we have always done. We must prepare to make a stand. A stand unlike any we have made before. And it will take everything we have, everything this Valley holds, to stop the coming tide of night.”

  Talmir was nearly breathless when he stopped. He looked up, refocusing eyes that had glazed over with half-formed images of black fires burning up from the Deep Lands, and of red eyes leering from the thickets and reeds.

  “Karin Reyna, First Runner of Last Lake,” Yush said. “He has gone south again, and taken two of our best soldiers with him, no?”

  “He believes we will need runners in the war to come,” Talmir said. “Given what I have seen of the man, I would trust him to do whatever he feels is in the best interests of this people. “

  “Just as we would trust you,” Yush said, his tone flat enough that Talmir turned his attention to him more directly. Yush winked so that the others couldn’t see, and Talmir actually found himself smiling, if only for a brief moment.

  “Jes and Mial,” Yush said, shaking his head. “Misha Ve’Gah before them. Crey—” He stopped at that and swallowed past the sudden lump Talmir’s quick stare caused. How quickly a good mood could sour.

  “And now Kenta,” Gretti said, ignoring their private exchange. She sighed and then cleared her throat, a sound of frustration.

  “You speak as if they will not come back,” Talmir said, to which Gretti shrugged as if it didn’t much matter.

  “Control,” Talmir said with a sardonic laugh. “It’s the lack of it you can’t abide.” Sister Gretti bristled, but did not lash out, not with Yush being in such a rare agreeable mood. Not with Talmir’s grief so near. “I am charged with protecting this city, and through it, this Valley and everything in it.”r />
  “You were once charged with fighting others in this Valley,” Gretti put back, even and unflinching. Talmir had to respect that, if nothing else about her. “And now we’ve sent some of our only Landkist off into wilds we do not control, Captain, and for what? To smoke herbs and mash paste, and to enter a warm delirium through which to see a future we cannot prevent in any case?”

  Talmir did not answer, but the words did less than make him angry and more than make him unsettled. Gretti sighed seeing his look, and this time there was no malice in it.

  “We lost much in the deserts,” Talmir said, his voice low and mournful. “Too much. I know that better than most. I know why I receive some of the looks I do. I don’t dismiss them. I understand them. I embrace them. They are a reminder to do better by us next time. To be better for us.”

  “You have nothing to prove—” Rain started but Talmir shook her words off.

  “I’ll not tell that to the ashes of Hearth,” he said. “What we lost in the sands we cannot get back. What we left behind was a life we cannot reclaim. I was there, my friends, and only the ghosts of the Emberfolk remain. What I found, I brought back.” He smiled, a private look he shared with them, and a true one. “But what fire they possess. I tell you, friends. I have seen such courage from them—even the children—that I cannot count them anything other than family.”

  “We are,” Yush started and then stopped. He cleared his throat. “We are glad to have them,” he finished with a sharp nod, as if the words had pained him to say. Strangers from distant lands eating the meats and growth of the Valley’s toil, and with nothing to trade.

  “They are made of strong stuff,” Talmir said. “Callous as it is to say, whatever we have lost in martial strength through recent trials, we may have redoubled with their presence.”

  “With the presence of one in particular,” Rain said. “The Northern Landkist. He is of the Skyr, no?”