The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  Talmir regarded her with surprise. He dipped a nod. “I heard him referenced as such, yes. He is a strange one, but he will stand with us when the time comes. He has a power that could spell the difference, same as any Ember that remains. I believe that.”

  “Then so do we,” Rain said.

  “Excellent,” Gretti said. “A joy to hear with the Dark Months closing in, and faster than they ever have before. And yet utterly pointless if the Faey devour him.”

  Talmir laughed, but Gretti’s look did not so much as shift. She watched him, unflinching.

  “The same Faey who walked through these very streets,” he gestured toward the amber-lit window, “healing those who could not walk, mending bonds and skin and offering such tender comfort as ours were too beaten to lend.”

  “The very same,” Gretti said, and Talmir could only stare. He did not know much of her past. Come to think of it, long as he had been forced into regular contact with the Merchant Council, he did not know much of worth about the lot of them save for Rain, who came up from the same new-forged gutters as him. The same cobbles and dirt. The same choices.

  He gave it up as pointless and hoped she would let it drop. She did.

  “All of this,” Yush said, “the threat of annihilation, the promise of hope, the path forward. All of it, on the visions of a girl less than half our age, and one who shared visions with the Eastern Dark. One who shared power, if not blood, with our former enemies, the gentle Faey of the Valley core.”

  “Do you doubt her?” Talmir asked.

  Yush regarded him coolly. He did not answer for some time.

  “She is the legacy of the Faey Mother,” he said, and the others—Piell included—bowed their heads for a brief moment as he mentioned the departed Valley legend, one who had held them together through times seeming darker than these. More personal and more close. In a way, it was simple to fight against the dark and all the things it brought.

  Talmir waited for Yush to continue, but apparently that was enough for him, one way or the other.

  “What use is seeing if there is no way to stop it?” Gretti asked, growing exasperated.

  “One can’t divert the future,” Talmir said. “None among us, and none among the Landkist. Still,” he met each of their eyes in turn. “We can move to thwart it, to meet it head-on, but only if we see its coming, its direction and its ending. The Emberfolk of this Valley have long been masters of preparation. We must do so again, and like we never have before. But first, we need to know what we’re up against.”

  Gretti tensed but calmed herself with effort. She was afraid, Talmir now recognized. They all were, and he was unhappy to realize that he was not exempt from their number.

  “Besides,” Talmir said, “we aren’t relying on Iyana Ve’Ran alone.”

  “Who, then?” Yush asked.

  “Our wayward champions,” Rain said, sounding less certain than Talmir would have liked. Sounding as certain as he himself was these days, with no word from the north or east and no way of getting it outside of Iyana or her ilk. “Kole Reyna and the rest.”

  “Ah, yes,” Gretti said, focusing in. “Some of our most powerful defenders, off roving the wider World in search of a Sage powerful enough to kill them. What has become of them, I wonder? Do they lie dead beneath the roots of Center? Perhaps they have made it to the black fields of the east and found ground soft enough and deep enough to fit them all.”

  Talmir frowned and took a warning step toward the table before he realized what he was doing. Now Gretti did flinch, but the water filling the wells of her eyes and reflecting the dusklight gave him pause.

  “All conflict has a source, Sister Gretti,” Piell said. Her voice was strong and not reedy as it was sometimes wont to be. “All wars a beginning. Ours is in the east.”

  “Ours?” Gretti asked, sounding more like a frightened child than a councilor.

  “We are of the World, are we not?” Piell asked. She switched her gaze to Gretti before she continued. “We must not separate our plight from the rest. We are all at war, child. We always have been. It just so happens that we, in this fertile Valley, have been fighting the true one longer than the rest.” She stopped and looked down, her eyes cast in what could only be described as shame. “Still, we are not free of the sins of our past, wars fought with little reason other than to see whose will was the greater.”

  Yush bristled at that and even Talmir felt his ire rise as images from his youth flashed before him: the speckled blood on his father’s face as he had returned home after the conflict that had started it all in the first place, pitting Emberfolk against Riverman, Rockbled against Faey. An ugly time, and one whose participants, whose sinners great and small, had searched for meaning in the decades to follow and found it fleeting.

  Perhaps Talmir and his lot were the lucky ones. Those who had lived long enough or been young enough to take up arms against the Dark Kind, a faceless horror that could not be seen as anything but evil. Wrong, which had to make the other side good, and right.

  “Kole Reyna, Linn Ve’Ran,” Piell said. “Jenk Ganmeer and Misha Ve’Gah. Baas Taldis of the River. These are names for stories. Let us not cast stones in the direction of that tome before the ink is dry.”

  “If they can stop what’s coming,” Talmir said, seizing on the thread, “and if Iyana can help them to do it, then perhaps our preparation will have been for nothing. We should count that a joyous day, and one to be celebrated with dry blades and white clothes.”

  Yush let out a heavy, weighty breath and stood, smoothing the folds from his gaudy robes. “I suppose you’ll be wanting the trade roads closed,” he said. “And the folk of the Scattered Villages pulled in.”

  “Yes to the first,” Talmir said. “As for the last, they suffered few casualties during the siege, when all of the enemy’s attention was on this city. We should wait until we’re more certain, or less uncertain.” Judging by their looks, it sounded as bad as he thought, putting it thus.

  “Preparation, then,” Rain said, standing as well.

  They said nothing, which was as close to acquiescence as the Merchant Council of Hearth ever came. Talmir usually felt happy leaving the stuffy confines with something approaching victory—however small and however paltry. Now, he only felt the weight of expectation, and for once, it did not come from the hunk of bronze that hung on his neck and pressed its sharp edges into his chest. The cut of metal whose properties he still could not explain, and that Sister Piell seemed unwilling or unable to.

  Talmir took the winding stair and remembered Kole Reyna taking it not so long ago, in a time that felt like another life. A time after the White Crest had fallen and before he had died. The loyal hound the Ember had brought from Last Lake had waited at the bottom, along with Jakub, a dirty gutter rat Talmir had somehow swept up in his august company.

  In a way, Talmir envied Reyna’s path even as he was glad to have no part in it. How freeing, to be blazing one’s own trail in the wider World, to have one’s own selfish ends align so perfectly with those of his people back home. Reyna was lucky to hold his power, and cursed to hold it. He was lucky to be so driven by grief and vengeance, and yet, Talmir knew the ending of his road would bring him no true closure to that end. Those wounds, left to fester, would never fully close. The key was learning to get on with them. Some infections could never be burned out, no matter how pure and hot the flame put to them. Reyna was a noble man, but he had a rot about him—a stink of destiny and a clinging smog of speeding mortality. Of inevitability.

  Talmir shook the thoughts as he reached the bottom of the stair. He looked at the quilts and tapestries of the gaudy hall with fresh eyes as he made his way toward the door that faced the open market bowl. In the place of his former indifference, now Talmir looked for bits of truth in the depictions. There were great towers of blown glass that stretched taller than the highest buildings of Hearth. There w
ere parapets and banners dyed red and silver verging on snow, blue and azure and forest green. There were battles drawn with winged Landkist flying across great expanses of sand with patched green and blue oases, clashing against tribal men with beasts and claws and all manner of markings upon their skin.

  It was said these tapestries had been brought on that long-ago caravan carrying Mother Ninyeva when she was just a child, and carrying Doh’Rah Kadeh, though he was in his mother’s womb. Talmir had always suspected that a good number of them had been made by some of the craftsmen of Hearth—fanciful reliefs of what might have been and not what was. Scenes to inspire a tradition where none existed, to give a new people a sense of the old—a sense of belonging that was sometimes difficult for them to come by.

  Just before he pulled on the half-open door at the arched marble entryway, Talmir glanced up at the tapestry hanging directly above the door. It was old and frayed at the edges, and the material it was sketched upon was rough and homespun. The paint seemed to flake, as if it had the consistency of clay.

  From far away, it was all black and gray, with blue shadows and lavender streaks. But as Talmir drew closer, he saw stalagmites and stalactites, hanging like the open maw of some great, dark beast, like a Night Lord of the World Apart. The deeper blue in the center was meant to be a lake, and in the distance, winking like a white star or a drift of mountain snow, was a crystal pillar, shining with a radiance of memory that the old paint could not imitate.

  Talmir smiled and pushed his way out into the dusklight.

  The market was full, but not so full as it might have been. People in the Valley were still on edge. That, and a good number of them had been lost in the siege of Hearth that Talmir had helped them to endure. The majority had been soldiers, but all wars had casualties of a softer bent, and the Corrupted had broken through—at least, their Sentinels had, along with Brega Cohr and his great black bear.

  What a scene that had been.

  “In all the wide World,” a soft voice said from behind, “I wonder if there exists a man who thinks as much as you, or as hard.”

  Talmir smiled as Rain hooked her arm around his on the steps to the Merchant Hall. Together, they stepped down into the market and began to make their way by a circuitous route to the east. It was a direction Talmir rarely traveled these days, but he was feeling nostalgic—even melancholy—and what better place to go in such a state?

  Rain’s skin was soft against his own, her presence warm as any Ember’s.

  “You’re near as dark as Mit’Ahn, now,” she said, giving the inner side of his forearm a gentle pinch. She saw him wince and turned it to a comforting squeeze. “The more we speak of him, the closer he’ll stay.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to stay?” Talmir asked. He didn’t make it sound bitter, but resigned.

  “Mit’Ahn would stay with you to the end,” Rain said, her voice firm and gentle all at once. She had such a way with it. Such a way with him, maybe. “You don’t think he’d only mean his own, do you?”

  Talmir barked a laugh. “I suppose not.

  “No more roads here,” he said as they moved to the back of the market bowl. They squeezed between the higher-stacked tents and ignored the grumbling of the merchants and cooks who made their private rooms in the backs of their threadbare shops. There were cobbles at the back that led up to squat structures ringing the eastern rim. These were private homes—some of the first built in Hearth—and it was long past time they were updated. Red clay on the foundations had peeled away in the northern winds and shingles were rough and splintered. They were charming and ugly all at once, and Talmir remembered running between the gardens of some as a boy, before the Dark Kind had come. Before even the Rivermen had made their declaration of war and not just of ire.

  The roads between the buildings that led down into the Red Bowl were stacked with old crates and refuse. Choked alleyways that should have been open—that had been open when the Bowl was little more than a field in the center of town for fun and revelry. That was before the people of Hearth had turned their minds from living to profit, from peace to prosperity.

  “They’ve no need of coin in the deserts,” Talmir said as they slipped between two leaning towers of boxes and crested the rise of moss-covered stones.

  “The coin they’re using now is little more than a joke,” Rain said. “A promise of future trade. Not all are honoring the practice. Bits of metal and wood full of promises, really.”

  “I expect that coin will come to rule all,” Talmir said with a sigh. “Promises are worth much to those who believe them. The folk of Last Lake will trade all the fish they can catch for promises, just as the folk of the Scattered Villages will trade them for iron and worked metal. Metal for metal.”

  Rain shrugged. Talmir looked back over the Red Bowl, his eyes shifting over the flapping canvas tents and the flags and streamers atop the beams and supports. He saw the amber of the eastern sky like a central eye—perhaps Kole’s or Creyath’s—and even saw the tips of the tallest trees beyond the wall standing out like shadows. The central way was a fiery gap of sky that separated the rows of Hearth’s tallest structures—blacksmiths and schoolrooms and homes built one atop the next, hallways leaning into each other, joined in a comforting sort of madness just like the folk of this Valley.

  “Preparation,” Rain said. She said it like the ghost of a thought, or like a mantra. Talmir looked askance at her. “It’s what we’re best at,” she continued. “Right, Caru? It’s what we’re best at, us Emberfolk.” He nodded, unsure which direction she was heading in. “Then why does this time feel so different? Why does it feel like this is the last time? How could we know?”

  They were heady questions, and ones Talmir knew he had played no small part in spawning. He looked back toward that amber gap, like a shard of golden sun that might warm them, shelter them or burn them all away. He sighed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have the answers.”

  “But you have more questions than when you left,” Rain said, dogged. “Questions whose answers are not easy to find, and questions which call up fears we’ve never held before.”

  “What fears would these be?” Talmir asked, feeling like he was being interrogated and not sure he deserved it, nor had patience for it.

  “Only the one,” Rain said, unflinching. “Will we lose, this time?”

  Talmir eyed her, searching for some ulterior motive, some statement beneath. He saw only truth in her eyes. He swallowed.

  “It is a good question,” Talmir asked.

  “And one you have asked every season for as long as I’ve known you,” Rain said. “Every time the skies darken and the moon becomes our sun. Each time that fiery orb sinks into the south and does little more than dry the frosted dew from the fields each morning before leaving us again. A good question, Captain Caru, and one we’ve answered time and again. Why, then, is this time different? Why, then, does it feel as if this time, the answer will not be the same?”

  Talmir thought on it for a time. He felt the sun paint the side of his face with its golden rays and it reminded him of watching the same ball sink below the dunes in the north.

  “Is it truly in Iyana Ve’Ran we place so much?” Rain said. “Do we trust in her visions of a future that has not come to pass more than we trust in our own strength, and the strength of those who have watched over us all this time? The strength of you and yours.”

  Talmir bristled. “Not too many more of those left, by my count,” he said. “Besides, what Iyana saw was no vision of the future, but one of the present. One of another world, and the one that’s coming closer to our own every day. The attacks on us, though born premature of the Sages’ collective folly, were nothing if not a herald of things to come. And much sooner than we anticipated. We should have known it.” He looked down at his boots, kicked moss away from its clinging crevices. “We should—”

&
nbsp; “What difference would it have made?” Rain asked. Talmir looked up at her, prepared to argue, but she, too, was looking away. In the place of frustration, he saw defeat—a rare enough thing to glimpse on the face of Rain Ku’Ral.

  “What did you see in the west, Talmir?” she asked without meeting his gaze. “Not through the eyes of the Faeykin. Not through false memories our people have held of the deserts. What did you really see with your own eyes?”

  “I saw,” Talmir started and then stopped. “I saw beauty,” he said, and Rain twitched as he stared. “I saw sin. I saw valor. I saw the hope and fear all tangled up in one, regret the only thing holding it back. I saw humanity in the conflict between the Sages we’ve long seen as gods and guardians.”

  “I suppose,” Rain said, “even in the Sages’ case, each person feels he or she is doing what is best. Nobody sets out wanting to be wrong. It only comes down to a matter of selfish or selfless. Are you for yourself or for others? You, Talmir, are the latter. And I’ll leave the rest to decide for themselves.”

  Talmir stepped toward her and cupped her chin in his hand, turning her to face him. It took her eyes—striking blue where his were pale—a moment longer to shift to meet his, but when she did, he felt a swelling in his breast.

  “We are the Emberfolk of the Valley,” he said. “The heart of fire. That is no small thing. That is no easy thing to beat. I won’t pretend to have the answers, Rain, nor will I pretend that Iyana’s visions are truth incarnate. But she has proven herself to me, and through me, to us all. She fears a thing, and when the Faey Mother feared a thing, it was always better to act on it than ignore it.”

  Rain grasped his hand. He thought she’d tear it away. Instead, she gripped it tightly and closed her eyes as she nestled into his touch. Her cheek was soft, and her dark bangs softer. Her lashes tickled his wrist and her shoulder touched his elbow, pulling a corner of the cloth that laid atop it aside to reveal more of the skin beneath.