The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “She is gone,” Ceth said the obvious, but Iyana nodded again to confirm it. “She died of age?”

  Iyana swallowed and Ceth clearly regretted his question immediately. She forced a smile to put him more at ease. “She died a hero,” she said. “She died fighting the nightmare the White Crest had become.”

  Ceth’s eyes widened. He looked in the moment like a child told a tale almost too tall to believe. “A mighty foe, that one,” Ceth said. “Pevah told me of his brother to the south.” He looked down at his hands as he walked but kept from calling up his power. Iyana felt a swelling in the atmosphere anyway, as if from his intent alone. “A true lord of the skies, he said. A being who could call a storm on command. Whose spears were lightning bolts and whose shield was the wind.”

  Iyana was taken back to that rain-soaked day in Ninyeva’s leaning tower, which had finally shattered in a storm it could not weather. She remembered the splinters that had carved the air like arrows and the blood that had run from Rusul’s hands, dying the tiny rivers that flowed among the dockside homes along the shore. More so, she remembered Ninyeva standing in the midst of a maelstrom that was as bright of light as it was dark of intent.

  “She stood before a dragon of the skies,” Iyana said, shaking her head slowly as she considered the poise and bravery her teacher had shown, an old woman. Oldest in the Valley core. Oldest, wisest, and strongest. “And it was in her defeat that Kole, Linn and the others found their victory.”

  “Someday, you will have to tell me the tale,” said Ceth.

  Iyana turned her smile to the front. “Kole will,” she said. “Or perhaps Jenk Ganmeer. He’s always been more of a talker. He will tell you of the battle in the peaks when they return from their eastern road.”

  “A good tale, I am sure,” Ceth said. “But not the one I mean.” Iyana frowned but did not turn around. “I would hear of Ninyeva’s stand against the dragon, and I would hear it from you.”

  They walked in relative silence for a time, listening to all the strange animal sounds of a land that was so close to that which she had grown up in, and yet seemed so very different. The insects’ songs were longer and lower, and the frogs trilled like songbirds rather than croaking like sick dogs. The leaves overhead did not blow in the wind or rustle in the night, but rather thrummed with that pulsing glow that attracted the flap and flutter of moths’ wings.

  “You know Shek,” Iyana said. Kenta blinked up from his private contemplations. “How?”

  “I told you,” Kenta said. “I have been here before.”

  Iyana made as if to speak, but Kenta continued.

  “She was just a small child when last I was here. Young for the Faey, who do not have children often.” He nodded up at Tirruhn’s back. “I remember his face, but not the name. Come to think of it, I don’t think any of the others lent me their names during my time—”

  He stopped and swallowed, and Iyana had to resist the urge not to flash into her greensight to follow his emotions more directly, trace them down to their roots. Perhaps if she refrained, showed restraint, then he would let her do just that in the future. Or perhaps it was a bittersweet memory, and one best kept for him alone. She looked ahead and tried to see Shek with fresh eyes. Kenta must have seen the direction of her gaze.

  “We all have our reasons for being as we are,” he said.

  Iyana could not help but watch the wrapped bundle as it bounced along with Beast’s steady gait. She shook the images that came with it and tried instead to concentrate on the land that passed them by. Once she looked, it was not so difficult to let her mind wander and her heart wonder.

  The narrow trail widened and fell, and the roots underfoot were soon invisible but for the impressions they left in the thickening, glowing moss that coated them. The land sloped downward more sharply than it had before, and Iyana’s breath was taken as she seemed to float down a still river of blue and green light. It was so bright in places and took up so much of her view that she stumbled on more than one occasion. The forest’s bright fur coated the sides of the tree-laden bowl with its luminous light. There were few flowers in the canyon, and Beast seemed to struggle with perceiving the best spots to place his hooves so that Shek had to walk directly in front of him.

  “Some place,” Kenta said as much as asked, and Iyana made a sound of awe as they crested the slope on the other side of the miniature, magical valley.

  Ahead, the ground leveled out and the trees grew thicker, more like those they saw in the Western Woods, along the edges of the Untamed Hills. The river was far away, now, so that Iyana could barely discern the sound of its carving through the dirt, roots and rocks, and so the moss that thrived in the mist it sent along the forest floor dried up, to be replaced by thick grass that bore only the slightest hint of light.

  At first, Iyana thought the trees were adorned with lanterns, until she recognized tulips and enclosed flowers that shone with yellow and deep amber light, splashing the black bark beneath. Now that the woods were not so choked with growth, she could see other Faey spilling up from the trails that had bordered their own. They walked beneath the natural lanterns and ran their fingers along the ferns that sprouted along the bases, their bows and buckles and blades picking up the light and illuminating them in a way that only made them seem more alien than they already did.

  They continued on for a little while, until the sun began to light the eastern sky, which was now visible through the threadbare canopy. As the sky’s light spilled down through the branches, the glow of the forest lost its war and was muted, and Iyana noticed that the flowers and bulbs sprouting from the trees she passed were not colored, but translucent white. She broke off from Kenta and Ceth and approach one, brushing her fingers along the edges, which were smooth as milk and fragile as wings. Inside, she could see a seed that looked to be as large as one of the Faey’s eyes. There was a pink one and a blue, but most were yellow like the sun overhead.

  “Come,” Shek called from up ahead, startling her. The Faey stood alongside Beast, who looked as weary as Iyana was beginning to feel. Ceth and Kenta passed by her, and Iyana rejoined the trail. “We are nearly there.”

  As the last of the night’s glow faded, to be replaced with a pale yellow-and-blue dawn, Iyana saw what looked to be a massive black wall up ahead. As they drew closer, she recognized it as being a semicircular row of great black trees with thick, sporadic branches bearing deep green leaves. Near the bases of the trees were arches that must have been carved. Tirruhn passed beneath the greatest of these, and they followed.

  The sight inside was shocking to her in its normalcy. In the place of toadstool towers and great blooms and gargantuan trees, there was a village. It was larger than she would have thought, and she saw that the whole of it was encircled with more of the ancient trees that seemed regular enough to have been formed through magic, or planted in a time before the Sages. Before war. Before time itself, perhaps.

  The homes were small and made of wood with thatched roofs, just like those at Last Lake. Iyana knew the folk of the Scattered Villages had been the first to build their homes that way a century before. Now, she cursed herself a fool for not wondering where they had learned it in the first place. She should have realized it during her days in the deserts, where the only shelter her people used had to be found and not made from timber and clay.

  The warriors who had escorted them spread out among the structures, and there were more, dressed in simple clothes and holding pipes as they leaned in doorways. They were alternatively very tall or very small, and though their faces bore even more varied hues and shapes than her own people, their hair was all black—all but for a few who bore the same silver-white as she, and even these moved about the cookfires and stone wells and shingled overhangs, shuffled along dirt paths and shooed the few children she saw out of the way as they trailed laughter in their fluttering wake.

  “Not quite what you were expecting
, I take it?” Kenta asked, coming to stand beside Iyana.

  “I don’t know,” she said as if in a dream, and she was suddenly acutely aware of how tired she was.

  These were the Valley Faey. They were different, and yet, they were the same. Iyana had long held an image of the Valley’s original inhabitants as an ethereal, wizened people who sat around fires and forged potions of sight in wood bowls and beneath roots in the forest floor. The sights she had seen along their nighttime march had coincided with this image, the glowing plants and the strange, alien songs of lands she had never crossed before.

  More recently, she held a clashing image of snarling, wild warriors whose green eyes flashed like demons as they brought their enemies to heel using the same power that coursed through her veins, and though none of them had been among the group that had come upon them to the west, their bows, arrows and gray blades and the poise with which they held them went more in line with this picture.

  The sight before her did not belong to either group, and yet, it could have belonged to both. She supposed every people came to be defined by its warrior class in the minds of those who bothered to know them as friend or as foe. For what was a friend but an ally in war? What was a foe but an enemy to be overcome?

  And yet, here they were, sitting on porches and rocking in chairs, smoking the same dried brown plants and wheeling the same white stones to keep their embers from spilling onto the shrubs. There was a spit of hares turning slowly over one fire while its minder—and old man who looked at them with a milky expression—eyed them with as disinterested an air as only the old and tired could.

  “The Emberfolk like to think themselves less crass than the men and women of the Fork,” Kenta said. “But the truth is, we never came far enough during the Valley Wars to see what the Faey were all about. True, they rarely come our way, though they did send their Landkist following the Siege of Hearth, but there’s nothing like seeing for yourself to dispel old prejudices. Perhaps to form new ones.”

  He said the last flatly and without a jesting tone, and Iyana was taken aback by it. She nodded and kept on nodding, caught in a daze. Was this the place Ninyeva had spent so much time? Was her wisdom gleaned from these huts and homes and narrow chins, or was it in there all along, carried along the winding, spilling roads in the northwest?

  One of the silver-haired Faey, a woman who did not look much older than Ceth, looked up from pouring a kettle as Shek approached her and pointed in their direction. She smiled warmly and set the beaten copper down. She wore a loose-fitting shirt that left little to the imagination, though she had few curves to speak of, not unlike Iyana herself, and tight leather leggings. Iyana spied a bone handle jutting from her belt with twine wrapped around the hilt, and as she approached, she saw a pink, mottled scar peaking up beneath the hair on one side just beneath her ear.

  She extended her hand toward Kenta and winked at Iyana in a playful manner. Kenta took her by the wrist and squeezed, and something passed between the two that was well beyond recognition.

  “Griyen,” she said. Her voice was like salt dissolving in a warm bath. Pleasant enough to be comfortable and rough enough to smooth hard edges.

  “Luna,” Kenta said with a bow.

  Iyana looked at Ceth, who watched the exchange with the rapt interest of a man of war. He was not as taken with the sights of domesticity as Iyana was, perhaps because he had nothing to compare them to. To him, the realm might be as strange and threatening as Iyana had expected it to be.

  “Come, then,” Luna said, sidestepping so that she stood facing Iyana. She smiled, and Iyana thought she saw teeth filed to points, but blinked the image away. “Introduce us, Kenta. I spy a sister in waiting.”

  “This is Iyana Ve’Ran,” Kenta said, “living legac—”

  “Just Iyana,” she said, extending her hand. Luna looked down at Iyana’s hand and let it hang for a space of time that stretched close to being uncomfortable. Finally, she bent and gathered Iyana up in her arms, squeezing her enough to draw a struggling breath. “My kin,” she said as she released her.

  Iyana felt flushed and saw Shek doing her best to appear indifferent as she watched from farther back, alongside Tirruhn.

  Kenta introduced Ceth next, and Iyana feared that Luna would gather him up as well. It seemed she was more perceptive than that, and Iyana thought she saw a glint in those green eyes as she took the northern Landkist in.

  “And where are you from, Ceth?” she asked.

  “Not here,” he said, and Iyana found it impossible to discern if his rudeness was intentional.

  Luna took it in stride, her smile not breaking until one of the Faey led Beast and his burden over to their small group.

  “One of yours,” Kenta said gravely.

  A strange look passed over Luna’s face that was impossible to read.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said. She grew another smile as she pulled her eyes from Sen’s body and rested them back on Iyana.

  “Welcome to the realm of the Faey,” she said, sweeping her arms out. She even stepped back and spun, drawing raised eyebrows from her compatriots.

  Welcome indeed.

  The sky matched the frozen ground for leagues in every direction, and there was a damp chill to the air that sent a shiver up Yana’s spine despite her hearty blood. She leaned her bow against one of the spikes of the Quartz Tower and interlaced her fingers, stretching her arms over her head and bending at the waist. Her men called her a cat when she did it, and she didn’t mind the comparison.

  It was the start of another slow, uneventful day guarding lands none but the mad would ever want to claim. Trouble was, the Sages were nothing if not mad. Most of them, at least. Perhaps all of them—even her own—each in his or her own twisted, valiant way. Still, the sky was nothing if not a portent, and it drew Yana’s gaze more today than it had in as long as she could remember.

  She traced the waves in the cloud cover as she stretched, leaning and tilting her chin so that it was difficult to tell which way was down and which up. It was humid near the ground, likely the result of southern currents wending their way up around the eastern tip and smoothing the jagged melt that dipped into the sea below the tower. But high above, the vapors froze and darkened, turning a blue deep enough to verge on black in places and suggesting depths more endless amidst the heights than those below her post.

  And what a post it was.

  When Yana had first taken command of the Quartz Tower, she had done so because she was youngest and boldest. And because, in truth, she had had no better choice. The veterans would guard the palace in the north, while the youngest and stoutest fighters would accompany Captain Saphyr and her Blue Knights to the south, over the gaps and trenches where they would meet the armored sycophants of the Sage of Balon Rael.

  Of course, it was not Yana’s people who had made the frozen sentries, of which the tower on which she stood was the last. Her ancestors had been scraping a living out of the mountains for as far back as the Sages had been warring. She still wondered sometimes, in the deep reaches of the night and sometimes the foggy, ethereal beginnings of the day, why they had bothered to get mixed up in it all in the first place.

  The cold. That was what they said. How strange, her mother had always said, that the World had grown so much colder of late. How strange, that the Frostfire Sage had offered them sanctuary within the crystalline walls of her shining palace and the carven halls of her mountain abode as soon as she had need of their martial ways. As soon as Balon Rael had started winning.

  She had few men today. Most had gone back with the Landkist of the Valley, leaving her with a threadbare contingent to guard against whatever was following them out of the dense, sweltering mess of Center. She swept her gaze out across the south and traced the white ridge that rose out of the permafrost to the east, where the newcomers had come down from. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to expla
in the nagging worry that clawed at her chest and burrowed at her temple, seeking a way in.

  Yana tried to shake the morbid thoughts. She tried to shake the warnings the Landkist had brought, just as she tried to shake the memory of the rot she had scented in the breeze as they had departed the day before—a smell like bodies burning.

  Instead, she allowed her mind to wander more buoying pathways. Pathways of light and hope. If what the Embers said was true, then the Sage of Balon Rael was dead, along with his greatest captain, the hated and hateful Asha. Yana remembered the day that one had come out of the south, her long golden locks flowing beneath that black spiked helm; remembered how many men Asha had cloven in two with great, sweeping swipes of that gargantuan blade.

  She remembered how Saphyr and the Blue Knights had driven them back for the hundredth time. Most of all, Yana remembered the young lad she had held as he died, blood gurgling from his half-open mouth and staining his pale face crimson, and wondering why the Frostfire Sage had not come down from her tower to help them like her husband would have. The same husband she had lost to the Dark Landkist and their Ember leader.

  Rane. That had been his name.

  Still, if Balon Rael was dead, that was one more Sage gone. One more corrupt power in the World snuffed out like a tallow candle that had long since run out of wax and had instead clung bitterly to life on the bubbling fat of the innocent dead.

  A latch flipped and metal clanged, shaking Yana from her wandering thoughts. She whirled and saw a sight that would warm even the dampest of bones: a steaming stone bowl held aloft by a fur-clad hand.

  “Guyy,” she said, striding over to the hatch and reaching down to him. She took the bowl in one hand and helped him up with the other.

  The old veteran dusted himself off and bent to catch his breath at the top, and Yana sniffed at the stew he’d brought. He frowned as he caught her look.

  “Now, I’ll have no complaints for that mush,” he said. “Mostly blubber, no doubting.”