Linn was not convinced. Her look must have showed it.
“But not before you take something for yourself,” Linn said. Her eyes flicked unconsciously toward the dead man whose heart still beat, faint but steady.
The Frostfire Sage swallowed and pursed her lips.
“What better chance does the world have than me?” she asked. “The World Apart is coming. On that point, there can be no debate. You have felt it. You, whose own power grows by the day, though you do not know it.”
“The world has the Landkist,” Linn said.
The queen’s face passed through a range of emotions, some of them alien to Linn, so complex and strange they were. In the end, she settled on something that lay between amusement and delayed recognition.
“What?” Linn asked.
“The stories you children have been told,” she said, shaking her head. “The Sages took their power.” Her voice went comically low and her frown deepened. “The Landkist were chosen. Gifted by the world to turn back the war those mighty tyrants had plunged it into.”
“Do you deny it?” Linn asked. She felt defensive and did not quite know why. Perhaps it was all just too much to take in. Perhaps she wanted those old stories to be true, though a part of her had always doubted them.
“I’ll ask you,” the Sage said. “If father sun cast one of his rays down in the depths of night. A single ray, golden and beautiful, and warm to the touch, in a field at the edge of a barrow. And if you, Linn, were walking in your slippers and gown and happened to see it. If you circled that beam of light—that beacon of warm and vibrant day that should not have been there—and felt the kiss of its radiance on your neck and on the backs of your hands. If you saw that and felt that, would it be ‘taking’ to reach your hand out? Or would it be something else?”
Linn opened her mouth to speak, but found the words slow in coming. She watched the Sage for a long time, trying to discern whether the story she told was true or not. She had grown up on stories of the Sages as miserly old wizards; magicians who tricked the world into giving them its power and showing them its secrets. They found the names of things—the wind, the trees and even the birds and beasts. The oceans and tides, the clouds and even the mountains, though never the sun and stars, and never—much to the pride of the Emberfolk—the Mother’s Heart that was the fire beneath the deserts. As Linn had aged and learned first-hand of the cold reality that was the World Apart and all its horrors, she began to subscribe to the growing notion that the Sages had taken their power from that blasted and barren realm and brought it here, either through some dark intent or vain folly.
Now, here she stood, blessed or cursed with the power of one of their number and standing before another—one who spoke of a soft ray of golden light in a faraway field out of place and time. One who likely danced in glittering parlors and watched gulls bank and wheel over the crashing foam from her crystalline towers in a time before wars were fought with anything but blades and bows and hurled stones.
What surprised Linn more than anything else, however, as she stared at the Frostfire Sage, the Witch of the North and all her other names, was the fact that she believed her. In this, at least, she believed her.
If the Sage saw the odd mix of chaos that passed behind Linn’s eyes, she made no move to show it.
“You can stop it,” Linn said. Her voice was faint. She expected the Sage to smile a smile of victory. Instead, her face hardened with purpose. It was just the look Linn needed to see.
“I can,” the Sage said. “I can stop the World Apart from coming. But I can’t if I die before my work is done.”
“Your work …”
“Unless you want to be burdened with visiting that dark, malevolent realm for yourself, I would suggest you leave the particulars to me.”
Linn glanced at the body on the dais, remembering the Sage’s words regarding life and death. The Sages were immortal, near as she could tell. So long as they weren’t killed. It seemed obvious to Linn that the Frostfire Sage was looking to get something else out of the World Apart. Some last secret. A parting gift before she closed the door for good.
“I need him,” she said, and Linn’s heart felt as if it had been bitten for the naked honesty with which she said it. “I need him in all the ways you think,” she said. “More so, we need him, if this is to work. He has a power about him that, once restored—”
“I understand,” Linn said.
In truth, she didn’t want to know the particulars. They were in over their heads. If she hadn’t known it as soon as they had passed from the Valley core to the black plains where a Raith had commanded an army of beasts to ride them down, and if she hadn’t felt it when she had seen the forces at work beneath the slick and dripping branches of Center, she knew it now, standing at the edge of the world and before one of its last clinging powers.
Kole said they had come all the way here to see what the Sages were about, to kill them if they had betrayed mankind. And if they hadn’t? To let them live.
Linn feared Kole was already bent on his purpose, blinded by his rage. It was quieter now than it was in the Valley, but Linn knew him better than most. She knew his quiet bearing was little more than a shell. She knew he felt in his heart that the Sages must die. In that, it seemed he was the same as the Eastern Dark, much as she hated the thought of it. In that, she knew it was she and she alone who was capable of protecting him from himself.
In the meantime …
“What do you need of us?” Linn asked.
The Frostfire Sage smiled. It was a smile of victory, but also of relief, and Linn chose to remember the latter more fully.
“The Eastern Dark is coming to kill me,” she said simply. “Ray Valour is coming to kill me because he believes it is what must be done. Just as he tried to kill my husband.”
But he is wrong. Linn thought it but did not say it. He is wrong. He must be wrong, or else…
“The Blue Knights will not be enough to stop him. But you,” she said. “The Valley Sage and her Embers…”
Linn grimaced at the term. “We’ve got a Rockbled, too,” she reminded her. “Others have truly rued the day they’ve forgotten that one. And a hound of Last Lake.”
The queen nodded.
“I will speak with the others,” Linn said.
“You mean Kole,” the queen said. She searched Linn’s reaction, and Linn had the impression that perhaps it had been no coincidence that she had been the one to see the queen in her frozen garden. “The Ember does not like our kind.”
“Many have good reason for that,” Linn countered. “Especially in the Valley.”
The Sage did not argue.
“Speak with him, then,” she said. “Though I wonder if he is willing to see new ends.”
Linn did not say that she was thinking the same thing—that Kole was so bent on killing the Sages that he wouldn’t stop to consider the possibility that those with the power to doom the world might be the ones best made to save it.
They went back the way they had come, the iron door shutting behind them sounding to Linn like secrets kept. She pictured the green door of Towles’ bathhouse at Last Lake and swallowed down the guilt that came with it, wondering if it were truly deserved.
Linn glanced back and smiled wanly at the other woman—and she did seem a woman, now, and not some being of immeasurable power—before returning to her chambers. She saw something in her look that gave her pause.
“What is it?” Linn asked.
“I sense him about you,” she said. She did not step closer, nor did she elaborate, but Linn knew of whom she spoke.
“Uhtren.”
The queen nodded. “There is more of him in you than you know.”
Linn didn’t know how to respond.
The queen smiled in a seeming attempt to put Linn more at ease. “Whatever you think of my kind,” she said,
looking up at the white tower that glittered with all its frost beneath the light of the moon that had retaken the sky. “Whatever your companions think, we can be shepherds just as readily as we can be destroyers.”
“But you can be destroyers,” Linn said.
“We.”
Linn swallowed.
“And besides, Linn Ve’Ran,” the Sage said with a pointed look, “you don’t give me enough credit. I’ve seen Embers fight. If ever there was a thing made to destroy…”
She let it linger, but before Linn could turn on her bare, freezing heels and conjure a waiting current to bear her back up to her high balcony, the Sage spoke again.
“Valour is close,” she said. “But he won’t attack yet. He is … waiting for something. Planning something.” She shook what looked to be a chill. “Explore the mountain,” she said. “Speak to the people of this land. Learn their names. If you do not fight for me, perhaps you and yours can take comfort in fighting for them. They are the folk the world over who will fall if the Eastern Dark succeeds.” Linn nodded. “And after that, have Captain Fennick bring you to the training yard.”
Linn made as if to speak. “I would not presume to teach you to fight,” the Sage said. “I know you know that well enough. My knights have told me as much, more in what they haven’t said than in what they have. Tundra in particular.” Linn smiled. “But if we are to turn back Valour and whoever he brings with him, we must learn to fight as one.”
“You speak as if it won’t just be him and the Shadow girl,” Linn said.
The Frostfire Sage wore a curious expression that Linn couldn’t quite read. “We shall see,” she said. “Besides, maybe it will improve Kole’s estimation of me if I give him a shot at a living, breathing Sage.”
“Careful,” Linn said with an easy smile. “The last time he had such an opportunity, he nearly made the most of it.”
The Sage laughed.
“There is, of course, another reason to play a few games of the martial variety,” she said. “What better way for you to learn to use that power you’ve got flowing within you—your real power—than for me to teach you, sister?”
Linn smiled, swallowing past the sudden lump in her throat. “Until tomorrow, then.”
The Sage watched her move back into the center of the frozen yard with its red-leaved trees. She called up the wind, conscious of the Sage’s eyes at her back, but she rode it steadily enough, and let it drop her back onto the inner side of the balcony before dismissing it like a summoned servant. She only knew she had guessed right when she saw her abandoned boots at the foot of the unkept bed and the glint of the great silver war bow leaning against the far wall.
As she lay down to sleep, she didn’t think of the distant, low drone she had heard before, nor the ripping and pulling of that other world next to their own. Instead, she thought of the dead man she had seen in his tomb of Nevermelt. She pictured the iron door as a green one, and wondered what Kole would think if he knew.
The world, Linn knew, was built on choices. Why did the worst ones always come to her?
That is what she will unleash.
The words echoed in Shadow’s mind as she stood a stone’s throw from the melted cave’s entrance, out on the wind-blasted sheets of ice. The direction of her gaze was east. East and north, where she could just make out the shadowed towers of the palace across the drifts and before the swells and crests that marked the frozen waves of the once ocean. The northern mountain range that speared the surface of the world like fangs separated them from whatever barren white nested in the valleys and clung to the cliffs there, where falcons flew.
To the south, the Quartz Tower had been reduced to a jagged tumble of rubble, its defenders reduced to nothing more than black specks in the night that, if they were lucky, might glitter a bit beneath the morrow’s sun. Shadow did not like this place. She did not like this land. It was cold enough to be uncaring, and detached enough not to be cruel. It was a land of false jewels and—if Valour was to be believed—false gods.
If the Shadow Kings spoke truthfully—and Shadow very much doubted they did—there might be a true one heading their way soon enough.
“You’ve been thinking more than usual.”
Shadow did not turn toward the Sage, but rather allowed him to come up next to her, near enough to converse and far enough to dispel any illusion of warmth or comradery. It was these little battles Shadow delighted in winning, even if their worth came to naught in the end.
“Interesting times,” Shadow said. “Boring times.”
Ray Valour looked at her curiously. She did not meet his eyes. It was unpleasant for her to look at him lately. The face she had known as T’Alon Rane’s seemed to fade more each day, the swarthy skin and amber eyes turning a bit more pale and a bit more purple. His ears, which had been small and flat, had elongated. His brow, which had been short and in keeping with his hooked nose, now widened and grew taller, and the tip of his nose was turned up. His hair, which remained jet black, now bore an oily sheen that it hadn’t before. It was as if the two had become one, but the Faey-like creature the Eastern Dark had been appeared to be taking over, and soon, Shadow knew, Rane’s façade would be lost completely.
They stood in a silence only the wind filled as it made chimes of the scattered ice dust and refrozen melt. The sheet beneath their feet was clear as mirrored glass and reflected the stars—a beauty made of the Sage’s destruction. How ironic, that Valour’s fiery missile had made something beautiful. Shadow was nearly moved.
“What of our new companions?” Shadow asked, and now she did turn, her eyes moving past Valour’s and angling back toward the blue cave at their backs. It was dark, with nothing but the suggestion of red in the center that might have been smoldering coals.
“Resting,” Valour said without inflection. “They must recover their strength. I do not know what roads they took from the World Apart to get here, but it wasn’t the work of rifts. They have retained more of themselves than the Sentinels of the past. It is a … curious thing.”
Shadow considered him. He was concerned.
“Is it true?” Shadow asked. Valour regarded her.
“Which part?”
“That the Last God is real? That the Night Lords overthrew him and took that dark realm for themselves?” Shadow sneered. “All the powerful, deadly things you called to in order to sort out the mess you began by opening the door in the first place. You learned to fear the power of the Night Lords early, Valour, as soon as you called them into the deserts to deal with your red brother. Your folly doomed him just as it doomed that falcon in the southern vale. Powerful enemies who could’ve been powerful allies in times such as these.”
The Eastern Dark considered her dispassionately.
“You do listen,” he said, and smiled.
“Always.”
“Such is the way with power, my dear Shadow,” he said. He looked back toward the cave, and it was difficult to read his expression. “I thought I knew of the threats that realm held. I thought I knew the power of the Night Lords, watching them from afar. I thought them mindless beasts, all rage and violence. They are that,” he swallowed, “but they are so much more. I still don’t know how Pevah,” he wrinkled his face at the name Shadow did not know, “managed to ensnare the one, and I’ll never know how Uhtren managed to kill three in the southern passes.”
“The third got the last laugh,” Shadow said. “She corrupted him with the hearts he stole, squirreled away in his tiled citadel—a crime the Embers hold you accountable for still.”
“I am accountable,” Valour said, surprising her. He actually sounded, if not regretful, then displeased. “I didn’t set that darkness on the Valley, but I saw it come about in any event. I saw the opportunity. Cull the wheat from the chaff. Allow the Embers to grow strong so that I might band them together—my bright swords—and use them against the coming darkne
ss.” He cast her a sharp look. “Yes, the darkness I called.”
He sighed. “I did not foresee that Reyna would be among the last, that this cursed world would take its gifts back when they needed them most.”
“What of the Valley Faey?” Shadow asked, and Valour shot her a glare that stoked her already-piqued curiosity. “That land has begun to make new champions of the Emberfolk.”
“The Dark Kind, the Night Lords, the Shadow Kings,” he tossed his head, “and even this god of which they speak—some magician, most likely, no different than I—will always fear a glowing Everwood blade more than a healer’s touch.”
“Their folly,” Shadow said, feigning indifference. “Seems they can do a lot more than that, judging by what the Sage girl said at Center. Judging by what you told her.”
Valour did not answer, nor did he strike her down. Instead, he smoldered, but soon his smoldering cooled. Shadow did not think anything could stay hot in this land. Not even an Ember in all his rage, though she had learned to keep her distance from that. She still remembered the way her skin had popped and sizzled when Kole Reyna had made for her. He was fast, violent. He had a killing mood about him that the others lacked—all but for the spear-wielder. Shadow licked her lips. She looked forward to having another go at them, though she feared that Valour’s new path would sooner have them join forces than continue to fight over misdeeds both sides would do better forgetting.
“How did you not see it coming?” Shadow asked.
She cared, and she hated that she cared. In truth, she was afraid. Not of the World Apart. She thought perhaps she might fit better in that place than in this one. But she hated the Shadow Kings just as much as anything else, and she hated that there were beings with intent in that land of darkness and dread. She thought perhaps she could slip in through one of the rifts Valour opened, or one of the scars the Shadow Kings spoke of. She thought she could climb some obsidian mountain and sit herself in a jagged throne atop the summit, and lord over things more wicked than her and less cunning.
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