The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “It is hard to hold any responsible in times such as those,” Luna said, taking a sip from a small stone cup before filling theirs. Kenta did not seem to agree, and Luna sighed as she finished filling his cup. “Fine, then. It is hard to hold any innocent. It comes to the same in the end.” She looked back to Iyana. “Perhaps Sen’s father was bearing arms and passing through lands too close to the Fork,” Luna said. “He never said, as far as I know. Perhaps his mother had gone home and they had followed after.”

  “Home?” Iyana asked. She looked to Kenta, but he seemed just as confused as she was.

  Luna frowned from one to the other. “You mean you didn’t know?” She set her cup down on the grate with a scrape. “Sen’s mother was of the Fork. She was Rockbled.”

  It should not have come as a major revelation to her, but it did. Iyana had known little about Sen. She had assumed him to be one of the Emberfolk. Now that she remembered him, however, called his face and form up in her mind, she saw the little things. A jaw that was more squared than the rest of them, and eyes more rectangular and less oval. His brow had been smooth enough to suggest flatness, and his shoulders, though bony, were wide-set and broad. He was strong. She remembered that. Much stronger than most among the caravan, though the Faeykin usually held the bearing of the Valley Faey, most of whom—Tirruhn being an exception—seemed slender and corded in the place of powerful.

  “The Valley Landkist are different from those in the wider world,” Luna said. “For many reasons that you already know, and for one somewhat obvious point you might not have considered.”

  “Their appearance,” Kenta said, nodding.

  “Of course, we are each blessed with our own brands of beauty,” Luna said, winking at Iyana. “But,” she reached out across the gray smoke and Iyana gave her her hand. “Different shades of milk, no?” Luna pulled her hand back and traced the contours of her angular face. “My cheeks may be a bit more pronounced than yours, my eyes a tad more canted, but a quick glance would sooner have one of your own calling you ‘Faey’ than ‘desert-born,’ no?”

  Iyana nodded, absently running her fingers along the tips of her ears. “I never thought of it that way before.”

  “Such a thing makes our blood lineage almost impossible to trace,” Luna said, taking another sip. “The Valley Landkist are old. Older than all the rest, perhaps. That’s our best guess. Long before the Rockbled began pulling stones large enough to build towns atop the sucking earth, and before the Ember fire burned in the north …” She included Ceth in her sweep. “Maybe even before the Skyr owned the skies farther on, the Kin of Faeyr were born, and some born gifted.

  “I am not surprised Sen didn’t tell you of his mother,” she said, and her look was difficult to read. “It must have been difficult for him to parse on his own, never mind those who might judge his deeds and misdeeds and trace a waiting path to their source. So much comes from a mother’s loss.” She gave a sad shake.

  “Kin of Faeyr,” Ceth said, his voice sounding rough from lack of use. He often went so long without speaking that Iyana forgot what he sounded like. Luna regard him expectantly. “I thought you were Faeykin.” He frowned.

  “Ah,” Luna said, inclining her head toward the Emberfolk across the grate. “A function of their misunderstanding, I fear. And one we never did much to correct.”

  Iyana looked to Kenta, who shrugged, drawing a short laugh from Luna.

  “Kenta was never as fond of listening as he was of speaking,” she said, and Kenta smiled, taking the jibe in stride. “Of course, he is quieter these days.” She looked at Kenta with such a sad fondness that it nearly pulled Iyana from her track.

  “I thought the term was one that belonged to all of the Faey,” Iyana said. “Kin of Faeyr.”

  “It is,” Luna agreed. “We do not have a name for our Landkist, Iyana, except for the first name.” When she frowned, Luna smiled. “Did you think the term ‘Landkist’ dropped out of the sky? There was always a first, and we named ours thus. Blessed by the World. Chosen. Landkist.”

  “I always thought the Sages named—”

  Luna nearly spat out her tea and Iyana’s heart skipped a beat. She feared she had insulted the woman, but as her hacking calmed some, it ended with a bitter laugh.

  “The Sages—most of them—never even knew how to describe themselves, never mind the champions that grew from the lands they would have ruled.” Her eyes took on a different light, then, and Iyana felt cowed seeing it. “But they never ruled this land. Never. Not even the White Crest, whose name was Uhtren.”

  Luna waved a hand, dismissing the topic as less than vital. “Do not bother me with the Sages’ collective folly, and do not bore me to old anger with their ignorance. There were Landkist long before them, and there will be Landkist long after them. It is a fool who discovers such a treasure as power and thinks himself the first to do it.”

  “A mighty fool,” Kenta put in, and the look Luna turned on him gave Iyana the impression that it was an old argument, and one that would do none of them well to revisit.

  “The Landkist were born in great numbers following the Sages’ folly,” Luna said, her tone brooking no argument. “And I do not think it was Her will that we be used as playthings or soldiers in their private war. A war that will end, just as all of them end.”

  “With us doing nothing to help it along to its ending?” Kenta sneered, and Iyana thought she saw some evidence of their split—a willing one, however sad it might have been.

  Luna turned another motherly smile on Iyana. “We are all Kin of Faeyr, Iyana Ve’Ran,” she said. “Faeyr means life, literally and in all the other ways that matter and do not. And kin. Well, go back far enough, and we are all family, are we not?”

  Ceth seemed uncomfortable with the thought, but Iyana smiled to hear it. They sat in silence for a time, watching Ceth fuss with the coals below the grate and tilting their chins as children trundled past, running their sticks along the wall boards and giggling as they raced away from the strangers’ imagined rage. There was a high window set above the beams, and Iyana could see that the sky was already darkening. She could see the reflected glow of torches, or perhaps of Sen’s lonely pyre, and felt an inkling of guilt for not standing beside it longer.

  “Sen had a darkness in him,” Luna said, following Iyana’s gaze. “Some don’t do well with gifts such as ours. I am sure the same could be said for any among the Landkist of the wider world.” Iyana thought of Kole and tried to wipe it away. She and Linn had taken turns at worrying after him almost as often as he had worrying for them. He had earned the Valley’s debt many times over. Surely, then, he could earn their trust.

  “A darkness …” Ceth offered, picking up the thread Iyana had been more than happy to drop.

  Luna glanced at Iyana and Kenta before settling on Ceth. “Sen sought to cheat death,” she said. She said it simply and without inflection.

  “You are healers, after all,” Kenta offered weakly, but Luna didn’t react. Instead, she focused on Iyana, as if giving her the opportunity to refute what she had said.

  “Immortality,” Iyana said in a whisper. “Sen was after immortality.”

  Luna’s eyebrows raised, as if she hadn’t quite considered it in those terms.

  “Possibly,” she said. “And in that, he would do little to separate himself from the Sages. Still, it isn’t what I meant.”

  Iyana and Kenta shared a look, and Ceth frowned in confusion.

  “Perhaps ‘cheat’ is the wrong word to use in this case,” Luna said. She set her cup down. “Where it is the responsibility of the Faeykin to close wounds, heal hurts and keep their fellows safe, Sen sought mastery over life’s opposite. After all, things that can grasp onto the very tethers that make up a life should be able to do the opposite. Of course, those of us who fought in the Valley Wars know that fact well enough, but it’s never been something we in the Valley have
been proud of. Our northern cousins are a different matter entirely, if the elders are to be believed.”

  “Northern cousins?” Iyana asked, a bit overwhelmed.

  “The Faey originated in the Valley core, or so we believe,” Luna said. “But we didn’t all stay here. Have your folk never spoken of those in the wider world? The wilder tribes of Faey? We like to believe they are responsible for some of the darker tales of the Kin. Still, even those who settled in the far north and farther east had that darkness about them. They built crystalline towers and sat on thrones of mirrored glass, and things like those don’t get built without blood. Lots of it.”

  Iyana racked her mind trying to think of everything she thought she knew of the Faey. Stories from childhood. But then, Mother Ninyeva was usually the teller of such tales, and she kept them full of light and life—the gifts of the Faey Iyana had grown up hearing. Now, she thought of the memory of Tu’Ren that she had invaded not so long ago. She remembered feeling what he had felt, forging his way through the dark, damp forests of the southern Valley. He had been afraid, but not of the rebels he was hunting; rather more of those he sought to protect. The Faey.

  She had seen a body, the only marker that it had been a resident of Last Lake being the face, which was still intact. The rest of him had been turned inside out, burst like a sick shell, all meat and gristle. One of the Faeykin had turned her gifts against the hunters.

  “I saw it in the deserts,” Iyana said absently. She blinked herself back into the present. “I saw hints of that darkness in Sen, and I even felt a bit of it myself, when things got … tense.”

  “It is a sorry thing to have to turn the power of the Valley to such dark tasks,” Luna said. “But it is important we remember what we are capable of. Sometimes, it’s important to remind others.”

  Iyana didn’t like the thought, but she saw Ceth nodding along. Ceth, the man who had died and been brought back before her very eyes. The miracle had not come by her hand, nor Sen’s, who had been taken by the darkness of the World Apart as much as by his own bitter heart, but rather by one of the Sages themselves and his tricks of time.

  “Sen was a restless soul,” Luna said. “The elders say he believed they kept the true arts of the Faey from him. He was right, at least in part. But then, they feared what a mind like his might accomplish without a heart pure enough to wield it properly. Such a power is not to be taken lightly, nor its secrets expressed freely, even to one of our own.”

  “Have—” Iyana started and then stopped, but Luna nodded for her to continue. She smiled sweetly, putting Iyana more at ease. “Have you ever been forced to use that power? To cut tethers rather than mend them?”

  “Yes,” Luna said. She looked as if she were about to elaborate, but something held her back. Her next sentence became a swallow, and her eyes flickered down toward her empty cup, which she moved to fill. She took a swallow that nearly drained it again, and Iyana could see her eyes water from the heat. “Sen told himself a lie he could never grow into. He thought himself pure, his path righteous, but there was a taint in him. A blackness that might have run soul-deep. He did things during the Valley Wars that few among us could, and at an age most could barely raise a bow, never mind seize the life threads of others and bind them.”

  Luna shuddered at the thought, as if having her tether seized was a fate worse than death. Iyana could see why she thought it, and pushed the swell of guilt aside for what she had done in the deserts, needed or otherwise.

  “Sen could make a cat claw out its own eyes before he understood enough of the true art to close the thin cut left behind by a thorn or splinter,” Luna said. “But then,” she sighed, “who hasn’t lied to himself? Kenta here was never the soldier he thought himself to be.”

  “And you were never the healer,” Kenta said. He shot it back with a bit more venom than Iyana thought he intended. Luna took it in her stride, but her look cooled.

  “There comes a time when we all have to stop lying to ourselves,” Luna said, recovering some of her former good humor. “Besides, long as your healing took under my care, I don’t exactly remember you straining to leave that bed.” She raised her eyebrows as she finished, as if daring Kenta to say something to the contrary. He didn’t, even presented the ghost of a smile. Iyana did her best to wipe away its implications.

  “The young will ever carry the weight of the old,” Kenta said somberly, and Iyana did not quite understand what he meant by it. “Mother Ninyeva stopped a war with words we’d been fighting for a generation. Makes it all look rather wasteful.”

  Luna took on a wistful look. “Ninyeva could have been buried among us, but she was all fire in the end.”

  Iyana remembered her pyre at the lake, and the salt she had shed before it. “We did the best we could,” Luna continued. “All of the tribes. Even the Rivermen.”

  Kenta sneered but caught himself as Iyana watched him. He took a hurried sip, seeming embarrassed. It was still strange to her, hearing those of previous generations speak of the other Valley tribes. Iyana had grown up with a Rockbled of the Fork in their midst. He was stolid and stoic, yes, but she held no doubts about his goodness, even before he had played a large role in bringing her sister back down from the White Crest’s bloody citadel.

  “He was good in the end,” Iyana said. She felt defensive and certainly sounded it, earning curious stares from the others. “Sen, I mean. And I’ll hold to that,” she said, firm. “Sen knew what he was. He was an arrow poorly aimed and done so with murderous intent, but his soul wasn’t as black as you think. It was bright and beautiful. He showed it in the end. He chose his side, and it wasn’t that of death.”

  Luna regarded her for a long minute. She attempted to hide her scrutiny with another sip, but it did little to dull the effect. “I’d very much like to hear the full tale someday—of the desert road. Of the fight with the Eastern Dark.”

  “I’m sure your elders were watching,” Kenta said derisively. Luna shot him a glare that he waved off. “Always watching.”

  “We’ve endured just as much as you folk have,” Luna said. “The Dark Months have affected us all in this Valley. Uhtren’s corruption doubly so.”

  Kenta screwed up his mouth and the tension grew rather than faded. Iyana shifted uncomfortably while Ceth looked from one to the other, eyes a little wider than they had been before.

  “You have something to say, Griyen.” Luna said it as a statement of fact rather than a question. Kenta looked at Iyana sidelong and smiled disarmingly at Luna. It was tight. Forced.

  “Better said in private.”

  “There are no strangers here,” Luna challenged, smooth as milk and soft as silk while Kenta ground his teeth.

  “You do realize the Valley corruption was just a piece of a larger whole,” Kenta said harshly. “You do realize we’re now fully caught up in the War of Sages.”

  “We’ve been caught up in it ever since Uhtren fell to the darkness,” Luna said evenly. “Ever since he took the Dark Hearts for safekeeping. A thing we did not see, just as Mother Ninyeva did not see it. Not for a long while, while men and women fought and died under the talons of the Dark Kind.” She looked toward the wall Iyana guessed to be facing northwest. “There was a veil on that place. Has been for a long time. The Between was distorted around the peaks. We thought it the work of the Dark Kind. Bloody irony that it was our once guardian.”

  “You came out of the Eastern Woods following the Siege of Hearth,” Kenta said. His voice was low, and Iyana could see that he was working to keep control of it. “And we appreciate the aid you lent.”

  “But you wanted it sooner.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Kenta said, “Not now.” Luna winced. “I care about the path ahead. We’re on it, now. As you know, some of our most powerful Embers are out there now, searching for the Sages to—”

  “To what end?” Luna asked. Iyana thought to speak, bu
t Luna continued. “Chasing Sages from one land to the next, casting fire and death in one direction or the other. We survived the siege, Kenta, in case you forgot. Let the Sages burn themselves out in their private war. Sending the Embers out was foolhardy.”

  Kenta was silent for a space, and Iyana saw Luna’s wide eyes begin to twitch, her lips tremble. The woman feared she had gone too far. Said too much.

  “You speak of the War of Sages,” Kenta said, his voice even lower now. Considered. Falsely calm. “You speak of the greatest war our world has ever known as if it is a storm you can watch pass by.”

  “Aren’t they all?” Luna asked. Now she looked to Ceth and Iyana for support. “Aren’t all wars nothing more than storms of steel and flame?”

  “You had no trouble joining in the Valley Wars,” Kenta said, unwilling to drop the subject. “Adding your own steel to that one. Spilling your own blood, no matter your talk of life and healing.”

  “Monsters had faces at that time,” Luna said. “Names and families. It is because of that conflict that we have held ourselves from the larger one this long. We turned our gifts in the direction they should have been all along: inward. That war made Sen and his ilk, and killed plenty more before the world had a chance to make them what She would.”

  She paused, and her face changed, her expression morphing into what Iyana could only describe as pleading. “This war has no faces, Kenta. Its ending and beginning span the horizon, too far to see. To join it is folly. To fight it is doom.”

  Luna seemed shamed as she finished. She looked down at her cup, or rather at the quivering hands that held it. She took a steadying breath and sighed it out.

  “You’re right about one horizon,” Iyana said, halting. Luna turned suddenly tired eyes her way. “We don’t know how far back the conflict between the Sages goes. We just know it is far. Far enough not to matter anymore. But its ending is coming.”

  “How can you know that?” Luna asked. She sounded almost broken by the thought of such suffocating inevitability.