The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “I look forward to yours,” she returned, but Linn wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t happy with the way things had gone here today, and Kole couldn’t blame her. What sort of a sparring session left a queen’s ancient sword shattered and two champions left in states sorry enough that they might need more than a good night’s rest to recover?

  He looked across the short span to where their hosts stood clustered and found himself beginning to move in that direction. He had to speak to Elanil before this went any further. He had to apologize, if it came to that, even though a better part of him delighted in the emphatic displays both Jenk and Misha had put on. Embers of the Valley indeed.

  “Kole Reyna,” she said in that carrying voice. Kole stopped in his tracks before he had gone much beyond Linn and Shifa. “I believe you are already acquainted with Gwenithil.”

  The Sage was watchful, indeed. Kole supposed you didn’t live to be as old as her without being observant. Every detail. Every moment and how it turned.

  The Blue Knight who had stopped him falling to the hard clay just an hour before stepped forward, seeming more reluctant than the others. Kole couldn’t say it was fear on her face, but something had her shaken.

  “We need to fight as one to stop the Eastern Dark,” Kole said, though he found his legs carrying him into the center of the yard. Gwenithil stayed just a few feet in front of the Sage. “Surely you won’t let Gwen fight an Ember without your support, seeing how the last pair of contests went.”

  Tundra stepped forward with an emphatic, almost childlike stomp. To Kole’s surprise, the queen did not stop him. The look on her face had shifted, changing from bemused to tight.

  “True enough,” she said, moving between the hulking Tundra and the more slender Blue Knight to form the prow of a three-pointed ship. “Valour has allies.”

  “The Shadow,” Kole said. “We know.”

  “Boy,” the queen barked it out, and Kole could not help feeling cowed. Her teeth were showing, now. “Allies was the word. Think on it, and think on how you will fare without us beside you on the ice when they come for us.”

  “When they come for you, you mean,” Kole replied evenly. He felt his heat rising in spite of his half-hearted effort to stamp it out.

  “If I die,” the queen was nearly chewing her lip, “the world dies with me.” Her look softened, too quickly for Kole’s liking, as if she were playing the part of an anger she didn’t feel. “But then, you already knew that, for that is why you have come, is it not? To ensure the Eastern Dark—wicked as he is—does not get what he wants?”

  “That’s a part of it, to be sure,” Kole said, leaving out the fact that he hadn’t yet decided if he would kill her as well. He suspected she knew that. There was a reason she hadn’t coaxed him down into the pink-petaled courtyard in the starlit reaches of the night. “I’m under no illusions that we can tackle this threat alone. But,” he nodded at Cress and Pirrahn, “that can be turned around and faced the other way, you see.”

  “Let’s see,” the queen said. “Let’s see what the bright and bold leader can do.”

  Kole turned to the others. Shifa was standing straight, eyes wide and mouth clamped shut. “Linn?” She blinked at him. “What do you say?”

  “It seems your Ember friends hold you in the highest esteem.”

  Linn blinked at the queen. It seemed strange to her that she suddenly had a name. Elanil. It hearkened back to a time Linn had never known. A time before the Embers in the Valley.

  Then she blinked at Kole. She thought it a jest at first, but Kole continued to eye her steadily, as if there could be no clearer answer than to select her as the leader of their company. She thought there was something else in the move, and searched Kole’s amber eyes in an attempt to discover what it was.

  Perhaps he had seen her in the courtyard with the queen, walking hand in hand with the Frostfire Sage, or close enough to it. Maybe he wanted to see how close the two had become in so short a time. Or maybe there was something else. She saw his hands twitching, veins standing out behind the knuckles and one beginning to burrow its way down his temple where his long black hair wasn’t hiding it. Kole wanted to fight. He wanted to fight very badly.

  Which was why he was trying to do everything in his power to keep from doing it.

  “Fine,” Linn said, stepping out onto the clay with Kole. She faced the queen and her Blue Knights—the two who hadn’t been reduced to shaking heaps leaning on the rock borders at the edges of the bowl. If the only way to end this growing madness was to join it, she would do so.

  The queen should know better.

  Linn called to the wind. She had teased it in the courtyard and answered its whispers every hour of every day now, but she hadn’t called it fully in some time—not even when she fought with the Blue Knights above the black shelves. It stirred up the driest clay on the surface and spun it, forming a fine pink mist around her, an approximation of her own Ember fire. The sky was already darkening with the threat of an evening storm, and Linn felt the electricity that had yet to be birthed. All it needed was a little coaxing.

  “Impressive control, for one so young,” the queen said, watching Linn’s preparation. Her eyes seemed almost hungry, and though she no longer held the hilt of a steel blade, her right hand was clenched into a fist.

  “Just us, then?” Linn asked. She was gritting her teeth in concentration, but the longer she held the swirling swath of earth and air, the easier she felt with it.

  “Your friend seems so eager,” the queen said. Tundra slid one of his studded boots forward, his look less hungry and more murderous. Linn felt Kole’s heat tickling the nape of her neck as it mixed with the cloak of swirling wind she’d gathered about her. But it was another who stepped forward to take on the challenge.

  “You will not face them again,” Baas said. His voice was flat, almost matter-of-fact. Tundra slid his eyes to the Riverman.

  “We have no quarrel.”

  “Is that what we’re doing here?” Linn asked, fixing her eyes on the queen. The female Blue Knight, Gwenithil, seemed as uncomfortable as Linn was with the whole affair.

  “We are testing—”

  “Testing what?” Kole cut in.

  “Limits,” the Sage answered without hesitation. “No doom will befall us in this red bowl, among friends. That I promise you. However, if we step out onto those frozen wastes without knowing what each can offer—where each will fail,” she glanced at the seated Misha and Jenk, the former of whom frowned at the slight, “then we may as well watch as the world falls apart. For surely it will, if Valour claims me.”

  Baas seemed unconcerned with the Sage’s words. He moved to stand beside Linn, reached up and over his back and lifted that huge stone shield from its metal hooks like Linn might lift a babe. He held it before him and began to walk toward Tundra.

  Kole stepped up on Linn’s other side and drew his Everwood knives, and there was a close rumble of thunder Linn hadn’t meant to call, though she knew it was her doing.

  “All for one,” the queen said, nodding appreciatively at Baas. She looked to Gwenithil. “Three against three. A fair fight, if ever I’ve seen one.”

  Whatever misgivings the Blue Knight held vanished at her queen’s command. She stepped forward, tall and straight, and held out her hand. The air went milky, but instead of forming spiked gauntlets or a long, shimmering spear, she conjured a sickle, sharp on both ends. It was a crude-looking implement, and Linn did not think it was intended for close combat. She reached around behind her back and touched the silver grain of her bow, bringing it around as she bent her knees and fingered the string.

  Tundra’s face, which held a tinge of fear, melted into something much different as Baas’s path showed no signs of slowing. His eyes, Linn thought, went a shade darker, and the atmosphere around him seemed to shift. It was almost imperceptible at first, but it was there, and it, too, seem
ed darker than the strange shimmering the other Landkist of the north prompted.

  Linn heard Shifa growling to the side.

  “Stay, girl,” Kole intoned. The hound did as he bade, but did not cease her complaint, which was aimed squarely at the hulking knight in all his golden splendor.

  Baas’s slow, steady walk turned into a faster one, and just before he reached the simmering, boiling Tundra, it turned into a sprint. Kole flared his blades to life and darted ahead so fast the flash of it blinded Linn momentarily. She stepped back to catch her bearings, unsure how best to proceed.

  She saw Baas reach Tundra, shield covering his lead shoulder and much of his bulk like a battering ram. She thought he would kill the Blue Knight, who had yet to call a weapon of his own. Right before the Riverman struck, the Blue Knight stretched his arms out to his sides, balled his blue hands into fists, and Linn saw that same clear white armor slide over them with impressive speed.

  They met with a force that jarred their surroundings, shaking red pebbles on the surface and shaking Kole from his racing path for a moment. Baas’s back was to her, but Linn saw him stopped dead in his tracks. His back tensed and heaved with effort, but his boots began to slide back, digging shallow trenches into the clay as Tundra caught his shield with nothing but his imbued hands and put his unnatural might into a grinding push.

  There was a yell and Linn looked to her left. She saw the long, narrow shard Gwenithil had held follow a low, shallow arc, moving with frightening speed toward Kole. The Ember showed no signs of slowing, and for a moment, Linn held an image of him impaled on the end of the missile. At the last second, he spun, the bolt scoring a silver streak into one of the ribs of his black armor. On he charged.

  Gwenithil, however, was far from done. Before Kole reached her, Ember blades bared and burning, she shot to the north, running faster than the other Blue Knights had. Kole skidded to a halt before the queen, tossed her a wild, suspicious look that she only regarded with dispassion. He planted himself on the balls of his feet and one hand, fingers splayed in the clay, before streaking toward the Blue Knight. She greeted his pursuit with another shaft that he dodged, and another, and another. Soon, the field of clay was littered with translucent spikes that appeared like icicles sticking from the earth and growing in reverse.

  Linn saw it all happening. She saw the Blue Knight retreating, legs churning beneath her. She saw her hands working, rising up and beginning their forward path before the shafts had even been called into being. She conjured spear after spear, and Kole was using all the speed he had, his blades dimming as he concentrated the heat into the blood and fiber of his legs, bunching them and making them stronger, quicker. The air was hazy around him, leaving behind a wavering veil that looked like a clear river passing through the air, as if from another realm. He would reach the Landkist, Linn knew. But would he do it before one of those bolts found their mark?

  She heard Baas grunting with effort and saw that Tundra was trying to rip the stone shield from his grasp. The Riverman looked as if he might give, and Linn swung her bow in the direction of the struggling pair. She didn’t have a clear shot at the Blue Knight. A torrent of wind would blanket them both, and she didn’t dare call down a lightning strike with Baas in the way.

  As it turned out, she didn’t need to. Not yet, anyway. Just as he seemed about to give completely, Baas slipped the hold of his shield from his left hand to his right. With the other, he reached down, gripped Tundra by the heel, scooped and heaved. The Blue Knight fell with a boom, and Linn heard Misha give a cheer from her vantage.

  Baas followed the move by raising his shield high above his head, bathing Tundra in a doom-filled shadow, and Linn swallowed and sent her cloak of wind and clay into a faster spin, thinking she might have to strike Baas after all. But Tundra was faster than he looked. Much like Baas, his bulk belied his dexterity, and his muscles, though large and knotted, moved with a quickness of reflex that tricked the eyes to witness. He rolled and kicked at one of Baas’s planted legs, and the Riverman went down.

  Tundra followed him, leaping atop him and wasting no time in bringing those armored fists down in a hail that beat upon Baas’s stone shield like harbingers. Linn thought to take her chance, but a shouted warning called her eyes back to the front. She gasped and rolled to her left as a blue-white flash streaked past her with a trailing roar. It sounded like the wind of a blizzard, and as Linn tracked its path behind her, she saw the cone strike the black rock at the base of the mountains with a hollow, ghostly sound. It plastered a swath of the stone with a frosted sheen inches thick. It was rough and not at all perfect like the Nevermelt of the queen’s palace above. It was a wild thing and full of all the rage of the north. The true north.

  Linn looked up and saw the Frostfire Sage standing with one palm stretched out, facing the place Linn had been standing. Her face, which had been blank, was now stretched into a smile that suggested a private thrill, and her eyes found Linn’s, unblinking.

  “So be it,” Linn whispered.

  She regained her feet and turned her bow on the Sage, trying to ignore the flashes of amber light as Kole carved razor bolts from the sky or smashed through the growing field of Nevermelt blades that littered the bowl. Baas bashed his forehead into Tundra’s and rolled the Blue Knight off him, and the two gained their feet and began to exchange blows—Baas with his shield and Tundra with his coated fists—that shook the ground and made the loose gravel dance.

  Linn called to the wind again and found it eager to heed her. It whipped around her body and she bent her back leg, letting her knee rest on the giving ground. She kept her front foot planted and let the tail of wind scoop up as much of the grit and gravel as it would before she pulled the string back, feeling the torrent pause for the briefest spell and follow her hand, like the inhalation before the unleashing of a hurricane.

  “Go.”

  She released the string and lost the sound of its thrum to the rush and then the howl of the shaft. It was as long as the queen’s beam had been, and just as fast. Linn stood and swung her bow down to her side, clenching her fist around the silver wood as she watched the impending clash.

  The Sage’s eyebrows raised as the shaft of wind and gathered earth neared. She swung her open palm over and Linn saw another blue-white flash as the Frostfire Sage called another beam of what could only be her namesake to greet Linn’s assault. The torrent of wind met the space just before the Sage’s glowing hand with a fury. It parted around the Sage. Linn could see its path because of the mist of clay it had donned as a skin.

  The queen gritted her teeth, giving Linn some small measure of satisfaction at having made her work, but it wasn’t enough, and as soon as Linn’s blast ended, the Sage stepped forward quick as could be and struck her other palm forward, sending another jet of ice and magic in her direction.

  Linn couldn’t help but yell as she dove again, hitting the soft clay hard and feeling it crack beneath her as she rolled. She heard the beam strike the spot where she had stood, and then heard the strange crackle coming closer. She sucked in a breath as the Sage kept this beam fed and swung it toward her, and Linn ran as if her life depended on it. She heard the sheet of frost coating the ground with a sound that reminded her of splitting coals in a fire.

  Frostfire.

  Linn could hear it getting closer, could feel the sting of it through her breeches as she sprinted. Just a matter of months ago, despite battling the monsters of the World Apart, Linn would not have believed a thing like frostfire existed, never mind the Sage who wielded it. The Sages were figures from stories and tales. They were the gods of the world, so detached, so seemingly apart, that they could just as readily be falsehoods as amalgamations of all the great heroes and mighty villains of old. Stories with which parents explained the dark and bloody ways of the world to their children. Stories with faces indistinct and indifferent. Faces of passionate rage and unearthly wiles.

 
But Linn was at the heart of those stories, now. She was a part of one. As she ran in the grip of fear from an immortal being she had dared to call ally, she saw the brilliant blue-and-orange battle between Landkist directly before her. She shot into the field of tall, Nevermelt blades and heard them shatter behind her just as she heard them shatter ahead as Kole batted them aside or broke them with his burning blades as much as his aura of heat. She saw him leap skyward and come down like a comet in the place Gwenithil had been, and saw the fear in the knight’s eyes as she began to realize what it was like to face an Ember of the Valley. The mightiest Ember of all.

  A fear Linn understood well as she watched Kole’s eyes burning brighter with every stride, saw the milky haze around him turn seemingly permanent shafts of ice and magic to pools that soaked the clay and turned it to a sticky paste. The sound of rushing, burning and cracking ceased behind her and Linn skidded to a halt and spun to face her attacker.

  She marveled, seeing that the Sage hadn’t moved from her place. Linn focused her eyes, felt the ache as they strained ahead. She had run nearly to the northern edge of the bowl, but using her keen sight, she could see the Sage smiling that calm, infuriating smile. It filled her with a bit of the fire Kole must have felt.

  There was a trail of white frost with crystalline ridges, like a submerged drake’s tail, covering a wide swath from where she had been all the way to the field of glittering spikes she stood among now. A shadow passed over her, making Kole’s fire burn all the brighter as his own fight took him to the west. Linn thought it was the coming of night even sooner than she had expected, and then she heard—felt—the rumble of thunder as if it had come from her. She looked up into the sky and saw a black cloud with blue streaks, ever-shifting, ever-changing.

  Charged and waiting, and for her.

  When she looked back toward the Frostfire Sage, she saw that her palms were glowing once more. Instead of sending another beam toward Linn, she raised them up above her head and conjured great, jagged spheres. They swirled and flickered with that blue light, but they were encased with frosted spikes, like the heads of flails.