“What about you?” Kole asked.
The queen returned her gaze to the steep incline she had laid one silver-booted foot upon. It was the trough of a wave, and at the top, the salted foam curled back toward them, drenching the upper half in deep blue shadows.
She did not answer right away, but turned and looked back the way they’d come. Linn followed the direction of her gaze. Though they had traveled for the better part of the morning through a twisting maze of frozen cliffs and alternating hills and valleys, she could still see the shimmering jewel that marked the crystal palace. Linn focused. There, on the east-facing crenellations, she could see fur-clad soldiers standing with pikes and bows. There were three who wore golden armor and glinted blue in the first light of the day, which would not be up for long. The last defenders of a forgotten kingdom, clinging to the last rocks of a mountain range like a stubborn barnacle that did not know its time had come.
“He’s up there,” the Sage said, turning back. She extended one of her half-covered hands toward the crest of the frozen wave, twirling her fingers around, three covered in silver armor and two bare. Linn thought she could see the air distort slightly around them.
There was a splitting sound. At first, it sounded as if it were coming from far away, but the next crack was ear-splitting. Linn stepped back and Baas and Misha matched her. As they watched, a splintered crack marred the underside of the crest, and the whole top of the hill began to slide down toward them. Tundra and Gwenithil remained rooted in place, and Linn did not know if it was out of faith or expectation.
Either way, the queen pressed her foot a little more firmly into the frost, her eyes locked on the slab that was picking up speed as it slid toward them, gathering bouncing shards of frozen salt along the way.
“A pity you can’t help me with this out here,” she said. Linn didn’t know who she referred to until the Sage tossed a quick wink at Baas, who regarded her flatly.
Maybe she did it for effect. To demonstrate more of her power, but whether to her new companions or the Eastern Dark, it was impossible to say. The slab shattered, but rather than shredding them to ribbons in a hail of stinging shards, those too burst into a powder so fine it felt like mist that coated their skin and the hafts of their blades. The shattering made a hollow, croaking sound as it split itself and raced through the trenches, lost to the reaches in the east.
“Go,” she said, and started her climb. Linn passed Kole and hesitated before him. He nodded to let her know it was all right and then motioned to Jenk to join him. Misha made as if to follow them, but Kole shook his head.
“You and Linn make a good pair,” he said, and then, to her somewhat doubtful look, “remember the road out of the Valley?” Misha eyed Linn and shrugged.
“Your spear would just get wedged between the ridges anyway,” Jenk said, patting Shifa on the top of the head as he joined Kole off to the side.
The hound and the two Embers moved to the split between the two ridges, waiting for the Blue Knights to join them. Tundra and Gwenithil had already started up the rise after their queen, and Baas followed after without a word. Linn heard a pair of thuds behind her and turned to see Cress and Pirrahn moving over to join Kole and Jenk. They seemed reluctant, and though their wounds had already healed, she had no doubt they remembered well the Ember fire from the sparring yard.
“Luck,” Linn said to them. Jenk smiled, as he always did, and Kole simply turned and shot off into the deeper blue, Shifa hot on his heels.
The way up was easier going than Linn would have thought. She had brought her bow along with her and used it to steady her as Misha used the butt of her Everwood spear to do the same. The incline was dusted over with a sticky layer of salt that gave their boots purchase.
She heard the wind howling before they gained the top, and then it hit her full in the face, whipping her hair back and taking the sight from her eyes for a spell as it dried the tears in place. Misha cursed beside her and began to slide backward, and Linn reached out a hand and snatched the Ember by the elbow, steadying her. It showed how far they had come together that the proud woman raised no complaint.
Baas waited for them at the top. He held his shield in his left hand and reached out with his right, pulling Linn up the rest of the way as she pulled Misha up behind her.
“A wild place,” the Riverman intoned. Linn could only nod her agreement.
Linn did her best to shield them from the violent gusts. They had not walked so far from the crystal palace, but it seemed the air followed whatever currents the ocean had left behind in its stillness. She caught the tails and turned away the barbs the open expanse threw at them, twisted them around like so much coiling rope, and soon enough, they were walking unencumbered across the surface of the frozen sea, a pocket of gathered wind swirling around them, picking up some of Misha’s heat in its tow.
The blue shadows were nowhere to be found up here. Instead, the sun turned the salt to an approximation of snow, and though there were slopes and cracks all around them, the vast emptiness that spread out in three directions took on a uniform look that Linn already found unnerving for its deception. One false step, and she would go tumbling into a crevasse that might yet find the rushing, violent waters of the eastern sea. One careless stride, and the cap of a frozen wave might break off and crush her beneath its screaming, scraping mass.
The queen stood a short ways before them, long hair blowing in the wind she did nothing to protect herself from. She was flanked by Tundra and Gwenithil, the Blue Knights standing tall and uncowed in their golden armor. They stood just a stone’s throw before a gap in the ice, but Linn did not see what gave them their rigid demeanors until Misha stopped and brandished her spear, the air popping with the threat of coming fire. The scent of ozone teased Linn’s nostrils and made the gooseflesh rise on her arms.
Baas stepped forward, bathing them both in the sheltering embrace of his ever-present shadow.
Ahead, across the gap that was wider than Linn had at first surmised, a man of average height stood bedecked in black armor with red tips. It recalled paintings Linn had seen as a child. Stories from the deserts and the heroes that populated them. She had seen it before, she thought, and the one to whom it belonged, though this man could not be called the same.
T’Alon Rane still looked himself. His skin was dark, though it had grown lighter than the last time they had met. His hair was longer, and, if it were possible, even darker than it had been. His face was weathered and tough, like leather stretched in the sun, and his brow was stern, his eyebrows harsh and his lips fierce.
The wind picked up and an errant gust took his unbound hair up for a moment, revealing ears that did not belong to a man Linn had ever seen. They reminded her of Iyana’s pointed ears, though these were wider and pulled back, close against his temples. His cheeks seemed higher than they were before, and more gaunt, and his nose appeared more hawkish.
But it was his eyes that had changed the most. In the place of the smoldering red and amber she had come to know—a darker fire than Kole carried in his gaze—there was a violet like twilight burning in a glade.
There was nothing left of T’Alon Rane, the King of Ember. There was nothing left of the man they had fought in the Valley core, and fought alongside at Center. The man who stood before them was no man. No Landkist. This was the Eastern Dark. This was Ray Valour.
On the whole, Linn found him rather disappointing. Maybe she was just getting used to the Sages and their forms. Fight anything often enough, and it became familiar.
“Who are those two?” Misha leaned in to whisper. “The allies the queen spoke of?”
Linn was so caught up in examining the changes the Eastern Dark had made to his Ember host that she hadn’t fully noticed his new companions. They were two of the strangest beings she had seen, making the Blue Knights look rather mundane by comparison.
One was a slender female. She ha
d long, white hair that would have been beautiful, like morning snow, had the sight beneath it been different. Her skin, though blue, was darker than the Knights of the North, and where theirs seemed to glisten like gossamer or silk no matter the light, hers was like a drawn curtain, like ink a shade above black. Her eyes were not golden bursts, but red beads, and her teeth were filed to points. In the place of clothing, she wore armor, but as Linn focused, she saw the pores in the surface and could spot no seam between the black plates over her chest and the skin of her collar. In all, the stuff hardly covered her modesty.
“Bone?” Linn asked aloud. Baas grunted in the affirmative.
“What?” Misha asked, disbelief evident.
The other looked similar enough. He was a sick, sticky green, like the moss growing on the underside of a fallen tree. His eyes were deep enough to verge on brown, and in the place of long, flowing locks, his hair was shaved down to white stubble. His armor was less smooth than the female’s and full of knots and knobs, cuts and gashes. His fingers ended in filed blade points that looked like the teeth of Dark Kind, and above the bone caps of his knees, there appeared to be two jutting shafts of bone that looked like crude handles.
“Is this all of them, my queen?”
Tundra’s voice was low, but he put more force in it than he had to. The Eastern Dark did not rise to the challenge, only continued to focus on his counterpart. The one he had traveled across the world to kill, and in a body not his own. His strange, monstrous companions smiled, unconcerned with the Landkist’s bluster.
Elanil did not answer, and Linn began to walk to the right, following Misha’s lead. Baas started to lean forward, as if he might join the Sage and her royal guards. Instead, he moved parallel to Linn and Misha, keeping just in front of them, that great stone shield sweeping in a low pendulum that picked up a dusting of salt as he went. The blue female’s eyes tracked them. She seemed, if anything, amused at their garb, her bloody eyes sliding over their bodies, their faces and their weapons. She frowned as she took in the silver bow Linn carried absent an arrow to nock against its chord.
“Queen now, is it?”
The voice that emanated from T’Alon Rane’s throat made Linn stop dead in her tracks. There were shades of that low, sonorous voice beneath. A voice that projected strength and solidity. But there was a layer of crude oil laid atop it. It did not sound like the old man she had seen in that wooden fortress to the west, but rather like a younger version of the same. It was a voice that held a razor’s edge of danger, and a trickster’s scorn.
“Aye,” Tundra spoke for his queen. “You stand before Queen Elanil of the Eastern Sea, wretch. You stand before the last—”
“She won’t be the last of anything,” the Sage said, his violet eyes flicking toward Tundra quick as a striking serpent before settling back on his true quarry. “Not once the day is through. Not if the world she professes to protect is to endure. Isn’t that right, Princess?”
Linn watched Elanil take in her rival’s address, face a blank canvas, unreadable as only aged things can be. After a few tense moments, it broke into a manic grin.
“Oh, Valour,” she cooed, “how I’ve missed your … confidence.”
That put a grimace on Valour’s borrowed face. He suppressed it quick enough.
“There are no queens in this land,” he said. He nodded behind them, toward the mountains they had left behind. “No kings. No princes.” He emphasized the last, and a deadlier look crossed Elanil’s face than Linn had yet to see from her. “Nothing but lies nest here.” He looked at the Blue Knights as he spoke, but soon gave it up as futile. Instead, he fixed his attention on the three Valley Landkist, who had drifted farther from the opposite retinues and closer to the gap. Linn could make it over with the help of a conjured gust of wind, and she knew Misha would have no trouble clearing it with a burst of the fire in her blood.
Valour turned those deep, alluring eyes back on Elanil, and Linn followed the look. The queen’s eyes were wide. She stood with her feet wide set, fingers splayed, as if she expected an attack at any moment.
“How disappointed would he be in you, I wonder? The proud, handsome, dashing Prince Galeveth.” He spoke in the tenor of a serpent, smooth and teasing. “How ashamed, to see what you’ve been reduced to. My brother in arms. My once companion. My endless quarrel.”
“Reduced?” Elanil spoke with a voice that seemed augmented by some spell, or a trick of the wind, though Linn was the only one in present company who could call herself master over that art. “I am just as I have always been, dark one,” she sneered, spittle leaking from the corner of her mouth.
“Your knights are almost spent.”
“My knights attend me.”
“Your palace echoes with the silence of empty corridors.”
“My palace is the jewel of the north, and a herald of things returning to the way they should have been all along, before you started the war that’s consumed half the world in its ugly throes, and swept all these wayward children up into it.” She swept her hand out to indicate Linn, Baas and Misha.
“Ah,” he said, seeming to have come to something. “Then you have forgiven yourself.”
“There is nothing to forgive!”
“Is there not?” Valour’s voice rang out like a crack of thunder splitting the bright afternoon sky. Linn’s heart began to ram itself against the walls of her chest. Baas set his feet and raised his shield just a bit higher, the strange blue creature watching him all the while as the green focused on the Sage and her guardians. “Do not think to judge yourself innocent of our shared sins, Elanil,” he said, voice dripping with disgust. “The others are dead and gone. The Twins were a scourge on every land they visited. My Landkist saw to their end. The Sage of Balon Rael, your most bitter foe, was undone by greed. The Fox and the Blade went on their own terms, and with more honor than you or I will be able to muster before the end. The Eagle had grown fat on fell corruption in the southern nest of his—”
“A corruption you sent!”
“Aye,” the Eastern Dark said, nodding quickly. “Aye. A corruption I sent, to cleanse the world of our fell stink, of our rot. To stop what’s coming.”
“To save yourself!”
Linn didn’t like the manner the queen had taken on. She was angry, and she was afraid. The Eastern Dark, though outnumbered—at least in terms of appearance—was the picture of icy calm.
“Do you deny it?” Elanil stepped forward and Tundra reached hesitantly as if to hold her back from the chasm.
Linn found herself caught up in the Sage’s response, eager to see how he would answer the charge, though she knew she couldn’t trust it even if he said what she wanted to hear.
“We are not long for this world, Elanil,” he said, sidestepping the question, though saying enough in Linn’s estimation. “Let the children take it over. Let us spare those among us, if we can. Let us settle things between us, so that the river of time might flow on in this realm and forget our ilk ever walked its ways and dug its deepest wounds.”
The queen looked as if she might leap across the gap then and there, knock the dark mage down and rend him apart with nothing but her bones and fury. She straightened, once more at ease, or seeming it.
“You’re too late,” she said. She spoke as if the rest of them weren’t there, and though Linn did not know of what she spoke, the implications washed her with a knowing dread.
“What have you done, Elanil?”
“I have made a choice, Ray Valour. A choice that will save the world, or doom it.”
Linn recalled the prince lying in his forever chamber beneath the lake of Nevermelt in the queen’s courtyard. She remembered the feeling of cold that the place had emitted, like life turned around and made bitter. She felt foolish wondering who should be believed between a queen from the oldest sagas and a skulking sultan of darkness, crawled out before the end of thin
gs.
“Trust me,” Valour said. “You cannot control it. The World Apart is teeming with power, but it can only be guided, directed, never controlled.”
“You would speak—”
“From experience,” the Sage said. He turned toward Linn and the others once more. “Look at these lands,” he shouted, sweeping his arms out. “A frozen sea that frothed and churned not so long ago. A land full of glittering towers and archers to man them, lanterns swinging on silken threads to call its banners home.”
“War comes to all lands,” Elanil said.
“You Landkist of the Valley know the truth,” Valour said, taking a step in their direction. Linn felt Misha’s heat redouble. It was beginning to make her sweat. “The World Apart is coming. But we can stop it. Together, we can.” He jutted a thumb at his chest. “I am your enemy. I always will be. It’s a title I’ve earned and one I wouldn’t shed. Fear made a bastard of me. Hate a coward.” He took the same hand and pointed a finger at the silver-armored Sage across the way. “Ask your queen why the shadows grow so long in the east. Ask her why the ocean waves cease to crash. Ask her where brave Galeveth is buried.”
Linn knew the answer to the last. If she hadn’t, she’d likely dismiss everything the Eastern Dark had said. As it was, she didn’t know what to think.
“Maybe Kole was right,” she whispered. “Maybe they both have to die, to stop what’s coming.” Baas turned to glance at her from the corner of his eye. He raised his shield higher still, slid his foot back, boot scraping across the salted surface.
“Stop the endless riddles, at least,” Misha shot back.
“You are being used, children of the Valley,” the Eastern Dark intoned. “You are being lied to, sapphire souls,” he said to Tundra and Gwenithil. “For the root of her power is no longer bound to the world, but to the same place I got mine. She calls to it still, and it will be the death of you all, and the end of any new beginning that might have been for those who would come after you.”
The Frostfire Sage Page 56