The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  Linn frowned. “The Eastern Dark says he is trying to stop it as well,” she said. “The Convergence. He—”

  “My dear,” the queen clucked. “The place has marked him. I cannot tell you if it is the work of his arrogance, his mania or something else that finally convinced him that the rest of us had to die to put things right, but I know where I fall in my belief. The place has marked him, and when he is dead, it will relent.”

  “And if not?”

  Elanil’s look changed. It was subtle, but unmistakable. It was cold and fierce, like a winter wolf.

  “Then we will beat it back, and whatever it brings with it.” Seeing the effect the words had on Linn and the others, her expression softened ever so slightly. “My children, the worlds are very close now, ours and theirs. The Dark Months will continue to fall. Rifts will open, but the world will go back to the way it was. These will be fleeting, infrequent things. The stuff that make up stories passed down through the generations. It isn’t such a bad thing, to have terrors in the night. Terrors with which to build legends. Get children to sleep.” She paused. “But I promise you, the great scars will not come. The Forever Night will not fall on my lands,” she looked to Fennick, “nor any other. You Emberfolk have suffered greatly under a nightmare that approaches it already. Never again.”

  Heavy bootfalls from the front of the hall, and Tundra entered the chamber bearing a tall form wrapped in a shroud. He moved over to the queen and placed the wrapped form on the dais as gently as he seemed capable. The other Blue Knight took the pair of steps in a stride. He brought something to the queen. Exactly what it was, Linn couldn’t see.

  “My queen,” the knight prompted, bringing her wide eyes up and away from the still, shrouded form at her feet. He held up a golden chain that looked darker than his armor. There was a medallion hanging from the end of it. It was shaped like a crescent moon, and it looked bronze. It reminded Linn of Captain Talmir’s medal. The one Sister Piell of Hearth had presented to him following the siege. Uncannily like it.

  “What is it?” Jenk asked, curious.

  “Something to protect me,” the queen said distractedly as she looped the chain over her head and held it in her palm before letting it rest against her armor. Linn blinked. The crescent moon seemed to glow in the mix of torchlight and the blue light that emanated from the walls and pillars, and more. It was as if it held an inner fire.

  “Where did you get that?”

  In the rush of familiarity, it seemed Misha had entirely forgotten the form lying at the queen’s feet. She strode forward, ignoring the warning look Linn shot her.

  “I asked you a question,” the Ember said. Tundra and the other knights stepped forward, responding to her seeming challenge. Misha stood up straighter, lifting the butt of her spear from the ground.

  “What is it?” Elanil barked. “What troubles you now?”

  “Apart from everything that’s going on here?” Misha asked. She glared sidelong at Linn and then jutted a finger at the queen, and at the pendant she now wore. “Where did you get that?”

  “It is a relic from the old World,” Elanil said, frowning. Linn could see her fingers twitching. Her patience was wearing thin. “An object of the ancients. Even before me and mine. It comes from a time when magic was less a matter of happenstance. When it was not of the world’s choosing, or the Mother’s, as you desertfolk call Her, but of ours.”

  There was a rumble of laughter, deep and sarcastic. Linn didn’t recognize it until she turned to see Baas shaking his head, Jenk staring up at him from his place against the wall next to Shifa.

  “What has you in such a mood?” the queen asked, an edge entering her tone.

  “You speak of the Landkist as if they are beneath you,” he said. “You speak of this … old power, this magic,” he spat on the Nevermelt floor, “as if it is a thing to be missed. And yet, look at what the Sages’ meddling cost us. Look at all it has caused. Think on your folly before you speak of the majesty of the past.”

  Linn closed her eyes and turned back to the Sage and her knights. For a moment, she worried that the queen might kill him on the spot, or else force Linn, Misha, Jenk and Baas to kill her and half her kingdom before they were brought down.

  Instead, the queen’s face went through myriad emotions, most of which didn’t last long enough to settle, and many of which surprised Linn to see. Elanil looked down at the form at her feet with a profound sense of loss. Even regret.

  “We know of our mistakes, Landkist,” she said, almost too soft to hear. She looked to Fennick before any of the others. “We spent a long time trying to make it right.”

  “There is another like it,” Misha said, not losing sight of the object of her concern.

  “Yes, Misha,” Linn said. “We know of Caru’s star. It hardly seems import—”

  “The Bronze Star?” the queen asked. Misha’s eyes lit up and Jenk stood, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Misha nodded in answer and the queen gave a slight nod. “A mighty thing.” She held up the crescent moon. “And this one’s brother.” She met Misha’s stare. “I should like to see it, Ember. At the end of this.”

  She went back to examining the cut of metal. It didn’t look so grand to Linn, or so powerful. But she could not deny the way it glowed. The queen let it drop, where it clanged discordantly against the armor over her chest.

  “Move back,” she said. She stepped over the prone form on the dais, the tip of her boot catching on the edge of the rich gray shroud and pulling the corner over to expose the prince’s face.

  Linn walked over to Misha, who was staring intently at the prince’s body, and laid her hand on the Ember’s, guiding her back toward the wall. Captain Fennick joined them. His face had gone pale. He seemed even less sure of the situation than they were.

  “Your people are tucked away, Captain Fennick?” Elanil asked distractedly. The captain nodded but didn’t give voice to an answer. If she saw him, she didn’t acknowledge it, nor did she ask again.

  “What’s happening here, Ve’Ran?” Misha half-whispered, half-growled as Linn guided her. Jenk didn’t look nearly as disturbed as the Third Keeper of Hearth, but he watched Linn, waiting for her reply. Baas only rubbed absently between Shifa’s ears as the hound, now sitting up, bandaged and weary though she was, watched the Sage move into the center of the throne room.

  “They’ve been fighting the Eastern Dark longer than anyone,” Linn said. “When he’s … back,” she nodded at the prone form of the dead prince, “they’ll be able to stand against him, no matter what he brings.”

  “He’s dead, Linn,” Jenk said. “Unless I’m missing something.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew about this?” Misha sounded more hurt than angry, and Linn felt it like a shard in her heart.

  She nodded. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “If Kole found out, he might have acted. He might have started something—”

  “He might have been right to do so,” Misha said. Linn looked at Jenk, but the Ember of Last Lake wasn’t willing to defend her actions. Her inaction. Not yet.

  “Kole,” Linn started, fighting past the pain, “doesn’t trust himself when it comes to matters of the Sages. He … he left it to me, in so many words.”

  “Who left it to him?” Misha asked.

  “We all did,” Jenk said. Misha glared at him, but Jenk didn’t back down, only returned it, steady. Linn saw that Baas was nodding without looking at them. Magic of any kind bothered him—even, Linn guessed, his own. Whatever was about to happen here, it had a dark touch to it. Linn wouldn’t deny that. But what choice did they have? What options were left to them?

  “Kill her, if you’re so inclined,” Linn said, feeling frustrated and bitter because of it. Misha shook her head and looked back toward the Sage. She seemed to consider Linn’s offer for a moment longer than Linn found comfortable, th
e Ember’s knuckles blanching as she squeezed her Everwood spear. Ultimately, she let the matter drop, but Linn knew it wasn’t going to take much to get her fire up.

  She was counting on it as she watched the Sage stand in the center of the room, eyes downcast, fingers of both hands splayed and palms facing down toward the milky, frosted floor beneath her.

  “Why now?” Jenk asked. “Why not sooner?”

  “The Convergence,” Linn said. “She needed the World Apart close. Close enough to … augment her power.”

  “That sounds—”

  “Exactly,” Misha whispered. Linn watched Captain Fennick out of the corner of her eye. He stood on the other side of Baas. He was far enough that he might not have heard them, but Linn thought it unlikely. In any case, he didn’t raise a complaint. “How do we know she didn’t let the Eastern Dark live?”

  “What?” Linn screwed her face up. The queen moved back to her place atop the dais and turned to face the front of the hall.

  “She said the World Apart is tied to him,” Misha whispered, also watching the Sage closely. “If she killed him, she couldn’t do … whatever it is she’s doing.”

  “The worlds are close enough, now,” Linn said. “They were before, I expect. Maybe Valour was waiting for her to start this. To begin this ritual. It would be a perfect opportunity …” She looked around the room, and then up, her eyes working to penetrate the gloom.

  “Besides,” Linn said, bringing her eyes back down, “did it look like she was holding back out on the ice?”

  “No,” Misha allowed. “No, it didn’t.”

  “The Eastern Dark referred to ‘Him,’” Jenk said, voice low. “He warned us she was going to bring Him through. Do you think he was referring to the prince?”

  “Prince Galeveth, he called him,” Linn said. “Who else? It stands to reason he wouldn’t want her to do it. He struggled enough with her as it is. Against the lot of us. I can’t imagine he’ll do any better now, especially once we see what this one can do.”

  “It is wrong,” Baas said. He didn’t work to lower his voice, and Linn shivered as Tundra—standing just below the dais—stared daggers at him.

  Linn couldn’t blame him. It was all wrong. All of it. The dead prince. The Convergence. But then, plenty had been wrong in the world, especially in Linn’s. In the Valley, which had been ravaged by forces of darkness, it seemed the rest of the world had been spared and was teetering on the brink of now.

  There was a part of her—a dark part, buried so deep she did not think it could ever rise to the surface—that wanted them to see that darkness. The rest of the world. To experience it, if only to see what horror was. If only to put aside their petty differences long enough to fight a common threat. The Willows and the Raiths of the Emerald Road. Wend’s Gray People and the sycophants who raised their forts below the stone towers of the Sage of Balon Rael. Even in the Valley, the now-peaceful folk of the three tribes had taken to killing one another in numbers Linn did not know and did not want to know before they had true evil to fight.

  Perhaps it was better if the Frostfire Sage failed. Perhaps it was better if the Eastern Dark succeeded. Maybe a world at peace was impossible, and maybe the only way to have virtue across all lands was to plunge them into a darkness so cold and complete that they had no choice but to stoke the fire in each other’s hearts.

  “What if he was talking about someone else?”

  It was Captain Fennick, and their heads and eyes turned toward him as one. He seemed shamed to have spoken, and one of the knights close by gave him a stare that would have frozen the blood of a lesser man.

  Linn swallowed. “Then it’s better to have him here in the light than waiting at the edge of things. Here where we can see him.”

  “You sound like Kole,” Jenk said. Linn turned a wounded expression on him, though he didn’t seem to mean it in a bad way.

  Linn turned back toward the throne, and the silver queen who stood before it over the body of her king. Maybe Linn really did want some great beast to come. Some titan. Something to make sense of all the wrong in the World. Something other than the Sages. The powerful, vain, cruel, petty Sages.

  Linn hadn’t quite realized it before now, but as she watched the Frostfire Sage mutter words to some ancient poem—perhaps a spell—glowing palm aimed at the center of the glass floor, she realized that she found them utterly disappointing. Not revolting. Not awe-inspiring. Only disappointing. Less than the stories made them out to be. In her estimation, they were beings unworthy of reverence and unworthy of fear.

  The World Apart, however. The Dark Kind. That was a thing to fear. Those were beings to fight. Beings worthy of hate.

  “He should be here,” Linn said.

  “Aye,” Baas intoned.

  Shifa began to growl. It was a sound others might dismiss out of hand, but not Linn. Not the folk of the Valley. The hounds of Last Lake were immovable. They did not complain. They warned. They threatened.

  The floor began to break apart. It was as loud as cracking thunder, and the white splits ran across the surface of the ice near as fast as lightning. The sound of grinding shook the palace, and Shifa went from growling to barking, snarling. Baas squatted down and seized her by the scruff as she attempted to lunge for the Frostfire Sage.

  Linn watched her at work. The crescent moon glowed a bit brighter, its imperfections lost in the light it emitted. Her eyes were enraptured, and her form began to glow with an approximation of the power she had unleashed to the east.

  The floor began to cave in, the great, jagged slabs of ice falling down into the opening chasm. Linn listened for it, but couldn’t hear them crashing among the rocks below. And on it went, the thick slabs breaking apart and hurtling down into the darkness, until the floor was nearly eaten away, forming a toothy pit.

  “We need to go!” Misha screamed. Even the knights looked toward the doorways to the front and back of the chamber.

  And then it stopped. The pit ceased its expansion, and the queen dropped to one knee, the pendant on her chest glowing even brighter than before.

  The edge was dangerously close. Only a stride from where Linn and the others stood. One of the pillars on the opposite side of the throne room had a crack in it, and Linn could hear the sound of rushing water coming from far below.

  Elanil let out something close to a whimper as she leaned over the body of the prince. She turned her palm up and gritted her teeth, as if she were pulling a great weight, and the sound came closer.

  Shifa was foaming, her claws scratching at the cracks in the glass beneath her as she tried to make for the dais.

  It seemed all sound had been sucked from the chamber, as if all the air in the great, echoing hall had fallen through a pulled stopper. The torches guttered and even the iridescent glow of the Nevermelt walls and pillars dimmed for a blink. When it brightened once more, the air returned, and the sound with it. There was no more cracking and splitting. The percussions that had been coming from below were now lost in a cacophonous roar as the ocean filled itself back in.

  Directly before them, floating above the yawning gap that had been cut into the floor, was a small black speck, no larger than a marble. It floated at eye level, its edges blurred with a strange warping that reminded Linn of the power the Eastern Dark had used out on the ice. It looked like a buzzing fly, or a wasp, caught in some invisible web, railing at its bondage with an almost silent rage.

  Queen Elanil regarded the speck of black as if it were the most deadly thing she had seen in her long existence. Her eyes were wide, her jaw clenched tightly, and her outstretched palm began to flicker, the blue-white glow it gave off struggling against the power she sought to contain and control.

  Shifa had quit her raucous complaints. Baas still gripped her tightly, but the hound only stared at the speck, ears pointed and alert as the rest of them. Her fur stood up in ridges, and her tail w
as down, tucked between her hind legs. She was afraid. A hound who would attack one of the last two Sages in the World was afraid of a smudge hovering in the center of the room.

  Linn tried to keep the speck in her sights, afraid that if she took her eyes from it, it might grow into something else, expand into some black pit through which untold horrors might claw their way through. The Blue Knights were not enraptured like their queen was. They were afraid as well. All but Tundra, whose knees shook. He stared at the dot slack-jawed, and even began walking toward it, heedless of the drop in the floor, until Elanil held her other hand out to catch him by the shoulder.

  Tundra stopped and blinked. Linn thought she saw some of the darkness about his eyes again. He was attracted to the mote of ash like a moth to a flame.

  “You cannot be blessed twice, dear Tundra,” Queen Elanil cautioned, as if she were a mother warning a child not to eat sweets before bed.

  Linn examined the Blue Knight. He was changed, after all. All the Landkist of this place seemed strange to Linn, but none behaved in quite the way Tundra did. He was silent and often still, but all that beautiful blue skin, shining golden armor and glinting jewels covered a seething, roiling core. The queen had done something to him that she had not done to the others. At least, none who stood here among them.

  “What is—” Linn started, but the queen glanced at her quick enough to stop her.

  “Call it magic, Linn Ve’Ran,” she said, her voice quivering. It was difficult to tell if it was the result of the strain she was under, or the excitement. “Call it power. This here is a bit of the World Apart. Rather, a bit of the stuff that makes it up, that forms the gateways between our realm and theirs.”