He needed no fuel for his fires now; he could burn the rock of the mountains if he chose, burn the very air itself.
The fire had a voice—it howled like millions of damned souls. It had a mind, and the mind was mad. Karsite and Valdemaran alike scrambled to escape the battlefield before the fires caught them. From the ground to the mountaintop, there was nothing but flame. Fire churned and roiled, fire roared and shrieked, fire filled the sky. Vortices of flame twisted, hellish dancers with the grace of a streamer in the wind and the appetite of a demon—
Even as Pol watched through his Companion's eyes, Satiran's voice keening on and on in his mind and ears, those nearest the flames were suddenly sucked up by a wind or the firestorm itself inhaling, pulled off their feet, into the air, and then, screaming, into the maelstrom.
—gods—
The maelstrom pulsed once, like a spasming heart, and enlarged again. Bits of burning debris rained down around him, kicked out of the top of the vortex. Fiery twigs. Ashes. Coals and cinders. The bright, glowing skeletons of pinecones. Once, horribly, a burning, human arm that landed with a dreadful sizzle in the melted snow beside him.
Pol could only sit, and stare, numb with horror, paralyzed with grief. Satiran keened on, trembling, oblivious to anything else.
Something tugged at his arm, nearly pulling him from the saddle. "Come on, man!" the Lord Marshal's squire shouted in his ear when he didn't respond. "Come on! If you stay here, you'll cook!"
The heat from the inferno was incredible; the snow turned to steam before Satiran's eyes, the ends of the pine needles around him curled up. The firestorm pulsed again, spasming, and expanded once more.
"Come on!" the squire shouted again to Pol. Then, heroically, he seized Satiran's bridle and forced the Companion's head around. "Come on, you stupid git!" he screamed, kicking Satiran in the side. "Move! Move!"
Neither of them could move on their own, but the squire was not to be denied. He tied Satiran's reins to his saddle, and his pony dragged Satiran behind him by main force as they joined the flight to safety.
With a terrible moan, Satiran broke the connection between himself and his Herald, leaving Pol in darkness, intolerable anguish, and bleakness of heart and soul to match the dark behind his eyes.
He simply clung to the saddle, bent and broken, weeping hoarsely, as he had not been able to weep for himself, and it seemed to him that he would never find his way out of the darkness and the grief. His tears scalded his eyes, soaked through his bandage, and still they fell; he tasted their salt on his lips, bitter and harsh, but no more bitter than his heart. Satiran trembled under his legs, shaking as if the Companion, too, sobbed.
How long he sank in that hell of grief, he didn't know; suddenly, there were hands on his arms and voices urging him to dismount. The roar of the fire was gone, and the air, cooler now, was scented with scorched rock. He slid off Satiran's back into arms waiting to catch him.
Ilea's arms.
He crumbled into her embrace, and gave himself and his grief into her care.
Satiran collapsed beside him; Ilea helped him down to the snow where he blindly groped for his Companion's neck and wrapped his arms around it as Ilea cradled both of them, crooning wordlessly.
Out of the chaos of shouting and noises around him, a single voice cut through his grief.
"Pol! Pol!"
He raised his head, responding to the frantic sound of Tuck's voice.
"Pol!" The boy's hands were on his shoulders, pulling at his tunic, despite Ilea's attempts to stave him off. "Pol, what happened to Lan? They dragged me away and won't let me go back—this Guard here won't let go of me! What's going on?"
He tried to answer, but could not get a word out of his throat.
But an answer came.
Pol had heard the Death Bell in the Grove toll before; he knew the sound of it as well as he knew the sound of his own name. But he had never before heard it with his heart—and never at such a distance from Haven.
Every Herald across the land must be hearing it—
It vibrated through him, somber, throbbing with unshed tears, and there was no doubt in his mind who it tolled for. Tuck collapsed beside him with a sob, and Ilea held them all while they wept until they could weep no more.
*
IT was four days before Pol could stand and walk again, four days before Satiran, surrounded by all the comfort the rest of the Companions could give, was able to act as his Herald's eyes again. Four days of sleep and grief, while the shattered army of Valdemar pulled itself back together, and put together the pieces of what had happened.
The only Karsite officer to survive the inferno had confessed that once the source of the hellfires had been identified, a hand-picked set of marksmen had been sent up the mountain with orders to shoot, not the Herald, but the Companion. The priests wanted the secret of the fires, and they knew the quickest way to disable a Herald was to slay his demon-horse.
The firestorm raged for no more than a candlemark, but in that short time, it destroyed everything on the mountain and in the pass below it. Where there had been a pine forest, there was now a totally lifeless plain, with no sign of anything but ashes. No remains, no smoldering tree stumps, nothing. Everything from the ground up had been reduced to gray-white powder.
As Pol woke on the morning of the fifth day and struggled for the first time to sit up, Ilea told him all this in a few stark sentences.
"Elenor?" he ventured.
"We were in the rear, with the baggage," Ilea pointed out. "I don't think she had any idea what was happening until the firestorm—and I don't think she even realized then what had happened until she saw you and Satiran."
Pol fumbled for her hands, and found them clasped tightly together in Ilea's lap. He coaxed them apart. "And?" he prompted hoarsely, his voice ravaged by weeping.
"And—she's taking it hard." That, and the softening of Ilea's stiff pose, bringing her into his arms where she finally wept, told him all he needed to know.
"I know this doesn't help now—but she'll recover, though I doubt she thinks she can. We all will...." He held her close, and let her cry herself out, she who so seldom wept, and more often for others than herself. He let her cry until she was exhausted, which took so little time that he knew she had been staying sleepless at his side until this moment. Then he made her curl up in his place, and stayed beside her until she slept.
:Satiran?: he called then, hesitantly, not certain that he would have an answer.
:Coming,: was the reply, lead-heavy with mourning, but at least it was a reply.
He heard plodding hoofbeats outside his tent, then, blessedly, vision returned, the view of his tent from Satiran's eyes. He stumbled to his feet, through the tent flaps, and flung both arms around Satiran's neck.
When they both emerged from a sea of mourning, and took notice of the rest of the world again, Satiran rubbed his soft nose against Pol's cheek, tasting his tears. :They want to send Fedor up the mountain this morning,: Satiran said, hesitantly. :To see what is there. Tuck wants to go, and Elenor, and the rest of the scouts. Ilea is going with Elenor. Do you?:
He already knew that Satiran did, and he did not want his oldest and dearest friend to go alone. :Of course I do,: he said instantly.
The sad little cortege made its way up the side of the mountain, unimpeded by snow, ice, or trees. It was the most utterly lifeless place that Pol had ever seen; not a bird, not an animal, not even an insect. The total silence made the ears ring and made Pol shiver.
But when it came to time to climb the last bit of the trail, there was a problem; the heat of the fire had cracked the rocks and made the trail unstable, and too dangerous to try.
But Wulaf, the shepherd-turned-scout, stared at the trail with his jaw set. "Gi 'e me yon box," he told Fedor, who wordlessly brought over a beautifully carved box that had held the Lord Marshal's Seal until that morning, and handed it to him.
The boy stuffed the box into the front of his sheepskin jacket, dism
ounted from his pony and took his shoes off. Before anyone could move, he was scrambling over the rocks above the trail and out of sight.
He was back before Pol could start to worry.
"'Tis same as th' pass; naught but ash," he said quietly, taking the time to put his sheepskin boots back on over his stockinged feet. Wordlessly, he handed Fedor the box.
Elenor sobbed into her mother's shoulder; Tuck's red cheeks were lined with tear-streaks.
He didn't open it, and no one asked him to. All eyes turned to Pol, who swallowed down his tears.
"Well," he said at last. "Let's take them home."
EPILOGUE
POL and Ilea picked their way along the goat trail to the place on the mountain where Lavan Firestorm and Kalira had died, with Satiran pacing alongside, though Pol no longer needed his eyes. Intensive work by the Healers had given him back the use of his own, although his vision would never be as good as it once had been. He never knew from what sources of strength Ilea found the way to Heal him, nor from where the Healers she recruited got the knowledge they needed to do so. But he could see again, however imperfectly.
It was the same procession that had gone up the mountain to be thwarted by the unstable trail, for the shepherds of this area under Wulaf's direction had worked all these months to make it safe for them to return. But there was a new addition, for Tuck had brought Lan's sister Macy, who rode pillion behind him.
Elenor had accepted no consolation whatever for about a month—but then, surprising even herself, she came to the end of her tears. Perhaps it was because it was difficult to sustain the illusion of an undying love on notes like, "Thank you for the headache potion, but can't you make it taste any better than that?"
Macy and Tuck helped her and each other, and Macy moved out of her parents' home and into the Palace as a member of the Queen's household—one of Queen Fyllis' personal embroiderers. It was a more comfortable place for her than her own home, and kept her near the people her brother had loved best.
When spring brought life back to Valdemar, and Wulaf sent word that the trail was safe, there was no question that they would all go. And now, once again, they rode single-file through the blasted pass. The ancient pine forest was completely destroyed, from the tallest tree to the earth itself, to a depth of the height of a man, as an experimental trench proved. Nothing would grow in the soil; perhaps nothing ever would again.
There had been no sign of Karsite activity anywhere along the Border. Then again, so much of the army and priesthood had been destroyed, it wasn't likely that this Son of the Sun would be able to hold his preeminence much longer.
The trail they rode now, although they had to go single-file, was far from the goat track Pol had first seen. This was a real trail, lovingly smoothed by hand and pick, that even an aged pony could follow. The shepherd's memorial to the one who saved us, Pol thought, with a painful lump in his throat. There might be more impressive memorials, but never one created with more sincerity and heart.
"Here," Wulaf said, pausing in a shallow, dishlike depression halfway up the side of the mountain. "This be the place."
Pol squinted, peering down at the pass, wondering what had happened up here. Something had happened to Lan even before Kalira's death. A touch of encroaching madness, perhaps? If I had been here, could I have prevented that? And if I had been here, wouldn't Satiran and I have detected the marksmen, even cloaked by the Dark Servants?
He, Tuck, and Satiran had pummeled themselves with might-have-beens for the past several months, with no answers to be found. It didn't look as if he would find any in this barren place either.
"Look!" exclaimed Ilea behind him.
He turned, to see her cupping something between her hands, down in the ash. He knelt down beside her.
It was a seedling, a tiny speck of green with two miniscule leaves.
"It's a firecone," Ilea said softly. "They're very rare, even here—it takes a fire to free the seeds from the cone, and even then, more seeds burn than ever sprout. It must have been here for years before—"
"Before it was freed," Pol finished for her, looking at the tiny thing with wonder. "But how it got here, of all places—"
Ilea shook her head. "There's no way of telling."
"Should we take it back with us?" Elenor asked, and a momentary thought of transplanting this bit of life and hope to the grave that held only ashes flickered through his mind.
"No," Ilea said. "It would never live. It needs ashes, mountain winds, and winter storms to thrive. Look—" she scraped the ashes away from the bare rock, to show how it was cracked and crazed. "This is what it needs; it can send its roots deep into the rock, and rise out of the ashes tall and strong." She patted the ashes around the seedling with a motion that was almost affectionate, then carefully dripped water into the mound of ashes from her water bottle. "It needs adversity to thrive."
He held out his hand to her, and she used it to get to her feet. "Something like Valdemar?"
She smiled, and if her smile held sorrow, it also held joy. "And—something like us. All of us."
:All,: Satiran confirmed. :All of us, together.:
For one last moment, they looked out over the mountains, wondering when adversity would cross them to find Valdemar again. It won't be soon. Lan bought us that—peace, for a while.
"And thanks to Lan, for a time we will have peace to grow," Tuck said, with unusual eloquence.
Pol nodded, and moved to put his arm around Tuck's shoulders. "Yes we will," he replied. "Just like this little tree. If it hadn't been for Lavan Firestorm, neither we nor the tree would still be here."
They stood together in the silence for a long time, each of them with his own thoughts. Wulaf was the first to move, collecting a handful of pebbles, and carefully ringing the seedling with a protective barrier.
Fedor did the same, then added the silver arrow-pin of a Royal messenger, burying it in the ash within the circle. One by one, they each built the wall of protection a little higher and thicker, some adding tiny keepsakes to the ashes. When Elenor's turn came, with only Pol and Ilea to go, she added a covering of paper torn into the tiniest of scraps, then wetted with water from her water bottle, to the top of the ashes to keep them from blowing away. Pol had a fairly good idea where the paper came from, for she had brought Lan's few notes with her, and he had noticed her shredding paper as the others made their offerings.
Ilea simply held her hands over the seedling, giving it the strength only a Healer could impart.
Then it was Pol's turn.
He slipped over the seedling a thin bracelet that Macy had made for him, braided of his hair and Satiran's together. He hadn't come here with the intention of leaving it, but—it seemed right.
He straightened up, and met the eyes of each of the others in silence. Now, he sensed that some deep wound in each of them had begun to heal. It was not closed yet—but in time, they would all be whole.
"Time to go," he said quietly, and they turned their faces home.
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