Season of Fire

by Lisa Tawn Bergren

I felt the deep blush of my guilt rise on my neck and dug more zealously into my stew, hoping they would think they’d misinterpreted me. Niero had always seemed to sense me more clearly than I could read him — ​but Vidar’s scowl troubled me more.

  As I ate, I told myself that it was just the exhaustion, and the relief of finding Niero alive, but then sorrow that he couldn’t be with us, directly, in the face of Kapriel’s weakness and more intense need. I told myself that he knew I had Ronan, and Vidar had Bellona, and Tressa had Killian, and therefore, he was concentrating on those who were without guardians. And yet I couldn’t deny it. I missed Niero. Missed his attention, his focus, his favor. It had always been mine, it seemed, from the day of our Call.

  But maybe those days were over, I brooded.

  I, apparently, was only a means to an end. We all were. And apparently, that end was Kapriel.

  They’d used me. And now they were tossing me aside.

  I swallowed hard, my throat closing around my last bite of meat, making me choke.

  Ronan cast me a worried glance, but I shook my head and lifted a hand. “I’m fine,” I managed to say, my eyes watering.

  “No. You’re not,” Niero said. He was standing in front of me. “Will you accompany me for a moment, Andriana?”

  Ronan began to rise, immediately on defense.

  “No,” Niero said firmly. “Sit and finish your meal, brother. I need a moment alone with Dri.”

  My heart skipped a beat when I heard the nickname on his lips, even as cold dread filled me. His black eyes were hard, demanding, searching. And just as much as I’d felt the chasm of missing him, I now fought the urge to flee from him.

  “Niero, she’s gone through a lot,” Ronan tried again, rising with me. “I would like to stay with —”

  “We’ve all gone through a lot,” Niero returned. “Just to the edge of the clearing, Ronan. You can keep your eyes on her the whole time.” He took hold of my elbow, and I felt a shiver run through me. Because it felt more like the grip of someone who thought I might run than the hold of a friend. Was there a reason to run? Had something changed in him that I should fear?

  “Not in me,” he said under his breath as he turned me and pulled me along. “In you, Dri. Something’s changed in you.”

  I did a double take and glimpsed Vidar padding behind us. His face was still a mask of concern. I swallowed hard, bile rising in my throat that he was welcome to join this little chat and Ronan wasn’t. And why was I in trouble? What had I done besides freeing the prince? Hadn’t I given everything I had to the effort? More than almost anyone …

  The villagers chatted on nervously, but I could feel every pair of dark eyes on us as we passed. I reached out to try and sense their mood, their feelings, but all I could feel was my own gathering dark despair. Separation.

  “Niero,” Vidar growled.

  “I know,” he said. He pulled me around a huge pine tree and pushed me back against it.

  “What? What are you doing?” It took everything in me not to knee him in the groin for his mistreatment. I was furious. Black with rage.

  “Fight it, Dri,” he said. “Fight it. I think Sethos must have cast some spell upon you. The darkness of the Sheolites is in your head, in your mind again. In your heart.”

  “What?” I sputtered. “What’re you talking about?”

  “The bitterness. The jealousy. If you let it take root, flourish within, they will sense you, like one of their own, just as the Ailith sense one another. They will find us.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Beside me, Vidar put his hand on my shoulder and began to whisper urgent prayers.

  And then Niero folded me in his arms. “You’re exhausted. Weak. But your dark thoughts have opened the door again, Dri,” he whispered. “To the dark ones. Maybe in ways you didn’t recognize. But their ways — ​their dark moods, their dark thoughts — ​do not belong here. Not in you, Andriana. Not in you. We already draw them, being together in such numbers. Their scouts might sense us. But if you allow the dark to have its way within …” He put his hands on my shoulders and closed his eyes. I felt my arm cuff kindle with warmth. “In the name of the Maker, be gone from her.”

  His words seemed to suck the very air from my lungs, and with it came something so big, so vile, so huge, that I choked and fought to breathe, fought to try and remember how to breathe, in the face of something so monumentally frightening.

  “You are a daughter of the light,” Niero was whispering in my ear, pulling me in and against him, holding me so close that it somehow felt as if he covered every inch of me. His warmth seemed to fill me and spread outward, filter through me, driving out the darkness.

  He gripped my shoulders and pulled back, staring at me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of his lips and the words emerging from between them. “This one is a daughter of the light. Darkness, be gone. You have no place here!”

  I took a staggering, gasping breath.

  And then another.

  And in that moment, I felt freedom. Lighter. Warm, for the first time in hours.

  And once I was free of it, I realized what my brothers had sensed.

  Somehow, I’d brought the darkness of Sheol with me. My time with Sethos … I hadn’t known, hadn’t sensed anything creep inside me, or the door I’d learned how to close cracking open. Had I?

  “Dri,” Ronan growled, standing behind Vidar, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “It’s all right,” Niero said, not turning toward my knight, but still concentrating fully on me. His hands moved to my elbows, and he helped me sink to the ground, as if he knew my legs now felt like sludge. And yet even in my weakness, I felt stronger than I’d felt since Keallach had made me his prisoner. Keallach … still with Sethos.

  “He likes to weave his way into your mind,” Niero said.

  Kapriel was there too, then. “They are rather good at it,” he muttered. He knelt beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  I managed to nod. I felt empty. But at least I was feeling at peace, too. “Just … tired. So tired.”

  “I think we all are,” Kapriel said. He looked to Niero. “What if we propose sleep first, to the chief? And all the information she could want, come morning. We’ll be much more coherent after some rest.”

  Niero nodded. “I think we should stay in Aravand for a while, actually. To regain our strength and wait on the Maker’s direction. I will stay up and speak with Latonia for a while. But you,” he said, looking at me with those dark, intense eyes that missed nothing, then to the rest, “go and claim your rest.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  ANDRIANA

  I awakened in the morning to the same bird call the captain had made, but recognized these sounds as the real thing. The birds moved overhead and I sat up, wishing I could see them.

  The early pink light of dawn illuminated the silhouette of Ronan, asleep on a low palette a few feet from mine. Bellona and Vidar were on the other two in the hut. I eased back the covers and slipped my feet to the dirt floor, shivering in the chill of morning and drawing the brown robe of pelts more closely around me before rising silently. I tiptoed toward the door and glanced back, grimacing a bit at Ronan’s swollen and battered face. It looked little different than the night before, when Tressa had tended to all our wounds again before we slept, aided by the Aravander healer. But he had to be seriously weary to not awaken to my movements. As long as we had been on this journey, it seemed all I had to do was breathe differently and he was alerted to the change. I looked at Vidar and Bellona, both still deeply slumbering too.

  But as exhausted as I’d felt the night before, I felt wide awake now, and the birds drew me again. I bent low, wincing as I felt my leg wound pull and tear a bit, and pushed through the door and outside, the campfires long cold, the red embers of last night now a cold gray ash. I stared around the clearing of the camp in confusion. Branches had been strewn about. Young saplings, cut and tied together, had been pla
ced here and there beside the huts in haphazard fashion. A method of disguise?

  I spotted a flash of blue in the dawning light and my eyes widened in delight. Two massive bluebirds swooped from one tree branch to the next. One chattered at the first, as if in complaint, and the other chattered back, as if telling him to mind his own business. My smile grew and I ambled below them until I’d reached the edge of the last huts. I looked back, and knew I shouldn’t go any farther.

  There, I knelt and turned toward the eastern horizon, growing a pale yellow with the rising sun. I stretched out my arms above my head and prayed that the Maker would bless our day, praised him for bringing us here, to a forest sanctuary, and thanked him for the gift of Kapriel’s freedom and our own.

  When I sat up, I glimpsed him, down the path. Niero, moving toward the river.

  I hurried forward, feeling a silent permission to leave the village if he was, and yet resisting the urge to call him, knowing I’d likely awaken others. Besides, I coveted this chance to speak to our leader alone. To find out what had happened to him. And what, exactly, might have happened to me.

  Niero disappeared over a rise on the path and I doubled my pace. But at the top, I spotted legs dangling from the branch of a tree, and as I came around, saw that it was Chaza’el. He was chattering at the bluebirds, mimicking their call with surprising skill. Perhaps it was a talent cultivated among those of his village too. I remembered the hunters who had found me and Ronan at the mountain’s edge and how they had made sounds of the forest.

  Chaza’el looked down at me and grinned. “Good morning, sister.”

  “Good morning,” I returned. “I’m surprised you didn’t greet me in the language of the bluebirds.”

  “Give me a few more days with them and I shall.” He gripped the branch and swung down and over to the trunk as easily as if it were second nature. Gripping the trunk between the palms of his hands and using his feet, he shimmied down the trunk, slipping in places, but always regaining his hold.

  I winced, wondering if he was tearing up his palms, but he leaped the last bit to the ground, crouched and then rose, brushing them off as if there was no pain in them at all.

  “So you can see the future, talk to birds, and climb trees as easily as a squirrel,” I said to him as he neared. “You might be our most gifted Remnant yet.”

  He shrugged and tilted his head to one side, grinning as if embarrassed. “Comes with growing up in a bedroom among the redwoods.”

  I gestured back toward the camp. “Do you know why they cover so much of the camp with branches at night? Anyone who came here would clearly make out their huts.”

  His smile faded as he glanced back up the path. “They are afraid of the mechanical birds that come, I think.” He pointed to the sky. “Not ground troops, but spy birds. They are said to patrol every few days, buzzing past. Tiny mechanical contraptions, disguised as birds.”

  It was my turn to frown. “What?”

  “I don’t know what the Pacificans call them. But the villagers call them dark birds. They live in fear of them. But so far, they’ve been …” His voice dribbled to a stop as his eyes grew wider and his pupils dilated, so big that his brown irises disappeared.

  I swallowed hard and grabbed his arms. He wavered, as if not with me. “Chaza’el? Chaza’el!”

  But his mouth dropped open and he stared upward with eerily blank eyes. I noted my cuff warming. It was then that I knew he was having a vision, something of our future.

  I grew silent and waited. After several interminable minutes, his mouth shut and he started, looking at me as if he wondered what I was doing there. What he himself was doing there.

  “You had a vision?” I asked, giving up on letting him speak first.

  He nodded, and I was relieved to see his eyes come back to their reassuring brown.

  “What was it?” I pressed.

  “I … I can’t share it yet.” But I followed his troubled gaze upward to the skies, searching with him, and I had a pretty good idea.

  “You’re going to speak with Raniero now?” Chaza’el asked me quietly, drawing my attention back to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Ask him how long he intends to stay here,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes at him and then scanned the sky around the big trees again. “I will,” I said slowly.

  He turned and left then. I watched him retreat, debating between chasing him down and forcing him to tell me what he meant and going to speak to Raniero. But Chaza’el had said he wasn’t ready to share. Even if I demanded it, would he tell me? I doubted it.

  Reluctantly, I turned and padded down the path, thick with needles, toward the river, thinking again of my desire to bathe. But there wasn’t any way I was going to strip down to my underclothes and swim in front of Niero. I would have a week ago. But not today. I already felt vulnerable and exposed around him after last night. The thought of that moment in which I’d very nearly betrayed the Ailith just by succumbing to dark thoughts … I shook my head and bit my lip. I didn’t want to be a weakness, a chink in our collective armor.

  I saw him up ahead, naked to the waist, his breeches wet and hair dripping down on his brown, broad shoulders. He was sitting on a boulder, staring out to the slow-moving river. He bore none of the green-yellow bruises from our battle at the Wadi Qelt, a week past — ​those I’d glimpsed yesterday had faded. But wouldn’t there be other injuries? I’d seen him take blow after blow myself, to say nothing of what he had to have suffered afterward. He’d moved like he was still hurting a little. And yet now, there was nothing but the ancient scars across his back and a surging strength within him.

  “Good morning,” I whispered. I settled on the rock beside him, thinking of the grief I’d felt, leaving him behind. The tearing.

  “Do not dwell on sorrow, Andriana,” he said, still staring forward at the water. “Dwell on things that bring you joy.”

  I sighed. “You going to tell me how you do that?”

  “What?” he asked, breaking up a twig and tossing bits aside.

  “Reading my thoughts. All I said was ‘good morning.’ ”

  “I didn’t read your thoughts,” he said, eying me over his shoulder, the hint of a smile at his full lips. “I read your … demeanor. Your tone.”

  “Hmm,” I said, thinking there had to be more to it than that. “What about your wounds? Will you tell me how you heal so fast?”

  “By the Maker’s grace.”

  I shifted my neck and moved my leg, which made me wince. For me, yesterday’s wounds felt twice as bad today. “Too bad the rest of us don’t share that grace.”

  “We all have our gifts,” he said, flashing me a rare, sly grin.

  “You’re sure you’re not Ailith?”

  “I’m sure I’m not Ailith.”

  “Well, you’re something, then.”

  His smile grew at that. “We’re all something, Andriana.”

  “Can you just be straight with me, for once?”

  His smile faded. “I don’t intend to hide the truth.” He pulled his left shoulder toward his head and twitched his lips. “I don’t know how I heal so fast; I just do. And as to how I know where your heart is, what you might be feeling, it’s more of a clear … understanding of another and where they are, good or bad. And only on occasion.”

  I absorbed this and stared with him out at the water for some time. “Maybe the Maker gifted you as such so you could be our leader.”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said. “To each of us, the Maker grants what we need, when we need it.”

  To the left, in the distance, just as the river bent out of sight, I saw boys working a line. Fishing, perhaps. I’d seen the racks in the woods, high up, boned fillets drying in the air. Again, it struck me that they would ideally be out in the sun to dry. Maybe it was because they wanted to hide any semblance of civilization …

  “How long do you intend for us to stay here, Niero?”

  “A few days, at least,” he said. “We all n
eed rest. Recovery time, before we wage into further battle. Time to pray and seek the Maker’s direction. Time to connect with Kapriel and take him through the armband ceremony. Meld as a group.”

  A thought startled me. The armbands. “Niero, where are the cuffs? Ronan—”

  “Chaza’el knew what was to come. He persuaded Ronan to release the armbands to his safe-keeping.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I nodded. “Chaza’el had another vision this morning. You’d best speak to him about what he saw. He seemed uneasy.”

  He rose and turned to face me, fully, for the first time. “I shall. We’ll have to pay close attention to his visions as we head back into the Trading Union.”

  I stiffened. He wasn’t speaking of going back to the Valley, but back into places we’d been. Was that truly our call? He picked up another twig and began cracking off bits of it, dropping them in the water, then eyed me. “We must return. We are together now, strong. And there are many, many in need of the hope we can bring them.”

  “If we can stay alive long enough to bring it,” I muttered. I stared at the water again, my mind swirling like the water at the base of the boulder, creating tiny whirlpools, sucking bits of Niero’s twig in and then under. Did he speak of the people in the Wadi? Castle Vega? Georgii Post? Places we had so narrowly escaped with our lives? It seemed impossibly daunting. But also irritatingly right. Like I knew, deep within, what he had already seen as truth.

  “What happened to you, Niero? Back at the Wadi? What did they do to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, rising. “It is in the past.”

  I reached up and grabbed his hand. “It does matter,” I insisted. “You were hurt. You sacrificed yourself in order to distract them from us.”

  When he said nothing, I dropped his hand. He folded his arms, but he didn’t move away. And yet as the silence went on, I knew he wasn’t ready to tell me.

  “There is much required of all of us, Dri,” he said softly. “This is but the beginning of our sacrifices.”

  I sighed heavily. Already I felt wrung out. Weary of the battle.