“Perhaps,” Valour said. “But the question, it seems, is now moot. Whether we invited his notice or he invited ours, our worlds are colliding, and she,” he turned back toward that crystal palace, “is the agent of the coming clash.” He shook his head slowly, as if lost in thought. “He must know something. He must know he can defeat us.”
“You’ve certainly made it easier for him,” Shadow risked. “Killing your brothers and sisters, and all. Then again, I suppose that was more my doing. And Rane’s.” She saw a twitch at the mention, but it was smoothed over quickly enough.
“She is planning something,” Valour continued, heedless of her prodding. “She must know. She has ever been a … difficult one, but never foolish.”
“Love makes fools of us all,” Shadow cooed, beginning to grow bored with the exchange. Let the World Apart come in all its shadowy fire. Let the Sages and Landkist and Shadow Kings try to throw it back, and let her find a way to see it to its ending.
But something she said had frozen the Sage in mid-thought. His eyes widened for long enough to make her heartbeat quicken.
“Shadow, Shadow,” he whispered. “I do think you are wiser than you know.”
He did not elaborate, and Shadow wasn’t willing to ruin the seeming compliment by prying for more. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
“Don’t they know their world is dead already?” Shadow asked. She was asking a lot of questions these days. She always had, she supposed, but now she asked them true. She asked them because she wanted to know the answers, not because she wanted to see the effect they had.
“Perhaps they have a fool’s hope that it can be restored,” Valour said. “When the Frostfire Sage lies dead and stiff beneath snows of her own making, the Last God’s connection to this realm will be severed, and with it, his last vestiges of power. He will wither like a plucked flower or poisoned root. He will die, and they will have a chance to throw down the Night Lords and take back their realm without that parasite rising again to spoil the attempt, to pick over the victors.” He paused. “Or perhaps, Shadow, they merely seek vengeance. Is that so difficult a thing to understand?”
Shadow did not answer.
“Where does a power like that come from?” she wondered aloud, knowing the Sage did not have an answer.
“It seems all worlds have their own hearts of power. Their own souls, as it were.” He seemed uncomfortable with the word and uncomfortable with the thought that his power might not have been his at all. That there was, in fact, very little separating him from the Landkist he and the other Sages had lorded over for centuries. “Some hearts go dark. Some fester and rot. Some are never full.”
Shadow shivered at the tone he adopted.
“We should let her finish whatever it is she’s doing,” Shadow said. “Her ritual.” She waved her hand in the air, making swirling patterns that annoyed Valour. She added another flourish just to further that end. “Draw him in. Expose him. Kill him. Burn him away.”
Valour did not refute the thought nor accept it easily. His face changed very little, showing her that he had been thinking the same thing. She had wondered why he did not charge across the frozen wastes with his shadowfire and his ancient and righteous-seeming rage to snuff her out. She had thought it, if not fear, then a healthy respect for the power of the Sage and her followers. Add to the mix Reyna, Ve’Ran and the Landkist of the Valley—the most potent Shadow had seen since her own roving band had terrorized the would-be kings and queens the world over—and the thought was not hard to rationalize. Now, she wondered if she had stumbled upon something closer to the truth.
Perhaps the Eastern Dark had a shred of bravery about him after all. Perhaps he meant to meet this dark god, and then to kill him with his own hands—or those he’d borrowed.
“Perhaps,” Valour said. “Either way, she has to die.”
“Why?”
“Because, Shadow,” Valour said, “I think you are right, and that love nests at the heart of the matter. She will have to die.”
Shadow shrugged.
“How foolish you must feel,” Shadow said. She was getting tired, and weariness made her lazy. Lazy enough to draw the ire of a Sage with the power of a fallen sun. “Following the lilting song of a trickster god into a place of shadows and wraiths, promises of treasures and power beyond counting.”
“We will see,” Valour said. “We will see who has the last laugh. I learned much in that realm and without it. Much more than this supposed god could understand.”
They were silent for a time, and Shadow had thought before that the land was as well. Now that she listened, she could hear it. It was rough and keening, the wind playing sharp notes on the small shards and runs within the ice, the hiss of rattlesnakes as the dust scraped the surface of the glass and made it rough.
All lands had their own voices. She had learned to listen to them in her long solitude in the south. That land had its own songs. They were deep and full of threat. Out on the road, when she had been forced to join with the Eastern Dark’s champions—his roaming band of conjured and captured death—she had listened to the voices of the other lands. Not the birds and beasts. She knew those well, even if the tones and pitches changed from patch to patch. No. Shadow listened to the land itself. She listened to the wind as it passed through the nettles and coiled around the trunks of trees. She listened to water—fresh or salt—as it pooled around stones or crashed upon cliffs. She listened to sand as it ran in currents of its own making, and to that distant, sonorous hum when all the world seemed quiet.
Often, when Shadow would disappear into the black patches and rifts that were her namesake, Rane and the others would assume she communed with the beast beside her. Sometimes she did, but often she had merely found a quiet place where she could listen to the stories the land wanted to tell her. They were rarely boring things.
“She is living in old memories,” Valour said after a time. “No time for spires these days. No time for palisades and silver horns. No time for towers.” He spoke in a voice barely above a whisper, and Shadow could tell he would have said it had she been standing there or not.
“You had plenty to do with the last,” Shadow put in, looking beyond him and back toward the jagged collection of icy shards that had been a proud and even majestic tower just hours before. He ignored her.
She watched his eyes flit and flicker as the first hint of yellow began to creep up over the edge of the east. The orb would not fly high today. Shadow could smell it. Instead, it would skirt the horizon, painting the sky the color of burnt blood and starflowers. In a week or three, it would barely do more than that. And soon after, it would only show a pale yellow fin as it fought the haze of the horizon for a few lone hours of light to keep away the Dark Months, when things much worse than Shadow would appear, crawling from their rifts and hiding in their pockets. Few enough to make some folk in some lands doubt their existence. Plentiful enough in some places to make a nightmare of the season.
“It is not ice anymore,” he said, his brow creasing as he examined those distant crenellations. “There is no water left in the place. It seems she has finally perfected the art of Nevermelt. No fire will bring it down. No fire I’ve seen. Her power has been changed by the World Apart, just as mine was. She will be … potent.”
Valour did not turn toward Shadow, but it seemed the startling beauty of the rising sun did enough to touch even his shallow, black heart.
“You must think there is nothing separating the Sages—separating us—from the monster coming our way,” he said. Shadow raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “Believe it or not, we used our power—stolen or otherwise—to create. And we did for a long time, Shadow. We built great towers and ploughed the lands in all directions. We planted seeds and made them grow tall enough to build castles and keeps within their branches. We raised great cliffs of red clay and hardened them to stone to keep the drakes of the north from our lands and from our peoples. We froze an ocean—or a part of it—and raise
d towers whose lights would never extinguish, to bring our sailors home.”
Shadow waited for the second part. The part where he talked about what the Sages had done after, when they had built monuments to their own glory and fought wars for the same with the blood of those deemed beneath them. When they had taken slaves and called them champions. When they had broken the lands they had planted and ruined generations of those who had called them lords and—in some places—even gods.
He did not say the second part. He did not say anything.
“What’s our next move?” Shadow asked. Valour glanced at her, likely hearing the way her voice had shifted. He had to know why. If he cared, he gave no indication, and her smoldering, acid bitterness returned, splashing and running through the well-worn grooves in her veins and heart.
“The old fool you let go was slow-going, but tough. He’ll arrive today. If he doesn’t survive, a patrol will find him. The Blue Knights will work themselves into a frenzy. Perhaps they’ll be foolish enough to strike out for us, to face us in the wastes.”
“And if not?”
“We enter a grand place in grand fashion.”
Shadow considered it. She felt a thrill that mixed a twinge of intoxicating fear with anticipation. It was a feeling she loved, even as it threatened to raise bile in her throat. No matter how calm, how serene she might feel in times of quiet reflection, when she listened to the songs of the land and the musings of Sages and Shadow Kings, Shadow was a dark blade, and one used to killing. She liked it, and had long ago given up trying to find out if she had always been that way.
“You will need the Valley Landkist on your side,” she said. “At least, you will need them not to be against us. They should know that we’re after the same thing.”
“I will tell them what their would-be queen has done, if they don’t know it already,” Valour said. He sounded unconcerned, but Shadow heard the effort in the attempt. He was nervous, and if there was anything more exhilarating than her own fear, it was that of a Sage she had once trembled before. “No matter what those with him believe—no matter their end—Reyna wants the Sages dead. He wants me dead, but he won’t suffer the Witch to live.”
“Reyna would meet with Rane,” Shadow said. “He won’t with you.”
“I have a reckoning with that one,” Valour said, nodding, and Shadow did not know which Ember he meant.
“He isn’t the only one you need to be concerned with,” Shadow said. “The Sage girl is strong. Very strong. The other Embers are skilled. Of the pair, one is bold enough to earn it and the other fierce enough to cover her recklessness. And then there is the Rockbled.”
“A Rockbled …” Valour seemed almost amused. “Fighting with Embers. Now that would be a sight.”
“It is,” Shadow agreed, though she was not nearly as amused.
“Yes.” Valour nodded. “They are strong, one and all. Some more than the others. Reyna and Ve’Ran will be too much for the Shadow Kings. They might even be too much for the Witch, depending on how far she’s truly fallen. For me?” He turned his palms up, examining them with less uncertainty than he had before. He let the thought hang, and then a new shadow passed across his face.
“They do not have their brightest star with them,” he said. “She is in the south again.” He tilted his head as if listening, searching. A wry smile crept across his face.
“I thought Reyna was the most powerful Ember the world over,” Shadow said.
“There are older Embers in the Valley core,” Valour said. “And one who was lost in the deserts. Experienced flames. Potent flames. Though,” he dipped his chin, “perhaps not quite as hot as that one, even if better aimed. He is, after all, his mother’s son.”
Shadow’s face screwed up in confusion. She shook her head.
“This ‘bright star,’” Shadow started. “Is she the one who turned you from the desert? The one who rattled you so, changed you so you had to resort to stealing the rest of a life you already destroyed?” She let it linger, expecting him to deny it or to try to explain it away.
“Yes,” he said, surprising her. “Yes, she is.”
And then Shadow remembered. She was taken back to the broken timbers of the Sage of Balon Rael’s fortress at Center. She remembered when the Eastern Dark had arrived to take his living Everwood blade, the brightest ever forged. She remembered the way the Landkist of the Valley had gasped and shaken when he referenced his recent time amidst the western dunes, Ve’Ran most of all.
“The sister of Ve’Ran,” Shadow stated more than asked. “She beat you.” All this time, she had thought that surely the Red Fox, the Red Waste or whatever he called himself in recent days, was the culprit. But the Eastern Dark truly had been rebuffed by a Landkist, and not one with a burning sword.
“None beat me, Shadow,” he said derisively. “For here I stand.” She thought to say something and then thought better of it. Survival. The trick was in knowing when to hold back.
“Still,” the Sage continued. “She could prove invaluable. Perhaps she could broker peace between us—her sister and me.”
“You said she was in the Valley,” Shadow said. “A long way to go in so short a time.”
Valour cracked a smile that was lit in a macabre glow as the sun peeked up from its bottomless, airy depths.
“Oh, Shadow,” he said in that silky, sickening way of his. “You should know. There are other roads than these.”
It was all a lot more ordinary than Iyana had expected, and she felt a coloring of shame for the thought.
They were gathered around a small pyre built of wood a little thinner and a little darker than those they would build in Hearth or Last Lake. Sen’s wrapped body had been placed on top, resting with his hands at his sides. Iyana did not know how large the Faey settlement was, but it seemed to her there were more here than could have resided comfortably in the smattering of modest homes and hollowed out trunks she had seen thus far.
“The Faey are less like squirrels nesting in cracks and hollows and much more similar to our desert ancestors,” Kenta told her, leaning in. “These folk have come from the surrounding villages and hunting clutches.”
“Would they do it for any Faey burial?” Iyana asked, marking the faces. She did not see outward signs of mourning. The pale cheeks were dry, many-colored eyes glinting with the fresh daylight, daylight that should have been a hair brighter for this time of year.
Kenta shrugged. “Can’t say I saw many of those, myself. Little time for it in those days.” Luna, standing just ahead of them, tossed a backward glance that had Kenta clearing his throat, suddenly aware of the Faey eyes that had begun to slide toward him. “But no,” he whispered, “there is something else to this. Sen was known to these folk.” He nodded toward the pyre, and to the figures making their slow and considered way around it.
Ceth frowned beside her as they watched a pair of elders being led around the pyre by Shek and Tirruhn. They did not shake sage or incense from dried herbs as Rusul and her sisters might, nor did they say words aloud, though Iyana thought she could see their lips moving, muttering. One of them, a shorter male, waved through the air in front of him, as if he were parting overhanging cobwebs or sweeping vines from their path. Iyana would have given it up as the senility of the very old, but the taller female made similar motions. Similar, but not exact.
Iyana focused on the pair and was now aware of the attention they commanded. Where before they had walked abreast, now the one followed the other, each seemingly guarded by the warrior beside them. Shek frowned in consternation, pulling the female to the side so she did not knock her hip into the pyre, while Tirruhn was patient but no less firm with the male. They were Faeykin, silver-haired and slender, less muscled than those with black and oiled hair on the outskirts, and Iyana could see the bright emerald glow tinting the hollows below their lashes, growing brighter with each passing step.
It was oddly haunting to watch, and oddly comforting. It looked as if the elders walked on a path sep
arate from the rest of them. Iyana thought it little more than a ceremony, right up until Luna ushered Kenta out of the way and sidled up beside her. Iyana smiled absently up at the other Landkist, but she, too, was using her greensight. She reached a hand out, fingers grasping for Iyana’s. She took her hand.
Iyana sighed a long, slow sigh and began to sway. She closed her eyes in a blink that could have lasted a second or a minute, and when she opened them, the ceremony took on a new brightness and a new meaning that made her heart swell despite her lack of understanding. Sen was not forgotten.
The crowd of gathered mourners faded into the background, all but for their many-colored tethers, which waved on private winds. Kenta and Ceth were mere suggestions at her sides, and even Shek and Tirruhn—warriors who could not have been missed for all the silver and glittering white metal that adorned them—were nothing more than gray shadows. The elders seemed taller here, and more bright. Their eyes, which were closed in the world, were open wide in the Between, as were Luna’s. The path they walked around Sen’s pyre was like a memory or a dream of that in the physical world, and the imagined cobwebs the man in front swept away were all too real.
Iyana squinted. “Threads,” she said, shaking her head. She did not understand. The lines the elder moved away from his path were undoubtedly there, but they did not carry the glow of the living, nor did they thrum like moths’ wings. Instead, they were empty, hollow things that broke apart at the touch. Mostly. Where before Iyana thought the female was doing the same, now she saw that she was gathering up the thicker threads that sprouted from Sen’s coil and joining them together in a great knot that grew as thick and tangled as a basket.
“This is a Faey burial,” Luna said. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from far away, and when Iyana glanced in her direction, she saw that her lips did not move. She could see the scene before them just as Iyana could, and just as the rest could only guess at.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 39
