“Hello,” she said.
He frowned as he looked back at them. “Yes,” he said. “Hello.” He said it at first with a flat tone, and then, seeing their uncertain expressions, he smiled and nodded at a semicircle of wooden chairs that had been set out among the grass and too-small rope rugs that littered the place.
Iyana took a seat in the center, feeling like a child as she waited for her instructor. Somewhat to her surprise, Ceth sat as well, sighing as if in relief. As Iyana’s ire grew at being kept in silence by a man she did not know and for reasons she couldn’t begin to guess at, Ceth seemed glad not to have discovered some enemy in their midst, as if there might just as well have been an ancient, bloody-toothed Sage waiting in the tumbled hodgepodge of leaning straw as a strange old man with pointed ears and hair that had gone more gray than white. When he glanced their way, mashing a dark green stem into a lighter paste, she saw that his eyes had lost none of the vibrancy of youth. If anything, they were brighter than any she had yet seen.
Round and round his gnarled hand and knotted wrist went, until the worn pestle ceased its scraping. He pursed his lips tightly as Iyana fixed a cold stare on him and then switched to Ceth, as if a brilliant new thought had occurred.
He veritably sprang across the space between them, making both Iyana and Ceth flinch as he plopped the stone bowl into her lap. She had to scramble to keep it from falling with a crack onto the hard ground. The old man began rummaging in the corner to the left of the crackling fireplace and its slow-spinning copper pot, which hung suspended on the end of a rose-colored chain, and moved a threadbare covering, disturbing all manner of dried leaves, dusty old clay cups and a fair number of skittering insects in his search.
“Aha.”
It was an exclamation of victory, and when he turned from the corner, Iyana expected either to see some great treasure, or else some hideous concoction or feral beast clutched in his crazed hands. Instead, it was a bundle of wood. Twisted roots that seemed engorged with fluid, all brown bark streaked with blue. He moved eagerly toward Ceth, who eyed him steadily, unconcerned. The old man deposited the bundle on his lap and made a snapping motion with his hands, which he wiped before returning to his place by the back wall and smoking cauldron.
Ceth glanced at Iyana, who was too stunned to offer anything other than a halfhearted shrug. The Northman looked at the bundle in his lap and cast about, reaching for the handle of a small hand axe.
“Tsk!”
He froze as the old Faeykin’s eyes and jabbing finger found him. He shook his head and Ceth twitched his hand back from the handle of the axe, frowning. The old man made the snapping gesture once more. He did it very slowly, eyebrows arched, as if he were demonstrating the most herculean, complex of tasks to the world’s mightiest simpleton. Ceth was not impressed, but Iyana was glad to see that he offered no complaint as he lifted one of the thick roots in his hands and began to strain.
She had seen this man shatter stones with his blows, but his face reddened as the task of breaking a simple root in half—and one dried with age—proved beyond him. The old Faeykin had already gone back to his task, whatever that was, and Iyana saw Ceth glance in his direction before closing his eyes in a long blink. She heard it before she saw it—that low, steady buzzing that preceded the shimmering armored covering that enveloped his hands like the clearest water. He raised the root again and now it snapped with ease, the center breaking in a spiral and exposing the dried ends of what looked to be dozens of smaller spindles within.
The sound drew the attention of the elder, who smiled in satisfaction and pointed impatiently at the others. Iyana saw Ceth wrinkling his nose and frowned in confusion before the sharp odor stung her nose and nearly caused her to drop the stone bowl she had forgotten she still clutched between her legs. It smelled like a mix of fruit and cinnamon, and it might have been pleasant if it weren’t so intense.
When the smell reached the Faeykin, he paused in the midst of his ministrations over the bubbling pot, breathing it in like the most welcome perfume. He turned around as Ceth cracked another and when he saw Iyana, his eyes flashed with a startling brightness as he took in the bowl in her lap.
He shook his head, retaking the space between them. He gathered the bowl and pestle once more into his hands and set to mashing with slow, grating deliberateness. Iyana felt guilty despite herself.
“What is your name?” Iyana asked as he moved to lean against the back wall next to the fireplace. She had grown tired of whatever game the old man was playing.
“Ah,” he said. “You do speak.” And suddenly, the strange, scattered façade he had worn disappeared as if it had never existed at all. Even his voice had changed. Gone was the reedy, stilted staccato. In its place was a calm, reasoned tone. He watched Iyana, eyes switching between hers.
“Speak.” Iyana’s mouth hung open. It took her some time to recover. Another snap broke the stretching silence as Ceth left them to it, unconcerned with their exchange. “Of course I speak. Why wouldn’t I speak?”
“You hadn’t,” the old man said, the picture of ease. He was already making Iyana feel particularly foolish. “Not until just now.” He pointed at her as if the evidence were damning.
“I …” She paused, looked to Ceth, found herself growing angry with his lack of support, and then looked back at the old man. She recovered some of her decorum and breathed out a sigh as he watched her, measuring her. “I am sorry,” she said, too slowly to be as polite as she should have been. His look flattened.
“About the poultice?” He shrugged. “Water beneath the roots. After all, why shouldn’t I do everything? It’s only your mixture I’ve been preparing for the better part of the week.”
“My mixture?” Iyana asked, ignoring the way his thoughts seemed to skip over hers as she eyed the copper cauldron.
“Yes.” Again, he said it as if it were obvious. He set the stone bowl down on one of the unused chairs between her and Ceth and reached for the scraps of root and detritus the Landkist had piled in his lap. Ceth almost seemed reluctant to give them up, not wanting any greater part of their exchange. He handed them over and the old man nodded his thanks before tossing the scraps onto the fire with a clumsy maneuver that sent up sparks.
“What is that?” Iyana asked the questions as they came, unable to fixate on one with the old man’s chaotic activity. “A part of the mixture?”
“No,” he said. He turned and sucked air in through his nose, filling his thin chest as he smiled at them. “I simply enjoy the smell, and my hands are less durable than they once were.” He seemed less interested in her for the moment as he was with Ceth, who regarded him with a far less interested expression.
“One of the Skyr,” he said, shaking his head. It was strange to Iyana, seeing one so presumably old rendered so utterly impressed by a man Iyana had grown as used to as any of her other friends or companions. “Landkist the world over,” the Faeykin continued, “and yet, the stories of the Skyr have ever been my favorite. How high can you soar, my friend?”
Ceth swallowed, his expression shifting. He didn’t seem to want to answer and Iyana found her annoyance with the old man redoubling. And then his expression softened.
“Ah,” he said. “I see. There are few of you now, in this cycle.” Iyana didn’t know what he meant. “You have no teachers.”
“He can soar to the height of a small mountain,” Iyana said. The old man’s eyes found hers. He glanced toward Ceth as if for affirmation. “I have seen it.”
“And his hands,” he said. “I have heard of the hardiness of the Skyr, but never something like the armor I saw you produce.” Ceth’s gray eyes flicked toward Iyana for a moment. “I am a friend, my boy,” the man said. “My girl.” He seemed kinder, now—not that he hadn’t been before—but Iyana felt utterly unbalanced. “It is an impressive trick, to make armor out of the world’s pull.”
“The world’s pull …” Ceth said it as if it were foreign.
“Weight,” the man said
. He picked up the green-stained pestle from the stone bowl, lifted it in two fingers above his head and let it fall. “Tell me you knew that was how your gifts—”
“I know how my gifts work,” Ceth said evenly.
“The world’s pull.” The Faeykin tapped a bare foot on the dried grass. He winked. “A fine use for it,” he said. “I dare say there isn’t a weapon known to man that could pierce you in your full might. I dare say there isn’t a make of armor could stop one of those fists. A fine use, if a bit crude.”
Ceth eyed him as if he suspected he was being misled. The old man returned the stare.
“You’re not going to ask why we’re here?” Iyana asked.
“He’s here because you’re here,” he said without hesitating. “As for why you’re here, no.”
“No?”
“No. Why, Iyana Ve’Ran, would I ask a question I already know the answer to?”
Iyana was dumbstruck for the moment, until she thought of all the ways he might know her name. It seemed less magical and more obvious the longer she thought on it. Luna could have told him. Likely did tell him to expect her. Of course, there were other ways, she knew.
His eyes took on a mischievous glint as he watched the wheels turning.
He sighed as she held herself from playing along. He bent to retrieve his stone bowl as the smell of the burning roots filled the chamber. Thankfully, they burned smokeless, else Iyana feared it might have been the death of them. He carried the bowl over to Ceth, surprising her once again, and motioned for him to drink it. The Northman flatly refused without saying as much.
“What is it?” Iyana asked for him.
“Something for him to follow along.” The old man shrugged as Ceth made no move to take him up on his offer.
Iyana made as if to speak once more, but came up wanting. She felt a tightness in her chest. Those brilliant green eyes shifted toward her as if on cue. They lit with greenfire, so bright Iyana could not see their centers. It was mesmerizing to look upon, and Iyana held no doubt that he was examining her tether and everything else besides as easily as she marked the lines on his ancient face.
He nodded as his eyes began to dim once more.
“My name is Falkin,” he said. “I am both Weaver and Unweaver, as are you. I know why you are here even if you do not. You followed a need. A need based on what you have seen, and very recently.”
“And what have I seen?” Iyana asked, half in a dream. She felt those eyes drawing her in as only the Faey Mother’s could before.
“Not the World Apart,” he said without room for argument. “Though that is, I assume, what you believe you have come to learn about. No, Iyana Ve’Ran. You have seen the World Apart, but you have seen something else that is more important, more pertinent by far. You have seen the intent behind it. You have seen what drives it, though your mind has not the knowledge to give it function. To give it form.”
Iyana watched him, caught in his sway, and she didn’t know if it was the truth of his words or his power that had her so enraptured.
“The Dark Kind, the Night Lords. Even the Sages, Ray Valour chief among them. These are fleeting things in the scheme of things. There is something driving the collision between worlds. Something older than the Sages’ petty war. Something more violent. Something more ruinous.”
“The Sages aren’t drawing the World Apart,” Iyana breathed. “Their war is a separate thing.”
He shrugged as if he truly did not know. More so, as if it were irrelevant. “No doubt it is all tied together. Very much so. But a beginning does not always match an end, and I fear the end was always coming to this. It is the end of all things, here, at least. In this place and in this time. And it is coming on the back of a darkness we cannot hope to stop.”
Iyana swallowed, feeling his proclamation like a sentence.
“That is my fear,” he said. “But then,” he smiled, “I am not so young as you, nor so strong as your teacher, who was also mine, even if she called herself my student.”
“Then you have no answers for me,” Iyana said, ignoring the last. She felt despair, and anger that would be slow in sprouting. “You have nothing for me.”
“I have the right questions,” he said. “And I have a steady hand, in the place it matters most.”
His eyes did not look like defeat, though his words said as much.
Iyana regarded him steadily, uncertain how to proceed. He stood and moved to the back of the room once more, gathered a wooden ladle from a shelf and scooped a bit of the steaming sludge into a bowl she doubted had been washed. Ceth watched him, seeming about as confident in this strange, waddling old man as she was.
She took the proffered bowl, wincing at the heat, and set it between her legs.
“Give it a moment,” Falkin said, folding his hands in his lap.
“What is it?”
“Something to ease the journey.”
Iyana felt at a loss. She looked around the chamber, at the hanging pots, wood piles and shelves stacked with jars and stoppered vials, and felt crippling uncertainty.
“That’s it?”
Falkin blinked at her, tilted his head like a confused or worried dog.
“Potions and dried scrub?” Iyana said. She felt tears welling. “This is the great secret of the Valley Faey and their gifts of Sight? A different sort of brew made of the same plants I could get at the Lake?”
Falkin smiled in a gentle sort of way, as if allowing the rambling tantrums of a child. “What were you expecting?” he asked. “Something more … magical?”
Iyana felt as foolish as it sounded, but then she remembered Falkin making his way around Sen’s funeral pyre, wrapping threads that Luna said were the Landkist’s regrets incarnate—the life he had lived and all the choices he’d made. If that wasn’t magic, she didn’t know what was.
“Did the Faey Mother truly never teach you to see?” Falkin asked it tentatively.
“She mixed her poultices and mashed her roots,” Iyana said, sounding more bitter than she should and less bitter than the thickening bowl in her lap smelled.
“There is a bit more to it than that,” Falkin said. He held up his hand to stay her interjection.
“No,” Iyana said anyway. “She didn’t teach me the ways of the Faey Sight. She taught me to heal. To mend wounds and burn corruption out. All of those mean and simple things.”
Even as she spoke the words, she knew her anger was misplaced. Ninyeva had shown her the things her people had needed most from her. She had shown her how to read the feelings of others, to follow her impressions. Iyana had only begun to see the tethers clear in recent days, and wondered why the Faey Mother hadn’t told her of them before. Perhaps she had meant to. Perhaps she would have, had she more time.
“She never took me here,” Iyana breathed. She did not know if she was more disappointed in that fact or in the truth of the Faey, who seemed not so very different from the rest of them. A little lighter than the Emberfolk. A little thinner than the Rivermen. A little older than both combined. But very much the same, in pettiness and in all the goodly ways, near as she could tell.
“There is much to learn,” Falkin said. “And in many places.” He paused and lifted his still-steaming ladle up to his lips, taking a pull on the juice that had gathered in the basin. He nodded for Iyana to do the same, and she did without thinking, Ceth watching all the while, concern mounting.
It was still hot, but not painfully so, the heat doing the job of cutting some of the bitterness. Still, she wrinkled her nose and squeezed her eyes shut tight against the taste as the mix coated her throat and warmed her chest on the way down.
“I am sure Mother Ninyeva did the best she could,” Falkin said. “I do not say this to placate you, Iyana. I say it because of the things you have accomplished.”
Iyana took another swallow at his prompting and then set the bowl down on the ground.
“In truth, there is very little one Seer can show another.”
Iyana frown
ed. Ninyeva had shown her plenty when it came to the healing arts. She did not see why the same could not have been so for the greensight.
“Take me, for example,” Falkin said, pressing a hand to his chest. “My eyes shine brightly, and I have seen many things, but the mind can only stretch so far without fraying on the back of imagination alone. Experience follows discovery. Discovery prompts innovation. You have seen more of the wider world than any here among the Valley Faey,” he said. “That makes you strong in ways you cannot understand. It has opened new pathways to you because it has opened new questions.”
Iyana’s head was beginning to swim, though not in an unpleasant way. It reminded her a bit of the way the hotwine at Hearth had made her feel, swaying beneath the glowing yellow candles and their running wax. At the same time, she felt her nostrils flaring, her vision clearing. Everything smelled more immediate. Everything looked a little brighter and a little more vivid. Her mind began to race, but she retained it all. Every whizzing thought and streaking impression left slow-fading lines like scratches on parchment. She felt, in a word, clear.
“You may be wondering if I am simply saying this to placate you,” Falkin said. “Or, if I am telling the truth, how I could possibly know it.” He smiled wistfully. “It was Ninyeva herself who showed that to me. She showed us all during her time spent among us, though some of my fellows still refuse to acknowledge her wisdom.”
He sighed. “We are old things. Many of us. We change slowly.” He looked at them each in turn. “Not unlike the Sages.”
Iyana was almost beyond the point of speaking. She came back to herself with effort, though she still felt the rhythmic swaying that preceded her greensight. That called the Between out in their presence, or else revealed its truth between them. The room took on an ethereal quality as the ruddy glow of the fire melded with the bright auras of Falkin and Ceth—one yellow-green and the other moon-white. Their tethers rose like twisting ribbons of sand underwater and merged into the uneven ceiling.
“You have a power to you, Iyana,” Falkin was saying. She had heard it before, and by more than one for different reasons. They told her she was strong when she mended wounds with nothing but her will. They told her the same when she seized upon the threads of others and bent them to her desire, as she had out on the sands. His next words gave her pause. “It is a power built on courage, and bolstered by a selflessness of desire. It is the power that allowed you to find your sister in the Deep Lands, beneath the raging River F’Rust, in the Valley’s darkest hour. It is why, I think, Ninyeva thought to guide your teachings more toward healing than seeing, as it has made those eyes stronger than mine could ever be.”
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 49
