The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4)

by Steven Kelliher

  Iyana watched him.

  “You seem to see plenty well enough,” she said. She spoke in a dreamy tone that sounded strange to her own ears and had Ceth looking at her out of the corners of his eyes.

  “It’s all I’m good for, these days,” Falkin said without a hint of shame. “It has always done us well to know the goings-on in this Valley of ours.”

  “Much good it did you,” Iyana said. “Much good it did us, in these long years of darkness.”

  Falkin opened his mouth to speak, but seemed reluctant to provoke her further.

  “You kept your people sheltered. You kept them safe here at the edge of the Valley, in the glowing Eastern Woods.”

  “We have suffered plenty,” Falkin said. He did not inflect his tone with anything other than a flatness that suggested she should not press.

  “Did you know?” she asked. “About the Sage, I mean. About the White Crest. Did you know of the darkness that had taken him, or did you think him lost, like the rest of us did?”

  “Do you think we would not have told you, if we had known?” Falkin asked, and a shred of the hurt she might have expected found his tone and coated it in rough silver. Iyana blinked and felt her blood cooling, her heart slowing. She thought to apologize, but saw Falkin’s eyes glowing in tune with her own. He must know she hadn’t meant it. At least, that she regretted meaning it.

  “Such a pall hung over those peaks,” Falkin said, his voice turning grave. “I fear, Iyana Ve’Ran, no matter what you expected of me—of us—that if Ninyeva could not breach that red-topped citadel with her Sight and learn the truth of it, there are none among us who could have.”

  “Your power,” Ceth broke in. “It moves in so many ways. Healing wounds. Seeing … whatever it is you see.” Iyana looked directly at the Northman and saw him less as the man she knew and more now as the spirit of wind he truly was—the Skyr, his flickering white form and the suggestion of the wings that had borne his ancestors on the highest, strongest winds. Wings not unlike those Linn had seen in the depths of the White Crest’s memories. It was a beautiful image.

  The glow began to fade as Iyana grew more accustomed to the ebb and flow of whatever altered, watchful daze Falkin’s mix had put her in, and the colors of the room began to take it back.

  “How?” Ceth asked. “How does such power work?”

  Falkin looked quite at a loss for how to answer Ceth. “Is it any less strange than how you summon the very weight in the air around you? In the way you ride the lightest gusts to the highest reaches as if your bones have grown suddenly hollow?”

  “That is not the same,” Ceth said, shaking his head. He seemed certain of it. “What I can do,” he said, looking down at his hands. “What the Embers can do, or Landkist the world over. They are gifts of war. Weapons to be wielded. I cannot see these … tethers. I cannot grasp the life of another as if it is a string to be cut. I cannot mend wounds with my thoughts, or travel roads that do not exist to places I have never seen.”

  “No,” Falkin said. “No, you cannot.”

  “These are mighty gifts,” Ceth said. “And old.”

  “Ah,” Falkin said. “But it seems you’ve come to it at last.” He smiled at Ceth and Iyana’s confused looks. “The powers of the Kin are tied to life,” he said. “And the tethers that make it up. There is an energy that each person possesses, just as each animal and plant does, and each mote of ash with clinging mold.”

  Ceth shook his head. Iyana wanted to shake hers as well, though she knew it to be true, saw it even now.

  “These tethers are tied to Her,” Falkin continued. “To the world and all its many children. And we,” he pressed a hand to his chest and bowed as if in reverence before extending the hand toward Iyana, “are her humble shepherds.”

  Ceth followed his hand to Iyana and judged the truth of it for himself.

  “At least,” Falkin withdrew his hand and shrugged nonchalantly, “that has always been my interpretation. I’ve had a long time to think about it. Too long, some might say. Ninyeva always did …”

  “You speak of the world as if it—as if She—is alive,” Iyana said. Seeing Falkin’s expression, she hated how callous it sounded. She had heard elders say it her whole life. Had even heard her fellows address Her casually, offhand, though they never seemed to mean it in any literal sense. Seeing the way Falkin looked at her now, she felt a fool for even daring to suggest that it might not be the case.

  “Ah, but She is,” Falkin said. “And not in any,” he made strange, meaningless gestures with both hands, “fluid, smoky way. She is alive, Iyana and Ceth, and always has been. This I know.” He paused and took a swallow from a cup that had been sitting there before they had come. “The ancients called it the Soul of the World,” he said. “Others, I have been told, called it the Heart of the very same. The tethers come from her, as her life flows in us. We are a smaller part of a larger whole. We come from one, and someday, no matter the lives we’ve lived, we will return to it.”

  He swallowed as he said the last and Iyana saw a flash of uncertainty pass across his face, as if he didn’t quite believe it to be true but wanted desperately to. He recovered quickly enough.

  “You have no doubt heard tell that the gifts of the Landkist come from the world?” They each nodded. “This is true.” He smiled fondly at Ceth. “You, my boy, are Her unfurled wings. The Embers are her beating rage, railing against all the hurt that makes life up. The Rockbled are her stony resolve. Each an aspect of a larger truth, like shards of a mirror of impossible beauty.”

  “And we are Her shepherds,” Iyana said. “To tend her flock.” It felt as if she were quoting something known and something written down, though not by her. Something that might be buried in the deserts, inscribed in the Valley and carved into stone tablets beneath the towers in the west.

  “But,” Iyana frowned. “But what of the Sight? What of the Between?”

  Falkin’s smile grew less wide, but his eyes became rapturous, even hungry. “It is not a place,” he said. “It is as much a place as the thoughts of another. No. It is a way built of intent. It is the tether that binds them all. It is—”

  “Her mind.”

  Iyana breathed it out, feeling it as the truth, though she couldn’t know it for certain. She blinked and saw that Falkin was leaning forward in his chair, gripping the rests. “Her mind,” he nodded. “Yes, Iyana. The Kin of Faeyr have one gift, and that is to see and to interact with the tethers others cannot know. We can seize upon them and gather the thoughts of those who carry them. We can see what they see. Know what they know. To a point.”

  He leaned back and breathed out an exultant sigh. “When we enter the Between, we see what She sees. We feel what she feels. We go where she takes us. Hers is the web into which all tethers feed. Time has no meaning, there. At least, not as we understand it. The world as we know it appears differently, as if it exists in all times before, melding with memories of itself and projections of what it could become.”

  Iyana remembered entering the Between on three occasions, all of them in recent days, and none with the blessing of the Faey Mother. She had followed a tether down into the mind of Braden Taldis and been trapped there by a Rockbled far stronger than she could have imagined. She had braved its uncertain ways with a hungry desperation as she had searched for her sister, following ethereal winds and half whispers that were more suggestions down through rocks that ran for leagues underground until she had embodied the form of a firefly.

  And then, at the edge of all reason and with all other choices lost to her, she had shifted into that realm as she witnessed a battle between Sages on the melted glass that had been the desert’s floor. She had followed it to the tether of one who kept it jealously guarded, and with him, she had careened on violent winds and passed over the edges of a world unlike anything she could have imagined.

  “Fear,” Iyana said. “Fear is what I felt from her, the last time I entered the Between.”

  “What did you see,
Iyana?” Falkin asked. They had come to it, then. “What did you see out on the sands?”

  Iyana tried to orient her thoughts. She saw it all now as she had then: a world of black fire and choking ash. A world with rivers run dry and castles that rose from gray cliffs, impossibly high until they were lost in violently flashing clouds. She saw great mountains with iron chairs, and great winged beasts seated atop them, looking down over all their ruined dominion. She saw bright beams of light breaking the deepest blackness between worlds, drawing the glowing eyes of that fell plane. She felt the fear now as she had then, and though she had felt it from the one she had flown beside, she had also felt it from the world itself as its dark cousin came calling.

  “I saw the World Apart,” Iyana said, suppressing a shiver. “And when I came back …” She pictured the scars opening on both horizons. She saw the great plateau of Center rent apart under the might of a demon as great as the purple beast Creyath had slain in the deserts. “The lake was burning. The water, it was black and orange. There was death and ruin in all lands, and there was war, or the memory of it. It had been swift and vicious, and we had lost. There was light and then darkness. There was … nothing at the end of it all.”

  She looked up at Falkin, hoping to see that easy smile that had already become so familiar to her. In its place, she saw an ashen face, as if she had confirmed the worst of his fears.

  “You have seen the end of things, Iyana Ve’Ran,” he said. “You have seen what I have only guessed at, what the Sages should have feared all along, had they the wherewithal to dislodge themselves from their bitter strife over the long years. You have seen the Forever Night.”

  Iyana swallowed and looked to Ceth, who seemed unsure how to react. He said nothing and she turned back to Falkin. “But … how can we survive a thing like that?”

  “I fear there is no surviving it,” Falkin said. He didn’t seem nearly as put off by the prospect as she was. He smiled. “We must stop it, I think. Yes.” He stroked his chin as if confirming long-held suspicions. “We must stop it happening in the first place.”

  Iyana must have looked as dumbstruck as she felt. “But the World Apart has always been—”

  “It has always been, yes,” Falkin said, holding up a finger. “But it has not always been coming. Brushing by, maybe. Admitting a few of its denizens through rips and fissures. But no, Iyana, it was not always coming. It was not always close, which means it can be stopped.”

  “How?”

  “How would I know?”

  Ceth chuffed for them. “You seem to know plenty,” he said. “Or to think you do.” He spat on the ground and Iyana frowned at him. “What is all this?” he asked, looking to her and not the other man. “The World Apart. The Forever Night. Storybook terms. Legends.”

  Iyana fixed him with the stare she usually reserved for Kole. It seemed to give him pause. “You fought one of those legends very recently,” she said, arms crossed. “Or did you forget the mountainous demon spewing fire the color of amethyst out in the desert sands?”

  “A trick of the Eastern Dark,” Ceth grumbled, but he settled back down.

  “A mighty trick, then, and one that did not come from here.”

  “Quite so,” Falkin agreed, holding his cup and crossing one leg over the other.

  “I assume you have a plan, then?” Iyana asked.

  “Of course I do,” Falkin said. He seemed to be measuring her reaction. Before she exploded, he said it plain. Too plain for her liking. “There is one who called it in the first place. There is one who knows more of the World Apart than we ever could. Its power and the direction of its gaze. Perhaps how to stop it. To stop the end of times, Iyana, we beg the aid of the Eastern Dark, whom you have known more recently than I.”

  Iyana should have been stunned, but somehow she wasn’t. She stared at Falkin long enough to convince Ceth that she thought she has misheard him.

  “Your master plan is to reach out to the greatest enemy the world has ever known?” she asked. It sounded ridiculous. It sounded like folly. It sounded like exactly what she had known all along, walking alongside Beast and his terrible, bouncing burden through the glowing ferns and shining streams.

  “Who better than he to know how to mend it?” Falkin asked, as if the answer were obvious. “Who better to right old wrongs?” He paused before speaking again, aware of the growing tension in the room, specifically from Ceth. Iyana hadn’t given it much thought before now, but Ceth had his own score to settle with the Eastern Dark.

  “Move your minds away from thoughts of hatred and ire, however earned they may be,” Falkin said. His voice, ever-changing, now thickened and grew sturdy, leaving no room for argument. “Move your minds from thoughts of redemption for Ray Valour.” Iyana blinked at the casual mention of the Sage’s true name. “Doomed or redeemed, he is the best path forward, because he is the only path forward.” Falkin set his cup down and folded his hands in his lap, waiting on her reply.

  Iyana nearly reached out to steady Ceth, but he had regained his usual composure. She could feel the swell and pull of his energy in the room, drawing hanging threads from the ceiling and causing the mixtures in Falkin’s stone and wooden bowls to lean toward him, threatening to spill.

  “Kole and Linn are out there now,” Iyana said, gesturing at the back wall. “In the northeast, trying to hunt him down, to kill him if need be.”

  “Him?” Falkin asked, seemingly amused. “Only him?” He leaned forward. “Or all of the Sages?”

  “Not many left,” Ceth muttered.

  “No.” Falkin settled back. “No, there are not. Still, sending the most powerful Landkist of the Valley out on some misplaced errand of vengeance seems …” He swallowed, seeing Iyana’s look. “It could be they succeed, Iyana. But at what cost? You’ve been there. You’ve seen the World Apart and you’ve seen the beams that draw it in like lanterns to sickly moths.”

  “Beacons,” Iyana whispered. “The Sages.”

  “Power,” Falkin said. “Power in its most corrupt of forms, yes, but power nonetheless.”

  “What are you saying?” Iyana asked, guessing the direction but unwilling to lead him there.

  “The Landkist are powerful, too, Iyana,” Falkin said. “You are powerful, just like Kole and Linn and all the others.” He eyed her. “If the Sages are truly drawing the eye of that dark realm, then surely your sister is a part of it.” He swallowed again. “Surely she must die, if they must die to prevent its coming. After all, is that not the aim of Reyna and his allies? Has it not always been, since his mother was snuffed out in the passes?”

  The silence that followed was a pregnant one. Iyana took a steadying breath, aware that Ceth would act on the slightest provocation. Falkin had a reason for saying what he said. He had a point, and Iyana had to keep herself from dreading that he might be right. Why else had she come, if not to learn from one who saw as she saw?

  “You see much in this place, away from the fields of Hearth and the salt of the Lake,” Iyana said. Falkin did not argue, only watched her, unblinking.

  “You must separate the self at times, to see most clearly,” Falkin said. “You have put all your faith in those champions of yours, your sister included. You have sent them out into the world to make a choice on Her behalf, to aim their fiery blades and blazoned shields and blinding bolts toward the oldest among us.”

  Iyana frowned, confused. “The Sages are our enemies,” she said.

  “In a time like this, with what is coming, with what you have seen firsthand, there is no time for enemies. Only friends, grudging or otherwise. Valour knows this. It’s the only reason you lot are still alive, I’d presume.”

  “I gave him a run,” Iyana said, hating the way it sounded. She had, though. She had hurt him. Made him change after seizing his tether and binding it with her own, dragging him unwitting into the World Apart, where they had both gazed upon such a display of chaos and despair that their conflict on the sands seemed meek and, ultimately, meaningless in com
parison.

  “You know the truth of my words,” Falkin said. “You don’t believe that killing the Sages will stop it. Perhaps it might have, years ago. Even centuries. Valour tried. Oh, yes, he tried. Once he had your Ember king in the yoke, it wasn’t hard to imagine why he thought he could take the rest, snuff out those bright and pulling beacons. But the World Apart had him in its sights already, along with the guilty few alongside him. It is coming, and if anyone knows how it can be stopped, it’s the man who’s been trying longest of anyone.”

  Iyana remembered the way he had looked as she studied Falkin. Valour’s ears had been longer, stretching back behind him in a way that looked at once beautiful and comical. His hair had been blacker than Tirruhn’s or Shek’s. Black as Beast’s oiled flanks. His eyes were the color of the Midnight Dunes themselves. He was handsome and frightening to look upon. He was impossibly young, tall and strong. But there was a rot to him, as well. A rot that belonged to one who should have died long ago, and likely a rot that all the Sages shared, moving through the world on their borrowed time, bound together in whatever misdeed had first attracted them to the World Apart and tempted them to wake whatever power nested there.

  “What do you know of him?” she asked.

  “I know that his power did not originate from that other realm,” Falkin said without hesitation, and Iyana began to wonder how old this Faeykin was. Did he consider himself one of the Kin of Faeyr? Did he walk among them? Those healers and seers from long ago?