Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1)

by Steven Kelliher

  “I can’t speak to that,” Kole said hesitantly.

  “But you want to speak to something,” Ninyeva said, green eyes boring in.

  Kole cleared his throat, and the whole of the hall seemed to swell in anticipation.

  “It was looking at me,” he said after a spell, the words sounding even more foolish spoken aloud than they had in his head.

  There was a silence that stretched before Kole broke it.

  “I mean to say, whatever it was, it felt like it was really seeing me.”

  “And?” Ninyeva prodded. Her eyes were a command unto themselves.

  “I felt that someone else was looking at me. Something greater. Something worse.”

  Grumbles in the crowd around Bali.

  If the room held the mood of a burial rite before, it now exploded into something verging on panic. Accusations were levied and put down, and Kole’s words were thrown in his face only for those around him to lob them back with twice the venom. Through it all, the greens of the Faey Mother never left him. She raised a hand, and either that or the sudden flash from Tu’Ren’s palms got everyone settled back in.

  “You never say much, Kole Reyna,” Ninyeva said as the scent of ozone curled throughout the hall. “But you say more than many know. Give us your true feelings. Do you think it was him? Do you think it was the Eastern Dark who glimpsed you and whom you glimpsed behind those eyes?”

  “You asked for my thoughts and you have them,” Kole said. Karin had shifted toward him in the crowd, silent as the rest were loud. His father’s presence was as reassuring as Ninyeva’s gaze was unsettling.

  “I have a part of them,” Ninyeva said, her tone unyielding. “As a child, you doubted the existence of the White Crest, just as you doubted his dark adversary.”

  Kole felt his blood go hot. Karin must have as well, as he laid a hand on his son’s arm.

  “I have never seen either of them,” Kole said through a jaw made suddenly stone tight.

  “I have never seen the eye of a storm on the lake, as Bali has,” Ninyeva said. The sailor’s demeanor softened at the mention. “I have never seen the far reaches of the Untamed Hills, though I trust they exist.”

  She looked as if she was about to go on, but Kole interjected.

  “It’s true that I doubted them as a child,” he said. “Who could blame me? I have never seen any of the Sages, but I have known them closer than most, closer than any should. I see the havoc their magic sews every night in my dreams. You know this.”

  Ninyeva said nothing.

  “I know all here hold the White Crest’s memory up as a shining example of the great exception among the Sages, but I have never felt it. I’ve heard the tales spun since I was a babe: how he opened the Valley to the Emberfolk and then closed it up behind them, how he battled the Eastern Dark and his Night Lords in the passes in a clash that formed the Deep Lands and shattered the River F’Rust.”

  Kole paused. His skin had gone hot, and he was feeling light-headed, Iyana’s paste doing its work in the wrong way now.

  “I have heard you, Faey Mother, tell the tale of how you saw him as a child—our protector—dressed all in white, whose robes billowed around him and cast rainbows in the sun.”

  “And you doubt me?” Ninyeva stated as much as asked.

  “I don’t doubt what you saw,” Kole said. “But I doubt if it wasn’t exactly what he wanted you to see. Just as I doubt if the White Crest was ever on our side in the first place. Just as I doubt if his dark adversary, whom we have not heard from since our king fled the desert like a whipped dog, would challenge one as powerful as he.”

  Faces went slack—some of them so white one could be forgiven for doubting their links to the desert.

  “You believe it was him you sensed?” Ninyeva asked. “Our Sage, and not the Eastern Dark? You believe the White Crest still lives?”

  “Our Sage was never my Sage,” Kole said. “I do not know what presence I felt except to say I’ve felt it before. I felt it when my mother died alone in the rain, clawing the earth and asking for help where none came.”

  Silence.

  “Do you think she was asking the White Crest to come save her from the Eastern Dark?” Kole asked, venom entering his tone. “A storybook villain from the sands none save you have seen. Or do you think she was asking him why he had betrayed us?”

  Kole stared a challenge around the room. He flushed when he noted Linn avoiding his gaze, and the shame redoubled when he saw his father’s haggard look return; it was the look of one lost in the painful haze of memory, and it was Kole’s doing.

  “I know the Sages exist,” Kole said, looking back at Ninyeva. “Unlike all of you, however, I don’t distinguish between them. They took their powers from the World, after all. We Landkist were gifted our own. I used to wonder why that was, but I think I know now. Just as I know why our jailor painted himself as our savior, right before he slew our Ember king.”

  The hall exploded again, and no matter what fiery displays Tu’Ren affected, it was a long time before it quieted. This time, it was Doh’Rah who managed to restore peace.

  “What is it, then?” he asked Kole, his tone weary. “What is it you think you know?”

  Kole cleared his throat.

  “The Embers are the strongest Landkist in the Valley,” he said. “You elders claim we’re the strongest in the World.”

  Doh’Rah did not argue.

  “The Sages have been at war for centuries,” Kole continued. “How convenient, then, for all of the Embers to be cloistered away in one of their nests, in a Valley for safekeeping. Until the time we’re needed to answer his call. How convenient that our Ember king was lost to the Eastern Dark when the White Crest returned from that battle to roost and lick his wounds.”

  “You would put the ambitions of the Eastern Dark onto our protector,” Doh’Rah said. “And you would belittle the sacrifice the King of Ember made in striking out against him. The White Crest returned here on his orders, to protect the Valley and its people.”

  “Haven’t the Sages been looking for an advantage in their private war forever?” Kole asked, exasperated. “Hasn’t each of them, in his or her own way, drawn the peoples of the World and their Landkist into their conflict?”

  “For a time, perhaps,” Doh’Rah answered. “But the White Crest abandoned that pettiness.”

  “Or so he would have you think. He convinced our king of it as well.”

  “Why, then, would he send the Dark Kind to slay us, Embers included, if he meant to use us in his war?”

  “An Ember of the Lake has never fallen against them,” Kole said, and the words sounded horrid even to his ears. “Neither has an Ember of Hearth. Not since they first entered the Valley when I was a boy.” Images of all the soldiers—and everyone in between— who had been killed flashed before his eyes.

  “The Dark Kind serve no master in this World,” Doh’Rah said. “No master save the Eastern Dark, who has ever been our enemy.”

  “Perhaps they have been let in,” Kole said, but he knew he had lost them. Whatever interest he had piqued had soured. If he was honest with himself, he could not entirely blame them. In matters concerning the Sages, he had never been able to remain clear-headed. His thoughts were guided by rage, his words by revenge. In truth, it was revenge as aimless as the wind itself.

  Was he wrong? Was he truly projecting his anger, his loss, onto a figure that had sheltered them against his own kind?

  More of the gathered had begun filing out into the night, and Kole suspected that whatever good will he had garnered in the assault went with them.

  “You are not the first Landkist to think to challenge the Sages, Kole Reyna,” Ninyeva said in a room grown quiet enough to hear the waves of the lake lapping beneath the boards. “Nor are you the first to question the loyalty of the one who swore to our king to shelter us against the rest. The Dark Months have never been as perilous as they are now. Whatever answers are to be found at the peaks, I expect they will
still be there to be found when the World Apart is no longer so close. For now, we cannot risk one of the few Embers we have.”

  Kole blinked, taken aback. He had expected her to rebuff his claims, to shout him down in defense of her Sage’s memory. He had expected her to turn her ire onto the scourge that had hunted them in the deserts of the north and quite possibly had returned to hunt them now.

  By the look on her face, Linn had expected the same.

  “You would give me leave to try for the peaks?” Kole asked, hating the quiver in his voice but unable to suppress it. Was it excitement, or fear?

  “I would give you leave to set your mind at ease, Kole,” Ninyeva said, “and in so doing, to do the same for your people. Questions are a powerful thing. In the past, it was easy to forget what it must be like growing up in the Valley but being of the desert.” Tu’Ren nodded gravely, staring into the dying coals. “And worse, how difficult it must be for your generation to grow up with no sign of the White Crest, with nothing but war and warriors for company. It is by necessity we live this way, but we cannot continue like this forever.”

  Ninyeva scanned the gathered crowd, her eyes finding each set among those who remained.

  “If the White Crest lives, he must be found,” she said. “If the Eastern Dark has returned, he must be found. Whatever path we take, I suspect, as I have long suspected, it is not to be found in the Valley. But these are pathways closed to us in the Dark Months. For now, we will endure, and we will hope another of those beasts does not come to our door with the eyes of a Sage, no matter which one.”

  Linn and Kole walked together for a spell in the soft light of dawn, while Karin stayed behind to give his reports. They did not speak, and Kole felt his scab burning angrily, though the rest of him had cooled. He was troubled by dark dreams that night. As always, they carried a core of hot flame and the echoes of a mother’s cry.

  Restless was not a sharp enough word to describe Kole’s sleep that morning, so he settled on broken. The shards of dreaming were still nesting in his mind. He tried to shake them as he walked.

  The clouds had moved off and the moon shone bright and blue. No Dark Kind would harry them now. Attacks were more frequent than they had been in any of the previous seasons Kole could remember, but they never occurred consecutively. Karin had done his job thorough. There were no Dark Kind moving in the South Valley as far north as Hearth, and those that had fled the wrath of Last Lake had done so in numbers too few to scatter hares.

  Still, Tu’Ren was taking no chances, Kole saw as he approached the yawning and splintered gap where the gate had been. Men and women toiled into the night rebuilding a barrier out of the wreckage. Every brazier was lit, each Keeper on guard but for Kole. They thought they were doing him a favor. Perhaps they were. Or perhaps Linn Ve’Ran had had something to say about it.

  She froze when she saw his brown eyes reflect amber in the torchlight, and the smile she forced did little to ease the unspoken tension from the night before.

  “You’re awake,” she said, straightening from the beam she had been leaning against.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  She shifted uncomfortably, but the smile soon dissolved and she blew out a sigh.

  “Iyana forced my hand,” she said, nodding up toward the nearest platform, where Jenk stood beside his crackling brazier, his eyes focused on the trees ahead as he pretended not to eavesdrop.

  “Embers heal fast,” Kole said. “I’m more than fit to keep watch.”

  “Good,” Linn said, tossing him a pack. “Then you’re more than fit to hunt.”

  Hunting in the Valley was rarely a solitary effort. In the Dark Months, it never was. Kole was about to reprimand Linn for striking out on her own when someone approached at a trot from the road behind.

  “Nathen,” Kole said, nodding appreciatively at the fisherman’s son. “How are you?”

  “Hungry,” Nathen said, all good humor. He was a genuine lad from a hard working family, and younger than Linn and Kole by close to a decade—young enough not to know a Valley without the Dark Kind. As it happened, he was also the best hunter on the Lake. It was a fact not lost on his father’s friends, who never let Bali hear the end of it.

  “If Nathen Swell is hungry,” Kole said, “then it truly is past time to bring in some fresh game. Not that we don’t appreciate your father’s fish, but there’s something about sinew to get you through dark times.”

  “And Dark Months,” Nathen said with a smile before taking the lead as they passed under the scaffolding.

  “You three going out now?”

  It was Kaya, leaning on her Everwood staff and craning over from what was usually Linn’s perch. It was a slight intended and received.

  “We need some fresh air,” Linn said without breaking stride.

  “Plenty of that all around,” Kaya called after her.

  “Especially around you, Ferrahl, since you’ve no brazier stealing it away,” Linn shot back. A string of curses followed and Linn left a trail of bubbling laugher in their wake as they ducked beneath the canopy.

  Though there were six Embers at Last Lake, there were only five braziers. Kaya was a powerful Landkist and formidable enough with her flames, but she was want to suck up more heat than she could easily channel, and the results had been near-catastrophic in the past. Kole held no ill will toward her, but facts were facts.

  Nathen was always quiet on a hunt, a skill the others possessed but felt no need to adopt as they marked a path west toward the nearest of the Untamed Hills. Linn and Kole had never been known to share words over tea. They thought best beneath the trees and spoke freely in the clearings.

  “You may as well ask,” Kole said, earning a confused look from Nathen up ahead before Linn answered.

  “You really think it’s the White Crest doing this to us?” she asked, her tone making her own thoughts on the subject abundantly clear.

  “I don’t know what I think,” Kole said, as if he hadn’t done a good enough job proving that in the Long Hall. “But he is one of them, isn’t he? One of the Sages.”

  “Was, you mean.”

  Nathen put a bit of distance between him and the pair, partly to avoid the distraction and partly—Kole suspected –to avoid getting involved. The stars lit the branches overhead like a thousand tiny mirrors, but the light faded as the woods grew dense, the path choked with roots and loose stones. The animals of the Valley were silent in their nests and burrows.

  “He is gone, Kole,” Linn said in that hard way of hers. It was the way she said things when she wanted him to prove her wrong.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We know that the Night Lords attacked him in the Valley passes thirty years ago,” she said. “We know the battle lasted three days—

  “And three nights,” Kole put in. “And their clash brought down the peaks and broke the River F’Rust, and the Rivermen who lived in the canyon were trapped in the Valley—those that survived, at least. Their bones litter the Deep Lands now, and the Steps still echo with the faint clashes of our Valley Sage and the Night Lords sent against him. I know the tale.”

  “It wasn’t so long ago to be called a tale, Kole. It happened in the lives of our parents. The White Crest fell and the Dark Kind entered the Valley. We’ve been fighting them ever since.”

  Kole said no more, and Linn grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around roughly. They were in a small clearing beset by filtered starlight. Though she was angry, she looked oddly beautiful.

  “Did you really sense something looking through that beast?” she asked, a hint of fear in her voice. “Kole. Did you see something?”

  Kole sighed.

  “Something saw me, Linn,” he said. He knew Nathen had stopped moving along the path up ahead, that he was listening with those hunter’s ears. “That was not your average Dark Kind. It had a master.”

  “The Dark Kind are a force of nature. Not in our world,” she said, noting his expression. “In theirs. Only one h
as the power to control them. If what you say is true, then Bali is right. The whispers are true, and the Eastern Dark has found us. He’s come back. The White Crest didn’t manage to kill him in the passes after all.”

  Kole did not look convinced, and that seemed to snap something in Linn. She grabbed him by the straps of his pack and nearly shook him.

  “What makes you say otherwise, Kole? Why are you constantly chasing the ghost of a Sage you’ve never seen? A Sage that died before we came into the world.”

  Kole looked away, dropping his voice so even Nathen could not hear.

  “I saw him the night she died,” he said, and Linn’s grip slackened. “I sensed him. He was there, Linn.” Kole’s brown eyes took on their amber glow as they met hers. “He could have helped her. I know it.”

  But he didn’t.

  “There were shadows with the same red eyes as that beast. They were in the peaks above the Deep Lands. Not Dark Kind, but something stronger.” Kole’s eyes widened as he remembered waking up in a cold sweat for the last time, before the fire had found him. Before he was Landkist. “If he was there, why didn’t he help her? Why did he let them …?”

  Linn shook her head and released him.

  “We’ve all lost, Kole,” she said, her eyes all sympathy. “But not all of the Sages are the same. There has ever been one the Emberfolk have counted an enemy. With the White Crest gone—gone, Kole—we can’t rely on anything but the strength of our people to repel him.”

  “Ninyeva knows something,” Kole said. “She led me like a lamb to the slaughter. If she knew he was back, she should have said so.”

  “You got exactly what you wanted,” Linn said, moving ahead of him. “You can make for the peaks when the Dark Months end, see what there is to see.”

  “She knows what’s happening, or has a guess,” Kole said, following after.

  “Ninyeva always has a guess.”

  Sure enough, Nathen was lounging idly on a leaning trunk, chewing some root or another. He stood when they approached, flashed that quick smile and continued on the path without a backward glance.