The Midnight Dunes

by Steven Kelliher

Iyana Ve’Ran was not a displaced youth looking for purpose in the shadow of her sister. She was as much a part of this as he was. More so, he knew, in many ways that had yet to be revealed.

  “How are they?” Talmir asked. She adopted a questioning look and followed his as he observed his soldiers barking the twin rows of horses and riders into shape. The merchants sat atop their mules, unsteady and grumbling.

  “Hopeful,” she said after a time. “Frustrated.”

  It wasn’t a guess. Talmir didn’t pretend to know how she knew it. He didn’t pretend to care.

  He saw Creyath detach himself from the rest, his black charger the only thing in the company darker than the Ember himself. His great bow hung loose across his back, the shafts in the oiled quiver thick enough to withstand the heat of his blood long enough to launch.

  Talmir waved for the Second Keeper and Creyath turned amber eyes his way, spinning his mount and whistling as he came over. At his command, Mial—the old trickster—brought Talmir’s painted mare at a trot. Talmir greeted the animal warmly and swung up into the saddle as Iyana allowed Creyath to pull her up behind him.

  “The gap?” Creyath asked, to the point as always.

  “The gap,” Talmir answered. The Ember nodded curtly, which showed Talmir what he thought of it. He bristled and thought to argue the reasons, but he knew the effort would be wasted.

  “It is decided,” Creyath said, as close as he would come to placating. Talmir accepted it and moved off, taking Iyana’s smirk with him.

  Talmir rode the length of the twisting lines and counted, though he knew none would be out of place. He passed the young soldiers and tried not to think of how foolish they were for following him. At least Mial was an old fool. The scout followed at an easy trot, shouting orders based on Talmir’s silent glances and sharp pulls.

  He stopped at the head of the two-breasted caravan and turned to look toward the south. The clouds billowed like plumes of smoke that would not reach this far. The black mountains that sheltered the Valley core stood vigil. Over whom, Talmir was not one to guess.

  “Where to, Captain?”

  The speaker was the Faeykin known as Sen. He had a habit of riding toward the front, a curious decision given his lack of weaponry. Talmir let him, though a part of him knew it to be irresponsible.

  “The gap,” Talmir answered, keeping his voice level. He cursed himself internally, knowing his tone shot down the possibility for an argument—knowing it showed he expected one. Sen merely smiled and inclined his head, his green eyes roving up the shifting wall of sand beside him.

  “The nomads haven’t entered, near as we can tell,” Talmir said, fighting the wind, which had picked up in the late afternoon. It seemed to shift direction as quickly as the salt lake to the south. Perhaps all oceans were alike in disposition, be they formed of sand or sea.

  He received searching looks. The nomads had been weighing on the minds of all in the caravan. A confrontation was coming. Talmir knew it just as they did. But its nature was still a mystery, as was the time and the place of its happening.

  “The gap carves a path due north,” Talmir said, spearing his hand forward before bending it to the right, “and then sharply east. The ground is hard-packed clay. It’ll be easier on the horses. The ridges on either side are full of alcoves and perches. Be wary. The desert hasn’t yet showed us what’s beneath its yellow skin.”

  “What’s out there, Captain?”

  Talmir searched, and the line bucked and bent to reveal a young soldier he thought he recognized. She worked beneath the White Cliffs.

  He thought on the answer for a spell and settled on the hoped-for truth.

  “Our homeland,” he said.

  It had the effect he wanted. Shoulders that had been slumped perked up. Eyes that had been glazed brightened.

  Creyath brought his black mount between the Captain and the rest, and Talmir turned and began to make his way around the steep incline and toward the lower ground.

  “To the gap,” Creyath said at his back, and they followed, the wagons’ wheels lurching in complaint as they fought the paste the sand had made of their oiled spokes.

  Homeland.

  The word seemed a lie, and Talmir did not dare tell them that they followed the fleeting impressions of a girl half the age of any in the caravan. Better that than the promises of old parchment.

  “What am I doing?” he whispered under his breath.

  “Leading.”

  He saw that Creyath had brought his charger up beside him with a silence that belied its bulk and twin burden. Talmir regarded his Ember friend, whose eyes remained fixed ahead. Iyana, however, did meet his stare, the green centering him in a way no words of comfort could.

  To the north and to the west. To the Sage of the Red Waste. To a fool’s salvation.

  They had told her the desert was a place of extremes, but Iyana never took it to be literal. As the caravan wended its way down the sliding slopes of dry, moving earth, dipping into the twilit shadows framed between ridges, she understood what they meant.

  In place of the arid heat of the late afternoon, the gap was cool, the blue shadows matching the mood of the land as the sun set the exposed ridges alight like spurs of Everwood. Moments before, she had cursed her decision to wedge herself between the back of Creyath Mit’Ahn and the radiating heat of the sands below the black charger’s hooves. Now, she was thankful for the Ember’s proximity.

  She was thankful for his presence and heat just as she was for his silence. It allowed her to concentrate, and in the lengthening shadows of the premature evening, Iyana began to sway. To an outside observer, her body would be still, but it was the inner self she moved—the self of which Mother Ninyeva had taught her from the time she was old enough to blow green flames to life in the pit of the Long Hall.

  Though it was a narrow place relative to the expanse they had just left—a land some in the company had taken to calling the ‘Great Empty’—the gap was still wide enough for the caravan to widen farther than Captain Talmir seemed comfortable with. He spun his painted mare around and rode up and down the twisting lines at even intervals, the soldiers under his command bending back in and straightening in their saddles as he did.

  Talmir led by example. His expectations were evident without the words to accompany them, and Iyana knew he held the hearts and minds of the men and women who followed him.

  It was the others she wondered about.

  Her thoughts became a wash, the shadows of the sheltering ridges framing the perfect canvas for her to do her work. The tethers were fleeting at first—difficult to parse and separate from the errant rays of drifting light. But the longer she looked, the more clearly she saw.

  They sprouted from horse and rider alike, waved lazily from the backs of the twin wagons they rode behind and beside. She knew one merchant was dozing without needing to see him, his tether pulsing with a rhythmic, soft light. The soldiers might look the same to a passerby, with their red and black studs and their orange sashes, but their tethers were as varied as the rest.

  She saw the telltale greens that marked the other Faeykin as they clustered together on the southern side of the company. There were two tethers, though she knew three were among them. Sen did not have a tether, she had been startled to learn. At least, he did not let it drift on whatever currents it would as the others did—as Iyana herself did.

  Though she camped alongside them and rode with them in the day, she felt alien in their company. They spoke little, preferring instead to do as she did now. They saw the others as emotional clusters swinging from the ends of strings, and Iyana thought it strange how easily those who counted healing their specialty could seem so detached from those they helped.

  Mother Ninyeva had been different. Growing up at the Lake, Iyana had heard plenty say it, but now she thought she knew what they meant. Her teacher had trained with the Valley Faey longer than any. She was the first of the Emberfolk to be Landkist by the Valley, and while her powers of sight
and healing were second to none, it was her empathy that Iyana had taken as her greatest gift, and the one she most wanted to live on.

  A glint of deep purple that Iyana first took for a trick of the light betrayed the First Runner of Last Lake, Karin Reyna, as he ranged up and down the steep slopes to either side. It was a marvel how quickly he could move, having left his horse down below. She saw Jes and Mial shadowing him on the lower shelves and giggled as they watched him leap across a span and share a look, all trepidation.

  Creyath shifted in the saddle and twisted to get a look at her.

  “How does he expect to teach new Runners if they kill themselves following him?” Iyana asked, keeping her voice low.

  The Ember smiled, showing his pearly whites. It was a wonder how serious he could seem in one moment and how cheerful the next. But even his happiness was a quiet thing, gentle and firm at once. It was steadying.

  “Few things like danger to teach the young,” he said. Creyath spoke in riddles. Talmir had told Iyana as they passed the cracked plains to the east, and she had ridden with the Second Keeper of Hearth the next day to find out.

  It was true, she decided. Creyath did speak in riddles. But Tu’Ren Kadeh had told her that riddles often concealed truths dressed in lies. She wondered what truths Creyath hid.

  The thought of the First Keeper of Last Lake sent a pang through her heart, the first she had felt in the days since leaving her sister on the lone hill that separated the black fields of the Barrens from the sea of sand they traversed now. She thought of how Tu’Ren must be busying himself in her absence and the absence of his brightest flames, and nearly laughed in a pitying sort of way as she considered the torment he must be inflicting upon Malena Holspahr—one of the new crop of defenders at the Lake.

  Would that they proved unnecessary before the Dark Months returned.

  A flash of movement to the left had Iyana’s heart catching in her throat. Creyath reacted to her sudden tension, swinging his snorting horse around to face the crumbling ledge on the western side of the narrow canyon.

  She felt his heat rise unbidden. The air became milky with it, like a haze, and Iyana coughed as she peered into the gloom.

  A questing tether leaked out from a tumble of loose stones, and Iyana had to blink to make out one of the desert foxes she’d counted by the dozen since their arrival.

  “It’s nothing,’ Iyana said, sighing.

  “Not nothing,” the Ember said. “We are in their land, now. Life is precious here, I think. It should not be counted as nothing.”

  Creyath swung his horse back around and they rejoined the line, a few of the soldiers taking up in their wake and throwing glances back at the place they’d stopped. Iyana frowned. She felt scolded, though she knew Creyath enough to know that was not his intent.

  “Life is precious everywhere,” she said. He didn’t answer.

  They traveled in silence and left the sun behind as they moved deeper into the twisting trail. The sky darkened from blue to the dark of water without moonlight, and the first twinkling stars began to emit their fairy light as Iyana watched in silent fascination.

  The longer she looked, the closer the winking lights seemed, though the ridges to either side seemed to creep in at the edges, reaching and grasping to steal what little light they had left to see by. She looked back down and then behind, and saw that they were indeed sinking lower into the heart of the desert, the trail taking them deeper. The wagons began to gather momentum, so a pair of soldiers riding the stoutest steeds tied ropes to the backs and coached them to slow. They didn’t want their water and dried meat joining one of the rocky tumbles.

  The thought of water clued Iyana in to the dryness in her throat. She blinked herself clear and found fresh waves of exhaustion she had not noticed while touching the Between. It was a warning Mother Ninyeva had given, and Iyana had to remember to take it well. She reached into the saddle sack and brought out a skin, delighting in the cool kiss of the clear liquid as it splashed over her tongue. She offered it to Creyath and he accepted, the water hissing and producing steam as it touched his lips.

  They continued on in that comfortable, easy silence for some time as evening fell, dropping a cool blanket over the company that carried a nip of cold. The wagon wheels protested in a steady monotony as the sandy paste worked itself deep into whatever grooves it could find between wood and iron, whereas the horses’ hooves were quieted by the subtle change from loose sand to packed clay that had a few of them slipping before the ground leveled out.

  Whatever sameness the company displayed was not mirrored by the landscape, which continued to bend where she thought it might straighten, to dip before rising. The spurs and ridges that bordered them closed in at times so that they had to go single file, but the gap would always reopen, admitting them into a new basin or starlit canyon. Each dip and eddy was a miniature valley unto itself, and Iyana found herself drifting on thoughts of the one she’d left behind.

  She cast about for something to distract herself, and settled to studying the lines carved into Creyath’s Everwood bow. When the darkness stole the details from her, she searched out the higher shelves for signs of Karin and his trailing scouts. But even the foxes no longer stirred. It seemed there was little in the way of life tucked into the crags and crevices, though Creyath had told her he spotted what must have been a hammerhorn bull watching their passage from crags that seemed high enough to flirt with the sky earlier.

  Creyath shifted and glanced back at her, his eyes holding an amber glow that was anything but natural. Iyana had thought it strange ever since meeting him. She had only ever seen that glow in Kole’s eyes before a fight, but the Second Keeper of Hearth seemed always to be simmering. She supposed hers were the same. She could even see the green hue reflected off the oiled studs in the saddle.

  Maybe that was why the soldiers of Hearth thought her strange. They were used to the green of the Faey signifying aloofness, not compassion. It was a shame that she’d need a tragedy—or something near—to disavow them of the notion.

  One of the dozing, travel-stained merchants caught himself before tumbling over the side of his cart, and Iyana let loose a relieved sigh. She would not wish for that.

  “What do those eyes see?” Creyath asked, keeping his voice low enough to avoid attention.

  “I wish I knew,” Iyana said without thinking, her thoughts drifting in time with the rhythmic steps of the strong charger that carried them.

  “Who would know but you?”

  There was no accusation in Creyath’s tone, only a calm and leading patience.

  “I see the men and women of this company just the same as you,” she said, scanning them. “But I see more. I see their whims and worries laid bare as plain as you see their swords and pauldrons.”

  “That is a mighty gift, I think,” Creyath said, nodding slowly.

  “Perhaps if I knew what to do with it.” Iyana dismissed the notion. Dismissed herself, which Ninyeva was always fond of reprimanding her for.

  “And the others are the same?” the Ember asked. He did not raise his hands from the reins but pointed with his small finger. Iyana followed it and saw the Faeykin bunched up behind Sen near the front of the caravan.

  “We are all Landkist by the Valley,” she said as if in answer. It didn’t seem to appease Creyath. He mumbled something unintelligible. “I don’t know, truth be told. I know we hold the same power, or power of the same bent. I know we can heal hurts and feel what others feel—see it, as a matter of fact. Like tethers on the wind.”

  “Tethers.” Creyath tasted the word. It struck something in him, but Iyana was left wanting when he failed to elaborate.

  “That’s the only way I know to describe it.”

  “Then that is what it is,” Creyath said it as if it were law. She thought he’d go silent again, but he spoke, his voice level. “I think you have a power in you, Iyana Ve’Ran. I think you must seek it out. Speak to it. Speak to those who know it better.” He indicated
the other Faeykin. “There is more to the Landkist than burning.” He looked around, studying the sheer cliffs and sloped runs of spilled sand. “There is more to this desert than death.”

  The words sounded haunting, though Iyana guessed they were meant to bring comfort. Try as she might, she only felt a shiver greet her spine that the Ember’s heat did little to quell.

  “What do you see when you look at them?” he asked. He meant the caravan. He meant the soldiers—his soldiers—and the others they’d dragged with them.

  “I don’t know how to read all the signs,” Iyana said, sheepish and growing frustrated. “My lessons were never finished.”

  “None of us are ever finished with our lessons, unless we close ourselves to them,” Creyath admonished. “What do you feel when you look at the tethers of those around us?”

  “I feel hope,” Iyana said, surprising herself with the assertion. She shook her head. “I feel fear and uncertainty. I don’t know which is the more prevalent.”

  She felt him laughing. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It makes all the sense you think it does not,” Creyath said through a smile. He kept his eyes ahead, scanning for trouble even as his body seemed relaxed. “You cannot have hope without the fear that made it necessary in the first place.”

  It seemed such a simple thing. Put like that, it struck Iyana profoundly.

  “I think you see more than you know,” Creyath said. He let it hang there, suspended, and Iyana took it and packed it away.

  “You saw them, didn’t you?” she asked, changing the subject. She felt him shift. “The nomads, I mean. You saw them with Talmir and Karin.”

  “The first time, yes.”

  “Talmir said they were not like us,” Iyana said.

  “We do not know who they are or are not like,” Creyath said and Iyana shook her head.

  “He said they don’t look like us.”

  “Ah,” Creyath said. “Their skin, you mean.”

  Iyana flushed and was glad of the privacy the night provided. “I suppose.”

  “Some of them were,” Creyath said, seeming to consider it for the first time. It was difficult to tell when he was joking, but Iyana didn’t think he was now. “Some were baked in the desert sun so they were as brown as the rest of us—some were near as black as me.”