Linn shrugged as she stroked the hound’s winter mane and the two looked out across the ribbed flats. “Your guess is as good as mine, girl,” she said. “I’d say we’re in over our heads, but that’s nothing new. We have been since we stepped out beyond the gap in the first place.”
Shifa gave a small sound of acknowledgement or complaint and started down the hard-packed, stone-filled slope, snout brushing the yellow scrub that sprouted in whatever patches were not taken with the spiky frost that dotted the landscape all around.
Linn turned back toward the night’s fire and saw Jenk’s light hair between a copse, coming closer. Misha was beside him, her own hair indistinguishable from the glowing coals they were leaving behind. Kole would be farther back, while Baas had ventured to the west. It had been two days since they’d last come upon one of Shadow’s black marks. Linn didn’t know what was more concerning: that their quarry had stopped leading them, or that they had allowed themselves to be led in the first place.
Shifa stopped a stone’s throw from where Linn stood atop the slope and sat, emphatic and impatient. Her ears were up. She was agitated, Linn knew. It was the first time she had lost whatever scent she had been following. Perhaps the cold was doing its work on her senses, just as it threatened to freeze Linn to the bone. She was not prepared for such a harshness in the air and shivered as the gooseflesh prickled along her bare arms.
She felt a cold breeze that was not quite icy and turned it back with a thought. It was a marvel how quickly she had grown used to wielding the elements. She turned breezes and blew storms the same way she used to nock arrows and pull strings. The thought was settling and unsettling all at once, and Linn tapped her booted foot, impatient as Shifa as her Ember companions made their aching way through the sparse northern woods. She needed their heat, and smiled at the thought of how she’d circulate the currents in the air to distribute their natural warmth among the company, put it into orbit around her.
She nearly laughed at the absurdity of it. Before, the thought of having such power had frightened her. Now, it only filled her with a driving force to act. To aim herself like one of the shafts she used to bury in the Dark Kind as they drove for the timber walls of Last Lake. She wanted to be done with these strange lands. She wanted to be done with the Sages and Ember Kings. She thought she understood how Kole felt, finally, and felt a coloring of shame that she had given him such a reckoning for his selfish ends.
Were her ends not selfish as well? Did she truly mean to save the World by confronting the Sage known as the Eastern Dark? Or did she just want to be done with it?
She felt the warm shock of heat and knew it to be Jenk’s before she turned to greet him. His was a gentle fire that coursed through his veins like noble sunlight.
“Nothing?” she asked, sidling closer to him. He shook his head and sighed, but he did not seem distraught, only bored. Linn called up some passing air and curled it around him like a swirling cloak before wrapping herself in it. He arched his brows in amusement as his heat was borrowed.
“Do you think it was a trick the whole time?” he asked as they looked out over the cold expanse and past the hound who regarded them with growing agitation.
“No,” Linn said, shrugging when he looked to her for clarification. “I don’t know. I won’t pretend to know what the Shadow girl’s aim is.”
“You mean the Sage,” Jenk said.
“No,” Linn responded, shaking her head slowly. “No, I think the markings are hers alone. Her work, and not on his command.” She knew she had nothing to base it on but a lighter form of the same intuition Iyana possessed in choking abundance. “T’Alon Rane may have been our king, once, but he was her companion. Her captain.” She frowned as she remembered the violence and the brilliance of their clash with the Sage of Balon Rael in his wooden fortress in the scarred and scorched clearing of Center.
“You think a creature like that owes loyalty to anyone?” Jenk asked, sounding doubtful.
Linn could only shrug again. “Perhaps she just wants to see all ends. She made for the sword in the end, before the Eastern Dark had come. She’d have betrayed him. She’d have betrayed her dark master if she could have taken the blade. Who knows what she planned to do with it? She doesn’t seem the ruling type to me.”
“A creature of chaos,” Jenk said, nodding, though Linn thought he might not be taking her meaning.
“Maybe,” she said and let it drop.
They stood and waited in silence, and Linn’s blood felt charged by her proximity to him. She felt energized again, and though the sun was still largely hidden behind a narrow band of white clouds in the distance, it felt good to feel a hint of its caress after weeks spent traveling beneath canopies denser than keeps and patched forests that counted shadows their bounty.
The air was crisp and clean. Even the bite it carried was fresh and stimulating, though Linn knew it could turn deadly given long enough. Given a storm. She wondered if she could turn one of those back. One of the great blizzards she had only heard tell of and could never have witnessed in the south, where the coolest of nights never approached conditions to slow water enough to freeze.
As they waited for the others, Linn traced the distant mountains with her eyes. She knew they were large, but now they were closer and they had grown no larger, she understood them to be leviathans. She hoped whatever lands they were meant to find were nested below them. To the east, the plains came up to a steep gray shelf that was higher than the Steps of the northern Valley. Atop it, a blanket of white stretched away until another plateau jutted from it. She could see hints of blue dotting the plains. Clear water that reflected the brilliance of the sky, and not yet cold enough to freeze. She wondered if the snow atop those shelves would last the day.
Linn’s thoughts began to drift back toward the fighting in Center. She remembered the charge she had felt as she had unleashed a bolt at the Sage of Balon Rael in his burning forest greater even than the one she had sent into T’Alon Rane in the south. It had been frightening. It had been intoxicating.
She thought of Baas fighting alongside their would-be king in that fortress of corruption, remembered the armored titan watching over them with black eyes and black intent. She remembered the Willows with their white eyes and then thought of their leader, the man they called the Emerald Blade but who was truly Maro. She had never seen martial work like his. Kole was the more powerful, she knew. Kole was more powerful than he had any right to be. But Maro had possessed a dancer’s poise and a killer’s precision. She wondered not for the first time what had made a man like him and how he had come to own the burden of his people’s fate.
She supposed they should sympathize. After all, were they four—five, if you counted the black-and-white hound who truly led them—not the collective blade formed out of the Valley’s strife and sent forth to challenge those who had doomed them?
“Nothing,” Kole said as he came up. He did not sound as discouraged as she had expected, and Linn let the rest of her thoughts tumble down into the frozen dirt.
“What now?” Jenk asked. Linn met Kole’s eyes and he nodded slightly. Shifa came over at his approach and he brushed the frost from her tail as she twined around him like a cat.
“Onward,” Kole said with a shrug. “Seems to be there’s no other direction to go.” He scanned from west to east. They were at the outermost borders of the patchwork of Center, and Linn couldn’t argue with his assessment. “They call her the Witch of the North,” he said, nodding across the white and blue-speckled plains. “Those shelves look to suit the name.”
Baas was along in short order, and the group moved off. The sun emerged from its threadbare cover and set the afternoon’s melt to glistening. It looked like a field of diamonds, but soon enough its brilliance turned to a sting that grew into a dull ache behind Linn’s eyes. By the time the sun had gone through most of its arc, the tan skin beneath the Embers’ eyes bor
e a deep blush, while Baas’s lighter tone verged on pink. Kole teased him for it and the Riverman smiled for the first time since his rescue.
Shifa angled directly ahead, darting from patch to patch and sniffing as she went, tail rigid and body set with purpose. Soon enough, however, the language of her form changed. It was subtle, but Linn confirmed its truth as Kole watched the hound with mounting concern. The direction might be ahead, but this was a sprawling land, and the sheltering ways of Center were drifting farther behind. Soon, they would be left to the wastes, and with nothing but the hardened figs the folk of the Emerald Road had given them for sustenance.
“She’s lost the scent,” Kole sighed, calling Shifa back as she began to wander. The hound whined as she neared them and even gave a bark, as if she blamed them.
Baas laid his great stone shield down beside a nearby pool and sat atop it. He leaned forward and splashed the clear water onto his face, sending forth a plume of white smoke as he exhaled from that monstrous chest.
“Is it possible to be lost in a land we’ve never known in the first place?” Jenk asked, his lame attempts at humor doing little to dispel the frustration of Ember and hound, who both regarded him flatly.
“If there is,” Misha said from behind, “we’re as likely as any to discover how.” The Ember of Hearth did not sit to rest by the pool. Instead, she stood and watched the west. Always looking back.
Kole followed Baas and stepped down into the shallow water, and Linn paused along its edge, marveling at the yellow and brown gemstones that made up its bottom. She thought she saw tiny fish swimming beneath the flares the sun made of its undulating crests and eddies, and as she focused closer, she saw that they had little gray shells and pincers. Strange beasts in a strange land. A land of the hardy, she guessed. A land of survivors.
What were they if not the same?
“We can shelter for the night beneath the first of the shelves,” Linn offered as Kole dipped his hands into the cold water. The hiss preceded a geyser of steam that enveloped him completely and set him into a fit of coughing that had Linn and Jenk struggling to suppress laughter. Even Baas smirked as the Ember flailed out from the billowing stack and stumbled back up onto dry ground, sputtering and already dry.
Seeing the looks of his companions, Kole allowed himself a smile, and Linn felt a warmth in her chest to see it. It had become a rare enough thing of late.
“Lead on,” Kole said, and Shifa cut her drinking short and bounded from the pool, heading off.
They reached the base of the shelf as the sun hung low, its orange haze looking like the fire Kole struck to the only bundle they could carry from the dry woods across the way. They settled down below an overhang, which rose higher than the tallest buildings of Hearth, and with no handholds Linn could see. They’d have to worry about finding another way up on the morrow. For now, they sat and regathered what heat they’d lost.
Baas’s oval shield was large enough for two to sit abreast and Linn joined him. The others watched the flames dance, the Embers taking turns moving the licking tongues with their intent alone. Linn wondered if they even knew they did it, or if it had become as natural to them as stirring a breeze into a hurricane might one day be to her.
Kole stroked Shifa absently and said nothing of their journey or their destination, and Linn looked beyond the pair, watching the orange orb give up its fight and acquiesce to the coming night.
They did not speak of how they would gain the shelf or what might lie beyond it, nor did they discuss Rane and what had befallen him. They did not broach the subject of the Eastern Dark. These were things each of them turned over in their own private ways, Linn knew, and giving voice to it would do little. Still, she felt they were together in their charge and in their direction where before they had seemed separate: Kole their charging arrowhead and Linn the tether trying to pull him back as the others followed and risked their lives without truly knowing why. Without being asked for their say or what they intended. Heedless of what might befall them.
“What do you think she’ll be like?” Linn asked. Misha regarded her with thinly veiled annoyance, which meant she was curious. She glanced toward Kole, who did not look up from the flames. Baas grunted something unintelligible while Jenk checked on Kole’s reaction before answering. She knew he did it to humor her. She didn’t mind. That was the point, after all.
“Powerful, I would guess,” Jenk said. He swept his hand out to encompass the flat lands they had passed over in the day. “Cold, most likely.” He looked as if he wanted to say more but found the words lacking.
Linn sighed. “We’ve come against three Sages, now,” she said. “Four, if you count whatever it was that was held in Maro’s blade.”
“The Sage of Center,” Kole said as if in a dream.
“Four, then,” Linn said. “We’ve fought them all—the Eastern Dark least of all in some ways and most in others, as he’s got his black hands in all of it.”
“What’s your point?” Misha asked, direct as the angle of her tasseled spear.
“They’re mortal,” Linn said, ignoring what it said about her and the power she had borrowed or been gifted. “We’ve killed them, or seen them killed.”
“Not easy to kill,” Baas intoned in a matter-of-fact sort of way that was just like him. But Linn saw that she had piqued Kole’s interest and whatever part of his attention the fire didn’t hold.
“No,” Linn said. “But we remain. Think of the things we’ve witnessed. The things we’ve been at the heart of.” She gestured as she spoke, and the flames whipped as an errant gust blew sparks toward Misha’s blowing hair. She recoiled and eyed Linn.
Linn elbowed Baas harder than she had intended. He didn’t seem to notice.
“This one whipped this very shield at the Sage of Balon Rael, a man who seemed to think himself a god,” she said. She nodded toward Jenk. “You dueled with the White Crest as he embodied the greatest fighter the Valley has ever known.”
“And lost,” Jenk put in with a sardonic laugh. Misha frowned at the way he said it, but Linn moved past it.
“We sent the King of Ember and his companions fleeing north into the tangle of Center after they failed to give us whatever reckoning the Eastern Dark had bid them give.”
Kole made as if to speak, but held his tongue, either out of deference to Linn or because he saw some truth in what she said, even if he could not guess its ending.
“Four Sages dead,” Linn said, “and we had a hand in every one.” She threw her hands up and another gust stirred, making Shifa raise her head from her white-tipped paws, ears twitching. “What do we have to fear from this Witch of the North? What do we have to fear from the Eastern Dark, who was so weakened by whatever happened to him out west, at the hands of our own, that he had to take the form of another just to keep from being scattered to whatever winds we chose?”
“Say what you mean to say, Linn,” Kole said, his firelit eyes boring into her, holding her. He wasn’t angry. Even Misha looked more interested than annoyed. Baas didn’t look up from the fire, but she had his attention same as the rest.
“We are the agents of whatever’s set to happen here,” she said. “We are the reckoning, for better or worse. Or we can be.” She sighed, a sound of exasperation, and tossed a broken twig into the fire. “It’s time we start acting like it.”
She thought they might ask what she meant and dreaded it. She didn’t know, not in a way that she could put into words. It was something she felt, had felt ever since they had come through Center relatively unscathed, but not unchanged.
“We’re not following one Sage to see what he wants with another,” Linn said. “We’re hunting.”
She caught a look in Kole’s eyes that unsettled her. He nodded once, then looked back into the flames, and she did not have to spare much imagination to guess what he saw there.
“That’s a heavy thing,” Misha s
aid.
The Ember looked from one to the other. She seemed different than usual, less sure of herself, even vulnerable. She looked young.
“Who are we to decide which of the Sages live and die? Which to save and which to kill, when we can’t even know their ends?”
“We might not know the Eastern Dark’s ends,” Jenk said, speaking up before Kole could. “But we can guess it isn’t good.” He met Misha’s stare and switched to the others. “We’ve all seen it, felt it. The days growing shorter before their time. We haven’t come far enough for the land to matter. The Dark Months are coming, and faster than they should. Nothing is as it should be.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Kole said. “To make things right.” He shook his head as the words left his lips. “To make the wrong things answer, at least.”
He looked to Misha until she looked back. He had a stare, that one, and even the Third Keeper of Hearth did not look away once he aimed it at her.
“You ask who we are to decide,” Kole said, his voice eerily calm, steady as the crackle in the flames. “We are who the World made us. We are who they made us, the Sages with their wars and meddling. The darkness that’s taken from us, harmed us, frightened us since we were babes. They called it, whether by mistake or to suit their dark designs. We’ve suffered in it, fought against it. But we remain. We’ve been hardened by it, shaped by it, and now, here we are, at the edge of one World and awaiting the approach of another.”
He looked back into the fire, and Misha did as well, seemingly eager to be free of his attention.
“Here we are,” Kole said again, so quiet Linn thought it was meant for him alone. Baas shifted on the stone seat they shared, glanced at Kole and then at Linn. He kept his judgments private.
Linn stood and stretched the tension from her muscles and Kole watched her. She nodded to him and he nodded back. She stepped away from the firelight and exulted in the shock of the cool, starlit curtain of night as it touched her skin. One Ember was warmth and comfort. Three was like being trapped in the corner of a chimney chute.
The Frostfire Sage Page 6
