She steadied herself and began to see the images of her arms and hands, ghostly white like Iyana’s and not the swarthy brown that was her true skin. There was light beneath it, she realized, and that was when Linn remembered the second gift the White Crest had given her.
Before she lit it like the most blinding storm’s dawn, Linn saw a face in the void. A face that left a hard-burned image on the backs of her eyelids even as she bolted awake and took in her corporeal surroundings.
Linn sat awake and panting. The palace chamber she had taken alone, though seemingly formed of ice—Nevermelt, as the queen called it—was warm enough to feel stuffy to her in her panic. She breathed, long and slow, but even after she had sat awake for a long time, she still thought she could hear a faint, pervading rumbling.
Linn swung her feet over the edge of the austere bed with gold-painted oak rails and feathered down coverings and braced for the shock of cold as she pressed her bare feet to the floor. It didn’t come. The floor was not warm, but it didn’t steal her heat and form a slick film between skin and glass. This was strange and seemingly eternal magic, and Linn did not like to think of how strong was the one who formed it.
Her chamber had a balcony, and Linn went to it. She was in one of the inner spires closest to the hollow mountain spur, but her view was to the north. She looked out onto a ring of similar towers set higher than they could have seen from the entryway the day before. She looked down to a large, oval courtyard that looked like a frozen pond beset with red-flowered trees with frosted blue trunks. She saw a white owl flit from the branch of one to another, saw the glint of gold as one of the Blue Knights marched past.
Linn turned and looked toward the blue-white hall, which was lit by candles she could not see whose light reflected and refracted through the levels and twisting ways until it spilled its soft, cool glow just as intended. Though she knew the others were in chambers close by—Kole and Shifa nestled just on the opposite side of her opaque wall—she felt that she could very well be alone.
She saw the conical towers and glittering spires, the white drifts of snow in the troughs of the frozen waves out on the sea she alone could just see over the northern walk, and impressions from her youth came flooding back. Stories from the old world that Linn had always suspected to be nothing more than a lie, or, more innocently, idealized flights of fancy by the elders among the Emberfolk who had seen their children and grandchildren suffer so greatly.
There were the tales of princes and princesses, kings and queens in far-off towers who called down to their adoring subjects below. Subjects who fought for them and in their many-syllabled names. Names for stories and songs. Names to be lost to the ages and remembered incorrectly, and for all the wrong reasons. Linn had never liked these sorts of stories. Neither had Iyana, come to think of it. But Jenk had. Jenk and Kaya Ferrahl.
Linn sighed as she thought of how the Ember of Last Lake had died in the rain. The thought brought all the others screaming back. The fight in the Western Woods. Larren Holspahr lying broken between two rain-slicked boulders, his legendary spear nothing more than a leaning black stick. She remembered the cave and Baas’s seeming death at the burning hands of the Second Keeper come back to haunt them.
And then she remembered the peaks, and how Jenk had fought to protect her. How Nathen Swell had nearly died rescuing her. And how she had nearly killed the King of Ember to do the same for Kole. For the Valley, and all whom she loved in it, and not for the iron-forged vengeance that nested in the heart and burned in the blades of her closest friend.
“Uhtren.”
Linn tested the name. Unlike that given to the Eastern Dark by this northern queen, it seemed to fit the image of the White Crest she had known as a girl even if it clashed with the horror he would later become. It sounded light and strong at once, airy and mysterious. It sounded ordinary enough to be human.
How strange it was, to think of the Sages thus. To see them rendered, for all their power, utterly mortal. She supposed she should have rejoiced at the prospect. If the Sages could be killed, their tyranny, where it still thrived, could be ended. If they were mortal, their minds could be changed and their intent with it, for better or worse. That was the hope that had driven Iyana and Captain Talmir Caru into the western sands and had rewarded them with whatever macabre fate the Eastern Dark had teased when she had addressed him at Center.
But Iyana still lived, and the Eastern Dark was changed. Linn knew it. She could have smelled it had she Shifa’s nose for it.
Linn straddled the rail high enough to give a fright to any who might happen to glance up her way from below. She thought of the Sages, and how stingingly disappointing she found the lot of them. For years, Linn had hoped against hope that the War of Sages was a righteous one that the folk of the Valley were simply on the wrong side of. That the Sages in the wider world were fighting against the darkness of the one known as Ray Valour; that they would set aside their differences and stand against the inevitable coming of the World Apart.
The reality was so much less than she could have hoped. The Sages were as petty as any lowly lords among men. More so. Their long years had not made them wise but twisted them with sour shades of the same bitterness she felt coursing through her veins and stinging the lower reaches of her throat now. Their conflict was as complicated as it was misplaced, the reasons that kicked it off in the first place now transformed beyond recognition.
Then again, it seemed the Sage of the Red Waste had withdrawn from the conflict, just as their own Uhtren had. The two had even gone so far as to forge an alliance with the King of Ember for the sole purpose of saving a people from the clutches of the Eastern Dark, the worst kind of villain, whose covetous grasp would seek to wield them against his own kind. And there was the Sage of Center, who had abandoned his own life, falling on his own sword in some sheltered glade and in turn becoming it, leaving it and all its immense power in the sure hands of a mortal man.
But that was where Linn’s sympathy turned from earnest to grudging before winking out entirely. The Sage of Center had retreated from the great war he had no doubt had a large part in starting. The Red Waste had done the same, hiding amidst the sea of sand. And the White Crest had withdrawn to his red-topped citadel, content to watch the ages pass him by. Content to watch the people wither and die in the crossfire of his fellows or in the ever-growing threat of the World Apart, if it weren’t for their mighty Landkist.
Linn told herself she was beyond the point of caring why it all began in the first place. But in the place of satisfaction and catharsis, the queen’s mundane tone and steady account of the folly that had brought the World Apart close enough to touch prompted a smoldering in her core.
She sighed again and made as if to withdraw back to her feathered bed, but a flash of movement from below gave her pause. At first, Linn thought it was another of the snowy owls streaking across the cold expanse, but as she focused down, she saw the hem of a night robe, translucent white like the faintest snow, and she saw that the armor the queen had worn before had been shed in favor of bare skin.
The queen paused beneath one of the red-leafed trees and motioned one of the owls down, cooing to it softly as it fluffed and clung to her arm with black claws that could not break what looked to be the softest skin.
Linn went down to her.
She did not know which stair led to which and which towers spilled out onto the oval pond below, so she rode the wind down. The northern winds were always close. They were howling and strong where the Valley’s currents were often warm and gentle, teasing more than threatening. Linn liked the northern winds and had made allies of them as she had ridden the jets and invisible streams up through the black shelves to the west.
The queen spun lazily as Linn drifted down, landing in a crouch a little harder than she had intended. She straightened, but the Sage was still locked in some private exchange with the bird of prey, which glanced at Lin
n stoically at first, and then with a bit of fervor as it glimpsed something it did not expect in her eyes.
The owl flew away, forgoing the blue frosted branches of the frozen garden in favor of the open sky. Linn watched it depart, wondering how long it would take to leave her sight if she continued to stare.
“You’re still in your traveling clothes,” the queen said. Linn had decided to join her on a whim, not considering the potential dangers of startling one of the world’s last great powers.
“I suppose I am,” Linn said, looking down at her threadbare brown pants and white-yellow undershirt that had verged a lot closer to the former than the latter when they had first set out from the Valley. “As least I took the vest off.” She shrugged sheepishly.
“We can have fresh clothes brought to your chambers,” the queen said. “Which one is it, again?”
Linn turned back toward the base of the tower she’d leapt down from and scanned up, only to realize it was much higher—and more beset with windows, ledges and private balconies—than she had first thought. “I … I don’t know.”
The queen laughed. It was loud and could have sounded crass coming from someone else, but the throaty sound felt right with the Sage. She nodded to a shadowed alcove and Linn followed her line of sight, catching a glimpse of one of the fur-clad warriors—or perhaps a servant—disappearing from view.
“No matter,” she said. “We will see you clothed in more appropriate garb for the northern chill.”
“I must say,” Linn offered, “I’ve grown used to it more quickly than I might’ve thought.” She held out a hand, weaving a near-visible swirling current of wind in a knot over her hand. “On the road out of Center, I counted more on the hot auras of my Ember companions. Now that we’re as far east as your frozen sea, however, I feel refreshed.”
The queen smiled. “Do you see anything below our feet?”
Linn looked. Where from above it looked to be a frozen lake, or else gray stone frosted over, now Linn saw that the oval expanse on which they stood was little more than a barrier separating them from a chasm that stretched far out of sight, its blue-white filtered shadows spilling down into a black depth. She had assumed them to be above the throne room where they had first encountered the queen, but she thought that chamber must be behind them.
“Darkness,” Linn said, sounding more afraid than she felt.
“A vent, they call it,” the queen said, tapping her foot to the surface. She had gray shoes on, and now Linn could tell that they were metal, like armored boots. In fact, the only other clothing the Sage wore now apart from the gossamer gown that left very little to the imagination were those same half-formed silver gauntlets that encased two fingers on each hand.
“I do not pretend to know all the secrets the earth holds, but this is one of its many pores,” the queen said, looking down into those endless depths below the glass. “There are several beneath the spine that makes up this mountain range. The last mountain range in the north. The air is not air but more gas and fumes.”
“Vent,” Linn said, trailing off as she tried to stop herself from gazing at the god’s form beneath the threadbare covering. The queen seemed to notice—how could she not?—and quirked her hips slightly, the folds of the robe shifting and the light of the moon overhead shining through more clearly. Now, Linn saw all, and felt her face flush as she tore her eyes away from the canted hips and supple chest to the angled face of one who was not entirely the same as she.
“I appear strange to you,” she said, and Linn nodded slowly before she realized what she was doing. “Still, you have seen my kind before. At least, you’ve seen those who claim to be the same.” She turned and Linn had to work to keep her eyes from drifting as she followed her on a lazy, circuitous route around the courtyard. “The Valley Faey,” she said, brushing the leaves as they passed beneath them. They seemed to curl at her touch, as if they were holding their breath, only to expand as she released them.
“You are one of the Faey?” Linn asked, stopping.
The queen paused and seemed to consider it for a time. “I suppose I am not unlike them, though it has been some time since I’ve seen those folk. Some time.” She drifted, both with her thoughts and feet. “I do not know how much they’ve changed since last I was within that black cloister.”
“You’ve been to the Valley,” Linn said, not caring that she sounded like a child. To one so old, surely she was, though she could not quite rationalize the lithe, graceful and unlined form before her with one who walked in a new Valley, long before the Emberfolk had come down from the north.
The queen laughed again, but this time the sound held a note of sadness.
“I have been,” she said. “Long ago.” She turned and met Linn’s eyes. Her own were yellow as sunbursts, and Linn did not know how she had taken them to be wild and threatening the day before. Then again, a hawk could nest in the same breath in which it could dive and kill.
She stepped toward Linn. Linn thought she should take a step back out of decorum, but resisted out of principle. The Sage seemed to read this. She wore the beginnings of a wry grin as she met Linn’s eyes. She was not tall and regal but rather ordinary, which did nothing to diminish her strange beauty. Linn felt a stab of panic as she wondered if some strange magic was at work. She frowned, and the queen tilted her head as if in question.
The queen reached out and Linn offered her hands as she might to a waiting prince. She did so without thinking, not breaking eye contact with the woman who seemed more wild and beautiful with each passing second. Her fingers tingled and she felt a strange shock as the warmth of the queen’s skin clashed with the stinging cold of the slender fingers encased in metal.
Linn found herself tracing the dips below the queen’s large eyes and riding the hills that were her raised cheeks. She slowed at the dip below her lips, which were thin, but pink and full of life. They broke into a smile and Linn shook her head and took a half step back.
“It is normal, child,” the queen said, placating and giving a gentle squeeze as Linn tried to pull her hands back.
“What is?” Linn asked, feeling as if she were still partially in the grips of a dream, only a more pleasant one. She wondered by aching degrees what had come over her. She had never felt such desire, and for a woman, though the folk of the Valley did not find fault with either bent. Reeds bend whichever way the wind blows, they would say.
“The attraction you feel,” she said. Her voice was low and hauntingly sonorous. “It is normal to feel it in the presence of the eternal.”
That broke the spell, and now Linn did pull away. She felt a stab of regret as she broke contact, the aching she felt dissipating and the flush falling from her face and breast. The queen looked as if she had been slapped. She stared, wide-eyed and insulted, but soon recovered and forced another easy smile.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to presume.”
Linn searched her and glanced unconsciously at the body beneath its clinging garb. She swallowed. “It’s fine.”
The queen seemed to think about taking another step toward Linn, closing the reopened gap between them, but stopped. There was an earnest vanity about her that Linn did not know whether to find alluring or disquieting. She settled for a mix of the two.
Linn felt awkward of a sudden, though the queen simply went back to examining each of her spiked red leaves in the oval garden. Linn could see that she watched her out of the corners of her eyes, waiting on her to speak.
“Your palace is strangely empty for a place so grand.”
The queen’s hand paused in the path from one leaf to the next, her fingers curling back against her palm. Linn hadn’t meant it to sound as rude as it did, but then, it was strange, and now that she had said it, she felt it all the more.
“Yes,” the queen said. “I suppose it is.” She seemed to gaze around at the towers, spires and hollow window
s as if with fresh eyes. There was a sadness there that could not have been anything other than bare truth, and Linn felt shame for having called it out.
“The people of the mountains,” Linn said, trying to forge her way through the sudden and widening divide. “Captain Fennick’s people. They are not allowed in the towers?”
“They have done very well by me,” the queen said. She spoke as if answering an accusation. Linn supposed it was. “Fennick and his men are welcome in this palace. They choose the warmth of the earthen halls instead. It is their choice, and one I do not begrudge them.” She went to reach for one of the branches again, but stopped and let her hand drop to her side. “In a way, this place is a maze of memory. Even sorrow.”
She bowed her head and brought one silver-clad hand up to cover her breast above her heart, closing her eyes as if in prayer or communion. Linn wondered what a Sage would pray to, and thought it could only be the past and the ghosts that drifted through it.
Her eyes flitted up toward Linn before looking behind her, and Linn heard the mild ting of armor settling into its grooves. She turned and saw a suit of gold that looked the color of honey beneath the light of the moon. She smiled, but the Blue Knight—the titan known as Tundra—did not smile back. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the queen, and in that look Linn saw a cold question that set a grip on her heart and caused the air to stir about her.
With a slight nod, he moved off, and Linn heard the queen’s sigh and relaxed some.
“Try not to mind him,” she said as Linn turned back to her, her defenses beginning to swell once more. “It has been a difficult era for my people.”
“Era,” Linn said.
“Not for Tundra and his ilk,” the queen said, “but for his mother and father, and theirs before them.” She had pulled a dry leaf down from one of the lowest branches and twisted it by the stem. She crushed it with a hollow crackle and let the pieces fall to the frozen ground. “We have been fighting the Sage of Balon Rael for some time. The Eastern Dark has long feared me the most, but Balon was the one who acted on it. If Valour feared a thing, Balon knew it must be grave indeed.”
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