“You are a Weaver, Iyana Ve’Ran,” he said. “And an Unweaver. Ours is a great and terrible burden. But this fight is not yours; this fight in the north, where your Embers and your sister tread. If it comes to a battle against the last Sages, it is better left to them. But you have come here to find answers, and all I’ve done is raise questions.”
“You’ve done plenty more than that,” Iyana said, nodding as her resolve began to form around that stone that always nested at her core. The stone of Ve’Ran. She knew now why Falkin’s eyes seemed brighter than hers. He had led her, reading her thoughts and emotions with such a deftness of touch that she hadn’t felt them. He hadn’t manipulated her, she understood. He had led her to the answer she had already known.
“I have to find him,” she said, feeling it as a certainty. “I have to know if there is a way to stop what’s coming, to tell Linn and Kole. And if not, how to survive it. There is plenty of fire left in the Valley. Plenty more than they think.”
Ceth cleared his throat. He shifted in his chair, looking nervously between them.
“What is it, my boy?” Falkin asked.
“I cannot follow her there,” Ceth said without meeting Iyana’s eyes. “I cannot help her if he should … if he—”
“No,” Falkin said. “No, no. You cannot.” He switched to Iyana, reached out and took her hand in his. “But I can. There should be enough left of whatever Valour once was to recognize one of the Kin, and to be on his best behavior.”
“Right,” Iyana said. She was already losing some of the effect of the mixture Falkin had given her.
Falkin moved to fill her cup once more. The mix had cooled and thickened, but Iyana drank it down, fighting past the nausea it had begun to call up.
“I’m going to invade the dreams of a Sage,” Iyana said. She said it matter-of-factly, nearly laughing at the absurdity of it. “If Braden Taldis had a trap set and waiting for wandering Faeykin … what could the Eastern Dark himself have in store?”
“I wouldn’t worry too hard on it,” Falkin said. “After all, he’s got plenty to occupy his mind as it is.” He scooted his chair across the dirty, knotted rug that covered the balding ground between them. “Stay close, Ceth, my boy. Stay steady.”
Iyana stared into Falkin’s eyes but began to see through him, beyond him. The room melted away as she let her senses wander. It was like having two minds at first, and it was the most difficult aspect of going through the change, passing between realms. She was both here and there, nowhere and anywhere she chose. She felt the rhythmic swaying, though her body did not move, and when she closed her eyes, she saw the pathways lit like beams of glowing water, green and blue and bright white, though they were surrounded by a thick and watchful darkness, red-hued in places, like curdled blood.
“I am here, Iyana,” she heard Falkin say. His voice felt as if it was a long way off, but she felt him close, felt his hand on hers, though she had no body in this place.
“Which way?”
“How did you find your sister?” Falkin asked. “Bring him into your mind’s eye. Fill it with his shape, his eyes, his wicked smile. Find his thoughts and follow them. He is, after all, a beacon brighter than most.”
Iyana sighed and felt it escape her chest without parting her lips. She oriented herself and dispelled the darkness, the crossing beams of many-colored lights and the waiting red glow in the corners, dismissing them like unwanted visitors. She had control here, in the Between. She was the master, the lord of place and time.
She called an image of the Valley and it rushed beneath her, freezing with a speed that was jarring. She was floating high above the thick canopy that covered the Eastern Woods. To the north, she saw the black peaks that no longer frightened her to look upon. They seemed somehow empty of the threat they had once held, and their glittering golden pools stood out like wells of fire warding off the coming night.
And the night was coming.
Iyana looked to the east, where the sky had blackened. It was not the smoky pall that had hung over the Valley during the siege of Hearth. This was a darkness made of night. The stars shimmered on the horizon, but above, they were lost to a deeper black that verged closer to purple. Iyana did not wish to go there. Instead, she angled her intent and made a body out of nothing, one replete with airy wings that gathered great swaths of air beneath her and shot her toward the place where the clouds met the edge of land.
The world hurtled beneath her, and since she did not know it this far from home, the landscape began to lose its form. Gone were the whorls in the branches that passed below her. Absent were the animal trails, the frothing rivers and turbulent peaks. Now, there was only a gray rushing blur. Ahead, she saw the ground turn cold, a blue-white covering of frost burying it in an icy grip.
He was there. She felt him below, like a needle that pierced her chest and squeezed her heart cold.
“Iyana …”
“What?” She whirled in place. Falkin’s voice sounded as if it was coming from far away.
“Here … afraid.”
He was struggling to find her. She concentrated on him, on the hand that gripped her own back in the hut in the sheltered glade.
“I am here, Iyana,” she heard him as he spoke in that hot room as the fire crackled at his back. “We are here. Do not be afraid. Have you found him?”
“I think so.”
“Go.” His voice took on an edge of warning. “You cannot linger. Go to him, and I will guide you back.”
Iyana refocused on her swirling, ethereal surroundings. She was in a cyclone of spinning clouds, encroaching dark and dying sun. When she looked down, she saw a blue cave, and on the outskirts, standing on a shining sheet of ice in an otherwise gray land, she saw a figure dressed in black armor with red spikes. His hair was long, and though his ears bore the now-familiar angle of the Faey, his skin was darker, more aligned with the Emberfolk than the man she knew him to be.
She flitted lower, thinking she had misjudged. There was a black figure sitting on the ruins of a crumbled structure that looked to be made of crystal or ice. She didn’t seem to notice her, so Iyana crept closer, feeling like a leaf on the wind.
As she neared the figure she thought was Ray Valour, Iyana’s heart nearly leapt into her throat. This man was not the same as the one she sought, and yet he was. His purple eyes clashed with his swarthy features. His hard jaw did not recall the slender taper she had seen before. He looked younger than the figure who had left them on the white, melted sands in the west, and yet his armor was scarred in a thousand places.
“The King of Ember,” she breathed. “You have taken him.”
“Clever thing.”
Shadow perked up from her seat on the ruined tower. Valour had been sitting beside her just a few minutes earlier, but some new thought had come to him. He had walked out a little farther onto the ice, his armor lit in the dying red rays of the sun. This time, the direction of his gaze was not northeast, toward the Witch’s palace, but rather … directionless.
“What’s clever?” Shadow asked, but a gust of wind stole her voice and carried it back toward the blue cave. She grimaced as she glanced in that direction. It was cold and miserable out on the ice, but she would much rather face a frozen waste than the company of half a dozen creatures made more of bone than flesh.
The Shadow Kings were unsettling to look upon and even more so to speak with. Where Alistair lived up to his name, smiling through his teeth whenever he spoke to her, Shadow knew he was false. Knew it in her bones. Myriel was more direct. She could respect that. Her blue eyes were the color of a sunlit sea, almost sickly so. She was hungry to find the Frostfire Sage and rip out her throat, and for reasons less virtuous—Shadow guessed—than what any of them said.
There was Martyr, who had yet to say a word. He was smaller than the rest and watchful. Thehn was the largest and perhaps the most powerful. He had spe
nt most of his time in their world sleeping, as if the very act of existing within its borders put such a strain on him that it might kill him to walk. Shadow hadn’t bothered to learn the names of the other two. They were twins, by the looks of it. Though the lot of them had the same bone armor covering their forms and the same bone blades jutting from their elbows, she could see glimpses beneath their wide, ashen faces of what they might have looked like before, in their own realm.
“The World Apart,” Shadow sneered, tossing a shard of ice toward the eastern sunset and watching it slide with a scrape across the frozen ripples.
She slid her bored, curious eyes back to Valour and saw his lips moving. He looked more like Rane than she remembered. Perhaps there was something to it—some battle taking place beneath the flesh and blood. Perhaps the king wasn’t as gone as he had appeared.
“Who are you talking to?” Shadow called over, but the Sage just kept on speaking into the northern wind.
Shadow felt her ire rising. She was bored, and boredom was a dangerous thing for her to have. Dangerous for those around her. Trouble was, she was in company far more formidable than she was used to, and far less forgiving. T’Alon and Brega had never liked her, but they would not have killed her unless in response to some dire affront. It would take less for Valour to do the same, and she did not want to think of what the Shadow Kings might attempt were he not here.
Still, boredom made her impatient, and impatience made her rash and reckless.
The light was low, and it made her vaporous skin tingle as the blue shadows slid over it. She found a shadow that was thicker than the others and closed her eyes, easing herself into its cold embrace like a welcome lover. She climbed out of its cousin just behind the place where the Sage stood in the warrior’s armor he hadn’t earned. She pulled herself up out of the half-world and felt the heat of his dark, fiery aura wash over her.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked again, leaving her usual purring behind in favor of a more direct approach. Still he did not respond.
It was strange, Shadow thought, walking a cautious path around him. Valour spoke, or appeared to, but no sound escaped his pale lips. He stared out over the flats but did not seem to see her passing before him. Did not so much as twitch in her direction. His eyes looked a bit redder than before.
“I asked you—” Shadow reached for the Sage as she spoke. When she touched the back of his hand with her fingertips, she felt as if all the air in the sky collapsed, filled her up and crushed the life from her.
The World faded away, and in the place of the realm of shadows she welcomed like the warmest embrace, Shadow was thrown into a chaotic realm of ill-defined edges and bright lights. As she oriented herself to her new surroundings, she saw that they were much the same as where she had been. They were still out in the frozen wastes, only much higher, as if they flew along with the clouds overhead. Far below, the frozen sea and the remnants of the Quartz Tower lay glittering like droplets of burning blood in the dying light of the sun. Valour was just where he had been, directly in front of her, his eyes focused on something ahead.
“Val—”
“Silence, Shadow,” Valour said. His voice had an echo, as if he were speaking through a thick veil. His eyes were multicolored—one burning with purple fire, the other with amber. He looked less like Rane and more like him all at once, and there was a terrible heat about him.
Shadow followed the direction of his gaze and was taken aback by the strange normalcy of the sight before her. In the place of some swirling, vaporous beast of nightmare or shining deity, there was a young woman. Her hair was white and her eyes startling green. Apart from that, the only shocking thing about her was the fact that she appeared to be suffering less than the rest of them were. Shadow thought she could see a figure behind her—just the hint of a presence as the clouds wheeled past without wind to push them.
“Ah,” Valour said. “I see you have seen him too, Shadow.” Shadow did not take her eyes from the girl, nor the milky form behind her. “An anchor to chain her to that Valley of hers. Keep her from floating off. Keep me from whisking her away, ripping that bright tether free of its innocent bonds.”
Shadow frowned at the words. Valour seemed to be looking above the girl’s head, but Shadow saw nothing there. No bright tether. No anchor.
“Who is your friend?” Valour asked her. “Who accompanies you so far from home? It is an impressive thing for one so young to navigate the rough waters of the Between with such aptitude.”
“His name is unimportant,” the girl said. Her bright emerald eyes flicked past Shadow as if she weren’t there. Shadow hated her already. “He is one of the Kin. One of yours, perhaps?”
Shadow looked to Valour. He had gained some definition, but the details of his face were still washed out. Shadow looked down at her own hands and saw that they had largely solidified, with a few twisting trails leaking from her elbows. It seemed this place—whatever it was—found it difficult to pin down an image of the Sage and his Ember host, as if it could not reconcile the two.
“I have not counted myself kin to any in some time,” Valour said. “Nor they me. I’m sure your friend of the Valley is old. But few are as old as I.”
The girl considered him as Shadow considered her. Normally, she would seek the nearest patch of blackness, the better to slip in and behind unnoticed, perhaps to catch the girl unawares. She gave the thought up quickly enough, even before those bright eyes switched toward her with a speed and intent she found disquieting. Shadow knew when she was outmatched. She decided to take a step back behind the Sage, balancing strangely on the milky, cloud-covered ground that was less real than imagined below her feet. This was a land of dreams, and Shadow never had them.
“Clever thing,” the girl said, causing Shadow to bristle. Valour laughed, once. His voice sounded less reedy than usual, carrying a bit of the ash and fire of his host. Shadow glanced at his windswept palms, looking for signs of that black-and-orange fire he had called down upon the Quartz Tower, but there was none to be found.
Time passed and Shadow was not sure how much. The red sun seemed to be taking a long time dying in the west, painting the whole of the frozen sea in a bloody golden sheen that pleased her to look upon. This was a battle of pride as much as will. Shadow held no doubt that coming so far from her Valley home took a fair amount of power, but that indistinct and ever-present form at the girl’s back seemed to bolster her, keep her vital.
Still, even patient things ran out eventually.
“Have you come to bid me turn back, young Seer?” Valour asked. The girl only watched him. “Have you come to bid me spare the Frostfire Sage so that she might plunge the world you so love into the ruin you so rue?” He smiled. “Or have you simply come for your friends, and for the sister you would no longer recognize?”
“You’ve done nothing with her,” the girl said. “If you had, I would have known. I wonder,” she spoke before Valour could interrupt, “did they put a scare into you at Center, as I did in the west? Did Linn, Kole and the Landkist of the Valley cause you trouble?”
No answer.
“Why else would you have spared them, if you knew they would end up here, all lines drawing toward the same point?” Shadow thought she sounded certain of herself, but Valour did not seem cowed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“You fear the answer to that last,” Valour said. “As you always have. You fear that I am right, and that they have seen the truth of it. You fear that your precious heroes have not come this far north and east to save, but rather to kill.”
“You, perhaps.”
“No,” Valour said. “Not I alone. Not all who travel with Linn are so conflicted. Others are pure in their convictions, no matter how they try to hide them. One in particular, and you know of whom I speak. Tell me,” Valour took a step forward, not that it mattered much in this place, “have you always seen this darkness in him?
Has Kole Reyna always carried such bitter fire?”
Iyana said nothing, but Shadow knew the look as confirmation.
“It is a good thing for the world that he has it,” Valour said. “That heat that has nothing to do with the Ember fire. That rage that has nothing to do with the vengeance he lost sight of long ago, in a burning citadel. That is a rage made for unmaking. Lucky for us, the Frostfire Sage requires unmaking, lest we face the wrath of what she calls in all her hopeless, helpless folly.”
“You know nothing of my fears,” Iyana said, changing the subject or clinging to the kernel he’d raised.
“Ah,” Valour cautioned, holding up one of those wisping hands, “but Iyana, I have shared a vision with thee. I have felt my life’s thread tangled in yours. I know more of you than you think.”
The girl known as Iyana swallowed. In the place of bluster, her look turned to uncovered determination.
“That can be turned around, you know,” Iyana said. “I, too, felt fear in that shared vision, and it did not emanate from me alone.” She took a step forward, so that the two of them—a picture of life-giving light facing one dealing too long in darkness—formed a mirror.
“If you expect me to deny it,” Valour said, “then you will be disappointed.”
The emotion that passed across the girl’s face was not disappointment or even denial, but rather something more hungry. Something Shadow thought could have been hope. This was what the girl had come to hear: a Sage’s confession.
But why? Had she come to bargain?
“Show me.”
Shadow looked from the girl—the woman, she felt now—to Ray Valour. He examined her. The amber eye dimmed a bit under her scrutiny, while the purple took on a brighter hue.
“Show me what it is you fear,” Iyana said, more forceful. “Show me the World Apart.
Valour did not laugh this time, though he seemed to consider it. “The World Apart is not a thing to fear, Iyana Ve’Ran,” he said, earning a confused look from her that he accepted and one from Shadow that he ignored. “It is a place, just like any other place, full of all the hopes and dreams and dangers inherent in a world blessed or cursed with those who walk upon it.” A strange look passed him by without settling. Shadow thought it made him look human. “At least, it was once.”
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