“Landkist by the World Apart …” Iyana said. “You truly believe that?”
Valour looked down at his own hands. At least, at hands that looked like his.
“Chosen,” Valour said, more to himself than her. “Found. What is power but more of the same?”
A strange vision came into Shadow’s mind, and she did not know if it was the work of Valour’s magic or of her own imagination. She saw a young man with fair features. He walked through carven halls. Crystal halls with tapestries inlaid with gold and jewels. He lay with courtesans and wrote songs and ballads. He fought in wars for the right reasons and others for wrong, but reasons not his own.
He was strong and handsome and sought after. But there was nothing special about him. Nothing potent. Nothing that would put him above those whose power began to awaken in the latest of what Shadow now recognized as a cycle that spanned all of time. A cycle of birth, death and rebirth. A cycle of gifts. Gifts of power from the world itself. A gift that was not given to Ray Valour. A gift he had been forced to look elsewhere for, using tricks of sight best left to those who knew them best.
“Everything that happened after, I played a part in. This much is true. But if you believe I wear the face of evil, you mistake the word or else use it too often. Make no mistake, when she lets that one in, you will wish for my strength. More so, you’ll wish you’d never had need of it in the first place.” He sighed and turned away, stepping back toward Shadow. “As it is, perhaps you won’t need it anyway. I will kill the Frostfire Sage.” He paused and thought of turning back. “I will kill any who get in my way.”
Iyana was angry, but she paused before speaking. Her look shifted, grew more calm as Valour stalked away, looking like the angry youth Shadow had just drawn an image of in her mind. “You courted a power you did not understand,” Iyana said. “And now we all live with the consequences.”
“Die with them, more like,” he said.
“You betrayed your mother.”
Valour stopped. Shadow saw death in his eyes, saw him tense to whirl. She thought for certain he would strike her down with a blast of shadowfire, or some unknown spell.
When he did turn, he did so slowly. Iyana’s eyes were glowing now. Glowing even more brightly than they had been when she had first come to seek him out. There was no black in their centers.
“You call your world ‘Mother,’” Valour sneered. “And to what avail? She blesses some and curses others. Some mother. Some benevolence. Some lie.”
“She knows her own,” Iyana said. “Those best suited—”
“She is a fallacy! Your kind is a happy mistake! A pattern. A bored, empty cycle, like the stars that turn in their sorry constellations.”
Valour was breathing heavy and ragged, now. He hunched forward, his hands curled into rigid fingers splayed like talons. “You fear your power,” he whispered.
“As you should have feared your own,” Iyana said. “Before it was too late. You are a Sage. An enemy of the world. An enemy to me and mine. I will not broker peace between you and our champions. Not with Kole. Not with Linn. Not with Baas Taldis or any of the names from the songs they’ll sing about their meetings on their long, dark road to your ending and our salvation. You have a reckoning coming.”
“With Kole Reyna and Linn Ve’Ran?” Valour laughed. The sound was maniacal, and Shadow could see tendrils of black tinged with amber streaming from his hair, which wavered and split apart like tentacles in water.
“Perhaps,” Iyana said. “But that is not the reckoning of which I speak.” She spoke as if channeled, and Shadow wondered what she could see with those bright orbs. She shivered at the thought of it and did not want them turned upon her.
Valour straightened. He looked at the Faeykin who had followed Iyana all this way. “What has your guide—your anchor—told you? What does he think he knows?”
The Faeykin seemed to hear the Sage on a delay. He only shook his head once to dispel the notion. Iyana’s words did the rest.
“Not him, Sage,” she said. “I have seen it. I see it now. The root of your doom, which will be here for you before the rest of us, no matter how long or short a time separates the one from the other.”
Valour’s laugh had no humor in it, and Shadow could see his hand shaking at his side, its pale, sweating surface reflecting the light of the world behind them. “You speak in riddles, girl. I am too old for them to work—”
“You have two hearts,” Iyana interrupted. “Two minds. You are a being with two cores. The other is not gone. The other is alive and well. He is angry.” Her eyes flashed so brightly they momentarily stole the red glow from her surroundings. Even Valour winced and covered his eyes. When he did, there was an amber glow on his palm.
“You have a reckoning, Sage,” Iyana said again. “And it’s coming sooner than you think.”
Now Valour did reach out, his right hand shooting up quick as a striking serpent. Iyana’s green eyes lost their light as she took a faltering step back. She raised her own hand in an attempt to ward the coming blast off, but Shadow knew it would be too late.
There was another flash to the side, and when the river of orange-and-black fire roared across the void to engulf the place Iyana was standing, she was gone, along with her silent, watchful companion.
Shadow watched the comet of shadowfire race across the black span between worlds, leaving the Sage panting. His back heaved beneath its black-and-red armor. His hair no longer flowed on airy currents. His eyes emitted light that Shadow could not see from her vantage. He straightened and looked at the place where the girl had been for a long while as the silver beam of light flowed under them like a herald of doom.
It wasn’t shame that drenched the Sage as he turned toward her, but rather defeat. No matter his bold words, the Eastern Dark did not believe this was a fight he could win. And if he could not defeat the combined powers of the Frostfire Sage and her new Ember companions, Iyana’s Sage-blessed sister and the Blue Knights, Shadow knew there was no hope of stopping the Last God and the denizens of the World Apart, should his fears come to pass.
Shadow never doubted much of what Valour said. She had no need to, as the Sage’s macabre proclamations had always seemed like commands to her. A thing would happen because the Sage said it would. Because he would bring it into being through the force of his will, and the will of those he controlled.
Still, she could not fathom the sight before them as anything other than hell. A hell that could not become of their world. No matter how bad wars between Landkist and Sages got, there would always be white clouds and blue rivers, yellow plains and snow-capped peaks. Shadow took few pleasures in the nightmare she called her waking life, but the land had always been one of them. There was no pain in a thing so vast and so sprawling. So beautiful. There was no betrayal in it.
There should have been no ending. But now, as she took the tired, smoking hand of the Sage who offered it to her as if she were a daughter and he her father, however twisted, she thought she wanted the world to remain as it was, albeit more empty of man and all the war they made. More empty of things like her, Valour and the Frostfire Sage. And even more empty of the Landkist, for a time. She thought, then, that she would help the Sage in the coming fight because she wanted to.
The passage back to the place they had been was no less chaotic than the last one was, but Shadow braced herself for it. She opened her eyes and felt the sting of the cold, icy wind against them, drying the film to a blurry paste. She saw her black hands pressed into the crusted snow, which was lit only by the last rays of the dying sun, so dark as to be called night. She looked up into the sky. The stars were hidden behind a rush of gray clouds, and to the east, the horizon was a swath of white and gray as the frozen waves came up against the sky she had just stood upon.
She tried to picture the World Apart and found that she could not. She looked at the lands about her with fresh
eyes, feeling it all as small and precious. She looked toward the northern peaks and the crystal palace across the flats and tried to imagine the silver beam piercing its sides and carving a path through the horizon.
How quickly the vivid could seem unreal.
Lastly, she looked at the Sage, who seemed very tired. It was the second interaction he had had with the girl from the Valley, and both had left him in a state Shadow had never seen him in before.
Seeing him thus, Shadow remembered the words the departing Iyana had left them with. Those that heralded a coming reckoning for the Sage. Those that suggested what Shadow had guessed, but kept from thinking on for too long, lest they kindle hope in her.
T’Alon Rane was alive. T’Alon Rane was angry. And the Eastern Dark knew it.
Valour turned his head sharply to the west and Shadow followed. The Shadow Kings stood just outside the entrance to the cave. They had changed so much that Shadow would not have recognized them apart for Alistair, who still had ashen gray skin and a bone armor chest. The others had grown into new colors. Red skin and blue for Thehn and Myriel, respectively. Dark, dark green for Martyr and snow white for the twins who bore red eyes. They looked like beasts in everything but for their bearing, which was watchful, considering.
“I don’t trust them,” Shadow said.
“You shouldn’t,” Valour said. He sounded tired. “But what choice do we have?”
“They will betray us,” Shadow said.
“Yes, Shadow. Some will.” She met his tired purple eyes, looking for a spark of amber that she couldn’t find. “That’s why I have you here.”
“You don’t believe we can win. You said it yourself.”
Valour shrugged. It was not a look of defeat. “Without Iyana, I cannot gain the favor of her sister. Of that, I have no doubt. But Reyna … Reyna is another matter.”
“You think you can gain his?” Shadow nearly scoffed.
“No, Shadow. But I intend to try.” His boots made a splitting sound as they tore free from their frozen holds in the ice and snow. He started up the slight rise toward the cave and their otherworldly companions.
“First, let us see if such a foolhardy move is necessary. Let us see what our friends can do, and what we can do with them.”
“We attack?” Shadow asked, feeling eager and afraid as she started up behind him.
“No,” he said, surprising her. She paused in her disappointment, and the Sage turned lazily. “We will move out into the frozen waves tomorrow. We will make our presence felt, and we will wait. We will not attack, Shadow. She will.”
The days passed with agonizing slowness, the lengthening nights with bitter cold and sour company.
Linn sat with her back to one of the white trees in the queen’s courtyard. She liked it out here despite the cold. She liked to see the stars, feel the air passing through her hair, coaxing her to pick it up, twist it, turn it around and use it in whatever way she chose.
There would be plenty of time for that in the battle to come, and while Kole no doubt had his mind fixated on the prospect, Linn wanted nothing more than to forget it until there was nothing left to do.
“No sign of them, still.” Kole tried to keep the bitterness from his voice as he approached from the southern arch, but Linn knew him better. She turned to take in his mood and saw the air shimmering around him. It was a slight effect, probably too subtle for any but her to see, but it was there, and growing stronger by the hour.
“How is our queen’s mood?” Linn asked, scooting over as Kole sat next to her on the stonework surrounding the tree. The leaves curled and cracked above them and the frost atop the Nevermelt below their boots ran in rivulets that sparkled like morning dew in the starlight. Kole seemed oblivious to his effect on their small patch of the world, and Linn wondered how far that went.
“Hungry,” he said after a time, settling on a word Linn might have assigned to him in any other circumstance.
“And the others?”
“Tundra’s not one for talking.” Kole shrugged. “Baas is a poet next to him.”
Linn smiled. “The ones we brought, I meant.”
“Misha is atop the walls, last I heard. She grew frustrated trying to wring every last drop of information out of the old veteran, Guyy. Jenk and Baas are in the caves with Captain Fennick. I haven’t seen Shifa since this morning, when she struck off toward the deeper tunnels.”
“She’s as foolhardy and curious as you,” Linn said. Kole smiled, but it was forced. She laid a hand on his armored shoulder. Armor he seemed rarely to take off these days. She pulled her hand back sharply as a pocket of hot air escaped from one of the open grooves.
“Sorry,” he said, seeming shamed.
“Don’t be. I suppose we’re all restless.”
“Most of us,” Kole said. Linn felt his eyes on her longer than they should have been. She met them, the steady ambers burning like his namesake. She was supposed to be the one with the strongest eyes in the Valley, even before the changes she had experienced after the Field of Suns, as the Emberfolk had taken to calling their victory above the Steps. Still, Kole had always had a way with his own. It wasn’t just the Ember fire that lit them with that eternal spark. It was the way he seemed to be looking through her, seeing into parts of her she could not see herself, or else chose to look away from.
“Linn,” Kole said, drawing it out. She blinked at him. “What’s the matter? The spar was two days ago. You’ve been … quiet since then.”
Linn swallowed, but Kole’s prompting brought all her questions, doubts and the revolting mix of anger and fear she had tried to keep buried boiling to the surface. The branches danced above them as her quick change stirred the salted nighttime breeze, and several of the blood-red petals flitted to the glass-like surface below them. A surface that held a secret that should not have been Linn’s, and one she had kept from her closest friends, Kole included.
“If that was a spar,” Linn started, veritably spitting, “then I don’t know the difference between that and whatever it is we’ve been calling war all these years.”
Kole watched her for a while. She made to answer his continued stare, but drew her mouth into a tight line. It reminded her of Iyana, and she pushed that thought back down with the rest of it lest it shatter her.
He turned to look across the sparkling blue surface of the courtyard, eyes tracing the branches of the other tree and noticing the snowy owls perched in the thicker center for the first time.
“Yes, you do.”
“What?” Linn shook her head.
“You know the difference,” Kole said. “Sparring between Landkist is not the same as it is for … everyone else. We’re stronger. We’re faster. We’re more resistant to hurt.” He shrugged. “Nobody wants to say it. Men and women don’t want to give voice to their lack of power, and most Landkist—good ones—don’t want to feel like gods, despite what many believe. But there’s no getting around it. In matters of war, men make corpses. Landkist leave scars upon the land itself, marks that will fuel memories by which future generations will measure the old.”
Linn took it in, but she wasn’t ready to answer. She knew where he was going. She knew he was getting to it, and there wasn’t any diverting him.
“You’ve always known me well, Linn,” Kole said. His voice was calm, even serene. His heat had dipped by small degrees until it was a pleasant, flickering warmth like that Jenk put off. “But now, after what happened in that clay bowl, and after the things you’ve done at Center, I think you know me more than you’d like.”
“Spit it out,” Linn said with a dramatic sigh, leaning her head back to land a hollow knock upon the white bark of the tree.
Kole smiled. “And you wonder where she got it from.”
Linn made a show of rolling her eyes. “I’ve never wondered, Kole. I’d just been loath to admit it.”
Ko
le swallowed, clearly uncomfortable at the prospect of saying something she wouldn’t like. Something that would hurt her. Make her afraid. In another life, it would have made her angry. Now, as he said, she understood. It was like they had always held the missing pieces to one another, but hadn’t been able to find a way to make them fit.
“Fear of the self, Linn. That’s what you’ve been building along with your power. Your ‘gifts,’ as others will call them. Fear is the purest emotion there is, and there’s no fear more inescapable and more earned than the one that’s got its hooks in you now.”
If he expected it to make her feel better, it did not. Still, Linn couldn’t deny the truth of the words.
“Anger could be a close thing,” she offered, and he didn’t argue.
“Love, Iyana would say.”
“Do you think she’s wrong?”
Kole paused as if truly considering it.
“I don’t want to think it.”
She knew exactly what he meant, which just made it all feel that much worse.
She leaned forward, brushing the tips of her boots on the glassy surface. She saw her own reflection looking back at her. Long, black hair that had grown longer, spilling down in a tangled knot over her right side. Beneath it, her arms were largely bare, her chest and core covered by little more than cloth and the same leather vest she’d worn for years atop the timber walls of Last Lake. It was strange not seeing the bow she’d been carrying for months. She’d left it in her chambers, and though she cherished it as one of the last things she’d taken from home before setting out on her fool’s quest, a part of her knew it would change nothing if she left it leaning by the mirror in the chambers Queen Elanil had granted her. She didn’t need the thing to unleash the power within her. She didn’t need it to focus a bolt from the sky, nor to call a legion of thunderous horses’ hooves out of the inky black swells over the darkest parts of the farthest oceans.
The Frostfire Sage Page 54
