Linn wanted to soar up into the skies, to make her voice as loud as she could and to tell them to hide, to flee into the deepest, darkest tunnels, to find new lands in the bowels of the earth within which to wait out the storm that had come. The last storm.
She knew it was futile, so she said nothing, only turned back toward the Eastern Dark and stepped into the path his palm pointed—a path that led directly to the crystal palace.
“You do not know the company you keep,” he told her, and Linn actually laughed. His eyes seemed to change on hearing it. They lost some of their light and perhaps a bit of their fury.
“Right or wrong,” Linn said, “we chose our side less based on what it stood for, and more based on what it opposed. There are people in that palace. Many of them, and many of them good. There are children in the mountain beyond it, the one you will bring down upon their heads.”
“She would bring Him here …” The Eastern Dark’s voice turned into a growl. Linn didn’t think it was anger or frustration, but effort. It was taking him all he had to hold the power he had absorbed at bay, to keep it from ripping his body apart from the inside. “There aren’t any strong enough to stop it. And she,” his glowing eyes seized on the limp and semi-conscious form Jenk held, “cannot control it. She has been used, as I was used, to draw the worlds closer together. To make the path between them easy to cross, like looking through the surface of a still pond.”
His next expression gave Linn pause. She did not know how to describe it, other than to say pleading.
“Do you not see it?”
“I have seen plenty, Dark Sage,” Linn said. “I have seen more than you know, enemy of the world. Do not think us folk of the far Valley simply slaves to any will you mistakenly believe to be stronger. We have braved the wild ways of Center. We have crossed the barren black shelves. We have fought with a warrior of legend and killed the Sage of Balon Rael. We turned on our once-protector, the lord of the skies themselves, when he turned on us. We are Landkist, and we will decide our fate. Just as we will decide yours. As for the world,” she shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, “I think it will get on just as well without you.”
“Even if it ends?”
“Even if it ends.”
Linn was not breathing heavily when she finished. She was calm. Too calm, even for her liking. Did she truly not care if the world ended? Should they not listen to him, and let him do what he thought he must?
“It comes down to trust,” she said after a time. “You stand there accusing, spreading the very same fear of a thing you helped to sow. Perhaps you’re right. Maybe the World Apart is coming to kill us all. Maybe it will come down to a game of who can last longest.” She smiled at him. “If it does, we’ve got a knack for it.”
There was a pause the wind filled.
“Where is Kole?” Linn asked, her voice going flat. She felt the wind tickling the backs of her hands, ready to join her once more, even after all of that.
The Eastern Dark didn’t answer. His face had grown tight. It only resembled T’Alon Rane’s in shape, now, and not in constitution. White sparks leapt from his black arm.
“Where—” she started to growl, but the Eastern Dark let out a scream that sounded more human than anything she had seen or heard from him yet.
It was a scream of pain, but also of madness, and Linn’s eyes darted to his arm, which had begun to spark and shimmer. Baas slid in front of her, shield braced, but Linn knew the beam would unmake him and continue on through her. There was too much power in it to be stopped, but she worked to gather enough of the air around to give a response, even if it was little more than a strangled gasp. She saw a flash of orange to the south; Misha’s spear reignited. Shifa let out a howl that sounded stronger than the hound looked.
Instead of smiting them and a thousand souls in the lands behind them, the Eastern Dark raised his palm up to the skies. The darkness and the white sparks crawled up his arm, revealing the red-and-black armor of the King of Ember he wore beneath. When it reached his palm, he let it out, eyes squeezed tightly as he did.
The expulsion was too loud to make sound. It was silent, a perfect jet of many-colored light—black, white, blue and all the shades fire could make—and it lanced up into the clouds like a shaft of judgment. It was radiant and terrible, and as Linn’s eyes flashed with its reflection, she thought it was beautiful, as well.
The dark clouds parted and fled, racing away to separate corners of the world, and high above, into the blue-black curtain, the beam flickered and curled, a shooting star that could have been seen from the Valley basin.
The Eastern Dark fell to his knees when it was done, his hand shaking. When he lifted his eyes to look at them, they were only violet.
“That is the last of it …”
The voice belonged to Queen Elanil, whom Linn had thought beyond them. She lay curled in Jenk’s arms, staring up into the stars.
“That was the last of your power, Ray. The last of you.”
Linn turned back to see what the Eastern Dark had to say. He only looked down at his hand. He did not deny it.
“And so it ends,” Baas rumbled. “Linn.” The Riverman swung his shield down and started toward the gap. He walked, and then he ran, and then he leapt, the shelf breaking apart under the force of it.
Linn’s heart caught in her throat as Baas hurled his bulk up over the chasm. Without sparing a thought to do it, she stepped forward and brought her arms in front of her, sending a blast of cold wind after him. It caught the Riverman at the zenith of his climb and pushed him just a little higher. Just enough to clear the gap.
If the Eastern Dark knew death had started down on its frightening path to meet him, he didn’t show it. Linn saw the shadows deepen around him. She feared it was the work of his magic, again. That the queen was wrong, and that he would blast Baas out of the sky with a mortal blow.
And then she saw those violet midnight eyes, and the slender black hands curl around the red-tipped armor of her liege lord. The Shadow girl embraced him like a lover, and still he did not react.
Linn glared at her, and those mischievous purple eyes left a fading afterimage as she pulled the Sage into the pocket she’d carved out of the horizon.
“Where is he?” Linn screamed it across the gap just as Baas landed in the pocket of blackness where the Sage had been. His shield led the way, and the crash was as loud as a peal of thunder. Linn worried for a moment that the shelf might break with him kneeling atop it, but the Riverman rose and pulled his shield from the ice as the blackness melted away below him.
There was a pregnant silence broken only by the howl of the wind over the ice and the guttering of Misha’s spear. She let it burn out, plunging them into the darkness of twilight. They turned toward the western sky, which was now a gash of red and purple that sank below the mountains. Linn looked to the south, seeing the remnants of the Quartz Tower shine like wind-blown coals.
“Too much,” Queen Elanil whispered, either to herself or for those close enough to listen.
Linn felt a crash just behind her that nearly took her from her feet and made her heart burst from her chest. She spun to see Baas dusting the frost from his breeches, his shield already secure on its hooks over his back.
“You could have made it on your own?” Linn asked him, bewildered.
Baas shrugged. “Seems I could. Better safe than sorry, though.”
Linn didn’t have the energy to tell him how little sense that made. Instead, she moved to stand beside Jenk, Misha coming to join them. Shifa padded over, whining softly, her eyes still fixed on the place where the Sage had vanished.
“Too much what?” Jenk asked.
“Power,” the Sage said. She grimaced as the first waves of pain came over her. “We used too much power, here. It will be close now. Close enough to get it done.”
“Get what—” Jenk started.
/> “Please.” The queen pulled at his vest. “Take me back. It is almost close enough. We cannot miss this chance, else …”
“Or else what?” Misha asked, annoyed at being ordered.
Linn swallowed when they turned their eyes on her. Misha looked particularly suspicious.
“Convergence,” the queen whispered, as if saying the word aloud might make it so.
“Whatever’s happening now is beyond us,” Linn said to their continued staring. How quickly it fell on her in Kole’s absence. Did they not understand that Kole had never had much in the way of a plan in the first place? That his entire aim had been to get them here, and to see where to aim his blades when they arrived?
She sighed, feeling a pang of guilt for thinking in such a way when he was missing, and—if Shifa’s grisly find was any indication—in dire need of help. Still, she had taken something from the Shadow girl’s look, and even from the Eastern Dark’s. Perhaps it was a vain hope, but there it was.
Kole was alive. She knew it in her bones. And the sooner the Frostfire Sage got what she wanted, the sooner they could set out with enough power to find him, and bring him back.
Whatever reckoning was to come. Whatever convergence. They would face it down together.
“I hope your prince is worth it,” Linn said as she walked past Jenk, heading in the direction of the torchlit walls of the palace, the mountains rising like the spine of a coiled beast behind it. They likely exchanged their glances at her back, but the others followed after, their boots no longer crunching in the salt and frost their private war had swept away.
There was a difference between dreams and portents, and Iyana had always had more of the latter than the former.
Dreams were the work of the subconscious mind; figments of imagination that combined deep-rooted fears with desires so deeply buried one didn’t speak them into the cold solitude of the darkest nights.
Iyana did not like visions and portents. She didn’t like the responsibility they granted, or the feeling of the real they called up. She didn’t like having knowledge that should have been reserved for those who were older, wiser and less riddled with doubt.
She hated dreams more.
Dreams, Ninyeva had always said, told more truth than visions, but they did it in the guise of lies. Dreams were made up of the past, and Iyana’s past—though it possessed bright, burning cores of sisterhood and friendship—was riddled with hurt. The only music her mind made when she slept deeply enough to dream were screams. The screams of the dead and dying. Mostly, the screams of those she had been unable to save in the long, dark months spent huddled in the Long Hall with the wounded and their caregivers.
But this dream was different, along with the scream that accompanied it. It was familiar, and though she knew she was not in the Between, she could not help but feel that she had stumbled onto something in the dark. Some warning. A cry for help, and from one whom she loved.
Iyana sat bolt upright in the thin, creaking cot. She was sweating profusely, and threw the thick blankets off as if they were trying to suffocate her. The fire had burned out in the hearth, and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the gloom of the cabin that lay on the edge of the town, bathed in the shadows of the great black ring of trees.
The Eastern Woods were cool, and as Iyana swung her legs over the side of the bed, she tensed for the shock as her bare feet touched the wood of the floorboards.
Ceth was nowhere to be found, the small clutch of threadbare covers he had used the previous night having been tossed aside, close enough to threaten catching on the edges of the burning coals.
Iyana sighed and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the dream. Where visions were always vivid, pressing themselves into the backs of her eyelids, her dreams were as fleeting as any other’s. She couldn’t remember what she had seen. Darkness and fire. Ice.
She tried to call up that voice again, and heard it like the faintest echo. It was not a cry of anguish or of tragedy, and though it carried a twinge of pain, Iyana did not think that was at its root. It was a cry of rage. An animal rage that could only belong to a beast, or a man brought low enough or driven hard enough to think as one.
The voice belonged to Kole.
It should have meant less than nothing to her. Iyana had railed against Falkin after their shared trek to the east, where she had come face-to-face with the Eastern Dark, the greatest and darkest power the world had yet known, and the one that had plagued her people longest. She had gone to sleep upset by the ensuing exchange with her newest teacher, and she had done so on the back of concern for her sister and for Kole and those who traveled alongside them.
It stood to reason that she would have dreams that preyed on that fear and turned it around, but even after she stood, dressed and made for the door at the front of the cabin, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. That Kole had been screaming, and that by some trick of her own strange, growing powers or by some fault in a world skidding ever closer to its doom, she had heard him.
Fresh air allowed Iyana to think best, and when she stole out into the night, she found it less full of stars than the previous one had been. She looked up into the sky, where the encroaching limbs of the encircling trees appeared as reaching hands with sharp talons, and tried to count them. There were no clouds to speak of. The sky should have been deep blue, not gray and black. It was as if the whole of it was sick, growing sicker.
The Dark Months were coming. They were nearly here, and far sooner than even the most consistent doomsayers among the Emberfolk had feared.
Iyana scanned the Faey village. The cookfires had all been put out, and there were only faint trails of smoke rising from the thatched eaves and stone chimneys. A clutch of discarded wooden and knitted toys rested in a patch of grass nearby, the children having taken up temporary residence as close to Iyana and Ceth as possible, so as to spy on them.
She heard a rhythmic thudding sound and the scratchy sound of gravel shifting underfoot, and turned toward the roadway to the west, expecting to see Ceth come back to rest, or else Kenta being granted a much-needed reprieve from Luna’s clutches. Instead, she saw a great black form lumbering toward her, all muscle, sinew and considerable bulk. Her heart nearly stopped, and her lips parted, the beginnings of a cry for help already starting at the back of her throat.
Beast snorted his greeting and Iyana blew out a relieved sigh that turned to a childlike giggle. Creyath’s black charger met her at eye level before she took the short stack of stairs to the ground. He pressed his nuzzle into her chest, closing his brown eyes, ears going back as she stroked his mane.
“Where has Shek gone?” Iyana asked him, to which the steed gave his customary reply. Iyana looked behind him, expecting to see the Faey hunter—her or Tirruhn—running down the roadway after him. “Looks like you’ve earned their trust after all. Or maybe you’ve just been too difficult to contain.” She stared into one big eye as he turned his head to give her his attention. “Which is it?” She smiled.
Beast’s ears perked up at some sound only he could hear and swung his head to the east, nearly knocking Iyana down.
“What is it, boy?” she asked, looking.
The woods were close by, with the long shadows between the black trunks continuing on for some time before the strange luminescence of the nighttime paths lent their light. Iyana felt a growing sense of fear as Beast stood stock still, watching the eastward path. She listened intently, trying to hear what the horse did.
There was a faint whooshing sound, like a murder of crows taking off in unison. She heard it once, then twice, and on and on it went, like a draft of wind followed by a soft impact. The sound did not seem sinister, and as she watched for Beast’s reaction, the horse did not seem agitated or afraid. Soon enough, he lost interest, and began pawing at the dirt, his lips parting and chomping teeth working at a tangle of rope he found in
the dust.
Still, the sound continued, and Iyana dipped into the power of the Between. Her sight changed, the details of her surroundings melding into a sort of blur that made the world look as if it were an oil painting. She could see the faint outlines—blue and green and yellow—reflected in the sectioned windows at her periphery, but her focus was to the east, and the direction of the rhythmic sound.
It was difficult to make sense of anything in this part of the Valley, especially at night. Where the plants themselves glowed and where every toadstool and petal acted as a miniature lantern, the tethers of the birds and beasts were harder to mark than in the south and west. Still, she could see them—the tiny, thrumming threads that betrayed the croaking frogs and slinking weasels.
And farther in, past the orange mushrooms and the fireflies, there was a silver-white tether that glowed brighter than everything around it. Iyana focused on it, saw it shimmering, loosening and slackening as the one it belonged to moved beneath it. She traced it up, high as she could, until she lost it in the tangle of branches above.
Beast had been watching her for some time. He snorted again and nudged her with his muzzle.
“Stay here, Beast,” Iyana said, patting him absently. “I’ll go to him.” She started in that direction. “It seems I’m not the only one for brooding tonight.”
As she walked toward the black gateway between the thick trunks, she tried to keep the argument from the day before from rushing back to her, bringing with it all the bitter frustration sleep had done nothing to dispel.
Instead, she concentrated on the sights and sounds of the land. It was a place she was already growing to love, though she had spent such a brief time beneath its branches and had traveled so few of its ways.
She should have felt frightened in the strange forest, but she did not sense any ill intent nearby, and trusted that the borders of the Faey domain were well-guarded. She parted the brush and stepped onto a path lit by the same sort of blue and green moss they had left behind in the west, alongside the flowing, moonlit river where they had first come upon the Faey.
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