Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1) (5 page)

“Did you really sense something looking through that beast?” she asked, a hint of fear in her voice. “Kole. Did you see something?”

Kole sighed.

“Something saw me, Linn,” he said. He knew Nathen had stopped moving along the path up ahead, that he was listening with those hunter’s ears. “That was not your average Dark Kind. It had a master.”

“The Dark Kind are a force of nature. Not in our world,” she said, noting his expression. “In theirs. Only one has the power to control them. If what you say is true, then Bali is right. The whispers are true, and the Eastern Dark has found us. He’s come back. The White Crest didn’t manage to kill him in the passes after all.”

Kole did not look convinced, and that seemed to snap something in Linn. She grabbed him by the straps of his pack and nearly shook him.

“What makes you say otherwise, Kole? Why are you constantly chasing the ghost of a Sage you’ve never seen? A Sage that died before we came into the world.”

Kole looked away, dropping his voice so even Nathen could not hear.

“I saw him the night she died,” he said, and Linn’s grip slackened. “I sensed him. He was there, Linn.” Kole’s brown eyes took on their amber glow as they met hers. “He could have helped her. I know it.”

But he didn’t.

“There were shadows with the same red eyes as that beast. They were in the peaks above the Deep Lands. Not Dark Kind, but something stronger.” Kole’s eyes widened as he remembered waking up in a cold sweat for the last time, before the fire had found him. Before he was Landkist. “If he was there, why didn’t he help her? Why did he let them …?”

Linn shook her head and released him.

“We’ve all lost, Kole,” she said, her eyes all sympathy. “But not all of the Sages are the same. There has ever been one the Emberfolk have counted an enemy. With the White Crest gone—gone, Kole—we can’t rely on anything but the strength of our people to repel him.”

“Ninyeva knows something,” Kole said. “She led me like a lamb to the slaughter. If she knew he was back, she should have said so.”

“You got exactly what you wanted,” Linn said, moving ahead of him. “You can make for the peaks when the Dark Months end, see what there is to see.”

“She knows what’s happening, or has a guess,” Kole said, following after.

“Ninyeva always has a guess.”

Sure enough, Nathen was lounging idly on a leaning trunk, chewing some root or another. He stood when they approached, flashed that quick smile and continued on the path without a backward glance.

“You’re right about one thing, Linn,” Kole said, unconcerned about Nathen’s presence. Linn stayed quiet, picking her footfalls carefully as the branches grew thicker overhead. “The Dark Kind are getting bolder, the Valley more deadly by the year. We can’t keep waiting at the edge of the World. Either our enemy’s out there or he’s not. It’s time we took control of our destiny rather than waiting for the ghost of a dead king to point us in the wrong direction. He already did it once.”

“You don’t know that. For all we know, the wider world is completely overrun by the Dark Kind, the Sages dead and gone—all of them.”

“They’re not gone,” Kole said bitterly. “Powers like that linger.”

“We need powers like yours to linger here,” Linn said. It was clear she was running out of patience, and Nathen’s nerves seemed about to fray as they reached the darkest parts of the woods that bordered the Untamed Hills. The Dark Kind were the least of their concerns out here.

“Good as my bow arm might be, Reyna,” Linn said, “it’ll never be able to stop what came through that gate. You and yours are the last Embers born in a generation. Even Ferrahl is someone we can’t afford to lose. Whatever you do, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

The conversation stopped there. And the hunt began.

Despite the early tension, Kole felt lighter after having it out. He could not say he sensed the same from Linn, but the White Crest had been a revered figure in her household as well as in many others among the Emberfolk—a deity of sorts to replace their lost king. He was a Sage who had turned against his own kind, had sheltered the Emberfolk against the Eastern Dark and had even struck out with the King of Ember to bring him down.

He had failed on that last count. As far as Kole was concerned, he had failed on all counts. Kole had no way of knowing whether or not the White Crest was dead. He had no way of knowing what had been looking at him through those reds. But it had the stink of magic. If one of them openly flirted with the Dark Kind, why wouldn’t the rest?

The Emberfolk had put the White Crest on a pedestal polished by memory and fear. Kole had no use for idols. His had burned bright, and her flame had died away, leaving only ashes. He would find the truth, and whichever Sage was at the end of it would rue the day.

Kole tried to leave the choking thoughts behind as they crossed another brook and approached the final tree line before the first glade. Starlight bounced off of the moon and painted the grassy hilltops silver in an approximation of the capped peaks in autumn.

The Untamed Hills were a place even the Dark Kind avoided. The creatures there grew tall and fierce, and unlike the rest of the Valley game, the prey there did not hide.

Linn unloosed her bow from around her shoulders as Nathen readied his own, a shorter and thinner band in keeping with the weapons of the Faey. Linn’s eyes were intent on the first rise, where the hint of outlines shifted in the half-light.

Kole fished through the pack Linn had given him and withdrew a sling. He picked out several tightly rolled balls of sticky pitch and lined them up on the ground before him, shifting beneath the branches to get a better view.

Linn nocked an arrow and drew, Nathen doing likewise. She nodded so slightly it could have been mistaken for a twitch, but Kole knew better. With a burst from his fingers, he lit a ball and launched it sky high with a guttering whistle, then did the same with two more in rapid succession.

The flares punctuated the cool semi-darkness and the tiny comets streaked into the stars, Linn and Nathen following their arcing path as they trended downward. Linn let fly half a breath after each ball struck the turf and announced its presence with a flash that blinded the horned animals gathered there. Their flight tore up clods in the earth as they scattered, but Linn’s arrows caught two clean before they turned, bringing them down in a heap. The third was either lucky or damned, depending on how many legs it would need to live out the week, and Nathen cursed his aim.

“It changed directions quickly,” Kole said, patting his arm. “The herd will look after it.”

Nathen forced a tight smile.

As Linn and Kole stood watch atop the rise, Nathen worked at the bodies of the fallen beasts, removing the shafts with expert precision and saying the words that needed saying. It took some time for them to drag the carcasses back to the trail, where they rested and refilled their skins in the brook. Sitting with his bare toes steaming in the water, Kole watched the last wind-blown embers turn to ash in the breeze, snuffing the orange lights from the field.

After a spell, Kole stood, his feet drying before he had taken two steps, and helped Nathen strip the most elastic branches from the boughs overhanging the water. Linn tied the best knots, so they let her secure the poles to the litter before loading their bounty and setting off. Their progress was slow, but they reached the unfinished gates before the moon had finished its slow arc across the night sky.

Nathen insisted on seeing both animals to the stores and bid Linn and Kole a good day. As he disappeared into the center of town—still bustling despite the recent attacks—Kole could not help but laugh.

“What is it?”

“Why that boy isn’t a soldier is beyond me,” Kole said. “Are we sure he isn’t Rockbled? He’s even stronger than he looks, and he looks plenty strong.”

“People have said that about my eyes since I took up the bow,” Linn said. “But alas, not all of us can be Landkist. Besides,” she shouldered her pack, “we’re all soldiers when we need to be. Some would rather leave it at that, especially when you’ve got a heart like his.”

Kole nodded and handed his own pack over.

“My turn at watch,” he said, earning a reproachful glare from Linn.

“First light is almost upon us,” she said, indicating the lake, which sparkled in the pre-dawn light. “Besides, I may not be as doting as my little sister, but you haven’t really slept in days, and, Ember or not, your mind needs rest as much as your body. If you get any warmer, you’re going to ignite, and I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

“That bad?”

“I can smell the ozone coming off of you from here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It always happens when you’re stressed.”

“Plenty of reasons to be stressed,” Kole said.

Linn said nothing. She turned and marked a path toward her lakeside abode. Kole walked her back. Iyana was gone when they arrived, likely more exhausted than any of them as she cared for the wounded.

Kole sat and watched the gray ash in the hearth swirl in the dying beam of moonlight coming in through the slatted window while Linn washed and changed. He liked being this close to the water, a trait that clashed with his base nature. He thought about the gentle waves as they lapped against the lichen-covered pegs beneath the house. He thought about their moonlit hunt and how the horned runner had cried as it disappeared beyond the rise, and if it really did have a herd to look after it.

His last hazy thoughts before drifting off were of Linn’s face in the moonlight.

When she returned, she brushed his dark hair back from his eyes and kissed his forehead before heading out, taking the path north for the wall.

Kole never slept without dreaming. But tonight’s dream was not in the rain-choked passes, as all the others were. Tonight’s was a dream of beginnings.

K
arin had told Kole of dreams and their power.

There were dreamers in far-off lands, over mountains and spanning snow-covered fields that held their visions of sleep in higher esteem than the trials of day-to-day living. There were dreamers now passed on that had lived in shimmering jewels in the deepest deserts where now there were only red wastes. To them, a day was merely a dream’s portent. And there were others beside, in the crenellated walls of rain-soaked keeps that felt any vision of the mind was wrought with illusion and deceit, its only outcome desire or despair.

The Emberfolk held their dreams private, and Kole was no different.

Now, he dreamed of the first time his blood had caught fire. He was eleven, and though he acted much the same then as he did now, he carried himself with the wobbling uncertainty of a child freshly bereft of his mother. For his people, it was a rare thing grown commonplace, and about to grow more so.

He remembered searing pain, as if he was boiling from the inside out.

Now he saw Ninyeva come to take him, Linn chasing after them while Iyana cried in the back garden. He saw his father wipe the tears from her eyes and sing songs of growing. Kole sat down beside her and listened, trying his best to ignore the wails of his younger self as he was carried away, his father flinching all the while.

“Just as the seed blossoms into the shoot,” Karin was saying as he ran Iyana’s pale fingers along the green stem, “so a child grows into a little girl.” He pushed her nose like a button, drawing a giggle through the curtain of tears. “And just as all young women flower, so too do the Embers that give our people their name, and their pride.”

And their power.

Iyana had that uncertain look children get when they’re being led. Karin saw it, so he led her on a walk along the cobbled garden path. She skipped over the sprouting moss between the stones and Kole followed after.

“This is a proud moment for Last Lake, for all the Emberfolk,” Karin said, inflecting his voice with a sense of awe and wonder, though Kole could see he already bore the deep creases he would come to know so well. “Once his body accepts the change, Kole will be the first Ember to awake in half a decade, since Taei Kane did before him. And he won’t be the last.”

Just third to last.

“The Dark Months are coming, and we need our Embers to help protect us.”

“But the monsters don’t come here,” Iyana said, looking suddenly afraid. “The White Crest protects us.”

“We do not know where the White Crest has been these last few years,” he said, smiling to reassure her. “But the Emberfolk are strong. We can look after ourselves.”

They said more, but Kole lost track of the exchange. He felt himself being pulled along, his attention turning and aiming him toward the shore. He stepped tentatively out onto the water and walked across its surface, standing beneath the creaking timbers of the Long Hall.

He walked further out and looked up into the sky. Clouds circled overhead, darkening the water, which grew violent around him. Kole felt his heart quicken. He spun, looking past the houses and up the hill, past the wall and over the trees. A darkness deeper than black polluted the clouds there. It rushed and scattered like smoke in the wind. It was a wall of night, a portal into the World Apart.