Leaves of Flame (4 page)
Authors: Joshua Palmatier
“Fools,” Colin muttered under his breath, glaring around at the cacophony of noise, the power of the seed pulsing with his own blood. “All fools.”
The power would not wait for the Evant to come to a decision. It had already been awakened.
He turned toward the platform, caught the eyes of the former Tamaea. She reached out and touched Thaedoren’s arm, the Tamaell’s gaze shifting from the bickering lords to Colin.
His lips pressed into a thin line as they regarded each other—
Then he nodded.
Colin moved, not waiting for the Evant to be called to order. Permission had been granted; the wishes of the Lotaern and the lords no longer mattered. He headed for the stairs, saw a blur of blue-and-red motion out of the corner of his eye, Eraeth and four other Rhyssal Phalanx surrounding him a moment later. But they didn’t impede him. Two darted forward and cleared a path up the stairs to the hall’s inner doors, Eraeth motioning the waiting Phalanx there to open the chamber. They scrambled to draw the doors back, even as Colin heard Lotaern shout out a warning from behind them.
Colin and his escort spilled out through the main stone doors of the Hall, past the thick colonnades, and into the blinding sunlight of the marketplace. The clamor of the Evant became the roar of thousands of Alvritshai vying for attention or haggling for a bargain, the plaza packed with hawkers, carts, tents, and animals. Alvritshai in the conical hats of commoners wove through the makeshift paths toting baskets and bundles, stopping to inspect wares or chat with friends and family. Children dashed between bodies, and messengers and pages darted through every opening as they rushed to deliver their notes.
Colin halted on the edge of the morass of people, Eraeth coming up beside him.
“Where?” the Protector asked bluntly.
Colin drew in a deep breath, felt the power of the seed building, drawing upon the life-force of the crowd around it. He wouldn’t be able to control it much longer. But the seed couldn’t be placed just anywhere. It had to be within the walls of Caercaern so that Thaedoren and the White Phalanx—and Lotaern and his Flame—could protect it.
But it needed room. Lots of room.
“The center of the plaza,” he rasped. Eraeth shot him a questioning look, but he shook his head. “There’s no other choice. We don’t have much time.”
Eraeth barked orders, the Rhyssal Phalanx closing in tighter around him, and then they plowed into the crowd.
Eraeth drove straight toward the center of the plaza, ignoring the cries of protest as the Phalanx shoved people out of their way.At the heart of the group,Colin struggled with the seed, its pulse now locked into his heartbeat, threading through his body and drawing on his own power. He could taste its urgency, frigid and silvery, like snow, the sensation coursing through his skin, making him shudder with cold. Eraeth glanced back, caught the look on his face, then barked new orders. The Phalanx broke through the center of a tent, cloth ripping as tables were knocked aside and pottery crashed to the ground.They tipped over a cart laden with melons, nearly trampled a gaggle of old women, who shrieked and scattered like hens, and then Colin could hold the power within no longer.
He shouted a warning toward Eraeth, even as the Phalanx drew back from him. He could feel the power slipping outward from his grasp, glanced up to see shock and horror dawning on the faces around him. The crowd, Eraeth and the Phalanx included, pulled farther back as tendrils of light began flickering upward from the stone around him.As the light intensified, Colin scanned the area, saw that they’d nearly made it to the fountain, noted the discarded blankets and abandoned tables of merchants, then noticed that the light curling upward around him was centered on one spot, one location.
He stepped forward, thrust a tarp from a collapsed tent aside with his staff, bared the stone of the plaza beneath in a wide circle, the seed clutched to his chest with one arm as he worked. Then he fell to his knees, setting his staff to one side.
The light emerging from the ground came in sheets, rising like steam or mist. On the far side of the veil, Eraeth and the rest of the Phalanx were herding the Alvritshai in the plaza back,farther away from Colin.The Protector met Colin’s gaze for a brief moment, then broke the contact as more Phalanx arrived in the varied colors of the other Houses. Colin caught sight of Aeren, Peloroun, Lotaern, the latter two looking furious, and behind them all, Thaedoren. The Tamaell broke through the widening circle of Phalanx, stepping close to the swirling light.
Then the urgency of the seed pulsed deep into Colin’s chest. He gasped at the intensity, felt his body shudder in response.
Lifting the seed toward the sky with both hands, he released the power of the Lifeblood, the Confluence, and the White Fire inside him. It surged through his arms, into the seed, and the last restraints on the power locked inside it collapsed.
With a harsh cry, he drove the shaft of the seed into the stone before him, felt it pierce deep. Beneath his hand, the knot atop the staff writhed. The pale white bark split beneath his palm with a crack of splintering wood. He hissed and lurched backward, stumbled on the detritus left behind by the market vendors, but caught himself. Grabbing his staff,he continued backing up.White light licked up around him, flowed through him, touching and tasting, rising higher as the stone beneath his feet trembled. It recognized its creator.
The crowd gasped when the seed quickened and the sapling that sprouted from it shot skyward, higher than the tendrils of light, piercing upward, growing in the space of heartbeats,seeking sunlight.The sapling thickened,the bole of an immense tree emerging, its bark dark, nearly black, limbs thrusting outward from the trunk like spears, splitting, branching. The groan of stressed wood fi lled the plaza, punctuated by sharp cracks and sizzling, hissing pops. And still the immense tree strained upward. Roots pierced the stone at the trunk’s base and dove back underground, grinding the stone to dust as the trunk thickened and spread. Buds appeared on the thousands of branches, burst open between one breath and the next, thick silvery leaves unfurling. Colin stepped back once, twice, tilted his head so that he could see the branches reaching outward, obscuring the sky, stretching out over the crowd below.
That crowd stood stunned, the Phalanx no longer trying to usher the gathered Alvritshai backward. Some had bolted and were thrashing their way through those too awed to move. Even the lords of the Evant and the Tamaell had stilled, gazing up in wonder at a tree nearly five times as large as any tree they had ever seen before. It would take twenty men, hands linked, to encircle the trunk alone.
Colin bowed his head. Weariness seeped through him, enveloped him like a warm blanket, sapped his strength. He turned, moved through the fading white light, the ground reabsorbing it. Behind him, the groans and shudders of the tree’s birth eased, replaced by the calming sigh of wind through thousands upon thousands of leaves. Silver leaves, even though the bark of the tree was the color of deep, earthy loam.
He halted before the Tamaell, Thaedoren ripping his gaze from the sight to look down upon him.
“The Alvritshai are now protected from the Wraiths and the Shadows,” Colin said, and his voice shook with exhaustion. “I give you the Winter Tree.”
COLIN STARED DOWN at the knife. The blade was about five inches long, the handle only four, handle and blade all one piece, shaped from a length of wood shorter than his forearm. The wood had been given to him by the heart of the Ostraell forest— the same forest that held the Well and the Faelehgre and had once been the prison of the Shadows—but unlike the staffs the forest had gifted him in the past, this had simply been an unshaped, yet living, part of the forest. He could feel the forest when he touched it, could feel the pulse of its heart when he ran his hands down its length. It throbbed with an inner life, with a power that even he, after all of the decades he’d spent in the city of Terra’nor and all of his searches throughout the lands of Wrath Suvane, did not understand. It was the power of the spirit of woodland itself, of the trees, smelling of the acrid inner bark of a cedar after the outer layers had been stripped away, tasting of bitter sap and damp moss.
And it was one of the few substances he knew of that could harm one of the Shadows.
His gaze hardened and he placed his hands on either side of the knife to keep them from trembling.
He sat at a table in the center of a meeting chamber of the Order of Aielan, at the heart of Caercaern. His staff leaned against the back of the chair beside him. Ancient tapestries depicting scenes from the Alvritshai religious Scripts lined the walls, a few small tables set beneath them at odd intervals, surrounding the large central table where he waited for the arrival of Lotaern and a few other members of Aielan’s Order. One of the acolytes had already been sent in search of the Chosen, the youth’s eyes widening when Colin blurred into existence in what, a moment before, had been an empty corridor.
Colin smiled as he remembered the expression on the youth’s face, but the amusement was fleeting. He shouldn’t have startled the boy, but he’d needed to find Lotaern as quickly as possible and he’d been too exhausted to conduct the search himself. The acolyte had recognized him after a moment and had led him to the meeting chamber to wait while he searched for the Chosen.
Now, as Colin sat and waited, he suddenly wished he’d asked the acolyte to bring him something to drink, perhaps something to eat. He didn’t know how long he’d spent within the depths of the Alvritshai catacombs, in the heart of the mountain, but this last excursion might have been days, maybe even weeks. He found that he lost his sense of time too easily now, especially when he was working alone.
Yet,
he thought,
perhaps this particular project was finished
.
He reached out to touch the knife, but his hand paused above it. He could feel it even so, could feel the multiple energies within it, mingling with each other. Flames from the numerous sconces that lit the room fl ickered on the bright sheen of its wooden blade, the gloss a consequence of the process he’d used to shape it.
He let his hand fall back to the table.
The shaping had been . . . difficult.
Colin stood at the edge of a room within the dead city of Terra’nor, sweat dripping from his nose, his chin. He held metal tongs before him, stared into the seething red-orangewhite embers of the forge.A misshapen form of heartwood rested on the fl oor before him. He’d already destroyed three pieces by attempting to carve them with a knife, had intended to make another attempt with this one until Os-serin had found him.
The gift of the heart of the forest can not be carved with so blunt an instrument as another knife
, the Faelehgre had murmured, light flaring in agitation, as if this were obvious.
The life-force that inhabits the heartwood—that gives it the power to affect the Shadows as if they were made of cloth, instead of passing through them like other weapons—will die as soon as any regular knife cuts too deeply into the grain. You must find another way.
And then the light had drifted off.
So Colin had set up the forge. It had taken him days to build it, days more to stoke the fire to its current intense heat. If the heartwood couldn’t be carved, then perhaps it could be molded and shaped, like metal.
The fire would never be hotter.
“Now or never,” he said to himself.
Reaching down with the tongs, he lifted the heartwood up and thrust it into the heart of the bed of coals, sparks whirling upward as flame rose with a hiss. Pain prickled his skin as the embers landed against his exposed face, but he held the tongs steady, gasping as the heat stole his breath and burned his throat and lungs. He pulled the heartwood out, noted the scorch marks along its sides, felt the pulse of the forest still residing within.Yet the wood hadn’t softened; he could sense it through the tongs.
“Too soon,” he hissed through clenched teeth, and thrust it back into the inferno. He counted slowly in his head, removed it again, the wood beginning to char, thrust it back with a curse.
The third time he pulled it from the coals, it burst into flame.As he stumbled backward in surprise,he felt the life-force inside it die. Before he could drop it, before the disappointment of this new failure could sink in, the length of wood hissed and then exploded, like the boles of trees at the heart of a raging forest fire.
He cried out, dropping the tongs as he protected his face and lurched out into the white ruins of the city surrounding the Well. The coolness of the forest air seered his lungs as harshly as the heat inside the forge, and he fell to his knees. He bellowed at the sky, his clothes flecked with smoking splinters of the heartwood, his chest constricted with raw frustration.
Osserin and the other Faelehgre found him there, head bowed forward where he knelt, sobbing. They calmed him down and after he tried the forge again with the same results, he gathered another length of wood from the heart of the forest and traveled to Caercaern, to speak to Aeren.
The Lord of House Rhyssal held the heartwood in his hands, turned it in the firelight of his inner chamber. He ran his fingers over the reddish wood, flecked with striations of burnt yellow and ridged like bark. “Have you taken it to Lotaern?” he asked.
Colin grimaced.“It’s one of the reasons I’ve come,to see if he has any insights into how to mold it. But since my arrival with the Winter Tree and the disastrous gathering of the Evant that ended with the planting of the Tree in the marketplace, he and I have barely spoken.”
A smile touched Aeren’s lips as he set the heartwood down and rewrapped it in the cloth Colin had carried it in. “He did not appreciate the responsibility of the Tree being thrust upon him, no. But he has managed to wield the unexpected responsibility to his advantage. My expectation that it would deter his rise in power in the Evant was, perhaps, incorrect.”
“What has he done?”
Aeren glanced up, one hand on the supple cloth that now covered the heartwood. Behind him, Eraeth stood near the entrance to the chamber. “You haven’t been following the events in Alvritshai lands since the quickening of the Tree?”
“I’ve been busy, Aeren, trying to balance the awakening of the Wells, battling the sukrael in the lands not protected by the Seasonal Trees, battling the Wraiths.”
“Battling Walter, you mean.”
Aeren frowned at the interruption of his Protector, Eraeth’s voice barely a murmur. But then he focused on the bundle nestled among the stacks of papers and other detritus of the maintenance of a House of the Evant. “Is that who this is for? Walter?”
“For all of the Wraiths and the Shadows,” Colin said, and heard the defensiveness in his voice. He sighed. “But yes, this is for Walter.”
“It’s been seventy-two years since the battle at the Escarpment and the signing of the Accord. Walter and the Wraiths have caused little problem since the planting of the Trees thirty-three years ago.”
“Not here on Alvritshai lands, or where the other two Seasonal Trees hold sway, but outside of their influence ...” Colin shook his head.“Walter and the Wraiths are only biding their time. The Trees were not meant to last forever.”
“How long
will
they last?” Eraeth interjected.
Colin shrugged. “I don’t know. I suspect hundreds of years, or longer, because of the Lifeblood they are imbued with. But we will need a way to defend against the Shadows and the Wraiths no matter when the Trees fail.”
Aeren’s eyebrows rose.“And this has nothing to do with Walter and what happened between the two of you?”
Colin said nothing, his brow creasing in irritation. For a moment, he felt the wooden bars of the penance lock across his neck, biting into his wrists. He felt Walter’s foot connecting with his stomach, Walter’s arm pressed into his throat, choking him.
The memories caused his hands to clench into fists.
Aeren sighed, and Colin saw Eraeth nod knowingly. “Eraeth, have someone bring us some wine, perhaps some bread and cheese.”
Eraeth moved to the door as Aeren motioned Colin to the balcony. They stepped out into the night air, chill even though it was nearing summer. Nights in Caercaern were always cold, and the temples of Aielan had rung the chimes for cotiern hours ago. Colin moved to the edge of the balcony, hands resting on the lip of stone, and glared out over what he could see of the tiered city. The streets of the third tier were empty, only a few windows glowing softly with lantern light. From the second tier, the Winter Tree cleaved the cloudless night, its silver leaves shimmering in the moonlight. Colin kept his eyes on the Tree, a new wall surrounding the marketplace where it had been planted.
“Does this mean that you won’t help?” he asked. His breath fogged the air with bitterness.
“No. You and I both know how dangerous the sukrael are, how deadly the Wraiths. But I will not help you out of any need for vengeance. I’ll help because, as you say, the Wraiths and the sukrael—including Walter—have not vanished. They will return at some point to plague us. You are letting your personal feelings blind you. I can see the tension in your shoulders, in your stance.”
Colin’s hands gripped the edge of the stone hard enough he could feel grit scraping free beneath his fingers. He drew in a deep breath . . . and then exhaled sharply, releasing the stone and pushing back from the edge, trying to calm himself. He caught Aeren’s gaze where the Lord stood in the half-light coming from the inner room and shook his head with a troubled smile.
“You’re right. I’ve been working on the heartwood and practically nothing else for too long. I’ve lost myself to the effort, the failure upon failure. . . .”
“You are too hard on yourself. You’ve done more than expected in our efforts to fight the sukrael and the Wraiths. You brought us the Winter Tree—even if the gift was unexpected and, perhaps, unwanted by some. And you’ve managed to halt the preternatural storms that plagued the plains, as well as the occumaen, by balancing out the power of the Wells.”
“None of that has solved the real problem. It’s only bought us time.”
Before Aeren could answer, Eraeth appeared behind him, accompanied by a servant with a platter of wine, bread, and cheese. Aeren motioned for the servant to set the platter to one side and then dismissed him. He poured each of them a glass, Colin raising his wine and drinking without really tasting it, still thinking about the heartwood, about Walter, about the Shadows.