Firebrand

There was the softest whisper of an arrow being loosed. It carved through the squall, flurries swirling in eddies behind the trailing edges of its feathers. White against white, an Eletian arrow.

Immerez fell into the snow with the arrow lodged in his chest, and Karigan staggered away. Zachary launched across the space between them. Immerez’s mouth worked as though he tried to speak, but Zachary’s blood roared in his ears and his vision narrowed. He held his sword hilt in both hands and drove the blade down into Immerez again and again and again, venting the full of his fury, all the anger and fear and hatred he’d held inside during his captivity and torment, and for all that had been done to Karigan, too.

“Enough! He’s dead!” The words came as though from a distance. He raised his sword to impale Immerez yet again when someone grabbed his arm to stop him. He whirled sword first.

“Sire—!”

The blade careened toward her neck.

“Zachary!”

Karigan. He cried out and let go the hilt before the blade could strike and it spun through the air landing somewhere well beyond her. All at once the fury drained from him. The force that had maddened him, that had made his blood run hot, faded and now he shivered with the cold. He sank to his knees in the snow before her, a supplicant, and she knelt with him. He labored to catch his breath. He trembled, and trembled more when she placed her hands on either side of his face. Her touch warmed him, but not with fury as before, only peace. The sound of battle faded.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I almost killed you,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“But you did not.”

“So close . . . I was—I was not myself. My rage, it blinded me. I am so sorry.”

She pressed his head to her shoulder, put her arms around him.

“So sorry,” he murmured into her coat. “Not myself.”

“I know,” she said.

They stayed like that for a time, as if by some grace they were separate from the rest of the world and its battles, snow falling softly on them. He reveled at their closeness, she holding him, he calmed by her scent and warmth, while guilt and fear of what could have been cut him up inside.

“Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore.”

She shook with quiet laughter. “Believe it or not, I can kind of understand.”

He raised his head from her shoulder so he could gaze at her, so close. Snowflakes melted on her cheeks, caught in her eyelashes, and he realized the patch was gone and he could see himself in the silver of her mirror eye. Images began to unfold so rapidly he could not follow. He glimpsed a child—was it himself, or one of his own? A man he somehow knew to be Cade Harlowe appeared. He was . . . he was making love to Karigan, her hair splayed across a pillow. There were brief images of Estora and Laren, a blur of battle and arrows in flight, and . . . The images layered over so quickly he was not sure what he saw, only that he could not stop looking until Karigan gasped and turned away, her hand clasped over her eye.

“Oh, gods,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”

“I’m all right, it’ll pass.”

He helped her to her feet. She was unsteady. “Your back, is it—? Are you—?”

“I’ll live,” she replied. “You?”

“I am all right, because of you.” Then, “We need to get you to some shelter.”

She brushed snow off the crown of her head and drew her hood up. The storm resurged in intensity, and ice now pelted them. He turned to look for Enver and Donal, and he barely saw their shapes through the wind-driven squall. There was a third person with them who looked neither like Rennard nor Fiori, but was female in form. It appeared they’d kept their distance to allow him a moment with Karigan.

A whirling cone of snow kicked up in the space between them. Karigan grabbed his arm. “The elemental!”

His sword—where was it? He’d tossed it and now? And now it was buried somewhere in the snow. He kicked at drifts trying to find it. When the whirl loomed into a rough human shape, he threw himself in front of Karigan.

HEART OF ICE

Nari had walked the northlands seeking the aureas slee. It had hidden among the clouds, mending its wounds, out of reach. She thought, perhaps, it would retreat until next winter, but clearly it could not let go of the vengeance it felt it needed to wreak upon Zachary.

She’d followed it back to the rocky plain between the campsite and the Lone Forest, and she sensed it stalking the soldiers approaching the forest in the night. Zachary, she deduced, was among them.

Her careful entry into the forest followed, through the snowstorm generated by the Slee. She could move as silently and unobtrusively as any Eletian, and so she remained undetected by the combatants. She tracked Zachary’s clutch of fighters and followed them as they worked their way through the forest.

She marveled at how brightly Zachary shone as he led his soldiers, how he fought to the front lines. If there was beauty in death, he created it, his gleaming sword arcing with grace through the night, its movement the rhythm of music, the blade a living extension of his arm. He was a burning flame and, in truth, the “firebrand” of his people.

Then came the attack of the dark ones, and she took up the sword of one of the fallen to defend herself. She could sense the abyss they’d spewed from, a gouting wound in the Earth. The dark ones had preceded the existence of even the Eletians in this world, but an ancient conflict, ancient to even the Eletian people, had cast them into their prisons.