Ignite the Fire: Incendiary by Karen Chance
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I jumped up, grabbed a protruding knot maybe ten feet off the ground, and scaled the trunk of the tree like I’d been born to it. I hadn’t, but Mircea’s abilities negated a lot of my mistakes, steadying my hands, ramping up my speed, and allowing me to catch the arrow that came tearing by my face. And to whip it back at the fey.
I could almost hear Mircea laugh at the fey’s surprised expression as he had to dodge his own weapon, but I didn’t laugh along. I was too busy tearing through the trees, pushing both mine and Mircea’s abilities to the limit to catch up. It was easier than I’d thought to leap from branch to branch, even at a dead run, since many of them overlapped and smaller limbs and leaves and forest gunk had formed a thatch underfoot.
It almost looked deliberate, as if the tree branches had been trained to grow together and create pathways in the sky. But if they had, the system had broken down long ago, with large boughs hanging low enough to threaten me with decapitation, forcing me to duck or jump, and sizeable gaps in the path underfoot showing dizzyingly long drops if I missed a step. But I couldn’t slow down, no matter how much I would have liked to.
Because the fey wasn’t alone.
I could see a camp, glimmering through the trees, in the distance. The leafy walls and dense tree cover had hidden it from the ground, but it was clearly visible up here, twinkling with dozens of campfires. I could also see it in the fey’s mind, with Mircea’s abilities grabbing hold of his consciousness as I raced along. I used the connection to stop him from alerting anyone to our presence by calling out or blowing the horn at his waist, which seemed to work.
But something else didn’t.
Kåre! The call was as loud as he could make it, but the worthless child sitting by the fire, staring forlornly at his bone flute, did not hear. They were too far south for him to be allowed to play it, in case the sound carried to enemy ears. But he had been moaning about it for days, and was too preoccupied to listen to more important things on the wind.
Ødger Redspear! The large fey was standing nearby, polishing the stolen weapon that had given him his byname. He’d taken it off a troll, after dueling him as if the creature was an equal. It should have been a sign of dishonor, yet he treated it as a trophy. He had as much intellect as that troll, Erri thought savagely, when he did not hear the message, either.
Arne! The lanky eagle tender did look up, as if hearing something, at least. But then his cursed bird screeched and stole his attention. He smoothed its feathers, calming it down, while his shield brother ran for his life, unheard—
The fey’s attempt at mental communication suddenly cut out when I plowed into someone. Someone I hadn’t seen because my mind had been busy with the camp, but who now yelled and fought and fell—and grabbed hold to take me along with him. The fey and I plunged what must have been thirty feet, leaving both of us stunned on impact despite landing in a massive pile of leaves. But I somehow managed to get an arm up, seconds before he stabbed an arrow through my heart, and caught his wrist.
Sleep, I thought desperately, and watched his eyes fall closed.
I fell back against the ground, shivering and shaking and wondering how many things I’d just broken.
It felt like a lot.
It felt like everything.
You’re okay, I told myself. You’re not really here, remember? But it was hard to keep that in mind as I writhed and twisted, fighting to pull air back into lungs that felt as flattened as the rest of me.
I finally managed it, gulping in a shallow breath a moment before Rhea and Guinn ran up, calling my name. I couldn’t see them, being buried under a mountain of leaves, and couldn’t hear them much better. But that last wasn’t the leaves’ fault.
My ears were still full of the sounds of the distant camp. Fires popped, horses whinnied, and a few light notes from a flute sighed on the wind. Whatever part of my mind that controlled hearing seemed to be stuck inside the fey’s head, and I didn’t know how to get it out.
Some of the rest of my senses were there, too, because I felt the flute being torn from my grasp a moment later, and an angry fey telling me off in words I only half understood. He must be speaking some dialect that Pritkin didn’t know, I thought, as he shook me. Only he wasn’t shaking me; my body was currently being dragged out of the leaf pile by a couple of panting, cursing women. But Kåre . . .
The forest winked out, and in its place, I saw a little boy, sitting at a rough wooden table in a house made of stone, being presented with a flute by an older, male fey. The older fey was dressed in a leather jerkin that looked like it had seen more than a few winters, and his face contained lines that I’d rarely seen on one of their kind. And, unlike the fey warriors I’d encountered a few times, who had mostly left their long hair free, his was barely shoulder-length and tied back with a leather thong.
“I’ll teach you how to play it, shall I?”
The boy looked up, excitement brightening his eyes. “Will I be as good as papa?”
The older fey’s smile faltered for a second, before he recovered and mussed the fair hair. “Perhaps. Although very few were as good as your sire, boy.”
I tried to pull away, to free myself from this, whatever this was. It felt like an imprint, except that it was crystal clear, like the fey version that the telepath had shown me. But I wasn’t touching anything but leaves, so I didn’t know what was happening.
Just that I needed to get out.
But the only reward for my struggles was that the view skewed, showing me a scarred wooden cutting board and an old woman’s hands. She was setting down a bone-handled knife and sweeping some vegetable tops into a wooden pail. Which she then picked up and headed out of the cottage door, carrying me along with her.
The cold was beyond bracing, causing us to pull our shawl closer around our shoulders and to view the quiet valley in front of us through a haze of our own breath. There was a cluster of gray, stacked stone cottages, like the one we’d just left; there was a dirt road, potholed with ice-covered puddles; and there were hills covered in fir trees, the branches of which hung heavily with snow. There were also some outbuildings down a small hill, and we headed toward one of those.
Our booted feet crunched over the icy ground, while we watched some distant neighbors moving behind horn covered windows, throwing shadows onto the snow outside. They were cooking, too, with thin threads of smoke curling out of their chimneys before blending into the slate gray sky. A lone fey came by, driving a wagon piled high with wood and pulled by an old white horse, and lifted a hand in greeting as we reached what I guessed was a barn.
It didn’t look much different than the house, except for a few gaps in the thatched roof, which would need mending by spring, and some holes in the sides that had been patched with wattle and daub. But the scent was suggestive, and then a couple of pigs poked pink and gray snouts out of the door, sniffing at our offerings as we broke the ice on a hand pump, to fill a water bucket. But they didn’t come out of the warm barn.
They knew we’d be in soon enough, and for carrot tops, they’d wait.
It was a peaceful, picture-postcard-like scene. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t also been a prison. Let me go, I thought, mentally thrashing. Let me go!
But the only response was the view skewing again, hard enough to make me dizzy. And when it stopped, I didn’t think I was the same person anymore. Not unless the old woman had a lover, I thought, as my arm drew a plump girl closer, feeling the curves that I’d enjoyed the night before.
My mouth came down on hers, and she was sweet, sweet as honey, sweeter than the cold aristocrats’ daughters in the city, who became incensed if you so much as mussed their hair. Hers was already mussed, and I ran my hand through it, admiring the bright red color and the curls—so strange, so different—flowing through my fingers, and then bouncing back delightfully. She needed no artifice, no long sessions with curling irons and crimps. She rolled out of bed looking better than they ever would.
My bed, I thought, and kissed her again, reluctant to leave even though I was already late.
“Come again soon?” she said, as I broke away. It was as much as she ever asked of me.
“As soon as I can.” It was as much as I ever promised, as much as I could.
I had an ice maiden waiting for me; a good match, the king had said. From a family nearly as old as mine, and far more respected these days. One with hair like moonlight and skin like fresh cream—and all the passion of the icicle she so closely resembled.
She was likely barren to boot, being her parents’ only child, even after hundreds of years of trying—one way to make sure that my line died out, I thought viciously. Only I had already found fertile fields here. My hand rested for a moment on Ronog’s belly, swollen with the proof of that. I looked into her freckled face and felt my heart clench. Marred, they called it, and alien and mixed blood and common, and a thousand more insults besides.
Beautiful, I thought, and broke away.
I pulled back, desperately trying to separate my consciousness from the fey’s before I lost myself in it, but it only brought me back to that half immersion I’d started out with. It left me feeling less like the person in question and more like his backpack, one he was carrying along whether I liked it or not. It was maddening!
There was no way to know who he was, but the shadow on the ground in front of me looked like someone dressed in armor, and his hand had been gauntleted. He also had a helmet on, topped by a feathered plume. Its shadow bounced as he jogged away from the girl’s small house.
I hadn’t known that people could jog in full armor, but he barely felt the weight of it, although whether that was because fey armor was lighter than the human variety, or because he was stronger, I didn’t know.
He headed up a hill overtopping the village, where a huge, feathered creature was tethered to a pole. The beast was in the middle of eating a mole that had gotten too close, its great beak ripping into the red flesh held between its mighty talons, its eagle-like eyes watching us warily, as if it thought we might be after its snack. I saw the fey’s hand reach out and grab its bridle, and heard his voice tell it to hurry up, that they had work to do.
The beast did not hurry up and tossed its eagle-like head with what looked like disdain at the suggestion. But it did allow us to mount the saddle affixed to its back. It felt completely unlike a horse under our body, being lithe and low to the ground and heavily muscled, and it moved with a fluid grace that a horse could never match.
Caedmon, Aeslinn’s old enemy and the fey king currently occupying his capitol, had told me once that Svarestri warriors sometimes came into his lands, trying to steal gryphon eggs. Caedmon’s fey used the creatures, which had an eagle’s head and wings and a lion-like body, as sky mounts, as the adult ones were powerful enough to carry a fully grown fey. I’d gotten the impression that very few Svarestri had succeeded in doing likewise, but it looked like at least one had.
Because a second after the gryphon gulped down the last of his meal, we were off, loping and then running down the hill, before taking off in a whoosh of huge wings and a mental shout from me, because holy crap, that was a rush!
The beast soared effortlessly skyward, and I held on for all I was worth, despite knowing that I was only in some fey’s head. I didn’t understand what was happening, but that had been so true for so long, that I was honestly getting used to it. I knew I needed to get out of there, to find a way to pull back into me, or into whatever version of me had just been dragged out of the leaf pile, but . . . but I could do that in a minute, right?
Because this . . . was seriously awesome.
The rider didn’t seem to think so, treating it as pretty ho-hum. But I craned my neck to see out of the corners of his eyes, not wanting to miss anything, and was rewarded with a bird’s eye view of more villages. Some were nestled in snowy valleys, while others were perched on craggy mountain fastnesses as if they’d been dropped from on high by one of the eagles riding the wind currents around us—and carefully keeping their distance.
Unlike the simple architecture of the valley towns, the mountain ones had massive walls and soaring spires, and open ledges beside which half frozen waterfalls gushed into the gorges below. They looked like they’d been magicked straight out of the mountains themselves, and they probably had. The Svarestri were lords of earth, and it never ceased to amaze me what they could do with it.
Like that, I thought, catching sight of a stone creature the size of a small mountain, hauling a pack of wood up a cliff face, toward one of the higher villages.
The pack was woven out of ropes as fat as the anchor chains on an ocean liner, and looked to contain half a forest’s worth of trees. Yet it had been slung over one gigantic shoulder with the same ease that I’d carry a large handbag. That was probably because the shoulder in question, along with the rest of the man-shaped creature, was carved out of what looked like reddish-brown granite, with the stone sparkling dimly despite the haziness of the day.
But it hadn’t been left as plain rock. It was crowned by a hedge of fir trees, giving it the illusion of hair, and had a flock of goats grazing on some dried grasses on one shoulder and down its great back. It turned its head as we passed and lifted the arm that wasn’t clinging to the almost perpendicular cliff.
I saw my gauntleted hand raise in return.
And, because I was looking for it, I glimpsed the tiny figure of a fey, the master of the creature that had been pulled out of a mountain and set to work, perched on the shoulder with the goats. He was sitting outside a tent, roasting something over a fire, and had a young boy with him. The boy had a baby goat in his arms and, like the older fey, was waving along with their creation.
It gave me a weird feeling, but not because I hadn’t seen something like it before. Aeslinn had used similar rock creatures at the battle for his capitol, with catastrophic consequences. They’d taken a terrible toll on our forces, running us down, pounding us like massive pile drivers, and being responsible for more of our casualties than the fey themselves. They were like tanks, only bigger, faster, and more maneuverable.
Which was why it had seemed like insult to injury when the Svarestri had personalized their war machines, painting their faces with stripes of ore, and decorating their bodies with enormous crystal formations. It had felt like they were mocking us.
But now . . . I didn’t know what I thought now. I craned my neck to the breaking point to keep the creature in view for as long as possible. It had already gone back to work, lugging more useful stuff up the mountainside than a whole fleet of trucks could have done.
Was this what they were meant for? Helping the fey to tame their rugged homeland, and allowing people to live where no one would have thought possible? Were they usually cranes and trucks and construction equipment, rather than tanks?
It made me uncomfortable, like seeing some farmer’s tractor turned into a war machine. Plowshares into swords, I thought, and felt uneasy some more. Which was stupid! Yes, we had invaded them, but if the gods came back, we all died, and probably a lot of the fey as well. We hadn’t had a choice!
But had they known that? The nobles, the ones giving the orders—probably. I assumed they were in on whatever Aeslinn was doing. But the regular Joes, or Svens, or whatever? What had they seen?
An enemy army coming out of nowhere, laying siege to their capitol and slaughtering them in droves. And now threatening to do it again, while hunting their scattered soldiers, all that was left of their army—their sons—across Faerie. No wonder we weren’t getting any cooperation.
I thought of Kåre and his little flute, which he’d probably much rather be playing back on his grandfather’s farm than dying like his father probably had. Like I’d rather be back with my court than killing him. But what was the alternative?
The mountains didn’t answer me back, and there were plenty of them right now, as we’d left the villages behind and started moving through a range taller than any I’d seen on Earth. It was cut through by a narrow valley with a river frothing with rapids at the bottom, and sprinkled with tiny fisherman’s villages, just a cluster of cottages at a time. But eventually, even that gave way to a winter wonderland of pure snow and ice and stone.
The highest peaks were wreathed in clouds and lost to sight, but even the lower ones towered on either side, row after row clad in stark colors of gray, dark gray, black and white. There were no villages here, or any sign of life at all. Just an occasional glacier filling the gaps in between pinnacles, like a sleeping giant under a blanket of snow, but holding strange blue fire at their hearts.
And then I was treated to something that made all of that look like nothing, just nothing at all.
We had been climbing for a while, steadily fighting our way upward with every powerful beat of those great wings, and finally rose high enough to break through the clouds. A cascade of light rewarded us, flooding the scene and making me blink. I didn’t know what the fey called their star—I’d never thought to ask—but it was dazzling.
But not as much as that, I thought, as a city appeared in the distance. It was carved into a magnificent cliffside, with multiple towers, domes and terraces. It was hard to make out details at this distance, hard to see it at all in fact, but not because of the clouds. Most of them were below us now, spread out like a vast white sea. They boiled up against the bottom of the cliff like waves crashing against a rocky shore, to the point that I half expected to hear the roar of the ocean.
No, the problem was that the city was carved out of stone almost as pale as the clouds surrounding it, like cream right before it turned into butter: off white with occasional veins of pale gold. The bulbous look of the domes also blended in perfectly with the surrounding cloud banks, fooling the eye, and making the city seem like just another part of the sky. If the fey hadn’t been looking right at it, I might have missed it all together, or thought I was seeing a mirage.
I still sort of did because I’d already seen Aeslinn’s capital. Issengeir, the City of Ice Spires in their language, currently lay in ruins at the center of a gigantic plain, inside a protective ring of mountains that hadn’t proved so protective, after all. But this was even grander. It looked like somebody was trying to copy Olympus which . . . knowing Aeslinn a little now, he probably was.
But he’d done a damned good job of it.
So, why hadn’t he used it? I wondered. Was that other city considered more impregnable? Because that didn’t seem likely. Or was I seeing something from the past? Was this vision, or whatever it was, from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and showing an older capitol now abandoned?
Because I couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning this.
I stared at it some more; it was hard not to. Under the bulbous domes, it looked like someone had brought a gigantic sword down, shaving off a third of the mountainside, to reveal the heart of the stone within. And then carved a city inside it, a massive sculpture that was largely invisible, being deep inside the rock, but could be glimpsed through terraces, balconies and open-air windows. There were some external staircases as well, linking two or more terraces and running for ridiculous distances down the cliffside, and making me dizzy at even the thought of traversing them, especially with the force of the wind currently whipping the fey’s hair around.
The same was true for a second fey who pulled up beside us a moment later. His silver hair was flying, and his body was half leaning out of a strange, wooden contraption that looked like a small, four-sided pyramid, except for a rounded top. It had several open sides and several closed ones and wasn’t much larger than the basket on a hot air balloon.
Only there wasn’t any hot air. Or any balloon. Or any visible means of support, yet it was keeping pace with us.
“Up for another go?” My fey yelled, his voice almost whisked away by the wind.
“You never get tired of losing, do you?” the pilot of the small craft said, grinning.
“Usual stakes?”
“Agreed. I can always use another flagon. Where to?”
“Same as always.”
The door on the opposite side of the small pyramid slammed shut. “Be waiting when you arrive,” the pilot said, and dropped like a stone.