Leaves of Flame (5 page)

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 filled 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.”

C
OLIN 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 flickered 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-­orange-­white embers of the forge. A misshapen form of heartwood rested on the floor 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 Osserin 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?”