Age of Swords (The Legends of the First Empire #2)

“Why didn’t you do anything?” Flood asked the Fhrey, and Frost who sat beside his brother nodded. “You could have stopped that thing. Killed it in an instant. We could have died back there. Why didn’t you stop it?”

“That raow, or whatever it was, is nothing compared to Balgargarath. The demon is…I can’t even explain it, except to say the raow is a bug in comparison. We nearly died and you just stood there!” Frost shouted, his beard bristling.

Arion looked at him but said nothing.

“You’re Miralyith,” the dwarf said incredulously. “We saw what you can do. What happened? Why didn’t you use your power, your so-called Art?”

Arion looked away as the spill of water roared off the rocks.

“Answer me!” Frost shouted.

“She wanted me to do it,” Suri said.

Heads turned.

The dwarfs thought about this a moment; then Flood turned to Suri. “Then why didn’t you do anything?”

Arion said angrily in Fhrey, “She’s learning, and that wasn’t exactly a classroom setting. You don’t just wake up one day able to move mountains.”

“When a creature is attempting to kill us, do you really think that’s time for training?” Frost bellowed. “You want to teach the girl, fine. But when our lives are on the line, you need to step in.”

“She needs to practice. The Art is rarely required when everything is calm and serene. Times of danger, when you must think and act fast, are the best environment for training. It builds emotion and adds power. Stress aids the process. We’re talking about the Art here; it’s not like making a sword or a pair of boots.”

“It takes years of practice to make a decent sword,” Frost argued.

“Of course. So how long do you think it takes to understand the rhythms and patterns of creation? Much of it is intuitive, but much more is not. And there isn’t a formula to follow, no step-by-step process that produces the same result. It’s an art, a process of intuition, trial and error. It’s mastered by learning through practice, finding out what each individual can do and how they can do it. What is safe and what is dangerous. What can be altered and what kills.

“You think Suri is less capable than I, but you don’t know the Art, nor can you see her potential. Trust me when I tell you that if this Balgargarath is as sinister as you keep saying it is, it’s Suri and not me that you want to face it.”

Arion shivered then and turned to Suri. Returning to Rhunic she said, “I am cold, and I am wet, and I am tired of explaining methods. Suri, can you please do something about that. The cold and wet part, I mean.”

“There’s nothing to burn,” Roan said. “And even if we had anything, it’d be soaked.”

“So?” Arion said, and turned to Suri.

The mystic nodded.

She raised her hands as if playing her string game without the string. She began to mumble and then hummed. Her fingers played and danced in the air for a moment. Then she paused and stopped humming. Just when Persephone was certain something had gone wrong, Suri clapped her hands, and a flame appeared. Not a campfire, just a single tongue of flame like a little person dancing on the stone.

“Over here.” Arion pointed toward the center of the stone ledge. “Make it come over here.”

The little spitting tongue of orange and yellow hopped and whirled to the center of the ledge. Everyone nearby drew back. Moya stumbled and nearly fell in the pool in her rush to get away. Even Minna began to growl at the dancing flame.

“Now,” Arion said, “make it grow.”

Suri’s gaze focused on the fire, and she whispered something while squeezing her hands into fists. Slowly the flame became two and then three. They spit and sparked and fanned out. Soon it was like any other campfire, except this one didn’t seem to burn anything. Still, it gave off heat, and everyone lost their fear as they gathered around it, joyous at the warmth and familiar light it offered.

The fire continued to burn, and Suri’s hum changed tone as she threw out her hands first one way and then the other. When she was done, Persephone was amazed to find she was no longer drenched. Everything from the top of her head to her shoes was as dry as when she had set out. By the looks of astonishment, not to mention the dried hair, fur, and beards of the others, she wasn’t the only one.

Arion nodded in approval and gave Suri a little smile. “Good. Very good.”

—

Persephone sat beside the pool on the flat rock with her back resting against the wall. It made a fine seat, and with Suri’s fire, she was warm enough to be comfortable. The light of the flames revealed the chamber to be smaller than she’d first thought. They were in little more than a pocket of hollowed-out stone, somewhere and yet nowhere, lost deep underground, disconnected from the world of light. The thought that she and the others were dead crossed her mind. This was certainly how she pictured death—dark, hard, and cold.

The spirits of warriors who fought bravely went to a place called Alysin, a green field of warmth and beauty. For the rest, there was Rel, if they were virtuous, and Nifrel—below Rel—if they weren’t. All three realms of Phyre were underground, deep, deep inside Elan. Whether dead or not, Persephone couldn’t imagine they were anywhere else. Either they had walked in through the front door by invitation or they’d accidentally slipped through an unattended crack. The result, she reasoned, would be the same. They were there to stay, but what did a person do after she was dead? The question might seem strange to the living, but was incredibly relevant to the recently deceased. She wished she had asked more questions when she was alive. She hadn’t expected death to be so complicated.

After a few hours—though it was hard to tell time, if time even existed for them anymore—some sought refuge through sleep. Brin didn’t try, even with Persephone’s assurances that she would personally keep a vigil. Persephone could still see the image of little Brin being dragged off, that pale white hand clamped over her mouth. She wondered if either of them would ever manage to sleep well again.

Suri sat off to one side, speaking softly to Arion. Moya, Rain, and Flood had climbed up the rock toward a higher ledge to see if there was a dry path they could take. Persephone could hear them causing little landslides of dirt followed by the occasional grunt from Flood or curse from Moya. As far as she could tell, Rain never made a sound.

“Are we dead, do you think?” Persephone asked Frost.

The white-bearded dwarf sat close to the fire, his feet out toward it and his back against the cliff. He raised a bemused eyebrow and chuckled.

“Are you laughing because we are or because we aren’t?”

“We are still very much alive.”

Persephone wasn’t sure she was willing to accept his judgment as fact, but he did sound most certain. Still, she had to admit she didn’t feel dead, even though she wasn’t sure what death would feel like.

“Where are we then?” Persephone asked Frost.

“I have no idea. We obviously didn’t come this way before. We’re down deep, though. Fell a very long way.”