Springwar (13 page)

Strynn was asleep when Rann returned from the bath. He’d likewise dozed off—in the tub—only to awaken when the water grew cold, which was too much a reminder of Avall.

Now he stood gazing down at her and Kylin. They’d
moved closer in his absence, neatly filling his spot. Not that he felt right sharing a bed with Avall’s wife in any case—not without Avall there. Their hands touched, he noted, and they looked at peace. He wondered if they were lovers. Stranger things had happened. Certainly they adored each other, and both were in desperate need of whatever comfort they could manage, here in the Dark Season. Avall might even approve. Probably would, he amended. It would take some of the pressure off him.

But he was sleepy, too, and so he steered his step toward the door to the common room. He’d already laid a hand on the latch, when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He paused, blinking, then realized that it was the gem lying on the rug beside the bed. By the way Strynn’s hand was draped over the side, it had fallen from her grasp while she slept.

He picked it up, started to set it on the night table, then thought better of it. It was a comfort of sorts, and he needed comfort now. Tomorrow was soon enough to return it, and tomorrow would be too soon anyway.

As quietly as he could, he made his way through two sets of doors to the pallet they’d set up for him in Avall’s workroom. The helm sat there, undraped, accusing him with empty eyes. Moonlight gleamed off the dented steel, the shattered bronze, the scoured gilding. Even damaged as it was, it was the most beautiful made thing Rann had ever seen.

Dropping the towel he’d worn from the bath, he stretched out naked on the pallet, letting the moonlight clothe him. A deep breath, and he laid the gem on his chest, with either hand beside it, so that two fingers from each barely touched it. He had no reason for so choosing, it simply seemed right. As if to reassure him, the gem rewarded him with a pulse of heat.

He felt guilty about this, though. It was Strynn’s gem, after all. He had no right to co-opt it, even for such harmless use as he made of it now. It really
would
be nice, he thought, if he had one of his own, one he could study; that was tuned
to his unique thoughts and needs and desires. Maybe he
would
dare the mines, if he could find some time when they were attended by no one who knew him.

Except that the gems came from Argen’s vein, not Eemon’s, and about such things the Wardens were strict. No way he could search Argen’s vein unnoticed.

Still, it would be nice.

Very nice indeed.

Pondering that, Rann slept.

He awoke in darkness, shivering uncontrollably. Yet he couldn’t move—not so much as a finger to drag cover over him. His teeth were chattering.

Yet there was heat, too: a burning centered on his chest above his pounding heart, as though someone had lit a fire there that had drawn all other heat from him.

But he had to move,
had to
. Gritting his teeth, he tried.

Couldn’t, even as the fire grew worse.

He fled from it, but it followed. He wanted nothing but to be warm. To be utterly enclosed with warmth and never be cold again. To be part of the earth.

The heat increased, yet so did the cold, so that he became a being of absolutes. And he suddenly couldn’t breathe, though it didn’t seem to matter, because there was something warm ahead of him, something that drew him on. It had no color but he gave it one anyway. Red. Red was warm, or warm was red. He reached out for it, touched it, felt it grow warmer yet, even as that wilder heat that had never left him flared hotter yet.

And then both those heats collided around his heart, and the heat consumed him. Maybe he cried out; certainly he knew no more.

Voices woke him: concerned cries from the half-open door. He blinked through his shivers, and made out the shapes of Kylin and Strynn standing there, each robed against the cold that pervaded the room—a cold that seemed to emanate from Rann’s own body.

“What—?” Kylin began.

Strynn cut him off. “By The Eight!” she cried, dashing forward to kneel by Rann’s side. Heat pulsed from her, yet he knew that she was cold, too, if not as cold as he. Goose bumps patterned her flesh. She reached for his face, then shifted her hand to his chest. Air swished, like a glacial wind, and the flame that had burned there departed. Something hard rattled on the floor.

Rann didn’t care. Heat—
life—
was washing back into him. Slowly, oh so slowly, yet it was blessed balm. He could breathe again. His teeth no longer chattered, his limbs no longer shook. Strynn slumped down beside him, awkward in her pregnancy, and folded her arms around him.

And Kylin …

Kylin had tipped his head to one side, as though listening, and was now pacing slowly across the darkened room. Rann expected him to join him and Strynn, but instead, he knelt a span away and began running his hands across the floor. “One,” Rann heard him murmur, as though to himself. Then: “Two. No—three! Wait …
five!
There are five of them, Strynn!”

“Five what?” Strynn called. “Kylin, we need to tend to Rann!”

Kylin didn’t reply, simply walked to Rann’s pallet and sank down there. He held his hand out for Rann and Strynn to see.

Red gleamed there, visible even in the moonlight.

The same red as Strynn’s gem. And Avall’s.

But there were five of them: two exactly the same size, one slightly larger than the rest, two smaller.

Rann swallowed hard and reached toward the smallest stone. “I’m not sure, Strynn,” he breathed. “But I think this one is … mine.”

“Tomorrow,” Strynn whispered. “Tomorrow. For now, we need to get warm again. All of us.”

Half a hand later, wrapped in their thickest robes, full of hot cider, and sitting by a fire punched up so hot it was like a forge, they slept. Even Rann.

But the gem—
his
gem—was still clutched in his palm when he awakened.

By the light, he guessed it was shortly before midnight. Kylin was still with him, but Strynn was gone.

“She wanted to be alone,” the harper murmured sadly. “I don’t know why.”

… eyes …

… bright or dark. Red or blue. Single, or paired.

Eyes:
the first things Avall truly recognized when he returned to himself after being dead.

There was an eye of fire fixed upon him from very nearby indeed: bright and indistinct, a nimbus of gold around dimmer crimson. Two more eyes regarded him at middle distance, these dark blue and hooded by level black brows in a young male face, tensed with concern. The last eye was also of fire, but brighter and ruddier than the nearer. It gleamed amid a wash of topaz splendor: a perfect round ruby atop a crown of snow-veiled mountaintops.

“Sun,” he whispered. “Sss—” His tongue gagged him. Air mixed with liquid brought up by his lungs to his throat. He choked, gagged again, felt his lungs take fire. Something ripped free, and he choked once more—endlessly. Flexing muscles that hadn’t moved in days—that would surely fracture like river ice if he used them—he wrenched his torso over the side of whatever soft, warm thing he lay upon and vomited a thin stream of water onto the floor.

Hands found him—related to the blue eyes, he assumed—and some sense of self returned, as he found himself utterly helpless, gagging and retching into an earthenware bowl strategically inserted between his mouth and the rug.

Heat washed the top of his head—the nearer fire—the
lamp
, he identified—come too near. Hair sizzled, the stench acrid yet strangely comforting. He shivered. And shivered again, though his body was warm—on the outside. Inside—he doubted he’d ever be warm again. His blood was clogged with ice crystals, every one of which hurt as it thawed.

“Don’t fight it,” a voice cautioned—loud beyond enduring, when he’d heard nothing but his own languid pulse for countless ages. “I got what I could out of you, but you’ll have to bring up the rest on your own.”

Avall did, choking, retching, spitting: weak as a newborn, and desperately grateful for that warm, solid presence beside him, arms wrapped around his shoulders (bare, he noted), one hand stroking his hair away from his face even as that hair soaked his benefactor’s tunic.

Eventually, the heaving stopped. He signaled its cessation with a spontaneous relaxation and a whispered “No … more.”

But he didn’t fight as the dark-eyed youth helped him lie back into what he’d determined to be a narrow but comfortable bed in what bleary vision proclaimed was an equally narrow but comfortable room with a fireplace somewhere beyond his head, a sturdy wooden door a span beyond his feet, and a thick-paned window opposite. Which made that direction west, for that was clearly a setting sun.

“Sun,” he said again. Numbly. Unwilling—or unable—to think because the only thing
to
think was impossible.

“There
is
one,” the youth agreed. He seemed barely older than Avall’s own twenty years, dark-haired and slender, and clad in what reflex as much as memory told him was Stonecraft black and silver beneath a tabard of Warcraft crimson.

Avall nodded weakly.

The youth’s eyes narrowed with a combination of fear and concern that Avall wasn’t certain he’d ever seen before. He had a narrow face, too; more quirky than handsome. His mouth twitched, as words fought to escape and were recalled, but Avall was too tired to aid his struggles.

After all, hadn’t he just been dead?

“Are you warm enough?” the youth ventured. “I can stoke up the fire or get you more cover …”

Avall finally realized, by the sensations along his body and the items of fur-lined clothing steaming in an untidy heap before the fire, that he was naked. Which meant that this fellow had probably undressed him. And while that wouldn’t normally have bothered him, it did now, because it implied that this …
stranger
had seen the gem.

“I’m fine,” Avall croaked.

“Hungry?”

“I don’t know.”

Eyes narrowed further. “I have brandied cider warming by the hearth. You need to get something sweet inside you. And warm. Then we have to talk.”

Avall nodded weakly. He would deal with
now
, he decided. He would deal with how he came to
now
later; otherwise, he’d find himself staring hard at madness. “My wife’s Warcraft,” he whispered. “Her bond-sister and my twin are at War-Hold.” Neither of which facts he’d been aware of until they’d simply appeared there, on the tip of his tongue. But now that he’d said them, a horde of information came stampeding back.
Wife … Sister …

No! He loved them, but dared not think on them now. He closed his eyes, felt sleep drag at him, comfortable twin to that terrible unconsciousness that had claimed him since …

Since when?

He remembered being dead, and before that he remembered being cold. And before that he remembered …

He knew, yet did not know, for that way lay fear. And behind it, responsibility and things he had to do that he dared not think of now, but that had to do with—

His fingers struggled to his chest, fumbling for what ought to lie there in a nest of wire against his flesh. He found it, and felt warmth and comfort and something he could only call recognition pour into him from that strange smooth stone.

Steps distracted him, and he eased his hand away, as the youth scooted a stool beside him. Scents came with him this
time: woodsmoke, soldier’s soap, and hot spiced cider. All at once his mouth was watering. Warmth joined the scent as the youth brought a stoneware cup to Avall’s lips. He sipped, almost choked again, then drank deeply as the fumes wound their way to his brain, which then told his throat it was allowed to swallow. Avall drained half of it before the youth removed it.

“Good for you,” he said. Then shifted his gaze to Avall’s chest. “That thing burned me,” he continued. “One more thing we have to talk about—
Avall,”
he concluded after a pause.

“You know me?”

“I know
of you
. I’ve seen you around Tir-Eron.”

Avall sighed, feeling at once remarkably more focused, and more alert and wary. “And you are—?”

“Myx. Stonecraft sworn to War, and thus, apparently, double-bound to you. Your mother is Stone, is she not?”

“Clay,” Avall corrected numbly. He had no energy to spend puzzling out genealogies—not with a generation mostly absent from them, courtesy of the plague. “How did I get here?” he asked instead.

Myx shook his head. “Better I should ask you that.”

“The last thing I remember,” Avall dared, “is falling.”

Myx countered with a lopsided grin. “The first thing
I
knew was that I came in here a finger ago to find you lying by my fire, soaking wet, with no way you could’ve entered this place unseen, never mind this room, since that door was certainly locked.”