Brightly Burning Read online

  :Easy, Lan—:

  He was beyond Kalira’s cautions now; the flamelets that had danced up and down his body flickered over him in a frenzy, filling the air around him, and even skimming over Kalira’s back. She didn’t seem to notice; there was a red glow of flame in the back of her eyes, and every muscle was tense with strain.

  What’s that?

  A roar from below—a hundred thousand voices shouting in triumph and challenge—

  They’re here! There’re here!

  He had to let them know that he saw them—and that he would still be fighting up here as long as he could stand . . . and that he was about to drop the barrier as ineffective.

  POL tried calling again. :Lan! Lan!: Could the boy see them? Did he even notice anything but the flames?

  A flicker at the edges of the barrier warned him, just on the periphery of Satiran’s vision. It flickered again, in a pat-tern of three—two—three. Lan’s using that to catch our—my—attention.

  :Yes, since there’s no one with the boy to relay what he’s about to do,: Satiran agreed. :I think he wants to drop the fire-curtain.:

  “The barrier is coming down!” Pol shouted, and repeated the warning in Mindspeech.

  :The fire-curtain’s collapsing! Ware!:

  “Archers, fall back! Form arcs!” the Lord Marshal bellowed, and Pol and the trumpeters repeated that order as well.

  Can Lan see this? he wondered desperately, and MindSent with all his strength. :Lan, look down here! Give us time to get into position!:

  He could only watch and hope that Lan had heard him—or was already watching.

  The archers moved farther up on the mountainsides, or dropped back behind the foot soldiers. The cavalry, light and heavy together, dropped away from harassing the Karsites and withdrew to the right and left flanks. The foot soldiers moved up, archers behind them, and made a solid, defensive line ten men deep, planting their pikes firmly in the churned-up snow to await the Karsite charge.

  Abruptly, the flame-curtain flickered and died.

  For a single, dumfounded moment, the Karsites stared at their enemies, with nothing between them. There was a moment of utter silence; not a man moved, as the two armies stared at one another.

  Then one of the priests at the front of the group howled something, and the Karsites charged.

  Screaming curses, the Karsite forces poured through the pass in a solid, black mass. Why had they chosen black as their color? Was it to contrast with Heraldic White? To stand out against the snow? To intimidate? It was working; Pol sensed the Valdemarans shrinking back a pace from the flood of blackness that threatened to wash over and drown them all.

  There seemed to be no end to them; if the Valdemar forces hadn’t already been at a fever pitch of excitement, the torrent of screaming men coming at them would have terrified even the hardiest. They surely outnumbered the Valdemarans by three or even four to one.

  It terrified Pol. It took all of his willpower to sit calmly on Satiran and relay the Lord Marshal’s orders.

  They couldn’t count on Lan. The boy was surely exhausted by now, and unable to do anything but watch.

  Before more than the first rank of Karsites had poured across the blackened line marking where the flame-curtain had been, fires flared again—but this time, in tall candles of fire that erupted violently out of the snow, then died to nothing, only to flare up somewhere else. They sprang up right in the path of the Karsites—they didn’t do much damage, if anything, but they did break up the Karsite charge. Although a few fighters caught fire, rolling in the snow quickly put out their flaming clothing—but no man, having seen his fellow go up in flames, was quite as enthusiastic about running at the Valdemarans full-tilt, at the risk of plunging into one of those fire-fountains.

  Then, as the push from behind forced the front ranks onward, Lan changed his tactics.

  He brought up the curtain again, farther in toward the Valdemaran lines, but this time it was for a very different purpose.

  He caught a full line of a hundred Karsites or more square in his fire-line, and he held the flames on them. Even over the din of battle, Pol heard the dying screams of those men as they tried to escape the inferno and failed, and his stomach lurched as the smell of burned flesh came to his nose.

  “Oh, dear gods—” Pol breathed. Lan had not deliberately called fire down on Karsites and burned them until this moment. What had made him do it now?

  The wall of flame died, leaving behind not only a blackened strip of land, but charred and twisted corpses lining it. The fire-curtain was gone, but this time the Karsites held back, despite the threats of their priests. They seemed to have figured out that if they were within the stretch where the curtain had already burned, they were safe.

  For a moment, it looked as if the Karsites were at an impasse. They couldn’t retreat, but they were not going to charge, either. Then a trumpet sounded an unfamiliar call, the priests screamed an order, and they started coming on again. But now, they charged forward in small groups of twenty or thirty, too many groups and too widely separated for Lan to stop with his flame-wall.

  Lan wasn’t going to give in. He sent up fire-fountains again, intercepting as many of the little groups as he could, and once again shrill and terrified screams rang out above the general mayhem. No one but Pol seemed disturbed by this change in Lan’s tactics; in fact, from the Lord Marshal’s muttered comments, and the shouts of encouragement out on the field, there were plenty who were cheering him on.

  What’s happening up there?

  Satiran, prompted by Pol’s unease, looked up to the place where Lan and Kalira perched. It was only the sense that something was wrong with Lan that prompted him to look up there, nothing more.

  But he saw—or thought he saw—something.

  He wasn’t certain what it was—a movement among the rocks where nothing should have been, perhaps, a man-shaped shadow behind them. He might not have seen anything—he did have a touch of ForeSight along with everything else, and it might only have been that ForeSight that warned him.

  All he knew was that suddenly his unease turned to horror, he knew that tragedy was a heartbeat away. Terror closed his throat, tasting bitter, and he tried, desperately, to project a warning into Lan’s impervious mind.

  :Lan! Lan! Hide! RUN!:

  LAN was the dragon.

  Driven by hunger that only increased with every new victim, he hunted the battlefield, pouncing on target after target, reveling in the screams of the hurt and dying, then going on to new prey. Flame filled his mind and soul, burning with unholy joy, insatiable rage. He had but one thought now—he would burn the world, if that was what it took, until the last of the enemy was ashes.

  ALTHOUGH Satiran’s eyes were fixed on the pair above, Pol wasn’t the only Herald to know, suddenly, that catastrophe was about to strike.

  The battlefield was disordered; now relative disorder became absolute chaos.

  “The hell!” the Lord Marshal exclaimed.

  All over the field, Valdemaran trumpeters called retreat, though no orders had been given for retreat. A dozen Mindspeakers bombarded Pol with panic-stricken calls to flee, then broadcast their warnings at full strength to anyone who could hear. Valdemaran fighters across the battlefield broke off their engagements and fled in no order at all, while beside Pol the Lord Marshal sputtered.

  Pol stretched out his arm to Lan and Kalira, in a futile effort to stop what was coming.

  A dark speck flitted across the distance from a shadow that might have been man-shaped, to the young Herald. Only a speck, insignificant—

  —WHAT?

  Something grabbed Lan and shook him. Distracted he glanced aside—

  Just as a heavy crossbow bolt thudded into Kalira’s chest.

  All breath driven out of her, she could only gasp and throw up her head in pain, but her mind screamed.

  :LAN!:

  Too late.

  She flung her head around to stare at him as he scrambled to reach her.


  Her eyes clouded with agony as she collapsed; but her gaze caught and held his. He reached frantically for her, but he couldn’t hold her. A greater power than his wrenched her away from him.

  He only heard her, fainter with each word, as her eyes closed for the last time.

  :—I—love—you—:

  Then she was gone.

  UP on the mountainside, the tiny figure of the Companion crumpled, and fell with a single, heart-rending cry that Pol heard only in his mind, a cry cut off with the finality of death.

  Up on the mountainside, Lan crumpled beside his lifeless Companion.

  It was not Mindspeech as such, that cut across the brains of every living creature in and around the battlefield. It was a mental howl of anguish, of grief, of terror—it drove tears into unwilling eyes and sent some to their knees in the snow. It triggered the worst memories of every person on the field—Valdemaran and Karsite alike.

  Pol clasped both hands to his head as the cry cut into his very soul. It went on, and on, a grief like a sword cutting him in a million pieces. —and it was not sane.

  Then—Fire, elemental, unstoppable, came to earth.

  It exploded down out of the sky and drove down on the Karsites like the very hammer of the gods. It spewed up out of the snow to meet the down-rushing flames of the sky-fires. In a single moment, it transformed the entire side of the mountain to a furnace, an inferno, and it spread from there faster than a man could run.

  —gods—

  Now Pol knew why Heralds had seized trumpets to sound retreat, and mind-voices had sent the Valdemaran forces scattering for their lives. ForeSight had given them the warning that something apocalyptic was about to happen, but not what, nor in time to prevent it.

  FIRE exploded down the mountain, an avalanche of flames.

  Lan lay over Kalira’s body, the dragon unleashed, unfettered, and free to ravage as it willed. All of his grief, rage, and hatred filled it and gave it a power beyond anyone’s direst nightmare.

  So long as it consumed him, he was beyond caring.

  :Wait for me, beloved. I’m coming. But first, I will avenge you. . . .:

  He closed his eyes, gave himself over to the dragon, and set the world, and himself with it, aflame.

  KALIRA!: Satiran, lost in his own grief, shuddered once, then lifted his head to the sky and keened out his loss to the heavens.

  Pol wanted to howl with him. Kalira was dead, struck down by a Karsite assassin’s arrow. Lavan Firestorm had nothing to help him control his powers—and with the death of his lifebonded Companion, no reason to want to—no reason to live.

  He needed no fuel for his fires now; he could burn the rock of the mountains if he chose, burn the very air itself.

  The fire had a voice—it howled like millions of damned souls. It had a mind, and the mind was mad. Karsite and Valdemaran alike scrambled to escape the battlefield before the fires caught them. From the ground to the mountaintop, there was nothing but flame. Fire churned and roiled, fire roared and shrieked, fire filled the sky. Vortices of flame twisted, hellish dancers with the grace of a streamer in the wind and the appetite of a demon—

  Even as Pol watched through his Companion’s eyes, Satiran’s voice keening on and on in his mind and ears, those nearest the flames were suddenly sucked up by a wind or the firestorm itself inhaling, pulled off their feet, into the air, and then, screaming, into the maelstrom.

  —gods—

  The maelstrom pulsed once, like a spasming heart, and enlarged again. Bits of burning debris rained down around him, kicked out of the top of the vortex. Fiery twigs. Ashes. Coals and cinders. The bright, glowing skeletons of pinecones. Once, horribly, a burning, human arm that landed with a dreadful sizzle in the melted snow beside him.

  Pol could only sit, and stare, numb with horror, paralyzed with grief. Satiran keened on, trembling, oblivious to anything else.

  Something tugged at his arm, nearly pulling him from the saddle. “Come on, man!” the Lord Marshal’s squire shouted in his ear when he didn’t respond. “Come on! If you stay here, you’ll cook!”

  The heat from the inferno was incredible; the snow turned to steam before Satiran’s eyes, the ends of the pine needles around him curled up. The firestorm pulsed again, spasming, and expanded once more.

  “Come on!” the squire shouted again to Pol. Then, heroically, he seized Satiran’s bridle and forced the Companion’s head around. “Come on, you stupid git!” he screamed, kicking Satiran in the side. “Move! Move!”

  Neither of them could move on their own, but the squire was not to be denied. He tied Satiran’s reins to his saddle, and his pony dragged Satiran behind him by main force as they joined the flight to safety.

  With a terrible moan, Satiran broke the connection between himself and his Herald, leaving Pol in darkness, intolerable anguish, and bleakness of heart and soul to match the dark behind his eyes.

  He simply clung to the saddle, bent and broken, weeping hoarsely, as he had not been able to weep for himself, and it seemed to him that he would never find his way out of the darkness and the grief. His tears scalded his eyes, soaked through his bandage, and still they fell; he tasted their salt on his lips, bitter and harsh, but no more bitter than his heart. Satiran trembled under his legs, shaking as if the Companion, too, sobbed.

  How long he sank in that hell of grief, he didn’t know; suddenly, there were hands on his arms and voices urging him to dismount. The roar of the fire was gone, and the air, cooler now, was scented with scorched rock. He slid off Satiran’s back into arms waiting to catch him.

  Ilea’s arms.

  He crumbled into her embrace, and gave himself and his grief into her care.

  Satiran collapsed beside him; Ilea helped him down to the snow where he blindly groped for his Companion’s neck and wrapped his arms around it as Ilea cradled both of them, crooning wordlessly.

  Out of the chaos of shouting and noises around him, a single voice cut through his grief.

  “Pol! Pol!”

  He raised his head, responding to the frantic sound of Tuck’s voice.

  “Pol!” The boy’s hands were on his shoulders, pulling at his tunic, despite Ilea’s attempts to stave him off. “Pol, what happened to Lan? They dragged me away and won’t let me go back—this Guard here won’t let go of me! What’s going on?”

  He tried to answer, but could not get a word out of his throat.

  But an answer came.

  Pol had heard the Death Bell in the Grove toll before; he knew the sound of it as well as he knew the sound of his own name. But he had never before heard it with his heart—and never at such a distance from Haven.

  Every Herald across the land must be hearing it—

  It vibrated through him, somber, throbbing with unshed tears, and there was no doubt in his mind who it tolled for. Tuck collapsed beside him with a sob, and Ilea held them all while they wept until they could weep no more.

  IT was four days before Pol could stand and walk again, four days before Satiran, surrounded by all the comfort the rest of the Companions could give, was able to act as his Herald’s eyes again. Four days of sleep and grief, while the shattered army of Valdemar pulled itself back together, and put together the pieces of what had happened.

  The only Karsite officer to survive the inferno had confessed that once the source of the hellfires had been identified, a handpicked set of marksmen had been sent up the mountain with orders to shoot, not the Herald, but the Companion. The priests wanted the secret of the fires, and they knew the quickest way to disable a Herald was to slay his demon-horse.

  The firestorm raged for no more than a candlemark, but in that short time, it destroyed everything on the mountain and in the pass below it. Where there had been a pine forest, there was now a totally lifeless plain, with no sign of anything but ashes. No remains, no smoldering tree stumps, nothing. Everything from the ground up had been reduced to gray-white powder.

  As Pol woke on the morning of the fifth day and st
ruggled for the first time to sit up, Ilea told him all this in a few stark sentences.

  “Elenor?” he ventured.

  “We were in the rear, with the baggage,” Ilea pointed out. “I don’t think she had any idea what was happening until the firestorm—and I don’t think she even realized then what had happened until she saw you and Satiran.”

  Pol fumbled for her hands, and found them clasped tightly together in Ilea’s lap. He coaxed them apart. “And?” he prompted hoarsely, his voice ravaged by weeping.

  “And—she’s taking it hard.” That, and the softening of Ilea’s stiff pose, bringing her into his arms where she finally wept, told him all he needed to know.

  “I know this doesn’t help now—but she’ll recover, though I doubt she thinks she can. We all will. . . .” He held her close, and let her cry herself out, she who so seldom wept, and more often for others than herself. He let her cry until she was exhausted, which took so little time that he knew she had been staying sleepless at his side until this moment. Then he made her curl up in his place, and stayed beside her until she slept.

  :Satiran?: he called then, hesitantly, not certain that he would have an answer.

  :Coming,: was the reply, lead-heavy with mourning, but at least it was a reply.

  He heard plodding hoofbeats outside his tent, then, blessedly, vision returned, the view of his tent from Satiran’s eyes. He stumbled to his feet, through the tent flaps, and flung both arms around Satiran’s neck.

  When they both emerged from a sea of mourning, and took notice of the rest of the world again, Satiran rubbed his soft nose against Pol’s cheek, tasting his tears. :They want to send Fedor up the mountain this morning,: Satiran said, hesitantly. :To see what is there. Tuck wants to go, and Elenor, and the rest of the scouts. Ilea is going with Elenor. Do you?:

  He already knew that Satiran did, and he did not want his oldest and dearest friend to go alone. :Of course I do,: he said instantly.