Born of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 8) (6 page)

“Regent, Tan. King Regent. And I will not be party to a silent coup.”

“Why must it be silent?” When Roine started to protest, Tan pushed on. “There is no one else fit to rule. You were Athan at the time of Althem’s death. The line of succession would be satisfied.”

Roine considered Tan for a moment, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Either you have been speaking with your mother, or you have come to the same conclusion. I’m not sure which worries me more,” he said with a laugh.

“I’m not trying to worry you. I only want what’s best for the kingdoms.”

“Only the kingdoms now?” Roine asked. He cocked his head and stared at him. “Not Incendin, and Doma, and Chenir…”

“And Par-shon,” his mother said, coming up behind Roine. She fixed Tan with an expression she likely meant to be withering, and to many others it likely would have been, but Tan had grown up around her and knew her moods. “Ara tells me that you journeyed across the sea, bringing one of the draasin with you. I thought that we’d talked about that foolishness and the claim that you were Utu Tonah—”

“Foolish to you,” Tan said. “But the elementals speak to
me,
Mother, and have made it clear that Par-shon had not changed. That was why I returned.”

Roine motioned them into the hall and out of the corridor where servants moved past, trying and failing to give them a wide berth. Once in the hall, Roine shaped the doors closed and crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re the Utu Tonah?” he asked.

Tan glanced at his mother and realized that she hadn’t said anything to Roine. “When we brought the body back to Par-shon…”

“They named you ruler?” Roine asked. “And you didn’t feel it appropriate to share this with me? Tan, you’re my
Athan
. You speak with the voice of the throne.”

Heat rose in his cheeks no differently than when his father had chastised him as a child when he’d forgotten to cover the firewood, or when he hadn’t paid enough attention while tracking. As he had then, he struggled to find the right words. There wasn’t anything that he could say. Certainly nothing that would make it better. He
should
have shared with Roine.

When Tan didn’t answer, Roine turned to Zephra. “And you. I would think that
you
would tell me about Tan. It’s bad enough that he keeps getting it in his head that he has to serve the elementals over the kingdoms, but at least you’ve usually backed me up when it came to him.”

Zephra took the chastising without saying a word. Some might think that meant she was appropriately chagrined, but Tan knew better. With his mother, silence often meant that she was biding her time, waiting for the right moment—usually when he was alone—to share her irritation. This time, he didn’t worry about what she would say to him. It was Roine who had to fear.

The King Regent turned back to Tan. “Why you didn’t let me know that we essentially
rule
in Par-shon—”

“You would have him rule?” Zephra asked.

“We’re the victors, Zephra. We get to decide what we do with Par-shon.”

“Are you certain that’s wise? We’ve got enough trouble in the kingdoms, especially with the unrest in the west.”

Roine cut her off with a shake of his head.

Zephra glanced over at Tan and nodded. “Regardless, we have enough going on trying to understand the new political dynamics. Incendin still claims that we should reunite Rens, Doma wants help with rebuilding following the Par-shon attack, and Chenir…”

“I know what we face,” Roine said.

“Not if you intend for us to provide rule over another nation. And I know that Tannen might think he’s doing what’s best, but he should not be the one—”

“
I
am the one who defeated the Utu Tonah.” Tan stepped forward as he spoke, placing himself between his mother and Roine. “You may think
we
are the victors, but in Par-shon,
I
am the victor.”

“You can’t think—” his mother started.

“I can,” Tan interrupted. “You would have shut down the borders, you would have barricaded the kingdoms and abandoned Incendin and Doma, thinking that Chenir had already been lost. So please do not presume to tell
me
what to do.”

He took a deep breath, already regretting the way that he’d spoken to them and fearing the way that his mother would react. Since the destruction of their home village to the lisincend, she had been an angrier person, fueled by a drive to defeat Incendin, but also one who wanted to protect Tan as much as she could. The problem was that there wasn’t anything that she could do to protect him, not as she wanted to. There were things that he had to do, and learn, on his own. They were the things that had brought him the knowledge and skills needed to defeat Par-shon. Without his connection to the elements and the elementals, everything and everyone would have been lost.

Roine started laughing.

His mother shot him a hard glare, but Roine shook his head and nodded to Tan.

“Whenever I think I know what I’m doing, Tan comes along and shows me how little I’ve figured out,” Roine said. “The boy is right, Zephra. We would have lost had it not been for him. Maybe not yet. We would have secured ourselves behind the barriers, but eventually. It would have been slow, and painful, and many others would have suffered before we fell. And now he’s no longer my Athan. He’s my equal.”

Zephra studied Tan, her head shaking slightly as she did. “And he’s not a boy,” she said softly. “So I must stop thinking of him as one.”

Roine chuckled. “I think you’ll struggle to see him as anything different than the child you raised, but
I
can see him as the man he’s become. Much greater than anything I had ever thought to find when I came to Nor. It seems so long ago that I came looking for the artifact. What I found was so much more.” he sighed. “So Tannen. You are the Utu Tonah. Is that what you came to share with me?”

Tan struggled to process the sudden change. “I don’t want to be Utu Tonah,” he answered.

“And I don’t want to be King Regent, so I guess we are well matched, then.”

“Which means you both are better suited for the job than most,” Zephra added. “I would be more concerned if either of you
wanted
the job.”

“I don’t want to be Utu Tonah,” Tan repeated, “but I don’t know that I can trust anyone else to rule in Par-shon until I understand their lands.”

“You won’t find those answers here,” Roine said.

“There was something else I discovered. I intended to see if I could find answers in the archives.”

Roine nodded slowly. “You didn’t intend to come to us at all, did you?”

“I would have eventually. But the archives were locked.”

“Until we come up with a plan for all those texts, I thought it best to keep it locked. There are some who have come forward, wanting to resurrect the archivists, but I’ve been careful with them so far.” Roine paused and glanced to Zephra. “Besides, it is good that you’ve come. We have news to share with you.”

Tan readied himself for whatever awful news they might have, but what his mother said next still surprised him.

“Theondar has asked me to marry him. And I’ve said yes.”

Tan looked from Roine and then to his mother, smiling. “Good. Maybe then we can have a joint wedding.”

Roine smiled, but his mother’s mouth twitched, and whether from irritation or another emotion, he couldn’t tell.

T
he lower level
of the archives appeared no different than the last time Tan had come here, but in a way, it was very different. When he’d been here last, the kingdoms had been on the verge of defeat to Par-shon, and he had sought answers, possibly even the kind that would allow him to somehow rebuild the artifact and discover a way to use it that the ancient shapers hadn’t considered. Except, he’d damaged the artifact attempting to shape it. Now it would never again be used.

In many ways, Tan knew that was good. The artifact, a long metal cylinder that had been formed using a combined shaping of each of the elements, somehow binding elementals into it, had been a creation of such power that when he held it, he thought he would be able to shape the world, that he would be able to do anything that he wanted. Such power was dangerous, even to him.

Maybe especially to him. Tan had shaping ability, or else he wouldn’t have been able to use the artifact, but it was more than his ability to shape. Althem had had that, or he wouldn’t have been able to use the artifact. Rather, it had been Tan’s ability to reach the elementals, his connection to powers more ancient than him, that might have proven dangerous. They had given him a connection and grounding, but would he have been able to maintain that grounding while controlling power like the artifact allowed?

Tan liked to think that he could, but what if he were wrong?

He stared at the wall of books. All around him were the ancient volumes brought and kept here by the shapers who had come long before him, knowledge that should be enough to answer any question that he had, but much like the portraits on the wall in the palace, some of the books served only as reminders of what should
not
be. The harnessing of elementals had been done out of ignorance, not out of a place of knowledge.

How much else was there like that?

Then there was the hut within the swamp outside of Doma. He pulled the book that he’d discovered there from his pocket and set it on the table next to him. He’d left it in the home he’d once shared with Amia, setting it aside for a time when he would have the opportunity to study its contents, but there never had seemed to be the right time. And then he’d taken to staying with Amia in the wagon with the Aeta and had forgotten about it entirely. Maybe there was something in it that could help.

Stamped into the cover was a rune for each of the elements. The thick leather had the sense of age and Tan folded it open carefully, knowing that this book was older than most books within the archive. He remembered the first time he’d read it, translating the
Ishthin
and realizing that he had found not only an ancient book but one that promised to hold secrets that he needed.

All the time that he’d spent becoming disenchanted with what the ancient shapers had done, only to find
this
.

Tan flipped the first few pages, skimming them. A journal, or letters. The writing seemed directed to someone, almost as if whoever had kept the record had intended it for someone else. Had this other person been the one with the hut in the swamp, or was there someone else? Maybe the person who had written this had been the person in the swamp and the book had never reached its target.

Unlike many of the texts that he’d read in the archives, this one interested him on a different level. Not only could he learn from the past, but he thought that he could begin to understand some of the ancient shapers, and maybe he could understand what they knew and why the elementals had been harnessed, or why there had been a desire to attempt the crossings of elementals, the same crossing that had formed creatures like kaas, or the hounds.

Wind swirled quickly, fluttering the page that had caught his attention.

Tan slapped his hand over the cover to protect it. Had his mother come to the archives to find him? The Great Mother knew she rarely had come down before. Roine visited often enough, but his mother preferred to leave him alone. Or maybe she didn’t care for the reminder of the archivists. Tan had never learned.

But it wasn’t his mother.

A dark shape coalesced in the chair across from him, taking on the shape of a man about his age, with jet black hair and a cloak that hung limp in spite of the wind. Honl looked at Tan with enough clarity to his features that Tan believed him real.

“You are no longer across the sea,” Honl said. His voice had deepened but still had something of an airy quality to it. The wind around them settled, and Honl leaned back in the chair, trying to take on a casual stance.

“I came here for answers,” Tan said.

“You think you will find answers here that you cannot in that place?”

Tan swept his arms around him. “There is a thousand years of knowledge here, Honl. There is value in learning what I can from here.”

“What of the land across the sea? How many years of knowledge are stored there?”

Tan shrugged. Par-shon didn’t strike him as older than the kingdoms, and certainly the buildings that he’d seen didn’t appear any older than the kingdoms, but those with elemental support might be more ancient than he realized. The connection to the elementals would make them stouter than any others without, perhaps stout enough that they could survive a thousand years or more without falling.

Hadn’t the archives lasted that long? Even when everything else within the city fell, the archives remained. With the elemental’s influence, the ancient structure had stood tall.

Tan set the book to the side and leaned forward as he considered Honl. The elemental had changed much in the months since he and Tan first met, and since they first bonded. Honl claimed that he had been there when Tan first used wind to defeat Althem, and then had helped when he needed the assistance of wind to reach Asboel. That had been the start of learning about the Utu Tonah. Without Honl, Tan might not have managed to reach the draasin, and he doubted that he would have escaped from Par-shon. In many ways, he owed everything to the wind elemental.

But the connection to him was different than the other elementals. Each was unique, as they should be, but Honl in particular had been hesitant at first, not wanting Tan to pull him into the attack with Par-shon. Once Honl had overcome that resistance, he had become useful in ways that even Asboel had not been able to expect.

And now… now Honl had become something else. The wind elemental regarded Tan with curiosity, and his dark eyes took on a scholarly appraisal as he stared at Tan.

“What do you know, Honl?” Tan asked. “What have you learned in the time since we last saw each other?”

“We have never
truly
been apart, Maelen.” Wind still circled him, touching the bottom of his cloak and making it undulate softly. The cloak itself was no more real than the form Honl had taken. He had once demonstrated that he could take any form he chose and, for some reason, preferred this figure. Each time Tan saw him, his features were more distinct, almost as if Honl were
becoming
this figure. “The bond connects us even when we are not physically together. It is much the same with the Daughter.”

Tan smiled. “Not truly apart, but distant enough, don’t you think, Honl? I haven’t seen you since…” He thought about how long it had been, and how much had changed. “It must have been since we defeated the Utu Tonah.”

“You have not needed me.”

“And I do now?”

Honl sat, studying Tan for long moments. When he spoke, he did it with a smile. “Like me, you are… unique… among your people, are you not, Maelen?”

“I’m the only one I know of who can speak to all of the elementals. Is that what you mean?”

“That, but you do more than simply speak to the elementals. You can borrow strength as well, draw strength and focus it. Without that ability, you would have failed countless times by now.”

“I can,” Tan agreed. Without that ability, he would not have been able to rescue his mother in Chenir, or stop the Utu Tonah. Tan could pull strength from the elementals, but he could also shape it without that connection, though his strength was severely limited when he did that.

“I have been searching for a reason for my uniqueness.”

Tan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “What if there is no reason for your uniqueness? What if it’s simply because of what
I
did to save you?”

“There has to be a reason, Maelen, much like you had a reason for your uniqueness. The Mother brought you at a time when such connections were needed. That is why you are here.”

“What if the Mother had nothing to do with the fact that I am here?”

Honl reached toward him, as if trying to touch his hand, before sitting back. “I think of everything that you have demonstrated in the time that I’ve known you. You have a connection that is unusual. There must be a reason for it.”

Tan was no longer sure of any reason he might have been given the ability to reach the elementals. And maybe there wasn’t one. Stopping the Utu Tonah had been the only explanation that he had come up with, but could the Mother have cared so much about the Utu Tonah? Or had there been another rationale?

The alternative was that there wasn’t. As much as Tan wanted to believe that there was something more about him that made him special, maybe the fact that he had the abilities he did was nothing more than chance.

“And your uniqueness?” Tan asked, pulling the focus back to Honl. “Have you discovered a reason for that?”

Honl paced the perimeter of the room. Honl didn’t walk, though his feet appeared to touch the ground. He floated, hovering slightly above the stone. Had Tan not had the connection to wind, he wouldn’t have recognized it, but then, Honl didn’t move his legs as someone who walked, either. As much as he’d learned and attempted to become human, he still had areas where it was clear that he was something other.

Every so often, Honl paused and looked at the shelves filled with ancient texts. He reached for one and Tan was surprised that he managed to pull it from the shelf and flip it open, scanning the pages before sliding it back on the shelf.

“There is much in this archive. Some of what I’ve discovered raises new questions, while some answers questions.”

Tan frowned. “You’ve read these books?”

Honl didn’t turn around to face him as he answered. “That is a gift that I now have. I have only to… touch… these tomes, and I gain the understanding from within their pages.”

Tan stood and stopped behind Honl. Had he simply
read
the book that he’d pulled off the shelf? Having that kind of ability would be valuable, especially as he searched for answers.

“How can you do that?” Tan asked.

Honl twisted to face him. “How can I do any of this, Maelen? How can I speak to you, or take on this form, or simply
know
as I touch these texts? These are questions I have not found answers to.”

“What answers have you found?”

Honl swept his hands around him, and the wispy form of his arm swirled through the books on the shelf, passing through them. Honl cocked his head to the side at a strange angle, giving him an unnatural appearance, and then he blinked his eyes and breathed out softly.

“Nearly as many answers as I have questions, but new questions arise.”

“Can you tell me about Par-shon?” Tan asked.

Honl’s features shifted, flowing into something resembling a puzzled expression. “Par-shon? Nothing of Par-shon, but Par… From what I can tell, that is a place much like this.”

Tan’s heart skipped a beat. What might Honl have learned? If he did have the ability to touch a book and know the contents, it was possible that he knew everything contained in the archives. Having access to that knowledge, to all of that understanding, would be incredibly valuable.

More than that, could he draw on that knowledge using the connection between them?

Tan reached through their bonded connection. The connection had shifted and changed in the time since the bond first formed. Now it was augmented in a certain way but shaded as well. Tan couldn’t simply access Honl, as much as he might like to be able to.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Honl swept his arm through another shelf. “This place, this archive, is built on a site of much power.” Honl turned to him with his head angled strangely. “You have recognized that, Maelen.”

“This is a place of convergence.”

“Gatherings,” Honl agreed. “Places where the Mother can be felt, if only you know to listen. In some ways, this archive was created to mask this Gathering.”

Tan studied the walls, thinking about what he knew about places of convergence. When he’d first discovered the lower level of the archives, he had realized that this was such a place, much like the one in the mountains. The elementals drawn here made this place powerful and made his abilities more potent. He could pull on the strength of the elementals and could use that strength—especially when combined with his ability to speak to the elementals—to create amazing shapings.

The ancient shapers might have been the same. That would be the reason for shielding these places, he suspected, unless they had a different goal. Maybe they had created the archive here to better
trap
the elementals.

Couldn’t the ancients have used these gatherings, these places of convergence, to harness the elementals drawn here?

Tan knew that they could.

What of a place like Par-shon, where they similarly trapped the elementals?

“Are you saying that Par-shon is a Gathering as well?” he asked.

Honl leaned forward and swept his arm through another shelf of books. He sighed softly as he did, and he blinked. Could he process all of the books that he touched? Was he able to organize everything that he learned—and actually be able to use it?

“There is… or was… a Gathering there,” Honl began. “I think that is how that one became as powerful as he did. Without the connection to the elementals, he would not have been able to force the bonds.”

Tan glanced at the books arranged on the shelves and wondered if he would find a similar type of archive in Par-shon, or was there nothing like this?

“Are you certain?” he asked.