Serpent of Fire (11 page)

T
an spent much of the afternoon searching for additional traps. Other than the earth traps placed by Par-shon, he hadn’t found anything else that would have the same effect. They
had
found three more piles of stones buried in streams. Each time Tan removed them, the nymid gave a sense of relief.

The more that he found, the more concerned Tan became. He’d gone searching, thinking that he would find something that would tell him what Par-shon planned, but what if he’d found something different? Why would Par-shon place traps that bound the elementals to the kingdoms?

He left Vel at the gates of the city. Tan gathered together the earth trapping rods and the stones and paused, not sure of a place that would be safe to store them in. Even the lower level of the archives created some risk. If others knew they were there, there might be temptation to go after them. Roine might be able to resist such temptation, but would the other shapers, especially once they learned what the traps could do? Tan wanted no temptation to exist.

His shaping took him to a familiar place high up in the Gholund Mountains. He landed in a clearing, feeling a slight edge of tension racing through him as he did. Gusts of wind swirled through the trees, setting the branches swaying. Leaves had fallen, layering the ground with colorful detritus. A massive crater in the ground was the only sign that his home village of Nor had once been here.

It had been months since Tan had come here. The last time he’d come, Roine had been with him. And Cobin. Now there was nothing.

How long had it been since he’d even thought of Cobin? Were he and Bal still alive? When Tan had lived in Nor, he rarely went a day without seeing Cobin. And he couldn’t go a few hours without Bal trying to find him. Back then, all he’d worried about was trying to avoid Lins Alles and, sometimes, Bal. Now he worried about how to keep the kingdoms safe and how to keep the elementals from being used in ways they were never intended to be used.

Tan made his way around the ridge of the crater. Lisincend fire had created this, had destroyed the entire village. Nothing was left after their attack. Only his mother, and it had taken him months to learn what really happened to her.

What would she have done had he not returned to Ethea? Would she eventually have come searching for him, or was she content to know that he had no choice but to leave Nor? Maybe there was a part of Zephra that was pleased Nor was destroyed. She had not hidden the fact that she wanted him to leave the village and had encouraged him to travel to Ethea.

The trees around the village were much the same. There, near the edge of what had been the village, before the mountains started sloping up again, he saw Cobin’s old sheep hold. Grasses that once had been trampled by his sheep now thrived. Weeds grew through the grasses, vibrant and alive. Some flowers grew as well, bright yellow daisies and pale white cryals. None had been found in Nor before the village was destroyed.

Even the depths of the crater had begun to see life. Grasses spread downward across the once-charred earth. A few flowers attempted to grow there as well. A tree shoot started along the edge. Eventually, the forest would reclaim the village. Life would go on as it always did, not caring about those who had once called this place home.

A shaping caused wind to gust behind him. “Mother,” he said as Zephra settled.

Zephra surveyed the clearing a moment, taking in everything around her. “I didn’t know you still came here.”

Tan shook his head. “I don’t. I haven’t,” he corrected. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to see what Nor has become?”

His mother turned toward the crater. The ground dropped off nearly twenty feet into a wide, sloping base, as if a chunk of ground had simply been scooped away. “I came back after I found Aric. When ara allowed me to bond again, it was the first thing I wanted. It was different then. The air was still bitter with the stink of the fire shaping. Even the wind didn’t want to blow through here. Time changes all things, I suppose. The lisincend might have destroyed Nor, but they did not destroy the life of the forest.”

“Do you ever miss it?”

“Every day,” she whispered. She turned away from the crater and met his eyes. Tears welled there and she wiped them away. “I was happy here, Tannen. Even after Grethan… after your father died, I was content remaining here.” She turned distant and smiled. “I wanted nothing more than for you to go to the university. I never expected you to learn to shape. At your age, I thought it was no longer possible.” She laughed softly. “It shows how much I know. But I wanted you to learn that the world was more than Nor.”

“I never wanted more than Nor,” Tan said softly.

“You didn’t know more than Nor. How could you know what you wanted?”

Tan looked around, remembering the times he would go tracking with his father, searching through the mountains, usually for wolves or bears, marking trees so that Nor would be protected. He remembered the lessons from his father, the way that he would teach him how to stretch out his senses, strain against the forest itself, and use what he heard, what he
felt,
as he sensed. Tan hadn’t known that he could be a shaper then, but those lessons had provided the foundation for him learning to shape with any skill. Without learning to listen to things around him, he would never have managed to reach the nymid or the draasin.

He stopped along the edge of the trees. His mother stood behind him, lost in her own thoughts. He knew she had happy memories of Nor as well, memories of his father and of the peaceful times they’d shared before they were summoned away. And of after he had died, when she had gone to work for Lord Lind, leaving Tan stuck as nothing more than a servant, forcing him to sneak off into the mountains, disappearing up the slopes only to come down hours later. Only now did he wonder if that had been intentional, her way of encouraging him to search for more.

“What do you want now, Mother?” Tan asked.

He turned to see her not staring down at the crater, but up into the trees. Their home had been there, destroyed by the mudslide that had forced them down into the village. That was why she had finally accepted the offer from Lord Lins.

“I want what I’ve always wanted for you,” she answered.

“I’m beyond finding happiness,” he said. “Life is a little too complicated for that now, don’t you think?”

She took his hand in hers and squeezed. “We are never beyond happiness, Tannen. Even after all that we’ve been through, there is always the chance for happiness.”

“You don’t want me to be with Amia.”

She smiled at him sadly. “It’s not that I don’t like Amia.”

Tan took a steadying breath and balled his fists to keep from snapping. “You’ve never really given her a chance. Even when you say that you will, you never do. And now that she’s the First Mother and we’re forced apart for much of the time, I think you’re happy.”

“It’s not Amia. And I’m not happy seeing you suffer. But you never had a chance to find anyone else, Tannen. She shaped you before you ever had a chance to know what else might be out there for you.”

“That’s what it’s about for you?” he asked. “Do you know that our bond allows us to know each more completely than even your bond to ara? Do you know that I would have chosen her regardless of the bond?”

“Only because you never knew anything else.”

“Would you have me with someone like Cianna? She’s more your style, isn’t she? A good kingdoms shaper who serves the throne happily.”

Zephra crossed her arms over her chest. “At least with Cianna, you would share more in common. You both understand fire.”

“As father understood wind?”

Her mouth pulled in a tight line. “That was different. We shared an experience, both of us knowing what it was like to learn in the university.”

Tan stared at his mother, debating what to say before finally settling on not saying anything. There really wasn’t anything that could convince her. Instead of speaking, he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her.

“Thank you,” he said.

She tensed for a moment before relaxing into the embrace. “For what? No one likes hearing that their beloved is not approved by their parents.”

Tan laughed. “You sound like you have some experience with that.”

“My parents would have preferred someone like Velthan. You wouldn’t know it now, but he was once the pride of Doma. A shaper of much skill, but also blessed with the gift of the sea, able to speak to udilm, to allow the ships safe transit, and keep the storms calm. But Vel was never the one for me. When I came to the kingdoms and met your father… it was different.
I
was different then. Irritable and quick to action.”

Tan bit back laughter.

His mother shook him off. “You think I’m bad now? You should have seen me before I met your father. He helped me find peace that was missing. He complimented me in ways that someone like Vel never would.”

“Amia does the same for me,” Tan said.

His mother ignored him as she went on, “But I would not have known there was someone like Grethan had I not moved past Vel. I was infatuated with Vel—many were in those days—but your father… well, he was something else entirely. Powerful. Comforting. Supportive.” Tears streamed down her cheeks as she spoke, and she didn’t bother wiping them away.

Tan hugged her again. “I miss him too.”

She sobbed for a moment and they stood there, in the shadows of their missing home with the familiar winds of Galen blowing around them. “It is hard, Tannen. Were Grethan still living, there is much he would have been able to teach you. I feel… I feel so guilty at times.”

“There would only be so much that Father would have been able to teach me. He could have helped me reach earth shaping sooner, but he would not have helped me understand fire, or water, or wind. That has taken other shapers. You. Roine. And Amia.”

She sighed. “Theondar is a good man. So different than the one I remember, but I wonder how much of that was arrogance then and how much grief.”

“He can still be arrogant,” Tan said.

Zephra laughed. “I think he would actually take that as a compliment. And there is a different between arrogance and confidence. Like you, he straddles it well.” She sighed and turned back to the crater. “Why are you here, Tannen? You could not have known that I come here, so what brought you back to Nor?”

Tan glanced over at the pile of earth traps and the stones that he and Vel had recovered from the stream. He didn’t worry about his mother being tempted to use them, but did worry that she might tell Roine. And Roine had asked that he store them in the lower level of the archives. Likely his mother had seen them, so he couldn’t tell her anything but what he’d found.

“Par-shon and their traps,” he said.

“What of them?”

Tan made his way to the pile of stones. He grabbed the topmost stone, one with a faded rune etched into it. Green moss had worked its way into the etching of the stone, burrowing deeply into the rune and giving it a dark, brackish tint. He handed the stone over to his mother and gave her a moment to study it.

“What is this?” she asked. “This can’t be Par-shon. This wouldn’t confine the elementals. And whatever is written here…” She trailed off and her breath caught. She tipped her head to the side and Tan suspected that she spoke to Aric, her bonded wind elemental. Without forcing himself into the conversation, he had no way of knowing what they said to each other.

“You see my concern,” Tan said.

“I see that this was made centuries ago. The skill to make this type of rune hasn’t been seen since—”

“Since I was in Par-shon. They had runes like this carved into the walls. They use runes like this to trap the elementals.” He pointed to the twenty-foot-long rods made of the dark metal, each covered with runes much like the one on the stones. The only difference was that the Par-shon runes were newer.

“This is not a trapping rune.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what these runes are for, but they do not trap the elementals.”

Tan took the rocks and piled them into the shape that he’d found them on the stream bed. Made in that shape, the runes added to each other, creating something greater than they were when separate. “This is the shape that I found them in the stream. Vel thinks these are binding runes, but not to bind to people. He thinks they bind the elementals to the land.”

“Vel said that?”

Tan nodded. “There is more, Mother. When I chased the Par-shon shapers last night—”

“I heard that you went alone. That is dangerous, Tannen, not the least because the kingdoms need all the shapers we have. We can’t risk you putting yourself in danger without knowing what might be out there.”

He resisted the urge to tell his mother that she shared the opinion with Cianna. It would likely only serve to inflate her opinion of Cianna. “When I chased the Par-shon shapers,” he went on, “one survived the attack. She was what they call a Rune Master. It was her responsibility to place runes on these traps, as well as to assist the Utu Tonah with placing the bond.”

“From what we know of Par-shon, such a person would be quite high ranking,” his mother mused.

From the Rune Master’s memories, Tan suspected she ranked somewhere below the Utu Tonah, but likely not much lower. That she would have come—that the Utu Tonah would have sent someone like her to the kingdoms—told him how valuable the traps were. It made him fear what else might be planned for the kingdoms.

“She had much knowledge of runes. From her, I was able to learn even more than what the First Mother had managed to teach.”

“You used spirit.”

“You think I shouldn’t use whatever abilities I have when facing someone who would do me harm?”

“We cannot become worse than those we fight, Tannen. If we do, what does that make us?”

He smiled, appreciating that she used much the same argument that he had been making.

“Did you shape her as well?” his mother asked.

Tan hesitated. “She killed herself before I had the chance,” he lied. He hated that he did, but after seeing Zephra’s reaction, he didn’t want to share what he had been willing to do. There was a part of him that regretted it, knowing that it made him no better than Althem, but he had needed to understand what the Utu Tonah planned for the elementals.