Leaves of Flame

branches draping over the edge of the platform in places.

“How can there be trees?” Aeren asked. He whispered, but his voice breaking the near silence still made some of the Phalanx start. “No sunlight can reach down here.”

“The Well,” Colin said, moving out from the edge of the platform toward its lip even as he spoke. “The Lifeblood keeps them alive.”

The group reformed, Colin drawing up to the edge of the Well to stare down into the depths of the perfectly flat water, the bluish light washing up over his face, the rest hanging back. He could taste the Lifeblood now, wanted to reach out and drink it down, feel its coolness in his mouth, slipping down his throat and suffusing his body with warmth. The need was an ache. When he reached one hand forward, it trembled. He stared at it, the skin pale, nearly translucent, the marks that had pulled free of the cover of his sleeve a hideous black in contrast.

“I need to see if I can find out what has happened through the Well,” Colin said. “I won’t be aware of what’s happening around me as I work.”

Eraeth immediately ordered the rest of Aeren’s Phalanx to spread out, halfway between the Well and the trees. Vaeren grudgingly did the same, sending Siobhaen, Petraen, and Boreaus to join them. Both Vaeren and Aeren remained close to Colin, who turned his attention completely on the Well and the pulsations of light.

With a small sigh of regret, he leaned forward and dipped his hand into the water, bringing it to his lips. He drank as little as possible, enough to connect him to the Well and no more. The tingling cold fire of it burned as he swallowed.

He leaned forward onto the stone lip, then closed his eyes and sank to his knees at its edge, as if in prayer in one of Diermani’s churches. He nearly crossed himself in reflex-shoulder, shoulder, heart, waist-but halted the gesture mid-motion with a small smile and a shake of his head.

Then he sank into the Well.

He dove deep, through the pulsating light and into the depths, even though he knew his body remained behind, at the lip of the Well, protected by Aeren and Eraeth and the others. He followed the Lifeblood, followed its taste of leaves and earth and snow, deep and deeper, until the flow that fed this Well emptied out into a vast reservoir of Lifeblood, a lake of power far beneath the surface of the earth. A lake that spread southward, beneath the lands that the Alvritshai had once claimed as their own, beneath the mountains. It grew shallow in places, deeper in others, was blocked by pillars of earth and stone and rock through huge sections of land and narrowed down to channels in others. He followed those channels, wove his way along them, rising to the surface through streams whose mouths were the Wells that had been discovered over the past few hundred years, Wells like those in the Ostraell at the heart of the dwarren plains. At each Well, he checked his wards and found them intact, so he kept roaming, reaching out along additional channels, along less familiar routes, searching for something that was different.

As he skirted the edges of the Lifeblood beneath the dwarren’s easternmost lands, he found it.

The flow of the Lifeblood had changed, the currents eddying in new directions. He felt them drawing him eastward, pulling him with a strength greater than any he’d felt before. He let himself be drawn along this new direction, felt himself funneled into new paths, ones that had not existed thirty years before. But as he was swept along, he realized that they had existed thirty years before. He felt the age in the rock, felt the hunger of the stone as the Lifeblood coursed through it, speeding eastward. These passages had been here long before the dwarren claimed the plains, long before the Faelehgre had built their city around the Well and been caught and transformed by it. These channels that now seethed with the Lifeblood had been closed off somehow, blocked.

And someone had released that block.

That was what had upset the balance of the Wells. That was what had caused the return of the ethereal storms on the dwarren plains, and the occumaen and iriaem of the White Wastes.

Walter.

Colin’s heart seized in his chest and he suddenly realized that the current dragging him eastward had increased, stronger now than it had been before. He began to struggle against it, fought his way back toward the west, felt a moment of pure panic as he thought the current had gotten too strong. As he struggled, he reached out to the east with thin tendrils, tried to determine where the new channels ended, because he suddenly knew that that was where he would find Walter, where he would find the Wraiths. He sensed further branches of the Lifeblood, far beyond the edges of dwarren lands. He snaked more tendrils east, followed as many of the paths as he could, but they all led toward the same location, toward the same central source.

Then, at the edges of his senses, stretched so thin he thought he would snap, he caught the faint vestige of another reservoir, another lake of Lifeblood so vast he gasped. His strength fled, and for a moment he lost his struggle against the current and was dragged toward that vast sea buried deep beneath the land.

A vast sea that had recently been awakened.

He snatched the tendrils back to himself, gathered them close. He couldn’t spare anything for a further search, for further answers. The currents of the Lifeblood had him, were increasing as they drove him toward that sea. He needed everything he had to push against it, to force himself through the churning flow. Surging forward, he struggled back through the formerly blocked channels, his progress increasing with every step forward as the strength of the current decreased, until he roared from the opened mouth of the passage and back onto familiar ground.

He paused to gather his strength, knew that his body back at the Well would be trembling, perhaps had even fallen from the lip of the Well itself. But he spared a moment to search the edges of the dwarren plain for other breaches leading to the sea he’d discovered. He found three, each drawing Lifeblood toward the sea as the two sources connected.

Then he shot northward, back to the Well, back to his body. As he traveled, his rage grew.

Walter had found another source of power. He’d opened up the paths to the east, had awakened the sea beneath, was drawing on it even now, had been drawing on it for decades. There was no other explanation. While Colin had been fumbling with creating the knife, Walter had already been moving forward, working outside the influence of the Trees. He’d thought there was nothing that Walter could do, that he’d accounted for everything by warding the Wells and protecting the Lifeblood.

He’d been so stupid!

The rage nearly blinded him to the taint in the taste of the Well as he approached the north. He caught it at the last moment-a bitterness, like sap. The taste startled him with its acridness, but it wasn’t in the Well itself. It was approaching from the south, from the direction of the tunnel through the glacier.

And he recognized the taint.

He dove into his body, tried to seize control of it even as he felt it slip from the lip of the Well with the force of his return, even as he felt seizures race through his arms and legs. He tried to speak, heard Aeren cry out to Eraeth, heard Vaeren swear harshly. He opened his eyes, the bluish glow of the Well too bright, blinding him. He couldn’t breathe, his chest heaving, and he broke out in racking coughs as he rolled onto his side.

“Shaeveran!” Aeren barked. “Don’t try to talk. Breathe in deeply. You’re only making it worse.”

“Wra-” Colin wheezed, but his chest contracted and he hacked dryly into the damp, rain-slicked stone of the plaza. The coughing sapped his strength, already drained from his battle with the currents of the Lifeblood.

“What is he trying to say?” Vaeren demanded. “What did he find out?”

“I don’t know,” Aeren said, his voice calm, although Colin could hear the tension beneath.

“It sounded like Wraith,” Eraeth cut in tersely.

Colin nodded, drew in another ragged breath, then gathered enough strength to snatch Eraeth’s arm and drag him in close. “Shadows are coming, with a Wraith. Through the tunnel.”

Before he finished, someone screamed, a horrid, high-pitched sound that cut off before it was finished.

Eraeth and Vaeren lurched back from Colin, Eraeth ripping free of Colin’s grasp. Colin rolled to the side, coming to rest on his shoulder, his view of the trees in the direction of the tunnel’s mouth clear.

One of Aeren’s Phalanx had fallen, the blackness of a Shadow writhing over his form in frenzied ecstasy. Before anyone could react, four more Shadows flowed out of the forest, two falling on another of Aeren’s guardsmen even as he swung his sword. He fell with a curse that cut into a shout and then silence. The third Phalanx member scrambled backward, falling back to Petraen’s side, his breathing harsh as he moved.

And then the Wraith stepped from the trees.

Colin’s heart leaped with a malice and hatred so fierce he half rose, resting his weight on one arm. He