Leaves of Flame

gaze with a shrug.

“She’s right,” he agreed. “It’s frustrating.”

“It’s frustrating for me as well,” Colin said, letting anger touch his voice. “I know as much as you.”

“No,” Siobhaen said, cutting him off. “You know more than you’ve told us. You’ve met with the shamans on more than one occasion since we left the Thousand Springs cavern. I refuse to believe that they’ve told you nothing, and I refuse to believe you haven’t kept something from us.”

Colin considered her intense gaze for a long moment, then said stiffly, “I haven’t told you everything-”

“Ha!”

“-but that does not mean that telling you will make anything clearer.”

“It might help,” Eraeth murmured, removing the eggs from the fire and separating them onto three plates. “We’ve been on edge for the entire underground excursion, not knowing whether we can trust the dwarren, not knowing where we are headed or what we will find when we get there.” He caught Colin’s gaze and lifted an eyebrow in rebuke. “It’s difficult to protect you when I don’t know what I’m to protect you from.”

Colin shifted uncomfortably as he accepted the plate of eggs. He was willing to brush off Siobhaen’s complaints as an effort to gain information for the Order of Aielan, but if Eraeth also felt compromised.…

He sighed. “If I knew for certain, I would have informed you. This is all I know:

“Perhaps eight months ago, something-I assume Walter and the Wraiths-awakened a Well to the east. This Well has a reservoir of Lifeblood greater than any of the Wells we know of, so vast that the Faelehgre believe that it is the source of all of the Lifeblood across the continent.”

“Why?” Siobhaen asked. “Why would they awaken this Well?”

“It will expand the territory that the Shadows can hunt extensively, perhaps as far south as Yhnar, or further.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. There aren’t many humans down that far, and no one has traveled or settled in the Flats or the Thalloran Wasteland. There must be another reason to awaken the Well.”

“Such as?” Colin wondered if Siobhaen would answer, wondered if she knew something she’d learned from Lotaern or the Order, perhaps unwittingly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the Wraiths and the sukrael want.”

Both Colin and Eraeth shared a glance. She’d answered too quickly to be lying. “The Shadows want freedom,” Colin said, rubbing his eyes. He’d just rested, but he already felt tired. “They were trapped near the Well and Terra’nor for so long their only goal is to escape it so they can feed. You saw their hunger in the years after the Wells were awakened.”

“No, I didn’t,” Siobhaen said. “I was not born until after the Winter Tree was planted. But that is what the sukrael want. What of the Wraiths? What of this Walter who leads them?”

Colin frowned. Walter wants to kill me, he nearly said, but stopped himself. It had to be more than that. But what did Walter want? He knew what the bully who had beat him in Portstown had wanted: the attentions of his father, Sartori, as well as his respect. That boy had gone on the expedition that had ultimately claimed the lives of everyone Colin cared about, so that Walter could prove himself to his father.

But Walter’s father was dead. He would never find the acceptance he’d craved as a boy, would never be the Proprietor of Portstown, the predecessor of what was now a GreatLord. Was that what Walter strove for now? Power? Did he want to rule as his father had?

Or did Walter’s wishes no longer matter? Had he been tainted by the Lifeblood to such an extent that the Shadows and their goals were all that mattered now?

Colin shuddered at the thought and unconsciously clutched at his own arm and the marked skin beneath his shirt, an empty pit opening in his stomach.

“The Seasonal Trees,” Eraeth said suddenly, dragging Colin away from his thoughts. The Protector glanced between both of them. “You asked what the sukrael and the Wraiths want. You say they want freedom to roam the land and feed. The only things stopping them now are the Seasonal Trees. They want to eliminate them.”

“Can they do that with a new Well?” Siobhaen asked.

Colin bowed his head, staring into the fire, brow creased in thought. “I’m not certain. The Lifeblood and the Trees have never appeared to interact with one another in any way.” Except that was a lie. In order to create the Trees, he had used the Lifeblood to give their seeds strength, in order to augment their powers so that it would spread across the lands of the three races to protect them, and to make certain the Trees would last for hundreds of years. The Lifeblood was an inherent part of the Trees’ power.

He looked up. “But it’s possible. The Trees appeared unaffected when I checked with the Winter Tree in Caercaern, but I will look again once we reach the Confluence.”

“How?” Siobhaen asked.

“I’ll use the Summer Tree.”

At the front of the dwarren encampment, drums sounded and the dwarren began to stir, tents collapsing as they began packing, fires doused with water from the river cutting down the center of the round cavern they’d chosen as a rest area. Colin glanced down at his eggs. He hadn’t had a chance to eat. Both Siobhaen and Eraeth were nearly done.

Siobhaen caught his arm. “What else? What did you learn from the shamans?”

“The Faelehgre told me to find the Well and do whatever was necessary to find balance again. None of the head shamans know anything of the Source. They only know the Wraiths and the rest of the creatures of the Turning have been gathering in the Thalloran Wasteland, creating an army, one to rival all of the races-dwarren, Alvritshai, and human-combined. They think that the awakening of the Well is a sign that their armies are ready to begin seizing control of all of Wrath Suvane. But it’s all speculation.”

“What do you think?”

Colin paused, then said quietly, “I think the dwarren are correct. They have prepared for the Turning their entire lives.”

All around them, the dwarren were smoothly and efficiently breaking camp. None of the fires remained, all of the tents were down, and the gaezels were already being spread throughout the group.

“Eat,” Eraeth said, nudging Colin’s plate of eggs. “We’ll get the horses and pack our tents.”

Without waiting for a response, he poured a bucket of water onto the fire, smoke and steam rushing upward. Colin began shoveling the eggs into his mouth as Siobhaen headed for the horses. They’d learned from experience that when the dwarren were ready to depart, they wouldn’t stop to wait for the human or the Alvritshai to catch up.

The two Alvritshai had their gear ready by the time Colin finished his breakfast; Eraeth washed the plate clean in the river and stuffed it into one of the saddlebags. The pounding rhythm that signaled the dwarren to move out came a moment before Colin swung himself up into the saddle.

Then they were riding, the dwarren leading them through one of three possible branches from the room, none of them markedly different from the others. As soon as they entered the tunnel, Colin turned his attention to what Eraeth had suggested, that the Wraiths were using this new Well to affect the Seasonal Trees. He had sensed nothing when he checked the Winter Tree in Caercaern, but he didn’t think the Well had been awakened long before that. And from what he had discovered using the Well in the White Wastes, the newly awakened Well in the east was still drawing Lifeblood from the reservoir beneath it. It was still gaining in power and strength. The Wraiths may not have attempted to use it to affect the Trees yet.

But the more he thought about whether it could affect the Trees, the more uneasy he felt.

He needed to see the Summer Tree, needed to touch it as he’d done with the Winter Tree in Caercaern.

They heard the Confluence before they saw it, a slow roar beginning to build beneath the sound of the gaezels’ hooves against the stone of the tunnel. The roar grew, until it thundered through the tunnel, shuddering against Colin’s skin and shivering deeper in his bones. When the noise had reached an unbearable pitch, the tunnel suddenly ended.

Colin had been to the Confluence before, but the immense cavern still took his breath away as the dwarren army spilled out of the corridor and down the short ramp to the main floor. To the north, cascades of water fell from the heights of the rock wall, over a hundred streams and rivers converging on this one location, spilling down from the rock watershed in a torrent. Mist rose from the falls, glowing with the pale green luminescence of the moss and algae that coated the damp, exposed rock around them and from the soft red light coming from the center of the chamber. There, the immense stone floor fell away in two short circular tiers to a red-tinged lake-the Sacred Waters