Michelle Sagara (18 page)

“Explain it to me?” she said, in frustrated Elantran.

“The tree destroyed part of itself.”

“What caused it?” Kaylin asked.

“I do not—as you must guess—know. Rumor says that you are a healer. That you became
kyuthe
to the Lord of the West March because of that singular gift. He does not resent you, and he does not fear you—and that was unexpected. The Barrani do not expose themselves to—”

“Healers? No. Believe that I’m aware of just how much they hate it.” She was afraid to touch what she could barely think of as a wound. Even in the darkness, she could see the scintillation of color flowing in the liquid, and if the Barrani of the West March insisted that this black mess wasn’t the shadows that plagued the fiefs, Kaylin couldn’t see what the difference was.

She examined the tree; very little of the dark infection was visible. If the tree had destroyed some part of itself in an attempt to be rid of it, that said something about the tree. “I’ve never tried to heal a plant before.”

Serian looked mildly offended.

Kaylin hesitated for one long minute, and then placed her hand on the tree’s bark, instead of the jagged edge of its wound. She closed her eyes as the marks on her skin began to warm.
It
is
a tree,
she thought, but kept her nervous defiance to herself. Most trees didn’t ditch large chunks of themselves in fancy, magic explosions. They certainly couldn’t write, and the rune was complicated enough that it hadn’t happened by accident.

Most trees didn’t
think.

* * *

This one did.

The problem with healing—from Kaylin’s perspective—wasn’t the exhaustion it left in its wake, although it could certainly have that effect. It wasn’t the physical contact, and the sudden knowledge of the limits of another person’s body; it wasn’t even the sense that, while she healed, there was little separation between her own body and her patient’s.

There was just as little separation between thoughts, between identities. She could feel and sense what they could feel and sense.

She didn’t know what the tree would offer. And the tree seemed content to offer her nothing. A lot of nothing. A great, endless darkness. She wasn’t even certain that she was connected to the tree at all; she saw a lot of what she assumed was unlit cavern.

But there was texture to the darkness, and it was a texture she didn’t like. She remembered what she’d done with the Barrani who had been injured in their skirmishes with the forest Ferals. They’d been infected—by bite—with the same transformative shadow, and she’d forced it out. Torn it out. Which had left injuries that
could
be healed the normal way.

Her arms were burning, but it wasn’t the usual heat. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t her marks—although they
were
warm—but the sleeves that covered most of them. It was the dress, the blood of the green. She felt a moment of sick fear because she knew she was worth far less than the dress to the denizens of the West March.

But the dress was somehow
of
the green. And the tree, if she’d understood anything—and given how little sense things made, that was questionable—was its heart. She opened her eyes and saw that the sleeves were...flowing. They were drifting off her arms as if they were liquid.

As if they were blood, Kaylin thought.

She
really
hoped the rest of the dress didn’t follow suit, because appearing stark-naked anywhere in the West March was almost at the top of her list of things Not To Do while on vacation. Dying was the first item.

She closed her eyes again, and this time, she whispered into the silence on the inside of her head. She didn’t have the tree’s name. But she had three of her own: the name of her birth, Elianne. The name she’d chosen when she’d escaped that early childhood, Kaylin. And the name that she had taken from the Lake. It was the most significant of the three—if you happened to be immortal.

But Kaylin wasn’t. She was a groundhawk. She served the Halls of Law. She struggled, every day, to believe in justice and that law. Some days, it was harder than others. Some days, it was blessedly easy.

Hello, I’m Kaylin. Kaylin Neya.

There was no answer. Not that she expected words, because usually there weren’t any. She touched—was certain she was touching—the tree. She tried to get some sense of its form, of its natural, healthy shape, because that’s what bodies knew.

But she touched nothing.

Kaylin
is the name I chose for myself. I’m mortal. I can choose the name I answer to. Neya is the short form of my mother’s name. Her name was Averneya, but no one ever used it, not even me. I didn’t call her by name. I called her Mother.

She had no idea what she was saying, or why.

But for just a moment, one clear, perfect moment, she could
see
her mother’s face. She could see it so clearly she lost all ability to form words. She couldn’t recall her mother’s actual face anymore. She hadn’t been able to do it for years. She could remember being held; she could remember some of the songs her mother sometimes sung to her.

Her mother’s face was
so clear.
Kaylin forgot the tree. She forgot the healing. She forgot the shadows and the infection and even the Barrani.

She had never seen her mother the way she looked at her now. Had her mother somehow lived, she would still never have seen her like this: she was a young woman. She was—to Kaylin’s eye—not much older than Kaylin now was. She had—Kaylin remembered it only now—a long scar, pale and slender, down the right side of her jaw. Her hair was as dark as her daughter’s, and her skin was only slightly paler; her eyes were so brown the pupil was lost to them.

Her hands were slender, and her arms; she was underfed. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks slightly hollow, their bones high and pronounced. She wore the nondescript, poorly fitted clothing that anyone in the fiefs wore.

But...she was smiling. She was smiling, her lips turned up at the corners, her eyes gentled by expression. She was smiling
at
Kaylin.

They could have been sisters.

Is this what Teela saw when she remembered her mother? A woman, much like herself? A woman who had loved her and who she’d loved in return?

A woman, Kaylin thought, throat thick now, that she could never actually touch again, that she could never grow to know better? She tried to etch this image into her mind, into her memory—her imperfect, mortal memory. Because this woman was alive. She had been alive.

Yes. You remember and you do not remember. You see and you do not see.

Kaylin didn’t look away from her mother. She lifted a hand and let it drop. She couldn’t touch her mother; her mother was dead. Gone. This was a gift—a strange gift—and she’d always been aware that asking for more was just asking for trouble. Asking for anything usually was.

No, Kaylin, daughter of Averneya, it is not.

No face, no body, appeared to accompany a voice that was so resonant she trembled at each syllable, as if she were caught in it, as if it came from the very center of her body. She turned to look for Serian, and saw no one.

“Serian?”

She is safe, for the moment. You have come to the heart of the green wearing our blood. What do you attempt?

She felt, as the voice filled all conscious thought, ridiculous and small. She had touched a tree. It was as much a tree as the Hallionne were buildings. “I’m trying to—to heal you.”

Ah. I am wounded. It is regrettable.

“What hurt you?”

The green,
was the softer—the much softer reply.

Kaylin hated confusion, especially when it was hers. “Aren’t you the green?”

We are. But we have taken a wound, Kaylin. It has bled, and it has festered since the day it was dealt us; it has not closed.

“Can I heal it?”

She heard—felt—laughter.
We can barely feel your touch. You are not of the green; were you not clothed in some part of ourself, we would not feel you at all. Healing us, as you are, is beyond you.

She felt completely deflated, but rallied. “If it’s beyond me, then why am I here?”

She felt confusion for the first time. Not doubt, nothing as large as that. No, this was sort of like the look adults got on their faces when small toddlers were attempting to speak and their words all came out in repeatable gibberish.

Kaylin attempted not to feel the frustration of the person uttering the repeatable gibberish.

You asked for the judgment of the green.

She turned to look at the small dragon because unlike Serian, he was still with her. He yawned. In the darkness, that companion now spread his wings and held them, rigid, to either side. One of those sides covered Kaylin’s eyes.

It wasn’t dark here. And she wasn’t standing in front of the hollow of a damaged tree.

* * *

She was standing on the banks of a river. She lifted her face and the river vanished because the thin membrane of wing didn’t follow her eyes. She lowered her face again. The banks of the river were silvered gray—it was night.

She took a hesitant step and realized she could no longer see the bubble that had protected her from the explosion. And gravity. So much of her life since the Devourer had been like this: a waking dream. The problem with Kaylin’s dreams was that they could turn, in an instant, with the slightest of gestures or sounds, into full-on nightmare.

And nightmare was here. Across the sand and rock that hedged the river’s flow was a dark patch. Even at this distance, it had a consistency that had nothing to do with riverbanks. It also pooled beneath a very ordinary streetlamp. Kaylin frowned and glanced at the small dragon. She began to walk, cautiously and quietly, toward the lamp. She knew she was being stupid—no streetlamp in her own city would be incentive to approach a small, roiling mass of chaos.

As she walked, she continued to speak. Caution replaced frustration. “My companion was born in the heart of a magical storm; he hatched after it had passed. When he’s with me, I can sometimes see things I wouldn’t normally see.”

You are like the Barrani, my distant children. You exist in one place, at one time.

“Yes. You don’t.”

I am like—and unlike—your Hallionne. My purpose is less circumscribed. But I exist across all planes, and in all places.

“Then the injury—”

Yes. It exists here, in this place.

“Where is this place?”

The green.

“If this were the green, Serian would be here.”

She is here. She is not in the here you are in. Chosen, if you desired it, you could see her. You could be where in the here she occupies.

Kaylin had drawn close enough that she could see the hanging lamp clearly. She could see the chaos across which its light fell, but for a moment, the chaos wasn’t as important as the light because what lay in the center of the globe was not fire.

It was a word. It was a True Word.

Where the light fell across black and roiling shadow, it fell in strips. It fell in patterns. They were familiar to Kaylin—and they should be. They were very like the marks that adorned over half her skin.

Chapter 14

The small dragon was silent. He wasn’t draped across her shoulders, either; he looked like he meant business.

“We need to get that word,” she told him softly.

He nodded, and lowered his wing. The landscape went dark immediately.

“You’re right. It’s going to be a pain in the butt. Can you deal with the shadow?”

He failed to hear the question. Fair enough; on bad days in the office, so did Teela. She took it as a definitive
No
. The small dragon lifted his wing again.

The landscape hadn’t changed in the interim. She was ten feet from the amorphous boundary of the chaos mass; the lamppost was in its center.

“Why,” she said, directing her question to the invisible but encompassing presence in which, she suspected, she walked, “Is there a name here? Why is it trapped like that?” To Kaylin’s eyes, it
was
captive. It moved, elements of the whole battering ineffectively against the globe, like a trapped moth.

Or a trapped bird.

The voice, like the small dragon, failed to hear the question. It was the most pressing question Kaylin now had. The word seemed small and almost forlorn, which was ridiculous. But it seemed diminished somehow by its cage.

All such words are caged. And all such words are cages.

Where it cast light in the shape of itself, the shadows were clearest; colors shone and moved beneath the bands of the rune’s form. They seemed, in the light, to have a consistent texture—and the chaos in the fiefs didn’t. And in the fiefs, wherever it was possible, the shadows spread. They infested land, buildings, and people; the people died.

Here, they touched nothing but lamppost—and ground. They didn’t appear to respond to Kaylin’s approach, either. Small mercies. She inched closer. The urgency to flee the tunnels, to escape them, to somehow be of use in the battle above, had bled away. She felt she was suspended in time; that time, here, had no meaning.

But the word did.

She thought it belonged, not to a lamppost in the middle of nowhere, but to the Lake of Life. It belonged in the keeping of the Consort. It was a
name.
Kaylin had no idea how to distinguish between True Names and True Words; five minutes ago, she would have said there wasn’t any difference.

She didn’t believe that now; she couldn’t make herself believe it. It was a name, and she couldn’t leave it here. “I think,” she said, “it’s time to breathe.”

The dragon said nothing. She was two feet away from the edge of the chaos, and she realized, watching it, that it reminded her of something beside the deadly shadow in the heart of the distant fiefs. It reminded her of Wilson, Hallionne Bertolle’s lost brother. It reminded her of the brothers she hadn’t tagged with an inappropriate name; they had become almost exactly this in the race through the outlands, creating something that had form and substance in a sea of gray fog and nothing.

That path had kept them together. It had probably saved their lives.

“Or not.”

The dress that had caused her so much trouble was now sleeveless. It looked like a summer shift. Everything else about it remained the same, but the marks that had been partially obscured were completely visible. She grimaced. It was the least of her problems now; she’d worry about it later.

She took off one boot and placed it at the edge of the puddle; it was the only thing she could throw that wasn’t a weapon, and she didn’t have enough of those.

She watched the dark sludge beneath it. She wasn’t surprised when it started to move, bubbling beneath the very green leather. She was, however, surprised when it inched away, leaving a gap through which sand and a few rocks became visible. Those and the boot itself.

Said boot hadn’t been devoured, and it hadn’t—as far as she could see when looking through dragon wing—been transformed. It was still a boot. On the other hand, she thought, as she bent, stretched, and caught it in two fingers, the boots had come with the dress.

She slid her foot back into it, squared her shoulders, and began to walk into the dark mess. Almost everything in her direct experience screamed
retreat;
her feet were steady but her steps were hesitant. They were also small.

Around her feet, iridescent color rippled and surged away. Only where the light of the word—the name—touched it, did it remain solid beneath her feet. She reached the lamp, and discovered once again that height—or more specifically the lack of height—was a disadvantage. She could touch the globe with the tips of her fingers, and it swayed. It didn’t fall into her hands.

What do you seek to do?

She lowered her hands. “I don’t understand why it’s trapped here, but I want to take it with me.”

The silence was longer and deeper.
Do you understand what it is?

“It’s life,” Kaylin replied. And to her eyes, for a moment, it was. It suggested movement and fragility and energy and bursting pride; it suggested quick wit and quick temper. Eyes narrowed, she stared as it revolved; it stopped struggling against its confinement, as if it were suddenly aware of her.

As if it were holding its breath.

What you desire has been tried.

“Not by me.” She turned her arms; the marks were glowing. They were the same color as the name that floated above her fingertips, but flat, confined in a different way.

Can you speak the name?

“That’s not the way it works.” But looking at it, she thought it might if she stared for long enough. “Can you?”

No, Chosen.

She blinked. “Why is it here?”

It is safe here. It is safe only here. Too much has been changed.

She bit her lip. Teela hated it when she did that, but Teela wasn’t here.

She is.

Kaylin froze. She looked at the name, but the name—it wasn’t Teela’s. It couldn’t be.

No. You are harmoniste. Take the name, but understand that it is one of the words that you must examine, one of the many, many choices you must make. The Teller will speak, harmoniste; but you will take the words that he speaks and you will choose a path that touches those words you feel must be touched. It is almost time.

“It’s
so
not time.” She lowered her hands. “When you say Teela is here, is she here the same way Serian is?”

She is here as you are here. She speaks, Chosen. Can you not hear her?

“No. No, I can’t.”

And you cannot hear him, either.

She looked at the name he referred to; as she did, the globe began to descend, floating as if almost weightless until it rested in her cupped palms. The glass was not glass; it was warm, and it felt almost like skin, but it dissolved as it met hers; the name did not. She shifted the position of her hands, cupping the name, enclosing it.

It bit her.

She didn’t even curse. She’d taken two words from the Lake of Life—not that it had looked at all like a lake to her at the time—but neither of those had felt like this one, and in theory, one of the two was hers.

She knew, then. She knew what she carried. “He’s not dead yet.”

Silence.

She looked down, at the ground, at the darkness. It seeped into the sand, avoiding her boots. Avoiding her shadow, as if it were a danger. It made no protest, threatened no attack. She watched it go.

“Are there others?”

Yes.

“Where?”

It is time for you to join Gaedin and Serian.

“Wait!”

I am not constrained, as you are, by time. What do you require?

“The injury—the names—”

Yes. They are connected. They are the same.
Taking the names, however, does not heal the wound. Do you understand?

No, of course she didn’t.

“Can you take me to—take me to Teela?”

No, but I will send you to Teela, Chosen.

* * *

The dragon folded his wing and squawked. Loudly. Kaylin, hands still cupped with care around a name, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand suddenly, sharply, on end.

Light cut the shadows, shattering them; it was bright enough to blind. And blind, given the way her marks were physically burning, was going to be bad. Vision returned with tears; her eyes were burning.

Smoke did that.

“Kitling!”

She could see the blackened, charred ruin of what she assumed had once been wall. Standing beside it was Teela. She was armed; she carried a Barrani war sword. In her hands it looked wrong—Kaylin was used to seeing the long club there. She preferred it.

“What are you
doing,
you idiot! Don’t just stand there!”

Kaylin blinked tears out of her eyes; she was afraid to move her hands. Teela cursed in rousing Leontine, her voice hitting a pitch of growl that only the Barrani Hawks could. She leaped over the two feet of burning wall and grabbed Kaylin’s left arm.

Kaylin cried out; Teela yanked her arm, dragging her off her feet. Her carefully cupped hands flew apart as she stumbled. Teela’s grip would leave bruises. Her eyes were so blue they looked black in the smoky hall.

Kaylin looked at her empty hands in a panic.

Against the palm of her left, flattened as all of the marks on her body were, was a word. A new mark. It wasn’t gold, the way the rest of her marks now were; it wasn’t the blue they sometimes became. It was red. But it was there. For now, that was all she needed to know.

She drew her daggers as she found her footing. The small dragon squawked. “Don’t you start,” she told him. “Be useful or be quiet. Teela—where in the hells is everyone else?”

“With luck, they’ve evacuated. The Lord’s hall was attacked at several points.”

“Why are you here alone?”

Teela glanced over her shoulder. “I wasn’t,” was her grim reply. Kaylin followed the direction of Teela’s brief glance.

Kaylin!
Three voices spoke at once. Only one of them twisted at her; only one caused pain because only one of them knew
her
name. She shuddered at the force of it, at what it contained, at the visceral fear; it was so strong, so raw, it almost overwhelmed her. She reached up to cover her ears. She only had one free hand, but tried anyway.

Severn! Severn—stop—I’m fine—I’m alive. I’m with Teela. I’m
alive,
Severn.
She inhaled, inhaled, inhaled; exhalation was too short, too shallow.

Teela was cursing up a storm. Kaylin found it calming. Given the color of her eyes, that said something.

Severn—I’m alive. Please—think of kittens or bunnies or something normal. Think of Mallory.

He laughed. It was a wild laugh; she felt it; she was shaking. “This name thing,” she told Teela. “I think I’m beginning to understand
why
the Barrani fear it so much.”

“I am
not
going to ask.”

“Let go of my arm. I’m not going to run off into the Ferals—or the fire. Let me check the guards—”

“They’re dead. We were three,” she added, “when the portal opened. We contained five of our enemies in the hall.”

Kaylin looked pointedly at the wall.

Teela nodded; she ran a hand across her eyes. “You are the
last
person I wanted to see. And—don’t take this the wrong way—but
what did you do to the dress?
”

Kaylin opened her mouth to answer and Teela caught her by the arm again. “Never mind—it’ll have to wait. The halls aren’t clear, and we cannot stand here talking.”

“Teela—the Consort—”

“I didn’t see her. I’m sorry.”

Nightshade—the Consort?

Tell An’Teela to go west. Cut through the dining hall, avoid its center.

The Consort?

We don’t know.

Lirienne? Where is the Lady?

She is not with us; her chambers were empty.

Did she go to the tunnels? Did she ask for the judgment of the green?
Kaylin felt her internal voice rising; if thoughts could squeak, hers would be.

Her chambers were empty. If she is in the heart of the green, we will know, soon.
He shut her out then. She began to widen her stride, to pace Teela. The small dragon dug claws into her shoulder and stared straight ahead.

* * *

The geography of the Lord’s hall had changed. It wasn’t the walls, although many of them sported new holes, or rather, it wasn’t the destruction of the walls. It was the patches of floor, wall, and ceiling that looked melted and deformed. “Tell me again why this isn’t shadow?”

“If you have enough breath to ask stupid questions, you have enough breath to run faster,” Teela snapped, and picked up the pace. She paused twice, threading her way back through halls that still had visibly normal—if scarred and scorched—floors. “Where are your servants?”

Kaylin considered bouncing Teela’s previous answer back at the Barrani Hawk, but decided against it—Teela could probably run faster; Kaylin wasn’t so certain she could. She was already short of breath, given the length of the run, and it wasn’t over yet.

But when they reached the dining hall, Kaylin froze in the ruins of the doorway. “Teela!”

Teela could stop on a pin. She did, and pivoted. “What do you see?”

Kaylin was staring at the center of the room that Nightshade had told them to avoid. “It’s a portal,” she said, voice flat.

“Then don’t step in it.”

“It’s anchored in the center, Teela—but it’s not contained there. Can you see the signature of its caster?”

Teela exhaled. Kaylin’s arms were too numb to feel what she assumed they otherwise would; Teela was casting. “I can see one,” Teela said.

“There are two. I recognize them both.”

* * *

Kaylin didn’t take her eyes off the sigil. The first time she had seen it, she had been suspended in the wreckage of her home. The second time, she’d been in the fiefs. This sigil mirrored the second sighting: it was strong, bold—and not small. But it was shadowed by a second signature.

The first time she’d seen the effect, she’d assumed the hand of two mages.