Cast in Flame (18 page)

A brow rose; he stared down a long, perfect nose at her as if she were an interesting, intelligent animal. “Oh? You claim to understand the whole of my imperative?” His smile was so lacking in warmth it seemed like a threat. “The burden you bear is light in comparison. And flexible.” He turned his attention to Annarion again. “You should not be here. You have disturbed my kin, and they seek you now.”

His...kin.

Nightshade.

I am speaking with the Avatar,
he replied.
Just as you are. We are not having the same conversation.

Is he going to try to kill Annarion?

Silence.

When the Castle talks about his kin, is he talking about the ancestors?

That is my belief. I have not interacted with the Castle in this particular way before. It is...instructional.

He’s not like Tara.

No, Kaylin, he is not. I stand at the heart of the words that bind him. You stand at the heart of words that protect you from him. I do not believe there is anywhere else in the Castle that could now be considered safe.

But...

Yes?

Andellen is in the Castle.

Yes. And others of my men, as well. I do not know if you can find an exit. But if you can, take it. This is not the place for you.

What will you do?

I will continue my discussion with the Castle. The Castle understands that, on some visceral level, it accepted me as its Lord. Unless and until I die, I will remain Lord.

She didn’t doubt him. But watching the Avatar, she wondered if his survival was guaranteed.

“You are not one of the echoes,” the Avatar said to Annarion. “Nor are you one of my kin. What
are
you?”

“He is,” Kaylin replied, when it became clear Annarion had no intention of doing so, “brother to your Lord.”

The Avatar frowned. “I cannot hear you,” he told Annarion. “Not as I did before.” His attention refocused on Kaylin. “Bearer of burdens, he is not for you. Release him.”

“I’m not holding him here. He’s here of his own volition.”

“I can barely hear him at all, and he is my domain. Release him.”

Kaylin glanced at the sphere made of words. “He’s free to leave if he so chooses. But he is also free to remain.”

The small dragon squawked.

The Avatar’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”

Squawk.

Eyes that now looked Barrani darkened.

“Maybe,” Kaylin said to her companion, “now is not the time to antagonize him.”

The Avatar opened his mouth on silence. But silence had texture; it had motion, it had temperature. Translucent wings rose and spread; claws dug in. Kaylin thought she felt a tail wrap itself around her throat. She didn’t need to understand small dragon squawk to know that the Avatar was dangerous.

Severn unwound his weapon chain. He didn’t set it spinning; in the sphere, packed as they were, there was no room. But if he meant to fight, fighting while anchored to anyone was a hazard for everyone concerned. Everyone except the Avatar. Severn gripped a blade in either hand, but said, and did, nothing else.

Teela didn’t bother to arm herself, which was a sign of how useful she thought weapons would be here. Her eyes couldn’t get bluer. She stepped partially in front of Annarion, as if in warning.

Squawk.

“Impossible.”

Squawk squawk squawk.

Light flooded the hall. It was sharp as a blade, but wider; it pierced the darkness beneath their feet, stretching toward walls that could no longer be seen by the merely mortal. What it touched, Kaylin couldn’t say, but she saw rock as it formed beneath her feet; it was a long way down.

“Teela—beneath the Castle there’s a cavern. A series of tunnels. I think they’re similar to the tunnels beneath the Heart of the Green.”

“Were they made the same way?” Teela asked.

Kaylin glanced at Annarion and remembered the sudden, inexplicable storm in the heart of Evanton’s Garden. Mandoran had tried to speak with the elemental water, and the elemental water had not been pleased. Kaylin thought, at the time, that the water had been enraged—and that was probably true.

But she thought, as she stood at the heart of a sphere that wouldn’t let her fall, that the water had also been afraid.

Teela understood what Kaylin didn’t put into words; if they didn’t share the intimacy of the bond created by knowing a true name, they had almost a decade of lived-in experience together. Teela inhaled.

The small dragon exhaled.

Kaylin froze in near panic as a stream of smoke left his mouth in a conic plume. It wasn’t steam; it wasn’t the smoke that generally accompanied Dragon fire. It was opalescent, flecked with colors that caught and reflected golden light.

Severn and Teela knew what the small dragon’s breath could do. Annarion probably knew as well, although he hadn’t been there to see it in person at any other time.

“Do you honestly think to threaten
me?
Here? Do you not understand what I have
become?
”

Trust a Barrani—an ancient, powerful, proto Barrani—to argue with something that had a brain the size of a walnut.

Squawk.

The Avatar lifted both arms; the air cracked, as if it were made of glass.

“We’ll risk the water.” Teela’s voice was low and urgent.

The sphere dropped. Everyone in it stiffened as gravity returned. Above their heads—inches above—the world exploded in something that felt like fire. It was white, and hot. Words—foreign and completely beyond her understanding—followed that fire. Kaylin didn’t need language to recognize fury.

* * *

The sphere dropped; the rock bed that Kaylin had glimpsed when she’d stood at the level of castle halls grew closer between eye blinks. But the sphere itself didn’t strike ground; it stopped abruptly a yard above impact, and hovered.

“Is this the same?” Kaylin asked the rigid familiar sitting on her shoulder. “Is this the shield you conjured to save us when the Arcane bomb exploded?”

The small dragon shook his head.

“It’s not his shield,” Severn said quietly. “It’s yours.”

“I can’t reliably light a
candle.
”

Severn offered her a pure fief shrug. “I paid attention in all the Arcane arts classes taught to the Wolves. This isn’t a magic that the Imperial Order is capable of teaching.”

“And lighting a candle is.”

“Lighting a candle is a magic anyone who has magical power can learn. Apparently. It’s a base test of both ability and focus.”

“You know this how?”

He shrugged again. “Shadow Wolves are tested for a variety of aptitudes. If it helps, I couldn’t light the candle. I couldn’t,” he added, as Teela opened her mouth, “make a simple light, either.”

“I’m going to demand that Sanabalis teach me the light trick. It’s got to be more useful than candles.”

“It’s theoretically more difficult than candles.” He looked at the sphere. “Could you do this again, if necessary?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take that as a no,” Teela helpfully told Severn. She had an arm around Annarion’s shoulder. “The first principle of magical competence is repeatability. You have magical power, which makes you dangerous. You can’t predictably use it, which makes you erratic. You don’t control the way the power is expressed, which makes you dangerously erratic. There’s a reason the Imperial Court wanted you dead when you first arrived on the scene.”

“Is the Court composed of mortals?” Annarion asked.

“It is almost entirely composed of Dragons,” Teela replied. “Why?”

“Dragons clearly don’t feel immortality the way the rest of our kin do.” Before Teela could speak, he added, “Immortals become weary with the passage of centuries.”

“You’re weary?”

Annarion shook his head. “I am reckoned old by my kin, but...I have not had the time to grow weary of this world; I have barely lived in it, after all. I have not seen all the changes wrought since we were first exposed to the
regalia.
I cannot understand how they occurred—I cannot believe it possible that we live peacefully in an Empire ruled by a Dragon. For what were we sacrificed? Why did our kin lose their lives in the wars that preceded that sacrifice?

“To become the tame Immortals that bow to a
draconian
Emperor?” He glanced pointedly at Teela, and although he could have spoken to her in the silence of their name-bond, he said, “I understand that ennui is inevitable. But the lengths to which our people have gone to avoid it almost beggars the imagination.”

Teela snorted. “It was not about ennui.”

“Oh?”

Above them, light shattered and fragmented. The Avatar roared like a Dragon.

“It was about the Shadows and the darkness that exists at the heart of this city. You will come to understand it if you take the Test of Name—but you will never understand it fully.”

That stung Annarion, judging by his expression. Whatever he said in response was fully private, which Kaylin guessed meant it was insulting.

“Oh, don’t. Just don’t.” Teela spoke in Elantran. “The world is what the world is. Try to change it when you actually understand
more
of it. If I catch you anywhere near the border at the heart of the fiefs—”

“Yes?” Annarion’s voice was very, very chilly.

“She won’t have to do anything,” Kaylin cut in, not liking where this was going given the ruckus happening above her head. “You’ll probably attract the attention of every dangerous one-off in miles, and you’ll die or get absorbed or get transformed. It’s probably the latter she’s worried about.” It occurred to her, as Annarion drew breath, that she was in charge of where they were actually standing, because she was at the center of the barrier.

She began to walk.

Everyone—even angry Annarion—followed.

“The world is not supposed to be this way,” he said, to no one in particular. Or to everyone.

“Tell me about it,” Kaylin replied. “I grew up with no parents in the fief your brother is Lord over. We were hunted by his thugs, by his Ferals, and by the mortals who were strong enough to enforce their particular desires. We ate garbage when we could find it. We didn’t have a stable home.

“I didn’t particularly like the way the world was. I don’t particularly like the way the world
is.
But complaining about it doesn’t change anything, and charging into Nightshade or his thugs would have just guaranteed that I’d be a casualty. You can charge across the borders if you want—”

“No,” Teela said, “he can’t.”

“—But it’s not going to change the world in a way anyone who lives in it would appreciate. Probably not even you.”

Annarion said, “Not while I’m naked, at any rate.”

Kaylin surprised herself by laughing.

“What, exactly, is a ‘one-off?’”

Kaylin glanced at Teela.

“No you don’t,” Teela replied. “It’s not terminology my people use. If you want him to have an understanding of your imprecise nomenclature, you can explain it yourself.”

“Your people being Barrani, not Hawks.”

“I’m perfectly capable of multitasking.”

Kaylin snorted. “You know about the Shadows, right?”

Annarion frowned. He said nothing but after a pause, nodded, his expression one of intent concentration.

“If rumors are true, they’re concentrated in the center of the fiefs. No one crosses those borders.”

“And the Shadows remain there?”

“Not willingly. There are Towers in the fiefs. Six that we know of for certain. Some people believe there’s a seventh.”

“In the center of the fiefs?”

Kaylin nodded. The light shed by her sphere was strong enough to illuminate smooth, worn stone. It was natural stone; it hadn’t been laid in by masons. She closed her eyes as she heard the distant trickle of water. “The Towers are like the Hallionne. I don’t know if they were created the same way. Given the Avatar, I have my suspicions.”

“They sleep, like the Hallionne.”

Kaylin nodded.

“And they wake the same way?”

She stopped. The Hallionne slept unless they were woken. Waking them wasn’t simple. It wasn’t a matter of shouting a few words or kicking the nearest wall. They woke to song—a specific song. Kaylin had seen and heard it performed by the Consort. The Consort and Nightshade, in harmony. By the end of it, the Consort looked as if she’d carried half her body weight on a twenty-mile forced march; she was exhausted.

“Clearly not the same way,” she replied. “Have you heard the song of waking?”

He blinked. She might have asked him if he’d ever drawn breath before. “Of course.”

Teela’s glance was sharp. It implied a question, without vocalizing it.

“Is there a song to put them
back
to sleep?”

“No. They drift, if there is no one to converse with.” Pause. “Sometimes you can converse with the Hallionne while they sleep. Their answers, then, are different.”

“And you conversed with the Castle while it was sleeping.”

“Not on purpose.” He hesitated, and then added, “The imperatives of the Castle are not the imperatives of the Hallionne; the Hallionne were meant to protect anyone who dwelled within their walls. The Castle’s imperatives are less clear to me.”

“Less clear how?”

“It is listening,” he replied, after a long pause and another distinct glare from Teela. “It is listening for one voice.”

“That’s not what I’ve been told.”

“I do not know what you have been told. You have not spoken with this Castle before. Perhaps the Towers, like the Hallionne, are unique, and each has its own imperative.” He frowned. “You have not spoken with the Castle, but the Castle knows your voice. It has listened, while sleeping. It understands what you are.”

“Please tell me you’re not talking with him now.”

“No. I cannot hear him, not as I did before.”

“Can he hear you?”

Annarion glanced at the translucent sphere of words that surrounded them all. “I...do not think so. If he is like the Hallionne, he will be displeased.”