Michelle Sagara (10 page)

She wished she could understand him. For now, it was enough that the eagles seemed to. The only two people caught in this song that couldn’t were Kaylin and the Consort herself, because as Kaylin found voice and exposed a ridiculous vanity, she heard the Consort singing.

But the Consort lay unmoving, her eyes and lips closed. Her skin, sallow, was now beaded with perspiration—but so was Kaylin’s. It made it hard to keep the grip on her hand. She changed that grip, entwining their fingers and tightening her hold.

She didn’t know what the birds hoped to wake, and in the end, that wasn’t her problem. What she wanted—what she needed—was to wake the Consort. She needed to make herself heard over the beautiful storm of sound that occurred when dream and nightmare clashed.

The dragon batted her cheek and shook his head.

The marks on her arm were a gold-white glow; she had to squint to read them. Not only were they on the edge of tear-inducing brightness, they seemed to be moving as she watched.

Gripping the Consort’s hand tightly enough she started to lose feeling in her own fingers, Kaylin reached out with her free hand, passing it over the brilliant lines and dots that formed runes on most of her skin. They were warm, but not searing, beneath her callused palm—but they weren’t solid. She felt resistance as her hand passed through them. The small dragon was bouncing up and down, although he didn’t stop his noisemaking; nor did he vary its rhythm.

Still, she understood that he meant her to do what she was trying—and failing—to do: take them in hand. Lift them.

No, she thought. Not them. One. Just one. In the past, she had lost marks before: to the trapped spirit of a dead dragon, to the Devourer, to the small dragon hatchling. But the marks had lifted
themselves
off her skin; she hadn’t chosen. She hadn’t had to choose.

She had no idea why they were hers; someone immortal, someone older, wiser, and more knowledgeable—someone like the Arkon—should have been chosen instead. She didn’t know what they were for. She had no idea why a word was necessary now—but she understood, watching the marks, that it was. And that this time, the hand of the Ancients wasn’t going to make the choice for her.

Her hands shook, and not because she was nervous. She closed her eyes.

Eyes closed, she could still see the marks, but the light didn’t burn her vision. Her body didn’t impede it, either. It wasn’t just the marks on her arms that were slowly beginning to rise.

Chapter 8

She could see—with her eyes closed—the shape of nightmares. They were clearer and darker than they had been the first time she’d encountered them; there was so much light here, the edges of shadow wings were harsher and sharper. They implied bird—or maybe bat—without any of the other physical traits: they were like the shadows the eagles cast in flight.

She held on to that thought as the voices of the actual eagles filled her awareness, blending in rhythm, if not in actual sound, with the voice of her squawky sidekick. Her ear was throbbing. After this was done, she’d have pointed words with the little dragon.

The shadows filled her vision as they wheeled in the confined space.

Except it wasn’t confined; it had no obvious shape, no floor, no roof, no walls; it implied a vast and endless sky—the kind you’d crane your neck to look up at. But it was a sky without color or cloud. She heard the voices of those shadows as clearly as she heard the eagles of Alsanis.

She looked down.

It was a mistake. She could see herself. She wasn’t translucent, and she wasn’t terribly impressive, but the dress she wore was: it was the essence of green, and green was the color of life in the West March. It was, she thought—and wondered why—the color of blood.

Beneath her feet, the shadows swooped and darted, their flight patterns interwoven with the patterns of feathered wings. They had no obvious beaks, no obvious
faces,
but their song came from somewhere, and it echoed. Given that there was nothing for sound to bounce off, this was impressive.

But no, even that was wrong: there was. The runes that graced over half of her skin had expanded outward in the shape of a sphere, and the sounds of raised voices were caught and returned by each element they touched. The shadows flew through them, rather than around; the flight path of the eagles was therefore far more constrained.

She almost opened her eyes when the small dragon bit her ear—again. It was more a nibble than an actual bite; she turned automatically in his direction and saw, to her surprise, that he was present in this vision. His body was composed of the same translucent flesh, and his eyes were the same black opalescence. But his wings seemed both more amorphous and larger; they were, she realized, very like the wings of the shadows above in shape and size; they passed through her, although his claws did not.

The only thing Kaylin couldn’t see was the Consort.

The small dragon warbled and nudged her cheek. Kaylin opened her eyes.

* * *

Nothing changed.

She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the odd sky, occupied as it was by runes and birds and their cast shadows, remained firmly fixed in her vision; she turned, and turned again, looking up and down as she did. She was no longer in the Consort’s room.

Lirienne.

There was no answer.

Nightshade?

Silence. She inhaled slowly, counting to ten. The small dragon bit her ear. This time it was harder, and his warble was higher. Exhaling, Kaylin nodded, remembering what she had so reluctantly set out to do. She began to sing. She had faint hope that her actual body—she had no doubt she still had one—was silent in the halls of the Lord of the West March. Barrani voices were clear and resonant and she had never heard one sing off-key, not that song was common.

Mortal voices, not so much, and Kaylin’s was on the bottom end of that scale.

But this wasn’t about the quality of voice. It wasn’t even about the words; she could have chosen words at random, the syllables of the eagles made so little sense. It was about harmony. About tone. It was about rhythm. It was about emotion, because even if she couldn’t understand a single word, she felt she understood intent.

There was a desolation, a yearning, and an emptiness in this song. No, not emptiness, but an awareness of loss, of all that had been lost and might never come again. It was hard to listen carefully with her eyes open, and as closing her eyes didn’t apparently change a damn thing, she gave up trying.

The eagles flew. The shadows flew. Their song soared and plummeted, as if it were the sole expression of everything they were. Maybe it was. She couldn’t understand more than the emotion behind the long, winding words—and she probably didn’t understand all of that, either. Just enough.

She became aware, as she watched, that her marks were stationary. So was she. While the eagles flew, while the shadows darted, she was as fixed in place as any of the marks. The small dragon’s claws curled into her collarbone, and she grimaced; her song banked briefly while she struggled not to swear.

She was mostly prepared when the dragon’s wings began to flap; they were silent, their movements suggesting power and grace. Kaylin began to move. Her flight was unwieldy; it had none of the grace or speed of the dreams or nightmares. But the slow, steady climb took her closer to the nearest of the floating marks.

It was larger than she was. She could see every detail of its full shape; on her arm, it was flattened and almost lifeless in comparison. It seemed natural that it shed its brilliant, golden light; it was like sun—but it didn’t burn and didn’t blind. At least, not yet. It felt almost alive as she reached out to touch it. She couldn’t read it; it was too large for that. She couldn’t intuit its meaning.

But she had come here to find the Consort.

The marks that adorned her skin were like a miniature world around her. They were individual glyphs, differing in shape and size, in simplicity and complexity. They were very like images that might be called up in Records for her inspection. And she knew, again, that she had to choose one.

She didn’t have time to waffle, but to make a decision based on—on
nothing,
really, when so much rode on the outcome, was almost paralyzing. She let her hand fall away. As it did, the rune faded from sight. She nodded to the small dragon and began her awkward flight toward the next one.

* * *

Every time she failed to choose a mark, it vanished. When this had happened a dozen times, she realized that the marks were returning to her skin. They were still glowing, and frankly, when they were part of her skin, they were warm. With so few reattached, it was uncomfortable; she had no doubt, when she was done, it would be painful.

But she’d live with the pain if she could wake the Consort.

Hells, she’d live with the pain at this point if she could
find
the Consort. The sky was full of wings and runes and nothing else; the birds circled; the shadows circled. The Consort was nowhere to be seen. Kaylin forced panic to take a backseat again; it was hard because it kept trying to grab the reins and set the course. She inspected rune after rune, wondering if this many of them could truly fit on her skin.

Every so often the small dragon bit her ear to catch her attention; it was always when she had forgotten to keep singing. Had he not been her only viable form of movement, she’d’ve bit him back.

The sky was slowly becoming an empty space; the flight patterns of the dreams and the nightmares of Alsanis had become less complex with the reabsorption of each word. Kaylin still hadn’t found the one she was looking for—and she was terrified that she hadn’t because she didn’t
know
what she was looking for.

She had never been good with words.

Oh, she could be a smart-ass. Almost a decade with the Hawks would have that effect on anyone. But when it came to important things? She couldn’t choose the right words to save her life. She blurted, if she could get them out at all. She tripped over them, even though she knew what she wanted to say. Or at least knew what she wanted to
convey.

It was simple to know what she felt.

It was hard to make other people understand it. Words were sometimes more of a barrier than a bridge, especially because it was so easy to choose the wrong ones. It was just as easy to hear the wrong ones—to think she understood what the other person was trying to say to her. To hear what the words meant to her, not what they meant coming from someone else’s mouth.

She was not the right person to be choosing words.

She stilled, frowning. These weren’t Elantran words. Or Leontine or Barrani or Aerian, either. These were True Words. In theory, if she chose the right word, there was no way to misinterpret it. It had no hidden meanings, no barbed cultural contexts, no past associations she could trip over like a clumsy toddler. It would convey the whole of what she meant, not more, not less.

This would have been comforting if she
knew
what she was supposed to
mean.
Or if the cost of failure wouldn’t be so high. Without the right word, the Consort wouldn’t wake.

And without it, Kaylin thought, as she bypassed four more runes, Kaylin wasn’t so certain that she’d find her way back herself. Opening and closing her eyes didn’t shift or change the scenery much; she was still here.

She stopped singing. The dragon, predictably, complained. She traversed sky, listening to the songs of eagles and their shadows, on wings that weren’t hers and never would be. As she did, she passed more of the floating marks and they vanished in her wake, dwindling and returning to her skin. She heard the sorrow and the loss and the yearning carried by the voices of dreams and nightmares. She understood them in a way that didn’t encompass words, they were so much a part of her life.

She’d heard that—and desire—in the Consort’s song of wakening, in the lee of the Hallionne Bertolle. She’d even joined the Consort, singing the part Nightshade would have taken had he been there. Desire—the desire she’d heard—wouldn’t touch this emptiness. Not in Kaylin’s life. She hesitated. This
wasn’t
her life, was it? It was the Consort’s. The Hallionne’s.

But it had been left to Kaylin to choose a word that would somehow respond to it. Kaylin’s choice. Kaylin’s imperfect choice. She stopped when there were only two runes in the whole of the sky. The eagles and the three shades continued to fly, their path unimpeded by obstacles, their voices soaring and diving as they did.

She didn’t understand how to say these words. Any of them. But as she looked at the two that remained, she understood what they meant.

They were almost of a size; their shapes were different. In the first, the long, straight line of the rune was central; the looping adornment to one side of that line was complex; the dots to the other side, and the single stroke at its height, a frame.

The second rune had no central element that she could see; it was a balance of delicate squiggles, dots, slender strokes. Its shape suggested a cohesion that closer approach dispelled.

Both were luminescent gold. Broken into components, they shared several base shapes—but it was the combination that made them so distinct. The combination, she thought, and the essential meaning. It was to the more complicated, delicate rune that she drifted.

She could almost hear it as she approached. It seemed to sing—or at least to hum, as she could make out no distinct syllables—in time and in tune with the dreams and nightmares. It was at the heart of their song; it was isolation, writ large and made strangely compelling. Seeing it, hearing it, she felt that she understood the song in a way that she hadn’t before. If she could
speak
it or sing it, she was certain that whoever was listening would know that she did, at last, understand.

It was larger than
I’m lonely.
It was larger than
I’m alone.
Choice and consequence and acceptance and pain were tied into it, part of it. This was loss, the result of loss; the result left when something whole had been shattered, and the pieces imperfectly swept away.

Yet there was no anger in it; no resentment, no desire for vengeance or destruction. It was—it was like a dirge. A funeral dirge. It was a farewell, a goodbye, uttered by the people who remained behind. Behind, Kaylin thought, and alive.

She skirted its edge, and then turned, almost blindly, toward the other word.

She couldn’t hear it, from here. She didn’t know what it meant. She glanced at the small dragon; he was staring pointedly at the side of her face. His tongue—solid, now, where the rest of his body wasn’t—flickered out to touch her cheek, and she realized she was crying. Normally, this would embarrass her. Here, it didn’t matter. Tears had no meaning to dreams, to nightmares.

She moved away from the rune; she had not dismissed it and it did not fade as she left; she could feel its light and heat as she rose above it and moved to the only other True Word in this sky.

Unlike the first rune she’d approached, she thought this one was silent. It didn’t hum; it didn’t have a voice—if
voice
was even the right word. It stood aloof from the song that moved around it, carried by invisible thermals. Kaylin almost dismissed it.

But something about its shape was familiar. Something about the whole of its three-dimensional form felt right.
Right?
she thought, grimacing.
Right for what, exactly?
This would have gotten her zero on any test she’d been forced to write to enter the Hawks; it wouldn’t have even gotten part-marks. It may have gotten derision and criticism.

It’s not about instinct,
she could hear Teela saying—at a remove of too many years. She sometimes wished she knew Teela’s True Name, because Teela’s voice occupied so much space on the inside of her head anyway.

You’ve got decent instincts. Most people do, even mortals.
But instinct isn’t law. It certainly isn’t Imperial Law. You don’t get to kick down a door or break through a window because it feels “right.” That usually leads to demotion or dismissal, if the Emperor’s in a good mood.

So I shouldn’t trust my instincts.

Did I say that? Honestly, kitling. You put words in the mouths of everyone around you; we probably don’t need to speak at all—you can carry both sides of the conversation. Understand, however, that they’ll both be
your
sides. You need to trust your instincts. And then you need to be intelligent about proving the truth of them to people who don’t have the same reaction you do. We call it covering your ass. It’s an important component of Hawk work.