Michelle Sagara (31 page)

Kaylin shook her head. “I would have said it was impossible that he have one—this story started long before either of us were born.”

“You don’t believe that.” She spoke in Elantran.

“I did. But...no. He doesn’t really have an age. I, on the other hand, do.”

Nightshade said a word, and the stairs were flooded with light. Kaylin blinked different tears out of her eyes.
Was that necessary?

Yes, Kaylin. It was dark.

But it hadn’t been, to Kaylin, which was a first. If the Barrani found it too dark for vision, Kaylin was usually bumping into walls, or anything else that stuck out.

What did you see?

Stairs, mostly.

Ah.

She still saw stairs. She realized, with a start, that there were no walls; the stairs descended in a winding, tight trail, toward the distant earth. They were narrow stairs, without rails, and without an obvious central pillar. But they felt familiar. She could have been running up—or down—the stairs that lead to the Hawklord’s tower.

She couldn’t run down these ones without knocking Lirienne out of the way, which seemed the very definition of career-limiting. He reached ground as she did, and he approached roots that looked very familiar.

“You must lead,” he began. But he looked up, over the rounded surface of root.

Kaylin, however, looked down. “Can you see the river here?”

Lirienne frowned. “No, Lord Kaylin.”

The Consort caught her arm. She could tell, from the expression on the Consort’s face, that she could. It was not a comforting expression.

Kaylin turned to the Lord of the West March; he was climbing. He was climbing with confidence and grace, and he stopped only when he had reached the height of a root that was very close to trunk. Kaylin could see shards of wood and something darker in the air. “Don’t touch those,” she told him.

He maneuvered carefully around them, heading to the gap in the trunk that Kaylin had caused by touching a lone ward. Nightshade passed Kaylin.

“Lord Kaylin,” the Consort said quietly.

Kaylin nodded and followed. She followed with vastly less grace, and had to accept help from both Severn and the Consort to find enough purchase to climb. Climbing was one of her strengths, but she didn’t do it with grace—which, come to think, was an apt description of the way she lived the rest of her life, as well.

Lord Barian came up after Kaylin, and he stopped at the gap in the trunk, staring. In the light cast by Nightshade, she could see his expression; she could also see his pallor.

“It was like this when I found it,” Kaylin said. She felt compelled to add, “but the damage was concealed by a ward.”

“You invoked the ward.”

She nodded. “I walked into the gap, and I heard the green.”

“You are certain that it was the voice of the green speaking?”

“Yes.”

Lord Barian turned to the Consort. “I spent so little time in your city,” he told her. “Are all mortals this...surprising?”

“In my limited experience, no.”

“That is some small relief. The mortals outnumber us; they always have.”

“Kaylin?” the Consort said.

Kaylin nodded and once again entered the breach.

* * *

She stepped into sunshine, and lifted her hands to shade her eyes. The Consort followed; Kaylin could see debris in the folds of the Barrani woman’s dress. Ynpharion entered behind them, Iberrienne in tow. The enmity he felt for Iberrienne was gone; it had been replaced by a wordless, nameless pity. Kaylin couldn’t blame him; she felt it herself.

Severn pulled up the rear, but she found herself waiting for him, as if afraid he would be sent back, somehow. His eyes widened slightly as they adjusted to sunlight. There was sun here. And there were trees, grass, even the sound of running water. In the distance, trees formed horizon, or as much of it as could be seen.

“It wasn’t like this,” Kaylin said quietly. “Not the last time. This is what the heart of the green looked like, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

But the Consort said softly, “There are shadows, Warden. Can you not hear them? Stay on the path.”

The Warden’s smile was soft. “It is a gift, Lady. I will gladly walk this path again.”

“Even if you understand what occurs at its end?”

“Even then. I can hear the green. Lord Kaylin?”

“I can’t hear them,” she confessed. “And I’m happy with that.”

* * *

The Lord of the West March continued—once he had ascertained that no one had been lost in the passage—to lead. The Consort released Kaylin’s arm, and to Kaylin’s surprise, scurried ahead to catch up with her brother. He bent his head to listen to whatever she had to say, and to Kaylin’s greater surprise, laughed. His laughter was deep and almost musical, and it reminded her that he was capable of mirth.

He has long been a Barrani Lord of whom you might otherwise approve,
Nightshade said.

Unlike you?

Very, very unlike me. He is Barrani, of course; he is a significant Lord of the High Court. He is impressive enough that he can display sentiment and its weakness without falling prey to the weakness itself.
She felt Nightshade’s quiet excitement. He, too, was caught by the familiarity of a green that hadn’t been seen for centuries. Maybe it reminded him of youth.

Not of mine,
he replied.
But yes, Kaylin. You asked me a question I did not choose to answer.

Did you understand what had happened to Iberrienne?

No.

Would you have taken the risks you took if you had?

I fail to understand,
he said, after a long pause,
why you waste time and effort asking questions to which you know the answer.

I don’t know, or I wouldn’t ask.

You don’t wish to know, Kaylin. You assume the Barrani are all alike—why, given the variance in human behavior, I do not know. We are not mortal. It is immortality that defines us when we leave our youth. Mortality defines you. You never leave your youth.

We do.

No, Kaylin, you do not. You have decades in which to live with the decisions you have made; decades in which to work to keep love and loyalty alive. You change
because
you age; you choose different lives. You are not bound, in all ways, by the past; you come from it, it informs you, but it does not imprison you.

You do not understand the ways in which we are always caged. It is not just the matter of a name—although you have seen the extents to which some of my people will attempt to escape even that weakness.

She had.

This was not an example of that, not directly. The twelve had barely discovered the joy of the bonds one can make with true names.

Those aren’t generally considered joyful,
Kaylin replied.

Not by the wise, no. But the wise do not consider love or sentiment a joy, either. They are weary, Kaylin. They have seen the failure of too much.

She frowned.
If you’re unchanging—if we’re defined by change, and you’re not...

Yes?

...isn’t your love unchanging? Doesn’t it last
longer?

He offered her an arm, and after a moment’s hesitation, she accepted it.
It is a weakness,
he said.
You have heard that; it is true. What we love, we love forever; what we love we fear to lose. We are held hostage by affection. No;
affection
is too slight a word, although it is the one most commonly offered, where love exists. The joy, we remember, but the pain of loss lasts as long, and, as with mortals, as with all who feel emotion, we come to doubt that the joy was worth the pain.

We do not always love our kin. It is not wise. We are often placed in situations in which we must disavow—or kill—them. You despise this.

She often did.

But it is irrelevant. You define us by the politics. If we had that strength, we would define ourselves the same way.

You do.

No, Kaylin, we do not. It is the politics we are willing to share. Come; we are almost there.

Where?

The heart of the green. The true heart. I do not know what you will see. I do not know what is waiting. I have hope,
he added softly.

And is that hope worth it?

I do not know. Ask me in a century. Or two.

She glared at the side of his face, and he surprised her. He laughed out loud, the sound just as rich, just as deep, as Lirienne’s.

Judging from the expression on Ynpharion’s face, it had surprised him, too—but Iberrienne’s smile was just as wide as Nightshade’s, and just as excited. He wasn’t skipping—that would have been enough to assure Kaylin she was dreaming—but he was practically beaming. She’d worked alongside the Barrani for almost eight years, and she’d never seen anything like it.

It broke her heart.

Don’t see them as children,
Severn warned her.

I don’t.

But...she almost did. She could see the youth in them; it seemed so fragile, it made her want to hold her breath. Hope was pain. She knew that. But for moments at a time, before it broke, it was joy.

And it was with joy that they walked this path, in something that seemed almost like a city garden, and came, at last, to the heart of the green.

* * *

Kaylin recognized the two trees that stood there, although they had almost nothing in common with the two husks she’d seen; they were taller, fuller; they were in blossom, and in this case, blossom meant flowers. The flowers were a delicate shade of pink at the edge; the hearts implied something darker and brighter. Petals were strewn, almost artistically, across the grass in the shade beneath their bowers.

But she was certain they were the trees she and Teela had touched when they’d arrived in a barren, desert version of this place.

It was the fountain that caught her attention; there was—no surprise—water in its basin. The water, however, was not clear. She almost stumbled, but Severn slid an arm around her shoulders, because—of course—he’d seen what she’d seen, and seen it first.

The basin was full of not water, but blood.

Chapter 25

The blood set a different tone. The Lord of the West March lifted a hand in warning, and they stopped; only the Warden ignored his subvocal command. Only the Warden had that right. He walked to the fountain’s basin and stopped there; he didn’t touch the water. Kaylin thought he was making certain that nothing from the fountain reached the ground itself, and given the various warnings she’d been given, that made sense.

But she approached the fountain, as well, once Lirienne had lowered his hand. So did the Consort. “Be cautious,” the Consort said quietly.

Kaylin nodded. She didn’t attempt to touch the liquid in the basin, but she examined it more closely. At length, she turned to the Barrani. “It’s not blood,” she told them. “I mean, there’s blood
in
it, but the water is here.”

“You are certain?”

“You can hear the green. You,” she said softly to the Consort, “can hear the shadows. I can hear the water.” She could. Its voice was so quiet it might have been easy to miss it, but it was here.

The only thing missing was Teela.

No, she thought. Not the only thing. She turned to look down the path that had led them here, but wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t find it. Sometimes, there was no way back. She couldn’t see the dragon. She couldn’t hear him.

She started to ask, but stopped when the Lord of the West March came to stand beside her. He didn’t look at the fountain. He didn’t look at Kaylin. Instead, he began to speak. She glanced at his face, and saw his eyes: they were midnight-blue. Which made sense because she didn’t recognize the voice he spoke with, and she didn’t recognize the words he spoke, either.

No,
Nightshade said. He didn’t approach Lirienne; instead, he walked to the base of one of the trees, just as Teela had done only the day before.
It is time, Kaylin.

But—but nothing’s been said, there’s been no...

It is time. Can you not hear him?

She could. She couldn’t understand a word. She glanced at the Consort; the Consort’s eyes were now the color of her brother’s, although she spared Kaylin one sharp glance which clearly said “Move your butt.” But minus the vulgarity.

Kaylin made her way to the same tree she’d stood beside. Or at least a tree that stood in the same relative position. She lifted a hand to touch its bark, but noticed that Nightshade hadn’t.

She’d never been clear on the role the Lord of the West March was supposed to play. She didn’t understand the difference between his role and the role of the Teller; couldn’t understand why the green needed two. Until she heard Lirienne’s voice.

It was not, in any way, his voice. It wasn’t Barrani. It was storm’s voice. It was, she thought, the voice of the green—but channeled into sound by the form that momentarily contained it. She couldn’t understand a single word of it. She wondered if it always came through like this.

She had expected that the
regalia
would be like the stories told by Sanabalis and the Arkon in the tongue of the Ancients. She’d secretly expected to see words form, the way they had when she’d first heard the story of the birth of the Leontines. But Lirienne’s voice was not Sanabalis’s.

It was storm without form, without cloud, without lightning or rain.

Yes,
Nightshade said.

Can you understand a single word he’s saying?

He didn’t answer. She looked across the red, red water of the fountain, and met his gaze; above his eyes, the gem in the center of the Teller’s crown was radiating light. She hoped it wasn’t radiating heat in equal measure.

Her own dress—the magical, revered blood of the green—was glowing with iridescent light; she wasn’t even surprised when the light separated from the cloth and grew. It reminded her of night sky on very rare evenings. But it changed the shape of the circle built around the fountain; it changed the color of a landscape that was, finally, green.

She heard Lirienne’s voice. She touched his thoughts briefly and shied away; they were so discordant, they clashed with the syllables leaving his mouth in a steady stream of thunder. Nightshade’s were less chaotic, but no easier to untangle; she stopped trying when he, too, began to speak.

She understood what Nightshade was saying, or rather, she understood the words: he was speaking in Elantran. It was just Elantran that made no sense. Individual words were clear as a bell, but they didn’t seem to go anywhere; they weren’t grouped in a way that implied sentences, or even muddled thoughts. He could have read a dictionary with just as much effect, except there at least the words would have
some
hierarchical order.

She listened. She listened, trying to pick out individual words, aware that her role as harmoniste was, in theory, to shape story, to build a coherent narrative from the strands offered her by the Teller. She didn’t even recognize the words as strands of different stories; perhaps they were. Perhaps they were coming in all at once and Nightshade was able to parse single words as they passed by; perhaps he could see sequences and had no other way of containing them.

It wasn’t going to help her. She wore a funny dress. She had thought the dress would give her some sort of power, some built-in influence, that would at least make the job possible. At the moment, it wasn’t. Her visible marks, however, were glowing a bright, bright silver. Without thought, she removed the jacket Lirienne had given her, and dropped it by her feet.

She was surprised when the jacket touched the stone at her feet and disappeared, fading from view as if being worn had provided the only anchor for its substance. She looked away from Nightshade, and saw that Lirienne still occupied the space directly between them. She couldn’t see anyone else.

We’re here,
Severn said. It was the first time she’d been able to hear anyone when the green had decided to relocate her.
We can see you.
He paused, and then added,
Don’t forget to breathe.

She closed her eyes. Nightshade’s voice became clearer, but the mishmash of random words didn’t make more sense.
Think. Think, Kaylin.
She didn’t worry about Lirienne; he was Nightshade’s problem. Nightshade was somehow pulling strands of related story from the flow of the green’s words. She wanted to know how, but knew it didn’t matter.

She was supposed to make sense of what Nightshade
said.
To somehow choose the words that would give form and shape to the green’s story. To scratch the surface of it, somehow, while still presenting as much of it as humanly possible. She blinked. She let go of Nightshade’s voice for a moment as she considered this.

The transformed, the lost, the elementals—they existed in spaces that the living couldn’t. They probably had stories of their own—stories that made no sense to anyone else. Certainly not Kaylin or the Barrani. Their worlds overlapped, but a person who could live in ten places simultaneously was not telling a story that someone who could live only in one could understand.

But the people gathered here, in the heart of the green, were living. They were solid. They had forms that didn’t change at whim. They needed food, air, water; some of them needed sleep. They could see the world they lived in; they couldn’t simultaneously see the outlands and whatever else existed for the Hallionne.

The recitation was a story—a communication from something that was not living, not in the way people lived. It encompassed what the green knew. She thought that what Nightshade was drawing from it was what the living
could
know. She heard it in Elantran because it was her mother tongue.

She understood, as Nightshade continued to speak, that she was the end-point. What she said, what she managed to capture, what she managed to convey, was meant to be heard by those who bore witness. She didn’t understand how that was meant to change people, to nudge their names, to shift their perceptions. And it didn’t matter.

The marks on her arm, silver and bright, began to pulse.

She listened. She listened as if her life depended on it. She tried to pull sense from words, tried to find sentences, bits of thought, even of intent, as Nightshade spoke. He wasn’t shouting, but his tone wasn’t measured; the beats of the same words differed, sometimes in emphasis, sometimes in intensity.

The light from the dress slowly spread. The light from the gem in the Teller’s tiara spread, as well. Nightshade and Kaylin stood beneath the bowers of two trees, at the center of a growing radiance. The two spheres—for it seemed to Kaylin that the light now traveled in spheres—met at the Lord of the West March.

It was light, multihued, and bright; it wasn’t solid.

But where it touched, it shattered.

* * *

She felt the impact and staggered; shards and splinters flew out from the point of collision, and she lifted her arms to protect her eyes. They struck those arms, and she felt a visceral panic as they pierced skin; they hurt. She was not allowed to bleed on the green.

But when she lowered her stinging arms, she saw that they hadn’t been cut. Her marks, the marks that defined her as Chosen, were glowing more brightly—but there were no wounds. She looked across to Nightshade, but her eyes didn’t make it that far.

She could see the Lord of the West March, but there were now three of him; they stood in the same spot, almost in the same pose, but they overlapped. And at their back, the fountain had shifted, as well. At its center, suspended above the basin as if she were essential sculpture, was Teela.

* * *

Her eyes were closed. Her skin was paler than usual. Her arms were raised, palms splayed flat above her head, as if she were holding up the sky. Her mouth was moving, but at this distance, Kaylin couldn’t hear her words; they were drowned out by Lirienne’s and Nightshade’s. Nightshade’s had shifted; she could now hear streams of sentences, overlapping each other, as if he spoke simultaneously from several mouths.

She tried to listen; she had eyes for Teela, and only Teela. She wanted to know what Teela was trying to say. She wanted to run from the lee of the tree and climb up the basin to get the Barrani Hawk down. She didn’t. She started to move and she heard—to her surprise—the rumbling roar of angry dragon.

His voice overwhelmed all other voices. Even her own.

Teela’s eyes snapped open, her lips still moving, her arms bending slightly as if the sky had gained weight.

Kaylin left the tree. Her dress did not stop glowing; neither did her marks. She headed straight for Teela and stopped only when the dragon roared again. She could see his shadow across the whole of the fountain and the trees; she looked up as he descended.

The descent was lazy, desultory; his wings were spread in a glide. But she could no longer see sky through them. She couldn’t, she realized, see them as wings at all; their edges were fraying, like the edges of old pants.

His voice, she recognized; it shook the earth beneath her feet.

Teela’s eyes widened; she lifted her face to look up at the underside of the dragon. She lowered her face, her eyes rounder; they narrowed as if she had only now become aware of where she was.

Of, Kaylin realized,
one
of the places in which she was standing. “Teela!”

Teela’s head snapped around so quickly, she’d have whiplash. Her eyes widened. Predictably enough, she looked unhappy to see Kaylin. “What are you
doing here?
”

There was only one answer to that question; the problem was that Kaylin
wasn’t
doing the job. She was here as harmoniste. She was here to untangle the bits and pieces of story that Nightshade was now throwing, in discordant harmony with himself, in her direction.

And she knew, looking at the Barrani Hawk she thought of as family—privately, where it wouldn’t offend Teela with sentimentality—that Teela was at the heart of the story, somehow. But...it began before her birth. It began before the birth of the Hallionne. It began when the Ancients walked, and possibly before they did; it began with silence.

She could hear that silence now, although words were wound around it. Nightshade’s voice became clearer, stronger; she couldn’t sense him in any other way.

“Kitling, go
back.
”

Kaylin shook her head and lifted a hand to stall Teela’s lecture. Teela was afraid—for her. The fear felt like a little bit of home. And that was the point, wasn’t it? Kaylin built as much of a home as she could for herself, time and again, and losing any part of it was like losing peace and the hope of safety. What Teela wanted didn’t—hadn’t—mattered. Kaylin had always assumed that they wanted the same things. They were both Hawks. They were both
good
at their jobs.

But they weren’t the same people; they weren’t even the same race. There were things Kaylin had done that she’d never shared with Teela; she’d never shared them with anyone, except perhaps Tara, and that, by accident. And there were things that Teela had done that she’d never shared, either, and maybe for the same reason.

“Teela,” Kaylin said, distinctly, “I love you.”

Teela looked as though she was about to hurl a volley of angry Leontine, and Kaylin turned as the dragon finally landed.

* * *

He was not a dragon now. He was not small. She couldn’t even understand
how
he’d landed, because there wasn’t enough room in this small, fountain-dominated clearing to support him. He didn’t crush the Lord of the West March; nor did he crush Nightshade. Kaylin, however, found the lack of light and air problematic.

He had, she thought, no face. But he had eyes, and they were the same as they’d always been, writ large. Writ impressively large. Large enough that she should have been able to see her reflection in them. What she saw, instead, was something that looked like words.

He turned his gaze on Nightshade; Nightshade didn’t seem to be aware of his presence, but Teela was. Kaylin didn’t understand what the creature who was no longer dragon wanted from Nightshade until she realized that she could no longer hear all of the threads of the story he’d been speaking.