Michelle Sagara (32 page)

Her eyes rounded. “No!”

She heard his voice, his rumbling response; it was no longer a roar. She thought it almost—almost—contained words, but they weren’t words she would ever be able to understand. In a panic she shoved her arms in front of his eyes, which now seemed to exist without sockets. If he understood what she was offering—if she did—he paid no attention, and none of the marks—not a single damn one—rose to feed itself to him.

He was going to eat the stories.

He was going to devour them, and leave her with no way of telling what needed to be told. And she knew that if he did, she would never save Teela. She understood that the green was in danger, that Alsanis was all but exhausted, that the lost children were a threat to their former people—and she didn’t care.

What she cared about was Teela.

Think, Kaylin.
She reached past the creature, although it was difficult as he appeared to be wrapped around her like a gigantic, uncomfortably heavy blanket with eyes. She reached and she began to choose. Not the silence, although that was a story of its own. That one, she could give to the creature.

Not the Ancients. No, wait—one small strand of their story was sharper and heavier than any other strand appeared to be. She drew it into her hands and wrapped it around her arms, as if the spoken word and the marks could be held in the exact same way. But the rest, she fed to the creature.

It was hard. She didn’t know what would happen to the pieces of history that she rejected—for she understood them as history now; they were the foundations upon which Teela stood, at least figuratively. She heard Alsanis’s name. She missed some of its beginning, but she understood enough to know that he was built by the Ancients. By two. She couldn’t hear their names, but understood that an echo of them existed in the history itself.

And she heard grief, she heard farewells. She heard the promise of eternity, and the threat of it. She caught those almost reflexively. To the dragon, she fed the story of the forests and the insects and the brooks and streams, shielding Alsanis from his hunger. Shielding the story of his grief. She couldn’t save the story of his brothers; she had no sense of what they had been before Alsanis became Hallionne, because the creature devoured it.

He devoured, as well, the story of the Dragons. The real Dragons. Sanabalis’s people. She panicked and shouted at him, and lost more words; she couldn’t afford it. She knew it. But she felt that she couldn’t move as fast as the creature now could; she couldn’t
see
whether or not something was important. She couldn’t assess it in time.

But she caught bits and pieces of the war. Of the Hallionne at war. Of the green at war. Of the Dragons and the Barrani and the weapons forged in the green. She let the weapons go. She let the wars go. She kept only the bare essentials because the stories of the wars were so long and complicated. She thought maybe they would feed the creature
enough
that he would stop.

Instead, he seemed to grow.

“Kitling—”

“I
know,
Teela!” But not, apparently, enough not to
shut the hells up
and ignore all other distractions.

She looked into the creature’s eyes. She could almost step
into
them, they’d grown so large. She didn’t. She could see the words they contained, now. The words were harder and more angular than the letter shapes she thought of as True Words; they were not golden, not blue. Silver, she thought, or gray, but strangely insubstantial. They looked like—like smoke.

They looked very much like the words that she had seen in the outlands when Iberrienne had attacked Hallionne Orbaranne. The words were not True Words, not in any sense that she understood them. But they weren’t the words that Iberrienne had tried to use at the heart of the Hallionne Orbaranne, either.

She thought she understood.

When she heard Nightshade begin to speak of words, of language, of a language of power and birth, she caught the threads of the story without conscious thought, folding them around herself as if they were now a part of her. Her arms burned, and her eyes teared, and she looked at herself in the creature’s eyes, and saw that the marks on her arms were as insubstantial and smoky in reflection as the words that existed at the heart of what she’d thought were simple, if gigantic, eyes.

And she heard about the blood of the Ancients; she heard about the words around which they’d carved and created the world in which Kaylin now lived. It was one of many such worlds, all contained, all built, on similar words, each of which told a story. They were, Nightshade told her, words meant for these worlds. They existed only here, were meant to exist only here. They defined and created solid spaces—the spaces between two people, the spaces between birth and death, between seed and sapling and tree.

They defined time. They defined its passage.

The creature spoke.

He spoke as Kaylin caught this one thread, and buried it; he pulled at it. She could feel him as if he were a giant, intelligent vortex into which all meaning must vanish.

She didn’t understand his purpose. She didn’t understand why
anyone
would want to summon something that ate words, that consumed meaning. He was here, yes. But this was not where he belonged.

She understood why fire was summoned; she understood water. Even earth and air made sense to her—but they were inextricably linked to this world. Fire, water, earth, and air existed without will in everyday life. There was no echo of the small dragon, the large dragon, or the creature it had become, in Kaylin’s world. What ate words? What devoured meaning?

And yet, somehow, this creature or one part of it, had been summoned before.

Why?

What did it mean?

“Kaylin!”

She didn’t shout. She had, she realized, been gathering strands of history as if they were objects. Those that spoke to her in some way, she kept. She didn’t question why; it was entirely instinctive, but at this moment, she had nothing but instinct to guide her. She wasn’t surprised to discover that the stories about words and language had drifted into stories about life. About birth. About the first rough attempts to create something small and contained that was nonetheless independent enough that it could live and grow and create in a diminished fashion.

There were rules, she thought. Life had rules. Not the ones parents handed down; not even the ones the Emperor did, although flouting those generally ended the life they were meant to govern. The words that gave life—the names—
were
True Words. But they were more. She couldn’t quite figure out how; they didn’t
change.
But they grew, nonetheless. It was the act of living that altered them, in subtle ways strengthening some part of their essential meaning.

It was why the loss of the word—not the life that contained it—was so
wrong.

And those words had been given to the lost children, not when they’d been chosen to enter the green, but when they had been presented to the Consort. At that point, no knowledge of what awaited them in future guided her choice. Kaylin wasn’t certain what did, in the end. Nor was she certain the Consort could explain it, if asked.

Something had happened to the children, here. But...their names hadn’t been changed.

Kaylin glanced at her palm; the mark that lay against it was the color of new blood, which was not a color she associated with True Words. It was the color she associated with life, with birth, and with pain. She had kept it, and knew now that it was one of eleven such names. It existed in the green, and only in the green—but it didn’t belong here.

Why had it been protected all this time?

The stories about life drifted into stories about being, becoming, and ending. She didn’t understand that endings meant death until she found the story trapped at the heart of the green, and she lost so much of it to the creature that had ridden on her shoulder for most of his existence.

There were no stories about him that she could hear or touch; she kind of wanted him to choke on them, at the moment. But she concentrated on the stories about death at the heart of the green; death at its edges were part of war, and although they might have hinted at something important, she couldn’t afford to hang on to them. She could keep hold of so little, between the creature and the speed at which the information was offered.

She held on to the deaths at its heart; she did more. She spoke of them. Aside from shouting at Teela in frustration—and in fear—they were the first words she had deliberately spoken out loud.

* * *

The green was alive in some sense; it was sentient. It spoke. It felt—as ages passed—sorrow and inexplicable grief, and it felt joy in equal measure. But it was not alive in the way the Hallionne were; it was not alive in the way the Barrani were. It existed where worlds existed, but it existed apart from them. She didn’t speak of its birth because if its birth was part of the multitude of histories that left Nightshade’s lips, she hadn’t rescued it in time.

It was like—and unlike—the True Names that gave the Barrani life. The words at the heart of the green were not words meant for the living; they could not exist in Kaylin’s world. The words that gave life to the Barrani were words it could read; it could see them so clearly, it defined life
by
words. Mortals made distant sense to the Hallionne; they made sense to the green only the way cockroaches, mosquitos, and plants did.

Blood was not forbidden the green: death was.

And death was forbidden the green because the words of the dying could not escape its grasp. They weren’t meant to be part of the green; the green was
not
of this world. And yet, not of it, it was part of it. It touched and spoke with the Hallionne, who were altered in just such a way that they could hear its ancient, endless voice, its plethora of voices. It heard the Hallionne’s voice, its many voices. It heard the Hallionne’s dreams.

And it heard the voices of the Barrani during the recitation. A window was open, then; a moment permitted in which the two—the lesser, fragile, fixed children of the Ancients, and the greater and eldest—might communicate. It might tell the Barrani their history. With will, and the right combination of Barrani, it might speak to the Barrani of its
own
history; it might give them a glimpse of the things that did not naturally walk the world. It might speak of its desires and its dreams and—last—its fears.

Kaylin understood these things only as a mortal might, although Nightshade spoke of dreams and desires and fears, and she fed those, her hands shaking, to the creature.

When the Barrani died in the heart of the green, when they shed their blood upon it, they surrendered the thing that gave them life: their name. Kaylin felt horror at this—it was a profound, an endless, loss. Mortals believed in souls. The Barrani believed in names. Teela often equated the two—souls and True Names.

The Barrani lost their souls here. They weren’t trapped, as they were in the High Halls; they were drained of the very thing that made them
names.
She closed her eyes. Opened them again. She couldn’t see the Consort’s face, and for once, she was grateful. She knew what she’d see in the Lady’s expression.

But the power that the name gave the Barrani conferred the ability to speak directly to the green. It made their desires—their final desires—as clear to the green as the green’s own desires were, because for a moment, before they were extinguished, they
were
part of the green.

Those wishes, those desires—they couldn’t be coerced; they couldn’t be changed.

The people of the Vale had died in the green. They’d died by order of Teela’s father. His name flitted past, and she let it go with vindictive fury, hating him for just this minute. They didn’t understand what their lost thoughts would do. They didn’t understand what their hatred and, yes, fear, would cost the green.

No, that wasn’t true. One woman did. One woman. Teela’s mother. She was Vivienne, of the line of Wardens and Guardians. She knew. She emptied her thoughts of rage and fury and bitter betrayal. The only thing she wanted, the only thing, was the safety of her daughter. The fact that her daughter bore the blood of the man who commanded the killings meant nothing to her.

She regretted only the fact that she had repaired to the High Court, away from kin and home and green; that her daughter, Teela, had not been raised to hear the distant voice of the green and to understand its ancient and abiding will.

Maybe Kaylin told this story first because it was about Teela. Maybe she told it because she, too, had lost her mother, and she wanted to believe—oh, all children wanted to believe—that
if
she were to be abandoned, it would be for reasons as perfect and clear as this one.

And maybe she told it because, as she began to speak, she could
see
Vivienne in the heart of the green.

Chapter 26

Kaylin wasn’t Teela. Vivienne was not her mother. But she was certain that she would have known this woman anywhere. She looked like Teela. Not in the way that all Barrani women, except the Consort, did, although she had all the racial characteristics of her race: the long, dark hair, the slender build, the high cheekbones, and, at this moment, eyes of midnight-blue. No, it was in the shape of her face, the length of earlobes, the way her chin tapered to a sharper point.

If Teela had been run through by multiple blades, she would have looked like this.

Her eyes were on her daughter’s face.

Teela had climbed down from the fountain, somehow. Whatever she’d been holding at bay was forgotten. Her mother knelt by the fountain, and in the distance, Kaylin could hear the shouts and the cries of fighting; she could hear swords against swords, and harsh Barrani orders.

She could hear the prayers of the Warden. She hadn’t expected that; she couldn’t see him. Nor could she see the other combatants; not until they fell. Their dying bodies came into view as they did; they were close, so close, to Vivienne.

Kaylin reached for Teela, and then let her hand fall. She couldn’t call her back; she couldn’t stem the flow of words because she understood that it was her words that had built this image, that had made this history real.

And as Teela walked onto the green—a green that contained no Warden, no Ynpharion, no Severn—they joined her. Kaylin watched as they appeared, translucent at first, but gaining in solidity as she spoke. The eleven children. Some of their names, she knew. Some, she hadn’t heard until this moment.

Sedarias came first. She looked so proud, so aloof, so arrogant. She glanced at the bodies of the dead and the dying without so much as blinking; she stood above them all. But when she looked at Teela, she froze for one arrested moment, her eyes—her blue, cold eyes, shifting in that second to a very rare amethyst. Like Kaylin, she lifted a hand; like Kaylin, she let it drop.

But she turned to Kaylin, her eyes wide, her lips parted as if to speak. Then she smiled and turned away. It was a very Barrani smile.

Annarion came next, seconds behind. He was much like Sedarias—cold and proud of bearing. But what she would not do, he did; he saw the dying Vivienne, and his gaze went immediately to her daughter. He walked over the fallen, pausing only once to touch the side of a man’s neck before he rose again and made his way to Teela’s side.

Eddorian followed. His eyes were almost instantly the same shade of purple that Sedarias’s had taken, but on his face, with his drawn expression, it looked natural. He didn’t approach Teela; to Kaylin’s surprise, he offered Sedarias—a woman who almost certainly would take insult at the implication that she needed support—an arm. And she
took
it.

Allaron followed. He was, as she remembered him, a giant of a Barrani, and although he had the natural grace of his kin, he seemed to slouch a bit more; he had always been self-conscious about his size; he had always been pushed to excel in acts of physical prowess.

And he had. But significantly, it was Allaron who cried. He didn’t weep; Kaylin had never seen Barrani weep. His eyes were an open amethyst. A Barrani man put a hand on Allaron’s shoulder, and Allaron turned, looking down; he met the eyes of Valliant—who, like any mortal child of Kaylin’s acquaintance, loathed his name. Allaron was one of the few, even among the twelve, who failed to tease him for it.

Terrano, however, had teased him without hesitation. He was mischievous, but he could laugh at himself—which was unusual for a child, and even more unusual for Barrani. He came to Allaron’s left. There was no sparkle, no joke, no witticism; he was drawn and pale. He wanted to go to Teela. He couldn’t.

Not counting Teela, six of the lost had arrived. The seventh was a woman, called Serralyn. She wore her hair in unusual braids that framed her face and made her look older. Had she been motionless, her expression would have matched Sedarias’s; she wasn’t. Even standing, her hands moved; her feet tapped the ground. She looked as if she could burst into motion at any moment.

At this one, she was looking at Teela’s profile, at Teela’s dying mother, and hugging her arms to herself; she opened her mouth to speak, closed it, took two steps forward, and then a step back. Kaylin felt a pang of sympathy: no one who wanted all their teeth offered Teela open sympathy. Ever.

But...Serralyn had known Teela before she’d become a Hawk. Maybe, in the old days, she’d been different. Judging from Serralyn’s growing distress, probably not.

Torrisant appeared—and the first thing he did was straighten his clothing, which, to Kaylin’s eye, was already perfect. He lifted a hand, raising two flat fingers, and a bird—a bird that had been no part of Kaylin’s conscious telling—landed on them, warbling.

Fallessian appeared just in time to kick him; the bird squawked in outrage and flew, tiny claws extended, toward Fallessian’s perfect face. He laughed and fended it off with his hand—taking care not to actually connect with the little ball of fury. He didn’t speak—none of them had—but the look he turned on Torrisant clearly said, “Now is not the time.”

The tenth of the children appeared then, eleven if one included Teela. He looked no younger than any of the rest; to Kaylin, even now,
children
was the wrong word to describe them. But Karian was grimmer and more controlled than any of the others except Sedarias; he didn’t have the obvious arrogance of the young Annarion, but there was something about him that suggested, strongly, that his arrogance was a wall that couldn’t be breached, climbed, or otherwise opened.

He walked, with purpose, toward Teela.

No, Kaylin thought, toward her mother. But he paused, a frown creasing his forehead, not his lips. He turned to Sedarias and Annarion, and then, when they failed to give him the answers he had pretty clearly demanded, turned to the green, to the clearing, and...to Kaylin.

To the harmoniste.

There were eleven children; Teela was at the center. Kaylin knew their names. She knew their personalities. She knew some of their history, although the creature had devoured their edges because she wasn’t quick enough or strong enough to see the whole of their shape and importance before they had passed her by.

She knew that the twelfth had not yet arrived. Some part of her knew that this was history, and some part of her knew that it was more. Regardless, Mandoran had failed to arrive in the heart of the green—and they were waiting for him. Just as, she realized, they had waited so many centuries for Teela.

Her arms were shaking; she felt, as she lifted them, that she’d spent the afternoon doing nothing but heavy lifting with no breaks, although she didn’t realize it until she lifted her left hand. She opened her palm. The rune in its center was Mandoran’s name. Teela had said as much in some other country, at some other time.

Bloodred, wet, it had the shape and the texture of a True Word. She held it now. She had taken it to protect it. She had taken it to preserve it. But while she held it, Mandoran couldn’t join the rest. She looked at the name. Mandoran’s thread, Mandoran’s history, was part of the tapestry three people were weaving, and if she couldn’t find his thread, her part would falter. She wasn’t certain what would happen then.

Maybe nothing. Maybe the eleven would vanish and the telling would end and Teela would be Teela and safe. She could stay away from the West March. She could refuse to come back here. She could remain in Elantra, with the Hawks, in the shadow of the High Halls.

But she’d done all that. She’d done all that, and in the end, this is where she was trapped. Nothing had changed, for Teela. Maybe nothing could.

Teela said that she had tried, when she had been chosen as harmoniste. She hadn’t told Kaylin
what
she’d attempted. But Kaylin was certain that the lost were involved, somehow. Teela had known that they weren’t dead because she knew their names; they were part of her. She was part of them.

She had never offered Kaylin the same friendship or the same opportunity.

The creature roared. His eyes were now half the size of Kaylin’s body, and it took her a moment to realize that while he wasn’t translucent she was seeing past him anyway, which should have been impossible. Just what was she seeing?

She lifted her hand, opened her palm; she turned it out, toward the eleven who now waited. The only person present who didn’t turn to look at her was Teela. Teela had eyes only for her mother. She knelt in front of the dying woman. Even as a child, she’d known death when confronted with it.

So had Kaylin.

But this death was eternal, it was endless. This was the death that Teela saw every time she thought about her mother. It was this clear for her, this real, this solid. Everything else that had happened surrounding the death was part of it, wed to it, tied to it.

But...Mandoran’s name was
not
a name, not quite. It was the slender remnant of something that seemed so thin it would no longer support life. It held form, but not a substance that could return to, or come from, the Lake of Life. The marks on Kaylin’s arms were a brilliant, brilliant white; they burned.

She was used to this. It was a familiar enough pain that it was almost a comfort. It didn’t involve helplessness; it didn’t involve cowardice. It wasn’t about death and the endless silence that followed it. It was just—heat. A little like burning. But it was a pain that sometimes conferred power.

Today, she took it in both hands. She understood what the name she had saved lacked, even if she could never put it into words. The thought made her smile because putting power into words was exactly what she intended to do. It was, she realized, like healing. Very like healing. The name knew its exact form and shape; it was injured, yes, but it retained enough of itself that she could press it between her palms and feel what it now lacked.

She began to heal it, palms pressed flat against each other. As she did, her palms warmed; the heat from the name was entirely unlike the heat that permeated the rest of her skin. The creature’s great eyes—and it seemed to be
all
eyes, now—looked at her hands with interest. She tightened her grip.
No. This is
not
for you.

He roared, but she’d pretty much had enough; she roared
back.

Around them, history passed in streams; he had momentarily forgotten to, oh, eat them. Kaylin, on the other hand, had forgotten to catch them and bind them. But this was what her life was like: moments of intense focus, and moments of reaction. It had a beat and a rhythm that she both despised and accepted.

Hands cupped around Mandoran’s name, she released it. And it hung in the air, emerging from the flat of her palm in a pale, pale gold that had dimension. It wasn’t large, or at least it didn’t start out that way; it couldn’t have, confined to her palm. But she held the creature back, somehow, and she watched as it drifted, at last, into the green.

The other ten had appeared on their own, first as ghostly images of themselves—as real as the glass statues in the Hallionne’s nightmares. But they had taken on form and substance and color, becoming as real as Teela while Kaylin watched. Mandoran did not do that. The name, his name, drifted toward them, as if it were part of an ancient tale, rendered in dragon voice.

They saw his name. Their eyes took on the gold of the name itself. They were silent, arrested; even Teela turned her head to see what had caught their attention, although no one even attempted to speak. Her eyes widened, as well, becoming, in that instant, as gold as the eyes of the people she had trusted and loved so much she had gifted them with knowledge of her name.

Mandoran coalesced
around
his name as Teela rose. She
stumbled.
She stumbled and she opened her lips on a name that Kaylin couldn’t hear, but nonetheless knew. And then she looked at Kaylin.

At Kaylin, who was standing beneath a tree, the long skirts of the dress she’d worn for weeks now seeping—literally seeping—into the ground beneath her feet. Teela’s eyes went from gold to green to blue in such rapid succession they seemed to be all of these colors, and none of them. And then she turned back to her mother, but this time, she ran. The stiff distance, the immobility of grief and knowledge, seemed to have deserted her entirely.

Or maybe, Kaylin thought, it was Mandoran’s presence. He was the twelfth, here. They were complete. She could
be
the Teela she’d been the day her mother had tried to rescue her daughter. She could leave centuries of experience and wariness behind. She caught her mother in her arms.

And this time, Kaylin thought, there was no father, no High Court. Maybe this was a better story.

The creature’s eyes were now as tall as Kaylin, and in them, she could see a stream of words, of language, that was in all ways too complicated, too big, too
other
for her. True Words sometimes made her feel small and insignificant, but not in the same way. She heard Nightshade’s words, and she gathered them, but even as she did, she looked at the stories held in the eyes of something so large it might have devoured whole worlds—for she couldn’t see a body at all; she might have been an insect standing on the bridge of a nose so vast she couldn’t conceive of it as anything but land and sky.

On the day the twelve had come to the green it had been sunny. Clear. The trees had whispered and the Barrani had heard their ancient voices and considered themselves blessed. But it wasn’t a blessing; it was a warning. Not a threat—there was no menace in it, but there was sorrow. Grief. Loss.

On the day that the green had chosen to speak to the gathered and expectant members of the High Court, it had not spoken of power. She understood that it had
never
knowingly spoken of power. Instead, it spoke of loss. It spoke with the voice of Alsanis because it heard what Alsanis did not say; it struggled to understand what it heard. It spoke with the voice of Orbaranne, and the voice of Bertolle; it spoke with the voice of Kariastos. These were part of the green and yet separate from it; they heard the thoughts and the will of green and they interpreted it for those who came to seek their shelter.