Michelle Sagara (33 page)

It spoke of their weeping. It spoke of their pain. It spoke of the need they denied. They had made their choice. They had chosen one desire over another. They had locked themselves into the existence of the Hallionne, and they had done so
gladly.
But the sorrow had grown in their voices, and the joy of making the right decision—if there was ever any such thing—was only barely enough to sustain them. They chose to sleep.

Sleeping, they controlled far less of their voices; when they dreamed, they were closest to the green. And so the green heard. It heard, but it didn’t understand.

On that single day, when all such speech, no matter how difficult, was allowed, the green spoke to the Barrani of the West March because the Barrani might understand what the green itself did not: loneliness. Abandonment. Grief. Love.

On the day Teela and her companions had come to the green, these were the heart of its story. And on that day, Teela’s mother had died. The lost, the other eleven, then understood that they faced danger, death—or worse—and that they were
meant
to face it. They had been given to the High Court to be forged, as all significant weapons were, in the heart of the green; if, like poorly tempered blades, they shattered, it signified
only
failure.

They were children, at heart.

Maybe, Kaylin thought, as tears fell unhindered down her cheeks, people were
always
children at heart. What the green asked, they
heard.
They felt it
all.
It was so much in tune with who and what they were, they had nothing to temper it with. They had no way of resisting. The green, for that moment, was
of
them,
like
them. There was no home and no safety for them in any other place...so they clung to the green, and when the story was done, they held on as tightly as the living possibly could.

Kaylin doubted a mortal could have done it; there was nothing with which to anchor themselves to the green.

They found freedom in Alsanis. They found freedom in the green. But not love, not from the green; it wasn’t living. It wasn’t a person. If it moved, it moved slowly; if it changed, if it gathered knowledge, it was slow, as well.

Only Teela had been left behind. Teela had heard the green’s story, and she had felt its resonance as strongly as her kin. She felt the loss, the shock of it, and the echoes, and the certain sense of its eternity, more strongly. She understood—she’d understood it then—what it meant for the people whose lives and names she had shared.

Only Teela was left behind.

Only Teela.

The green had devoted the whole of its power to protecting Teela from itself. In exchange for the life, for the
word,
at the heart of her mother. But Teela’s name was connected to the names of the other eleven. They formed a bond, yes; they also formed a chain.

If they had not trusted each other with so much hope, and so much youthful optimism, the eleven would have vanished into the green and the things that lay beyond it. They couldn’t. Because they lived and the words lived, and the bindings, so tenuous, held them. They were aware of Teela. And Teela? Was aware of them.

And they had waited. They had searched. They had troubled the green and the Hallionne. They understood that the world was made of words. That the living were. That everything that they had ever touched or shaken or destroyed had come from the words of the Ancients. But in all those words, in the ones they could touch and the ones they only barely infer, they couldn’t find the words they needed to free Teela. To bring her...home.

They never stopped trying.

It was Eddorian who suggested their final solution. It was Eddorian who pointed out that entire
worlds
had been created from nothing, as laboratories for the Ancients, those absent creators who, like any neglectful parents, had spawned and moved on. If worlds could be created, if words that distilled the essence of love and hate, war and peace, birth and death, could define the fates of whole races, the words themselves had power.

They only needed to
find
the words that would allow them to re-create one small, isolated event in the past. They needed to save Teela’s mother’s life. The rest were inconsequential. If Teela’s mother did not die in the green, Teela would not now be trapped and unreachable. Teela would, as the rest of them, finally be allowed to leave. She would be with them.

But...they had a Barrani understanding of power. They understood that the Hallionne had almost unlimited power within a small, focal point, and they had attempted to unmake Orbaranne in order to gain that for themselves. They wanted to change
one
small event. One small event, one minute, one hour in
one life.

The green did not want Orbaranne’s death. No more did it wish to lose Alsanis, and strangely enough, the eleven didn’t wish to lose him, either. He was their cage, yes, but he was also the only home they had. They had grown into their confinement; they had played in the limitless possibilities of the space he governed; they had rested at his heart.

And yet, without power, they would never have Teela back.

They needed new words. They needed new possibilities. They needed, they realized, to destroy the green. It was the only other option available.

Kaylin shook her head. She walked away from the tree, the eyes of the creature following her. They were larger now; they were taller than Kaylin. They no longer looked like eyes to her, they were so large.

“Yes,” Mandoran said, which surprised her. “We tried. We tried to summon a familiar. We failed. We tried again, and we failed.”

Kaylin blinked. She felt—she heard—history continuing to unfold around her and she let it go now. She heard the green’s voice, the green’s incomprehensible voice, and she knew that today, the story the green told was the continuation of that earlier story. But now, the green understood a little bit more.

“And now, you have brought yours. Teela knows you,” he continued, looking slightly surprised.

“What—what is a familiar?”

He smiled. It wasn’t a friendly expression; it was full of the usual Barrani condescension. “Do you not understand, yet? Look at him, Chosen. He shows you
all
that he is now.”

She’d been looking; it was hard not to. She could see the words coiled in him, and they were words without end. They
weren’t
True Words. But they were words that had movement and strength and depth; they had shape and form. They were made of shadow and smoke and the type of light that strikes from a distance, like the light on forest floor.

“Do you understand?”

And the sad thing was, she did. In the familiar, in the small dragon, in whatever the small dragon was part of, she saw the words he contained. Some of them were words that felt familiar, shadows of True Words. Shadows of names. Some were words she was certain she would never see in life. And all of them were waiting.

All of them. If she spoke these words, if she asked the familiar to speak them, they would be
almost
true. Even thinking it, she saw the light ripple and change; she saw iridescence give way, at last, to gold.

And she understood
why
sorcerers of legend had risked entire worlds to summon such a creature. Because those sorcerers could speak the emerging words. They could, for a moment, be gods, be Ancients. They could change the course of history. They could remake a world. Nothing was beyond them because in the space the familiar occupied, that he was part of, all things were possible. All words were true.

All words could be true.

She lost the thread of the story then.

Because
all things were possible.
Because
history could be changed.
Because if she had the familiar and his power, Jade and Steffi would never need to die. They would never
have to
die. She could rewrite it all: her mother’s death. Or Steffi’s and Jade’s. Severn’s choice. Everything. She could remake the fief of Nightshade. She could remake the fiefs entirely. She could change the world so that the pain she’d suffered need never be suffered again.

And even thinking it, words emerged, as strong, as golden, as names in the Lake of Life.

She turned to Mandoran, and was surprised to get a faceful of Teela instead.

That, and two hands, one on either shoulder, and a lot of teeth-rattling. Teela was blue-eyed and angry. She was not the child who had come to the green to be blessed and empowered. She was the Hawk. She was the Hawk, except there were tears on her cheeks and her lips were trembling.

She had never come so close to striking Kaylin.

Kaylin didn’t know Teela’s name. Teela had never trusted her with it, not the way she’d trusted the eleven. But she knew that Teela wanted what they wanted: in the end, she wanted to be free. In the end, she wanted to join the only people she had truly loved.

Yet she was angry at Kaylin, right now, right here, for even thinking it—because she’d always known what Kaylin was thinking, from day one. She’d often belittled it because that was what Barrani did.

“Do not make me hit you,” Teela said through clenched teeth. She threw one backward glance at her mother, now suspended, blood no longer running from multiple wounds. “Do
not
make me do this. I have seen this day every day of my life, kitling. Every. Single. Day. It drove me to kill my father, the single act I refuse to regret in a long history littered with regrets.

“Do you understand? This
made me.
It made me what I am now. Whatever you profess to love about me—it comes from this.”

Mandoran came to stand beside Teela; he put a gentle hand on her arm. “Teela—” And then he stopped, his eyes widening.

Teela’s eyes widened, as well.

Mandoran turned to the others, who stood frozen as if holding breath. “I can—I can
hear
her. I can hear Teela!”

“What. Did. You. Do.” Teela grabbed Kaylin’s left hand; there was no longer a mark on her palm. She froze, looking into the eyes of the familiar; eyes that now seemed to stretch halfway up to the sky, the words there multiple and endless.

“I—”

“Kaylin.”

“I healed it, Teela. The name. I—I healed it.”

Teela let go of her hand. She closed her eyes. Then she turned and threw her arms around Mandoran’s neck; he laughed, although he was clearly surprised. Kaylin would have spoken, but there was something in the hug that made her feel like a voyeur. She wasn’t part of Teela’s life; not the way these people were.

But she understood what Teela’s anger meant, what Teela was trying, around the shape of her own pain, her past, and her grief and loneliness, to tell her.

And Kaylin turned, at last, to the words.

Chapter 27

“I know,” Kaylin said to a creature that was no longer small, no longer a dragon, no longer simply an annoying but unique pet. “I know what you are, now.”

She felt the rumble of his voice; she felt the voice of the green. She understood that the moment was almost done, and she understood what she had to do, because she understood that it was all she
could
safely do.

She approached Terrano first; he frowned, the way any Barrani with little experience of mortals would. She tried not to hold it against him. She wasn’t surprised to find that he wasn’t solid; he had no flesh, nothing to impede the progress of her palm as she pressed it against, and then through, the center of his chest.

He frowned and stepped back.
No.
His lips moved; nothing else did.

Kaylin closed her eyes. “We don’t have time for this. You can stay, Terrano, or you can go. But you can’t live between, like this. The word at the heart of your existence here, the word the green has tried to somehow preserve, belongs here. Leave it, and go, or stay with it and become it.”

“Terrano,” Mandoran said.

But Terrano shook his head, his lips quirking up in an odd smile. “I can’t go back. There’s nothing for me. My family is dead now. I didn’t even kill them,” he added, without a care in the world, and without any sign of grief. “I waited for Teela. But I waited so we could
leave
together. There are worlds out there,” he added. “Not like this one. Different. Better. We can be anything. We can be
nothing.
I won’t. I won’t do it. I
don’t want it.
” Terrano was part of Teela. Teela was part of Terrano. “Save her mother. Save her, and she won’t lay her curse on Teela.”

“It wasn’t a curse.”

“It
was.
Save her.”

And at this moment, it didn’t matter. “I can’t do what you ask.”

He laughed. “You are the
only
one who can.”

And she wanted to. She wanted to do it because if she could, she could save all her own dead. There would be no ghosts to lay to rest. There would be no paralyzing, self-destructive guilt, no self-loathing, no
loss.

“This is the lie,” she told Terrano softly. “I didn’t understand how lies could be told with True Words. And they can’t. Everything you can say with a True Word
is
itself. But we don’t speak True Words. We don’t speak true language; we speak its echoes. We dimly understand the shape of the words—but they don’t mean the same thing to two different people. They can’t.

“This is the lie,” she continued. She turned to the giant eye of the familiar. “I can see what you want. Can you see it? It’s there. And beside it, the heart of what
I
want. The only thing I’ve truly, desperately wanted in my life; the only thing I would die for.

“And they’re the same, Terrano. They’re the same. There are some words that
can’t exist
here, not in the real world. Not in our lives. We can daydream them. We can pray for them. We can hope, and plead, and grieve. But we can’t make them real—because they
aren’t.
There’s no way back. And the lie is that there
is.

“Maybe familiars can grant that. Maybe they have the power to make the lie real. I have to guess that’s exactly what they can do. But—it’s still a lie. Because it’s not part of the real world. It’s part of our dreams. It’s part of our nightmares. It’s part of the us that we carry around inside of our heads. But that’s all it can ever be.”

He stared at her for one long, frozen moment. “No,” he said. “It’s not. It’s
not.
”

And Teela said clearly, “Vote.”

Her voice carried; it rippled through the green. It was, in all ways, a Sergeant’s voice. Marcus would have been proud.

But Kaylin said, “It’s not a matter for vote. Mandoran didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry for that. But you’ve lived centuries since the day your mother died. So have
they.
If you can’t go back, if you can’t deny what those centuries of living mean to you, they shouldn’t have to do it, either.” She turned to Mandoran and said, simply, “I’m sorry. I can’t undo it.

“I won’t force that change upon anyone else. I can’t. But I won’t let you run wild. Hundreds of people have died because of you. I won’t let you kill the Hallionne or destroy the green.”

“If we die here, the names will be lost—”

Kaylin shook her head. “Chosen, remember? I won’t let the words be lost to the green. I’ll return them, in the end, to the Lake.”

“Terrano,” Mandoran said again.

But Terrano shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t do it. I love you. I love you all as if you’re part of me. But I’d lose all my limbs first. I’d go blind, deaf. I can’t do it.”

Kaylin closed her palm into a fist and withdrew it. Terrano’s eyes widened. They seemed, for a moment, to sparkle. His face lit up with an incandescent smile; it took her breath away. It took all of their breaths away. He began to fade. Even before he was no longer visible, he was no longer Barrani in appearance, but the warmth of his unfettered delight lingered like a pall.

When Kaylin opened her hand again, she wasn’t surprised to see a mark there. A red mark, much like Mandoran’s had been. It was a less complicated letter form, but it was thinner and paler.

She approached Sedarias next, because Sedarias was the de facto leader of this group, inasmuch as it could be led. As she’d done for Terrano, she pressed her palm against, and then into, her heart.

“And so, all our years of waiting and planning have come, in the end, to this? We are to be diminished and returned as a curiosity to the Courts that were willing to sacrifice us?”

The familiar roared.

She raised both brows in a look of autocratic outrage that was nonetheless cool and contained. “Oh?”

“He speaks only the truth,” a familiar voice said.

Kaylin was surprised, because it belonged to the brother of Alsanis. She couldn’t remember the moment at which he’d disappeared; maybe he hadn’t.

“You have been part of Alsanis for a long time, even in the reckoning of your kind. You might remain as guest. Or as ward. He has heard your voices when ours were lost to him. If you make this choice, he cannot compel. He will not be your cage, Sedarias. But if you allow it, he will be...your brother.”

“My brother,” Sedarias said grimly, “attempted to kill me four times in my childhood.” But even saying it, she smiled. “Yes, Lord Kaylin. Terrano found ways to leave us. It was not Eddorian who approached Iberrienne, but Terrano. He was always ambitious, always precocious.

“I will accept what you offer.”

Where Terrano had faded, Sedarias grew more solid. Kaylin’s hand was pushed out; she didn’t withdraw it. She saw the faint tinge of purple to eyes that then shaded green as they widened; she smiled. She didn’t speak. But she looked at Teela and Mandoran, and then turned back to Kaylin. “Will I remember everything?”

Kaylin was surprised. “Yes. At least—I’d bet money on it. Mine, even.”

Sedarias looked confused, and then looked up at Teela. Kaylin left them and moved on. She offered them all the choice, and they accepted what Terrano had rejected. But when she approached Annarion, he frowned. “The mark you bear—”

She had forgotten about the mark. These days, she almost always did. It was now just part of her face. The High Court more or less accepted it. The Vale? Maybe that was part of the reason they had been so unfriendly—but maybe not. They were Immortal; she wasn’t.

“Yes,” she said tersely. “It’s your brother’s.” To her great surprise, he looked concerned, not disgusted.

“You must be mistaken—”

“Believe that I know where it came from. It’s on my skin, remember?”

He glanced at the
rest
of the marks on her skin, and she grimaced. “It is not like those.”

“No, it’s not. Maybe. Umm, I should tell you two things. Nightshade is Outcaste.”

Annarion’s eyes shaded to indigo.

“And he’s the fieflord of, well, Nightshade. He owns the Castle there. Oh, and—”

“That is three things.”

“Numbers are not my strong suit. He’s here. He’s the Teller.”

“I see.” He turned, then, to Sedarias, and offered her the slightest of bows. “It appears the world has changed since our incarceration.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. Did you have some concerns?”

“Not until this mortal brought them to my attention.” He left Kaylin and moved to join the group, and it was a group now; they were standing in the shadow of one gigantic eye; it was the whole of the sky in Kaylin’s view, at least on one side of the world.

And the words—the words she’d wanted, the words that had taken the sheen of gold and truth, filled that sky. And she did want them. If Jade and Steffi had never died, she could live with Severn. She would probably be living with him. It hadn’t been much of a life, compared to the one she’d built in Elantra with the Hawks—but she’d been happy then.

It was just
one
thing. It was just so
small
. If she could arrive
in time.
Just that. Just that one thing. She would save Severn, too. She would save him from the torture of guilt and the absolute knowledge that he was—that he could be—a cold-blooded killer.

“Kitling.”

“Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be?” Kaylin didn’t take her eyes from the sky; she couldn’t.

“Yes.”

“Then go there. I’m fine, Teela. I’ve got this.”

Teela slid an arm around her shoulder. “Yes. You do. You won’t mind if I stay here anyway, just to be as annoying as you generally are when you worry at me?”

“I think the others are waiting for you.”

“Oh, not me,” Eddorian said, joining Teela. “I’ve seen a lot, but to be honest—and if I know Teela, you know how rare that is among our kin—I’ve seen nothing like this. Are you going to destroy the world?”

“I think I understand why Teela likes you,” Valliant added. “Mortals are so unpredictable. You haven’t come all this way to end the world, have you? It would seem a waste of effort. You could have just left this corner of it to us.”

“Oh, leave the poor mortal alone,” Serralyn told him. But they all came to stand beside her, watching, their eyes bright with genuine curiosity. Yes, they were as old as Teela—but they hadn’t spent their life in
this
world. She couldn’t tell who she felt more sorry for—the children or the rest of the Barrani.

She had a suspicion it was the rest of the Barrani, and that didn’t bother her at all.

She turned back to the giant eye. “No,” she told them all. Looking up at the creature, or across at it, she said softly, “Yes, it’s what I want. But I also want wings. I want to be beautiful. I want to be strong. I want to be perfect.

“If every wish I ever had, if every
fear,
could become real, instantly, I would destroy the world. I didn’t understand how it could happen, before. The stories about familiars—the ones we have—never make it clear. But I—I understand it now. What I don’t understand is how any sorcerers survived summoning familiars. I’m not even a sorcerer. I can barely light a candle. I still can’t do it reliably on command.” She lifted her arms; her marks were now gray and flat. “You might recognize them. You might even be able to read them. I don’t, and can’t. But it’s—it’s a borrowed power. It’s not mine. I don’t control it. If you came to me because of the marks, I’m sorry.

“Close your eyes. Go back to sleep. We’ll try not to wake you again.”

The eye did not, predictably, close. Instead, the creature inhaled; the words that had filled the whole of a night sky were sucked into a maelstrom of other words, of different light, until they were lost. She reached out instinctively to try to...do what? She forced her hand back to her side.

She’d had the chance. She knew. She would have died for them. If it would end there, she thought, even now, she could do it. If there was some way to trade her life for theirs, with nothing else lost in the balance, she thought she could die. She was grateful that she didn’t believe in ghosts, because she couldn’t imagine facing the two girls to tell them that she couldn’t take the risk. How would they ever believe that they had been important to her?

They would know you.

She frowned. “Who said that?”

“Who said what, kitling?”

They would know you, Kaylin.

“Never mind.” The eyes were closing. Or at least, to Kaylin, it looked as if they were; it took her a few seconds to understand that they were actually shrinking.

You will do.

“Do for
what?
”

Worlds have been destroyed before. Not one. Many. And it starts, as it almost started for you, with
one
moment.

“And you couldn’t
stop
it?”

All possibilities exist in me, some darker and some brighter than others. All words, all languages, all silences, all emptiness, all isolation. I am not the containment. You are. You are what stands between me and the world in which you live. Some of the words
are
your words. You would recognize them. Many are not.

“But I didn’t summon you.”

No more did you summon the water, Chosen. But she hears you when you call. The fire speaks your name. I did not come to you. You found me. You came to
me
.

The eyes were now the size of Kaylin, although they existed in the air without a face as a frame.

“Kitling—”

“I’m doing what I can, Teela,” Kaylin said—in brusque Elantran.

She was surprised by the sound of Teela’s laughter. Teela tightened the arm she’d draped around Kaylin’s shoulder. “Yes. You always did. I remember the day you ended up in the lethe dealer’s den—you’d run yourself practically to exhaustion. You didn’t lose them,” she added, fondly. “You were fourteen. I thought it extremely unlikely, with your sense of caution, you’d survive to see fifteen.

“But you did. And sixteen, beyond it.”

“Teela—what did sorcerers do with familiars?”

Teela shook her head. “I didn’t lie; I have no idea. I would have bet against their being real.”