He took the burden upon himself. He killed them. He was not Chosen; he had no power. He has endured what you should have endured because you did not have the strength to do what must be done.
But it should have been your hand.
"I was a child!"
Ignorance is not an excuse. It is a fact, like any other. You wished him dead because he could do what you could not.
Choose.
But she had already chosen. Severn was a Hawk, not a Wolf.
Choose.
She snarled in Leontine. Had she fangs and claws, she would have ripped the root from its mooring and eaten the damn thing, just to shut it up. It was a favored Leontine threat. But she had neither.
She looked up, met Severn's eyes; he wavered in the frame of her vision. She said, "I want to see them."
He said nothing.
Her voice thickened. "Severn—"
But he shook his head. "I chose," he said harshly. "I killed them. Not you, Kaylin. You could never have done it." He believed it. Why wouldn't he? He had known her better than anyone; it was true.
Oh, she had hated him. Hate froze in her, hard and cold; it lost all life in that moment. "You saved the world," she told him. And this time, she meant it. She wanted to weep.
"What kind of a world," was his bitter reply, "did I save, that could demand this?"
"Our kind," she answered. She touched his face slowly, and this time, he didn't stop her. Instead, he lowered his head into her hand. She'd dropped the dagger, but it hadn't made much sound; it was caught in the folds of her skirt. The other one joined it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and drew his head down, and she held him for a long, long time.
Hating, at last, not Severn, but Kaylin.
He is yours, the root said, the words writing themselves in a flurry of motion and metamorphosis. Because he bears your burden. Understand what is offered. Understand that ignorance will not save you.
And she said, "I'll take him. We had each other, once, and we only had each other." She paused and added, "The world is still worth saving." Barely. But barely would do.
Then climb, the words said. You have passed through the first door.
Chapter Fourteen
"Easy for you to say," Kaylin murmured.
Severn drew back and looked at her. He could see her face. He gently unwound her arms, and took another step back. He could see her skirt. The latter made him wince. "The daggers," he said.
"I can clean them."
"You can't sew with them."
"There is that. Do you think it's obvious?"
"Two gaping slashes and some blood?"
She grimaced. Took a step back and hit the broad root. It was still there.
Severn frowned at it. "We're going to have a bit of trouble getting past that," he said at last.
"I'm not sure we're supposed to." She placed her hands around the great root, and got dirt under her fingernails. Again. The words hadn't changed any further, and they no longer glowed. "I think we're supposed to shinny up the damn thing."
"To where?"
She raised a brow. "Someplace that isn't here."
"I'll go first."
"The hell you will." She added after a moment, "I'm going to need a bit of a push."
He laughed. Bracing himself, he intertwined his hands, and she put a shoe in them. He lifted her, and she caught root, and then a series of roots. She began to push them aside, and they fell away as if they were only barely lodged in some unseen surface.
"Is there a hole?"
"Not much of one. But I think we can push ourselves through this mess, if that's any help."
He nodded, and she came down. When he stood again, she was sitting on his shoulders. She began to work, pushing small tendrils to one side or the other around the trunk of the large root; it seemed to travel straight up now, instead of across the roof.
She nodded an okay, which he couldn't see; she smacked herself on the side of the head, and told him that she was about to let go. Which, in this case, meant clamber up his shoulders, standing on them as she tried to find purchase along the single vertical root.
She managed to do this; dirt was all of her vision for a minute, and dirt was not her favorite thing to inhale. But the smell of it was clean and new, and she contented herself with that. She edged up, and up again, and then her face broke surface, as if the earth were a river that moved slowly and imperceptibly, carrying life with it.
She could see something that looked like moonlight—the red moon was full; the bright moon must be hidden by something in the distance. She could see something that looked like grass at the level of her eye, and having been on the end of a few losing fights, was both familiar and uncomfortable with the view. She reached out, grabbed a handful of said grass, and pulled it up in an attempt to drag herself forward. Which was stupid, because she was sitting between the V formed by the exterior roots of a tree. A really, really tall tree.
She grabbed the exposed roots instead, and felt a familiar—and unwelcome—tingle that traveled up her palms. Which, given the lack of a warning mark, was a tad annoying. She pulled herself up and let go as quickly as possible.
Severn was a bit slower to follow, but not by much. He had height, and he had always been better at climbing than she had; he could find purchase on almost vertical walls in cracks that she would have sworn wouldn't aid a mouse.
"Where are we?" he asked her.
It was a perfectly reasonable question, and because it was, she was also annoyed. Being reasonable when the world wasn't reasonable wasn't always a gift to the person on the receiving end.
But, being a Hawk, she let her eyes acclimatize themselves to the faint light. "I think we're in a garden. Well, with walls. And pointy things on the top of the walls."
"Heads on the spikes?"
"I can't see them that well."
He shrugged, brushing dirt from his tunic. The dirt that had lodged in his mail would have to wait.
"Garden," he said after another minute. "With flower beds."
The way he said the word made her stiffen. Or cringe. Severn was, like Kaylin, not a big fan of cultivated plants that couldn't also be eaten. This meant that he only noticed the wrong kind. As if to underscore this, he lifted a hand and pointed.
Around the great tree, in a careful circle that was bounded on either side by low rocks, were white plants with four petals; they were open, and their golden hearts were exposed. Even in the moonlight, Kaylin could identify those flowers. Lethe.
She groaned. "If they are Lethe flowers—"
"They are."
"No one's harvesting them. Not here." The dirt that clung to her dress was sort of embedded. She didn't even bother to try to remove it. Instead, she touched the trailing weight of Sanabalis's medallion. The dirt there was easier to brush aside. "I could maybe try burning them—"
"Don't even think it," he snapped.
"Lethe doesn't work on humans."
Severn said nothing for a moment. "It doesn't work predictably. But it has an effect."
"You want to destroy them."
He shrugged. But he walked toward the white ring that circled them, and he stopped, his feet inches away from stone. It was gray with blue veins, and the blue veins were glowing slightly. The circle was wide enough that jumping over it wasn't a real possibility.
He lifted a foot, and Kaylin's arms burned suddenly. "Don't!"
His foot stopped in midair. He withdrew it.
Something was nagging at her. Damn it, there was something she was missing. She looked at the flowers. A wind began to blow across their open faces, moving through them in a way that suggested water on a white, white ocean. And carried in the fold of that breeze, a scent, strong and cloying.
"I have a bad feeling about this," she told Severn.
Severn had already pulled back in silence. He had many shades of silence; this was grim.
"Don't you have to—eat it or something?" she said without much hope.
He
shrugged. "In our world, yes. But this is demonstrably not the same world."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she took his hand in hers. "Would you forget, if you could?"
"Forget what?"
"Anything."
He looked at her.
She gave in quietly. "That you killed them."
"No."
And bit her lip.
"Would you?"
She wanted to say yes. She didn't. For seven years, the answer would have been no. But in the High Halls, the answer had shifted, and the ground she was standing on wasn't so firm. She stalled. "Why?"
"Because I did kill them. Forgetting it wouldn't change the fact."
"It might change you." It might change us.
"It might," he said quietly. His voice was at its lowest. "But it wouldn't bring them back. It wouldn't change anything that's happened."
"But it—"
"Kaylin. Elianne. Whoever you are. It's part of who I am. It's part of my understanding of who I am. I spent a long time learning to live with it. There are days—" He shook his head, discarding the words. She wanted to hear them, but she knew Severn; they were gone someplace she couldn't follow.
"I wouldn't choose to forget. Besides," he added, squeezing her hand, "you're a Hawk now. You'd figure it out sooner or later, and we'd have to go through it all over again." His smile was tight. "And I won't put myself through those early years again. Not even for you."
She understood then. "This is a test," she told him softly.
He nodded, as if he had understood it the moment he'd set eyes on the flowers.
"It's a stupid test."
"Maybe the Barrani would feel differently. They live forever, and their memories dim much more slowly than ours. Truth is not their strength… they play games, they live and breathe deceit. It's why they make good Hawks," he added. "They understand deceit in most of its forms."
"And me?"
"You're not Barrani." He paused. "The Barrani wouldn't consider the deaths a crime. It wouldn't be murder. They barely understand loyalty to kin."
"That's not true."
"It's not true of all of them," he conceded. "But I pity those for whom it isn't."
"Why?"
But he shook his head again. "Do you want to forget?"
She swallowed. "Sometimes."
"Do you think it would change anything?"
"It would change how I see you."
"And is that important?"
She almost laughed, but it would have been the wrong type of laughter. "Severn—you were the entire world to me. You were the only person I counted on. I trusted Steffi and Jade in a different way—they were children. My children," she added bitterly. "But I would never have asked them to save my life. I could never have asked them to fight for me. I could never have believed they could save me."
"From what?"
"From anything."
"Do you understand that I wouldn't have remained your entire world? Even had they lived?"
The moonlight was bright here. The sky was hazy, and it made a soft ring of light around the bright moon's face. She could see it now, see it clearly; it was almost full. The red moon was full. Two days.
She had two days to save the Barrani from something bitter and terrible that she didn't understand, and for this small space of time, it didn't matter.
"You were thirteen," he told her. "You were a child."
"I'm not a child now."
"No? But you think like one."
It should have annoyed her. Maybe later it would. Here, it didn't quite have the barbs it should have. "Because I can remember how much I believed in you?"
"No. Because you still want to. Because knowing the truth, you still want to. I'm what I am," he added.
"It's not what you were."
"No. But I changed then. I understood what I was willing to do. You understood it, too."
She nodded.
"There's no way back."
"There's no way forward."
"There is, Kaylin. You weren't a Hawk. I wasn't a Hawk. Or a Wolf. We were trapped in the fiefs. We're free now."
"We aren't free," she whispered.
"We're as free as we're ever going to be. We make the choices we make… we live with the consequences. There's no other way. Take away the memory, and the consequences teach us nothing. In the end, I learned that I could live with what I did.
"I don't know if you can. But that's a consequence, as well. And I knew it then. The alternative was worse."
She looked at the flowers, felt her throat tighten. The scent was stronger. "What if we don't have the choice?"
"We always have the choice. Isn't that the point of all this, in the end? Wasn't that the rune that you touched?"
She nodded. Reaching up, she clutched the medallion of Sanabalis, Dragon Lord. "Is burning them really bad?"
"It would be."
"How bad?"
He frowned. "This isn't rhetorical, is it?"
"Not really. And yes, I know what the word means. If you explain it, I'll stab you."
"With what?"
She grimaced. "I'll kick you."
"Better." His smile was less tight. "I'll risk it," he added quietly. "The scent is… bad."
Holding the medallion as if it was a talisman, she lifted it high.
"Is that necessary?"
"Probably not." She studied its face, felt the comfort of its familiar weight. "I learned something," she added.
"Is it going to kill us?"
"Maybe."
He shrugged.
And she spoke the word fire.
Fire came, like the breath of a Dragon. What it touched, it burned, and flame spread, contained by stone, in a circle of heat and orange light. She lost the moons to its glow, the dance of its many tongues, the language of its crackling. She didn't lose Severn; he still held her hand as he watched. They held their breath because it was practical.
They stopped when it wasn't.
Smoke, white smoke, rose above the flames like a curtain of dense fog. But the wind that had moved scent did not move the growing wreath; it reached up, and up again, an illusion that spoke of walls.
And as it billowed, Kaylin saw words in the shapes; fleeting words, broken by flame, and reshaping, over and again, the scream of the flowers, all subtlety lost.
She would remember this.
That was the point.
"Kaylin?"
She lifted a hand, looking at the smoke; Severn fell silent. Then, pulling him by the hand, she retreated, walking backward, limned in light.
"It's the tree," she said softly.
"What of it?"
"We have more climbing to do."
"The Lethe?"
"It's gone. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't change our minds now."
"Do you?"
She shook her head; her hair was in her eyes. Pushing it back, she smiled. Raw smile. Real smile. "Forward," she told him softly.
The tree was waiting for them.
But Kaylin was wrong.
She saw the trunk. Saw, engraved in it, a simple rune. Which she cursed roundly, in all of the languages at her disposal. She even wondered, briefly, if you could swear in the tongue of the Old Ones. What would it sound like?
Severn waited until she had finished. "What is it?"
"It's a damn door-ward," she snapped. "It's too bad the people who built this place are long dead."
He laughed. She kicked his ankle.
And then, before she could lose all nerve, she lifted the hand that Severn wasn't holding and placed it, palm flat, against the rune.
Light flared, brighter than fire, in the dark of evening sky. Kaylin's reaction was typical.
"Do you ever stop swearing?"
"Yes. But it's not generally considered a good sign."
He laughed again.
The trunk of the tree began to dissolve. It was a slow dissolution, the texture of bark shifting beneath her hand as if to cling, to leave an impression. Her f
ingers curled around it for just a moment, holding it in place. There was peace here. She wasn't quite ready to surrender it.
But that was her life: ready or not, it went, smoothing and stretching until it formed the surface of a door. It was, she noted, a wooden door, and its edges were still tree shaped, bark colored. As if the door were a cross section cut from the trunk of a huge, old tree.
There was no handle.
"You ready?" she asked Severn.
He nodded.
She gave the door a little shove, and it fell away.
Standing here, in the frame of something that was still mostly tree, she saw a room. It was a very large room, and it was lit by torches in wall sconces. Those sconces were green, like the eyes of a calm Barrani.
The floor, she couldn't see clearly, but the walls were dark; stained, she thought. Wood.
She tightened her grip on Severn, and when he winced, she offered a crooked smile. "I don't want to leave you behind," she told him by way of apology.
"Oh. I thought you were just trying to break my hand." But his smile was familiar. Wearier. Older. But at heart, familiar.
They stepped through the door, one after the other, like two links in a very short chain. Kaylin wasn't surprised when the door vanished at their back.
"Kaylin?"
"Hmm?"
"What did you see in the smoke?"
"Words," she told him quietly.
"I guessed that."
She shrugged. "I'm not sure, but I think the High Halls consider me a bit of a cheat."
He chuckled. "Oh?"
"I gave the decision to you," she said without smiling. Nothing much to smile about, really. "I let you make it."
He shrugged. "They were my memories."
"Not just yours."
"It's about choice," he reminded her, the smile gone from his lips.
"My choice."
"It was your choice, Kaylin." He frowned. She recognized it; it wasn't aimed at her.
Turning—because she had turned to look at him—she surveyed the room. Large? Yes. The floors felt wooden; she was in her shoes, and the soles were a bit thin. Part of her considered taking them off, but it was a small part.
There was a table in this room. It was long and dark; wood, but a heavy, dense wood. The top was perfectly flat. Two chairs faced each other across its width. It wasn't a dining table, or if it was, people were expected to eat with their hands off the top of the table itself. Oh, and bring their own food while they were at it.