They were all mortal.
The Barrani were not, and they really liked to rub people's noses in the fact.
Nor had Kaylin tended their young, their orphans. The only orphans in the foundling hall were human.
She had once offered to help a Dragon, and she had been curtly—and completely—refused. She understood why, now.
"He's alive," she managed to say. More than that would have been a struggle. Because alive in this case meant something different than it had every other time she offered this assurance to onlookers, many often insensate with fear and the burden of slender hope.
His skin felt like skin. And it felt like bark. It felt like moss, and fur, and the soft silk of Barrani hair; it felt like petals, like chiton, like nothing—and everything—that she had ever touched before. And there was more, but she hadn't the words for it.
She almost pulled back, but Severn was there, and he steadied her. She could feel his hair brush the back of her neck, and realized her head was bent. Her eyes were closed.
The room was invaded by scent: rose and lilac, honey, water new with spring green; sweat, the aroma of tea—tea?—and sweet wine, the smell of green. The green. Behind her eyes she could sense the bowers of ancient forest, could almost hear the rustle of great leaves.
But here, too, she found silence. The silence of the smug, the arrogant, the pretentious; the silence of concern, of compassion; the silence of grief too great for simple words; the silence that follows a child's first cry. She found so many silences, she wondered what the use of language was; words seemed impoverished and lessened.
But she did not find the silence of the dead.
Her hands were warm now. The fires had cooled, banked. What they could burn, they had burned, and embers remained. She moved her fingers slowly, and felt—skin. Just skin.
When she had healed Catti, the redhead with the atrocious singing voice, she had almost had to become Catti. Here, she was alone. There was no wound she could sense, and no loss of blood, no severed nerves along the spine. There was nothing at all that seemed wrong, and even in humans, that was unnatural.
So. This was perfection.
Unblemished skin. Beating heart. Lungs that rose and fell. An absence—a complete absence—of bruise, scar, the odd shape of bone once broken and mended.
She wanted to let go then. To tell Teela that this Barrani Lord—this son of the castelord—was alive and well.
But she didn't. Because her hands still tingled. Because there was something beneath her that she could not see, or touch, or smell, that eluded her. Like dim star at the corner of the eye, it disappeared when she turned to look.
She opened her mouth, and something slid between her lips, like the echo of taste.
Without thinking, she said, "Poison?"
Which was good, because the only person who could answer was Kaylin. Yet poison… what had Red said? Poison caused damage. And there was nothing wrong with this man.
Except that he lay in bed, arranged like a corpse.
Had she not seen Teela dispose of a Barrani, she would have wondered if this was how immortals met their end. But the dead man had bled, and gurgled; his injuries had been profoundly mundane.
War.
The word hung in the air before her, as if it were being written in slow, large letters. As if she were, in fact, in school, and the teacher found belaboring the obvious a suitable punishment. Humiliation often worked.
It just didn't work well on fieflings.
The Barrani Lord slept beneath her palms. Time did not age him; it did not touch him at all. But Kaylin, pressed against his skin, didn't either.
This is beyond me, she thought, and panic started its slow spiral from the center of her gut, tendrils reaching into her limbs.
Severn's arm tightened.
She heard his voice from a great remove. "Anteela," he said, pronouncing each syllable as if Barrani were foreign to him, "your kyuthe must know what the Lord is called." Not named; he knew better than that. And how? Oh, right. He'd passed his classes. She'd had to learn it the hard way.
"He is called the Lord of the West March," Teela replied.
"By his friends?"
"He is the son of the High Lord," was the even response. It was quieter but sharper; she could hear it more distinctly. And she could read between the lines—he didn't have any friends.
"Anteela, do better. Your kyuthe cannot succeed at her chosen task, otherwise."
But Teela did not speak again.
Lord of the West March. Kaylin tried it. As a name, she found it lacking. He must have found it lacking, as well. There was no response at all. There was nothing there.
Swallowing air, Kaylin opened her eyes. And shut them again in a hurry.
But she was a Hawk, and the first thing that had been drilled into her head—in Marcus's Leontine growl—was the Hawk's first duty: observe. What you could observe behind closed eyes was exactly nothing. Well, nothing useful. There were situations in which this was a blessing. Like, say, any time of the day that started before noon.
But not now, and not here. Here, Kaylin was a Hawk, and here, she unfurled figurative wings, and opened clear eyes.
She was standing on the flat of a grassy slope that ended abruptly, green trailing out of sight. Above her, the sky was a blue that Barrani eyes could never achieve; it was bright, and if the sun was not in plain view, it made its presence felt.
There were, below this grass-strewn cliff, fields that stretched out forever. The sun had dried the bending stalks, but whether they were wild grass or harvest, she couldn't tell. She'd never been much of a farmer.
The fields were devoid of anything that did not have roots.
She turned as the breeze blew the stalks toward her, and following their gentle direction, saw the forest. It was the type of forest that should have capital letters: The Forest, not a forest. The trees that stretched from ground to sky would have given her a kink had she tried to see the tops; it didn't.
But she wasn't really here.
Remind me, she told herself, never to heal a Barrani again.
She wondered, then, what she might have seen had Tiamaris not had the sense to forbid her the opportunity to heal a Dragon. She never wanted to find out.
There were no birds in this forest. There were no insects that she could see, no squirrels, nothing that jumped from tree to tree. This was a pristine place, a hallowed place, and life did not go where it was not wanted.
This should have been a hint.
But there were only two ways to go: down the cliff or into the trees. The cliff didn't look all that promising.
She chose the forest instead. It wasn't the kind of forest that had a footpath; it wasn't the kind of forest that had any path at all.
It was just a lot of very ancient trees. And the shadows they cast. All right, Lord of the West March, you'd better bloody well be in there.
She started to walk. In that heavy, stamping way of children everywhere.
Shadows gave way to light in places, dappled edges of leaves giving shape to what lay across the ground. She got used to them because they were everywhere, and she'd walked everywhere, touching the occasional tree just to feel bark.
If time passed, it passed slowly.
Her feet—her boots still scuffed and clumsy—didn't break any branches. They didn't, in fact, leave any impression in what seemed to be damp soil. Rich soil, and old, the scent mixed with bark and undergrowth. She could plant something here and watch it grow.
Her brow furrowed. Or at least she thought it did. Aside from the forest itself, everything—even Kaylin—seemed slightly unreal.
She reached into her pockets, and stopped.
Her arms were bare, and in the odd light of the forest, she could see the markings that had defined all of her life, all action, all inaction, all cost.
She held them out; the marks were dark and perfect. It had been a while since she'd looked at them in anything that wasn't the mirror of records. She to
uched them and froze; they were raised against her skin. They had never had any texture before.
Lifting a hand, she touched the back of her neck; it, too, was textured. She thought she might peel something off, and even began to try.
"Kaylin."
She stopped. The voice was familiar. It was distant, but not in the way that Severn's words had been distant.
"Hello?"
"Do not touch those marks in this place."
It was Nightshade. Lord Nightshade. She turned, looked, saw an endless series of living columns. There was no movement, no sign of him.
"They're—I think they might come off."
"Do not," he said again, his voice fading. "I am far from you, and you are far from yourself. Leave, if you can."
She shrugged. "There doesn't seem to be a convenient door."
"Unfortunate."
"Where are you?"
"I am both close and far, as you are close and far. You have my name," he added softly. "Remember it."
"I… do." Even in sleep. "But I… don't think it's a good idea to speak it here."
Chapter Six
His laughter was a surprise to her; it was almost youthful. "You are a strange child," he said when it had trailed into silence. "What do you do, Kaylin Neya?"
"I—" She frowned.
"Where are you?"
"In a big damn forest."
The silence that followed her words was heavy, a different silence. She could not interpret it, who'd been offered the space of so many other silences simply by touching a stranger's skin. "Kaylin," he said in the tone of voice she least liked, "what have you done?"
It was, of course, a tone she was familiar with. Severn used it. Not many of the Hawks did, though; they had to drill with her sooner or later, and she sometimes forgot the rules.
"Teela dragged me to Court," she said curtly.
"To Court, Kaylin?"
"To the—to the Barrani High Court. Because the Lord of the West March was—wasn't—" Frustrated, she tossed the sentence out and started again. "I think he's been poisoned. I think he's dying. But not dying. I don't understand it."
"I cannot come to you," he replied, as if she'd asked.
"No. You can't." The minute she said the words, they were true. As if words had that power in this place.
"Words have power in all places," he replied. She hated it when he did that. He couldn't even see her face, so the convenient "you're an open book" excuse was beyond them both.
"I can't leave if he doesn't wake up."
"You are not as foolish as you often appear. You are, unfortunately, far more reckless. I would have bet against it, were I offered odds."
She almost laughed.
"I do live in the fiefs," was his wry reply. And it hid nothing from her; she could sense his worry.
"I don't know how to make him wake up. But I thought—"
"Careful, Kaylin."
"I don't know his name," she said, flat now. "I don't have any way of finding him here. He's lost. I'm lost. I thought if I could plant something—"
"Plant something?"
The rich loam of the soil was beneath her hands as she bent. She knelt, and felt it, damp, against her knees. Which meant she wasn't wearing her old pants.
Looking down, she saw that she was, however, wearing her tunic, and it was a good deal cleaner—and longer—than it had been minutes or hours ago. The Hawk was a thing of gold and flight. Death or freedom.
His silence was not a comfort.
She wanted to cling to his voice because she didn't want to be alone here. And she hated herself for the weakness because it meant she was buying into the illusion.
"It is not illusion," he said.
So much for morale.
She looked at her arms, above the wrists. "Nightshade," she whispered, "you'll just have to trust me."
"Oddly enough, I do. I trust you to be Kaylin Neya."
She chose to make the effort not to be insulted, and said, "For you, I could do this."
"Yes. For me. But you have my name, and it binds us. Were you to heal me, you would be a part of what you see."
"Would I see forest?"
Silence.
She responded in kind, but she didn't stop. Her fingers made impressions in the dirt, and the dirt turned her nails a rich, dark black. Digging was easy. It gave her something to do with her hands, and that was better than wandering around like an idiot pilgrim.
When she'd made a furrow a hand's depth in the dirt, she looked again at her arms. At the symbols that graced skin, that seemed more solid in this place than they had ever seemed. They didn't burn or glow; they just were.
They had been written by the Old Ones in ways that no "new ones"—that being anyone living, or having lived, in the last millennia—could understand. Certainly not Kaylin, whose grasp of the historical was accurate to the day The one she was living in.
They had been changed by death and sacrifice, the sigil shapes shifting and altering almost imperceptibly with time. And they had been altered again, when she had returned to the heart of Castle Nightshade.
What they meant now, no one knew.
She studied them all, her eyes tracing thick curves and thin, as if they were a mandala that moved with her, lived in her. They looked the same at first glance. They looked the same at a tenth glance, and a few solid glares.
But there were differences. Very subtle differences.
Probably imaginary ones, given how long she'd been staring.
She chose one at random. Her fingers brushed its surface, and she felt it again, like a raised welt with sharper edges. Her nails were short enough to be useless and long enough to be dirty. She struggled to use them for some time, but they were blunt instruments.
So she reached for her daggers.
They weren't there. At least not the ones she was familiar with. She'd bought them with her own money, and she'd paid a small fortune in trade with a mendacious man who had actually been capable of some magic.
What was left in their place was dagger shaped. It even had a hilt. But it was translucent and fine, like a sliver of worked glass. It shone blue.
Blue was bad. This kind of blue, like a sliver of sky, reminded her of magic, and she did not want to lay it against her skin. Although curiosity had its uses, she had a bad feeling that shedding blood here would be costly.
"It will."
"Thanks." She sat in front of a trough of dirt, feeling like a pig. She was tired, and her stomach was rumbling.
Not the words, then. Not the marks.
They were hers, but they weren't hers.
And there was only one thing that she now wore that she valued. The Hawk shone gold.
Removing it was harder than she expected.
Laying it in the furrow, folding the tunic so that it could rest an inch below the space she'd managed to dig was worse.
Worse still, burying it. She had to close her eyes.
"Well done, little Kaylin." The voice was so soft now she could barely catch the words.
It's not real, she told herself as she stood and took a step back. But it was real. It was the only thing that was.
And because it was real, the ground closed over it. The scratches she'd made in its soft surface vanished; the rough, loose texture of new-turned earth smoothed out, as if the forest floor had flexed its hand and made a flat fist.
She watched a tree grow.
It was unlike any other tree in the forest. It was a pale color, and its bark was soft, almost golden in hue. There was no almost about its leaves; they shot out as branches unfurled, as roots spread beneath her feet, pushing her back. Even stumbling, she still sought sight of the sky through the bower of the other trees. Seeking sky, she caught gold instead. The leaves were like feathers, flight feathers, and they hung in the air as the branches that bore them rose, bursting toward the sky.
She watched; astonishment was too meager a word for what she felt… It should have gone on forever.
Inst
ead, the leaves began to fall. The breeze carried them. The wind swept them into the other trees, and where gold touched green, color happened. Red, yellow, burgundy, a riot that spoke of autumn, and the change of seasons.
When she looked down—when she could bear to look down—she saw that she still wore her boots. And that she wore an undershirt and loose-fitting pants.
It was better than being naked. But not by much.
She walked over to the trunk of what was now an immense tree, and wondered at the nature of age. It was of a height with the forest although it resembled no other tree that grew there, as if, although it was bound by the forest's rules, it was also bound by hers.
She leaned against the smooth, smooth trunk and picked up a leaf. It turned to dust in her hands, but it was a golden dust that made her skin shimmer.
A shadow crossed her hand as she stared at it, and she looked up. A Barrani man stood before her, his eyes the green of the leaves before they turned.
"You're the Lord of the West March?" she asked quietly.
He nodded; he barely spared her a glance. She would have mumbled something about gratitude, but his gaze had gone up to the leaves above, and he was staring in wonder. She almost hated to break the trance. She understood what he saw.
But she understood, as well, that they could not remain here forever. So she cleared her throat.
He looked down at her then. He was tall, even for a Barrani. "You are Kaylin Neya," he said.
"That's what I'm called."
"Ah. It is a title?"
"A name."
His brow rose. His eyes narrowed. "It is not a name," he said quietly. "There is only one name here."
"Yours, I take it."
But he stared at the tree. "And yet… I read it, there, in the leaves. You are a bird of prey. Whose jesses do you wear?"
"The Hawklord's," she replied, rising.
He bent and lifted a golden leaf. In his hands, it didn't crumble. Then again, ice probably wouldn't melt in his mouth, either.
He looked at her face. Frowned. Reaching out, he touched her cheek.
Her right cheek. "Nightshade," he said.
"It's a plant."
His smile was odd. "It is, as you say, a plant. I do not believe it grows here."