It hurt to stand in his glare, it hurt to stand still. Her body had already entered the subtle fold that meant she was ready for action—fight or flight.
“Try. Try.”
Not for the first time in her life, she struggled to keep her mouth shut. Memories of those other times tried to wedge themselves between Kaylin and the eyes of a Dragon Lord in his full glory. Some splinter of them—mostly of Marcus at the very edge of his fraying temper—held fast, they were that deep.
The rest scattered. She knew his name. Knew it the way she knew how to breathe—it was a reflex, something beneath conscious thought. But she knew that she could not speak it. Not here. Probably not ever.
She felt her handful of years more keenly than she had ever felt them—twenty and counting. Maybe she’d never see twenty-one. And standing, rising, on the other side of a barrier that she didn’t understand, centuries glared back. Centuries, the knowledge of each year strengthening and deepening power. He was an ocean; she was a puddle.
She was rigid now, staring; she couldn’t have looked away had she wanted to. And she did.
She could see in his eyes the shape of many things that Sanabalis had tried to teach her. Fire. Wind. Even water. And she could see, growing brighter and clearer as she stared, the shape of something so complicated it made the marks on her skin look like smudges.
She knew what it was.
She might even have started to try to put it into something as simple as words—foreign, strange words, but words nonetheless, had Lord Nightshade not spoken her name.
Kaylin.
She felt it as a tug, as a demand, as a question. Felt its insistence, the subtle strength of its hold. Kaylin Neya. A name she had invented for herself on the spur of the moment, a way of hiding.
She’d been so good at hiding, it had become its own truth.
She tried to answer.
She tried to speak Nightshade’s name, his true name.
She stopped, because she couldn’t recall it. At this moment, it was too slight.
He said something short in Barrani that she didn’t understand. But she understood what she heard next: the sound, the familiar sound, of a sword leaving its sheath.
Meliannos blazed in the evening sky.
And Kaylin understood then why someone would name their weapon.
CHAPTER 22
If fire could be a thing with tongues of ice, Meliannos burned. Seeing it drawn, seeing the naked blade, Kaylin wondered at the sheath that could contain it and remain intact—but it was a brief thought; the rest of her body was already in motion. She ran to intercept Nightshade, because he was already on the border of the fief he ruled.
She didn’t understand what bound them, fief and man, but she knew that something essential would unravel if he left.
“He does not yet own the heartland,” Nightshade said, divining the thought, replying to it as she grabbed his sword arm in both of her hands and tried to slow his stride.
“Neither do you!”
“No,” he said softly. “But you, little one, I claim.”
The Outcaste had not moved an inch since the sword had cleared its scabbard, but the pressure of his gaze was gone from Kaylin, lingering only in the ache of her skin, which felt both new and raw.
The Emperor will know that you’ve drawn that sword.
Yes, he replied, his internal voice so much closer, so much clearer, than his spoken words. He will know. He has always known. This is not the first time that I have drawn it in this fief. It will not be the last. You have seen it blooded, he added, but you have never seen its fire before blood quenches it. He will hear it, even in the Palace. And he will know why.
She held his arm as tightly as she could, sword or no. They hovered on the border, and in the end, Nightshade grudgingly gave way to her silent, insistent gesture.
Makuron the Black, as the Outcaste was once called, reared up and roared, and as his jaws widened, flame reached, like orange fingers, across the invisible divide. Nightshade his raised sword, and the flames parted to either side; Kaylin could feel the heat. The stones to either side of her feet grew orange; the weeds evaporated. Heat caused the air to ripple, and the great, black form of the Dragon’s extended wings undulated, shifting in the haze.
All around him, the landscape whirled, dark shadows folding around colors that were iridescent, almost opaline. There was no street beneath him, and Kaylin could no longer even imagine something as mundane as a street existing. She heard the wind’s roar, felt its ice.
Nightshade’s smile was thin and sharp, something felt rather than seen.
“Clever, Lord Nightshade,” the Dragon said.
“You are not dead, and you are not bound, not yet. Come, Makuron. In the elder days, we never faced each other upon the field.”
“I chose, and choose, the fields upon which I fight,” the Dragon replied. “And you are not unprepared, this time. But neither am I.”
“You do not yet rule the Shadows,” Nightshade said, “and you must have been greatly injured since your last sojourn into Nightshade to stay your ground there.”
The silence was cold.
“You call me weak, when you will not step across the border with Meliannos in your hands? You, who stand on the edge of power and skirt it like a mortal?”
“I prefer to control power, rather than be controlled by it,” Nightshade replied evenly. It was clear, however, that the Dragon’s challenge—and accusation—was not to his liking.
“Like the rest of your kin—and mine—you hide from power. I was a greater adept, and in my centuries of study, nothing prepared me for what I might find, and take, here. If I do not rule the Shadows, they do not rule me. They sustain me,” he hissed. “Nor will I give up the advantage without cause. I have no need,” he added, and the sibilance reminded Kaylin why Dragons were sometimes called winged serpents. He roared.
And this time, the earth shook beneath him, and all around him, the shadows rippled, as if they were the earth, the wind and his voice.
They parted, those shadows, like curtains.
And from their depths, across a field of black, two shapes ran. It was hard, at first, to discern what those shapes were—had she been asked, Kaylin would have said they were Ferals. But they were larger than Ferals, and as they ran—and they ran fast—the strange, silent soldiers who flanked the Dragon on either side pulled back.
She saw them clearly, then, as they approached the front line, running for the border as if it didn’t exist. They were black, ebony with eyes. Sleek, trailing shadows as if they were of it, and not quite free, came two creatures that Kaylin knew had once been Leontine.
In the ripple of their fur, she saw some likeness; in the fact of fur, the likeness was marked. But the fangs that jutted prominently from their open mouths—visible even at a distance—were no Leontine fangs; there were just too damn many of them. The shapes of their heads, as they approached, were an echo of the panther that Marai had been on that first evening, but it was a dim echo; they were misshapen, unique. Even the eyes were wrong—they had more than two, to start. And they were colored, like gems, flashing in chaotic sequence.
They ran on four legs, but as they approached Makuron, they slowed and shifted to two legs, and the legs…were wrong. They were furred, but resembled nothing so much as the great, twisted knot-work of the roots of ancient trees. Trees that broke rock, and resisted all attempts to uproot them.
But the worst thing about them emerged only when the first spoke. “Lord Makuron,” it said. Its voice was a rumble, like the stories of avalanches in a distant, winter country. Kaylin’s hair stood on end. All of it; she felt like a cat caught in a lightning storm.
“Orogrim. Marai.” The Dragon inclined his head. “Your enemies have come, at last, to destroy you, to unmake you.”
Two heads swiveled as one.
Kaylin’s hands dropped to her daggers, and they came, scraping slightly, out of their sheaths.
“They do not know or trust the w
ords of power,” Makuron continued. “And they have destroyed your kin since the Eldest first woke you from the sleep of animals.”
“Kaylin.”
Severn’s voice sounded so slight it was almost a whisper in comparison. But she heard it. She always would.
“It’s them,” she told him, her eyes never leaving the Leontines. It was hard—if she blinked, they shifted, their shape subtly changing. If she watched, she could see them almost as obsidian mist, shaped and reshaped in an instant.
“Yes,” he replied. He was behind her, and he stayed there. “But, Kaylin, you understand what they’re saying.”
She nodded.
“I don’t,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t. I know you do. I can sense it.”
He so rarely made mention of what he could sense, usually preferring to wait until she offered him what she knew. Even when he already knew it. As a child, she hadn’t even been aware of it; as an adult, she was grateful. Grateful in an entirely different way when he set aside caution, and privacy.
“Nightshade?”
“I do not understand it,” Nightshade said, “but I recognize the cadences.”
Orogrim howled.
Kaylin felt as if she been slapped by the hand of a god. As usual, she wasn’t picky about which one.
“Kill them,” Makuron said. “Kill them all.”
She knew that he’d spoken normally, because every Barrani present understood what he’d said.
She moved. She moved without thinking, without planning; her instincts took over and she let them. Thought was slow. Around her, the ranks of the Barrani thinned suddenly, changing shape. She was aware of where Nightshade stood, aware of the way his guards shadowed him. Aware, as well, of his sword. It was like a constellation in the night sky, and it was night, now. Somehow, sunset had escaped her notice.
She heard Tiamaris roar, and felt the fire crest her back as it left his open mouth. The Leontines had crossed the border that held the Dragon and his honor guard in check. They were met by armored men, two of whom fell back at the force of their leap.
The others were moving, as Kaylin was; she brought her daggers down at an angle, and connected, briefly, with flesh. Blood darkened the edge of her blade; she felt its warmth as she adjusted her grip, acknowledging, as she leaped away, that it was a shallow wound at best.
Orogrim did not kill the Barrani beneath his claws, not instantly. But the claws themselves had sundered armor as if it were thin cloth, and what Orogrim did not do, time probably would.
He howled like a maddened beast, leaping beneath the arc of a blade. He was fast—the Barrani were faster.
But when a blade bisected his arm, and his arm shuddered, changing shape and texture before reasserting itself, the fight changed.
It was almost like fighting the dead—injuring them didn’t stop them. Tiamaris roared again, and this time his wings bent, and they came down upon Orogrim.
She heard the crack of bone. Heard the shifting, grinding sound that bodies were never supposed to make as Orogrim absorbed the damage, remaking his body around it. Becoming a parody of whole.
She opened her mouth to shout something—a warning, something useless—before she was swept off her feet to one side. She rolled along the ground, rolled cleanly, came up in a crouch, both daggers ready.
Standing between Kaylin and the other Leontine was Severn. He’d unhooked the chain that bound his blades, and he was weaving them in the air; they whistled and keened all the warning he would give.
Kaylin. Nightshade’s voice. She could almost feel his name on her tongue as she opened her mouth, he felt suddenly that close, that present.
The other Leontine hissed and her body folded to ground in a crouch, shadows scraping weeds from their moorings. What those shadows touched, they consumed as certainly as if they were fire, black fire.
The Barrani undead had been stopped by flame.
But…these weren’t undead.
Eyes opalescent with hidden fire, the Leontine stared at her as if Severn did not exist. She opened her jaws and the gap of exposed teeth just kept on growing, as if she were adding fangs as she went along. She leaped before Kaylin could move—and before Severn could, which was worse. Her forepaws took him in the chest, and he grunted at the weight that bore him back. She snarled in pain as his blade bit into her left shoulder.
Kaylin leaped as well, throwing her right foot out in a kick that connected with the corner of the parody of a jaw. It sheared the bottom of her boots off. Had they been anything less than the heavy-soled regulation wear her job demanded, she’d be missing the bottom of her foot as well.
But Kaylin hadn’t dislodged her. And in the silver of moonlight, she could see where claws had pierced Severn’s flesh by the spread of blood.
What Kaylin failed to do, Tiamaris did not. The battering of his wings sent the Leontine flying. But the creature landed like a cat lands, and tensed to leap again; fire grazed her, hissing its way through fur. It didn’t stop her—how could it? She was changing as she fought, her paws taking on the semblance of—of hands, her face and form shifting until she could easily stand upright. Two of the Barrani guards fell on her, and fell away; her tail, like a slender arm, had literally knocked them off their feet.
And all around the Leontine, black and misty, shadows twisted, forming symbols that her movement swept aside. She was staring at Kaylin, and she didn’t so much turn as…shift in place, her face emerging, always, in Kaylin’s direction.
Orogrim had launched himself into—and almost through—Nightshade’s guard. More than that, Kaylin couldn’t risk watching. She understood what Nightshade’s death here would mean: the fief would be without its Lord. And without its Lord, she very much doubted that the other Dragon would stay so obligingly out of the fight.
If he was. She could hear the rumble of his voice, the forced play of syllables muted by Tiamaris’s roar. The Imperial Dragon’s wings were edged in shadow—or blood—but he didn’t take to the skies. That he could wasn’t in question—that he didn’t said something about the nature of boundaries.
But if he hadn’t been here, they’d be dead. All of them. It made her wonder how there were enough Barrani left standing for three Draco-Barrani wars. She had taken two deep gouges—fast, clean cuts, like knife wounds. She was certain she’d done worse in return, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did. They couldn’t carve their way through the two Leontines—it was like trying to cut water. They flowed back into shape, no matter what you hit them with.
This was what the Dragons feared. This was why Sanabalis was perfectly willing to kill an infant. She saw it clearly, understood it perfectly. The fear. The truth of the fear.
What had Sanabalis said, that day the Leontines had flocked to him as if they were obedient puppies? What had he told them?
She dodged, pivoting and lifting her arms as the Leontine sailed past, caught by gravity and momentum. She heard the heavy landing, saw it, was already off her feet and rolling along the ground. She felt the slice of claws cut her cheek, was grateful it wasn’t her forehead. She wasn’t wearing anything that could absorb the blood fast enough; it would fall right into her eyes, and she couldn’t afford that. Not and survive.
Kaylin!
She couldn’t look, couldn’t take her eyes off the Leontine. But she could listen, and above the sound of blade against claw and flesh, louder than the forced grunt of breathing and exertion, she heard the howls on the wind.
Ferals.
But worse, far worse, was the answering howl that left two Leontine throats in unison. The Leontines were talking to the Ferals. And the Ferals, Kaylin knew, were listening.
She needed to think. But she also needed to be alive to do that. And the Leontines weren’t tiring, or if they were, it didn’t slow them at all. Kaylin, on the other hand, was human. She could keep this up for another ten minutes, twenty—but her movements would lose edge and speed, would eventually slow just enough that the
re wouldn’t be any more movement.
How many, she thought. How many Leontines will hear what you hear and be changed the way you’re changed?
How many more would it take? These two, she thought, were enough. Even the Swords would have trouble containing them; they’d cut their way through Elantra, riding on the fear their presence evoked.
Her whole body ached now.
She turned just a little bit too slowly, and a claw passed through her upper arm, skidding across bone. She bit back a cry as Severn’s blade came down across the arm the Leontine had extended to cause the injury.
The massive jaws of Tiamaris snapped in the air as the Leontine melted away.
It would be back, and in the meantime, she was losing a lot of blood. She grimaced, standing as Severn glanced at her. He couldn’t put up his blade to bind the wound.
But he didn’t have to. Because the pain had cleared her mind, shutting down fear, panic, the possibilities of a future that might never arrive.
She dropped a dagger into its sheath and, clutching her arm, steadied herself.
What had she said to Sanabalis?
I’ll tell them a different story.
She wanted to close her eyes or plug her ears; it was hard enough to tell a story without the certainty of an audience. She did neither; she needed to see. Because she could—the shadows that were both dense and diffuse around both Leontines had begun to make sense: They were words. Something, someone, was telling them a story, just as Sanabalis had done when he had visited the Leontine Quarter. It was a different story, and the words were harsher and more frightening—but in the end? Words.
Like the words that were written across half of her skin. She didn’t understand them; she never had. But she owned them. And knowing this, she used them now.
“Marai!”
A name. Just a name, a mortal conceit given to a living, breathing infant. Not a name in the Barrani sense, or the Dragon sense; nothing that was required to give life, or to sustain it. A Leontine name was not a soul—if you believed in souls, and if you believed that Barrani and Dragonkind possessed them.