Severn nodded. Kaylin wanted a recap, but couldn’t quite force herself to ask for one.
“We have been waiting, Lord Sanabalis.”
Sanabalis nodded. “We will wait perhaps another two hours—the moons will be aligned at that time.”
The Arkon nodded.
Kaylin turned to Sanabalis. “Two hours?” she said. She almost added, I dragged my butt out of the infirmary, pissing off Moran, and we have to sit around waiting for another two hours?
Severn stepped on her foot.
“In the meantime, I have asked the kitchen to prepare food suitable for your consumption,” the Arkon told them both. “It will not, of course, be eaten in any of the rooms that house the collection.” He began to walk away, and they followed, passing through the cavernous walls of books, books, small statues, glass cases and more books. Kaylin wondered exactly how it was that something that burned so damn easily could end up as the hoard of an ancient Dragon, but she managed not to ask. Instead, she concentrated on being quiet, because the Arkon’s temper when his rules were broken was probably more than she could survive—Dragon voices had a way of shaking the ground you were standing on, and the carriage ride had jarred her ribs enough. Her left arm was in a sling, and she let the sling carry most of its weight.
But the Arkon didn’t speak and didn’t stop until he reached the room with multiple doors. They were blessedly free of doorwards. He took a key chain from his pockets and he opened the door to the left. “This way,” he said. “It is not much farther, and I apologize for the length of the walk. I am told,” he added, glancing at Sanabalis, “that you should not be walking at all.”
He led them down a hall that had normal ceilings—it almost felt like she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up somewhere outside of the Palace—but the hall opened into a room that looked, from this distance, to be round. She could see the gray of stone and the hint of curvature.
She could also see two familiar figures, seated in what appeared to be practical, plain chairs, which were pulled a little back from a table that would be right at home in the mess hall. Kayala and Tiamaris.
Neither rose to greet her, and in Kayala’s case that was probably a good thing—Leontines were physical creatures, and being hugged by one right now would probably really hurt.
“Kitling,” Kayala said.
Kaylin felt her whole body shudder, then. She could see clearly why Kayala hadn’t risen—a small bundle with a furry face at one end was perched in her lap. It was true: the baby was still alive.
“Kayala.”
“I’ve been warned not to hug you,” the Leontine told her.
“I have four broken ribs. They’d like them not to pierce my lungs.”
Kayala chuckled; it sounded like a growl to humans who weren’t used to Leontines. To Kaylin, it sounded like home. “You’re to eat,” she added, and nodded toward the food.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I want to hold him,” Kaylin said. “I need to hold him.”
Kayala’s glance flickered briefly across Sanabalis’s face. The Dragon Lord nodded. “Then come and take him. He’s sleeping.”
Kaylin crossed the room and held her arms out. One of her arms didn’t follow, and she grimaced.
“Your arm, kitling—”
“Hell with my arm. He doesn’t weigh that much. I don’t need both of them.” Babies didn’t count as heavy lifting. She lifted him awkwardly, cradling him against her chest, and remembering the night he was born. He stirred in her arms, and she looked at him with faint concern. “Is he hungry?”
“He’s a baby.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Babies are hungry, dirty, or sleepy. That one, though,” Kayala said, with the hint of a frown, “is too sleepy, in our opinion. It’s hard to wake him, and it’s hard to feed him. He really is scrawny.” She stood, then, and pulled out a chair for Kaylin. “We’ve been waking him up for feedings, but he doesn’t eat enough, and he doesn’t stay awake.” And her tone of voice, the subtle inflection in it, made clear to Kaylin that Kayala wondered privately if this wouldn’t be the best possible outcome. And wondering that, tried anyway.
She really wasn’t hungry, but Kayala growled at her, and she knew that particular growl. She allowed Kayala to drop food into her mouth because she really didn’t want to let go of the baby.
“Kaylin,” Tiamaris said, “Kayala has protected the cub in your absence. She can be trusted to protect the cub in your presence.”
“It’s not about trust,” Kaylin replied, around a mouthful of food. “I was just so afraid he’d be dead. I’m tired of dead children,” she said starkly. “I’m tired of having my life defined by them.”
“And living children are a better definition?”
“I can’t think of a better one. Honestly, can you?”
“I’m not human. Or mortal. And I will never have children.”
She nodded. “To the Tha’alani, it would be better. To the Aerians, certainly. But it doesn’t matter—to me it’s better.” She brushed the baby’s forehead with her lips. “Marai died because of him.”
“Had Marai died at birth, as is the custom in the plains, we would not be in this position.”
“Tiamaris—if we all died at birth, nothing bad would ever happen. Nothing would happen at all.”
He nodded, his expression carefully neutral. He looked exhausted, but he still had Dragon dignity keeping him from falling over on his face; Kaylin, lacking that dignity, held a baby in its place. Severn sat beside her in silence—he was always so damn silent. But he ate, and he did smile slightly when Kaylin attempted to tell Kayala that she’d eaten enough.
And then the Arkon returned to the room. “It is almost time.”
“Where are we going?”
“We are not required to leave this room. The ceiling, however, will open.”
“With our luck, it’ll be raining.”
The Arkon sniffed. “That,” he said, as he touched a mark engraved in the wall, “is what mages are for.”
She almost laughed, but the ceiling, as he had said, opened. It wasn’t like the Hawklord’s tower—it was something…magical. The plain and unadorned stone of the round room just faded out of existence, as if it were simply chalk and someone had rubbed a brush across its lines. The stars were bright, even given the dim lights of the city; the moons were brighter. Silver and full, they were untroubled by clouds.
“Kaylin,” the Arkon said.
She held the baby just a little bit tighter as she turned to face the Dragon, and froze. His eyes…were silver. Not gold, not orange, and thank the gods, not red. But she had never seen silver Dragon eyes before.
“Lord Tiamaris has spoken at length in Court. I have listened, and Lord Sanabalis has listened, and we two are possibly the only two who could make full sense of what he said—because it should make no sense. The Emperor,” he said, his voice shading into the dry, “was patient. He did not interrupt.
“Lord Sanabalis argued on your behalf. Tiamaris was silent throughout the discussion about the fate of the babe you now hold in your arms.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m aware that you feel that we would have to kill you to kill the child. It is not, however, true.”
She should have been afraid. Maybe she was just too tired.
“I abstained from the discussion as well. I do not understand your attachment to a stranger’s child, but Lord Sanabalis said—eloquently—that children are, in some metaphorical way, your hoard. And I therefore allowed him to talk me into this.”
Sanabalis said nothing. His eyes were the normal gold of a Dragon, but his inner membranes were up.
“You heard Lord Sanabalis when he first set foot in the Leontine Quarter a handful of your days ago. You did not understand what he was saying.”
She nodded.
“But Lord Tiamaris insists that you were speaking in the same tongue in the fiefs. Lord Tiamaris is young, and undereducated, a fact that has caused some
discussion at Court. Only two living Dragons in the Empire can claim to speak the ancient tongue, but almost all Dragons would recognize it. I am uncertain that Lord Tiamaris is one of them.
“Therefore, Kaylin, you will speak to the child you now hold.”
“What?”
“You gave your word, in the oldest tongue we know, to the child’s mother. You will fulfill your word, and we two—Lord Sanabalis and I—will listen. And we will judge the risk based on what we hear. Do you understand? Lord Sanabalis did not argue for the child’s survival. Given that the child presents a danger to the Emperor’s hoard, it would not be possible to do so. It would certainly be unwise. What Lord Sanabalis argued for was the possibility of his survival, and this was granted—barely.
“I have no interest in the child, but I confess I have little interest in the Empire, either. I am also not responsible for your life in any way. I am therefore considered an unbiased judge. And jury.”
His eyes seemed to grow, or the light in them did, until his face was suffused with it; he was hard to look at. But she looked because, conversely, it was impossible not to look at him.
“As you are unfamiliar with the tongue, I will guide you some part of the way. But only part. What you did in the fiefs, I could not do. Nor could Lord Sanabalis. What you did in the fiefs should not be possible. But neither, in the end, should you.”
He began to speak. Kaylin couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and she felt the ground drop beneath her feet. The fear that she hadn’t felt upon first seeing the odd color of his eyes came in a rush, like unwelcome gravity might return to someone clinging by their fingers to a cliff’s edge.
She couldn’t understand him. The syllables sounded familiar, and in the growing light that surrounded him, she could see them begin to dance in the air, as they had danced for Sanabalis on that single day.
She must have clutched the baby too tightly, because he woke and began to cry.
“I will take him, kitling,” Kayala said softly. The hush in the words was the only sign of reverence she showed. But the fact that it was there was unsettling. Her husband, Marcus, didn’t feel any of the Leontine racial reverence for Dragons, or their magic. Or maybe he did. He wasn’t one to let personal feelings get in the way of his job.
But she shook her head mutely and turned again to look at the words before her. Legal High Barrani had seemed like that, at one time. No, not quite—the individual Barrani words made sense, it was just the whole sentences that were as torture. These were different.
She tried to slip out from under the fear. It didn’t help her—it almost never did. Right now she held the baby. Right now he was alive. She began to walk toward the Arkon. If he saw her, it changed nothing. He continued to speak, and she continued to struggle with the familiar cadences of a completely unfamiliar tongue.
But as she approached, she became aware of the tingle that stretched up the length of her back. It was uncomfortable, but it was welcome. She drew closer to the Arkon, and the tingling increased until it was actively painful. Shifting the baby’s weight, she perched him carefully on her hip—which, given his age and lack of coordination, took a great deal more care than it did with Marrin’s foundlings—and then reached out to touch one of the moving sigils.
She thought her hand would pass through it. It didn’t. The symbol stilled in the air, and grew denser and brighter, as if the contact gave it form and shape.
“Sanabalis,” she said, in a hushed voice, “can you see?”
“Yes,” he replied, and his voice was equally hushed. “Is this what you saw when I spoke?”
She nodded. “I can’t read it.”
“Arkon?” Sanabalis said.
It was the space of ten very loud heartbeats before the ancient Dragon answered. “Yes. I see what you see.”
“Kaylin, touch the others.”
She nodded, not really noticing that he hadn’t used her rank. She wished she had given Kayala the baby now because he was fussing, and the fussing was growing louder, and she had nothing to feed him.
She began to awkwardly try to rock him while she walked. She was lucky it didn’t cause her to fall over. But while he fussed, she touched the words she could see, and as she did, they coalesced in dense, bright shapes, the movement of lines and squiggles and dots stilled.
It was only then that she realized the Arkon had ceased his story, if that’s what these words were. No wonder the baby sounded so loud; everything else was utterly silent.
“Severn?”
“We can all see them,” he replied. “As clearly as we can see the marks on your skin.”
“Arkon, can you read them?”
The Dragon Lord—if that was the right word for him, Librarian just seemed wrong somehow—was moving, in a slow circle, from symbol to symbol. He reached out once, and then drew his hand back before it could make contact.
“Arkon?” Sanabalis said.
But he continued to walk, to stare and, eventually, Sanabalis said to Kaylin, “Cover the child’s ears if you can, not that it will do much good.”
“Cover his ears? Why?”
“I believe it best that we have the Arkon’s attention. Elantran is not his first language. It is probably not his last, but there are a great many, most dead, in between. When he is absorbed with something, he tends to fall back on Dragon thoughts, and in general, our language is the best way to retrieve him.”
“Got it,” she said. She tried to cover the child’s ears, but understood why Sanabalis was certain it wouldn’t do much good.
Sanabalis roared. That sound, coming from an incongruously person-shaped throat, shook the entire room. If that’s what they did to catch your attention when you were daydreaming, she never, ever wanted to see them at war.
The Arkon raised a brow. His eyes were still silver, but she could see some hint of gold emerging in their depths. “My apologies,” he said, in his perfectly modulated, almost human voice. “I have not seen anything like this since I was all but a hatchling.”
“Not even in Ravellon?”
Sanabalis covered his face with his hands. But the Arkon merely stared at Kaylin, as if seeing her for the first time. “Not even there,” he said quietly. “And I gather, from the reaction of Lord Sanabalis, that you have been instructed not to ask.”
She swallowed, bounced the baby and started walking in a fast circle. The Dragon’s roar had momentarily silenced him—if by silence one meant the long intake of breath that precedes all out screaming.
“Not there,” he said again. “But I have wandered. What you saw in my speech is not what I see in the speaking. But I see it now. Bring the child, Kaylin Neya. Follow the path I walk. The words are not…in sequence, and not all of the words are present.”
“Those are the ones I could see.”
“Yes, and for that reason, they must be significant. What you did for Marai, I cannot do.”
“I didn’t do anything for her but let her die,” Kaylin replied starkly.
The Arkon shook his head. “You did. You let her choose her form, and the moment of her death, and she accepted the limitation of that form to its end. She heard you,” he added softly. “And I think…she heard the first story, the story of their creation as it was spoken at their birth. And she understood it.”
“And you don’t think she would have heard you?”
“I think it a pity that Tiamaris is so reluctant to take up his studies,” was the severe reply. “But…I have doubts. None of us were Chosen.” He held out a hand. It had the normal five fingers, it lacked claws, and yet it seemed, to Kaylin, utterly alien for all its semblance of the familiar. The baby was crying. Kaylin almost wanted to join him.
Instead, she took the Arkon’s hand. And when the Arkon led her to the first word, which was not the first one she’d touched, she stopped before it. Without thinking she lifted the crying child into the radius of shed light, and his crying stopped.
She would have been embarrassed to admit that the first
thing she did was make sure it hadn’t somehow killed him. But she was also embarrassed to admit that she went out drinking with Teela and Tain. The baby’s eyes were round…and blue.
“Kayala, what does blue mean?”
“Kitling?”
“Eyes. Eye color. What does blue mean?”
“That,” the Matriarch of the Pridlea growled, “is a Barrani color.” Which pretty much answered the question. “If his eyes look blue, they could be reflecting the light.”
“Or capturing it,” the Arkon said.
The baby reached out, and Kaylin lifted him closer to the light, and the shape that cast it. Human babies didn’t have this much coordination. From Kayala’s sharp intake of breath, Leontine babies probably didn’t either.
But when his downy paws touched the word, the light slowly dimmed. He began to cry again. Her side was sore, and she was certain that running around in circles wasn’t going to help. So Kaylin began to speak softly to the child. Nonsense words. Baby words. Soothing words.
Words.
The Arkon said nothing very loudly, and Kaylin had the grace to flush. But he was old enough to take care of himself, and the baby was, in the end, more important and immediate than her dignity. Nor did he choose to criticize her; instead he led, and she followed. At each sigil, the child quieted for a moment, and at each, he was lifted to touch some element of the word—a line, a dot, a stroke. When the light dimmed, he would cry, and when he cried, Kaylin would whisper or hum or even sing—because it seemed to help, and it was better than doing nothing.
The light in the room slowly faded. The blue of his eyes slowly grew.
And when the last word had dimmed, the darkened shells slowly faded from sight.
The Arkon frowned; he was staring at Kaylin. She realized this when Sanabalis cleared his throat loudly.
Before she could speak—or think of something to say that wasn’t baby nonsense—she felt a warmth at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, one last word hovered in the air before her face. It was golden in color, and the light it cast was not as bright as the light of the Dragon’s words, but it was still recognizably the same language.