She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the odd sky, occupied as it was by runes and birds and their cast shadows, remained firmly fixed in her vision; she turned, and turned again, looking up and down as she did. She was no longer in the Consort’s room.
Lirienne.
There was no answer.
Nightshade?
Silence. She inhaled slowly, counting to ten. The small dragon bit her ear. This time it was harder, and his warble was higher. Exhaling, Kaylin nodded, remembering what she had so reluctantly set out to do. She began to sing. She had faint hope that her actual body—she had no doubt she still had one—was silent in the halls of the Lord of the West March. Barrani voices were clear and resonant and she had never heard one sing off-key, not that song was common.
Mortal voices, not so much, and Kaylin’s was on the bottom end of that scale.
But this wasn’t about the quality of voice. It wasn’t even about the words; she could have chosen words at random, the syllables of the eagles made so little sense. It was about harmony. About tone. It was about rhythm. It was about emotion, because even if she couldn’t understand a single word, she felt she understood intent.
There was a desolation, a yearning, and an emptiness in this song. No, not emptiness, but an awareness of loss, of all that had been lost and might never come again. It was hard to listen carefully with her eyes open, and as closing her eyes didn’t apparently change a damn thing, she gave up trying.
The eagles flew. The shadows flew. Their song soared and plummeted, as if it were the sole expression of everything they were. Maybe it was. She couldn’t understand more than the emotion behind the long, winding words—and she probably didn’t understand all of that, either. Just enough.
She became aware, as she watched, that her marks were stationary. So was she. While the eagles flew, while the shadows darted, she was as fixed in place as any of the marks. The small dragon’s claws curled into her collarbone, and she grimaced; her song banked briefly while she struggled not to swear.
She was mostly prepared when the dragon’s wings began to flap; they were silent, their movements suggesting power and grace. Kaylin began to move. Her flight was unwieldy; it had none of the grace or speed of the dreams or nightmares. But the slow, steady climb took her closer to the nearest of the floating marks.
It was larger than she was. She could see every detail of its full shape; on her arm, it was flattened and almost lifeless in comparison. It seemed natural that it shed its brilliant, golden light; it was like sun—but it didn’t burn and didn’t blind. At least, not yet. It felt almost alive as she reached out to touch it. She couldn’t read it; it was too large for that. She couldn’t intuit its meaning.
But she had come here to find the Consort.
The marks that adorned her skin were like a miniature world around her. They were individual glyphs, differing in shape and size, in simplicity and complexity. They were very like images that might be called up in Records for her inspection. And she knew, again, that she had to choose one.
She didn’t have time to waffle, but to make a decision based on—on nothing, really, when so much rode on the outcome, was almost paralyzing. She let her hand fall away. As it did, the rune faded from sight. She nodded to the small dragon and began her awkward flight toward the next one.
* * *
Every time she failed to choose a mark, it vanished. When this had happened a dozen times, she realized that the marks were returning to her skin. They were still glowing, and frankly, when they were part of her skin, they were warm. With so few reattached, it was uncomfortable; she had no doubt, when she was done, it would be painful.
But she’d live with the pain if she could wake the Consort.
Hells, she’d live with the pain at this point if she could find the Consort. The sky was full of wings and runes and nothing else; the birds circled; the shadows circled. The Consort was nowhere to be seen. Kaylin forced panic to take a backseat again; it was hard because it kept trying to grab the reins and set the course. She inspected rune after rune, wondering if this many of them could truly fit on her skin.
Every so often the small dragon bit her ear to catch her attention; it was always when she had forgotten to keep singing. Had he not been her only viable form of movement, she’d’ve bit him back.
The sky was slowly becoming an empty space; the flight patterns of the dreams and the nightmares of Alsanis had become less complex with the reabsorption of each word. Kaylin still hadn’t found the one she was looking for—and she was terrified that she hadn’t because she didn’t know what she was looking for.
She had never been good with words.
Oh, she could be a smart-ass. Almost a decade with the Hawks would have that effect on anyone. But when it came to important things? She couldn’t choose the right words to save her life. She blurted, if she could get them out at all. She tripped over them, even though she knew what she wanted to say. Or at least knew what she wanted to convey.
It was simple to know what she felt.
It was hard to make other people understand it. Words were sometimes more of a barrier than a bridge, especially because it was so easy to choose the wrong ones. It was just as easy to hear the wrong ones—to think she understood what the other person was trying to say to her. To hear what the words meant to her, not what they meant coming from someone else’s mouth.
She was not the right person to be choosing words.
She stilled, frowning. These weren’t Elantran words. Or Leontine or Barrani or Aerian, either. These were True Words. In theory, if she chose the right word, there was no way to misinterpret it. It had no hidden meanings, no barbed cultural contexts, no past associations she could trip over like a clumsy toddler. It would convey the whole of what she meant, not more, not less.
This would have been comforting if she knew what she was supposed to mean. Or if the cost of failure wouldn’t be so high. Without the right word, the Consort wouldn’t wake.
And without it, Kaylin thought, as she bypassed four more runes, Kaylin wasn’t so certain that she’d find her way back herself. Opening and closing her eyes didn’t shift or change the scenery much; she was still here.
She stopped singing. The dragon, predictably, complained. She traversed sky, listening to the songs of eagles and their shadows, on wings that weren’t hers and never would be. As she did, she passed more of the floating marks and they vanished in her wake, dwindling and returning to her skin. She heard the sorrow and the loss and the yearning carried by the voices of dreams and nightmares. She understood them in a way that didn’t encompass words, they were so much a part of her life.
She’d heard that—and desire—in the Consort’s song of wakening, in the lee of the Hallionne Bertolle. She’d even joined the Consort, singing the part Nightshade would have taken had he been there. Desire—the desire she’d heard—wouldn’t touch this emptiness. Not in Kaylin’s life. She hesitated. This wasn’t her life, was it? It was the Consort’s. The Hallionne’s.
But it had been left to Kaylin to choose a word that would somehow respond to it. Kaylin’s choice. Kaylin’s imperfect choice. She stopped when there were only two runes in the whole of the sky. The eagles and the three shades continued to fly, their path unimpeded by obstacles, their voices soaring and diving as they did.
She didn’t understand how to say these words. Any of them. But as she looked at the two that remained, she understood what they meant.
They were almost of a size; their shapes were different. In the first, the long, straight line of the rune was central; the looping adornment to one side of that line was complex; the dots to the other side, and the single stroke at its height, a frame.
The second rune had no central element that she could see; it was a balance of delicate squiggles, dots, slender strokes. Its shape suggested a cohesion that closer approach dispelled.
Both were luminescent gold. Broken into components, they shared several base shapes—but it was the combination that made them so
distinct. The combination, she thought, and the essential meaning. It was to the more complicated, delicate rune that she drifted.
She could almost hear it as she approached. It seemed to sing—or at least to hum, as she could make out no distinct syllables—in time and in tune with the dreams and nightmares. It was at the heart of their song; it was isolation, writ large and made strangely compelling. Seeing it, hearing it, she felt that she understood the song in a way that she hadn’t before. If she could speak it or sing it, she was certain that whoever was listening would know that she did, at last, understand.
It was larger than I’m lonely. It was larger than I’m alone. Choice and consequence and acceptance and pain were tied into it, part of it. This was loss, the result of loss; the result left when something whole had been shattered, and the pieces imperfectly swept away.
Yet there was no anger in it; no resentment, no desire for vengeance or destruction. It was—it was like a dirge. A funeral dirge. It was a farewell, a goodbye, uttered by the people who remained behind. Behind, Kaylin thought, and alive.
She skirted its edge, and then turned, almost blindly, toward the other word.
She couldn’t hear it, from here. She didn’t know what it meant. She glanced at the small dragon; he was staring pointedly at the side of her face. His tongue—solid, now, where the rest of his body wasn’t—flickered out to touch her cheek, and she realized she was crying. Normally, this would embarrass her. Here, it didn’t matter. Tears had no meaning to dreams, to nightmares.
She moved away from the rune; she had not dismissed it and it did not fade as she left; she could feel its light and heat as she rose above it and moved to the only other True Word in this sky.
Unlike the first rune she’d approached, she thought this one was silent. It didn’t hum; it didn’t have a voice—if voice was even the right word. It stood aloof from the song that moved around it, carried by invisible thermals. Kaylin almost dismissed it.
But something about its shape was familiar. Something about the whole of its three-dimensional form felt right. Right? she thought, grimacing. Right for what, exactly? This would have gotten her zero on any test she’d been forced to write to enter the Hawks; it wouldn’t have even gotten part-marks. It may have gotten derision and criticism.
It’s not about instinct, she could hear Teela saying—at a remove of too many years. She sometimes wished she knew Teela’s True Name, because Teela’s voice occupied so much space on the inside of her head anyway.
You’ve got decent instincts. Most people do, even mortals. But instinct isn’t law. It certainly isn’t Imperial Law. You don’t get to kick down a door or break through a window because it feels “right.” That usually leads to demotion or dismissal, if the Emperor’s in a good mood.
So I shouldn’t trust my instincts.
Did I say that? Honestly, kitling. You put words in the mouths of everyone around you; we probably don’t need to speak at all—you can carry both sides of the conversation. Understand, however, that they’ll both be your sides. You need to trust your instincts. And then you need to be intelligent about proving the truth of them to people who don’t have the same reaction you do. We call it covering your ass. It’s an important component of Hawk work.
Did she understand what this rune signified? No. And staring at it wouldn’t give her that understanding. She needed to approach it more closely, and she needed to hear it over the competing songs that filled the air.
* * *
What she felt, as she approached, was the warmth of sunlight on a still, cold day. It was the hearth fire in Marcus’s house, when the Leontine kits were sprawled in one messy, living fur heap in front of it, and invited her—by more or less tackling her, knocking her over and dragging her—to join them.
Kaylin couldn’t imagine living with Marcus’s Pridlea; his wives, although she loved them, were terrifying. But from the first night he’d taken her home, she’d felt as if she almost belonged.
“I don’t suppose,” she asked the small creature who was both her passenger and her only form of locomotion, “that we could take both of them?”
The dragon said nothing. He didn’t even warble. When she hesitated, he bit her ear again. She growled. Marcus’s kits would have choked with laughter at the sound she considered a growl.
She wanted this word. She wanted what it reminded her of. She realized she had no single word to describe it. It didn’t matter. She knew that it wasn’t home, not exactly, but it was close: welcome, warmth, acceptance. Acceptance of Kaylin, a human, in a home meant for Leontines. Acceptance and a place for her. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even the promise of love.
But love could grow in a space like that if it was freely offered and freely accepted.
If she could only choose one word, it would be this one.
Thinking that, she looked over her shoulder. Only one? Was that what she had to do? Her arms ached; her legs ached; the back of her neck was burning. Only the mark on her forehead failed to cause pain, probably because it was singular.
In the absence of clear rules—hells, in the absence of murky ones—there was instinct. There was previous experience. Using the power granted her by the marks allowed her to heal—but healing didn’t change the marks themselves.
But freeing the trapped spirit of an ancient, dead Dragon had: one rune had vanished. Interacting with the Devourer had, as well—but she’d lost more.
Yet she’d also gained marks. She couldn’t be certain that they hadn’t always been there; she felt that they were emerging with time. Only the mark on her forehead was one she had chosen—and she hadn’t consciously decided to add it to her skin; she had been in a panic because she didn’t want to see it destroyed.
There were no rules.
She turned away from the rune that offered warmth across so many spectrums, and once again faced the one she thought of as mourning. She hadn’t examined it as closely because she didn’t want to return to what it evoked in her. Mourning was not the right word. Grief, maybe. But even that felt thin.
She reached out and placed a hand around one of the thinnest of the curved lines that comprised the rune that meant almost-home. When she started to move, it came with her. She was surprised that it had no weight, no drag; it wasn’t small and it appeared—to her eye—to be very solid. But it didn’t fade away; it didn’t return to its place on her skin—wherever that was.
Nor did the other rune disappear; it waited.
I don’t want to go there. But want or no, she went; the wings were not, in the end, her wings.
* * *
There are places no one wants to revisit.
Kaylin was afraid of this word and what it meant, even though she’d seen enough at first glance to get the gist of it. This was not a word she wanted to define anything. The one that she now carried with her, yes. But not this one.
The dragon was singing. The eagles were singing. Their voices had flattened into a single thing; she could no longer hear harmonies or the subtle shifts that indicated multiple voices. Her own voice was silent.
She had been to so many dark places in her life. She had suffered so many losses. She had lost the only home she had known, but had never lost the desire for, the need for, a home. She had lost her family. She had lost the person on whom she had most relied. She had become something she hated, and stayed there for long enough it was still hard, on some days, to look in the damn mirror.
“I don’t want to do this,” she told the small dragon. But she flew toward the rune anyway. “I mean it.”
His squawk was turned to song and not to what often sounded like angry, harping lecture—absent intelligible words.
And she realized that it didn’t matter. She couldn’t understand the thing if she didn’t examine it. She probably couldn’t understand the whole of its meaning, regardless; she wasn’t an Ancient or an Immortal, or the distant relative of a world-devouring creature. This wasn’t, and would never be, her language; her understanding would alw
ays be imperfect.
But...the rune itself seemed so personal. It seemed, for just a moment, to be part of her, exposed, writ large. Since closing her eyes made no difference in this space, she gritted her teeth instead. She was angry.
But she’d been angry at herself, on and off, for a long time. Anger didn’t control her actions anymore; it just made long, hard days longer and harder. What she’d done in the past, she couldn’t change. She could refuse to make the same stupid choices; it wouldn’t stop her from making different stupid choices in the future. If she learned something from them—if she survived for long enough to learn something—she could narrow the stupidity options. She was human; she would never narrow them to zero. But no one did. Even the Hawklord made mistakes.
On most days, she pulled herself up off the ground from her figurative face plant, and kept moving, reminding herself that it was normal to make mistakes. Everyone had to fail sometimes. On some days, no.
And she could see failure in this rune. Failure. Loss. Grief.
But she couldn’t see rage, self-loathing, the desire to lash out and break everything in sight. She couldn’t see what she’d felt when she discovered the death of the two children she had known and loved best.
No, that wasn’t quite right. She could. She just couldn’t see all of what she’d felt. She couldn’t see her own sense of betrayal at Severn’s hand. She couldn’t see her certain sense that if it were not for her, both girls would still be alive. There was no self-loathing.
There was loss. Isolation. A hint of choice—but it was a choice that would be made, again and again, a defining choice. It was...it was like responsibility. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was duty. It was defining duty. It was as strong as her sense of duty to the Hawks.
Yes, she hated the bureaucrats. She hated the stupid regulations that seemed to serve no purpose, unless one wanted criminals to get away. She hated parts of Elani street, her regular beat. But she loved the work. She loved the sense of purpose it gave her life.
Would she still love it so much if every Hawk she knew and worked with now were dead and gone? Would she feel the same sense of purpose if she were the only one left to do the work? Would she still do the work? Could she?