But Kaylin walked, dragging a rune that seemed to gain weight with each step, and a rune that seemed so light she could forget it was in her hand. She didn’t; she didn’t want to let it go yet.
She only knew she was heading in the right direction when she heard singing, because it was singing. She would know that voice anywhere: it was the Consort’s. The Consort’s voice was not the only voice she heard, and sadly, she’d recognize the other five anywhere, as well: the dreams and the nightmares; the eagles and their shadows.
She glanced at the eleven ghosts; they trailed like shadows—reflecting light—behind her. She wondered if they were responsible for the weight of the word in her hand, but they hadn’t been able to touch it. Then again, did she expect anything that happened here to make sense?
She cursed. Leontine again. Her ankle hurt, the rune weighed a ton, and she wanted to reach the Consort before she finished singing, because she knew—the way she did in a dream that was about to go very, very wrong—that the song was almost done.
* * *
She couldn’t run. Her ankle wasn’t broken, but the word had become an anchor. She dragged it down the hall, sweating all over a very fine, very magical dress. She wanted to curse, but saved her breath. The small dragon stopped playing shawl; he rose and stretched, digging claws into various parts of her collarbone and neck as he readjusted his position. The urge to curse grew stronger.
He spread his wings, but managed to do so without batting her in the face—which meant, of course, every other wing-slap was deliberate. She could see him lift and stretch his slender, translucent neck; he inhaled.
“Now is so not the time,” she told him.
As usual, he ignored her. He opened his jaws, with their disturbingly solid teeth, and joined the eagles in song. Kaylin didn’t have the breath to start singing again; she didn’t try. But the runes were warmer and brighter as she struggled with the weight of the one on the right. They served as lamps, but there was no flicker in the light they cast. The fact that they were behind her and she cast no shadow should have disturbed her more.
It didn’t; she was frowning instead at the door she was inching toward. She hadn’t seen a single door so far; it figured that the first one she’d find stood between her and the Consort.
* * *
The door did not obligingly roll open when she reached it. Of course not. That would be too easy. Her arms were shaking; if she had to drag the word on the right another foot, she’d collapse from exhaustion.
To make matters so much worse, the door—a door that was at least two stories in height, and made of either stone or pocked iron—was warded. Exactly how was she supposed to touch a door ward when both of her hands were full?
She looked at the small dragon.
Hiss, squawk, hiss. His wings rose, and he whacked her in the face. “Look, I understand that we have to get through the door—but it’s warded. You open it! Just—just bite it, like you did with the tree!”
He hissed again, raising his head and stretching his neck. He inhaled.
Kaylin said, “No!”
Small, transparent creatures should never be able to look so smug. She dragged the two words until she was flush against the closed door, grinding her teeth. She didn’t want the dragon to breathe on the door—and why, she didn’t know. Everything about this space implied dream, which could terrify but couldn’t exactly kill.
Except for her ankle. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d twisted it; she was familiar with sprains; this was not dream pain. Dream pain usually ripped your heart out and left you screaming in fear or rage, or weeping helplessly. It didn’t give you a bum ankle.
But this dream would kill the Consort. She couldn’t treat it like any other dream she didn’t want to be in. She’d seen what the small dragon’s breath could do; she wasn’t willing to risk damaging the Consort.
And you’re willing to damage yourself, idiot? No one is paying you enough for this.
She pressed her forehead into the ward. And of course, given the day—and the weeks leading up to it—alarms began to blare. At least her forehead didn’t go numb and her hair didn’t catch fire—not even when the door did. She jerked her head back. She couldn’t leap away unless she surrendered the words she’d carried all the way here, and she knew it wasn’t the time yet.
It would have been easier if the fire hadn’t been so damn hot. It was almost white; the edges were gold and orange and too damn close to her face; her eyes watered. The small dragon, however, stayed where he was, neck elongated, chin tilted forward; she glanced at him, saw fire reflected in his eyes.
She glanced back and saw the eleven ghosts; they were white with reflected light, and very slightly transparent. They reminded her, for no reason she could think of, of the small creature clinging a little too tightly to her shoulder.
Kaylin had to admit that it was a pretty impressive way to open a door. Most doors didn’t dissolve into ash. The ash clung to her dress. It probably dusted her face, as well, but she couldn’t see her face; it certainly settled on the small dragon’s wings; he shook them out, which probably didn’t help Kaylin any. As the air cleared, she looked through the frame of what had once been a door.
It opened into a very, very large room—but it was a room built in a shape that Kaylin had never seen before; it had so many almost triangular corners recessed into the walls it seemed to be all corners. The floor was tiled, or appeared to be tiled, in a way that suggested flagstones and courtyard, and indeed, it was open to air.
Or it was open to sky—but the sky held no moon; it held sun, sunlight, azure, no hint of cloud. And in the center of this spiky, oddly shaped courtyard stood the Consort.
* * *
The Lady was pale; she wore robes as white as she now was; as white as the fall of her hair. Her arms were raised, but they were trembling like a junkie’s; they had always been slender but now—now they looked emaciated. She stood before a fountain; water fell from air into a basin of ivory and gold. It was a trickle, a drip. The Consort’s voice could be described the same way.
On the basin, perched two eagles; the shadows flew above. Kaylin walked, cursing, dragging the rune that seemed determined to scratch the hell out of the stones beneath her feet.
But with the runes, in Kaylin’s wake, the ghosts entered the courtyard. As they did, the Consort, voice wavering, lowered her arms and turned. Her eyes widened as she saw Kaylin, and their color—clear tens of yards away—was gold. Kaylin almost never saw that color in a Barrani face: it meant surprise, and it faded into a more natural green as she watched.
The runes did not magically transform any part of this room. They did not become smaller or lighter; they didn’t fly away. Kaylin dragged them, heading in a straight line toward the Consort and the fountain. She wasn’t certain what she found more disturbing: the fountain or the Consort’s fragility. No, that was a lie; she was worried about the Consort. The presence of water, here, would have to wait.
The Consort nodded encouragement—but she didn’t move. It was almost as if she couldn’t. Kaylin, ankle throbbing, could. As she did, she noticed that the glass statues, the ghosts, began to separate. The first of the statues, the slender man, walked toward one of the triangular corners. His feet left a trail in the stone, which should have been impossible as his steps didn’t actually reach the floor.
But when he came to the corner, he rose, stepping onto a pedestal of nothing but air. Only then did he look back at the others, and he smiled at them. It was meant, Kaylin thought, to be encouraging, to give them strength; it cut her. She had never seen a similar expression on the face of any Barrani she had ever met.
She spun then, Consort almost forgotten; all ten were now departing, walking—as he had done—to different empty corners and taking their positions upon equally invisible pedestals. They weren’t still; they didn’t become statues in the same way; they looked for each other, sometimes wildly and sometimes casually, as if they couldn’t bear to look weak. That, a
t least, was familiar.
Each of the corners filled this way; only when they were filled did the glass ghosts look into the center of the courtyard, and their gazes fell on the Consort. Kaylin reached her as she lowered shaking arms, and at the last, Kaylin let go of the runes, held out her arms, and caught the Lady as she collapsed.
The eagles fell silent; the shadows fell silent, although they continued to glide.
Kaylin wasn’t Teela; she couldn’t carry the Consort far—but she could now carry her to the edge of the fountain; the water had ceased to fall. The last drop of water hit the surface of the rippling pool beneath it; Kaylin could see reflected light in the basin.
The light grew. It grew, and it rose; the Consort whimpered, lifting her hands; she had no voice left. But Kaylin shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said, although it wasn’t. She turned to look at the runes she had left at the edge of the fountain. They were glowing, but they had done that since the moment she’d touched the Consort and closed her eyes, entering a dream and a nightmare.
She was afraid to let go of the Consort. She was afraid that if she did the Lady would slip away; the dream would swallow her. She would go where Kaylin couldn’t follow.
Lirienne.
No answer. Kaylin set the Consort on her feet and kept one arm around her back, beneath her arms. She stumbled; she’d forgotten her ankle. She didn’t fall. The runes weren’t that far away.
The Consort whispered something; Kaylin couldn’t hear it. It sounded like Barrani, but spoken with a throat so dry only a rasp was left. Kaylin shook her head. She had no idea what the words were supposed to do, and this was the first time she was being asked to decide. To choose the words. To choose their destination.
Chapter 10
Kaylin hesitated, but only because supporting the Consort and dragging the heaviest of the runes at the same time was impossible. The small dragon squawked.
“If you can’t be helpful, shut up. Not you,” she added in panic as the Consort lifted her head.
Kaylin grabbed the rune that had remained weightless; that, she could do. It fit her hand like one of her own fingers, although it didn’t vanish at the contact. The Consort’s eyes widened, shifting from green to a familiar blue. But she reached out, as Kaylin had, and she touched it, as well. Her eyes widened farther, and took on the oddest sheen of gold. Kaylin noticed that the Consort’s hand didn’t pass through the rune, the way the others had. She was as real as Kaylin in this place.
Supporting most of the Consort’s weight, Kaylin turned to the fountain. The surface of the water in the basin was rippling, and the ripples grew stronger. Light was no longer reflected in it because the water wasn’t still enough. She almost asked the Consort where the rune should go or be. Almost. But she understood that somehow, it was her decision to make, wrong or right.
The first word she’d chosen was easy to move; it came with her as if it weighed nothing. She was afraid to let it go, because if that feeling of acceptance, of belonging was somehow a part of her, it was a part she’d worked for. A part she wanted. But she understood that its meaning didn’t and couldn’t exist in isolation, and she offered it to the only open space it might fit: the fountain, with its rippling water.
The Consort watched, eyes darkening. In the Barrani, fear, anger, and loathing were all expressed with shades of darker blue.
The water rose as the rune began to sink. Given how little it weighed, Kaylin had thought it might float, but she didn’t watch it disappear; instead, she turned to the weightier word and saw that the Consort still gripped one long, curved line in white fingers. Kaylin’s were about the same color. “Hold on to it,” she said, her voice low. “I can’t lift it with one hand.”
She could barely lift it with two. The Consort understood what she intended. The Barrani Lord was shaking with exhaustion, her eyes ringed in circles that Barrani skin almost never saw, but she planted her feet against the floor, straightening as she did. She put a second hand on the same curved line, and as Kaylin struggled with the weight of the complex word, she strained to help her lift it.
Together they pushed it over the edge of the fountain’s basin, scraping gold and ivory; it teetered for a moment on the rim, and the whole of the fountain shook as the rune’s weight balanced there.
If Kaylin needed any proof that dreams—at least the dreams of a building—made no sense, she had it; where the weightless rune had sunk into water that was theoretically too shallow, the one she could barely move began to rise. Kaylin’s fingers were numb and tingling as she let the word go and turned to the Consort. She slid an arm around her as the Consort began to sway.
Together, they watched the rune rise. It seemed to absorb the sunlight that shone from a near cloudless sky, brightening until they had to squint to see it at all. When it was four yards above them, the shadows took to the air directly above it, the featherless wings moving in time. They began to circle the rune, and as they did, they began to speak.
So did the eagles, although the eagles didn’t join their flight pattern.
The rune stretched, thinned, elongated. The light it had absorbed was so brilliant a white, Kaylin lifted a hand to her eyes. She’d tried closing them, but it still made no difference; she might as well have had no eyelids.
She lowered her hand in a hurry when the water shattered.
* * *
Shards flew. Kaylin didn’t have time to duck; unlike the Consort, she tried anyway. Three glittering pieces of what could only be ice struck her; two hit her arms, piercing skin exposed by the patterned holes in her sleeves.
The third struck her in the chest, just beneath the hollow of her throat. There was no convenient hole in the green, perfect fabric—or there hadn’t been. The shard wasn’t large, and it wasn’t long; she’d taken more serious injuries in the drill yard on a bad day. But it was cold; she felt a brief, sharp pain followed by a spreading numbness as the world stopped moving.
No, she thought, not the world—just everything in it. The eagles. The shadows. The Consort. Shards of ice—ice that glittered like broken glass—continued their outward trajectory. She watched, knowing suddenly where they were flying: to the statues that stood on nonexistent pedestals in the spokes of the courtyard.
The statues moved, as Kaylin had, lifting arms to protect their faces. Nothing made sense; Kaylin held her breath as flying ice met standing glass. She wasn’t certain what to expect. Where the Barrani ghosts were struck, their entire forms rippled and shivered, as if they were water into which a small object had been violently thrown. The rippling didn’t stop; it was disturbing. Worse. The rippling spread, changing their haughty, Barrani expressions, distorting the lines of their faces in a way that implied emotion was the result of external force.
She turned back to the Consort, who hadn’t moved at all. The eagles had. If Kaylin hadn’t spent too damn long in pointless memory exercises in the Halls, she might not have noticed. Time hadn’t stopped—it had slowed. It had slowed for everyone but Kaylin. Reaching up, she grabbed the ice that had lodged in her chest and attempted to pull it out. Her hand went instantly numb; she couldn’t even move her fingers.
She stopped trying.
No sign of the two words she’d brought to this chamber remained.
Instead, in the center of what had once been a basin, standing exactly where water would have fallen, was a statue; it was a thing of ice, a sculpture just under six feet in height. Its feet were bare, and its arms; a simple summer shift fell from its straight shoulders, trailing down front and back in a drape that implied heavy silk.
Hair fell in the same way, but Barrani hair always did that. Kaylin lifted her face to meet the clear eyes of the twelfth statue, the twelfth Barrani ghost.
It was Teela.
* * *
But she wasn’t the Teela Kaylin knew, not exactly. Kaylin knew she’d never seen Barrani children. The eleven ghosts hadn’t looked particularly young to Kaylin, either; they looked like Barrani to her.
But Teela did look younger. She didn’t look like a child, but she didn’t—quite—look like the adult she was now, either; she was caught in the middle somewhere, the way teenaged mortals were. She didn’t look gawky or skinny; she looked slender, not quite finished, her chin slightly softer, her expression—well, she had one. These colorless, ice eyes were wider, her lips were parted, her hands extended, palms cupped before her as if she were carrying something, offering it, pleading. It made Kaylin distinctly uncomfortable, but she couldn’t look away. And because she didn’t, she wasn’t aware that the other statues, still distorted by whatever had struck them, had started to move. Not until they approached the basin.
The nightmares spoke; the eagles spoke.
The statues were silent until they reached the basin that had become a pedestal. There, they lifted their arms in unison and looked up at Teela, as if reaching for her.
As one, they opened their mouths. And as one, they began to scream.
* * *
The Consort staggered as movement returned to the room. She flinched at the sound of Barrani screams because they were Barrani voices.
The runes were gone. The water, gone, as well.
Kaylin and the Consort, however, were still trapped in a stone courtyard in the nightmare of a Hallionne; Kaylin couldn’t think of this as a dream. She turned to the Consort, trying to quash growing panic. “I’m sorry.”
The Consort’s voice was thin and rough. “For what? There are very few apologies I will now accept from you.”
“I thought—” Kaylin swallowed. She had to lift her voice; even standing as she was right beside the Consort’s ear, everything else in the room was making so much damn noise she had to struggle to be heard. “I thought, if I brought the words to you, they’d—”
“Yes?”
“I thought you’d wake up.”
“I am not asleep,” the Consort replied. Her voice was calm and quiet.