Severn was the first to release her. Nightshade’s hand lingered a moment longer, as if he did not trust her.
“Severn,” she said, in the same croaking voice, “is my back like this too?”
“Right up the nape,” he replied.
“What does it look like, to you?”
“Ash. It’s gray,” he added. “And different from the arm markings.” He paused. “What does it mean?”
“How the hell should I know? He said I was tainted,” she told them, her eyes drawn to the patterns, absorbed by the trace of their curves, the way they moved at the rise and fall of her chest. “But that I was all they had anyway.” Her arms were shaky; her fingers were also white. She massaged them; apparently blushing did not extend to her hands.
“We almost couldn’t hold you,” Severn told her. His voice was low. Low enough that she had to listen to catch all the words.
“I saw you,” she whispered. “I heard you call my name. Both of my names,” she added, turning to catch Nightshade as well. “It was…enough. Lord Nightshade, I need a big room.”
“Not this one.”
“No. Not this one.”
“And clothing?”
She swore. “That, too. Do you have anything practical?”
The answer was a big, fat, “sort of.” Which he didn’t say, of course. He didn’t speak mortal tongues, at least not in her presence, and his Barrani was a bit on the stilted, high-caste side for her liking; it didn’t contain colloquialism. He brought her a shirt, and pants—but they were silk-soft, thin and clingy. The Hawk was also absent, and she missed it.
Her hair was still bound, her face mercifully free of any mark but his. She avoided the mirrors in the room to which he led them, but it took a bit of work; there were a lot of them, all taller than she was, and all—of course—very fine.
“How long?” she asked them both.
“Less than ten minutes.”
Plus another fifteen to get here and dress. “What time is it?”
Lord Nightshade gestured, and one of the mirrors shifted in the peculiar way that mirrors—enchanted ones—did. It became a window; she could see the streets of the fief beyond the castle, although it took her a moment to orient her vision.
“What do Barrani want?” she asked him, as she stared at the falling shadows, the lengthened shadows, of the fief’s buildings.
“Many things. But the dead? I cannot say.”
“Power?”
“Power, perhaps. Life. For the Barrani, the two are not easily separable.”
“I don’t understand how they die,” she said.
It was a question. He didn’t answer.
She undid a button or two, rolled up her sleeves. She would have stripped, but there were witnesses. Witnesses who had already seen her butt-naked, but she still felt self-conscious. The Seal room had receded, and she was returning to herself. Whoever that was.
Her arms were still glowing, and the blue fire trapped there was like a written promise. In a language that she didn’t understand.
She looked at the mirrors. “Are they all magic?”
“They are.”
“Can they—do you have a map of the fief?”
A dark brow rose. It was an expression that was almost familiar. A Dragon’s expression. A Hawklord’s.
“Records,” she said softly.
He smiled. “That is not the word that activates them, Kaylin. Ask, however, and I will grant you access.”
“Where’s Tiamaris?”
“He will be here soon.”
“Good.”
“How?”
“He’s used your mirrors before. I haven’t.”
“He cannot pay the price of their use, now.”
“What price?” She met his eyes. Her voice was almost normal. Almost. “I’m tired of games.”
“That is because you are young, and you have not yet realized that that is all you have.”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s all you have.”
“A challenge?”
“A fact.”
“Kaylin,” Severn said. She looked at him; she had almost forgotten he was here. This was not his realm. But it wasn’t hers either.
“The dead Barrani are in your fief,” she told the fieflord. “They’re gathered somewhere in Nightshade. You can’t find them. Not in time.”
“The death that they will offer today is not the death it would have been had they killed your foundling.”
She didn’t ask him how he knew what he knew. It would have been a waste of a question, had he answered. “So you think you have time?”
“I think you have time, Kaylin.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh?”
“They know. They know that we know.”
“It is…possible.”
She waited. Realized that he could outwait her, in any number of ways. He probably had more people killed in a year than she could save. Certainly more than she intended to save today.
“What do you want from me?”
“Ah. Now that is an interesting question.” He stepped away from her as he spoke, and toward the bank of mirrors; each one reflected his expressionless, flawless face. “What do you think I want, Kaylin?”
“I don’t know. But I’m betting it has something to do with these.” She lifted her arms; the sleeves, unbuttoned, fell immediately to her elbow in a fine drape of dark cloth.
“Betting is a mortal pastime.”
“It’s just another game.”
“But mortals seldom gamble with anything of value.”
Had he been standing closer, she might have hit him. The anger was sudden and sharp. Severn caught her eye, held it a moment; his jaw was clenched, but it stayed shut. For better or worse, this was her conversation.
“When Severn came to you,” she said, her voice low, “you knew.”
“No, Kaylin. I suspected.”
“You let the killings happen?”
“I did not understand the purpose of the killings.” His eyes narrowed. “And in truth, I did search. I understand some of the power inherent in death magic, but it was not a power that expressed itself within my fief. That, I would have known.” He turned away; she saw, in multiple reflections, the length of his hair. “But when I met with Severn, when he spoke of you, I began to understand. I did not realize, at the time, how dangerous you were.
“How dangerous you would have been, had he not come to speak with me at all. Do you? Do you understand what you might have meant to Elantra? I think even the Dragon Emperor would have felt your threat, had he assembled the whole of his Court and taken to the streets against you. What,” he added softly, “might have remained of those streets.
“But now? You were marked by one force. You have been slowly marked by another. I think of you as something fragile, balancing on a thin line that you cannot even see. And in that balance, should you manage to hold it, there is something of value.”
“Power.”
“Perhaps. But I will say this—if there is power, it will be yours.”
“And not yours?” She lifted a hand to her cheek.
His smile was subtle. “Were I capable of taking what you might possess, perhaps. But others have played that game in our long history, and it is a dangerous game.”
“You like games.”
“Indeed. But I feel that a game is something that is played only when there is a chance of winning.” He paused, and then he lifted his hand to the surface of one stretch of mirror. “The Dragon comes,” he said, almost bored.
And the mirrors sprang to life, in concert. Not even the mirrors in the morgue could boast such a wealth of instant detail, such a depth of color, of vision.
“Lord Nightshade.” Tiamaris tendered him a bow. A real bow.
“Lord Tiamaris. I believe that your part in this is almost at an end. I could, however, be mistaken. Come, Kaylin. This is my fief.”
Kaylin stared. After a minute, she remembered to close her mouth.
>
The fief was not seen at a distance; not from a height greater than the tallest part of Castle Nightshade. But no matter how far away the farthest of the streets were, she could see them, could make out the details. She could also see the people in the stretching shadows; they were few. Night would fall soon, and although it was not yet upon them, they gathered their belongings, closed up their carts, made their way to their homes.
She could see the Four Corners, and she could see, as she followed their stretch, the building that she had once called home. Could see windows, and wondered who lived there now. There wasn’t much space in the fief, and new occupants often didn’t care what had become of the old ones.
But in all of this, she could see no answer, just the passage of time.
Severn came to stand by her side, and Tiamaris also joined her. The two men bore the crest of the Hawk that fire had burned from her. But she held its truth closer than that, now; it wasn’t a simple adornment. It wasn’t even a statement meant to convey authority to outsiders. It was what she was. Or what she hoped she could live up to being. She had to try.
Lifting her arms, exposing what she had always hidden, she stared at the blue and the black that adorned her arms until one melded into the other.
“Tiamaris,” she said.
“Kaylin.”
“This is the language of the Old Ones?”
She saw the shadow of his nod from the corner of her eye. “What were the Old Ones?”
“We are not entirely certain. Fragments of history exist, but not one living creature remembers them.” His tone suggested that this was the reason there were living creatures. “Some believe that they gifted the races with language,” he added. “With sentience.”
“Why? Why would they do that?”
“Who can say? Why do painters paint? Why do singers sing? Why do writers write? There is an impulse to create.”
“And to destroy.”
“Yes.”
“Are they so different?”
“That is a Barrani question.” The Dragon’s response was cool. Sort of like fire was cool.
“Why did they need language?”
“Pardon?”
She shook her head. “These,” she said, lifting her arms, “are words. You said that. These are their words. But—but they sound so powerful. You said that it isn’t even safe to study the words. That mages have died.”
“Yes,” His eyes narrowed. He reached out, his palm hovering above her skin, as if she were an artifact as dangerous as the ones that had killed those mages.
“Why did they need them?”
“Why does any thinking being need language?” He withdrew the hand. “You were not, perhaps, the best of students, Kaylin. But you learned to speak Barrani. You learned the Leontine that would draw you closer to Sergeant Kassan. You failed—”
“Almost everything else. I know.”
“Then why could you learn the languages?”
Because she had no choice. She couldn’t be a Hawk without learning them. And she had to be a Hawk. She started to say this, but it wasn’t entirely true. She had some small gift for languages. At least compared to her gift for any other academic subject. Memory intruded, as it so often did. “It was…something the Hawklord said. When I told him I hated Barrani.”
“What was that?”
“That language was both a window and a wall, and that if I knew the words, I could choose which it would be. Without them, I had nothing—no way to—”
Understand.
“Words are power,” she said softly, repeating Lord Grammayre’s distant words as if she had just heard them, would always hear them. And she closed her hands, fault lines, life lines, disappearing in the clench. She stared at her arms. “You could read some of this.”
“Some. But Kaylin, I cannot speak it. No one living can. We do not know the sounds, if they even had them, that those shapes represent. We guess at the meaning, but even that is like walking in the dark.”
In the dark.
“I learned Leontine,” she said. “You’re right. I learned it for Marcus, because it was part of him. And Aerian. I learned that. Not for the Hawklord. For Clint. Because he loved it when I tried.” These memories intruded as well, and she gripped them tight.
“I spoke with the Old One,” she added softly.
They all froze.
“But I didn’t use words. I couldn’t. I spoke, and he understood, even though I didn’t shove the meaning into containers.”
Hesitantly, tracing sigils and their edges in the recess of memory, she, too, began to walk in the dark.
She heard Lord Nightshade’s cutting breath, saw the light play against the motion of his hair as he moved, and moved again, standing in place, pivoting as the surface of silvered mirror, perfect map, shifted.
He turned suddenly to face her, and he held out his arms, mirroring her gesture, making the poverty of both her strength and her grace absolutely clear. Facing her, reflecting her, he waited, his eyes a shade that was exactly the heart of the darkest of emeralds.
And then he smiled, and gestured. “Kaylin Neya,” he whispered. She felt every syllable. Without intent, her lips moved in reply, but she did not speak; didn’t have to.
His name was in the air between them, window and wall, and the pattern of it—she could touch it without giving it voice, invoke it without descending into syllables. It was like, and unlike, the marks upon her arms, slender and intricate where they were bold, simple and stark where they twisted in upon themselves like snakes or vines, living things. It was like, and unlike, the symbols that adorned the ceiling and the floor of the seal room. Like, and unlike, the conversation with the Old One.
It was a part of her, the way the symbols were. It was a bridge, between what she had learned in the Tower of the Hawks and what she been given, in ignorance, as a child. A key.
A gift.
Her eyes widened.
Lord Nightshade’s eyes were as wide as she had ever seen them, and they were blue, crystal blue, a color that was too pale for Barrani. She had feared him, had always feared him; he had been a shadow. The fieflord. Another death.
But she saw clearly, for a moment; he was death, yes, but he was not dead; he was more.
“You lied,” she whispered.
He smiled. “Truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, almost shaking her head, unable to keep expression from her face. “Your name—you gave it to me. It wasn’t necessary.”
“You see much,” he said, “that I would have kept hidden from you. Yes, Kaylin. I could have pulled you from the seal, then, without offering you what I have offered none of my kin in centuries.”
“But…but it’s your name. I don’t understand.”
“Nor have you need,” he replied. “Understanding is the end of the journey. Come, Kaylin. Find what I cannot find.” He lifted a hand, brushed the mark he had placed upon her cheek. “You have paid. You bear my name, and you bear my mark. If I have given you something, I am Barrani—I have taken something in turn.”
She could have pulled back; she didn’t. The tips of his fingers were warm, and his expression was—almost—gentle.
“Time, Kaylin,” he told her, and he lowered his hand.
She was left with his name in the silence.
With all the names of power that were written upon her, over and over, like bane and blessing.
“Yes,” he said softly. “They are names. Some, I might have recognized once, had they been given to me. They are the names of the dead,” he added, as her eyes widened. “But not the dead alone. Written there are also—I believe—the names of those who sleep—light and dark, law and chaos. Death magic,” he added softly, and looked at Tiamaris. “Did you not tell her?”
“It was not necessary.”
“Knowledge is power.”
“If you can guard it, yes. Otherwise, it is simply death.”
“Isn’t it just power gained
from killing?”
He laughed. “Then all power held in Elantra is death magic. No, Kaylin. It is…more than that. The names that are written, in a tongue that even I cannot read, have no power over the living. They once did. But they were uprooted. In our history, we struggled against the nature of names—they were our one weakness, our one vulnerability. What we learned in that ancient struggle we do not speak of openly, nor will you. But there are those who lost their names, and retained only the ability to invoke the power inherent in them.”
She shook her head. Felt, for a moment, that she was stuck in a magic class again. Except this one wasn’t theoretical.
“The dead ones do not know what they write upon their sacrifices,” he said softly. “They know only that it brings them power for a brief time. They are lost to us. They have the cunning and the intelligence of our kind, but they are animals. And they are free. My name,” he added, “is a binding. You can see it.
“See it. But understand that it is more—and less—than what your vision makes of it. Do not speak it.”
She didn’t need to. She knew she didn’t really know who he was. But some part of her had thought she understood him, as much as she understood any Barrani who didn’t wear the Hawk. She knew, now, that she didn’t. He had given her something she couldn’t have taken by threat or force. She didn’t need to understand it; it was his name, but it was also hers.
“No one wrote these,” she told him.
“Someone did.”
“Who?”
“Say the Old Ones…perhaps it is true. Or say nothing. But time, Kaylin, will destroy you, in one way or the other. Choose.”
Choice. She bit her lip and nodded.
Extending her arms, she stepped toward the mirror and touched the closest surface with the tips of her fingers. She stared at the symbols that were part of her skin, and drew them out, not speaking, no longer trying. They danced there, trapped and aging, and she caught them.
Tiamaris spoke. She didn’t understand what he said.
But she didn’t need to.
She could see the shadows seep from her skin into the mirror, part of her, and not part of her; could see them questing and struggling across a foreign landscape, flat and cold; could see them, at last, come to rest, to spread and deepen, gathering and dousing light, until only they remained.