Lord Tiamaris echoed that frown. But when it became clear that the fieflord was finished, he spoke. “You almost killed him yourself, Kaylin. Had you, I think you would have survived. But the children would not. And when the fires left you—if they ever did—you would bear the weight of their deaths.”
The fieflord began to walk away.
“Lord Nightshade!”
He turned, his eyes a deep, deep green, with fragments of a cold blue at their heart.
“Thank you.”
He bowed. “It is not over,” he told her quietly. “Between us. Between the Old Ones. You are here, and you live, and you have used their power.”
“Then he—”
“Makuron has lost much. But until he is dead?” He shook his head. “He is best not forgotten. It is not the first time that he has almost died.”
“What did he—what was he trying to do?”
The fieflord’s eyes widened a moment, and then he chuckled. It was the Barrani equivalent of an open laugh. “You don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “And I will not be the one to explain it. Not yet, Kaylin Neya, not even to one whom I’ve graced with my name.” He turned away then, leaving them.
“Makuron could read the old writing,” Tiamaris said quietly. He looked again at Kaylin. “And he could summon…the dead.”
“The Barrani?”
He nodded. His expression was about as warm as quarried stone.
“Why did they serve him?”
“He offered them power,” Tiamaris said. “And yes, this is why Lord Nightshade cannot answer you. Makuron offered them the power for which they surrendered their names.”
“But—”
“Power is strange and fickle. What they thought they surrendered was the vulnerability with which all immortals are afflicted—the weakness of name. What they surrendered instead was much, much more than that. Like all such bindings, it serves two purposes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. You don’t.” He hesitated for another minute, and then said, “History is not our guide, it is not our friend. It is a passing stranger, one which shadows legend, sprinkling it with the seeds of truth. It is said that the Old Ones—which ones, we do not know—created the races. The first, the immortals, were their greatest creations. But they could not give them life without giving them names. The words had power,” he added, “but I think you understand this one fact better than even I.
“Regardless, the Old Ones made our forms, but our forms were not living. Into the heart of these, they carved runes and sigils, each unique, and when they had finished, they spoke those names for the first, and the only, time. And the power of those words is said to have wakened each—Dragon, and Barrani. We were few, then.
“But the names were the source of our existence, and we were bound to those who knew them.” He paused. “Not a one of us likes to be ruled, Kaylin. You could not understand that, no matter how much you might think otherwise. You are mortal.”
“But immortals—they have children. Do they name them?”
“No.” His lower lids rose.
She knew him well enough to change the subject. “And the rest of us?”
“How you were created, we do not know. There is some argument. Some scholars believe that you came to this world by some method of travel denied those of us bound to it by the ancient laws.” His shrug was about as expressive as his face.
“From another world? There’s more than one?”
She saw from the look on his face that he had no intention of answering that question. If he could. Dragon pride, she was discovering, was as tricky as legal Barrani to negotiate. Still, this was more than she’d ever gotten him to say, and she didn’t want this subdued openness to end before she’d managed to get everything she could. “But…the dead ones?”
“When it became clear that the names themselves were a leash, it is said that some of the living rebelled. Those who had names attempted to divest themselves of that one weakness. They studied the tongue of the ancients. They even felt, in their hubris, that they understood it. They sought to replace what was written at their creation with words over which they had control. And at least one succeeded.
“They now bear a greater weakness because of it. The power that took the place of their names hollowed them. They are not what they were.”
“Do they even remember what they were?”
His smile was thin, like a knife’s edge. A honed knife. “Very few of us know, very few have had reason to speak at length with the dead. It is…dangerous,” he added quietly. “They can take the names we bear, if we are not cautious, and if they cannot become those names, they can take power from them, replacing it slowly with the lingering state that is their endless death.”
“Then what are these?” She held out an arm. It was a bad idea; her hands were trembling.
“Older still,” he whispered. “And a sign that old powers are waking. The…scholars believe they are the words upon which the names were founded. Those sages,” he added, “who survived their study. And perhaps it is true. I will not say what I think. I will say only this—let them sleep, Kaylin, if you can.” He paused. “The Hawklord’s trust in you was not ill-founded. I do not know why you were chosen, if that is what you meant to ask—and it was, even if you do not know it.”
“But the marks changed—”
“Yes. They changed. Had Severn not intervened the first time—” He paused. Saw her grim expression, the pain in it that she was too damn tired to conceal. “I am sorry,” he said softly, “but you are strong enough to bear this. You already know it. Had Severn not intervened the first time, you would have been lost, both to him and to us. You would be, in form and shape, Kaylin Neya—but you would be only a vessel, and at that, a vessel whose neck is held by the only outcaste Dragon in the history of my kind.
“And Elantra would not, now, be a city. What it might become, I do not know, but the dead would be beyond number—some of them, Barrani, some, Dragon. Mortals simply falter, and they, too, would litter the streets like cattle.
“What Severn did, I will not justify—it was not my action. But I will say this…. He saved not only Elantra, but the Empire, for the Dragon Lord that would have arisen in the aftermath of your power would be Emperor, and his reign unlike anything you can imagine, even in nightmare.” He bowed his head. “We had hoped, with the death of those children seven years ago, and your absence from the fief, that it was over.”
“It is now.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “It is. Tonight, in this place, and by your own will. You wondered why the deaths came so quickly, this time—but the answer must surely be clear, now—you are no longer a mortal on the threshold of adulthood…you are adult. Coming into your power without his intervention,” he added, “would mean that that power would be yours. It was a gamble. He could end his long exile in a handful of mortal deaths, had he but found you, as a child on the brink. He could sense your waking. He must have known how short his time was. Time is a constraint that seldom binds the immortal.
“Had you been allowed to pay the price, to stand for moments longer against Makuron with the full force of that ancient power as your only guide, you would better understand what each mark is. I can only…guess.”
“Guess, then. Tell me.”
“The new marks, the changed marks are, in part, the names of the dead, taken from them centuries before you were born. I think—and I once again offer conjecture from the uncomfortable vantage of ignorance—that he hoped to use those names to bind you, to mark you in a way that Nightshade himself has not, to make your power subservient to his own. He could not use the writing that was originally placed there, but if he could change it, corrupting it, until it was something he could speak, he could take that power into himself.”
“But he has a name.”
The Dragon was utterly silent. After a moment, he offered a weary smile and lifted his gaze. She couldn’t see where it ended, but she could
guess.
“She’s Kaylin,” Severn said. His voice held a shrug, but as he carried her, he didn’t. “She sees what she sees.”
“I have pitied her teachers in my study of her transcripts,” the Dragon confessed. “But I have so rarely understood their complete astonishment at her inability to see.”
But what she saw, as the sun’s light guttered, was the glistening ebony of familiar Aerian skin. Clint alighted slowly. He was wounded; his forehead was an ugly gash, and he’d bled into his own eyes. Not pretty. But not life-threatening, either—at least not his own life. His pole-arm had been snapped in the middle, but he held it anyway; anyone who had served with the Barrani Hawks as long as he had knew the value of a good, long club.
“Kaylin?”
“Clint,” she said. Her eyes widened as she saw bloody streaks across the even gray of his wings. “Your flight feathers—”
“They’ll hold.” He paused, his gaze slanting toward the east before his shoulders relaxed. “It’s pretty much over,” he told her. “The…other Barrani…are walking pyres now. They’re a bit hard to kill,” he added.
“They would be. They’re already dead.”
“They bleed a lot for dead people. And they make us bleed a lot.” His smile was grim. He slid into Barrani. “The Hawklord will require your presence for debriefing.”
She nodded; it was all the obedience he required. Had it been necessary, she would have danced or done somersaults, although not without pain. Then she looked to the east as well, to the knot of lost children who were waiting in silence, a stunned silence that would haunt dreams for decades. Hers. Their own.
“What will we do about the children?” She counted them as a Hawk counts. There were ten. One boy, naked, was covered in the marks; two girls had likewise been marked, and they covered themselves with shaking hands, attempting to hide the sigils that had also covered Catti. Catti and over forty dead children whose bodies had been left in the streets of the fief of Nightshade. She wanted to get up, to strip herself of the long, torn shirt she wore, to give it to one of the children. But she couldn’t move.
And what she did not do, the Aerian Hawks began to do instead. The children were frightened, and she wanted to tell them not to be. They would be safe with these men, these winged beings, so much like Angelae in appearance they seemed—at this moment—to be gifts from a merciful god. If there were any.
“We will make every effort to find their parents,” Severn told her. His voice was quiet, even subdued. She looked up at his face, saw it at an odd angle, the chin the widest thing in her field of vision. He’d lost blood, just as Clint had, and another scar might adorn him in a few weeks’ time.
She hadn’t the strength to remove it; the bracer saw to that. But she didn’t ask him to remove the bracer, either. It was still glowing, still making its silent accusation.
“How many of them still have living parents?” Bitterness seeped into every word. She thought of the woman by the old well.
“At least one,” he replied softly. “But Kaylin, those that don’t, we will take to Marrin. And Marrin will make them hers.”
She thought of the Leontine, and she was oddly comforted. “They’re old, for foundlings,” she told him, as he began to move. And they were; between ten and twelve years of age, and under the shadow of puberty.
“They’re old,” he agreed. The words were fading. She could feel their rumble in his chest. “But they’ll survive to be older.” If the words were bitter—and they might have been—she didn’t cling to them.
She let him carry her away; away from the children for whom, as Severn had often said, she had a weakness.
Just not enough of a weakness not to kill them all. She closed her eyes; they were heavy anyway, and there wasn’t much she wanted to see.
But closing her eyes wasn’t much better; something trailed from each, tracing the curves of her cheeks. It wasn’t a lot like peace. Luckily, she had an out: she faded into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 21
She slept for three days.
Woke for hours at a stretch, and ate what she was given; it was mostly mush or broth. She lay abed in a familiar room; it was the one that she lived in. The mirror was silent; someone had covered it.
No, she thought, as she shook herself out of sleep for a moment. Severn had covered it.
He came and went from view. She was both afraid to see him and afraid that she would never see him again, depending on how awake she managed to be. She let him spoon feed her for the first two days, but on the third, she insisted on feeding herself, and he sat, crouched on the only chair she owned, staring out the window. Or staring at her reflection in it.
Severn wasn’t the only person she saw. Teela and Tain made their way across her threshold, and she woke once to see Teela draped across the bed like a slightly fussy cat. Clint came to visit, and he brought his baby with him, apologizing because the baby wasn’t exactly quiet. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t mind the tears—because she didn’t—but he faded from view, and when she woke, he was gone.
Even Caitlin and Marcus came to see her; Caitlin brought flowers, and tsked about the condition of the room, picking up a piece of discarded clothing that she swore could almost stand up and walk out on its own. Her voice, when it came from the kitchen, was even more shocked, in that maternal way. It made Kaylin smile.
It made Kaylin weep.
Marcus spoke to her, holding her hand; she knew he did, because she had a distinct memory of the soft paw-pads against her palms. Against her forehead. Leontine breath was not exactly the most pleasant of sensory experiences, but she felt that as well; felt his tongue touch her forehead in benediction. Or gratitude.
“Get your butt out of bed,” he growled in her ear. “Or I’ll dock your pay.”
She smiled wanly. “How long have I been out?”
“Three days. And counting. I’d throw you out of bed, but Caitlin would shred my fur. And my wives would make hunt-meat out of me.”
She heard an agreeable growl, and saw Marcus roll his Leontine eyes. One of the wives—she couldn’t quite focus to see which—was standing ten feet beyond his shoulder.
“I came,” she said, in her slurry, perfect Leontine, “to keep him in line. The males never know their place.”
“Now you know,” Marcus told Kaylin, his paw-pads soft against her forehead as he pushed her gently, but inexorably, back into her pillows, “why I spend so much time at the office.”
Marrin came to visit after she’d slept again, and Marcus and Caitlin, and the wife who had spoken with such certain affection, had been banished by sleep. Her fur, still white around the edges, was perfectly flat, and it had regained some of its luster. Her claws were completely sheathed.
“You look tired,” Kaylin said.
Marrin hissed in Leontine laughter. “Someone should take the cover off the mirror,” she said, “if you can tell me that.” She paused, and then added, “I have seven new kits, and they all want to meet you.” But her eyes flickered as she said it.
Kaylin closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Leontine claws caught her chin just gently enough not to pierce skin. But not, in truth, by much. “Don’t,” Marrin said firmly.
“But I—”
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Not while I’m here.”
“But they don’t want to—”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’m their pride-mother. I know what they really want. If they haven’t figured that out yet, they will. They’re rough around the edges,” she added, “and they’re so scrawny you couldn’t make a meal out of the lot of them. But we’ll change that.” She paused. Her eyes glittered. “They’re scared,” she said quietly. “They think I mean to use them. But you came from the fiefs, and you can talk sense into them. One or two are already at home—but the others? When you can, Kaylin. Come.”
She, too, touched Kaylin’s forehead with her paw-pads. They were dry. But Marrin mothered, and she h
ated to be mothered. Kaylin said nothing.
“Severn’s been in to see them.”
The words didn’t terrify Kaylin. They would have, once.
“I…like him, Kaylin. I don’t know what he did to you. I won’t ask. Whatever it was, he’s paid. He’s still paying. But he brought them to me, and he covered the expense of clothing them. He’ll do.”
Tiamaris came later, with, of all things, flowers. She stared at them as if they were withered branches. Or as if he were mad, and it wasn’t safe to look at him that way. “The Emperor is in your debt, Private Neya.”
She cringed.
He nodded. “Very wise. You are, of course, too weak to attend him. I think it would be very wise if you remained too weak to attend him. He is not a patient man.”
“Meaning I’ll embarrass the Hawks and he’ll have to kill me?”
“Something very like that.” He spoke, not in the Barrani that was his most frequently used language, but in Elantran.
“What will you do now?”
“Now?”
“Now that it’s over.”
He held her gaze, his own golden, his lower lids hidden. “I will, I think, be a Hawk for some time yet. It is…an interesting life. The rhythm is mortal, the time is odd. But I find it satisfying in a way that I have seldom found my work satisfying.” He reached out for her hand. No, she amended, not for her hand.
For the bracer. It was a steady, warm weight. “The gems are dull now,” he told her.
“I know.”
“I think it would be safe to remove it, if you felt the need.”
She shook her head. Thinking of why it was on her wrist; of what might have happened had it never been placed there at all. “Not yet,” she said softly.
“You are growing, Kaylin Neya. In wisdom.”
“Is it always going to hurt so much?”
“The gaining of wisdom? Not always.” His smile caught her by surprise; it was gentle. Almost human. “The Emperor has graciously allowed you to remain in the ranks of the Hawks.”
Both of her brows rose.