“I have a bad feeling about this,” she told Severn.
Severn had already pulled back in silence. He had many shades of silence; this was grim.
“Don’t you have to—eat it or something?” she said without much hope.
He shrugged. “In our world, yes. But this is demonstrably not the same world.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she took his hand in hers. “Would you forget, if you could?”
“Forget what?”
“Anything.”
He looked at her.
She gave in quietly. “That you killed them.”
“No.”
And bit her lip.
“Would you?”
She wanted to say yes. She didn’t. For seven years, the answer would have been no. But in the High Halls, the answer had shifted, and the ground she was standing on wasn’t so firm. She stalled. “Why?”
“Because I did kill them. Forgetting it wouldn’t change the fact.”
“It might change you.” It might change us.
“It might,” he said quietly. His voice was at its lowest. “But it wouldn’t bring them back. It wouldn’t change anything that’s happened.”
“But it—”
“Kaylin. Elianne. Whoever you are. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of my understanding of who I am. I spent a long time learning to live with it. There are days—” He shook his head, discarding the words. She wanted to hear them, but she knew Severn; they were gone someplace she couldn’t follow.
“I wouldn’t choose to forget. Besides,” he added, squeezing her hand, “you’re a Hawk now. You’d figure it out sooner or later, and we’d have to go through it all over again.” His smile was tight. “And I won’t put myself through those early years again. Not even for you.”
She understood then. “This is a test,” she told him softly.
He nodded, as if he had understood it the moment he’d set eyes on the flowers.
“It’s a stupid test.”
“Maybe the Barrani would feel differently. They live forever, and their memories dim much more slowly than ours. Truth is not their strength…they play games, they live and breathe deceit. It’s why they make good Hawks,” he added. “They understand deceit in most of its forms.”
“And me?”
“You’re not Barrani.” He paused. “The Barrani wouldn’t consider the deaths a crime. It wouldn’t be murder. They barely understand loyalty to kin.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not true of all of them,” he conceded. “But I pity those for whom it isn’t.”
“Why?”
But he shook his head again. “Do you want to forget?”
She swallowed. “Sometimes.”
“Do you think it would change anything?”
“It would change how I see you.”
“And is that important?”
She almost laughed, but it would have been the wrong type of laughter. “Severn—you were the entire world to me. You were the only person I counted on. I trusted Steffi and Jade in a different way—they were children. My children,” she added bitterly. “But I would never have asked them to save my life. I could never have asked them to fight for me. I could never have believed they could save me.”
“From what?”
“From anything.”
“Do you understand that I wouldn’t have remained your entire world? Even had they lived?”
The moonlight was bright here. The sky was hazy, and it made a soft ring of light around the bright moon’s face. She could see it now, see it clearly; it was almost full. The red moon was full. Two days.
She had two days to save the Barrani from something bitter and terrible that she didn’t understand, and for this small space of time, it didn’t matter.
“You were thirteen,” he told her. “You were a child.”
“I’m not a child now.”
“No? But you think like one.”
It should have annoyed her. Maybe later it would. Here, it didn’t quite have the barbs it should have. “Because I can remember how much I believed in you?”
“No. Because you still want to. Because knowing the truth, you still want to. I’m what I am,” he added.
“It’s not what you were.”
“No. But I changed then. I understood what I was willing to do. You understood it, too.”
She nodded.
“There’s no way back.”
“There’s no way forward.”
“There is, Kaylin. You weren’t a Hawk. I wasn’t a Hawk. Or a Wolf. We were trapped in the fiefs. We’re free now.”
“We aren’t free,” she whispered.
“We’re as free as we’re ever going to be. We make the choices we make…we live with the consequences. There’s no other way. Take away the memory, and the consequences teach us nothing. In the end, I learned that I could live with what I did.
“I don’t know if you can. But that’s a consequence, as well. And I knew it then. The alternative was worse.”
She looked at the flowers, felt her throat tighten. The scent was stronger. “What if we don’t have the choice?”
“We always have the choice. Isn’t that the point of all this, in the end? Wasn’t that the rune that you touched?”
She nodded. Reaching up, she clutched the medallion of Sanabalis, Dragon Lord. “Is burning them really bad?”
“It would be.”
“How bad?”
He frowned. “This isn’t rhetorical, is it?”
“Not really. And yes, I know what the word means. If you explain it, I’ll stab you.”
“With what?”
She grimaced. “I’ll kick you.”
“Better.” His smile was less tight. “I’ll risk it,” he added quietly. “The scent is…bad.”
Holding the medallion as if it was a talisman, she lifted it high.
“Is that necessary?”
“Probably not.” She studied its face, felt the comfort of its familiar weight. “I learned something,” she added.
“Is it going to kill us?”
“Maybe.”
He shrugged.
And she spoke the word fire.
Fire came, like the breath of a Dragon. What it touched, it burned, and flame spread, contained by stone, in a circle of heat and orange light. She lost the moons to its glow, the dance of its many tongues, the language of its crackling. She didn’t lose Severn; he still held her hand as he watched. They held their breath because it was practical.
They stopped when it wasn’t.
Smoke, white smoke, rose above the flames like a curtain of dense fog. But the wind that had moved scent did not move the growing wreath; it reached up, and up again, an illusion that spoke of walls.
And as it billowed, Kaylin saw words in the shapes; fleeting words, broken by flame, and reshaping, over and again, the scream of the flowers, all subtlety lost.
She would remember this.
That was the point.
“Kaylin?”
She lifted a hand, looking at the smoke; Severn fell silent. Then, pulling him by the hand, she retreated, walking backward, limned in light.
“It’s the tree,” she said softly.
“What of it?”
“We have more climbing to do.”
“The Lethe?”
“It’s gone. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t change our minds now.”
“Do you?”
She shook her head; her hair was in her eyes. Pushing it back, she smiled. Raw smile. Real smile. “Forward,” she told him softly.
The tree was waiting for them.
But Kaylin was wrong.
She saw the trunk. Saw, engraved in it, a simple rune. Which she cursed roundly, in all of the languages at her disposal. She even wondered, briefly, if you could swear in the tongue of the Old Ones. What would it sound like?
Severn waited until she had finished. “What is it?”
“It’s a damn door-ward,” she sna
pped. “It’s too bad the people who built this place are long dead.”
He laughed. She kicked his ankle.
And then, before she could lose all nerve, she lifted the hand that Severn wasn’t holding and placed it, palm flat, against the rune.
Light flared, brighter than fire, in the dark of evening sky. Kaylin’s reaction was typical.
“Do you ever stop swearing?”
“Yes. But it’s not generally considered a good sign.”
He laughed again.
The trunk of the tree began to dissolve. It was a slow dissolution, the texture of bark shifting beneath her hand as if to cling, to leave an impression. Her fingers curled around it for just a moment, holding it in place. There was peace here. She wasn’t quite ready to surrender it.
But that was her life: ready or not, it went, smoothing and stretching until it formed the surface of a door. It was, she noted, a wooden door, and its edges were still tree shaped, bark colored. As if the door were a cross section cut from the trunk of a huge, old tree.
There was no handle.
“You ready?” she asked Severn.
He nodded.
She gave the door a little shove, and it fell away.
Standing here, in the frame of something that was still mostly tree, she saw a room. It was a very large room, and it was lit by torches in wall sconces. Those sconces were green, like the eyes of a calm Barrani.
The floor, she couldn’t see clearly, but the walls were dark; stained, she thought. Wood.
She tightened her grip on Severn, and when he winced, she offered a crooked smile. “I don’t want to leave you behind,” she told him by way of apology.
“Oh. I thought you were just trying to break my hand.” But his smile was familiar. Wearier. Older. But at heart, familiar.
They stepped through the door, one after the other, like two links in a very short chain. Kaylin wasn’t surprised when the door vanished at their back.
“Kaylin?”
“Hmm?”
“What did you see in the smoke?”
“Words,” she told him quietly.
“I guessed that.”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I think the High Halls consider me a bit of a cheat.”
He chuckled. “Oh?”
“I gave the decision to you,” she said without smiling. Nothing much to smile about, really. “I let you make it.”
He shrugged. “They were my memories.”
“Not just yours.”
“It’s about choice,” he reminded her, the smile gone from his lips.
“My choice.”
“It was your choice, Kaylin.” He frowned. She recognized it; it wasn’t aimed at her.
Turning—because she had turned to look at him—she surveyed the room. Large? Yes. The floors felt wooden; she was in her shoes, and the soles were a bit thin. Part of her considered taking them off, but it was a small part.
There was a table in this room. It was long and dark; wood, but a heavy, dense wood. The top was perfectly flat. Two chairs faced each other across its width. It wasn’t a dining table, or if it was, people were expected to eat with their hands off the top of the table itself. Oh, and bring their own food while they were at it.
“Are we supposed to sit?” Severn asked her.
“Not sure. It looks…”
“Like a war room.”
She shook her head. “Not war.” She lifted a hand. “There’s a door.”
He nodded. But he was drawn to the table. Where he went, she followed.
The chair moved almost quietly across the floor. Given that Severn was dragging it, it said something about the floor. Or the chair legs. “It’s heavy.”
“Doesn’t look it.”
He set the chair aside. “Look at the table, Kaylin.”
She did. And frowned. There were no engravings here—which she half expected. But the lines of wood grain were…unusual. It took about half a second to realize why: They were crawling, as if trapped beneath the surface. Roiling. “Not liking this table much,” she said grimly.
“Don’t touch it.”
“Wasn’t going to.” But she was. Her hand had moved without much thought behind it, and it rested an inch above the table’s surface. There were words beneath her hand; even in its odd rush of movement, the wood grain retained their shape, tracing them over and over again in a frenzy that increased as her hand drew closer.
She recognized them, although she couldn’t precisely read them. “I don’t think there are any games left to play,” she told the table. “Severn—I need both of my hands.”
“No.”
“Severn—” She hesitated. Straightened out. Her sleeves were draped across part of the table’s surface, and they irritated her immensely. “Can you cut these damn things off?”
“The Quartermaster—”
“Is already going to pitch the biggest fit the Halls of Law has ever seen. How much worse can it get?” But she didn’t see his expression; her eyes were drawn to the surface of the table. It looked shiny. It reflected nothing.
“Kaylin—”
“I gave you the choice,” she said quietly. “Give it back.”
He let go slowly, but he did let go.
And she put both of her hands on the surface of the table. They slid through.
Words began to crawl up her arms, like a legion of small insects. She could feel their march, as if she were parchment and they were a thousand expert quills. She promised herself, gritting her teeth, that she would never hate cockroaches again. She could step on those.
“Kaylin—what is it?”
“Power,” she told him grimly.
“Magic?”
“No. Power.” She shook herself; her hands could move freely beneath the surface, but she couldn’t withdraw them. She only tried once. “This is a Barrani test,” she added bitterly. “Power would have to play some part in it.”
She felt her arms tingle; the tingling grew in intensity until it was pain. Pain, she could handle. Fire, she could barely handle, and that came next. But if this was a game of cosmic chicken, she wasn’t ready to blink.
Kaylin didn’t play chicken.
“It’s not a Barrani test,” Severn said, his voice in her ear a relief from the buzzing that was growing in volume.
She bit her lip; tasted blood. Thought after. Blood was a bad idea.
Very bad.
Blood was the liquid of the living. Blood was the water of life. Blood was the ink in which old words—ancient words—were writ.
She knew this, as her blood touched her tongue. It was a trickle; she’d bit her lip harder just jumping down the stairs. Admittedly, she’d had three armed thugs on her tail at the time. Here she had a quiet room and a table that wouldn’t let go of her hands. She’d had no reason to bite. Except vanity; she really didn’t like screaming.
Teela would have hit her.
Severn was silent. If he even understood what had happened, he made no sign, gave no word. But she felt him by her side, like a shadow.
The surface of the table was no longer shiny, it was shining. The light was pale, diffuse, and ringed with a halo of pale blue.
The words—and they were words—had crawled up her arms, settling against her skin, matching, curve for curve and line for line, the words that were already there. They didn’t speak to her, but the buzzing was loud. They were seeking some answer from her skin, some kinship, something—an answer came to her slowly, like the straggling result of a difficult numbers question.
They wanted a vessel.
A living vessel.
Blood, and bone, and flesh.
She remembered Castle Nightshade. She remembered the Long Hall; the silent Barrani who moved at the scent of blood as it passed them, as if they were almost dead, but could be stirred by the memory of, the desire for, life.
This was different. The Barrani had been housed in their own flesh, gone pale and slack with the passage of time and their endless inactivity, thei
r guardianship of the doors that opened only at the whim of the fieflord.
The words? They were unleashed, uncontained. Almost frenzied.
And she felt them huddle against her, seeking sustenance. Or entrance. But they did not speak, and this frustrated her, although she wasn’t sure why: Words were spoken; they didn’t have a voice of their own.
And yet…
They were more than words.
Just as some names were more than words. They weren’t her names. Hers, she could speak; she could hear without compulsion; she could ignore. But the names of the Barrani? They were more. And the names of the Dragons.
Their names were forever.
Old names, she thought. Old words.
What stories had she heard? What legends had she grasped from her time in Nightshade? Half-remembered—which is the way, in the end, almost all things were in her life—she thought of stone casements, the small windows sculpted into statues that would one day wake, and see through them as if they were eyes. Tall and elegant, large and ferocious, the daydreams of ancient gods; they had been carved and molded by Lords of Law and Lords of Chaos. And they had been given words of power so that they might live. Words that had meaning in her life in only the most superficial of ways.
But those words were these words.
She understood it, and was silent; in the face of words such as these, what power did her own have?
She whispered a name. Human name. Severn.
And he was there; she felt his hands upon her shoulders, the steadying strength of his silence. Was this power? Not as the words understood it.
Not as the words could be understood.
But she wasn’t clay. She wasn’t nameless. She wasn’t—
“No,” she whispered softly.
“Kaylin?”
“I asked him,” she told Severn.
“Asked who?”
Calarnenne. She did not speak the name; her lips formed it, but it formed base sound, no more. She did not think it, although thought was present. The name that came to her was primal, primitive, visceral—something deeper than thought. It was the true name of the Lord who ruled the fief that bore his name: Nightshade.
And she heard his voice over the buzz of these words, although she couldn’t see him. Kaylin.