Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  Kaylin, who could barely use her power to light a candle, couldn’t carry a tune and didn’t try. Instead, she watched the ground as it continued its odd rumble. In the domain of Hallionne Kariastos, the river’s water had risen out of its bed to become a great, flying Dragon in shape and form; she expected that something would rise out of the earth in a similar fashion. Standing on top of it while it formed was probably extremely stupid—but she knew the Consort wouldn’t move, and the only support she could offer was to remain by her side.

  Sing, Kaylin.

  I can’t.

  This is not the time for petty mortal embarrassment. This is not a song to entertain; it is not a song designed to part money from an audience. It is an invocation, not more, not less. Sing.

  I can’t. I don’t know the words.

  He fell silent, but she wasn’t fooled; she could feel his frustration, and nothing about it spoke of retreat. Her arms were glowing, each stroke and line the soft silver that the unmarked Consort also shed. It was an unusual color for the marks, but she’d never managed to figure out how the color of the marks was significant.

  Nightshade began to sing. Kaylin heard it instantly—felt it as a sudden, inexplicable warmth in her own chest. She understood that he meant her to follow his lead, because as she stood absorbing the feel of a voice that wasn’t a sound, she became aware of his presence; both his voice and the sense of him strengthened as the seconds passed. Her cheek grew unpleasantly warm, and she knew the mark he had placed there in the fief of Nightshade was now glowing, as well.

  It wasn’t what she wanted, but it didn’t matter. The Consort’s arms were visibly shaking, as were her lips, and sweat now beaded her forehead, although the night air was cool. Kaylin drew a shallow breath, because that’s what she had the nerves for, and then she joined the Consort’s song, carrying Nightshade’s harmony into the external world, where it could be heard by anyone who wasn’t marked the way she was.

  She tried to ignore the sound of her own voice, which was thin and reedy to her ears. The Consort’s was rich, deep, its range so far above Kaylin’s she couldn’t hope to match it by squeaking, let alone singing. She tried to sing louder, tried to concentrate on only Nightshade’s part of the song—which was easier because at the moment it filled most of her conscious thought.

  She drew deeper breaths as she struggled with syllables and words that made no sense to her. She lost the fear of exposing her voice to an audience—especially one as unfriendly as the Barrani—and concentrated on increasing her volume. If she didn’t understand the words, she felt the emotion with which they were conveyed: there was longing in these words that she hadn’t heard in the duet of Nightshade and the Consort by the river’s side.

  It was a longing she herself had never felt. It was not the song she would have sung after her mother’s death, not the song she would have chosen for Steffi and Jade. It was like a visceral, terrible need—there was no guilt, no regret, no confusion, just a universe full of loneliness, isolation, pain. There was only one way to end that, and she sang a plea, a tirade, a demand. She laid bare the whole of her desire.

  But it wasn’t her desire. She almost stopped singing, stumbled on two words, and righted herself with effort. The Consort continued without her. So, if it came to that, did Nightshade, and she once again slipped into the stream of his voiceless voice, pulling harmony that matched melody in a blending of two voices. Of three.

  The earth rose. At first it appeared to Kaylin that something that lay beneath it must be slowly crawling its way out of the dirt, but as the song continued, she realized it was the earth itself, the way Kariastos-as-Dragon had been the river water. Something about the fluidity and the clarity of the water had added beauty to that transformation of nature; the earth itself was not so kind. The dirt that rose, rose in dark clumps and only slowly took the form and shape of a man. In the dark, Kaylin thought she could see the confused struggle of worms much happier below the earth’s surface.

  She closed her eyes and then forced herself to open them again. She regularly washed blood and birth fluids off newborn infants who had looked just as disturbing the first time. She could think of this as a birth. She could force herself to do that. Even with the worms and the million-legged unknown insects that also reared up from the sculpted earth.

  The dirt condensed as it rose; a misshapen pillar that was tall and slender formed as invisible hands—or words—packed and pressed it into shape. The fact that parts of it almost fell off only became disturbing when the body, in the light of two moons and two singers, looked more or less complete. At a distance, she would have mistaken it for a Barrani Lord. That Lord turned toward the two singers; only one of them seemed to be aware of his presence.

  He walked, and as he took his first step, breaking free in some ways from the bindings of the earth itself, a cascade of brilliant light passed through him, and the color and texture of packed dirt, small stones, and moving, living creatures vanished in that instant. What was left was a Barrani man. The light began to expand and dim. It left him clothed in robes that were very similar in color and texture to the dress Kaylin was wearing—at least in the moons’ light.

  He did not speak. But he approached the Consort as she held a sustained, attenuated note, lifting both hands to cup her face in his palms.

  Without thought, Kaylin reached out and pushed his hands away.

  A murmur went up in a semicircle that happened to coincide with the Lords of the Court. Even the Consort’s eyes widened as her voice dipped. Kaylin, however, hadn’t given up the harmony to silence, and the Consort, stepping back, drew breath and once again shouldered the weight of the song. She didn’t ask—as the other Lords did—what Kaylin was doing. It was clear from the width and color of her eyes—they’d shifted to the usual darker blue—what she was thinking, but she only had voice for one set of words and chose the song instead.

  Kaylin’s hands encircled the wrists of the Hallionne’s Avatar. They felt like warm rock. He swiveled to look down at her and then raised his hands, dragging her onto her toes. She sang, but her voice rose into a squeak at the sudden shift of movement. The marks on her arms, which had been glowing a steady, soft silver, shifted color; they became a bright, burning gold. Sadly, burning felt literal; over half her body suddenly felt as if it was on fire.

  But she knew what she was looking for, because the Hallionne had opened his eyes—and his eyes looked like patches of chaos, encased in sockets. She knew that the Avatars weren’t flesh and blood, that the rules of physical form didn’t bind them the same way they did the rest of the living, breathing denizens of the world. Even given that, his eyes were wrong.

  And Nightshade had told her there would be some difficulty with his awakening.

  What he hadn’t told her—probably because it seemed so bloody obvious—was that healers never attempted to heal a building. Healing for Kaylin was intuitive. She could only detail the effects of what she did because she’d spent a long time at Red’s elbow in the morgue. The body had its own energy, its own sense of its best and truest self, none of which generally involved injuries or diseases.

  The Hallionne had a body; touching wrists that felt like warm stone was almost like touching fingernails. The sense of the rest of its form was there but almost beyond reach. She reached anyway. The Consort sang. Kaylin wasn’t certain if she continued the harmony; she had found something very similar to the infection or intrusion that had almost killed the Barrani by altering their essential nature. But in the Hallionne, she found something else as well, and it almost caused her to let go and pull out as quickly as she possibly could.

  At the heart of the Hallionne was a name: a True Name.

  * * *

  It was not like the names in the Lake of Life; it was much closer to the density of design and pattern of Bellusdeo’s final name. But it was larger than that. She couldn’t see the whole of it at once, or couldn’t keep the whole of it in mind.

  She understood, staring at this w
ord, that she would have to try—because she understood that it, like the Tower of Tiamaris, was under attack. In the Tower the words that comprised the Laws of governance had been physical; she could touch them, could hold them, could brace them with hands or shoulders to keep them from collapsing or falling.

  Here, that wasn’t the case: there was nothing to hold on to and nothing to brace herself against; there was a word that seemed strangely elongated, as if it were being constricted by something she couldn’t see. It was, in some ways, like a normal, living body: she had an instinctive sense of what its shape should be. Unlike a living body, she had no ready way to channel power into it so that the form righted itself.

  She opened her eyes and discovered that she could still see the name; it hovered behind and above its Avatar. She released his arms and slid to the ground. He tried to grab her, but he moved far too slowly. She sprinted toward the word that she saw, and when she reached it, she placed her palms against the nearest surface. She touched it as if it were flesh.

  This time, she could feel the problem, she could see the effect: something it had absorbed, or something that had invaded its perimeter, was transforming the sigils in its center. It wasn’t Shadow as she understood Shadow, but it didn’t matter; it had a similar effect, and that was the only thing that counted.

  Severn, don’t let him touch her. Don’t let him interrupt her song.

  To Nightshade, she said, Don’t stop singing. He can hear you, even if you’re on the inside.

  She began to work. She tried to think of the word as a living form, a body; it helped, but only a little. If she could understand the whole of the word’s meaning, she thought it would be easy; she could say the word, reinforce it. But she didn’t understand the truth of these words and never really had. In the Tower, it had been Tara who had guided her through the hundreds of syllables each form required. Tara wasn’t here, and had she been, the Hallionne would have considered her just another form of attack—and at that, probably a more dangerous one.

  What had she done with the Barrani?

  She had separated the parts that were foreign from the parts that were original. And it had caused more injury, more bleeding, but not, in the end, death. She wasn’t certain if she could perform the same type of healing here, because she didn’t know how the parts affected the whole—but she knew if they weren’t separated somehow, the whole would become entirely different, entirely other. What was left would not be the Hallionne that the Consort was, even now, attempting to awaken.

  The element of the word she was supporting with her palms was vibrating, and as she concentrated, she realized it was almost humming in time—and in tune—to the Consort’s song. It wasn’t a voice, not precisely, but she felt some of the sense of urgency the Consort’s voice contained. Which made no sense; the word wasn’t sentient, it wasn’t emotive. It couldn’t and didn’t sing.

  But it responded to song, to sound, to the unknown language of the Consort’s entreaty.

  She let her hand fall away from the word’s surface as she reached into its center; her fingertips brushed the first of the three altered marks. It was cold. It was cold and it was silent.

  Don’t stop singing.

  * * *

  Words were like cages. She’d been trapped by words before—her own, both the ones she’d said in fury or fear and the ones she couldn’t force out. She’d been hemmed in by the words of others: their orders, their rules, their commands. They created a maze through which it was almost impossible to navigate on the bad days.

  This single word was both like and unlike the host of the daily little ones. She could—with effort and the notable loss of surface skin—maneuver around the rigid bits of its shape, its exterior lines. It wasn’t easy and, like orders or commands, was to be circumvented only at need, but this was pretty damn necessary.

  She heard the clinking of metal at her back that meant Severn had unleashed his weapon’s chain. She knew this meant she had almost run out of time, and if she could have bent the exterior bits of the large, dense rune out of shape to make her passage to its heart faster, she would have. The flexible bits were all attached to her; she was certain the dress would be markedly worse for wear if she managed to writhe her way out again.

  But she’d reached the three points of change; she could place her palm flat against their surfaces, and did, braced for cold. They were cold. They were cold like ice was, in dry winter air. Far too thick to be brittle, they couldn’t be snapped or broken, and she thought if she pulled her hands back, she’d leave skin behind.

  She could afford that; she could heal herself in a pinch. But she couldn’t afford to let these go—not yet. Closing her eyes again, she felt the cold travel up her arms, and she pushed warmth back into them and, from there, into the palms of her hands. Here that warmth was like fire, although it shed no flame; she felt the ice beneath her hands begin to melt.

  It would have been less jarring if it hadn’t also screamed.

  The marks on her arms were glowing gold-and-white; she could see them clearly through the tightly closed lids of her eyes. They existed in darkness, they existed when she tried her best to ignore them, and they existed in the same way the Hallionne’s name and the Hallionne’s invader did. Just…smaller.

  They were warm. No—they were hot. They were hot, but they didn’t burn the rest of her skin, and before they could, she drew heat from them and sent it, once again, out through her palms. The screaming increased in tenor, and clamping her jaws, she braced herself against the sound. It didn’t help.

  But the Consort’s song did. She sang, and Nightshade sang, and Kaylin tried very hard to hear melody and harmony, not dying screams. Her arms were shaking, she was so tense; her hands melted figurative ice and the literal form of something that wasn’t flesh. As it dwindled, the word’s natural form began to reassert itself, healing shape and alignment, shifting cohesion.

  Only when it stilled did the song come to an end—and even the end was a long, attenuated note.

  * * *

  She had no idea how to get out; she was standing in the word’s heart. Lifting her hands, she touched a dot and a slender, undulating line. They were warm, not hot, and they felt very much alive to her. She couldn’t remember whether or not similar structures had felt almost like flesh to the touch. She didn’t think so and wondered if this was a characteristic of the Hallionne or maybe even the Towers of the fiefs.

  “Lord Kaylin.”

  She turned—with difficulty—in the direction of the Consort’s voice.

  “Lady. I appear to be stuck.”

  “Stuck?” The Consort said, repeating the intonation of the Elantran word more or less perfectly.

  Kaylin reddened and switched languages. “Is the Hallionne whole?”

  “He is. He is now awake.”

  “Can he do something about this—this—”

  “This what?”

  Kaylin hesitated and finally said, “His name.”

  “You…can see his name.” It wasn’t a question. It also wasn’t happy.

  “I’m stuck inside his name, Lady.”

  “This may present a difficulty,” she replied at length. “He is content to have you, as you put it, stuck inside his name.”

  “I’m not inclined to remain here,” Kaylin told her.

  There was more silence. Into it, Nightshade said, You should not have spoken those words aloud, Kaylin.

  Clearly. The Hallionne would know anyway, and at the moment, he’s my biggest concern.

  Think beyond the moment. You understand that the Hallionne were made as defensive structures?

  I got the impression they were made as babysitters.

  She felt his smile.

  To know the name of the Hallionne is a threat.

  Kaylin spoke a few heated Leontine phrases. If I hadn’t seen the name, I wouldn’t have been able to help him!

  He is aware of that; it is why you are not dead.

  I’m not standing in the middle of a wor
d for the rest of my natural existence. You may tell him I said as much, but skip the Leontine.

  And I am now your servant, Kaylin? An unmistakable edge crept into the words. This was the fieflord’s voice. It chilled her.

  And then it angered her. Fine. Tell him to keep me here. I won’t go to the West March and you can handle the damn story on your own. Had she not been surrounded by so many different forms, she would have found a patch of ground on which to sit, and occupied it like a feral cat. She did have enough room to ball her hands in fists, not that it made much difference.

  Kaylin? Severn’s voice was quieter and entirely free of ice or edge.

  I’m fine. No, I’m really pissed off, but I’m not injured.

  The Consort is speaking to Hallionne Bertolle.

  Does he look less wormy?

  Significantly less, yes. I don’t understand the language she’s speaking.

  Which meant it wasn’t any of the languages that were spoken in Elantra. Is he answering the same way?

  He is.

  Are they arguing?

  Hard to say. The Consort’s eyes are the wrong shade of blue, but she doesn’t otherwise appear to be angry or frightened.

  Is Teela back yet?

  No, I’m sorry.

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she could see the night sky, the Consort, and Severn. She could see the less welcome Lords of the High Court, but given the work of the evening, didn’t resent them at all. The bars of the cage had evaporated. Stealing a glimpse at her arms, she saw that the marks were once again the dark, dark gray they usually were.

  She offered the Consort a very formal bow.

  “Might I suggest,” the Lady said, approaching Kaylin, “that in future you refrain from even mentioning the fact that the Hallionne has a name?”

  “Done,” Kaylin replied in hasty Elantran. She would have said more, but the Avatar of the Hallionne chose that moment to approach. He looked, to her eye, to be made of chiseled stone. His every motion implied a perfect sculpture, every shift in position an act of artistry.

  He came to stand in front of her and she closed her mouth, which had fallen open in an unfortunate way while she watched. Teela would have mocked her.