Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  “Yes,” the Avatar told her, smiling. Her eyes were the color of Kaylin’s marks. “I could not touch what you have touched. But you did. And you brought it—and them—to me.”

  “Lady, do not let them form a circle here!” the Lord of the West March said as the whole of the room filled with poorly dressed mortals. It was too late; they formed it and they filled it. Even Iberrienne was surrounded.

  The Avatar smiled in response. It was a heartbreaking smile; young, open, tinged with fear and with a strange hope. She had accepted death and destruction—her own—but that was not what she now saw.

  Iberrienne lifted his arms again, and this time, every hair on Kaylin’s body that wasn’t somehow tied down stood on end. He spoke. His voice was thunder. Literally. Lightning followed; people fell as it illuminated—and consumed—them. Kaylin started to move, but the Hallionne tightened her grip. “They are my guests.”

  Was she trying to tell Kaylin—as lightning fell again and again—to trust her?

  “Yes. Watch,” she continued. “He is speaking.”

  “I can hear that!” It seemed unfair that she had to shout to be heard; the Hallionne didn’t. Her words were clear; the thunder of Iberrienne’s voice couldn’t obliterate them. Lightning struck Kaylin and fizzled; the small dragon hissed. Iberrienne didn’t seem to be directing the bolts; they were the aftershocks of the words he now spoke.

  And they were words. They were words, but the form and shape they took were foreign. They, like the words engraved in stone, were the wrong shape, the wrong texture; they weren’t solid enough to touch. They were solid enough to see, and Kaylin watched as they emerged. Thunder, she thought. Thunder, lightning, and cloud. It was a storm.

  It looked like the heart of a storm, and she felt a sickening lurch as she realized, suddenly, that that was exactly what it was.

  Ynpharion stiffened. He stopped struggling against her imperative; he searched for, and found, no exit, no means of escape. She felt what he would never express: fear. And he knew she knew it. That it was dangerous to know it, and that right now, it didn’t matter. She watched the words form in their amorphous, dark shades; she watched them compress and congeal as their individual forms converged.

  And she knew, suddenly, that they would all die—or worse—if that was allowed to happen. She reached out with the hand the Hallionne wasn’t holding, lifting it. It was the hand that was ink-dark and still, after everything that had happened, wet. When it came into contact with the dark, dense cloud, she felt something solid beneath her hand. Solid but rough. It did not, thank gods, feel like a living organ.

  She pulled it out of the growing mass and it came. It was small and distinct in shape, as unlike True Words as the Elantran alphabet. The runes that had been engraved in stone had been larger, their shapes poor mimicry of truth. This word—if it even was that—was not. It was small, compact, entirely what it was. And what it was, as she withdrew it, was…a stick. A dark gray stick. She stared at it, and as she did, the Hallionne smiled and took it from her hands, examining it as Kaylin reached out again.

  She wasn’t surprised to find that the next word in her hand was a stone; the one after that, also stone, but smoother and flatter. She found a bell, and also a basket, and although each was dark, dark gray, the textures and shapes were otherwise right. She paused when she pulled a patched, threadbare blanket out of the mire. These were not words.

  But the Hallionne was passing them to people in the silent crowd, and as they accepted what she offered, their whole mien changed. A boy took the stick, and a girl, the two stones. An older man accepted the basket, and an elderly woman, the blanket. They stood examining them as if they were precious, personal items.

  And why wouldn’t they be? These people were all from the fiefs. In the fiefs, sticks and stones were often the only toys you had.

  Kaylin shook herself and continued to pull these small words from the looming cloud. They couldn’t be what they appeared to be—that made no sense at all. But it didn’t matter. She found a ribbon. She found a pendant hanging on thick string. She found a pipe, bowl cracked. She found almost nothing that looked like a weapon and almost nothing of monetary value. But she examined each as it coalesced in her hand, and she passed each to the Hallionne, who, unperturbed, was waiting to pass it on. She seemed to know who should receive each item, and although she never let go of Kaylin’s hand, she didn’t seem to be inconvenienced by physical distance. Nor did the lightning and the thunder of Iberrienne’s voice disturb her.

  Were these words?

  “No,” the Hallionne replied. “And yes. They tell a story. There is the echo of story in each mortal life, but never the whole. But this, this is different. It is not that.”

  “What,” Kaylin asked as she handed the Hallionne a wooden spoon, “am I really doing?”

  “What you desire to do. You are giving them back the little that remains of their lives. They are,” she added, “dead to you. They will never return home. Do not stop.” As she spoke, the floor beneath Kaylin’s feet began to lose the texture of familiar stone. It buckled, changing texture every few inches and changing color, as well. This was the ground in the Shadowlands.

  “I am Hallionne,” she continued as the ground began to slant toward the center of a Tower whose walls were no longer solid. “I understand the majesty of words, I understand their power. So, too, Iberrienne.

  “But, Kaylin, you understand their smallness. You understand that in the slight, there is truth and a quiet, almost inaudible dignity. Look: he does not hear it. He cannot understand what you are doing. He believes that mortals have strength only in numbers, and so he has gathered them in number. They do not belong here; to bring them here at all took power—but he himself does not belong here, and the price he pays in order to stand here, where all words have truth, is high. Do not stop,” she added more sharply.

  “You could help me.”

  “No,” was the soft—and inexplicably sad—response. “I cannot. But I see the small syllabus you return to them, and it moves me. I can almost remember. You work against him,” she continued, “because he cannot see the small—but if you do not work, he will create as he intended. I am…interfering now.”

  “But how?”

  “You do not understand what your blood in this place meant.” She glanced at Kaylin’s hand. “And what you yourself touched; it clings to you. You hold strands of their history in your hands; he holds the rest. But he cannot see clearly, and while he cannot, you must find those stories, those small, insignificant words. They do not speak to him. They speak to you because they are, in part, yours.”

  Because, Kaylin thought, she was of the fiefs and mortal, two things that were beneath Iberrienne’s notice. Two things in combination that often felt as though they were beneath almost anyone’s notice—maybe even her own. What had she wanted while living in those streets? Escape. Freedom.

  But as she pulled another stick from the cloud, she lifted it to her eyes, and she remembered playing in those streets, just before her mother’s death. Not everything had been dark. Not everything had been deadly. There was a ring, a plain band that felt metallic; its color made it impossible to judge the quality of the metal. She frowned when she picked up the slingshot and considered tossing it over her shoulder. The Hallionne took it before she could make that decision. When she found a doll, she smiled. It was old and worn, and it had clearly been patched a time or three. She had no idea if it belonged to a child or if it would at some point, and it didn’t matter. She’d brought so little from the fiefs when she’d left them.

  So little that she could hold in her hands, as she was holding these. She pulled her hand out of the Hallionne’s grip, and the Hallionne allowed it. The floor was slippery where she now stood, and she moved slowly as she tried to find a different place to stand, passing through the edges of cloud and into the center, where Iberrienne stood. She hadn’t come to confront him, though. This was where she needed to be.

  He looked throu
gh her, as if she were already one of the dead.

  And she reached both hands into his coalescing maelstrom, and she pulled. What came this time had no physical component. It couldn’t be held. So many of her early memories were the same. She’d had oversized clothing, which, over the years, had become undersized; she usually had shoes, but not always. She’d never particularly valued the mismatched dishes and cutlery in her home, although the food had always been welcome, when it was there. But she’d loved her mother. She couldn’t remember—as Teela could—what her mother looked like.

  But she could remember the comfort of her mother’s arms. She could remember her mother’s voice. She could almost hear it.

  No. She could hear it. She could hear it now, and it was stronger than Iberrienne’s voice, stronger than the cracking of stone, stronger than Ynpharion’s fear. It had never been solid. If someone had asked her to prove that her mother had loved her, she had nothing to give them. But it was here. The proof of it was here. She could make it solid, whole; she could hold it in her hands. She gripped it as tightly as she possibly could, eyes closed; it wasn’t something that could be seen, anyway.

  I will always love you.

  Had it been a lie? Yes. There was no always for mortals. All their forevers were planted in memory; it was the only place strong enough to shelter them. It was what their lives from start to finish built, and those memories were here, at the heart of the storm, where all words were true and Iberrienne was attempting to tell a lie.

  There were bad memories. There was no way to avoid that; what was built was built by everything. But Kaylin was making the choices here. Kaylin was building a different narrative, working from the same building blocks.

  I will never leave.

  A lie, yes. But she could hear the truth at the heart of the words she hadn’t heard so clearly since she was five years old. And maybe that’s why mortals had no True Names of their own: because their truths and their lies were so often the same damn thing. Her mother had meant every word, every time.

  And her mother was not the only one.

  She had no toys, no physical mementos, to form tent pegs for the important things, because she realized that that’s what they were. People loved dolls or toys because of what they meant; they held on to them because it was a guide to memories, a touchstone. She couldn’t draw familiar and sentimental items as touchstones of the love she’d been given and still desperately wanted—from Caitlin, from Marcus’s wives, she could admit that here—from the whirlwind.

  But she didn’t need them. Because in this place, the memory itself was tangible.

  She saw her mother’s corpse, and that was harsh, as hard, in the wake of her mother’s words, as the death itself had been. Harsher, really, because she now understood the endless silence of fifteen years. She accepted it and reached beyond it, because if it was true, it was one truth, and every life accumulated many.

  It was the largest thing she pulled from the whirlwind. It was the heart of the storm. And as it came to her, she understood that it wasn’t just her memories of her mother that she had released: it was all of their memories.

  Iberrienne’s voice hardened, but it was a voice now; the syllables didn’t disappear into rolling thunder. Kaylin spoke, was surprised to hear herself speaking. That had happened to her before, though. What she hadn’t expected was that everyone else was speaking now, too. They weren’t speaking—or moving—in concert, and they stumbled when the ground broke and congealed beneath their feet, but they were speaking the way a crowd at an office social function might: as themselves, as individuals. Their voices, their unadorned, mundane voices, were louder than Iberrienne’s. They weren’t magical. They weren’t individually impressive.

  It didn’t matter.

  The Barrani Lord’s voice grew hoarse; his arms trembled. He was injured and exhausted. While he teetered, his hands falling to his side, the Lord of the West March approached, sword drawn.

  Iberrienne coughed blood. “Not here, Lord of the West March,” he said, falling to his knees. “Not here.”

  Kaylin reached for him, as she could finally see his name. His two names, so similar to Ynpharion’s she was certain she could somehow purify him. But to do that, she had to catch him, and as she leapt—and she did—he began to fade.

  She added Leontine cursing into what was an already overly chatty room.

  * * *

  The Lord of the West March sheathed his sword. “Hallionne Orbaranne.”

  She shook herself and glanced across the room. “Lord of the West March. We are secure.”

  The Barrani man who remained in the room knelt instantly, the gesture skirting the outer edge of total abasement. “Lord Ynpharion.”

  “Lord of the West March.”

  “Lord Iberrienne is Outcaste.”

  It was not a decision that the Lord of the West March could make, in theory. Ynpharion, however, understood how tenuous theory was.

  “Were it not for Lord Kaylin, you would join him for your presence here.” He turned to the Hallionne. “Is Ynpharion now trapped in this place?”

  “No, Lord of the West March. He will leave when Lord Kaylin leaves, and he will not return. He is not what he was when he entered this space; I do not now believe him to be a danger.” She glanced down as someone—a boy who was on the edge of childhood—tugged her arm. “If you will show Lord Kaylin and Lord Ynpharion out, I would remain with my guests.” She frowned, and as she did, the whole of the geography shifted in place in an instant, and they stood, not in a Tower and not upon a grassy plain, but rather, in the streets of a familiar City.

  It was Elantra, but on the right side of the bridge.

  “They are my guests, Lord Kaylin.” The boy continued to tug at her hand, something no other visitor would have dared to do. “I need to say goodbye, Ger. I’ll be there in a minute.” She turned, once again, to Kaylin, her eyes, for the moment, mortal eyes. “They cannot leave here. They are dead in any sense of the word—in your world.

  “I do not know how long they will stay. I do not know how long I can keep them. But…for now, Lord Kaylin, they are my guests, and I would play host to them. It…reminds me. It has long been quiet in this place.”

  “But—”

  “Kyuthe,” the Lord of the West March said, offering Kaylin his arm. She stared at it for a long moment. “Come.”

  Epilogue

  Her hands were red and wet as they fell, at last, to her side. Her hair—a white, pale gift of her mother’s ancient lineage—was dusted with dirt, small splinters, pieces of what might, in the City, pass for glass. That she could still see at all was due in large part to Calarnenne’s intervention; he had shielded her, at some cost to himself.

  He was not the only one. Not since the war of the Flights had the Consort seen so much death, so much carnage, among her own people. And she had not been Consort then. She had been warrior—as devoted to the preservation of her mother as the fallen had been, in their turn, to hers.

  The earth formed a gigantic basin around the Hallionne. The Hallionne had taken a form and shape that the Consort had never seen on the forest roads: a Tower. It was simple, unadorned stone. A Tower such as this might be planned and constructed by mortals who had no recourse to magery; it was squat, flat-topped, and heavy. The only nobility of feature was its continued existence. Nothing that had stood here—not trees, plants, or forest animals—had survived. Nothing but the Hallionne itself.

  The Consort’s throat was raw; too raw for song. Speech eluded her, but for a different reason. The sunlight was harsh, the sky clear; birds flew in lazy, wide circles, their shadows large across the ground. The dirt and rock were unremarkable, but splintered wood and unearthed roots jutted from the basin’s curved walls.

  “Lady.”

  She exhaled and turned. “Lord Corvallis.”

  “We have found Lords Evarrim and Severn, as you commanded.”

  “They were alone?” The words came too quickly; she forced a pause. “Lord Kay
lin?”

  “I am sorry, Lady. No sign of Lord Kaylin could be found. Lord An’Teela is still searching; she sent me to report.”

  Of course. An’Teela, she thought with only a trace of bitterness. This is why our Lady warned us all against developing affection for mortals; they die. But the Barrani had died here as well, giving lie to the warning and no lie whatever to the fear. She turned—as so many of her kin did—to anger instead, clutching it and wrapping it tightly above things that must remain unsaid and unexposed.

  “And Iberrienne?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are Lords Evarrim and Severn mobile?”

  “They are walking,” Corvallis replied. “Aid was offered, and aid was refused.”

  Of course it was. The Consort inhaled heavily. Evarrim, legless, would drag himself across molten lava before he accepted the aid of lesser Lords. Lord Severn, however, was pragmatic; if he walked, he was not near death. More than that, she could not yet say.

  “They will be here ahead of the scouts. Landaran has taken the liberty of creating stairs for their use.”

  “They were not found within the basin.”

  “No, Lady.”

  “And Bertolle’s kin?”

  “If they are present, we cannot detect them.”

  She nodded again. “You did well,” she added softly. “All of you.”

  He bowed; he offered no reply. Only the dead did, and it was silent and wordless.

  * * *

  It took the Lords Evarrim and Severn fifteen minutes to reach the Consort; she did not insult them by walking past the perimeter of her guards to meet them. Instead, she waited, watching as they walked. To her shock, she discovered that she had been wrong: Evarrim had accepted Lord Severn’s aid, and to her eye, Lord Severn now supported the greater burden of Evarrim’s weight. They were both wounded, although at this distance, she could not discern how. Their robes were red with blood, and given their rate of progress, some of it was their own.