Cast in Shadow

by Michelle Sagara

  Black wings rose out of his back, and claws extended from mailed fist—and only then, because she was still Kaylin—did she realize why the armor had looked so familiar: she had seen its like once before, but its color and shape were so different she hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

  The scales of a Dragon.

  CHAPTER 20

  Kaylin.

  She didn’t answer. Wouldn’t have had time to process the sound had it come from outside of her, the way sound usually traveled. She had just enough time to slam into Severn, just enough weight to push him beyond the edge of the sudden eruption of Dragon’s jaw. She trusted him to survive this, as she would have trusted no one but Teela or Tain; he was already on his feet, in command of the momentum, before she had come to a stop.

  The Dragon’s attention was still focused on her.

  “Let them go,” she told him, tense and low to the ground. Her voice, like the Dragon’s, was a roar of sound, a personal storm. It should have surprised her.

  His great eyes were orange, unlidded, the size of her fist. His breath was red, and traveled far beyond the reach of his tongue. She stood in the path of fire, and when it struck her, it parted as if it were water. Or ash. Where it passed, it left darkness, and only darkness, in its wake.

  As she stepped forward, she did the same. It should have been hard to separate his darkness from hers. It wasn’t. She crouched, bending her knees a few inches lower, and reached for the blood that Severn had spilled. Where she touched it, it, too, burned. These flames were black, with hearts of blue. Leather cracked beneath her feet; she tried her best not to step on that fire.

  “So,” the Dragon said. “You are still mortal.” The word was a spit of contempt, a funereal wreath of smoke and ember. “Do you think you can use the power you contain? Fool. It will devour you.”

  She understood everything he said, and knew she couldn’t. But she’d always been practical, and doubting her sanity wasn’t all that pragmatic at a time like this.

  “You speak of choice,” she said. Severn was beyond the Dragon’s jaws, just out of the reach of his claws. If the Dragon noticed Severn at all, he gave no sign of it, and Severn stepped…back. The darkness swallowed him, but she could hear the keening of his chain; what she couldn’t see still existed.

  “But the dead have none.”

  Eyes glittered, huge eyes, against the sheen of startling black. “You speak of my servants.”

  She said nothing.

  He laughed softly. Laughter was fire and pain. “They surrendered their names,” he told her softly, “in return for power. For freedom. They were given power,” he added.

  “And you?”

  “I surrender nothing.” He held out a hand; she could see fingers as if they were the soul of claws, small and ethereal, but somehow still present. If the Barrani were dead, the Dragon was not.

  Not yet.

  “You were a threat,” the Dragon continued. “And a gift. But not yet. Not yet.” And he leaped toward her suddenly, lunging, his wings rising and folding, their pinions bearing down on the stones that held her.

  She leaped away as they came crashing groundward. Splinters broke the soles of her boots, cutting holes into the perfect fabric of her tunic, her pants. She grimaced. She’d done this before, and she hadn’t enjoyed it the first time.

  The Dragon reached out for the child who struggled across the altar, and she realized that Severn had—again—done his work, made his choice; he was upon that sacrificial stone, feet planted astride the young victim, his chain a wall against which the Barrani broke, again and again, as they sought the time in which to finish what they’d started.

  Kaylin.

  Nightshade’s voice again. No command, no question, no warning marred her name; it was simply a word, a joining of two syllables. An anchor. She held it, held on to it, as she leaped forward, dreaming of darkness. The dream enfolded her. As the Dragon reared up, as his ebony claws extended, she leaped between Severn and death, her daggers forgotten as she raised both palms. Symbols came to life beneath their thin, torn shelter of black silk; they crawled up the backs of her hands, living things. She had never really thought of them as language before. Had never really thought of language as something that was living or dead; it was, like walking, something she rarely thought about at all, unless she was caught in the crossfire of legal Barrani, in which case the not thinking part took a lot more effort.

  The Dragon was not so blessed.

  As the symbols shifted, she felt their sudden weight across the mounds of her exposed palms. Fire was black, now; it would always be black. It enveloped her vision, and she let it, because the alternative was the unnatural gleam of Dragon teeth, Dragon scale, Dragon jaw. She had come all this way to do something.

  But she forgot it, whatever it was: even the memory of Severn dimmed and faded as she at last gave in to inexplicable rage. There was glee in that rage, and malice, and—yes—a desire to cause pain and suffering. Or to share it.

  She spoke the words. Her lips moved over syllables that made no sense to her ears, that contorted her throat, twisted her lips and changed the contour of her face, as if in the speaking, she had suddenly begun to grow jaws as lethal as the Dragon’s.

  Those jaws snapped shut on the resonant, lingering end of old syllables, and the gold of Dragon eyes, the red of Dragon eyes, gave way to a color that she had never seen: White, milk and ivory, an absence of slitted pupil. She heard the Dragon roar as scales began to peel away. Saw those scales fall, a glittering darkness, the weight a heavy rain of a type that make docks and city ports look like a fool’s dream of safe harbor. They did not disintegrate; they did not turn into ash that even the slightest of breeze could obliterate. They hit broken stone with a clatter.

  She noticed it, but barely; the Dragon had been exposed. Beneath the black scales lay something so pale it might have been skin. She lifted her hands again.

  Teeth grazed her palms, slashing across the form and curve of thick sigils. Flesh left as well, and blood scattered across the scales that had fallen. Her blood. The pain was brief and sharp, and her fingers spasmed, as if they might follow.

  But she was beyond pain. It might have been happening to someone else entirely; it might have been happening in a dream laced with dark fog and distance. She didn’t bring her hands in, didn’t try to protect them; who protected a sword, after all, when it had hit steel, a like weapon?

  She heard the Dragon roar. “Kill the children!”

  And his words made sense in a way that memory hadn’t. Brought back memories older than the mere minutes of these ones, brought with it a pain and a terror that she thought she had faced down in the Hawklord’s tower.

  She’d been wrong. Would always be wrong. It was there, and if she moved quickly enough, if she gave over everything she had to the words that now adorned her, she might finally achieve her goal, and have peace.

  She could save them. She could save them all.

  He became her enemy, her only enemy. As if he were Severn, all along; as if he were the darkness that lurked in the hands that had done the inconceivable.

  She leaped toward him, hands extended, and she hit him with the full force of her negligible weight. It wouldn’t have moved Tiamaris, at a different time; Tiamaris would have stood there like a damn wall.

  But this one? This Dragon screamed, and pain mingled with fury, drowning out all other sounds. Scales parted, again and again; some fell and some clung, sundered, useless armor. She saw the words in him, then, as they gave way. Saw, as she had seen Nightshade’s gift, syllables as strong, as fine and as alien. She did not try to speak them; she made them her own.

  Drew them in, as she had drawn words from the seal, the man of blue fire. Ate them.

  He cried out in rage; pain was beyond him.

  And then he began to shrink, to dwindle, to fall again into the casement of flesh that Dragons wore in Elantra. She could see the dark wash of blood that covered his chest, his arms, his shoulders, tha
t trickled from the side of his mouth.

  Not enough. Never enough.

  She sent fire out in waves, in dark swirls and eddies, and he stood in their center, his own hands outstretched, the fire coming from them as dark as her own. They spoke the same grim, bitter language, in a silence broken by grunts, by heavy breaths.

  All around them, fires burned, dark now, the red forgotten. Even the hearts of blue that had adorned the first fall of blood faded slowly from her vision. This was what she wanted. Only this. He had to suffer. He had to die.

  Kaylin!

  Not here. She heard and felt the tug of her name, and she struggled to relieve herself of its unwelcome weight. Not here, and not yet.

  The Dragon shrivelled; he might not have been a Dragon at all; he might have been…a man. Just that; a man with odd eyes, his scales pulled in, his broken wings—and they were broken—pulled back into the shelter of shoulder blades and spine. She hardly noticed. The contest of language, the fight for conversational space, was all that mattered. Rock melted beneath her feet; she could feel it, but it didn’t burn. Rock melted beneath his, to like effect. They were evenly matched.

  She knew this.

  And then she let go of even that much awareness, and let the blackness take her. Let herself be taken by darkness; it was the same, after all.

  But into the darkness, light came, like a third sword, like an angle of conversation that she hadn’t considered, another way of looking at death. It was a golden light, and it was broken by shining shards of different color, blinding in their contrast with the things that she had chosen to see.

  She heard words, different words, thin and spoken; recognized—but barely—the voice that uttered them; she couldn’t see the face, but she would have known Severn anywhere.

  Kaylin, he said, at a great remove, his voice following this new light, you’re killing them. You’re killing the children.

  No! She wanted to scream the words, but the language was wrong; she was mute. You killed them! You, not me!

  She closed her hands; made fists of them. In the distance, she heard the breaking of a hundred bones, all at once. There were no screams, and she regretted their absence; she would do better next time.

  But the voice spoke; whoever she had killed, it hadn’t been Severn. Still. Always. How did you kill memory?

  She struggled with it, with the darkness, with the words. Saw the Dragon recede, and made to follow, but only with power, with symbols, with words. She could do that, now.

  But something held her back. Some words, something that Severn had said, now penetrated her awareness—as did the sense of the passing of rage.

  It was almost over. The Hawklord would be angry.

  Funny, that that was her first thought. Funny and humbling.

  And then the light caught her extended arm, and she had enough time to recognize what it actually signified; she had abstracted it, somehow, forgetting.

  It was the bracer. She couldn’t see the hands that carried it, but knew they were Severn’s. The bracer caught her wrist, and where it touched, she thought to feel fire. Felt instead a blessed coolness, a familiar weight. For just a moment she struggled against it, but there were things buried in memory that didn’t need images to coalesce.

  Lights danced. Blue, blue, red, blue, white, white.

  She heard the click of the golden cage, and felt its invisible bars bearing down on her. Black shadows ebbed between those bars, seeking egress; they touched the light and cringed back, and back again, falling toward her skin as if from a great height.

  She staggered as the ancient bracer that had been a gift and a burden given her by the Hawklord made its weight and presence known. Her vision cleared slowly, and with the passage of shadow and black night, her strength also fled. She sank to her knees—or would have—but Severn caught her before she could hit the ground.

  Could hit what was left of it; it was shattered rock in places, and where the rock had been lifted or broken, the ground was red, almost liquid. Severn lifted her. She wanted to argue, but the movement of her lips made no sound at all.

  He brought her up to his chest; she felt his chin against the top of her head. Felt the rise and fall of his chest, the breath that left his slightly open mouth as it pushed against her hair.

  Her eyes cleared completely; reality returned, and with it, the words that she’d learned in the heart of the fief of Nightshade. Words that she couldn’t speak. Worry followed, sudden and sharp, and behind it, much stronger, the metallic taste of fear. She grabbed at Severn’s surcoat, saw the ragged Hawk beneath her fingers, and clenched.

  “Severn—”

  “They’re safe,” he told her quietly. His voice was thin. She wondered if it would always sound that way; the thunder in her ears was its own deafness. She looked at the courtyard in the fading of sundown, and saw that the bodies of Barrani were scattered across the stones.

  And frowned. “The Dragon—”

  “He’s gone, Kaylin.”

  “You let him—”

  “It was him, or the children,” Severn replied.

  “Where are they?” It was all she could think of to ask.

  He gestured with his shoulder, and then, navigating broken ground, turned slowly to face them. They were huddled against the east wall of the courtyard, their bodies intertwined, their hands and arms around each other, their heads—different colors of hair blending in the scant light of evening—were bowed. But they were not terrified, and one boy looked up, his eyes passing over hers to meet someone’s. Severn’s, she thought.

  The Barrani were not all dead.

  But they would be. From above, fire began a gentle rain, and it was a red fire.

  The Hawks were landing in the open courtyard in ones and twos. Where there was no safe place to stand, they hovered, pole-arms at ready, seeking the dead, or the soon to be deader.

  “You…you saved them,” she whispered.

  He said nothing.

  Reality bit her, hard. “You saved them from me.” The shadows were better than reality; they caused less pain. To her. The gems on the bracer were glowing. She had never once seen them so bright.

  “You didn’t mean to threaten them,” he told her. As if it were a comfort, or meant to be.

  “I didn’t even think of them,” she whispered, and she turned her face into his chest, into the threads of gold that had come unbound: the Hawk’s symbol.

  “You found them,” he continued, although he couldn’t see her face. “We would never have come in time if not for you.”

  “I would have done their work for them.”

  He said nothing, but his arms tightened. She felt them as an offer of protection. But how the hell did you protect someone from themself?

  “Severn—”

  “Not now, Kaylin. Not now.”

  She heard the sound of wings, the sound of weapons striking flesh; the cry of the Aerians at war. Seven years ago she would have joined them.

  And five minutes ago, she would have been their target. She knew it, and wondered how many of them did. Maybe none.

  She knew Severn would never tell them.

  “Corporal.” Smooth, cold voice. It took her a minute to place it as Tiamaris’s. She turned, then, but her hands still held on to Severn.

  Severn’s nod was bleak.

  Tiamaris crossed the broken ground as if it was of no consequence. His step was heavy enough to dislodge already weakened flagstones. He stopped five feet from Kaylin, and met her eyes, holding them. Demanding, in silence, some answer that she was no longer certain she could give.

  But after a moment, his shoulders relaxed, and the blade he carried fell slightly. “You saw,” he said.

  “The Dragon,” she whispered.

  “Makuron the Black,” Tiamaris replied. “The only living outcaste.”

  The reason, Kaylin realized, when he fell silent, that there were no outcaste Dragons.

  “Yes,” a second voice said, and turning slightly, unwilling to relinqui
sh her seat, she saw Lord Nightshade. His armor was rent, and his sword, crimson.

  “You knew.”

  “No, Lord Tiamaris. But I suspected. Of those who have come to study the ancient ruins, only one has never been threatened by the power contained in the sigils.” The fieflord met the Dragon’s glance, and raised his sword.

  The Dragon’s golden eyes rounded, shifting into a deep orange, something just shy of red. The length of the fieflord’s sword was reflected in his unlidded stare.

  “Yes,” Nightshade said, although his gaze fell upon Kaylin and remained there. “One of the three. Meliannos, the second.”

  Kaylin looked confused.

  And Tiamaris smiled grimly. “Three weapons were crafted by the Barrani in a time when war was more…common. They had the power to withstand Dragon fire,” he added softly, “and the strength to pierce Dragon armor. It has been…many years since I have seen one such. The Emperor does not favor them.”

  “It has been long in my keeping,” the Barrani fieflord replied gravely, “and only against such need.”

  “The Emperor will know,” Tiamaris said, eyes still upon the unsheathed blade.

  The fieflord shrugged. “If he is wise, he already suspects. And I fear that the blade will not be his only concern, nor even his greatest.”

  “Makuron is not dead.”

  “No.” The fieflord hesitated for a moment, and then met Kaylin’s eyes. “You do not understand what transpired here.”

  She shook her head. Because she didn’t. And because she did. She was shuddering now, as power fled. Consciousness would soon flee with it, but not yet. She struggled to keep her eyes open.

  “Makuron is old,” Nightshade said. “And you weakened him greatly. More, I fear, than either I or Lord Tiamaris might have, had we been present.” He reached out; she stilled. His hand brushed the mark on her cheek, and almost without volition, she leaned into his fingers; they were cool and soft.

  “I did not kill him,” he told her, and she thought the words were meant only for her, although he spoke them carelessly in front of witnesses.