Cast in Sorrow coe-9

by Michelle Sagara

  But—but that’s a hereditary title.

  Heredity, like any other custom, is subject to the demands of power. If I could not hold the West March against her son, I would not deserve to rule it. Her son failed.

  She frowned. You liked him, she said, in some surprise.

  It is not relevant. Had he become a Lord of the High Court, one of the two of us would not have survived.

  Lord Barian didn’t take the test.

  No. His brother’s failure was vindication for his cowardice.

  Kaylin frowned. I don’t think he’s a coward.

  No?

  No. I think he feels responsible for the West March. He can fulfill those responsibilities as Warden. He can’t, if he’s dead.

  He is not like his brother; he looks inward, rather than out.

  I don’t think the green cares.

  “The green does care,” the eagle on her arm said.

  Lord Barian’s brows rose slightly; Lord Lirienne’s expression did not change at all.

  This is why you don’t care for the dreams of Alsanis. Kaylin grimaced.

  The Lord of the West March laughed. It is one reason among many. At the moment, I am enraged by their existence.

  To Kaylin’s surprise, this was true. He made no attempt to hide the depth of his fury; it opened up in front of her like a door.

  I do not know what Barian told you, he continued when she failed to find words, but my sister cannot be woken. We have tried. Lord Nightshade and Lord Evarrim have been by her side since dinner. She does not respond to touch, to sound, or to the enchantments it is safe to cast. Barian allowed her to take the burden of his responsibility upon herself. If she fails to wake, I will kill him. I will not kill him quickly. I may be moved to allow his mother to live.

  Kaylin glanced at Lord Barian. Swallowing, she said, I’ll wake her.

  You are so certain you are capable of it?

  She wasn’t, and he knew it.

  * * *

  To her surprise, Lord Evarrim and Nightshade were still in attendance when they at last arrived. The Consort lay between them; they stood watch. Evarrim noted Kaylin’s presence with a grim nod that all but screamed distaste; Nightshade offered her the nod that passes between equals. Neither man spoke, but as she approached the Consort, they stepped back to give her both room and their silent permission.

  Evarrim seemed ill-pleased by the presence of both Barian and the eagle that rested, weightless, on her arm. As it was clear that the bird was there with the Lord of the West March’s permission, he said nothing.

  Lord Barian seemed entirely unconcerned that an Outcaste wore the Teller’s crown.

  Kaylin knew the Consort’s skin shouldn’t be the color it was. Barrani skin was generally flawless and pale—but this had a sallow, green tinge that looked worse than unhealthy. She stopped herself from checking for a pulse, and then realized it didn’t matter. The only person present she would have spared her sudden fear already knew what she was feeling.

  She knelt by the Consort’s side, and very carefully touched her hand. It was cold. Morgue cold. “Lord Barian,” she said, in High Barrani, “if you have anything of import to tell me about the nightmares of the Hallionne, now is the time.”

  “I can tell you less about the nightmares than our companions can,” he replied. “They are one.”

  She resisted the urge to snap something rude in Leontine.

  “He is not wrong,” the eagle on her arm said. She released the Consort’s hand and attempted to remove the bird; his weightless claws tightened. “Do not be foolish. We have accompanied you for a reason, Chosen. If you set us aside, how will you speak to the nightmares?”

  “Probably the same way I’m speaking to you,” she replied. “But less politely.”

  The bird spoke to its companion; their voices rose.

  The Barrani found their discussion fascinating. Kaylin, hand once again touching the still iciness of the Consort’s, found it annoying. She closed her eyes and counted to ten; she made it to four, and not for the usual reason.

  In the silence of watchful Barrani, in the darkness behind closed lids, she could hear the eagles speak, and the language that sounded so painfully familiar took on the tones and the range of sound she associated with song. There was a distinctive cadence to the words, a stretching and thinning of syllables that speech didn’t normally contain.

  Music—even wordless music—had a feel to it. It evoked emotion. There was a simple harmony to the speech of these creatures, although she couldn’t quite place how—they seemed to take turns, to be singing different parts, and their voices were distinct. They didn’t overlap. But there was no point in expecting dreams in the shape of eagles to actually make sense.

  “Lady.” Kaylin’s voice was rough and tuneless in comparison.

  The Consort didn’t answer—no surprise there.

  Kaylin inhaled, exhaled, and then reached out with the power that she used to heal the injured. If there was nothing wrong with the Consort physically, there would be nothing to heal.

  The dreams of Alsanis continued their song, and as Kaylin listened, she understood why it sounded so familiar; she had heard something similar before—but never in voices like these. The Consort had sung something with the same feel, the same tone, when she had been forced to wake the Hallionne Bertolle. There was a yearning, a desire, and an emptiness to the song of the dreams of Alsanis that reminded Kaylin very much of the Consort’s song of awakening.

  She started to tell the eagles that the Consort wasn’t a Hallionne and couldn’t be woken that way, but stopped. She had no idea whether or not that was true, anymore, because something about the Consort was subtly different from the other Barrani she had healed. She almost forgot to breathe, the panic was so sharp.

  But it was hard to hold on to it; the song of the dreams of Alsanis was too insistent, too urgent; there was a warmth—a heat—to the urgency. She felt it pass through the Consort’s hand into her own. As it did, she heard a second song.

  If the first song was the conversation of the dreams, the second was the construction of the nightmares. It should have been cacophony. It wasn’t. Somehow, the two disparate songs overlapped and blended; they were distinct, but they were—as the eagles had said—part of a single piece.

  Kaylin’s arms began to burn. So did the back of her neck, her legs, and a small spot in the center of her forehead. She knew the marks that adorned over half her body were now glowing. Lady, she thought, squeezing the Consort’s hand. Wake.

  There was nothing wrong with her body. There was nothing to heal. But Kaylin knew, as she listened, that the Consort wouldn’t wake without intervention. Barrani didn’t require sleep, but even Barrani could starve to death.

  The small dragon bit her ear hard enough, she was certain, to draw blood. She let loose a volley of Leontine as she opened her eyes and grabbed for him with her left hand. Her right remained tightly clasped around the Consort’s.

  “Lord Kaylin, your ear is bleeding.”

  “I kind of guessed that. I don’t suppose you have a cage?”

  The small dragon squawked. He batted her face with surprisingly heavy wings as he pushed off her shoulder, roundly berating her in his unintelligible bird-speak.

  Except what she heard was cadence. Rhythm. Nothing in his lizard vocal chords evoked music, but she realized that he was trying to sing when both of the eagles fixed their gaze on him. Their voices rose; she was caught instantly by the shift in their song, as if it were current and she was almost drowning.

  Her very frustrating companion squawked back. It was a harsh noise; it blended with nothing. If he’d tried to coax notes out of a drum, he’d have had an easier time. As if he could hear the thought, he then turned his attention back to Kaylin, and this time, his voice was softer and almost plaintive, although it wasn’t any more musical.

  “You want me to sing?” she asked.

  He nodded with his whole body, bobbing up and down in place.

  �
�Only because you’ve never heard me.” She glanced once, apprehensively, at the gathered Barrani lords. Singing off-key and out of tune in the West March was not the same as singing with the foundlings in the foundling halls, and that was the only place she readily joined a group song.

  But the small dragon landed on her shoulder and nudged her cheek, and she knew he not only meant her to sing, but meant to join her. How much worse could she sound?

  “What,” Nightshade said sharply, “do you intend to sing?”

  “Badly, and probably off-key, whatever it is,” she replied. “But not on purpose. The eagles are singing,” she added, “and I think small and squeaky wants me to join them.”

  “The eagles are not singing,” the Lord of the West March said.

  “But they are,” Lord Barian said. The two men’s gazes met, and both fell silent.

  Kaylin wanted to ask Lord Lirienne what he heard, but the eagles’ voices had grown higher and more urgent, and she turned to listen, closing her eyes and concentrating on a song that was two parts. Two parts, and what seemed like a dozen. There was no room for her voice in the throng.

  She made room. She wound her voice—dissonant, unmusical, and uncertain—around the squawking of her small dragon, finding words that spoke to what she heard, even if there were no similar words in the music of the dreams and nightmares of a Hallionne. Feeling self-conscious made her voice even weaker than it usually was, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d made a total fool of herself.

  Her arms ached. The burning, she was used to—if one could ever get used to that sense of skin being seared. But they also trembled, as if she’d been carrying way too much for too long. She looked at the small dragon; he was watching her, his squawk gentled to a croon.

  She wished she could understand him. For now, it was enough that the eagles seemed to. The only two people caught in this song that couldn’t were Kaylin and the Consort herself, because as Kaylin found voice and exposed a ridiculous vanity, she heard the Consort singing.

  But the Consort lay unmoving, her eyes and lips closed. Her skin, sallow, was now beaded with perspiration—but so was Kaylin’s. It made it hard to keep the grip on her hand. She changed that grip, entwining their fingers and tightening her hold.

  She didn’t know what the birds hoped to wake, and in the end, that wasn’t her problem. What she wanted—what she needed—was to wake the Consort. She needed to make herself heard over the beautiful storm of sound that occurred when dream and nightmare clashed.

  The dragon batted her cheek and shook his head.

  The marks on her arm were a gold-white glow; she had to squint to read them. Not only were they on the edge of tear-inducing brightness, they seemed to be moving as she watched.

  Gripping the Consort’s hand tightly enough she started to lose feeling in her own fingers, Kaylin reached out with her free hand, passing it over the brilliant lines and dots that formed runes on most of her skin. They were warm, but not searing, beneath her callused palm—but they weren’t solid. She felt resistance as her hand passed through them. The small dragon was bouncing up and down, although he didn’t stop his noisemaking; nor did he vary its rhythm.

  Still, she understood that he meant her to do what she was trying—and failing—to do: take them in hand. Lift them.

  No, she thought. Not them. One. Just one. In the past, she had lost marks before: to the trapped spirit of a dead dragon, to the Devourer, to the small dragon hatchling. But the marks had lifted themselves off her skin; she hadn’t chosen. She hadn’t had to choose.

  She had no idea why they were hers; someone immortal, someone older, wiser, and more knowledgeable—someone like the Arkon—should have been chosen instead. She didn’t know what they were for. She had no idea why a word was necessary now—but she understood, watching the marks, that it was. And that this time, the hand of the Ancients wasn’t going to make the choice for her.

  Her hands shook, and not because she was nervous. She closed her eyes.

  Eyes closed, she could still see the marks, but the light didn’t burn her vision. Her body didn’t impede it, either. It wasn’t just the marks on her arms that were slowly beginning to rise.

  Chapter 8

  She could see—with her eyes closed—the shape of nightmares. They were clearer and darker than they had been the first time she’d encountered them; there was so much light here, the edges of shadow wings were harsher and sharper. They implied bird—or maybe bat—without any of the other physical traits: they were like the shadows the eagles cast in flight.

  She held on to that thought as the voices of the actual eagles filled her awareness, blending in rhythm, if not in actual sound, with the voice of her squawky sidekick. Her ear was throbbing. After this was done, she’d have pointed words with the little dragon.

  The shadows filled her vision as they wheeled in the confined space.

  Except it wasn’t confined; it had no obvious shape, no floor, no roof, no walls; it implied a vast and endless sky—the kind you’d crane your neck to look up at. But it was a sky without color or cloud. She heard the voices of those shadows as clearly as she heard the eagles of Alsanis.

  She looked down.

  It was a mistake. She could see herself. She wasn’t translucent, and she wasn’t terribly impressive, but the dress she wore was: it was the essence of green, and green was the color of life in the West March. It was, she thought—and wondered why—the color of blood.

  Beneath her feet, the shadows swooped and darted, their flight patterns interwoven with the patterns of feathered wings. They had no obvious beaks, no obvious faces, but their song came from somewhere, and it echoed. Given that there was nothing for sound to bounce off, this was impressive.

  But no, even that was wrong: there was. The runes that graced over half of her skin had expanded outward in the shape of a sphere, and the sounds of raised voices were caught and returned by each element they touched. The shadows flew through them, rather than around; the flight path of the eagles was therefore far more constrained.

  She almost opened her eyes when the small dragon bit her ear—again. It was more a nibble than an actual bite; she turned automatically in his direction and saw, to her surprise, that he was present in this vision. His body was composed of the same translucent flesh, and his eyes were the same black opalescence. But his wings seemed both more amorphous and larger; they were, she realized, very like the wings of the shadows above in shape and size; they passed through her, although his claws did not.

  The only thing Kaylin couldn’t see was the Consort.

  The small dragon warbled and nudged her cheek. Kaylin opened her eyes.

  * * *

  Nothing changed.

  She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the odd sky, occupied as it was by runes and birds and their cast shadows, remained firmly fixed in her vision; she turned, and turned again, looking up and down as she did. She was no longer in the Consort’s room.

  Lirienne.

  There was no answer.

  Nightshade?

  Silence. She inhaled slowly, counting to ten. The small dragon bit her ear. This time it was harder, and his warble was higher. Exhaling, Kaylin nodded, remembering what she had so reluctantly set out to do. She began to sing. She had faint hope that her actual body—she had no doubt she still had one—was silent in the halls of the Lord of the West March. Barrani voices were clear and resonant and she had never heard one sing off-key, not that song was common.

  Mortal voices, not so much, and Kaylin’s was on the bottom end of that scale.

  But this wasn’t about the quality of voice. It wasn’t even about the words; she could have chosen words at random, the syllables of the eagles made so little sense. It was about harmony. About tone. It was about rhythm. It was about emotion, because even if she couldn’t understand a single word, she felt she understood intent.

  There was a desolation, a yearning, and an emptiness in this song. No, not emptiness, but an awareness of loss
, of all that had been lost and might never come again. It was hard to listen carefully with her eyes open, and as closing her eyes didn’t apparently change a damn thing, she gave up trying.

  The eagles flew. The shadows flew. Their song soared and plummeted, as if it were the sole expression of everything they were. Maybe it was. She couldn’t understand more than the emotion behind the long, winding words—and she probably didn’t understand all of that, either. Just enough.

  She became aware, as she watched, that her marks were stationary. So was she. While the eagles flew, while the shadows darted, she was as fixed in place as any of the marks. The small dragon’s claws curled into her collarbone, and she grimaced; her song banked briefly while she struggled not to swear.

  She was mostly prepared when the dragon’s wings began to flap; they were silent, their movements suggesting power and grace. Kaylin began to move. Her flight was unwieldy; it had none of the grace or speed of the dreams or nightmares. But the slow, steady climb took her closer to the nearest of the floating marks.

  It was larger than she was. She could see every detail of its full shape; on her arm, it was flattened and almost lifeless in comparison. It seemed natural that it shed its brilliant, golden light; it was like sun—but it didn’t burn and didn’t blind. At least, not yet. It felt almost alive as she reached out to touch it. She couldn’t read it; it was too large for that. She couldn’t intuit its meaning.

  But she had come here to find the Consort.

  The marks that adorned her skin were like a miniature world around her. They were individual glyphs, differing in shape and size, in simplicity and complexity. They were very like images that might be called up in Records for her inspection. And she knew, again, that she had to choose one.

  She didn’t have time to waffle, but to make a decision based on—on nothing, really, when so much rode on the outcome, was almost paralyzing. She let her hand fall away. As it did, the rune faded from sight. She nodded to the small dragon and began her awkward flight toward the next one.