The fire looked at Teela, his expression shifting. She is cold.
“She’s not dead.”
No, Kaylin. Let me carry her.
Kaylin opened her mouth.
I have carried you, Chosen.
“Teela, he wants to carry you.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Let him carry me for as long as you can sustain him.”
The fire slid an arm around the back of Teela’s neck and the backs of her legs. Kaylin hovered; in the narrow staircase, this took work.
Where do we go?
“Up,” Kaylin said.
He said nothing else. She found the fire confusing at times. In the elemental garden, the fire didn’t use words. He seemed, to her admittedly prejudiced mind, almost childlike; he asked for stories; she told them. His idea of stories tended to lack things like character or narrative; he wanted stories about fire. About lighting a fire. About what fire did, what it was used for, and even how it saved lives.
But outside of the garden, fire had a different voice.
It is a smaller voice, he said.
Kaylin didn’t consider it all that small.
No, but you are very, very small, Chosen. In the garden, it is hard to hear your voice at all; everything makes too much noise. He paused. It is hard here, as well. You should not be here. It was said in a tone that implied concern, but Kaylin found it forbidding anyway.
* * *
Without Teela’s weight, climbing was trivial; the stairs went up in a straight slope. After the first dozen stairs, Kaylin stopped worrying that the fire would accidentally char Barrani skin, and she looked straight ahead. There wasn’t much else to look at; the walls failed to sprout windows, doors, or other hallways.
“Kitling?”
“I’m here. I’m here, Teela.”
“We’re almost out.”
Since the stairs and the hall that contained them continued for as far as Kaylin could see, she frowned and briefly placed the back of her hand on clammy Barrani brow.
“Remind me not to break your arms when I have the strength to do so. You know how I feel about your worry.”
“Why do you think we’re almost out?”
“I can hear voices.”
Kaylin could hear nothing. Even the fire was absent its usual crackle. “Do you recognize them?” she asked.
“Yes.”
This didn’t make Kaylin feel any safer. She could guess, from Teela’s expression, who she thought she could hear, and the last time anyone else could hear them there’d been a whole mess of injured and near-dead in their wake.
Kaylin couldn’t hear them—but Kaylin hadn’t seen the nightmares, either. “Tell me if you see them?” she whispered.
Teela nodded and turned her face toward the fire’s heart.
The stairs widened. The halls therefore opened up as well, to accommodate the shift in width. It was easier to walk two abreast, and Kaylin waited. She didn’t need to walk beside the fire, but she wanted to keep Teela in easy reach.
Her fear that Teela would see something she couldn’t proved to be unfounded. The stairs came to an end. Beyond them, white stone continued in a flat, bright plane. At their height was a Barrani Kaylin recognized: Terrano. The Terrano of the forest.
But she’d seen the glass statues in the heart of Alsanis’s nightmare—and this boy had not been among them. He was smiling as he watched the fire approach; he appeared to have eyes for Teela. They were not, sadly, Barrani eyes.
“Teela! We’re waiting!”
Teela struggled to stand; if she’d had the strength, she would have insisted on walking. She didn’t, and if she was ferociously proud—and she was, being Barrani—she nonetheless had a strong streak of pragmatism.
It was Kaylin who spoke. “Who are you?”
He frowned, the exuberance draining from his face.
“Teela thinks you’re Terrano—but you’re not.”
“Kitling—”
Kaylin shook her head. “I saw them, Teela. I saw them—they were like ghosts, but I’d remember them anywhere. This man wasn’t one of the eleven.”
“I recognize him,” was the gentle reply.
“Yes—but you shouldn’t. This isn’t even what your Terrano looked like.”
“The nightmares of the Hallionne are not considered a strict guide to reality. They are replete with symbols, with suggestions. What you saw was the Hallionne’s interpretation.”
“Yes,” Kaylin said. “And no. I would bet anything I owned that what I saw is what they actually looked like. Except for the being made of glass part. How do you recognize him, Teela? How, when your memories are perfect? Does he really look like Terrano?”
“She doesn’t see what I look like,” the young man said, his frown growing edges. “She sees who I am.”
“Really? Why exactly are you trying to present as Barrani, then? Why don’t you shed that and look like what you think you actually are? Because if you are Terrano, why can’t you remember your own face?”
“Kitling—”
Terrano now looked confused. It was the type of confusion that could spill into anger, and from there, all-out tantrum; Kaylin recognized it although she usually only saw it in the faces of foundlings.
“Teela—”
“She’s wrong,” Teela said, leaning against Kaylin. “I did recognize you. I still do.”
“You look the same,” Terrano said, sounding more hesitant.
Teela nodded.
“But you aren’t here to join us.”
“I don’t know how,” Teela replied. “I’m still what I was. I didn’t mean to stay behind.”
“No. The green kept you. The green. But Teela—we can fix it, now!” He paused. “Well...almost.”
Kaylin felt cold. The fire wrapped an arm around her shoulder. It didn’t help. “It’s not that kind of cold,” she whispered.
He said nothing. His black eyes were all but glued to Terrano, and she felt, as he watched, his growing sense of revulsion. It wasn’t what he felt for the water, the earth, or the air; there was no respect in it.
“Terrano,” Teela said, her voice much stronger than she was. “Where is the Lady?”
“Oh, she’s with everyone else. I came to find you.”
“Why you?”
“It’s easiest for me,” he replied, frowning. “Why have you summoned him?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“The mortal summoned him?”
“She is Chosen.”
Terrano frowned. “She’s the harmoniste.”
“Yes, she is that, too. She is Chosen, Terrano.” Teela frowned. After a longer pause, she said, “We were not taught about the Chosen. Not then.”
“What is a Chosen? Is it a mortal thing?”
“The Chosen are almost never mortal. There have been Barrani who have been Chosen; there have been Dragons.”
He spit. Clearly, Dragons were not high on his list of happy things. “But what is a Chosen, Teela?”
“Look at her arms. At her forehead. Do you recognize the marks?”
Terrano did as bid. He looked like a Barrani, but nothing about his posture or expression suggested the elder race. His eyes, however, widened. They were the same color as the eyes of the fire’s Avatar.
The marks on Kaylin’s arms began, at last, to glow. The glow was golden. Terrano’s brows disappeared into the perfect line of his hair. It was comical, or would have been in any other circumstance. Kaylin saw much more of his eyes; they had no whites, no iris, no pupil. They were the eyes of the small dragon, the eyes of the fire, the eyes of things ancient and wild.
“She has words. She has words on her skin.” He took two steps toward them; Teela stiffened. The fire stepped in front of them both, and to Kaylin’s eye, his flames grew almost white.
“Teela.”
“I can’t leave the way you can,” Teela told Terrano. “And I can’t give the Chosen to you, I’m sorry; she is kyuthe to
me. One of the only friends I’ve found in centuries who is almost what you were.”
“Does she know your name? Does she hold it?”
Teela shook her head. “I would never risk the pain of that loss again.”
Loss, Kaylin thought. Not vulnerability. Not weakness. Loss. “Do you know hers?” Kaylin asked.
The silence was profound. After a pause in which the fire began to crackle, Terrano said, “We don’t need names anymore. Teela, come with me.”
“I cannot. I have absorbed the nightmares of Alsanis, and I have accepted the judgment of the green. There is only one way I can leave this place, if I am to leave at all.”
“Try,” Terrano said. He held out a hand.
The fire reached out and pushed it away. Terrano’s eyes widened; his skin blistered.
Teela whispered a single, Barrani word. “Kaylin—the fire—”
“I’m not telling the fire what to do,” Kaylin replied, with more heat than necessary. She didn’t want Terrano touching Teela. She just...didn’t.
“You can’t let fire do whatever it wants!”
“You can’t let Terrano do whatever he wants, either!” Kaylin struggled to lower her voice. “We’re going up the stairs.” She offered Teela a shoulder; Teela stiffened, but accepted it because she had no alternative.
Terrano backed away from the fire as the fire advanced. He backed into a hall. This hall reminded Kaylin of the High Halls in Elantra; the ceiling was so far above the ground she could kink her neck looking up at it. She didn’t try. She could see that the walls were no longer roughly worked; they were smooth, and they were pillared. The pillars were carved in likenesses of Barrani, in alabaster, or something that looked like alabaster at this distance; they weren’t close.
“Don’t come here,” Terrano shouted. Kaylin couldn’t be certain who he was shouting at until Teela stiffened. “It’s not the right place, it’s not the right time—you’re not ready yet!” He shrieked in outrage as the fire struck again. “Teela!”
“Kaylin—stop it. Stop the fire!”
Kaylin heard the pain and fear in Teela’s voice as if it were a mirror of her own. She closed her eyes, and she called the fire.
He does not belong here.
No. But neither do I.
It is not the same, Chosen. He must be destroyed.
She thought he was right. But Teela’s expression cut her. Yes, but not now. Not right now. Come back to me. Carry Teela again. Please. Please.
The fire hesitated. In the hesitation, Terrano saw an opening; he ran toward one of the pillars, leaped at the feet of the sculpture carved into alabaster, and vanished. Kaylin looked at the statue. She wasn’t surprised to recognize it.
“I don’t know if this leads us out,” Kaylin said. “Or in.”
Teela, however, was looking at the pillar. She mouthed a name.
“There are twelve,” Kaylin told her.
“Of course there are.” Teela glanced up at the fire as he lifted her.
“Does the green have nightmares?”
“You ask the oddest questions.”
“It keeps my mind busy. What did he mean, Teela? Did you understand him? What was he hoping to fix?”
Teela laughed softly. “They left me behind. My mother’s life blood was meant to buy my safety—and it did. It did that. But my friends don’t see it as safety. They see it as abandonment. They left me. They went where I could not follow. Had I stayed in the Hallionne, had I stayed with them, they might have been able to do for me what was done to them.
“But my father escaped, and took me with him.”
“Would you have stayed with them?”
“Does it matter? I’m here. I can’t enter the Hallionne. If the green considers me unworthy, I will never leave the green. I am tired, kitling. You were right,” she added.
“About what?”
“That is not what Terrano looked like. The statue, though, is.”
“How did you recognize him?”
“I knew his name. I knew him. I don’t know why he looks different, now; I imagine he—like most of us in our distant youth—had insecurities about his physical presence. He is no longer confined to that form; he has choice.”
“Does he?”
“Demonstrably.”
Kaylin frowned. “I’m not so certain about that. Iberrienne didn’t, in the end. Ynpharion didn’t. Whatever they absorbed, whatever they agreed to, it changed them in some fundamental way.”
“It would have had to—they could transform.”
“It changed what they wanted, Teela.”
“And are our desires so fundamental? Is that what defines us?” She shook her head. “You will have to lead, kitling. I will have to trust you.” Teela smiled at Kaylin’s expression. “I don’t think doubt will serve you well in the green. It slows you down, it teaches you not to trust yourself. I understand my own doubts and my own weaknesses, in this. They are constraining, but they have claws here; I cannot escape them.”
“Except through me.”
“Yes.”
Kaylin exhaled. “Let’s go.”
* * *
She had to stop at the twelfth pillar, and she was relieved to find that it, unlike the other eleven, was one great column that seemed to almost hold up the sky. There was no likeness of Teela here.
“No,” Teela said, as if reading her mind. “But there are twelve.”
“I just think it’s weird that they’re pillars. I don’t understand the symbolism. I think I understand why they were made of glass in the nightmare—it makes more sense to me.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re empty. They’re vessels. Whatever made them real, for want of a better word, is all but gone.”
“But not gone.”
Kaylin lifted her left hand, exposing the mark; it was the only one that hadn’t changed color. “But these pillars kind of hold up the roof.”
“You are looking for too much logic.”
“There’s nothing wrong with logic.”
“No—but you’re trying to understand a book when half of it’s written in a language you’ve never heard, let alone read. You’re missing half of the story because it’s not a story you can inhabit in any way. The Hallionne are not mortal. The green is not mortal. You are.”
“You’re immortal—do you understand it any better than I do?”
Teela shook her head. “The green and the Hallionne don’t differentiate between your kin and mine. Oh, they understand there is a difference—but to them, we are locked into our shapes and we exist in an entirely superficial way. We live in the world. We are of it.”
“And they’re not.”
“No. They exist in a space of their own. They overlap many roads. I think that visitors sometimes came to the Hallionne from the outlands.”
“We did.”
“Yes—but in an emergency. We don’t, and can’t, live there. If not for Bertolle’s...brothers...most of us would never have arrived at Orbaranne. You would. Nightshade. I’m tempted to say the Consort.”
“And you?”
She didn’t answer, but turned her face up toward the light because there was light now. It was sunlight. It was the type of sunlight that artists painted, the type that fell through branches into the quiet of forest floor. The forests without insects and burrs and things that were all thorn with a tiny bit of root beneath. An arch opened up in the wall at the end of this gigantic hall, and it framed—at last—green.
Kaylin could see trees; she could see grass, or at least wildflowers. She could hear the trickle of water in the distance, which implied either river, brook, or possibly fountain. She could see sky, and the sky was the normal azure.
“I think we’re almost there,” she told Teela.
Teela nodded and closed her eyes.
* * *
There was no sun in the sky, which was the first oddity. Kaylin was so grateful to see life—or at least its imitation—that it took her some time to realize what wa
s missing. There were no insects or birds. In all, this should have been idyllic.
It wasn’t. It was giving her hives. The marks on her arms were glowing brightly. Of course. When they could have been useful, they’d been flat, gray, and lifeless.
She viewed the garden from a terrace. The terrace, like the hall itself, suggested Barrani architecture, and a path led from both the height and the base of its steps. Kaylin hesitated. She looked to Teela for an opinion; Teela was utterly silent.
The fire set her—carefully—down. I will leave you now, Chosen.
“I’m not—”
You are. I have been in this place before; it is peaceful, but it is not mine. Go. My part of this story is told.
“I can’t carry her.”
You can, if you must. Come back to the Keeper’s garden when you are done. There are stories to be told.
* * *
The fire took warmth with him. Kaylin didn’t need it, not here—but Teela did. She knelt beside the Barrani Hawk she’d known and envied and—yes—loved for so much of her life. And she was afraid—that was the truth. She hadn’t understood, at her mother’s deathbed, what death meant. Severn had.
But she’d learned. It was endless. It was loss. It was loss every day. It was an emptiness and a permanent lack of warmth.
Teela had been nothing like her mother. Teela was Barrani. Teela was immortal. Teela had taken her places her mother would never have taken her; had forgiven things her mother would never have forgiven. She wasn’t always kind. No, scratch that, she was almost never kind. It wasn’t her way. But she was solid. She was—mostly—safe.
And she wouldn’t wake up.
Kaylin shook her. She shouted. She whispered. She even pleaded—because Teela couldn’t hear her. That was the point, wasn’t it? Teela couldn’t hear her. God, Tain was going to kill her. Tain would be so upset.
They’d all be upset. This wasn’t supposed to happen—if anyone was in danger, it was supposed to be Kaylin. Kaylin, who was going to die sometime anyway. She was crying, now. She was crying, and she had to stop because tears were useless. They’d get them nowhere, and they had to move.
But she hadn’t lied to the fire: Teela was heavy. She was wearing too much armor. The armor could be mostly removed—and Kaylin did remove it. The sword, she kept; she attached it to her own waist, where it dragged across the ground. She would have tried to sling it across her back—half the Barrani war band did that—but if she had any hope of moving Teela at all, it was going to be by taking the brunt of her unconscious weight across that back.
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