Cast in Honor

by Michelle Sagara

  * * *

  Gilbert stepped away from the door to allow them to enter.

  Bellusdeo went in first, cutting Kattea off to do so. Kaylin almost reached out to grab Kattea’s shoulder, but she knew how she would have reacted to that at Kattea’s age. Kattea’s trust of Gilbert was not trust as Kaylin had grown to understand it. It was necessity.

  “Kattea said you were unwell.”

  “I know.”

  “You look...”

  “Unwell.”

  “Yes.”

  “I said—” Kattea began.

  “Kattea and I have a bit of a bet going.”

  “Kattea has been attempting to explain betting to me. It is confusing.”

  “It can’t be more confusing than basements that change shape and size and doors that aren’t where you left them.”

  Gilbert frowned.

  Kattea said, “That’s what I told him.”

  “Did any Barrani come to this house yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “But something else did?”

  Gilbert was silent for a long beat.

  “Let me lose a bet.”

  “I do not think that would be wise. The injuries you heal are not the same injuries that my people sustain. My injuries would not, I believe, make sense to you.”

  “They don’t have to make sense to me.” Kaylin lifted her arms. Gilbert, seeing them, froze. He turned to Kattea.

  “Her arms—were they glowing like that when she entered the halls?”

  “You couldn’t see it? You can see everything.” Kattea said this without apparent sarcasm.

  “I can see it now, yes. I— May I examine your arms?”

  Kaylin unbuttoned the cuffs of her sleeves in reply. She rolled up the loose material and winced; the marks were bright. She rolled her sleeves down again instantly.

  “Kaylin?”

  “Sometimes they— Sometimes the words leave my skin.”

  “Yes.” Gilbert now looked confused.

  “You’ve seen marks like these before. You called me—”

  “Chosen.” The most disturbing thing about his gaze, Kaylin realized, was the fact that Gilbert didn’t blink. Nor did he look away. His glance never strayed.

  “You lived in Ravellon,” Kaylin said, changing the subject.

  He nodded.

  “How do you know what these marks mean?”

  Bellusdeo folded her arms. Her eyes remained a bright, intense orange as she studied Gilbert.

  Gilbert frowned. “I do not understand the question.”

  “Ravellon is at the heart of the fiefs. Kattea’s told you about at least one of them—you found her there.”

  “Lord Nightshade’s home.”

  “Yes. The fiefs exist because of Ravellon. The Towers—or castle, in his case—exist to prevent Shadow from encroaching upon the rest of the city. Gilbert, was Ravellon your home?”

  * * *

  Gilbert turned to Kattea. “Go upstairs,” he told her quietly, “and entertain our guests.” He glanced up, as if the ceiling of this very ordinary room was transparent to his gaze. “Kattea. Go. We do not have much time.”

  Kaylin glanced at the girl. She had folded her slender arms tightly, clearly intending to stay.

  “Kattea, you gave me your word.”

  Mutinous, the child hesitated.

  “Do as he says,” Kaylin told the girl. “It’s never wise to break a promise made to someone as powerful as Gilbert.”

  “I didn’t promise to obey,” Kattea said, voice low. “Not everything.”

  “You must go to our guests. While you are with them, they should be safe.”

  “From what?” Bellusdeo demanded.

  “I would tell you to leave with Kattea, but it would be pointless. You will remain with the Chosen. I intend her no harm.”

  “But you send the child from the room.”

  “I am not what you are. I am not what she is. She has made a bet with Kattea.” He spoke the word as if it were a sacred oath. “I am not what I was. I am...ill. There is a possibility that she can heal me.”

  “Healing is not, generally—”

  “But there is a possibility that she will fail. Or that I will. You will, in all likelihood, survive such a failure. The Chosen is likely to survive. Kattea is not.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Bellusdeo demanded of Kaylin.

  Since the answer was more or less no, Kaylin didn’t bother with it. Kattea was already afraid. “Keep your promise,” Kaylin said.

  “You don’t even know what the promise was.”

  “I don’t have to. You know, and Gilbert knows.”

  Gilbert cut in. “Go upstairs. I will meet you there.”

  “You promise?”

  Gilbert was silent. He was pale now, far paler than he had been when he’d opened the door. His eyes, however, were just as bright, just as clear. No, Kaylin thought, they were brighter and clearer; it was as if light was now attempting to escape his body, and his eyes were the only possible exit.

  “Bellusdeo.”

  “I am not leaving you here.”

  “Kattea has to go. I don’t want her to get lost in the halls—”

  “I won’t get lost in the halls!”

  “You don’t get lost because Gilbert guides you. He’s telling you he might not be able to. You need to be somewhere safe.”

  “There’s nowhere safe!”

  “Fine. You need to be somewhere safer. There are two Imperial Hawks in your parlor. Go there and stand behind them if something else comes to the house. But do it now.” Speaking, she reached out and grabbed Gilbert’s hands. The light that she saw in his eyes was familiar. It was not the gold of Dragon calm or Barrani surprise; it was the gold of the marks on her arms, legs, back and, she imagined, the mark on her forehead, which had not yet returned on its own to the Barrani Lake of Life.

  Bellusdeo’s eyes were a deeper orange. Her gaze moved from Kaylin to Kattea and back. Kaylin wasn’t certain that Bellusdeo would, in the end, do what she’d asked, but she had hopes.

  “If you do not return unharmed,” the Dragon finally said, “I will find your remains and burn them to ash.”

  “Fine. But only if I’m dead.”

  “No promises” was the dire response. Bellusdeo then turned her glare on Kattea. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  Kattea didn’t argue.

  * * *

  “Ravellon was my home.”

  Gilbert’s hands were ice. Kaylin had handled warmer corpses. “You should lie down.”

  “Kattea said this, as well. I do not completely understand it.”

  Realization came to Kaylin as she held Gilbert’s hands. “You’re not used to the body you inhabit.”

  “I am not used to the smallness of the form I inhabit, no.”

  “Why do you bother?”

  “Because I cannot walk here if I do not. Not safely. The seals are breaking.”

  Kaylin understood that this was important, but it made no sense, and to make sense of it would probably require time. Or someone else. She had a hundred questions to ask, and all of the answers were equally important. She chose one. “How much time do you have?”

  To her surprise, he laughed. The laugh echoed in the room; it was almost a Dragon’s laugh. This did nothing to make Kaylin any calmer.

  “Time,” he said bitterly, “I have.”

  “You just told Kattea—”

  “Time is what you do not have. It is what Kattea will not have.”

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I am wounded, Chosen. I am bleeding in ways you cannot see.” His hands tightened on hers. “Lord Nightshade’s broth
er is here.”

  Kaylin frowned and turned. She was relieved to see that Annarion wasn’t present in the room. Relief shattered when she heard a very familiar—and very close—squawk. If Annarion was present, however, he remained silent; unlike Mandoran, he was good at that.

  She closed her eyes, in part because her marks were now glowing so brightly that they hurt to look at, and in part because Gilbert’s eyes were doing the same thing. “Should I be able to choose which word leaves me?”

  “Can you not? If you cannot, how can you use the power you’ve been granted? How can you fulfill the responsibility that comes with it? The words are your power. Without them, you are merely mortal.”

  Kaylin was more or less used to this, but still found it annoying. Annoyance, on the other hand, was better than fear; she held on to it because it was familiar. Eyes closed and holding the coldest hands in the world, she let her awareness expand.

  Chapter 13

  If Kaylin did not heal immortals often, she did have some experience. She didn’t expect Gilbert’s body to conform to the rough shape and functionality of her own. She did expect to at least find wounds, because Barrani wounds and Dragon wounds had a lot in common with merely mortal ones, and in general, bleeding implied that kind of injury.

  Gilbert was not Barrani; he wasn’t a Dragon. He had chosen to adopt the appearance of a mortal—possibly for Kattea’s sake. It wasn’t, however, a simple illusion.

  Gilbert’s appearance was in some ways like Kaylin’s skin. It was attached to him. It was part of the whole, not separate from it. But the whole was not simple interior—organs, muscle, bone; the skin didn’t contain the rest of him. Even had it, she would have found it disturbing. She didn’t expect Shadow to be living and organic. She expected it to be...well, shadowy. Deadly.

  This...wasn’t like that. Parts of Gilbert were physical; they were almost what his form suggested. But they didn’t...attach to each other in a way that suggested those parts had an actual function. If Kaylin could look at the contents of a working stomach—she’d seen the dissection of a dead one in the morgue—she imagined they would look similar to Gilbert’s body. Except for the things that a stomach couldn’t contain.

  She wondered, queasy now, if that was what his interior was—a collection of the things he’d swallowed, consumed and only partly digested. As a living body, this one didn’t work. And yet it was alive. She could sense that much.

  A body knew its healthy state. Kaylin’s healing wasn’t like doctoring or surgery. Had it been, she would have failed the first time she tried; she’d been twelve or thirteen, and she’d had no words for any of what she did. The words, the knowledge, had followed from the time she’d spent on a stool in the morgue at Red’s side.

  The morgue would not give her the words for what she touched now.

  Kaylin often felt fear when she healed, but this fear was different. It was visceral. Gilbert felt wrong. He was alive, yes—but in his case, life was inimical, dangerous. She was afraid to heal him, because at the core of the mess that was Gilbert, she felt and touched traces of the unpredictable Shadow that grouped in the heart of the fiefs, traces of the Shadow that crossed the boundaries created by active Towers, and in so doing, transformed the landscape and the living they encountered. Shadow was death. Shadow meant nothing else, to Elantra.

  Shadow, however, was part of Gilbert.

  It would have been easy to assume that the Shadow existed in Gilbert as contamination. As something that needed to be cut out and excised in order to save his life. It wouldn’t be the first time Kaylin had had to do it. But she’d known then. She had known what Barrani health looked like. She’d been able to see the Shadow corrupting the Barrani body it infested and knew that if it wasn’t stopped, nothing Barrani would remain.

  But she did not understand what healthy Gilbert looked like. Her power—if power had sentience—didn’t understand it, either.

  Squawk.

  Annarion was definitely here. Mandoran was probably with him.

  “I need to heal him,” she told the familiar, without opening her eyes.

  Squawk. Squawk.

  “He apologizes for intruding,” Gilbert said, his voice so close to her ear, his mouth might have been plastered to the side of her face. “He feels you will need...help.”

  “Did he happen to say what kind of help?”

  “No, Chosen. I believe he expects you to understand.”

  And after a long moment, she did. It did not make her day any better. “He’s here to help contain you. The other two are somehow with him because they need to be within range of him or...”

  “Or?”

  “I can’t explain it because I’m not them. You probably understand it, if he’s here.” To the familiar, she said, “I don’t know what he’s supposed to be when he’s not—not injured.”

  Squawk.

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t usually have to know. The—the patient’s body knows.”

  “And Gilbert’s doesn’t.” This was Mandoran. Kaylin didn’t open her eyes.

  “No.”

  “Do ours?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never been allowed to heal either of you. The only Barrani I’ve healed wanted to kill me for it.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Mandoran helpfully said.

  “Great. If you get mortally wounded or infected, I’ll keep that in mind. Annarion wouldn’t let me touch him.”

  “That is possibly for your own safety,” Gilbert told her.

  * * *

  Healing went one way, in theory. Power flowed from Kaylin to the injured. Information—scattered and diffuse—also traveled, and that was a two-way communication.

  What surged through Kaylin now was not information. Not as she understood it. It was not—quite—Shadow, but it was of Shadow. She pulled her hands away from Gilbert’s; she no longer had to be in contact with him to be aware of what he was.

  She could, with her eyes closed, see Gilbert’s eyes. He had two of them, in the expected place. Not all Shadows did; many had multiple eyes, of different sizes, different shapes. Those eyes often occupied body parts that eyes normally didn’t, at least not in any race or species with which Kaylin was familiar.

  But...he didn’t have two eyes now. The quality of the eyes, the harsh clarity, the solid physicality, remained. They were Gilbert’s eyes. They just weren’t attached to his face anymore, and there were a lot more of them. She stepped back—or felt as if she was trying to—but it didn’t help; the eyes ringed her, surrounded her, cocooned her. There was no way out.

  She opened her eyes, her physical eyes.

  Gilbert’s eyes remained, but the rest of the room returned. With it, she caught a glimpse of Mandoran, Annarion and her familiar.

  Her familiar.

  He was not in his small dragon state. He was not in his large, rideable state, either; he was somewhere in between. He had wings, yes, and he was slender, but he had lost the reptilian look that had defined his relationship with Kaylin. If what stood before her now bit her ear or stole her accessories, she’d probably try to stab him before she could override her instincts.

  And yet, she knew him. The fact that she could now see Annarion, Mandoran and her erstwhile familiar was far less disturbing than it would have been at any other time. What was disturbing was the lack of Gilbert.

  “What are you doing?” Mandoran asked her.

  “I am trying to heal Gilbert.”

  “Possibly not your brightest idea. Teela says you take betting to unacceptable extremes. She’s worried,” he added.

  “This is not about a bet,” Kaylin said, through clenched teeth.

  “Teela offers a wager.”

  “Tell Teela to shut up. I need to concentrate.”

  “On what?”

  On Gilbe
rt.

  “Yes,” the familiar said. He stepped toward Kaylin. She recognized his voice, although she heard it seldom.

  “I understand you.”

  “It is a function of your state. You cannot maintain it for long; you will be absorbed. You are too thin an existence to avoid it.”

  Kaylin shook her head. “Kattea has avoided it.”

  “Gilbert has avoided absorbing Kattea—or anything else he has touched in this city. His efforts mirror those of Annarion and Mandoran, but he is not entirely as they are.”

  Kaylin lifted a hand. Holding her breath, she placed her palm as gently as she could against the nearest eye. The eye closed. Until she’d touched it, it hadn’t appeared to even have an eyelid.

  “What are you doing?” Mandoran asked.

  “Thinking of strangling you,” Kaylin snapped at him. Even as she spoke, she reached for the next eye, the movement both deliberate and hesitant. This eye also closed. It made her feel vaguely better, but there were a lot of eyes. This was not at all like healing.

  “Your feet, Kaylin.”

  Kaylin looked down. She was practically standing on a bed of eyes. She could no longer see the stone floor. What she saw in its place was chaos. Opalescent Shadow; hints of broiling color that glittered and moved as if being disgorged. The eyes rested above it.

  “This is not healing,” Kaylin almost shouted.

  “Then stop,” Mandoran told her.

  She would have if she’d any idea how. But the eyes formed a layer between her feet and the Shadow that would transform them, and that Shadow seemed like a very, very large pool. She left those eyes alone, for the sake of self-preservation.

  The rest, she continued to close. After half a dozen such closures, she no longer hesitated. After a dozen she finally noticed that the marks on her arms, which were still glowing brightly, had begun to develop dimension. They were still attached to her skin, but they were attached to her skin the way Gilbert’s human appearance was attached to his body: they were part of Kaylin, and yet at the same time separate from her.

  “How did you get here?” she asked Gilbert as she worked. “You said you crossed the bridge.” She closed an eye.

  “That was not entirely accurate.”