You told me—
What did I tell you?
Nothing, of course. Nothing of value. The scant force of air over the shape of tongue, teeth and lip said nothing at all. Noise. Buzzing.
The children, she told him, concentrating.
The silence was almost complete; he would have withdrawn had she not called him again, forcing his attention to focus upon her. She felt his surprise, his hesitance, and yes, his anger. But she wanted none of those things.
How are the Barrani children named?
A pause. A swell of resistance. And then, beneath that, amusement and…pity. Midwife, he called her with mockery. You are in the High Halls.
I’m in the damn High Halls, she snapped, clenching her hands. Words slid through, crushed but not destroyed. And there are names here, waiting for life.
You…see much.
And hear less. Answer the question.
Silence.
Please.
The Lord of the High Court has a daughter, he said at last, and she will be Consort. To her will come all who are born. They sleep; they will not wake until she takes them along the paths that are open only for her. She is appointed.
Kaylin swallowed. She knew where the Consort would bring those children. But—she’s—
Yes. She will be wife to one of her brothers; the Lord of the Green or the Lord of the West March. I told you, Kaylin, that her role was ordained.
They’re not born alive?
They are, but life is flimsy, fragile; it passes fleetingly. They will not wake until they know the whole of who they will be; they are not given their name; they are taken by it.
And do they remember the taking?
Silence. Profound silence.
She didn’t ask again. Instead, she watched the writing swirl and shift. The light was intense. The pain was worse.
They want to name me, she told him.
And the silence changed in texture; it was dark here. The only warmth in the room—if you didn’t count the burning along her arms—came from Severn’s hands.
You cannot be given a name.
Why?
You are mortal.
She understood that. And told him so, but not in words. I already have the words, she began, looking at them; they glowed brightly enough that her sleeves couldn’t hide them.
They are yours, but they are not you. If this is the gift the High Halls offers, refuse it.
But they—
Kaylin, did you offer the altar your blood?
Ummm. Would it make a difference?
The silence was one of astonishment. And not the good kind.
It was an accident, she began defensively.
But he was concentrating, and she fell silent. She could feel his presence grow as she waited. She couldn’t see him. But he was drawing nearer, along the length of the only thing that bound them: his name.
The name he had surrendered to her.
You are not alone.
Severn’s here.
Good. You shed blood.
Not on the table.
Again the silence. She was a bit tired of it. Her teeth, however, were clenched about as tightly as they could possibly be, and she didn’t feel like swearing. Barrani didn’t have truly useful curse words.
Why did you touch it?
I—it seemed like the right thing to do.
Given how often your right is wrong, I would suggest you ignore your instincts in future. If, he added darkly, you have one.
Silence returned, and in it, he observed her from a distance. Not, she realized, a safe distance; she could almost see where, in Castle Nightshade, he was standing, and she’d walked that floor before. It had almost devoured her.
You are almost safe, he said at last. The words find no purchase in you.
They’re…on me.
Yes. I can see that.
I, um, my hands are kind of stuck. In two fists. She tried to pull them free, purely as a demonstration, and they did not come; they were anchored there, in a sea of Old words. Anchored by them.
He frowned. She didn’t see it, and was grateful for the distance, but the feeling lingered anyway. You will pay a price for this, he told her softly. You cannot now withdraw your hands unless you take what is offered.
She had a little quibble with his use of the word offered, but then again, he was speaking in the essence of High Barrani.
What does the Consort do?
She chooses a name.
But that means she can read them.
No, Kaylin, it doesn’t. These are not mortal words, to be read and picked over; they are the gift and price of the Old Ones. They are the force of our lives. And you have your hands in them.
Look, it’s not like I can pollute the damn things. They’re all the hell over me!
You have to choose, he said softly. And the wisdom to make that choice wisely will not be yours for centuries yet.
Dust doesn’t make many choices.
He didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.
She uncurled her hands; the fists had been tight, and shaking. She couldn’t see them clearly for the words, but she could feel the pain in her palms.
Ummm.
And feel, as well, the raised curve of one of the fieflord’s brows.
If I bleed at all in the table—or the altar, whatever it is—is that worse?
His answer was silent; it contained no words. Barrani, as she had noted earlier, wasn’t an aid to swearing. But she wasn’t dead. And the tingling was less painful. And the words moved more slowly. None of this was cause for comfort.
She ignored him then, and began to trace what had seemed like wood grain, searching it for meaning. Searching it for something that might have meaning. And it occurred to her, as she did, that the act itself was futile.
That almost all acts were, in the end.
She would die; nothing could prevent that. The march of these disembodied words would go on beyond her, as if she were inconsequential.
She understood two things then. That if this was not exactly a testing ground for the Barrani, it had never been designed for mortals. And that, mortal, she was here, in its heart; that she had been given a choice.
Choice…
Calarnenne.
Kaylin.
You dared the High Halls.
I am Lord, yes.
And you succeeded.
Yes.
How many fail?
Numbers beyond your ability to count.
She nodded. When you came to the tower, what did you see?
Stairs, he said, but there was a caution in the words that flagged them. He did not lie to her; she didn’t think it was possible. But he didn’t tell her the whole of the truth, either.
Did you see a word?
Yes.
What was it?
His silence was the silence of resistance. And she held his name. But the temptation to use it was vanishingly small. If he held answers—and he did—he would not part with them willingly. Maybe it was a Barrani thing.
But Kaylin wasn’t Barrani. I saw a single rune, she told him, offering the same vulnerability she asked of him, and first. I asked Andellen what it meant. He could see it.
He would; he was tested, and he passed.
He told me it was a symbol that meant choice. That’s not what you saw, was it?
No, Kaylin.
So this is—
Yes. Do not surrender this information to another. It is safe to do so with me; you hold my name.
She nodded, but it was an absent nod; a gesture of habit or the type of acknowledgment that breezes above actual understanding.
Andellen saw—
He was your guide.
She would have spit had she been anywhere else. She didn’t. Her hands were glowing, and they were the pale green of Barrani eyes—children’s eyes. She’d never seen a Barrani baby; they were rare. But she knew it for fact. Both of her hands. She opened them both. Saw nail crescents—three each—that had bitten thei
r way through her skin. She’d had worse paper cuts in her life, but not here. Context was—as her very irritated history master used to tell her—everything.
She closed her eyes slowly. She could still feel her hands, but without vision to guide them, she could no longer see the runic words. Sight wouldn’t help her; it kept trying to make the shapes into something they weren’t: language. And comprehensible.
She felt the tingling in her arms lessen; felt the frenetic crawl of desperate shapes slow. Her skin was hers; it was dry and hot, as if all moisture had been absorbed. Or as if she were fevered. She was certainly dizzy.
But she let those go; they weren’t for her. Or of her. What she held in her hands, what passed over her open palms like the shallow current of a brook, might be. And she had to choose.
Not one, but two. She understood this because the symbol itself had responded to both of her hands; the single hand had done nothing.
What if I don’t choose?
A choice will be made for you; not choosing is a choice.
No good, then. Eyes still closed, she felt shapes. And the shapes gained weight, and differing textures, as the dark minutes passed. Her right hand closed upon something round and hard; it was neither too hot nor too cool, but it was heavy. Almost too heavy to hold.
Yet it felt, as she struggled with the immensity of its weight, like something solid enough to build a palace on; a foundation, a thing of strength. It was large. She’d never tried to carry something that large before; certainly not in the palm of her hand.
Her hand was almost flat, her fingers shaking with the effort to sustain her grip. She pulled. And felt her left hand come free.
But her eyes were still closed. One hand. One word.
She concentrated on the other hand, the empty one. And felt it as that: empty. Something nicked her palm, something as sharp and clean as Severn’s daggers had been. She almost opened her eyes. Keeping them closed required more effort than running after a Leontine suspect who didn’t want to be questioned.
Still, she’d done that, time and again.
Sharp. Hard. Both of these things. But her fingers closed effortlessly over the shape, and she felt, to her surprise, something softer and more giving beneath those fingers, something that was warm and light, like mossbed or flower petal. Clenching her hand drove the edges of the whole thing farther into her palm, but she did it anyway. There was…life here. Something living. Something that was utterly unlike the vast shape she contained in her left hand. It almost seemed to sing.
She lifted her hand without thinking, and opened her eyes. And screamed.
CHAPTER 15
Her hand was dripping blood.
She’d seen more, even of her own. The blood itself wasn’t the problem; it was the thing she held in her hand.
Severn’s grip tightened. “Kaylin—”
She shook. Not her head, but her whole body, a convulsive movement that had nothing to do with voluntary choice.
“Your hand is bleeding.” The words told her more clearly what she wouldn’t have thought to ask: He couldn’t see what she carried in her right hand. She could.
It was…a symbol. A rune. But it was throbbing faintly, and it was red as dragon anger; it was both hot and cold, the edges sharp, the curves above them like scintillating light. It was pain.
It was more than pain. Sorrow, here. But also joy. Peace and despair. It was birth and death, and everything in between; a small microcosm whose shape somehow implied the whole of a world. She moved her left hand automatically, but it was heavy with what it carried, and had she been able to look away, she would have seen that, too—and it would have been far, far too much to take in.
“Kaylin.” Pause. “Elianne.”
She could not look away. Her eyes seemed to lend shape and substance to the rune; to give it dimension that it hadn’t possessed when it traveled the currents beneath the surface. It was waiting, she realized.
And she had no idea what it was waiting for.
Or rather, no idea she liked.
Two hands. One rune. A choice. But she’d made more than one damn choice on the path that led to this one. And she wanted to be around to make a lot more of them.
Severn’s hands left her shoulder; the cold in the air could be felt as his absence. As the absence of all things that meant life to Kaylin. She wanted to cry out again, but the single scream was all she was afforded; her mouth would not open in anything that resembled speech.
She heard the tearing of cloth as if from a great distance and wondered dully if he’d finally given up and cut off the damn sleeves that were such a horrendous pain. If she ever daydreamed about finery again, she’d make a beeline for the bridge across the Ablayne and throw herself over it. It would be wet, it would hurt, and it would be far, far more practical.
He came back. He had never really left her. Even during the seven years after she’d fled the fief of Nightshade, he had never left; she’d just never felt his shadow, the comfort of his presence. Guilt had done that. Hers. His.
He caught her right wrist and she almost cried out a warning—but she was mute. She saw, however, that he held a strip of green silk in his hands. Mute satisfaction was better than none, and it was all she was going to get; he meant to bind the wound.
And the rune was in the way. She had thought the words attracted to blood, but this wasn’t a great, fancy leech; it didn’t absorb blood. It sat above it. She saw Kaylin in the rune, as if it had changed shape, had granted her a moment of familiarity. She saw, as well, Elianne, and heard the distant sound of Steffi’s voice, felt the discomforting presence of Jade’s silent suspicion. She felt Catti there, and saw her, red-haired and mutinous; saw Dock as well; saw a gleam of golden fur, and claws that were red with blood. Greater claws than that appeared next, appeared on top of the Leon-tine ones; she saw the jaws of a Dragon open so wide it could swallow the rune whole.
Without thinking, she pulled the rune up—and pulled her hand away from Severn before he could bind the wound he could see. She wasn’t certain that the silk would pass through the rune; wasn’t certain what would happen if the rune no longer touched her skin, her blood.
She heard screams of anger, of pain, of joy and of pure irritation; she felt the flight feathers of Clint’s gray wings, and then, on those wings, the feel of the wind high above the city, near the southern stretch Clint called home.
She heard the Leontine vows she had been taught, and she almost said them; this was the closest she could come to speech. Some of it must have forced itself out because Severn touched her again.
But her eyes were wide and unblinking. She saw the fief of Nightshade. And the fief of Barren. She had spent six dark months there; she saw the deaths. The training. The other vows. Dark and sharp, the rune bit her hand again. A reminder.
Everything was here, in this shape, every little scrap of knowledge that memory couldn’t contain so elegantly. Everything she was.
And she understood, in a way she had never understood, what a cage was: this. This word. And it had her name on it.
No. Worse than that, it was her name; she had chosen it, and it had taken her blood and her permission. It would become what she was, and she would bear it as scar and threat, as vulnerability and fear, for the rest of her life.
She had envied the Barrani. Anyone less beautiful than the Barrani always did—and that was pretty much anyone. She had envied them their forevers; had envied them their Hawks, their golden crests, which they could bear long past her dotage.
But she did not envy them now.
Choice. She closed her eyes again. There was too much of her life here, and she was living it all in brief flashes so intense they made her nauseated. The hate she had felt for herself, the contempt, the disgust, were brighter and clearer than they had been in—hours. Hours ago. When Severn had buried Steffi and Jade.
She lifted her right hand. What it held was now weightless, almost insubstantial. Closing her eyes because open eyes were infinitely worse,
she brought the hand to her chest; the word was crushed against a part of her dress that she hadn’t managed to rip, slash, bleed on or otherwise deface.
And she bled on it. And bled.
The sharp edge of the word cut her dress and her skin as if neither were of consequence. She understood that this was symbolic—but symbolic was something that involved long robes and funny hats, cheap wine and incense, stupid words repeated by people who were so accustomed to saying them they’d lost all meaning in the drone.
This was different; it was the root of symbol, the thing from which the branches grew, distinctly different from the powerless repetitions that might follow. Or even the powerful ones.
She accepted the choice. Accepted the irony in the Elantran translation. And she pressed the rune into her flesh, into her skin, into her heart. It was an act of suicide.
Or an act of birth.
The pain ebbed slowly as she drew her bloody hand back. She heard Severn swear. Words.
First words.
And she heard, blended with his syllables, the rush of his welcome worry, his obvious fear, another sound like the crash of thunder momentarily given sentience and voice.
Ellariayn.
Her name. Her true name.
By your choice you shall be known, she thought bitterly. And now, by her choice, she would be, and in a way that no mortal should ever be known.
Severn’s hands touched her cheeks; they were wet. His eyes were dark, the same shade they had always been. His hands were gentle as he brushed the tears away.
“You’ve cut yourself,” he told her softly, as if she had gone mad, or had come so close there was no other way to speak to her.
She nodded. Felt the weight of the word take root inside her, where no others had gained purchase. Or permission. And the words that were crawling up and down what had already been written on her arms stilled; they faded until she could no longer feel them.
Looking at Severn, she reached out to grab his hand; hers was ice. And smeared with blood. But he didn’t seem to notice.
And her left hand? Weighted and heavy, she looked at it: It was empty. Whatever she felt, whatever she had pulled from the miasma, it was gone.
And it was not gone.
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