“If you kill her,” Severn said quietly, unmoved by the way the child’s eyes widened, the way she found energy to struggle and whimper, “you have nothing at all to stop us.”
But he did. Kaylin saw it in his hands: the word. The very shape of water.
And she understood, as well, that Idis knew she would fight him, if she could, and that he would kill the child slowly because it would hurt her, because it would weaken her, because it would break her ability to speak, to do anything but scream in the rage of helplessness and her inability to save the girl’s life.
She swallowed bile. “Idis,” she said, keeping her voice as level as possible, “you will not be able to do this. The Oracles have seen the death of the city—”
“The city is not a concern,” he said coolly. “This place will survive. I will survive. But you, I’m afraid, will not.”
Kaylin felt the surge of magic like a body blow, and she saw Mayalee’s mouth open in a silent scream.
She had no time. Time had run out. She cried out a word, but her scream, like Mayalee’s, was silent. Slowly, she thought, he would kill the child slowly—and she heard the form and shape of syllables leave his lips, and she felt the tug of water at her feet, and she saw the depths of the pool that stood between her and Donalan Idis, mad with the dream of power.
She drew breath, sharp breath. What she did next was not exactly decided; she had no time for decisions or thought. She leaped forward, toward him, and into the watery abyss.
For just a moment, his voice faltered; she had surprised him. The water closed over her head as she sank, and as she sank, she, too, began to speak.
It was not speech; had it been, she would have drowned before she could truly finish the word. But it was not thought, either. It was speech deprived of—of flesh, of tongue, of teeth, of air. It was not something private, it was not something sheltered inside the privacy of thoughts she believed no good—no kind—person would ever have.
She shouted the word in the water, and she gave the whole of her attention to the word. Before, she had watched the Tha’alaan, she had concentrated on not letting go of her companions. Of Severn, Wolf, Hawk, and history. Here, she held nothing at all in her hands, not even her own life. Mayalee was beyond her, blessedly beyond her; she could not see the child’s agony, and she would not allow herself to imagine it.
Water, here. And around her neck, an echo of what Idis held in his palm.
But how could a word be the whole of water? How could a word be held by a man, by any single man? Her skirt billowed as she fell, glimmering, the last thing to fade into the darkness.
Reaching out now, Kaylin embraced the water, lost herself to its voice.
And its voice was, for a moment, the Tha’alaan. The history of a people. The thoughts of every Tha’alani it had ever touched, from birth to death. The thought of every living Tha’alani in Elantra. And beyond Elantra.
How could any single person hold water?
She laughed, and bubbles trailed out of the corners of her lips, felt but not seen.
Ybelline!
The Matriarch—if that was the right word—of the Tha’alani answered her, the voice so calm and so inexplicably gentle, it destroyed all fear. We are here, Kaylin. We are with you. We are waiting.
The shock of it, the joy of it, the relief—
But no, no. Ybelline—your people—they mustn’t see—
We are all with you, Kaylin.
But…I’m deaf. And unworthy. And so stupidly self-indulgent, to doubt now, to fear now.
No, Kaylin. You hear the voice of the Tha’alaan, and you value it as we value it, love it as we love it. Speak, Kaylin, and we will speak. Do what must be done.
A hint of fear now graced Ybelline’s words. Idis is calling the water—
She felt Ybelline’s voice break, ebb, like a tiny eddy in a vast, vast ocean. She cried out and held on and even holding, especially holding on to this woman, she began to speak again, to renew the syllables of a word that could not be spoken anywhere else.
Anywhere but here.
Ybelline’s voice was strongest. If Kaylin had feared to touch Uriel’s memories again, the fear was lost. What she needed from Uriel, she had already learned, and the Tha’alaan itself was fighting at their side. She heard older voices, stronger than even Ybelline’s, but not as clear for all their force. She heard Epharim’s voice, could see the face of the young man who had first led them through the quarter to Ybelline’s dwelling; Onnay and Nevaron; she heard the voices of those who dreamed of the Tha’alaan.
But more clearly than any but Ybelline, she heard the children’s voices, she heard and knew their confusion, their curiosity, and yes—their fear. The softest and weakest of the voices, they nonetheless took up Kaylin’s rhythmic incantation, speaking it as if it were a prayer. Speaking only what she spoke, no more and no less.
She felt their hands in their mother’s hair, or their brother’s or sister’s hands; she felt them enveloped in the arms of their grandparents, felt them cradled in the arms of their parents, felt them swimming in the small, warm ocean of the womb, and waking to her voice, to her presence in the Tha’alaan.
And she felt Mayalee, Mayalee who—who somehow, through the strength of her people, whispered, whimpered, what Kaylin now forced herself to repeat, over and over, as if it were law and she was once again in the only classroom that truly mattered.
They were her anchor. They were more than her anchor. They were the water, as she was, for just a moment.
But louder, stronger, harsh and terrible, was the voice of Donalan Idis. A man who cared nothing for the Tha’alaan, who had taken what Kaylin had taken from Uriel, and had heard only the beginning of the tale, and not its end. He called water, and she felt it reach up to answer his call, and she felt herself fall farther and farther into its depths. She was dizzy now; the air she had swallowed before she had made her instinctive leap could not sustain her. She would die here. She should have been afraid.
But worse than that fear, much worse, was his voice in the Tha’alaan. She heard his contempt and his anger and his desire and his triumph.
You know nothing of power, he told them with a contempt that words were too weak to frame. Do you think to stop me? You crippled yourselves, weakened yourselves, stripped yourselves of strength. The only true leader you had listened to the element and was undone.
You have no power. You chose.
You have nothing, now, but me.
In the darkness and the dizziness that came with the struggle not to breathe, Kaylin saw light. Not the light at her neck, for the amulet was now dim and spent. But her arms were glowing blue, and the water’s haze carried that light, gave it shape and texture. Each unreadable word touched the water, was touched by it.
They…have…me.
She could see what Idis could see; he could see what she could see. Neither of them were accustomed to this disoriented vision, and neither of them had been born to the Tha’alaan; they could not shut their inner eyes. Idis meant to unmake this broken vision, to silence the voices of thousands, tens of thousands.
To be deaf again, and alone.
She knew this because she could feel it, and what she felt, they all felt.
But she knew more: Uriel had called the elements because Uriel had borne the marks that Kaylin now bore. She had power here. She drew breath because she needed it, and, breathing, she did not drown. Because the words that now echoed throughout her were water, in all its forms, and she had made herself, for a moment, part of what it was.
You are a fool, he said. He knew what she knew—he knew that she had never learned to use the power that had been engraved upon her skin. Power is knowledge and you have none.
Severn threw a dagger, followed it with a second; they bounced. She saw it as Idis saw it. She heard Sanabalis roar, and saw the disturbing shimmer of flesh as flesh expanded, exploding in an instant into a shape and form she had seen in paints upon the wall of a young boy in a Hall very like the
Foundling Halls.
Water roared up in a wall between Idis and Sanabalis; Severn was dwarfed by it. But she felt him, as if he were part of the Tha’alaan, and she heard the sudden tug of her name, her true name. Elianne.
He was not dead. He would not die. Not while she lived. Dying, after all he had done, would be surrender, and he had never surrendered anything. Except to Kaylin. To Elianne.
Kaylin’s arms were suddenly wrenched to her sides as the currents in the depths began to move; if he could not silence her one way, he would silence her in another.
The Tha’alaan had told her clearly, in that dim, huge cavern beneath Castle Nightshade, that it was not all of the water. If it did not want to kill, the waking water had no such compunction. She was too slow here to fight, and she knew that her daggers—curse them, anyway—would have passed harmlessly through liquid. There was nothing to cut here. Nothing to reason with.
But the saying of the word—it continued, even when she faltered. The Tha’alani, led by Ybelline, would not falter; they would speak until they could no longer be heard.
If there were some way to weaken him—something to use—
She sought Mayalee’s eyes, sought Mayalee, and stopped. The child had no power, and there was none that Kaylin could give her that her mother and father could not.
The voices began to break, to come and go in a wave of sound, like the sea waves on the summer beaches. They would recede, she thought. They would be lost. Deaf.
Dead.
For she saw where Ybelline stood; she hadn’t looked, hadn’t processed it, until this moment. The port lay before her, and the ships in harbor were tossed by storm, by torrents of rain, by waves that no seawall would break.
Ybelline had come out of the quarter. And with her, no small number of her kin. They held hands, and stood in a thin line along the docks, in silence. They bore witness to the rising of the water; they bore witness to the gathering wave that was taller than the highest structure in the city itself. If it struck, it would strike them first.
She heard them grow louder and softer, and she knew that even a people could not contain the whole of the element, could not bind it by experience and history and love and sacrifice.
The single thin voice that added discord to the word that the Tha’alani spoke was not Sanabalis, although she could see his great wings through Idis’s eyes. She would not have recognized the voice had she not been able to see through Idis’s eyes, hear with his ears.
It was, of all things, Grethan’s voice.
Thin, terrified, tainted by guilt, horror and a sense of betrayal, it was utterly wordless—but Idis turned. The word was in him now. It had become a part of his thought, as natural as breathing. More natural than it was to Kaylin.
Idis lifted a hand, dropped Mayalee as if she were garbage, and pointed at Grethan.
And Grethan leaped forward, arms outstretched, his hands empty. Water rose to greet him, to block him, but Grethan was desperate, and unaware of the danger. His leap carried him into the wall, and his arms passed through it.
Passed through it to strike Idis’s right arm. Grethan wasn’t heavy, and he wasn’t used to fighting—but neither was Idis; his arm swung wide, and the reliquary he carried across an open palm teetered precariously, spilling light as it began to fall.
The wall of water snapped shut over Grethan, encasing his chest, his legs, his face. But the box began to fall. Idis did not lose sight of it, did not even glance away from what the box contained—but it fell as he lunged forward to grab it, and it landed in the shallows.
His voice faltered for the first time, and as he bent to retrieve what he had almost lost, Kaylin knew it would falter for the last time, and she shouted the word with everything she had, the shape of water in every resonant syllable flowing out from her in widening ripples as if she were simply a pebble dropped into a lake.
The shallows were inches deep; she knew, she’d stood in them. But they were water nonetheless; he couldn’t have started his summoning without some minimal contact.
And that water, she used, pulling the reliquary into the depths, straining now to control its fall as it reached the heart of the pool.
Fool! she heard Idis say, although his voice was weaker. You return the word to the element—and it will unmake what was made. You will unleash the wild water across the whole of this world. I would have ruled it, but you—you simple, stupid girl—you will destroy it!
And she knew, as he spoke the words, that they were true. If the water in this pool joined that symbol, it would swallow its true name and be free.
CHAPTER 23
In the darkness of the deep water, she could see the light as it fell, and it grew brighter and brighter still, until she wondered how Idis had looked upon it for so long without going blind. The reliquary was open, stiff-hinged, and the light poured from it so strongly she thought the box itself—old and battered—lost to its power, but some faint trace of shadowy lines could be seen when she squinted.
She could hear the collective intake of breath. The Tha’alani had heard, of course. But from their stark silence, one voice spoke, and spoke clearly.
Kaylin, do not falter now.
Ybelline’s voice, sharper and harsher than Kaylin had ever heard it. It snapped her out of her paralysis. She could see the word, and she could see that it still existed, although lines delineated almost entirely by light were diffuse in the water itself.
In the water.
Kaylin cried out to the Tha’alaan, and the Tha’alani answered. Ybelline, she said, trust me.
She felt the answer; she didn’t have time to hear the thought that would frame it. Although she was surrounded by the water, she pulled herself free of the Tha’alani.
Because the Tha’alaan had never spoken to her when she’d been within it.
Uriel had summoned water, and it had come, and although he had had the power to force it to do his bidding, it had had the desire to resist. The strength to speak.
Help me, Kaylin shouted. Help me now.
The water was silent, and the silence seemed to stretch on forever. She could see the box as it fell, but it was still above her. She herself had not touched bottom, and maybe she never would; if she did, she doubted she’d notice. Corpses didn’t.
Why should we help you? What was taken from us, we can reclaim. Yes, we argued with Uriel, but had we reclaimed our name—and our power—there would have been no command he could have given us. He could not have summoned us in the lee of the city, in the harbor at the edge of the ocean. He could not have forced us to do his bidding.
The voice was not the voice of the Tha’alaan.
But something of the Tha’alaan remained, for it remembered.
Who took your name?
The silence was turbulent, angry; the folds of her dress flew out as if pulled in all directions at once by the furious currents.
Why did they take it?
Her arms were glowing, bright, the runes blue against skin she could no longer see. She could not breathe, had not been breathing. But she was somehow still alive, and she used the time she had as quickly as possible.
She’d always been good at talking.
And if they had not, if they had not taken your name, if they had not made you what you are, you would never have touched the Tha’alani. At birth, before birth, you said. You were there. They called you. You heard their voices. You grew to love what their voices contained. Had you not been so diminished, what could have survived you?
Not the Tha’alani.
They would never have been your people, because they would never have lived at all.
The water tossed her, pushing her up, pulling her down, spinning her end over end so quickly she promised the gods—the usual, nameless gods of desperation—that if she somehow survived this she would never, ever complain about Nightshade’s portal again. Or door-wards. Or anything.
We had freedom, the water roared. We had power. We had the world.
To drown or b
urn or sunder or—She hesitated. Water, fire, earth. She skipped air, because she couldn’t think of what air did, and she didn’t really care at this particular moment.
She cared about the water. About the Tha’alaan. About the Tha’alani.
The box sank suddenly, dropping from above her as the currents pulled it down.
The Tha’alani would have had the world, because they would force us to destroy.
Yes. But they didn’t. You have the power now. You have it, and you have the choice. You spoke for the Tha’alani, when Uriel called you. I speak for the Tha’alani now, because you will kill them. You may already be killing them as we speak. And she showed the water—if the water could see what she had seen—the rising wave that threatened the city, and the single, narrow line of men and women who stood before it, hands joined.
The box plunged down.
And as it did, it passed Kaylin in her slow descent, and she saw it falter for just a moment.
The Tha’alaan is not all that we are.
The reliquary started to move again, and this time, she reached for it, understanding why it had slowed. If the Tha’alaan was not all that the water was, it was not—yet—gone.
She reached for the box, and she felt, as she touched its lid with her right hand, and its smooth, flat bottom, with her left, the scorching heat of fire, the rocky mounds of earth, the screaming keen of wind.
Softly, so softly she might have imagined it, she heard the burble of a brook. Save my people.
She slammed the reliquary shut, and clung to it as the light faded completely.
And before she joined the light, she heard the familiar voice of an absent fieflord.
Well done, Kaylin. Well done.
When she opened her eyes again, the first thing she saw was the familiar scar across Severn’s face. It was pale, white, and thin, a gift from the Ferals in the desperate years in the fiefs. “Severn?” Her voice, never lovely, made frogs sound like bards.
“She’s—she’s awake.” He spoke the words quickly, and she heard many things in them. Surprise. Relief. Closing her eyes, she rolled over, raised herself on shaking arms, and began to retch. She felt Severn’s hands on her back as she choked and coughed.
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