Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  When you had a duty, and you failed it, what then? Guilt. Grief. Regret. Self-loathing. These were harder to find, and she searched a long time because it was important. You had to see them, you had to name them, if you wanted to escape them. She struggled until she found the right word for flawed; it felt like the word for life, for just a moment. She knew she would never be able to repeat it to Tara, not even with her help.

  But once done, she could offer acceptance. The past was the past. The future was still open, and it was still possible to find the strength to return, changed, to your calling. Hiding the past, pretending it had never happened, wasn’t accepting it—and Kaylin had done that for years.

  She accepted it here and now. She had done what she had done. She was not—would never be—proud of it, but the thirteen-year-old girl that had stupidly, foolishly, desperately destroyed so much was gone. She would never be that girl again; she understood the costs too damn well. Time, then, to let her go.

  All the while she thought, she worked, the deliberate choice of words and runes becoming repetitive, like people said knitting was. Kaylin had only tried it once, during someone else’s arrested labor, and she had somehow managed to end up with far more stitches than she’d started with, which caused no end of amusement to the rest of the midwives, and the expectant mother’s mother.

  She hadn’t Tiamaris’s eye, but she no longer saw the runic patterns as carvings; she saw them, instead, as a surface beneath which meaning lay. It was the meaning she now sought, as if it were small wells of light in the gloom and the red-tinged shadows, and when she reached them, she drew them out, wedding them to her narrative of what it meant to be alive.

  Of what living meant, of the way it shored you up and the way it wore you down; of what love meant—yes, love, because in the end, it defined so much of Kaylin’s life, both by presence and absence—to those who lived, and floundered, and fumbled and fell flat on their butts, and then got up and tried again. These were Tara’s people, whether she knew it or not, and they lived in the streets yards away from the fence that circled her; they were the people she had, unknowing, been set in place to protect.

  Are they? the more analytical part of her mind asked. She often resented it. She resented it now.

  Does it matter? These are the people who live here now, and these are the people who need her. And we all need to be needed. We need to be useful. We need to know what our role and our responsibilities are.

  She’s not human.

  No. But she can do what we can’t.

  And what can we do for her?

  This was the worst part of the analytical mind. Kaylin knew enough about people—of any race—to know that you couldn’t ask them to work for free. They had to get something out of the experience, or the work stopped. Things broke down. No one except maybe a mother—and even then she wasn’t certain—could give and give and give without getting something in return; it was like having leeches you couldn’t remove. In the end, there would be nothing left of you but an empty husk—if you were lucky.

  What, she asked herself, her hands stilling, can we give to her in return for what we’re asking? How can we appreciate what she offers if we don’t see it, and don’t understand it? How can we speak to her at all?

  We aren’t meant to, she thought. It was a slow realization. We were never meant to speak with her. The fief lord was. And is. The Lord of the Tower is the interface between the Tower, the anchor of the Ancients, and the people who take root around her.

  But this fief lord was not that bridge. All he left was a gap; he showed how sharp and bitter the divide was. When she completed whatever it was she was doing, would there be any room for him at all? No, she thought. He could not love the mean streets and the meaner mortals that managed to scrape out a living beneath his windows. He could not—as Nightshade did not—care for them.

  But Nightshade existed.

  Illien did not.

  Why?

  She shook her head. It didn’t matter. In the end, it didn’t matter. Nightshade’s Castle was not Tara, had never been Tara; what he loved—or hated or claimed or owned—was not here. It wasn’t relevant. Here, she had offered the Tower a glimpse of ideal, and idealized love. Idealized because it was gone; it was what loss made of her early life.

  She could change that, now. She could almost see the way to do it. She could reshape the words, shifting their meaning until they resembled what she thought the original purpose of the Tower had been. She even started to do so. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  This Tower—this Tower—was awake. It was alive, in just the same way Kaylin was, if you made allowances for the lack of limbs and the ability to move or breathe. This Tower…

  Wasn’t, she realized, a Tower. Not in the metaphorical sense of the word. Not an island. Not a stone fortress. From the moment she had touched Kaylin, or Kaylin had touched her, she had ceased to be some magical, mysterious construct that was at a remove from her inhabitants. She couldn’t live alone for all of her immortal existence. She couldn’t function in complete isolation.

  And she knew it, the way Kaylin at five had known it. Isolation meant death; like any living thing, death was something to be feared. Tara had turned that knowledge into some sort of weird and broken way of relating to the Tower Lord, wedding her reason for existence to her awareness of her own emotional needs.

  But for the City, lack of this Tower was death. It had already begun.

  Kaylin found that she had arranged the white haze—for it was that, now—of words in a ring around her, as if she had touched the spirit of the walls and drawn them toward her, condensing their size and shape. She understood what the mix of runes meant—to her—although she lost her own words for them as soon as they began to move.

  But she understood, as she stood at their heart, that they were not yet complete, and she understood, as well, what was missing at their center. She paled, drew breath, rose. Turning, she saw the room that existed beyond the work she’d done; her arms and legs ached, as if she’d been carrying sandbags on an endurance run devised by the most sadistic of the Halls’ many trainers.

  The shadows were there. The creature that had arrived through the cracks—literal and emotional—in the Tower’s armor was now a twitching and burning mass. Tiamaris was not in his Dragon form but he didn’t need to be to burn things. Severn was standing to one side of the Dragon, favoring his left leg. But he didn’t look at her; he looked, instead, at what should have been a corpse.

  Out of the smoke that rose from this carcass, another creature was taking shape and form. It moved like mist or fog, which was a problem for the Dragon and the Hawk.

  But the mist sparkled as if the particles it were composed of were made of obsidian, and it headed straight toward Kaylin.

  It had no head, no body, no obvious limbs, nor did folds of mist open to reveal eyes. She watched it glide through the space between Severn and Tiamaris, passing unharmed through the wall of Severn’s moving chain. She heard Severn shout, saw Tiamaris turn, and saw Tara lift her arms, as if in denial.

  Kaylin tensed as it approached the words she’d formed. It slowed as it approached, as if it saw the words as a wall or a barrier. Circling, in as much as slow-moving mist could, it attempted to seep between the spaces in the words itself.

  It shifted what was there, nudging a line to the side, a stroke or a dot to the center. She had seen Tiamaris do something similar, and she had let him. But the Dragon had not attempted to alter meaning; he had attempted to make it clearer, somehow.

  “Kaylin—what is it attempting to do?” the Dragon shouted.

  “I don’t know—I don’t think it can change the meaning of these words.”

  “Not the meaning, no,” Lord Illien said. He had been silent for the whole of the battle, on either front. “But the meaning that you have laid out does not exist in isolation.”

  Kaylin’s eyes narrowed just before they widened in alarm.

  “Yes,” Illien said softly. “The
pattern is not complete. The shadows will seek to complete it, now. If they can, they will control the shape of the whole.”

  “No—that’s not the point of these words—”

  “Point or no, Chosen, the Tower is, and was always meant to be, armor. Armor is donned, it is worn. You cannot turn armor into the man that wears it. No more can you make it a soldier or a leader. It is what it is, if it is to serve its function.” He nodded, his face once again completely without expression. “But I can no longer stand in the space you have left. I cannot complete your pattern in any way.

  “Neither can the shadows.”

  “You do not understand the nature of shadow,” he replied. “Watch it now. Can you not see what it is forming?”

  She watched. The mist had condensed, and what was left was something that should have looked serpentine. It didn’t. It looked like black, black ink, and it was flexing itself into lines, and those lines pressed themselves against the exact shape of the lines Kaylin had pulled from the memory of stone.

  She felt the sudden intrusion as a painful, cold pressure against her skin, and looked at the insides of her arms; nothing was touching them. It didn’t matter. She felt the line she had drawn retract and shift under the pressure of this very unexpected attack, its shape changing as it shrunk and pulled away. She saw the word go with it, changing its form, and slowly altering its meaning.

  Reaching out, she grabbed the line in her hands—and her hands went numb almost instantly. It was a familiar numbness. Tara, she thought. Illien. What did you do? The line was not malleable, but she could bend it, stretch it, force it—while she held it—to maintain something like the same shape.

  But it wasn’t the same damn shape. She knew it, and wondered if this certainty was what Tiamaris had meant when he talked about harmony and pattern. She wrestled with shadows here, felt the cold, and realized, bitterly, that she had wrestled with shadows for most of her life.

  And that she would continue to wrestle with shadows for the rest of it, no matter how long that was. She took a deep breath. What was the option? It was wrestle or give up.

  But you’re tired. You’re exhausted. You’ll do nothing but struggle until you die.

  Yes. She grimaced. But I know what the alternative is. Fingers numb, she peeled the shadow back; it clung for a moment to her fingers, crawling up her hands like a living glove. But when it reached the edge of her wrists, it stopped, and she heard the faintest of hisses as it suddenly withdrew.

  She realized as it did that it was not a single thing; sleek lines, bright dashes, gleaming, hard dots, had attached themselves to parts of her work while she had struggled with one damn line. Yes, struggle was inevitable. But there was stupid struggle and smart struggle. She didn’t even reach for the blackness, this time.

  She knew what to do to drive it out.

  She was afraid to do it. What Tara needed, she wasn’t certain she could give. Yes, she could work—without pay—for the midwives. She could supervise the foundlings, take them on tours of the office, teach them to read and write, in as much as she was capable. But in both of those cases, she helped people who needed her help, and then she got to go home. Home, where she could relax and worry about what she needed—which, admittedly, was usually food and enough sleep to make her very late for work.

  Taking the Tower—and that was the only alternative, the only way to defend it—meant that this would be home. Tara would be hers, to care for, to defend, to protect; there would be no place to retreat.

  But she would be here. The fiefs would be standing. The rest of the City would be safe for a while.

  She whispered Tara’s name, and then, she whispered her own. Elianne. Kaylin. These two came easily: the one that she had been given at birth by the woman after whom she’d so carelessly named the Tower, and the one that she had chosen in haste and without thought, which she had taken for her own, and grown into.

  But when she tried to speak the third name, and the most recent, she found her tongue almost too heavy and too thick to utter the syllables. Ellariayn. The name she had taken from the High Halls. The name by whose grace she was a Lord of the Barrani High Court.

  A name she could give to the Tower that would allow her to hold it. She would be Ellariayn, a mortal with an immortal name. She would be fief lord. Illien would no longer matter. She knew it.

  The shadows knew it. They pressed in against the words she had so carefully constructed and drawn—out of memory, out of experience, out of empathy—and they stained them and attempted to twist their parts so that the runes had a meaning far, far different than the one Kaylin had intended. She knew it because, even changed, they did have meaning, and that meaning was also a part of her experience and her truth.

  She couldn’t deny that truth; she accepted it. She accepted, as well, that the parts of her that had broken would never be whole and unbroken again, but they were foundation; she built on them. She tried to learn enough from them to understand other people better. She wasn’t always good at it. Most days, she was damn bad. But…she tried, and that counted for something.

  She struggled, now, to give the Tower the third of her names. But it was a name that didn’t feel like it was truly her own; she’d never lived in it. She barely acknowledged it.

  But the shadows did. They couldn’t take it; they tried, but this was a true name; it wasn’t given to them. They struggled; she saw their frenzy; felt a hint of something that might be anger or fear or some blend of both. She worked through it; felt pressure, like a hand against her mouth.

  The syllables were hard. She pushed them out, stumbling on vowels or the harsh clash of consonants. She had never thought of the name as long, but this? It was like telling a story when you could only barely remember what happened. But as the syllables emerged, she felt the lines of her chosen words hardening and developing a clarity that diffuse light couldn’t give them—and, more important, that shadows couldn’t eat away.

  She felt them take shape, felt the structure underlying their composition grow denser. She saw—for just a second—the shape that her name was meant to fill; it was the last gap, the last hole, in the wall. She drew breath, and stepped toward it.

  She wasn’t expecting the Dragon that materialized in the center of the construct; she certainly wasn’t expecting to be knocked off her feet—and most of the way toward the far wall—by the swing of his massive head.

  Severn was in front of her before she’d fully gained her feet. She turned almost wildly toward Tiamaris. His scales were red, tinged now with bronze, and infused with the glow of the runes Kaylin had built. They lit up the underside of his massive jaw as he lifted it and roared.

  The shadows splintered at the sound, shattering as they fell away from the whole of the pattern. Tiamaris roared again, and a storm of fire left his open jaws.

  Illien, still floating in the air above the ground, froze there, his wide eyes the color of sapphires. Beneath him, Tara froze, as well, her gaze caught between the fief lord who had changed the nature of his existence in an attempt to escape her, and the Dragon Lord who had entered the ring of words from which he might never again be free.

  Between these two, there was Kaylin, and it was Kaylin who caught and held Tara’s gaze. Stone didn’t cry, but Kaylin already had some experience with Tara’s tears. These were quiet; they traced her cheeks in the odd light. Her face was still bruised, but at this distance, the bruises looked like shadows.

  “Tiamaris!” Kaylin shouted, turning away. “You don’t have to do this!”

  He turned as the runes began to glow, free from the constraint of shadow. He roared again; she thought that might be his answer. But she understood, as the roar grew in volume, extending until it shook the ground, the walls, and the runes themselves, that that was not what he was doing. He was speaking his name.

  It was a long damn name, but he didn’t falter once, and he didn’t appear to need to struggle with anything but breath. She saw the runes begin to separate, to leave the formation s
he had made of them; she saw them move slowly away from him in an expanding circle. Glancing back at Tara, she saw the Tower’s avatar begin to smile. It was not a triumphant smile, nor was it fearful, but there was an element of surprise in it.

  It was, Kaylin thought, so entirely peaceful it was in its own class of beauty—because at that moment, for the first time, the avatar was beautiful. She raised her hands in front of her face, examining them, and as she did, all scratches, all bruises, all obvious signs of injury began to fade as if they, like the shadows, had been dispelled by the roar of a Dragon.

  A Dragon.

  “Tiamaris—you don’t know what you’re doing—”

  His roar didn’t shift or change, but the glance he gave her should have been impossible in his current form, it was so obviously derisive. He knew. He knew exactly what he was doing—and as was so often the case, he was doing a better job than Kaylin had in her attempt. The runes continued to move, and as they did, for just a moment, Kaylin could see the small lines, the small hatches and crosses, that seemed to touch Tiamaris from every single one of them.

  As they moved away from him, she saw their shape change; they moved not in a ring, but a sphere, expanding until they touched walls that were now completely blank. No engravings had been writ upon their surface; no runes, no circles, no complex designs; they were solid, smooth rock. They weren’t the walls Kaylin had studied in her attempt to somehow fix the Tower. She wanted to ask Severn what he saw, but his back was toward her; he trusted her there, and clearly trusted nothing else in this room.

  The roar stopped. The sigils didn’t. But Tiamaris, still a Dragon, lowered his massive jaw. It was hard to tell, given the size of that jaw and the size of the teeth it exposed while open, what his expression was. But it didn’t matter; he didn’t turn it on Kaylin. He turned it, instead, upon the Tower’s avatar; she was shining, now, as if she were a ghost, or a human vessel for diffuse, gentle light.

  “Interesting,” Illien said softly. “You understand, Lord Tiamaris, that had she taken the Tower, this fief would be all but unassailable? You might have seen a power to rival—”