She gave herself those minutes. The past several months had been one rush from emergency to emergency, some of which involved her own life, and much of which involved the lives of strangers. Some of those strangers had become part of her life. Some had died. But death didn’t remove them from the pattern.
It made them more painful, but they were still part of her life. If she had a name, they were part of her lines, her brushstrokes, her squiggles, her dots. She stopped walking.
“Kaylin?”
“I’m thinking about names,” she told him. “Not names the way we use them. True names, the way the Barrani and the Dragons do. The Devourer can hear them, if they’re spoken. I don’t know if it understands them. I think we can safely say it destroys them. But we don’t know why.”
“And it matters.”
“I always think the why matters. But only up to a point. If you’re trying to sell children in the streets of the City, knowing why doesn’t change the way I’m going to react.”
He nodded. They were strolling, now; Kaylin could almost hear the water of the Ablayne as it moved past them to the side. “Do you remember what we wanted? Or what I wanted?”
He understood what she meant. “Yes. The City. The City over the bridge.”
“As if it were a rainbow,” Kaylin agreed. “And it’s just a bridge. All of them. Just bridges. Crossing them doesn’t change what we are. People are still afraid. They’re less hungry, so they spend their fear in different places.”
“What we want defines who we’ll become.”
“I hope so. Because what we did want was good. I still want it,” she added. “I still want to live in a better world. A safer world. I still want a world in which children don’t starve or freeze to death in the winter. I want a world in which power isn’t the only definition of strength.
“But I thought I would just be given that world if I walked that bridge. And I know now I have to try to make the world.” She stopped walking. “Huh.”
“What?”
“That was the answer. That was the answer to the question. Why do I always think of the right answers after the damn test is over?”
He chuckled. “Because you haven’t thought of the question before the test, and you’re still thinking?”
“Yeah. I’m thinking that there’s only one answer. Sometimes that would be nice.”
“But limiting.”
“Limits have their uses.”
Severn stilled. His hand tightened slightly around hers. “Sometimes, Kaylin,” he said softly, “you scare me.”
She didn’t ask him why. She didn’t need to ask. In the distance, as if they defined it, she could see the tiny shapes of people. Some of them were moving. Some were not. She could see, of all things, wagons, and sheltered in their lee, the less distinct forms of people huddling together. Not for warmth, because it wasn’t cold here, and it wasn’t windy. But the need for comfort wasn’t always driven by external forces.
“I don’t suppose,” she asked softly, “I can let you do the talking?”
“If these are the people whose approach has caused so much havoc in the City, no. On the other hand, if these are those people, you probably won’t be able to do much talking, either.”
Everly’s painting had been exact, but Kaylin’s less practiced artistic eye hadn’t picked up one important detail: they were tall. Taller, she thought, than the Barrani; broader than Dragons in their human form. They were also, if tired and lost, alert. Several of the still bodies moved, with purpose, toward Kaylin and Severn, pausing at the periphery of a camp they now defined. They were armed with greatswords. Or what would have been greatswords in Severn’s hands.
They did not look friendly.
Severn, however, didn’t arm himself; neither did Kaylin. They stopped about ten yards from the closest of the strangers, and waited. For the first time since they’d left what was arguably Evanton’s shop, Severn let her hand go; he held up both of his own, palms out, to show clearly that he was unarmed.
The strangers, however, didn’t seem to be either relieved or impressed. They were silent. At this distance, Kaylin couldn’t see the color of their eyes; the color of their clothing was muted. It wasn’t the dust and dirt of long travel that had dimmed the colors; the colors themselves were shades of browns, with some hints of variant greens in secondary layers. Kaylin lifted her own hands, exposing her palms as she did.
She received a glance, no more, as if her relative size made her a child, and at that, a child of little consequence. Usually this was mildly irritating; today, it wasn’t.
One of the men spoke. His voice was low and deep, and it rumbled through scant syllables like an imminent storm. Any hope that she would magically understand what he said vanished like last week’s pay. She said, slowly, “We can’t understand you.” Her hands were still spread, but the desire to at least drop one to a knife was getting stronger.
He spoke again. This time, the syllables were lighter, quicker; his voice seemed to rise a half octave. To her surprise—and why should it have been such a surprise?—she realized he was trying a totally different language. She shook her head. But she did the same, then: she tried a different language. Sliding from the Elantran that was her mother tongue, she began to speak in Barrani.
The stranger frowned. Then his expression cleared—slightly—and he started again.
Ten minutes later—by feel, because there was absolutely no other way to mark the passage of time here—they had established two things. The first: that although these men were large and looked like berserker thugs, they weren’t immediately violent, and second, that they spoke three or four languages. None of them were languages that Kaylin had heard before. But Kaylin’s ability to speak several languages seemed to have put them at ease, for a value of ease that still saw large damn swords ready for use in an eyeblink.
They also established some sort of pecking order, because one of the silent men—and there were now about ten men here, only one of whom opened his mouth at all—turned and headed back toward the camp. When he returned, he brought another three people with him, one of whom was a woman. None of the three, however, were young.
They were also armed. The woman, however, was slightly shorter than most of the men present; she was not notably more friendly.
“Why did we forget Ybelline again?” Kaylin asked Severn.
“She was busy.”
“Good. I’d prefer that to ‘we were stupid.’”
He chuckled, and then looked toward the new arrivals, who were also speaking—more rapidly—among themselves. At last, one of the two men disengaged. His hair was the color of snow, and as he approached, his sword held casually in one hand as if it were a dagger, Kaylin could finally see the color of his eyes. They were a shocking blue in the well-worn lines of his face. That kind of blue you usually only saw in Barrani, and it was never exactly a comfortable sign.
The men who had barred their entrance formed up like a ragged escort at his back, and they now approached more closely, fanning out again as he stopped. Kaylin lifted her empty hands, as did Severn. The old man nodded, as if he appreciated the gesture; he didn’t, however, disarm himself.
Their eyes were shades of blue or gray, some as shocking in brilliance as the old man’s. Her own eyes were brown, and the color only varied with strong light; she wondered, idly, what brown might mean to these people, if it had any meaning at all. But…at least one of the men spoke a handful of languages, and that implied familiarity with other races, whose eyes would have to shift color in different ways. At least some of them.
The older man now began to speak. He spoke slowly and clearly, although his voice was as low as the first speaker’s, and it broke more. Some of the syllables were harsh and dissonant in sound; some pleasant and fluid. None of them were familiar.
Kaylin now tried her own small repertoire again, although the old man looked first to Severn, who, if it came down to it, was probably better versed in non-street language than Kaylin w
as. When Kaylin started to speak, he shifted his attention without raising a brow. And it was a brow; it was possibly the most intimidating thing about his face.
But eventually, he, too, shook his head, turning to the first man who had spoken. They repeated this process with the two new arrivals, the second man speaking next, and the woman last. But there was no sudden discovery of common ground, no sudden clear bolt of understanding.
“What now?” Kaylin asked Severn.
“I’m not sure. I think they’re trying to decide the same thing.”
“They have more swords,” she said, grimacing.
“And louder voices.” This last was evident because the discussion, which looked grim, composed as it was of tired, stressed-out people, had progressed beyond what would pass for polite in any society Kaylin had even glancingly been part of. The raised swords did not help, and Kaylin had to stifle the instant urge to break it up before blood was spilled.
You’re not in Elantra. These are not your people. Severn’s firm grip on her arm helped, that and his watchfulness. “They’re angry. They’re upset. They’re frightened. They’ve been living a nightmare for some time, by the look of it. Watch. Learn. See what they do at their worst.”
“And if they start killing each other, they won’t finish with us?”
Since the answer was obvious, Severn didn’t give it. But he did watch, and because he did, Kaylin did. There were only two things that made her flinch. One of them was the sudden roar of one of the men who had been utterly silent until this point. The other was the overhead arc of his sword.
It was met by the sword of the man who had first spoken, and the clash of the two was like metallic lightning. They were physically shaking with the struggle as the weight of the one sword bore down upon the other. But before they could withdraw and start again, the woman spoke. Her voice was almost literal lightning; her syllables were low, evenly spaced and dripping with the fury that implies both contempt and imminent doom.
You could almost hear her say you are embarrassing me in public.
The two men broke; they eyed each other warily, but they deferred to her without speaking. Which, given her expression, was a good damn thing—for them. She then turned to Kaylin and bowed, briefly, before she started to speak. You could hear the apology in the clipped, swift words. The realization that it would mean nothing followed.
But Kaylin chanced a brief smile, because she’d dealt with the foundlings for seven years, and had occasionally used that tone herself.
And if they had no other words in common, the expression was something; the woman raised a brow and then snorted, the anger draining from the etched lines of her face. She turned to the man who had first spoken, dropping her hands to her sides—one of which still held a sword a few inches above ground. This time, when she spoke, he glanced at Kaylin and Severn and shrugged, and the woman then turned to them and also spoke, slowly this time, pointing toward the heart of the encampment.
The men who had guarded the periphery formed up around them warily; they were, at the moment, watchful, but it was hard to say who they were more worried about: the woman, or the two Hawks. Kaylin, therefore, stayed close to the woman; she would have stood in her shadow, but here, there were no shadows.
There were, however, children. And wagons. The wagons had, from the look of it, carried their supplies; they had come at least somewhat prepared for the journey. But days—weeks? She had no way of asking—spent in gray nothing had diminished those supplies, and the people who were even now gaining their feet moved slowly, their expressions grim, their eyes shadowed and hollowed. The children were tall. Some came to Kaylin’s shoulder. It was a bit disconcerting.
The older woman now spoke rapidly again, this time pitching her voice so that it would carry. She was in the middle of a sentence when Kaylin heard the unfamiliar lowing of great horns. Everyone stopped then, turning in a single direction. Kaylin turned that way, as well, although she couldn’t quite fix a direction for the horn’s loud call.
But all around them, the camp began to dissolve into an orderly, tight-lipped chaos. Some of the children cried, but most just moved as ordered. Kaylin noted that some of the older people who had been aground were lifted and deposited into the backs of the wagons. The wagons weren’t pulled by beasts; they were pulled by men. The harness wasn’t one she’d seen before, and it took six men—three pairs—to start them in motion.
“Severn?”
“I think,” he said, echoing what she hadn’t said out loud, “we’ve found both our refugees and our Devourer.”
Forgotten for a moment, they stood in the midst of this camp as it transformed from a circle to a moving line. Some of the men now headed toward the wagons that had already begun to move, and some stood back, watching. Kaylin understood that they meant to guard the rear, and that the rear wouldn’t see movement for some time yet. They were a handful of armed men, and were joined by a dozen more. Fifteen in all. The old woman had vanished, for a moment, in the throng.
They had decided, for now, that strangers—unexpected strangers in an entirely dreamlike world—were far less of a threat than whatever it was that had caused them to sound the alarm. They therefore spoke among themselves, but they didn’t speak a lot. Still, at this distance, she could watch their faces. They wore half-helms, and their exposed jaws were bearded in a way that suggested shaving was not the priority that long facial hair was. Above the beards, their faces wore the unnatural pale streaks that spoke of scarring. Not all of them had those scars; this wasn’t ritual marking.
They’d fought, seen fighting, taken scars; they wore weapons as if they were clothing. They were taller than Barrani, and broader than Dragons; she studied their eyes, and the color that she saw now was predominantly blue. They were obviously worried; she filed that correlation away for possible future use.
The horns sounded again, but the note was different; the men looked up at once. Beneath their feet, the soft sandy texture of the unreal ground began to shudder. And the sky, such as it was, with no horizon to mark it and nothing to differentiate it from any other part of the landscape, began to roil, turning from the gray of nothing into something that might have been either night or storm.
Kaylin’s arms began to ache. She hesitated, and then quickly rolled up one sleeve; the marks were glowing brightly. But this time, the damn things weren’t glowing evenly; some were lit to almost incandescence, and some seemed to just absorb the spill of that light. She squinted.
But the strangers stiffened, and one of them suddenly thrust his sword into the ground six inches from Kaylin’s feet. She leaped back, dropping her sleeve and grabbing her daggers as she landed into bent knees. The men who had been so grim and dour were now staring at her, and the color of their eyes was no longer blue; it was a uniform green.
Great, she thought. They’re giant Barrani.
Fifteen men now began to speak in low, fast syllables, and one of them nodded, separated, and began to tear across the ground, moving as easily and gracefully as anyone could who was encumbered by a sword that size he had no intention of actually sheathing first.
Those who remained behind realized that she was staring at them, and that she was armed. Given the size of the daggers and the size of Kaylin, they didn’t look very alarmed. They didn’t, on the other hand, laugh outright, which the thugs in the fief might have done. Barrani, on the other hand, would sneer.
These men did neither. Instead, they offered her one open palm each, mirroring the weaponless “I mean no harm” gesture that Kaylin and Severn had both used. It didn’t have as much effect, given the swords they did carry. But she thought it was meant to be calming.
To no one’s surprise, the man who had run at a tear across the slowly building line returned dragging the same three people as had come to the edge of the encampment: Two older men and one woman. This time, Kaylin placed a hand on the center of her chest and said, clearly and slowly, “Kaylin. I am Kaylin.”
The woman nodded.
She mirrored the gesture, but pointed, instead, to her sword arm. “Mejrah.”
And then she pointed to Kaylin’s arm. The sleeve had fallen. Kaylin met the older woman’s gaze, and then nodded, and the woman turned to one of the two silent older men, and handed him her sword. He said something that seemed, even absent any understanding of language, formal, and they nodded to each other at the same time. Then, unarmed, and looking no less intimidating for the lack of weapon, Mejrah turned back to Kaylin.
Kaylin held out her arm, and with shaking hands, the older woman gently pushed the sleeve up, to the elbow. The runes, exposed, caused the woman to squint, but she didn’t look away. She didn’t even notice the resurgent tremors that now shook them all. But when she did look up, when she let the sleeve fall, she met Kaylin’s gaze, and her eyes were golden.
CHAPTER 26
Gold wasn’t a Barrani color. Nor was the woman’s expression one she’d ever seen on a Barrani face; not even her dreams were that perverse. Before Kaylin could speak—and she was surprised enough that her mouth was already half-open on words that would be gibberish to the stranger—the old woman turned and snarled something. The man holding her sword approached her instantly, and held it out, point toward the ground. She took it, and then knelt. She didn’t thrust it into the ground, but it was clear that she was offering its flat as a sign of genuine respect.
A sign Kaylin neither wanted nor felt she deserved. From a vantage closer to ground, the much taller woman looked across at Kaylin, the underside of her eyes lined and darkened, her jaw set. The rest of the men gathered around this kneeling woman; they didn’t lower their swords.
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