Severn, however, was busy. He was untwining the chains of his weapon from its resting place at his waist. “I did try to talk you out of this, didn’t I?” he asked, with a small smile.
She laughed. “What is it that you love about me?”
He froze for just a second, no more. Kaylin felt the hesitation—and the links of the chain—more than she saw them; she was watching as the storm’s eyes suddenly opened. She could see them; they were huge. They scanned the ground—if ground was a word that could be used here—and then stopped as they fell upon her.
“It’s not a rhetorical question,” she continued, as she met those huge and ancient eyes.
“No.” He planted his feet slightly apart, standing behind her. He had her back, here. He always had her back. I’ll tell you, he added. If it’s necessary, I’ll tell you.
She nodded. The gray of the landscape solidified as she watched. She opened her mouth and snapped it shut on whatever stray words were seeking escape as the storm hit.
CHAPTER 27
She held her name. She held the shape of the strokes, long and short, thick and thin, and she held what they contained. They weren’t large enough—the Devourer was huge.
It rose—and rose, and rose—as it gained substance. No, substance was the wrong damn word. It gained something like shape, but it was shaped the way glass was: it had form and lines and even something that might suggest texture, but she could still see through it. What she wanted to call black wasn’t a color. It was an absence. It was emptiness given solidity. Even the eyes that met hers, grazing her as if she were a flea, contained that emptiness.
And the desire to fill it, and have peace.
Devourer. Devourer of worlds. How many worlds had died to appease an ancient and endless hunger, to no avail? How many names—of people, of places—had he somehow emptied in his endless quest? And why names? Why words?
As if to answer, her arms and her legs began to ache; the marks on them burned, as if they were being newly branded. She looked down at her arms, and she could see—through the pale cloth—the glowing sigils that she both hated and had learned, with time and experience, to rely on. They were as much a part of her as the name she’d chosen for herself from the Barrani High Halls, and she understood them about as well.
But the Devourer saw them as clearly as she felt them, and the storm—if it was that—grabbed her, lifting her into the air. Or into more gray. There was no wind here, no sun, no earth, no rain; it was empty of everything familiar.
Everything but Severn.
Is this your world? she thought, although her body was already tensing for physical combat. Is this the whole of the world you can create for yourself? Its response was to reach through her, as if she were no more real than the rest of the gray. But as it passed through, it touched the weakly moored name she carried, and it froze there for just a second. And then, as if it were a giant hand, it closed.
The word compressed under the pressure of its grip, the lines crowding in on each other and bending into slightly different shapes. Kaylin started to fight this shift, because she’d done it once before, in the Tower of what was now Tiamaris. But…this was different. It felt different. The pressure wasn’t attempting to rewrite or revise; it wasn’t changing any meaning. It was gathering and it was as clumsy as a bull might be if it were trying to pick berries.
It didn’t hurt. The name was part of her, but it didn’t sustain who she was. She started to tell Severn as much, but the Devourer spoke again, and this time she could understand what he said.
Where? Where? Where are they? Where am I?
She had no answer to give. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have been able to speak, because the pain started then.
She was only tentatively attached to her true name; her true name was therefore only tentatively attached to her. But what had started as gathering became a type of frenzied unmaking as the Devourer sought to reduce the runic symbol to its component parts. Pain clouded understanding; it always had. What she had prevented herself from doing when the creature had first touched the word, she now struggled to do in earnest: to hold it together, to keep its identity. Strokes and dots just didn’t add up to much without a pattern.
She gave the name its meaning, as she struggled. She found the parts of her that were already part of it, and she brought them forward. She knew, if she didn’t think too damn hard, what the shape of the word was. Pain clouded thinking, as well.
But it was ultimately going to be a losing battle; she’d seen it before, and she knew its outcome. She lost focus, lost all sense of the self the name defined—wanted to retreat to a self that it didn’t. But before she could instinctively do so, she heard a familiar voice. Severn was afraid.
He was afraid for her. But his fear was measured, controlled. You asked me why I love you, he said, speaking along the bond of her unfamiliar name. You’ve never asked before.
She bit her lip, tasted blood. No.
Why?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t—talk about silver linings—think for long enough to answer the question. I don’t know. He accepted it. He always accepted it.
You were afraid.
She was always afraid of something. Right now, it was pain. The pain receded and returned in waves as the name dimmed inside of her. Severn’s voice grew softer. Yes.
He didn’t ask her why, this time. You were afraid that I loved something I’d made up, something that doesn’t actually exist. That I didn’t—and don’t—see you.
She said nothing.
I see you, Kaylin. You were afraid of what you’d done in Barren. No, afraid that if I knew what you’d done, I’d stop. We’d all stop.
She’d said as much. And he had discovered what she’d done for six months of miserable life when she’d given in entirely to pain and fear.
I’d guessed. I watched you, when you were with the Hawks. I know how they train. Some of the stuff you knew, you didn’t learn from them. But I knew…when you ran…that you might not survive. I tried to find you. I knew what you must have been feeling, and what that might cause. When I first found you, in the Hawks, I watched you. I thought I must have been wrong, or you must have been lucky.
And after?
It didn’t matter. I learned that the choices you make when you aren’t afraid or in pain aren’t that much different than the choices you made when we lived together in Nightshade. This doesn’t mean you’re a child, to me; you have changed.
The name was so dim it was almost translucent. Severn knew. His words were more urgent, and they came faster.
You don’t expect people to be what you aren’t. You don’t expect them to give you what you can’t give. You don’t judge them—all right, you do, but you don’t let the judgment form the basis for the rest of your life. Your sense of self-worth isn’t based on a hierarchy of who’s worth less.
What you do have, you give. You always have. You give your time to the midwives. You give your time to the Foundling Halls. You know what it’s like to have nothing, but you don’t make it an excuse to resent anyone else you meet who has something.
But she did those things for herself. Because the midwives’ guild and the Foundling Halls made her happy. She felt as if the name itself was so thin, so slight, she could only barely grasp it.
He grimaced, and he shifted direction. I love you, he said, because you get lost everywhere you go. You’d get lost heading to the change rooms if you didn’t practically live in the Halls. I love you be cause you lose or misplace anything that isn’t actually attached to your person.
I love you because if you can’t be on time to save your job or your life, you will be on time to save anyone else’s. I love that you can’t place a smart bet unless you’re lucky.
She almost laughed. She did snort.
I love you because you’re afraid of anything that’s strange or different, but you hate being afraid, so you charge ahead anyway. I even love you because you’ve never lost the habit of thinking the future
is at most a day away. That has to change, he added, because I fully intend that your future will go on for years.
He shook his head. I love the fact that you live in the moment. I love the fact that when you do figure out how wrong you’ve been, you change and you grow. I love that you’re so easily, predictably outraged—by Elani street, by Margot and her stupid sign. I love that you say what you’re thinking.
And I love that you never give up. You suffer setbacks, you find your feet, and you keep moving. It doesn’t matter how impossible something looks. You throw yourself at it, time and again. You give everything you have, and then, when you’ve got nothing left, you find more. Betting doesn’t count.
She did laugh, then.
She laughed, and the pain and the fear slid through her as if it could no longer find purchase. The Devourer stopped speaking. He almost stopped moving; she could sense him; she could almost touch him. He was still, on the other hand, an almost amorphous cloud with large eyes.
No, not eyes. They were landscapes. Deserts: sand and snow. Nothing moved in them at all. But they watched her as if they could—for just a moment—see her.
Severn’s words fell like water in her own personal desert, like the turning of the seasons on snow. She wanted them, and knew it. But it was the smaller words, the words that described what she believed about herself that she held on to; the other words were too large, and too intimidating.
But he hadn’t finished.
It doesn’t matter why you do it. It doesn’t matter whether or not you do it only for yourself. It’s how what you do affects others, in the end, that counts. I don’t love you because I have the ideal Kaylin—or Elianne—in mind. I don’t love you because I expect you to live up to some vision of perfection. I love the things about you that you don’t see, or don’t love yourself.
You make every place you stop for more than ten minutes a home, Kaylin. I want that. It’s never been my gift. I stop in the doorway, aware of all the ways in which I don’t belong, aware of the ways in which my presence alone could be an interference. You walk in, head straight to the kitchen, start piling up dishes. You ask what has to be done. More often than not, people tell you.
Sometimes what they told her was: get out. She laughed again, but it was rueful. And the Devourer almost shuddered at the sound—because it was a sound.
Most people make the Hawks their job, or even the start of their career. You’ve made them family. You live with them. You fight with them. You fight for them. You ignore their foibles as if they were the drunk uncles you can’t get rid of. You don’t know how to treat your work like work, and you never have. Even when you were thirteen, you tagged along like someone’s younger sister, trying not to get underfoot.
I would have done that with the Wolves, if I could have. I couldn’t. I don’t understand home the way you do. But I understand this. You’re where home is. You always were.
He fell silent, and if she could have, she would have turned to look at him, even if she couldn’t find anything to say. Home. She gathered the pieces of her Barrani true name as carefully as she could, righting them until they formed a rune she recognized.
The Devourer was all she could otherwise see, with its huge desert eyes that didn’t reflect her. It was no longer attempting to rip her name apart as if it were packaging; it no longer roared. But it watched her as she worked, and when it spoke again, it spoke a single word. Home.
Severn’s words had been a gift, and she had almost wept to hear them, because she was still so certain she didn’t deserve them. But the Devourer’s word made her want to weep in an entirely different way. It—he—wasn’t a child. But some of the empty, desolate bewilderment that older orphans faced was in its tone.
She’d dealt with those orphans in the Foundling Halls, as they struggled with the truth of their new existence, and with the changes they had no choice but to accept. She’d done it herself, on the morning her mother had not woken up. She understood that for those children, home and safety were the same thing, and with the loss of home, safety had vanished. The Foundling Halls could be a new home, but home wasn’t something that could be built and forced on them in a single day, and what they wanted, at heart, was for time to turn backward and death to be a nightmare they could wake from, preferably in the arms of their parents.
They, on the other hand, didn’t destroy whole worlds in their grief and need. Maybe that was why small children—hells, most people—didn’t have the power to destroy whole worlds. In the grief of the moment, they would—and there wouldn’t be a lot left standing.
She had seen, trapped in ancient Records, the death of Vakillirae as he faced the Devourer. She’d seen his determination, and she’d seen what Enkerrikas had done to succor him while his life was slowly drained. This was different.
How? Why? The Devourer hovered, drifting slowly toward her. As it did, the noncolor of its form enveloped her.
Kaylin!
I’m here. I’m here, Severn.
I can’t see you!
I think he’s swallowed me. Good damn thing he has no digestive system. Severn smiled at the gallows humor; it was brief, and she couldn’t see it, but she felt it anyway. She opened her eyes. Or she tried, and realized they weren’t closed. In the center—or at least inside—of the Devourer, it made no difference. She’d often closed her eyes when she wanted to think; it lessened distraction. Here, it didn’t matter; it was almost like being on the inside of her own head.
Because it’s empty?
She laughed again. She was going to hit Severn, on the other hand, if she ever made her way out.
Vakillirae had sacrificed himself for his people. His people had done what they could to help him make his final stand. In the end, it hadn’t saved him; it had saved at least some of his people, because those memories were preserved on this world, somehow. But she’d seen his face, his expression. There was no way he didn’t understand what home meant, or what family meant.
And yet, he’d died. During the whole of their almost static combat, the Devourer had never fallen silent. What was the difference, besides race and gender? Kaylin had a feeling the Devourer didn’t consider the living significant enough to assign value to, either.
Home.
The word was like an earthquake; it shook everything. She understood it. But…Vakillirae must have understood it, as well.
No, Severn said, and she realized how closely he must be listening.
What do you hear?
Two things. When I listen to what I’m hearing, it’s roaring or thunder. If I listen to what you hear? Words. Or syllables. But…I can’t hear what you’re hearing, Kaylin. To me, even through the bond of the name, it doesn’t sound like home.
But this is different. The Devourer—he’s not behaving the same way. I don’t understand why.
Severn’s voice fell silent for a moment, and then he said, You laughed.
Pardon?
You laughed, Kaylin. You were in pain, and you were afraid, and you’re here in the end for essentially the same reasons that Vakillirae was—but you laughed.
I laughed because you— She stopped. She would have turned to face the Devourer, but that was impossible given his eyes were on the outside. She’d laughed, yes. She almost said You made me laugh, and in some ways that was true. But on the surface of things, there wasn’t all that much that was funny about his actual words; she laughed because they implied history. A history of affection, arguments, teasing, a little smugness.
A history of being at home. Of being known. Of, she thought, belonging. As she so often did, she began to speak, and as often happened in situations like this, the markings on her arms, her legs, and her back began to hurt. They also began to make themselves visible in a way they’d never done before: they burned through her clothing.
Her first almost irrelevant thought was: Damn it, I can’t afford this! Followed quickly by I need a raise and if you mention budgeting, I’ll break both your legs.
Again, the Devou
rer stirred, but he didn’t resume his frenzied unmaking.
Get ready, she told Severn.
The runes on her arms weren’t a frame; they were almost a cage. But hadn’t she sought the comfort of cages in the past? Their bars formed guidelines, made options clearer. And there was only one way to leave the damn thing, anyway. She drew breath and she began to tell the Devourer a story. It wasn’t a child—she understood that. But if it had learned from the experience it absorbed in its attempts to find what it sought, there wasn’t any evidence of it.
The story she told was one she’d told only once before: it was a story meant for elemental fire, and it spoke of what fire meant to the living. In it, she described the raging fires that consumed whole city blocks; she told of the fires that consumed whole forests—although these, she had never personally seen. But she also spoke of the way the necessary warmth of fire sustained life in the bitter cold of winter; the way it warmed water, cooked food, brought light to dark places. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a story; it had no narrative, no beginning, and no real end. The foundlings, especially Dock, would have been rolling their eyes in boredom long before she’d finished.
But the elemental fire had listened, seeing itself—seeing most of itself—in the words that related the experiences of those who lived around its edges. It had carried her across the wild miles of the Elemental Garden as she’d spoken, without once burning or blistering her skin; it had offered her both attention and warmth, instead of what seemed almost inevitable death.
She wondered, briefly, what kind of story the Arkon would tell the fire, because Dragon experience of flame was beyond her; it wasn’t her story to tell.
As if the Devourer were fire, he listened.
He’s moving, Severn told her.
Quickly?
Meaning, can I keep up? I can. Not without effort.
She didn’t tell him to make the effort; she knew he would, while he breathed. I don’t hear him roaring. Or speaking.
Cast in Chaos Page 38
