Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  “No.”

  “But you suspected I might.”

  “Yes. Given the unusual disposition of the role of Teller, I thought it likely, if you were present at all.”

  “I don’t understand the point of this game.”

  He did raise a brow then. “The point of any game,” he said in a light tone, “is to win, Kaylin. It is not unlike your betting.”

  “If I make a bet, I know the stakes.”

  “True. But even if the stakes are not in your favor, you choose to take the bet.”

  “There are some bets I wouldn’t touch.” But not, if she were being truthful, many. “You recognized Terrano’s name.”

  He nodded. “There are very few Lords of the High Court who would not. The names of the twelve lost to us are preserved; it is one of the few instances in which failure is marked and regarded with something akin to respect.”

  She listened to the words; they were polite, distant, formal. They were true, but they weren’t the whole of the truth.

  “We do not easily expose the whole of the truth,” he replied.

  “That’s not why you recognize the name.”

  Her thoughts were an open book to Lord Nightshade; his were opaque to her.

  “I have told you in the past, there is no reason why they should be. You hold my name, Kaylin; I do not hold yours. If you cannot learn to take what you desire, you will be hindered in all ways.”

  “I don’t want to take what isn’t offered.”

  “That, too, is a limitation. Or perhaps it is human nature; mortals would like something, but they do not fully appreciate desire. Their concept of desire is weak and ephemeral; they wait and hope, but they do not turn their will and their intention toward what they claim to seek.”

  His words irritated her; she wasn’t certain why. She was certain that giving vent to the irritation, even in the Hallionne, wasn’t smart. “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.” Her arms tightened.

  “And the subject?” He was closer than he had been when he’d started speaking, small dragon notwithstanding.

  “How and why did you know Terrano?”

  “Was that the subject?”

  “Yes. You wanted me to come to the West March because you knew that I’d be harmoniste, and you expected difficulty with Terrano. With the other children.” The mark on her cheek was warm. It wasn’t hot; it felt like a flush that occupied only half her face.

  His eyes were a shade of violet as he lifted a hand to touch her mark-adorned cheek. She forgot to breathe. The small dragon wasn’t paralyzed in the same way. He bit Nightshade’s wrist. The fieflord’s eyes shaded instantly to indigo; he reached for the small dragon’s neck with his free hand.

  Kaylin caught his wrist as his palm and the translucent length of the small dragon’s neck met. To the small dragon, she said, “Let go right now.”

  The small creature opened his delicate jaws. There was blood on his teeth.

  “Please don’t attempt to strangle him,” she then said to the injured party.

  Nightshade said nothing. He hadn’t looked at her once, not even to acknowledge the whitening knuckles of the hand that gripped his wrist.

  The small dragon, however, didn’t appear to notice Nightshade’s grip. Given the color of the fieflord’s hands, this said something about his need to breathe.

  “Lord Nightshade,” she said. “Let him go.”

  To her surprise, Nightshade relaxed his grip. The color of his eyes was now in the solid blue range; he was angry. “Yes, I knew Terrano before the recitation that destroyed him. Yes, I thought you might be chosen as harmoniste, and yes, there is a risk. But there is a tale that was half-told, broken, ruptured, and we two—we three—might at last finish and understand as much of its meaning as it is given to us, by the Ancients, to understand.

  “It is not the only reason; it is one of many. But it is the reason that you will most easily grasp, because it is a reason you are willing to face. I did not expect to return to the West March. For reasons which remain obvious, my chance of survival would be low. It would not be zero, but the possible gain—if any—was vanishingly small. But the Teller is immune, in theory, to the predilections of the High Court.”

  “Why did you suspect that this telling, this recitation, would somehow finish that tale?”

  “I did not suspect, Lord Kaylin.” His voice was formal, stilted. “I hoped.” He turned away.

  She started to follow him, but the small dragon bit her ear. Not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to catch her attention. It was necessary. This was a side of Nightshade she had never seen, and she had instinctively turned to follow him as he retreated. Her hand was raised, as if to catch his arm or shoulder, to turn him around, to offer—to offer what?

  She wanted to ask him who, among the lost children, had meaning to him, but she knew he wouldn’t answer. He had given her as much explanation as he was willing to give, and even that had been far more than he wanted.

  “It is,” a new voice said.

  She turned to see Hallionne Bertolle.

  * * *

  “Calarnenne, will you not speak plainly?”

  “I have spoken plainly, Hallionne.”

  After a significant pause, the Hallionne nodded. “She holds your name.”

  “She does.”

  “And you do not fear her. She has seen mine.”

  “Yes, Hallionne.”

  “Should I?”

  “I would not presume to give advice to a Hallionne,” was the cool—but respectful—reply. “She will not break your rules, and she will make no attempt to harm you, if that is your concern. Left to her own devices, she behaves in a manner that would meet your approval no matter where she chooses to reside.”

  “And she is Chosen.”

  Nightshade nodded.

  “From within your Castle?”

  “Even so.”

  “Very well. I will speak with the Chosen. Will you join the Lady at her meal? She wishes to converse with you.”

  “I will.”

  Chapter 24

  Nightshade left the long hall. Hallionne Bertolle indicated that Kaylin should leave, as well. She stared, with some longing, at the food on the table, but obeyed his silent command and left the room. He followed.

  The small dragon yawned, displaying his very fine teeth. Those teeth were now more solid than she remembered them being. They retained some of the bright red blood. It was, of course, Nightshade’s, and she was surprised at how much she regretted it. In all the time she had known him, or even known of him—the latter being longer—she had never heard him express concern that she trusted.

  When she’d been in the High Halls and trapped in the dreams of the Lord of the West March, his voice had reached her. It was Nightshade who had saved her from a very long stretch of empty, empty gray; Nightshade who had pulled her out of the literal maw of an almost insensate Devourer. In all those things, she had felt his concern not as concern but as the worry Severn might have for his favorite dagger.

  This once, she felt that he had a genuine attachment to—to someone. Not her, of course; not a mortal. But—it was real.

  “Why does this matter?” the Hallionne asked as they walked.

  “Because the Barrani almost never love anything.”

  He nodded; she might as well have said “water is wet.” “You value it for its rarity?”

  “I don’t know if ‘value’ is the right word. I was…surprised. It made him seem almost human. He’d hate that, by the way.”

  “I will not repeat it. But I do not understand your thought. If you could speak with our tongue,” he said softly, and with what sounded like genuine regret, “I would understand the whole of your thought, and I would never need question you again.”

  She shook her head. “You’d understand the whole of me as I am right now.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’ll change. I’m not who I was a year ago. I�
��m not who I was seven years ago, or thirteen. If I could have spoken to you in your own tongue at any of those ages, you would only know who I was at the time—but nothing in the speaking prevents change.”

  He stared at her for a long, long moment.

  “Lord Kaylin,” he whispered in a tone of voice that not even Tara had ever used. “That is exactly what the speaking does.” He walked on in silence; the halls seemed to go on forever.

  * * *

  He came to a stop in front of a door. “This room,” he said, “is safe.”

  “Is safety now an issue? We’re in the Hallionne.”

  A smile—a genuine one—transformed his features, adding a depth of warmth that Barrani features generally eschewed. “I am aware of that. Some of the Lords of the Court are concerned about your presence.”

  This wasn’t new.

  “It is; before your arrival, they were merely annoyed. Four covet your companion because they do not understand his nature.”

  “Neither do I.”

  The Hallionne smiled. “Not all of them believe this, although two are certain you are ignorant; they are, however, certain they are not. They are wrong. Regardless, all are concerned that your knowledge of my name will grant you control of my abilities, and they feel that you intend them harm.”

  She snorted. “Every Barrani Lord at some point in his or her miserable existence intends every other Barrani Lord harm.”

  He nodded pleasantly. “They are seldom in the position to cause the harm they intend, and they fear the consequences of their success enough that they seldom attempt to kill each other within the Hallionne. Not, demonstrably, never. I feel it wise to take precautions.”

  “Will I like them?”

  He opened the door into what was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a room. It was a graveyard.

  * * *

  “And I thought the Hallionne had no sense of humor.” The small dragon lifted his head, glanced through the door, and lowered it again. He wasn’t worried. Then again, he slept on her shoulders or head most nights; he didn’t need a bed.

  Every other room she had seen in the Hallionne so far had boasted a bed. A single bed, true, but those single beds were large and relatively comfortable. Here, there was stone—stone markers, stone statues—and trees that looked as old and forbidding as the standing stones themselves. The air was chilly. She glanced at the small dragon; he opened one eye, snorted, and closed it again.

  Fine.

  “I think I’d prefer the less safe,” she told the Hallionne.

  Hallionne Bertolle walked through the door into the graveyard, and she hesitated for a minute before following him. She wasn’t certain she wanted the door to close.

  “Hallionne are capable of lying,” he told her, “but it is seldom required. It would, however, be difficult to lie to you.”

  “The name?”

  “Indeed. I imagine that your Tower—”

  “It is so not my Tower.”

  He lifted a perfect brow. “Very well. Your Tara, then. The distinction is necessary?”

  “The owner of the Tower is a Dragon.”

  “The distinction is necessary. Your Tara would have similar difficulty.”

  “I don’t think it’s occurred to her to try; she’s almost painfully honest.”

  “The Hallionne have a different concept of truth. I did not, however, lie. This is the safest part of the Hallionne; it cannot be breached unless I fall.”

  “You live here?”

  He nodded and began to walk. Kaylin lifted her skirts to avoid the roots of a tree that defined gnarled, and followed. The air was chilly and damp, and the breeze, humid and cold. The irony of possessing the Hallionne’s name and finding the heart of his vast domain so dismal and unpleasant wasn’t lost on her.

  But as she walked between the headstones, she frowned. She had assumed that they would be Barrani graves—why, she wasn’t certain. These graves, however, were marked in a language she couldn’t read. She knelt by a headstone that stood at two-thirds her height, and looked at the symbols engraved in the stone.

  Reaching out, she ran her fingers across the runnels. The small dragon hissed, springing instantly to attention, and she withdrew her hand immediately.

  “An interesting choice,” Hallionne Bertolle said softly. “Why that one?”

  “It was closest.” She rose. The word carved in the headstone’s center had begun to glow, and she found the light disturbing. Her own marks often shifted in color and intensity—blue, gold, gray—but in a uniform and even way that seemed to imply wholeness. This was a light she had seen in the fief of Tiamaris, after the shadows had transformed the ground; it was a light she had seen in the eyes of walking corpses, and a light she had seen take the forest floor where the transformed had fallen.

  “It is not the same,” was the Hallionne’s quiet reply.

  To her eyes, it was. The small dragon’s posture and tension lent support to her interpretation. “How is it different, to your eyes?”

  He frowned. “To my eyes?”

  She nodded.

  The eyes that she’d referenced widened. “I think I understand your difficulty.”

  Her difficulty. Of course, it would be hers—she was limited in all possible ways by birth, ability, and mortality. She drew an irritated breath. “My memory’s not perfect. I’ve had some training, but I acknowledge my own subjectivity. I understand that at some point in prehistory, there were Lords of Law and Lords of Chaos.”

  He nodded.

  “They disagreed about the fundamentals of what life either meant or should mean.”

  “That is inexact.”

  “Is it close?”

  “It is a gross generalization. There were Lords of Chaos and Lords of Law, yes, although they no longer walk this world in freedom; only their children are left, and we stand sentinel against their return.”

  “You were created by the Lords of Law.”

  “I was created,” he replied, “by one such Lord. The Lords of Law were not, as the Barrani are not, of one mind or one goal. No more were the Lords of Chaos, unless that goal be the overthrow of the Lords of Law. Law and Chaos,” he added, “are also incorrect. They are symbols or motifs, and they have the same relation to the reality as a simple line drawing of a figure has to a living, breathing person. I would not use those terms, were I you.”

  She was looking at the changing face of the headstone and stepped back as the runes carved in stone began to morph, pulsing and writhing as if seeking release from the constriction of their shape. “Shadows,” she finally said, “were the creation of one such Lord?”

  “Three,” he replied. “You can see the signatures of their creatures like eddies or echoes if you read them carefully.”

  Given that the Shadows she had met were murderous and intent on her death—or, to be less personal, the death of anything moving or growing in their path—reading them was not high on her list of priorities. But she had seen sigils or signatures in the wake of Shadow magic before, both in Tiamaris and in the Leontine Quarter.

  She took another, deeper breath. “So your definition of Shadow is based on the work of three Ancients.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mortals are likely to make a broader judgment.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lords of Chaos—or their leftover creations—have caused a world of problems, literally. Several, actually. The creatures that we fought are Shadows by any definition of interaction with the rest of the solid world.”

  “Their goals,” he said quietly, “are not the same. They are smaller and more discrete.”

  “How do you know?”

  He smiled. It was not a happy expression. He turned toward the gravestone, which was now doing its best to melt; the stone was running in cool rivulets on the left front side of the whole. “Because these,” he said, lifting an arm to encompass the gathered gravestones, “are my brothers.”

  * * *

  Kaylin was confused, which wasn’t h
er favorite state. The answer to her question, which he’d offered in the same frank way he offered any answer, appeared to be entirely unconnected with what she’d actually asked. Adopting the neutral tone she used during investigations, she said, “Hallionne Bertolle, you were, you said, built by a Lord of Law. Were all of the Hallionne constructed by the same Lords?”

  He raised a brow. “No.” He appended a silent and definitive of course not.

  “When you speak of brothers, you aren’t speaking of the other Hallionne.”

  He took a step toward the melting stone and the flashing, grasping light it emitted. Before Kaylin could react, he caught the liquid as it dribbled, like candle wax beneath flame, toward the ground. “That is perceptive, Lord Kaylin. No, I am not.”

  The stone flowed around his hands, between his fingers; he whispered a word and his hands changed shape to prevent it from reaching the ground.

  “They’re alive.”

  He cradled the stone as it flowed around his wrists and waist; the plain gray of its surface took on flecks of marbled color. “They are not dead,” he replied. “But in any sense of the word life as you understand it, they are not alive. They do not speak. They do not sing. They cannot truly touch me.”

  The small dragon was hissing, his wings rigid and high. Kaylin stepped back, her arms aching. No, not her arms; her skin. The marks were active, reacting in their own way to the flowing stone.

  “Did they ever?”

  He didn’t have to look at her, but did. “Yes, once.”

  “Were you—were you like they were?”

  “Yes. I was not, however, what they have become. Can you hear them?” His voice was so soft she had to strain to catch the words.

  “No.”

  “No more can I. Come. They cannot transform you if I am with you.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  “I will not leave this room until you leave it.”

  She moved toward him, and the dragon hissed in her ear. “I can’t,” she told the Hallionne.

  “Your companion is afraid?”

  This caused a different hiss.

  “I think worried would be a better word. I don’t know.” She turned to face the small dragon. He held her gaze with his tiny opal eyes, and then he leapt off her shoulder toward where the stone was pooled in the Hallionne’s cupped palms. “The word on the headstone—” She stopped. She wasn’t even certain if the word had been a name, or the headstone a true marker.