Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  “And so you lie?”

  “I’m a terrible liar, but yes—we lie. We lie because we believe we’re protecting ourselves. Sometimes we lie to protect others.” This was not the conversation she’d expected to have with a Hallionne. “But when you speak the tongue of the Ancients, there are no lies.”

  “No.” He closed slate eyes. When he opened them again, they were brown. Brown, she thought, and liquid; they looked almost like living eyes.

  “Thank you,” he told her gravely. “You are Chosen,” he said. “And you are mortal. It has happened seldom in the long history of the Ancients. Not all the Ancients consider your kind with care; you are like the animals to us; you live brief and fleeting lives, and you cannot comprehend—cannot speak—true language.

  “But you bear it, Lord Kaylin.” He appeared hesitant for a moment, after which he spoke a single long, resonant word. The ground shook beneath her feet. “The Barrani require the truth as we know it to speak, to think, to live. But they do not hear the words we hear in the way we hear them, and some are resentful.

  “Perhaps it is not unlike your secrets.”

  “Hallionne Bertolle,” she said as the echoes of the vast word faded into silence, and a thought—an uncomfortable one—struck her. “What happens if someone who can speak True Words attempts to tell a lie with them?”

  He closed his eyes and turned his face away, releasing her curled hands.

  * * *

  She had expected to walk through the emptiness of the vast gray space that existed between worlds until they reached Hallionne Orbaranne, but when she cleared the arch, she found herself in, of all things, a forest. The forest floor was dappled by shadow that implied branches thin enough at the heights of trees to let sunlight through.

  The Consort, around whom the six had formed up like an honor guard, was waiting. “Lord Kaylin. Lord An’Teela. Lord Severn.”

  “You’re sure we’re in the right place?” Kaylin asked Teela.

  “I am certain, Lord Kaylin,” the Consort replied.

  Looking at the trees and the road—both of which appeared to be solid, normal landscape—Kaylin noted the absence of carriages and horses. There were two familiar packs leaning against a tree. She passed Severn’s to him and shouldered her own.

  One of the six turned to her, with his unblinking, oddly colored eyes. “We thought that you would find forest familiar, but maintaining it is not an insignificant expenditure of power.”

  This did not make her feel any better. “Lady?” she asked the Consort.

  “I have never seen the portal paths take this shape,” the Consort replied. “It is a shape that everyone present sees; they appear to be forcing the pathways to conform to us.” She glanced at Kaylin. “The Hallionne Bertolle must have felt the weight of his obligation keenly.”

  “This means we can walk to Hallionne Orbaranne without losing anyone?”

  “It appears that way at the moment.”

  Kaylin turned back to the stranger. “I expected there to be a whole lot of nothing,” she confessed. “And if it’s not, I’m worried it’ll attract attention.”

  He laughed. It was a very human laugh and therefore slightly creepy coming from a Barrani mouth.

  “Really?” The laughter slid immediately out of the lines of his face. As the question left him, the rest of the Barrani tensed; Kaylin hadn’t put the thought into words, but clearly, her lack of words were no barrier. Kaylin, however, did not react. If the Hallionne Bertolle—and Kariastos—seemed far too sophisticated and intimidating, Bertolle’s brothers, for want of a better word, didn’t. They really did remind her of Tara in her earliest days.

  “It’s because you look like the Barrani,” she explained as the Consort began to move forward. “The Barrani don’t laugh like that.”

  “You are not Barrani?”

  That caused the Consort to miss a step, although she made no comment. Teela, however, snorted. “She is in no way, shape, or form Barrani. She’s mortal.”

  “Ah.” Pause. He turned back to his brothers, and they conversed in their almost musical and completely foreign tongue. “You are an…animal? A talking animal?”

  Without missing a beat, Teela said, “No, of course not. She’s much, much harder to train.”

  * * *

  Kaylin had to admit that the trees—which varied in height, placement, and shape, much the same way normal forest trees did—made the walk much less disconcerting than a walk through the featureless gray would have been. This bothered her, because she knew it wasn’t real. Taking comfort from something fake set her teeth on edge.

  “It is not fake,” the Hallionne brother told her. She wasn’t even certain he was the same brother who’d spoken to her initially.

  “We are all the same,” he replied.

  “Then why does there have to be six of you?”

  He raised both brows. “We are all the same,” he repeated, “but also different. We find your language limiting.”

  She glanced behind her and stopped; the other five had disappeared.

  “They are with us,” he told her. “But they walk the outer edge of this space. There are things within the passage that are inimical to your kind.”

  “But not to yours?”

  “No. They attempt to harm, but they cannot succeed; we absorb them if they come too close.”

  The small dragon lifted a lazy head. He had done no flying, and little squawking, since she’d left the heart of the Hallionne. But he nodded before lowering his head again.

  She was getting highly tired of referring to her companion by a generic, and not terribly descriptive, noun.

  “Does the appellation signify anything?”

  “It stops us from getting confused. No, it stops us from getting confused about which of you is which.”

  “Then you may assign us these appellations and we will attempt to respect their use.” He added, in case she was dim, “They are not, you understand, names.”

  She bit her tongue. “Yes,” she said gravely, “I understand the difference.”

  “I will join my brothers.”

  * * *

  “Do you think Wilson can get lost?” Kaylin asked an hour later.

  The Consort raised a white brow. “If you must identify them by name, could you not choose more appropriate ones?”

  “He didn’t seem to mind.”

  “No. I admit I find it jarring.” She inclined her head toward Nightshade. “Lord Calarnenne.”

  “Let us continue; if they can, they will join us. I understand the reason for the forest, but it seems to me that the passage between the two Hallionne is longer than necessary.”

  “Time has always been…subjective on the pathways,” the Consort said softly.

  “The time, in this instance, is not subjective, Lady,” Nightshade replied. He glanced through the trees as the scouting party signaled, his eyes shading into a dark blue.

  The small dragon squawked at him, and he lifted a brow, dark to the Consort’s white. “One day,” he told Kaylin’s passenger, “you will need to find words.”

  “He can make himself understood,” Kaylin said because the small dragon couldn’t.

  “In a broad sense, yes.”

  “…And at least this way, no one’s insulted.”

  Before Nightshade could reply, something else did. Sadly, it had the same facility with words that the small dragon did, but it also had a much, much louder voice. It was a roar. The Barrani turned in its direction. Kaylin, however, looked down at the small dragon on her shoulder, who had lifted his head. His wings now rose as well, batting the underside of her chin.

  “Time to go,” Severn said softly in Elantran.

  “Probably long past,” Kaylin replied just as loudly.

  * * *

  The roaring—and it was roaring—grew louder as they formed up and began to move.

  Kaylin asked—once—if anyone was certain they were even going in the right direction. She received two glances and several g
lares and decided the answer, which was about as verbal as the small dragon’s general utterances, was yes.

  The Consort gave orders; the Court spread out. Those who carried swords drew them; those who relied on magical defenses also began to cast. Their spells did cause Kaylin’s skin to break out in goose bumps in protest. Quick, curt Barrani traveled in all directions as the marching order changed; even Teela armed herself.

  A second roar joined the first. The small dragon dug claws into Kaylin’s shoulder. “I don’t have a sword,” she told him. “I have daggers; would you feel better if I drew them?”

  He snorted, turning toward Kaylin’s left. She kept walking, but turned the brunt of her attention to the left, as well. “Teela.”

  Teela nodded. Severn began to unwind his weapon chain.

  A tree cracked and fell in the distance.

  The Barrani didn’t pause; they moved faster. Kaylin lengthened her stride to keep up. The skirts of the dress were loose and wide, which helped. Another tree crashed into its surroundings; it was far enough away that it couldn’t be easily seen.

  Kaylin continued to jog until she ran into Nightshade’s back. She didn’t even need to ask why the Barrani had stopped their silent forward movement; she could see. The flattened dirt path unexpectedly forked.

  * * *

  The roaring grew louder, which made a decision necessary; sadly, it provided no other clues. Kaylin, who never particularly yearned for command, was glad the decision was not in her hands. Left to her, she would have flipped a coin, which would hardly improve morale. Then again, the Barrani didn’t seem to require it. They were grim, silent; they waited on the word of the Consort but shifted to the left, fanning out as they faced the forest and the sound of the occasional falling tree.

  “Nightshade?”

  No, he replied in silence, indicating that she should do the same. Understand that we very seldom choose to risk the portal paths. This is not the first time I have taken them; it is, however, the first time they have presented such a distinct paradigm.

  The forest?

  Yes. What I encountered on those paths the first time was almost formless; it was like a tunnel of glass. The path between Kariastos and Bertolle did not fork.

  You think something created the fork? No, sorry, that was a stupid question.

  It was, rather. There was genuine amusement in the response, although it underlay worry. I do not know. If the path has been broken or altered, we can assume that neither branch is safe, inasmuch as the paths here are ever truly safe.

  Kaylin turned to the small dragon. He was sitting on her shoulders, his claws once again almost piercing her dress. “Right or left?”

  He stared straight between the two paths, which was the answer she didn’t want. To Nightshade, she said, “I don’t think it’s safe to take either.”

  It was the Consort, however, who replied. “Why, Chosen?”

  * * *

  The Consort never called her by that title—and she gave the title weight by the way she intoned the word.

  Kaylin glanced at the small dragon; he didn’t appear to notice. She considered the folly of attributing the decision to him and decided against it.

  But the Consort had seen the direction of her brief gaze. Her eyes were Barrani-blue, but at the moment, everyone’s—whose eyes could change color—were.

  “Teela?” Kaylin asked.

  Teela joined Kaylin at the fork of the path. Like the small dragon, she stared between them, as if attempting to see through the trees that stood in the way. “It would be safer,” Teela finally said, “to return to the Hallionne.”

  “I do not think,” the Consort replied, “that is possible.”

  “Why?” Kaylin asked.

  Teela gave her a look.

  “Perhaps your sense of direction in this place has been impaired,” the Consort said. “But if mine has not, the falling trees you hear are in the direction from which we came.”

  “They’re to the left,” Kaylin pointed out.

  This got her rather more Barrani attention than she wanted, given its nature.

  “They are to the left of where we stand, yes, but they come from behind. The path here has not been straight.”

  “Why the hells not?”

  More stares. Kaylin winced and repeated the question in High Barrani, adding, “The Hallionne, in theory, built this path. Why wouldn’t they make it a straight path between point A and point B? A winding path makes no sense.”

  “Lord Calarnenne?”

  “She is remarkably straightforward.” He smiled, and Kaylin felt the mark on her cheek warm slightly. “And it is perhaps a flaw in her training as an Imperial Hawk that she expects both logic and sense. There is a reason that the portal paths are seldom taken and only at need; it is not merely because not all those who take them are guaranteed to arrive at the destination of their choice.

  “This is the other. It is my guess—and where the Hallionne are concerned, we are reduced to such guesswork—that the Hallionne created these paths in order to transport the Court, whole, to the West March.”

  “And without the paths?”

  “We would wander, Lord Kaylin. We would not see the same things; some would see the elementary gray of the space between portals. Some,” he said softly, “would see other elements, and they would pick a path between them. It is very difficult to progress as a group of any composition in that case; my obstacles might not be your obstacles; my path might be a chasm in your eyes. At the moment, however, we all see the same forest; it was not a small expenditure of effort on the part of at least Hallionne Bertolle, and the difficulty may now reside within the domain of Hallionne Orbaranne.”

  The next sentence was lost to the sound of roaring and the accompaniment of falling trees. The ground shook beneath Kaylin’s feet.

  “Lady.” Lord Nightshade bowed. “Your decision?”

  “Lord Evarrim,” the Consort said, turning to the Lord Kaylin most disliked. “We will attempt to carve out a path of our own.”

  Chapter 26

  The why of Evarrim became almost instantly clear: he summoned fire. It was not the fire that lit candle wicks and of which Kaylin had felt so justifiably proud what felt like months ago. Her fire, small and flickering, had had no voice, no presence; it was an echo of the essence of flame.

  Evarrim’s fire was not. As Evarrim met her gaze, she understood that he had, without hesitation, revealed some part of his mastery of the element—to her. It surprised her. He knew it. Although it was hard for Evarrim to keep his predatory gaze away from the small dragon that currently adorned Kaylin’s shoulder, he managed. “We are cautious,” he said in his condescending voice, “where caution is wise; where it hampers us, we cast it aside. Remember this.”

  She nodded, or thought she nodded; it was hard to keep her attention on the Arcanist when the fire appeared in front of him. It was an elemental, not a flame, and it emerged in the space between them fully formed. She had seen a similar elemental only once, in the heart of the Tha’alani Quarter, and at that time, she’d seen a bonfire, absent the wood generally required.

  Today, she saw a man of fire: arms, legs, the general shape of a face seen from behind a sheet of orange-red. He had no hair, although flames leapt and twisted above his head. She didn’t expect him to be happy to be here; he was chained to Evarrim, as all summoned elementals were chained to their summoners.

  But it wasn’t to Evarrim that he turned. It wasn’t to Evarrim that he bowed. It was, of course, to Kaylin. Tell me, he said, his voice crackling and sizzling, a story.

  Evarrim’s eyes were the blue Kaylin identified as surprise in Barrani. Given the Barrani, it was also a color she seldom saw. “Lord Kaylin,” he said in a winter voice—but colder.

  She immediately lifted both her hands. “I’m not doing anything.” This wasn’t entirely true; she was attracting a lot of attention—or at least the attention that wasn’t being given to the approaching sounds of destruction.

  �
�You are not attempting to exert any influence over the element?”

  “No!”

  The fire turned as she spoke, and then turned again; Evarrim was pale, and his eyes had gone the indigo of anger, which was more common—and less welcome.

  Tell me a story, the fire said again, and she heard, in its thin voice, a hint of the fire at the heart of the Keeper’s garden, hundreds of miles from where she now stood. Or would stand if she were actually in the world.

  She cleared her throat. “We need,” she told the fire carefully, “to clear a path through the forest. Without burning to death while it’s being done.”

  The fire blazed in silence.

  “…But I will tell you a story, while you work.”

  Surprise colored Evarrim’s eyes again. It was strong enough that he spoke through it. “You will tell the fire a story?”

  “It’s what he wants.”

  “And how, exactly, are you aware of this?”

  Evarrim couldn’t hear the fire’s voice. Kaylin closed her eyes briefly. “Does it matter?”

  “If I do not maintain control of the element here, Lord Kaylin, it will.”

  “He asked.”

  Silence.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve told stories to the elements.” She considered her options with care. “I spend time,” she told the Court, “in the Keeper’s garden.”

  The silence developed a different texture.

  “In the Keeper’s garden, I speak to the elements. Sometimes I tell them stories. They consider it their due and my function.” Lifting her arms so that the drape of the sleeves fell away from her wrist, she exposed the marks that adorned her skin. They were glowing faintly. “Maybe it is. The Keeper’s control in the elemental garden is absolute. When the elements speak to me there, they don’t fight him to do so.”

  Without waiting for Evarrim’s response, she held out a hand to the fire.

  The fire didn’t hesitate; he took what was offered. Kaylin tensed as warmth became heat, and relaxed when heat failed to become pain. He did not speak her name, but she spoke his: the name of fire.

  It came to her naturally, easily; had it come that way on command, she wouldn’t have spent months glaring at the unlit wick of a candle. The conceit of form fell away from the flame, as if consumed. Even so, he still held her hand.