Cast in Courtlight

by Michelle Sagara

  The Lady lifted a palm and all but put it through the planks. Apparently, she had the same fondness for door-wards that Kaylin did—and a lot more muscle to back it up.

  The door did not buckle or snap, and it didn't fly off its hinges, but it did swing open with a great deal more speed than it had the first time. Kaylin stepped into the torchlit gloom of a familiar room.

  The door closed behind them. The chimes were lost. The growling, unfortunately, was not, and without the sweet music to drown it out, it sounded obscenely close.

  "Why?" Kaylin asked as the woman made her way across the rune-etched floor.

  The woman turned to look at her. Turned away. But she answered. "I love my brothers," she said quietly. "Both of them. And they will both be destroyed. I have waited," she added bitterly, "and I have worked. But I am not Consort, and the tower is not open to me."

  "I'm not, either."

  "No. But I know what you did, Kaylin. The Consort told me. And she told me as well of her hope. It is a fool's hope," she added bitterly. "And we have proven ourselves, to the last, fools.

  "But I am not the Lord of the West March. I am not what he will be, or what he has been. I am to be mother to my people, and I will not see them die without even the faint hope you offer."

  "Did he tell you—"

  "No."

  "Then how—"

  "Do not ask. It is best that way. My father fears your knowledge."

  "Will I kill the Lord of the Green?"

  "He is almost dead," was the stark answer. Shorn of cold and ice, it held only pain. "I will take the risk."

  She touched the lip of the seal, and Kaylin stepped forward to join her, watching as the runes lit up. She had seen this before, and had seen, as well, the waters—the thick, turgid waters—peel back like layers of something almost solid.

  This time, she looked at the liquid. »

  "What is this?" she asked.

  The Lady did not answer.

  And rising from the heart of this circle, bounded on all sides by words too old to be read, rose the Lord of the Green for a second time.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kaylin turned almost instinctively and gave The Lady—she really hated the Barrani love of titles—a very unladylike shove. It wasn't expected—by either of them—and The Lady staggered back a couple of steps. She didn't lose her footing. She did, however, lose her place on the periphery of the circle.

  Kaylin hoped that she didn't hit back.

  She met the gaze of the Lord of the Green; it was black. If there was color in it, as there had only barely been in dream, she couldn't see it. She blamed the torchlight out of desperation. But the torches that lined the circle in eight even intervals were bright enough.

  He was pale, and he was not lovely in the same way either of his younger siblings were. He couldn't be, here. He did not attempt to step toward her. She almost took a step toward him, but thought the better of it before her bare foot connected with what could charitably be called slime.

  "My brother is not with you," he said. His voice sounded normal to the ear. It sounded—and almost tasted—of ash to the part of Kaylin that listened in other ways. The healer, she thought.

  "I dreamed about you," she told him.

  And he did something strange and terrifying: He smiled. There was genuine humor in the expression. And it shouldn't have been there. "In my youth," he told her, "many mortals did."

  She had the sense, then, that he was trying to ease her. Or distract her. Either would be a kindness, and the Barrani weren't famed for their generosity. Or rather, they were, but not by its presence.

  And yet, this one—this one had been marred, marked, and damned by his. She knew that now. She had seen what he had faced, and in his failure, she saw her own. Proud failure. What it said about him—to Kaylin—was not what it said to the Lord of the High Court. It spoke to her in ways that almost nothing in any other Barrani legends had ever done.

  She said, clearly, and in Barrani, "I chose to come here."

  He looked at her from the center of the circle. "My mother," he told her softly, in Elantran, "was never very strong. She was a girl, and a foolish girl. You would have liked her, in her youth."

  "I like her now."

  "It is a fault," he replied. "In a Lord of the High Court. She wanted for her children what she herself had not seen among her brothers. And she chose. And now we are here, all of us. It would have been better had she been like my father."

  Death in his voice. And the flicker of life, clinging to the edges. She recognized them both now.

  "I can't judge her."

  "No. You are too human. You cannot even judge me." He lifted a hand. To her.

  She swallowed. She heard the sister move, and felt a presence by her side—but a step back.

  Lifting her left arm as if it weighed as much as she did, she reached out, shaking, and touched the hand the Lord of the Green had extended.

  And in the darkness, she felt both ice and fire, and she heard the voice of the darkness speak. She couldn't understand the words, and was glad.

  The Lady by her side said nothing.

  The Lord of the Green closed his hand over hers; he raised the other hand, and caught Kaylin's left wrist. Where he touched her skin, it burned; where he touched the marks upon the skin, they flared, blue and bright.

  But this time she didn't see the whole of her life pass before her. She wasn't forced to relive it. She wasn't tossed into those currents. She felt, instead, the great, great weight of a word, a living thing, a rounded curve that was almost flat in the palm. Not her name.

  And she remembered it, remembered lifting it, as if she were straining against the stream and the current of Barrani life.

  She looked at his eyes. They were black, and open wide. And she looked into them, seeing shadows, seeing the chasm, hearing the whispering voices of the damned. Their accusations. Their pleas.

  Lost, all. But not this man. Not yet.

  He took the word from her. She felt it leave, felt his hands pass above and through it, seeking purchase. It was larger in all ways than he was, and as her marks glowed blue, they illuminated what she had chosen to touch. She hadn't seen it. Couldn't see it. Not then.

  But now, it was vast, taller than she was, one long, obsidian curve that seemed to stretch from one end of this huge, rough cavern to the other. And she saw it clearly not as a word but as a single curve, a single mark.

  She knew then that she had been right: She had carried this for him. But it wasn't a word. It wasn't a name. She might have wept had she time or strength; she had neither. To hold the weight of this one, long stroke demanded everything she had.

  She whispered something. She couldn't say later what it was, or rather, what the words were; the meaning was clear. Desperation did that.

  Give me your name.

  It wasn't a command. It couldn't be.

  But the darkness heard it, and there was laughter in the distance far more disturbing, in the end, than the sounds of the creature Andellen had called firstborn. She was late. She was too late. The baying of the ferals grew loud.

  And blending, at last, with that baying, the sounds of horns. The war cry of the Barrani. The Lady stood by her side for just a fraction of a second longer, and then she cried out and turned, running toward the door.

  Kaylin was held, transfixed. Had she wanted to run, had she wanted to join the fight—and she had no doubt that The Lady had gone to do just that—she wouldn't have been able to do so.

  Because, just as she needed the name of the Lord of the West March in order to return from the odd world she'd entered to heal him, she needed the name of the Lord of the Green. She wasn't caught in the heart of arboreal forest; the room was real. But the trap was the same; the cost of failure was higher.

  Noble failure. Proud failure.

  And she wasn't going to settle for it until she had no other choice.

  She said again, Give me your name.

  And the darkness told he
r that the Lord of the Green no longer had it.

  His face was twisted with hunger and pain and—yes—humiliation. He fought; she could sense the Other in him. It was the source of the voice. But the darkness was lying, and she knew it. Prayed—which, given her stance on gods in general, was stupid, but entirely human—that the Lord of the Green would know it just as clearly.

  He struggled.

  And she reached out with her right hand and slapped his face. It was harsh, yes, but it was real. There was no ghost voice in it, no Barrani damn words, nothing that wasn't Kaylin. She wanted his attention.

  She got it. But in order to slap her back, he had to let go of her hand. And she realized that he couldn't. They were anchored together by both of his hands and her left one. And beyond them, the time of leoswuld had begun. Or ended.

  That didn't bear thinking about.

  But she had his attention, and she could almost see glints of blue in those eyes, like tiny fractures in ebony. It could have been the midnight blue of rage or terror. She guessed rage. "You have your name! It's yours. It's still yours. Yes, you can be controlled by it. Yes, you can be forced to do what you do not choose to do—but it's your name. And damn you to your own hell, I need it!"

  But he hadn't the power to speak it; she saw that clearly. Healer's vision saw the weakness in the body through the tips of her fingers. She started to curse because she couldn't think of anything else to say—and then she stopped because she saw that he was, in fact, doing something. Not speaking—if names ever came that way. He couldn't do that.

  But… he was the Lord of the Green, and she knew that he would not allow himself to be bested by a mortal girl who was barely an adult.

  Between them, in the air above her hands, and beneath the great weight of the single, huge stroke she had borne this far, delicate curves began to form. She knew what they were. She had seen something similar before, in Castle Nightshade, when Lord Nightshade had given her, in the end, his name, the truth of himself.

  To speak it? No.

  But to think it, to write it in this fashion—if it were real and not an elemental part of their joining—this much he could struggle to do. It came slowly, curve and dot, curve and dot, line and line. It was a complex word, in a way that Nightshade's hadn't been.

  She couldn't read it as she had read Nightshade's, and for a moment, she foundered; she let fear take hold. Heard the voice of the darkness as a physical force, demanding that the Lord of the Green release her. Kill her. Devour her.

  But he couldn't.

  The marks on her arms were now so bright they almost dwarfed his own rune. Their glow rose in the air in the shape of words, each dense and perfect, each complete in and of itself.

  His was not.

  Understanding robbed her knees of strength, and had the Lord of the Green not had a literal death grip on her hand, she would have fallen.

  The Barrani had a mother; they had no midwives. They had no concept of midwives, and why should they?

  But this birthing—ah, this one had been difficult; it had gone wrong. She understood, looking at the name as he finished it and his strength seemed to ebb, that she had come, in the end, not as Hawk, and not as Healer, but as midwife. What the Consort had failed to understand—as mother—Kaylin could now see, as midwife. The Consort had grasped, not the whole of the thing but only part; the part she could grasp; the part she could carry. She had been young then. Too young. She had chosen what she could carry.

  And Kaylin had finally come to help her. To carry the rest. She brought the large, last stroke up, although her hand was bound, and with it, came his. She brought it to rest to the left of the symbol that lay between them, incomplete. She was aware that the symbol, incomplete, had meaning. How could it not? Had it not, the Lord of the Green would never have awakened.

  But it was not the whole of the meaning the source had intended for him. And she brought the hard curve of the last stroke to complete it, to transform it, to make it more, and not less, than it had been.

  The stroke touched the lines that composed the rest of his name, and when it did, it began to resonate, to shake, to transform both itself and the rest. She could hear it, then, keening, and she tried not to listen as it spoke the whole of his name.

  And he cried out with it, cried out what it said. She could feel this, as well. He swallowed what he had offered at the edge of his ability to defy the darkness, and with it, the last stroke.

  Some midwives considered newborn cries to be a sign of health. They didn't differentiate between cries and screams because in an infant there wasn't much difference.

  She didn't have that comfort. He was screaming in a voice that shook the High Halls themselves. That broke stone. That shattered stonework and drove shards into the underside of Kaylin's bare feet. She bled again, but he held her up, shaking now with the force of this new name, this whole name.

  When silence came, she opened her eyes. She hadn't been aware that they were closed. He stood in the circle, and he held her up by her arm. She dangled, watching in dim fascination as the runes that rimmed the circle began to go out.

  And she heard a distant roar of rage, and it, too, shook the Halls and shattered stone. It wasn't a conversation she wanted to be part of, but she'd made a choice, and she'd live with it. She hoped.

  He stepped out of the circle, still holding her. In the gloom of the room, she couldn't see the color of his eyes, and she desperately wanted to know what they were. Anything but black, she prayed. Anything but that.

  But he wasn't undying; the taint of the effort to end his existence in that particular fashion was gone from him.

  He strode across the fissures in the floor, still holding her. When he reached the door, it flew wide, and this time, it splintered. The halls on the other side of the arch were like a different country, and he stepped across the boundary. Only then did he set her down. She gave a little yelp of pain, and followed it by a one-footed dance as she tried to dislodge stone shards.

  He gestured, and they flew, carrying her blood with them.

  He was, and was not, the man she had seen in her dream. But his eyes—his eyes were blue. Warrior blue, she thought. Or hoped.

  "The leoswuld," he told her. He wore light, or so it seemed, and she remembered that he had worn light the first time she had seen him. Light transformed, shrinking and dwindling until he wore armor, and a cloak that was forest-green. Familiar. He drew his hood up, and also drew his sword. In fact, to her surprise, he drew two.

  He handed the second to Kaylin. "It is not your chosen weapon," he told her, "but you are not yet a master of the weapon that is, and I am not… yet… whole enough to contain you if you falter."

  She didn't understand what he meant. And then, as he looked at her exposed arms, she did. She pulled the sleeves down in a hurry, wondering when it was that she'd yanked them up. If she had.

  "It has started," he told her grimly, "and now, we face opposition. If we do not arrive in the High Court Circle soon, all of your effort will count for nothing. There will be none to accept the gift, and none to take the keys of power from the Lord of the High Court, for I fear you were right—my brother will not take them."

  As he spoke, she saw them: black shadows racing down the halls behind a set of fangs. Ferals.

  The fangs of the Lord of the Green weren't really, but his smile was a hunter's smile, and if he had any fear of ferals at all, madness drove it from him.

  She wanted to hide behind him, but she knew ferals; it wouldn't do her any good at all.

  Lirienne! she called.

  And the ferals leaped.

  She couldn't see the blade move. She knew it had because bits and pieces of feral flew free. They didn't have time to roar in pain; they just died. She hadn't wanted to hide, but she didn't want to step up. The hall wasn't wide, and the sweep of his damn sword was.

  He didn't seem to need help, though. He was the Lord of the Green. And these were his rats.

  He moved forward, cutting the
m down. If they wounded him at all, she couldn't see it; the ferals bled red, and that red covered his armor, darkened his cloak, adding color to his face.

  And to hers.

  She heard horns in the distance and wondered how many ferals had been unleashed. Prayed it was only ferals.

  Kaylin. The Lord of the West March spoke, his voice clear above the horns and snarls of ferals.

  The Lord of the Green is coming, she told him desperately.

  Heard his silence. But it's going to take a bit of time. How much do we have?

  Tell him… to hurry.

  She looked at the Lord of the Green. Uh, no.

  Kaylin—

  I'm not telling him to do anything. I'm right here. You're somewhere safe.

  She heard his wild laughter inside of her mind, and knew that safe was not quite the right word.

  She looked down the hall; the ferals were thick there. She should have felt rage; she didn't. Just… fear. The Lord of the Green was right—she didn't have control of her power. Couldn't just turn it on and off. She saw the darkness, and in it, some part of herself.

  She could not afford to call her power here. If it came, she wasn't certain what it would be, or do.

  But she had one other choice. And she lifted the medallion of Lord Sanabalis, and blessing Dragons in general, she spoke the word of fire.

  The hall erupted in a flame that shot out from the medallion like the breath of a dragon. It devoured the ferals, leaving a wet ash in their wake.

  The Lord of the Green looked at her in some surprise, and then, looking at what she held in her hands, he laughed. "Come," he told her, racing ahead. "You've bought time, but they will fill the Halls soon."

  Where he ran, the High Halls seemed to shorten in length, as if the building itself was attempting to aid them in their passage. She stretched her legs, keeping up, but only barely. His sword should have weighed her down, but it was light for its length, lighter than Severn's daggers had been. She wondered what it was made of.

  She lost any sense of geography; she lost the ability to keep track of where she had been. It didn't matter. If she could remain in the wake of the Lord of the Green, she didn't need to know. But it was hard to keep up.