She had never been afraid of the small dragon. He had saved her life at least twice. Yes, he criticized her, and yes, he smacked her face—but so did the Hawks, or at least Teela on an annoying day. He had also killed Ferals, simply by breathing into their faces. She knew he was deadly, or could be deadly. The Barrani treated him with healthy respect.
Until this moment, she hadn’t.
Then again, until this moment, his voice had never been a Dragon’s voice. It was, now. As he approached, it shook the earth she was standing on. Yet when he did descend, hovering, he was still tiny. His neck was delicate, his wings wider and broader than they had been in any place but the dream of Alsanis. She could see, briefly, through their membranes—and the sky was violet and black.
He roared. It was like listening to Bellusdeo and Diarmat; Kaylin had two hands full of daggers or she would have covered her ears.
He snorted smoke. It looked like steam, not the usual clouds. He then landed—on the ground a yard away from Kaylin’s feet. He looked up at her face, his eyes dark, the colors that skirted their surface bolder.
“I don’t even know what you are,” Kaylin told him, as he lifted his face and opened his small jaws. “I don’t know where we are. But the whole dive into the stone basin, nose first? Don’t do that again.”
The small dragon cocked his head. He squawked. Except, of course, it was a roar of sound.
When Kaylin failed to answer, he snorted again; she knew, if he were on her shoulder, he would either smack her face or bite her ear. Instead, he stalked—which, given his feet, looked funny—toward Teela. Kaylin stiffened, shifting both position and daggers; the small dragon looked at the knives and hissed.
It was the hissing she associated with amusement.
She didn’t sheathe her weapons. She watched him as he headed toward Teela, and she stiffened again. “Don’t breathe on her. Don’t even think it.”
His eyes widened, and then he shook his head, looking for all the world like a child’s version of a dragon baby. He did, however, nudge Teela’s hand with the tip of his nose. He even bit her fingers, but gently, as if she were a dead bird and he were her mother.
Then he turned to Kaylin again.
And she understood what he was offering. He was tiny, yes—but his voice implied that size wasn’t necessarily an issue. He could, if she asked it, carry Teela. He could, if she agreed, carry her.
And if he did, she thought, as her throat went dry, he wouldn’t be a small dragon anymore. He would be a large dragon, as much hers as Tiamaris was when he went Dragon. She couldn’t own Tiamaris—or any member of the Dragon Court. She relied on their sense of humor, their indulgence, and her own relative insignificance in order to survive her mistakes and the many, many social gaffes she was learning to obliterate.
Except that he wasn’t a Dragon. His eyes—his eyes were like Terrano’s, like the fire’s. They always had been. They were shadow eyes. Did she trust him?
She wasn’t certain. Trust hadn’t really been an issue before. He was like a cat. You could love them, and you could trust them to be cats. But you couldn’t trust them not to wreck your furniture or your carpets, and you couldn’t trust them to stay out of your food; you couldn’t trust them not to kill helpless mice and leave parts of their corpses scattered around your home. It just didn’t matter because cats couldn’t kill you. They couldn’t kill your neighbors or your friends.
Why was life like this? Why was she asked, so often, to choose between two different fears?
Because, she thought, that was mostly what life was: choosing between two different fears.
“Yes,” she told him, before doubt and uncertainty made her change her mind. “Please. Carry her. Carry us.”
* * *
He stepped back. Actually, that was the wrong word—he launched himself into the air, and flew ahead down the path. Kaylin returned her daggers to their sheaths as she knelt beside Teela. Teela was still breathing, or at least, she still had a pulse. She didn’t wake.
Kaylin watched the small dragon.
His wings expanded first. She’d seen that, before; they’d become the size of Aerian wings in the dreaming world of Alsanis. They weren’t Aerian wings. They were more membrane, less feather; they seemed less substantial only because they were translucent. They spread. They spread, and as they did, Kaylin could see a purple sky unfold in the azure that could be seen at any spot his wings didn’t touch.
She vastly preferred the azure.
His neck elongated, thickening; it was still much longer than normal Dragon neck, and seemed flexible in the fluid way snakes were. His jaws grew, his face thickening and stretching; his legs developed a heft and musculature she wasn’t sure she cared for. She couldn’t see his tail; it was lost to the bulk of his growing body.
But he didn’t seem to have scales; his body seemed smoother, more glasslike. And he wasn’t actually all that far away from them when his transformation had been completed.
He roared. She could swear it sent her hair flying. Then, before she could say anything else, he pushed himself off the ground. His shadow covered both of the Hawks. Kaylin discovered that he could hover in pretty much the same way he had at a more compact size; his claws, however were not the pointers he used to get her attention; they were thicker and attached to feet that couldn’t actually grip her shoulder; they were too large.
They could, however, surround her entire body, and one of them did. The other clasped Teela firmly. He rose.
“Can you carry us to the end of the path?”
He roared.
She needed a different method of communication; her own voice hadn’t changed, but she’d be deaf by the end of the day if his continued like this. She reached out to grab Teela’s hand, although she was fairly certain the small—the nonsmall—dragon wouldn’t drop her.
They began to move.
* * *
She didn’t know what a familiar was. Truth? She’d been uncomfortable with the idea. Anything that made Barrani Arcanists covetous was never going to work out well for a mortal. She already had the marks of the Chosen, and she’d more or less made peace with those, in part because she was certain it was the marks that allowed her to work with the midwives. They saved lives.
No, she saved lives, using their power. It didn’t make up for the lives she’d taken. Nothing would. There was no going back. But going forward, she could prevent deaths that would happen without her intervention. She could make a difference in the lives of strangers—and this time, it would be a positive difference.
The small dragon—she really had to stop thinking about him that way—wasn’t like the marks. He clearly had a mind of his own, and he could make it known, even if he couldn’t speak. And he could speak—she just didn’t hear his squawking as language. The Hallionne did. Hallionne Bertolle’s brothers had. The fire had.
If he was something as ancient, as wild, as they were—why would be live as a pet? A pet owned by a mortal Hawk? How could she bind him and command him when she could barely keep Ynpharion from scorching what little self-esteem she managed to maintain? She’d relied on what she assumed was his interest or affection; she did treat him like other people treated their cats.
And she was beginning to realize that she couldn’t keep doing that. She had no idea how to change that. What had the Hallionne said?
She had to name him. The thought was terrifying; the only thing that calmed her was the fact that she had named the fire. She could. But she’d learned the fire’s name; she hadn’t had to come up with something that meant fire—because what would that be? Hot? Pretty? Deadly?
Did the dragon even have a name?
Terrano didn’t now.
She froze, considering that. Iberrienne only barely had a name. His memories were not Barrani memories; they were broken and confused. She didn’t understand why, but then again, Barrani birth was pretty much mystical; it made no logical sense. Work with the midwives had made it seem far less sensible than it had to st
art, and it hadn’t made much sense when she’d first heard it, either.
She also understood that the Consort, the giver of names—and therefore the Mother of the Race—might be able to help Iberrienne. She doubted very much that she could help the lost children; what they wanted from her wasn’t what Iberrienne required.
Kaylin closed her eyes; wind swept her hair out of her face. Water. Consort. Teela. Everything else could wait, unless it tried to kill her first. Opening her eyes, she looked down at the path. It was a slender, gray-white line in a field of green and silver that continued on, to the horizon—like a road might. She attempted to look behind, but the dragon’s leg was in the way, and maybe, given the geography in places like this, that was for the best.
Forward, she thought. You had to keep moving because if you stopped you might never start again. Who’d said that to her? Oh, right. Teela.
She wasn’t surprised when what was sort of road through picturesque wilderness ended in a large, large circle. At the center of that circle, seen from this height, was, at last, a fountain.
“Is this where you were?” Kaylin shouted.
The dragon roared.
“Take us down. Do not drop us!”
He laughed. It wasn’t the normal hiss, either; it was full-throated laughter; even his legs shook with it.
He did set them down before he landed, but he didn’t land on them, which Kaylin had been half-afraid he’d do. He set them down a yard or two away from the fountain itself. This fountain was very much like the fountains in the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Water didn’t trickle from thin air; it poured from the stone structure that stood in its center. It was not a small statue; the basin itself was almost a pool, it was so large; it was set into the ground, not over it.
Sprays of water caught light and made small rainbows of it. It was quiet here. There were no obvious shadows, no obvious threats. She felt the ground shake as the dragon landed.
Kaylin found her feet and immediately turned to Teela, supine on the ground. She then caught Teela’s arms and draped the bulk of her body across her back, as she’d done once before. “I think we’re here, Teela.”
* * *
The statue at the center of the fountain was familiar, but until Kaylin was almost in the water—she stopped at its edge—she wasn’t certain why. It was a figure—and it seemed to Kaylin’s eye to be a human figure. A woman, or a girl on the edge of adulthood. Water spilled from her open palms—palms that were held in front of her chest, upturned as if in offering or supplication. Water trailed from strands of her hair.
Blood trailed from her eyes.
At this distance, it shouldn’t have been obvious, but it was, and Kaylin didn’t doubt what she saw. It was red. It was the only color in an otherwise white-gray.
Kaylin recognized the girl: it was the Avatar of the water. Here, in the heart of the green. If Kaylin had wondered how much of the landscape was drawn from her memories, she had her answer. This was Kaylin’s version of the water. This was how her mind had seen the element the first time she’d encountered it.
There was no Consort by this giant fountain, but the eagles had said the water would tell them where the Consort was. First things first, then. She knelt by the edge of the basin, and she lowered her palm into the water. It was surprisingly cold—but the cold was bracing, and therefore welcome.
She should have been surprised when the statue moved; the water didn’t usually take the form and shape of stone—and given the way the stone grated as it moved against itself, she knew it couldn’t be liquid. Water splashed as the figure moved slowly toward Kaylin, lowering its hands to its sides and lifting its chin as it did.
The dragon roared.
Kaylin froze as the statue frowned and looked beyond her to what she presumed was the dragon itself. She was unprepared for the dragon’s sudden leap. He landed in the water and sent it flying in a large spray which left every part of Kaylin that wasn’t covered in emerald dress soaked. It soaked Teela, as well. It didn’t wake her up.
The statue lifted its hands; the water that had been streaming from its palms froze instantly. Kaylin recognized the shape the ice took: it was a sword.
She almost called the dragon back—but she didn’t. Because she understood that whatever this statue was, it wasn’t the water she knew; it was some other thing. If it animated the statue, it wasn’t bent on the protection of the memories of a mortal race; it was bent on something entirely other.
At the moment, that was the destruction of the dragon.
The dragon wasn’t having any of it. Kaylin moved as his tail swung, gripping Teela’s arms tightly enough she’d probably cut off circulation. The sword of ice glanced off the side of dragon jaw—but its blade didn’t shatter. Neither did the dragon’s jaw. It sounded like steel hitting stone.
The dragon reared up as the blade bounced; it inhaled. Kaylin knew what had to follow; she opened her mouth to tell the dragon to stop, but no words fell out. It was too late for them. Either that or they were the wrong words.
Breath, a stream of silver mist, engulfed the statue and its weapon. For one long second, Kaylin thought the mist would dissipate with little effect. The statue brought its sword down—but it hit water. Water froze in a circle that spread across the surface of the shallow pool. It spread everywhere that Kaylin’s hand didn’t touch.
She waited, her own breath held, and for far less reason.
The statue began to crack, as if it were made of ice, not stone. The dragon roared. The statue, lips crumbling, roared back. Its voice was not a dragon’s voice—but it might as well have been. The statue didn’t exhale breath the way dragons normally did when they were fighting.
No, it exhaled words, a dark cloud of lines and dots and hatches, a cloud of letter forms. Or at least they looked like letter forms to Kaylin. Not, of course, Barrani forms—although there was similarity in the components—and certainly not Elantran. But they were dark, like the smoke from burning flesh; they didn’t attain the solidity of form that Kaylin’s words could and sometimes did. They didn’t look like True Words.
They looked like the shadows those words might cast, distorted by the landscape that underlay them. She watched as they coalesced; the dragon fell silent.
“Fly!” Kaylin shouted. “Get out of there!”
The dragon gave her a side-glance that, in any other immortal face, would have been dismissive.
“I mean it! Get out of there right bloody now!”
He pushed himself, slowly, out of the ice; it clung to his feet. Kaylin swore a lot. The statue cracked as the ice did. If the surface of the stone was a white-gray, the interior wasn’t; it was dark, and it glittered.
Kaylin hadn’t been worried about the stone; she’d been worried about the words. They looked familiar to her, and not in a good way; they reminded her of the words that Iberrienne had attempted to draw from the citizens of the fief. They reminded her of the words that Iberrienne had attempted to say in the heart of Hallionne Orbaranne.
Kaylin stopped breathing for one long minute. And then, in a desperate, almost unreasoning frenzy, she began to call the water she knew. She didn’t use words; words would take too long. She was never good with words when she was terrified. She was afraid of what the words would do to the water—if the water was actually really here at all.
She almost cried when she heard a single word.
Kaylin.
Come to me, she thought. Come to me right now. Come to where I am.
I am here.
“Come here, come away from the—”
The water rose in a pillar; it was the shape of a woman, and it held Kaylin’s hand. You couldn’t hold water in your hands; it always slid through, dripping between your fingers. Kaylin tried anyway—but at least this time she had the water’s cooperation. She pulled the water out of the shallow pool that was otherwise now ice.
You should not be here.
The water looked down at Teela, and Kaylin realized that while she’d b
een almost shocked to see fire take a human form, she expected the water to do so. The form wasn’t natural to either.
The dragon roared. The ice—which Kaylin now understood was not, in any way, actual water—shattered. Gravity in the environs of the shallow pool broke. Hand still encased in water, Kaylin watched as the shards flew away to reveal the dark, roiling mass of words that remained.
“Can you read them?” she asked the water.
The water shuddered.
Kaylin glanced at her; her eyes—if eyes was really the right word for something that shouldn’t actually have any—were closed. Do you understand what has happened, Kaylin?
“No.”
A pity. You are Chosen; if you cannot understand, you will tell no story that the green can hear, and you will offer no healing to the wounds that now bleed freely.
Kaylin hesitated. “Can you carry Teela?”
I can. It will not help her now. You intend to return to the greenheart.
“Yes, I think so. But we need you there.”
She lifted her face. There is a risk.
There was always a risk. “What risk?”
Watch, Chosen. Watch and understand.
* * *
Kaylin turned to the cloud. It was dense now, and it sparkled as if it had developed a surface that was hard and reflective. The density apparently made it heavier, because it began to sink. It touched the pool bed and it continued to sink, eating away at the stone beneath it; eating away at the earth beneath that stone. Kaylin watched as it slowly submerged.
The water rippled, but said nothing. Kaylin started to move; the water held her back, in the way undercurrents could. Wait.
“For what?”
There was no further answer. She looked up to see the dragon—the huge dragon—hovering above the sinking mass. Only when he landed did the water let her go. She walked to the edge of what was now a pit. The water lifted Teela and followed.
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