* * *
Kaylin recognized the two trees that stood there, although they had almost nothing in common with the two husks she’d seen; they were taller, fuller; they were in blossom, and in this case, blossom meant flowers. The flowers were a delicate shade of pink at the edge; the hearts implied something darker and brighter. Petals were strewn, almost artistically, across the grass in the shade beneath their bowers.
But she was certain they were the trees she and Teela had touched when they’d arrived in a barren, desert version of this place.
It was the fountain that caught her attention; there was—no surprise—water in its basin. The water, however, was not clear. She almost stumbled, but Severn slid an arm around her shoulders, because—of course—he’d seen what she’d seen, and seen it first.
The basin was full of not water, but blood.
Chapter 25
The blood set a different tone. The Lord of the West March lifted a hand in warning, and they stopped; only the Warden ignored his subvocal command. Only the Warden had that right. He walked to the fountain’s basin and stopped there; he didn’t touch the water. Kaylin thought he was making certain that nothing from the fountain reached the ground itself, and given the various warnings she’d been given, that made sense.
But she approached the fountain, as well, once Lirienne had lowered his hand. So did the Consort. “Be cautious,” the Consort said quietly.
Kaylin nodded. She didn’t attempt to touch the liquid in the basin, but she examined it more closely. At length, she turned to the Barrani. “It’s not blood,” she told them. “I mean, there’s blood in it, but the water is here.”
“You are certain?”
“You can hear the green. You,” she said softly to the Consort, “can hear the shadows. I can hear the water.” She could. Its voice was so quiet it might have been easy to miss it, but it was here.
The only thing missing was Teela.
No, she thought. Not the only thing. She turned to look down the path that had led them here, but wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t find it. Sometimes, there was no way back. She couldn’t see the dragon. She couldn’t hear him.
She started to ask, but stopped when the Lord of the West March came to stand beside her. He didn’t look at the fountain. He didn’t look at Kaylin. Instead, he began to speak. She glanced at his face, and saw his eyes: they were midnight-blue. Which made sense because she didn’t recognize the voice he spoke with, and she didn’t recognize the words he spoke, either.
No, Nightshade said. He didn’t approach Lirienne; instead, he walked to the base of one of the trees, just as Teela had done only the day before. It is time, Kaylin.
But—but nothing’s been said, there’s been no...
It is time. Can you not hear him?
She could. She couldn’t understand a word. She glanced at the Consort; the Consort’s eyes were now the color of her brother’s, although she spared Kaylin one sharp glance which clearly said “Move your butt.” But minus the vulgarity.
Kaylin made her way to the same tree she’d stood beside. Or at least a tree that stood in the same relative position. She lifted a hand to touch its bark, but noticed that Nightshade hadn’t.
She’d never been clear on the role the Lord of the West March was supposed to play. She didn’t understand the difference between his role and the role of the Teller; couldn’t understand why the green needed two. Until she heard Lirienne’s voice.
It was not, in any way, his voice. It wasn’t Barrani. It was storm’s voice. It was, she thought, the voice of the green—but channeled into sound by the form that momentarily contained it. She couldn’t understand a single word of it. She wondered if it always came through like this.
She had expected that the regalia would be like the stories told by Sanabalis and the Arkon in the tongue of the Ancients. She’d secretly expected to see words form, the way they had when she’d first heard the story of the birth of the Leontines. But Lirienne’s voice was not Sanabalis’s.
It was storm without form, without cloud, without lightning or rain.
Yes, Nightshade said.
Can you understand a single word he’s saying?
He didn’t answer. She looked across the red, red water of the fountain, and met his gaze; above his eyes, the gem in the center of the Teller’s crown was radiating light. She hoped it wasn’t radiating heat in equal measure.
Her own dress—the magical, revered blood of the green—was glowing with iridescent light; she wasn’t even surprised when the light separated from the cloth and grew. It reminded her of night sky on very rare evenings. But it changed the shape of the circle built around the fountain; it changed the color of a landscape that was, finally, green.
She heard Lirienne’s voice. She touched his thoughts briefly and shied away; they were so discordant, they clashed with the syllables leaving his mouth in a steady stream of thunder. Nightshade’s were less chaotic, but no easier to untangle; she stopped trying when he, too, began to speak.
She understood what Nightshade was saying, or rather, she understood the words: he was speaking in Elantran. It was just Elantran that made no sense. Individual words were clear as a bell, but they didn’t seem to go anywhere; they weren’t grouped in a way that implied sentences, or even muddled thoughts. He could have read a dictionary with just as much effect, except there at least the words would have some hierarchical order.
She listened. She listened, trying to pick out individual words, aware that her role as harmoniste was, in theory, to shape story, to build a coherent narrative from the strands offered her by the Teller. She didn’t even recognize the words as strands of different stories; perhaps they were. Perhaps they were coming in all at once and Nightshade was able to parse single words as they passed by; perhaps he could see sequences and had no other way of containing them.
It wasn’t going to help her. She wore a funny dress. She had thought the dress would give her some sort of power, some built-in influence, that would at least make the job possible. At the moment, it wasn’t. Her visible marks, however, were glowing a bright, bright silver. Without thought, she removed the jacket Lirienne had given her, and dropped it by her feet.
She was surprised when the jacket touched the stone at her feet and disappeared, fading from view as if being worn had provided the only anchor for its substance. She looked away from Nightshade, and saw that Lirienne still occupied the space directly between them. She couldn’t see anyone else.
We’re here, Severn said. It was the first time she’d been able to hear anyone when the green had decided to relocate her. We can see you. He paused, and then added, Don’t forget to breathe.
She closed her eyes. Nightshade’s voice became clearer, but the mishmash of random words didn’t make more sense. Think. Think, Kaylin. She didn’t worry about Lirienne; he was Nightshade’s problem. Nightshade was somehow pulling strands of related story from the flow of the green’s words. She wanted to know how, but knew it didn’t matter.
She was supposed to make sense of what Nightshade said. To somehow choose the words that would give form and shape to the green’s story. To scratch the surface of it, somehow, while still presenting as much of it as humanly possible. She blinked. She let go of Nightshade’s voice for a moment as she considered this.
The transformed, the lost, the elementals—they existed in spaces that the living couldn’t. They probably had stories of their own—stories that made no sense to anyone else. Certainly not Kaylin or the Barrani. Their worlds overlapped, but a person who could live in ten places simultaneously was not telling a story that someone who could live only in one could understand.
But the people gathered here, in the heart of the green, were living. They were solid. They had forms that didn’t change at whim. They needed food, air, water; some of them needed sleep. They could see the world they lived in; they couldn’t simultaneously see the outlands and whatever else existed for the Hallionne.
The recitation was a st
ory—a communication from something that was not living, not in the way people lived. It encompassed what the green knew. She thought that what Nightshade was drawing from it was what the living could know. She heard it in Elantran because it was her mother tongue.
She understood, as Nightshade continued to speak, that she was the end-point. What she said, what she managed to capture, what she managed to convey, was meant to be heard by those who bore witness. She didn’t understand how that was meant to change people, to nudge their names, to shift their perceptions. And it didn’t matter.
The marks on her arm, silver and bright, began to pulse.
She listened. She listened as if her life depended on it. She tried to pull sense from words, tried to find sentences, bits of thought, even of intent, as Nightshade spoke. He wasn’t shouting, but his tone wasn’t measured; the beats of the same words differed, sometimes in emphasis, sometimes in intensity.
The light from the dress slowly spread. The light from the gem in the Teller’s tiara spread, as well. Nightshade and Kaylin stood beneath the bowers of two trees, at the center of a growing radiance. The two spheres—for it seemed to Kaylin that the light now traveled in spheres—met at the Lord of the West March.
It was light, multihued, and bright; it wasn’t solid.
But where it touched, it shattered.
* * *
She felt the impact and staggered; shards and splinters flew out from the point of collision, and she lifted her arms to protect her eyes. They struck those arms, and she felt a visceral panic as they pierced skin; they hurt. She was not allowed to bleed on the green.
But when she lowered her stinging arms, she saw that they hadn’t been cut. Her marks, the marks that defined her as Chosen, were glowing more brightly—but there were no wounds. She looked across to Nightshade, but her eyes didn’t make it that far.
She could see the Lord of the West March, but there were now three of him; they stood in the same spot, almost in the same pose, but they overlapped. And at their back, the fountain had shifted, as well. At its center, suspended above the basin as if she were essential sculpture, was Teela.
* * *
Her eyes were closed. Her skin was paler than usual. Her arms were raised, palms splayed flat above her head, as if she were holding up the sky. Her mouth was moving, but at this distance, Kaylin couldn’t hear her words; they were drowned out by Lirienne’s and Nightshade’s. Nightshade’s had shifted; she could now hear streams of sentences, overlapping each other, as if he spoke simultaneously from several mouths.
She tried to listen; she had eyes for Teela, and only Teela. She wanted to know what Teela was trying to say. She wanted to run from the lee of the tree and climb up the basin to get the Barrani Hawk down. She didn’t. She started to move and she heard—to her surprise—the rumbling roar of angry dragon.
His voice overwhelmed all other voices. Even her own.
Teela’s eyes snapped open, her lips still moving, her arms bending slightly as if the sky had gained weight.
Kaylin left the tree. Her dress did not stop glowing; neither did her marks. She headed straight for Teela and stopped only when the dragon roared again. She could see his shadow across the whole of the fountain and the trees; she looked up as he descended.
The descent was lazy, desultory; his wings were spread in a glide. But she could no longer see sky through them. She couldn’t, she realized, see them as wings at all; their edges were fraying, like the edges of old pants.
His voice, she recognized; it shook the earth beneath her feet.
Teela’s eyes widened; she lifted her face to look up at the underside of the dragon. She lowered her face, her eyes rounder; they narrowed as if she had only now become aware of where she was.
Of, Kaylin realized, one of the places in which she was standing. “Teela!”
Teela’s head snapped around so quickly, she’d have whiplash. Her eyes widened. Predictably enough, she looked unhappy to see Kaylin. “What are you doing here?”
There was only one answer to that question; the problem was that Kaylin wasn’t doing the job. She was here as harmoniste. She was here to untangle the bits and pieces of story that Nightshade was now throwing, in discordant harmony with himself, in her direction.
And she knew, looking at the Barrani Hawk she thought of as family—privately, where it wouldn’t offend Teela with sentimentality—that Teela was at the heart of the story, somehow. But...it began before her birth. It began before the birth of the Hallionne. It began when the Ancients walked, and possibly before they did; it began with silence.
She could hear that silence now, although words were wound around it. Nightshade’s voice became clearer, stronger; she couldn’t sense him in any other way.
“Kitling, go back.”
Kaylin shook her head and lifted a hand to stall Teela’s lecture. Teela was afraid—for her. The fear felt like a little bit of home. And that was the point, wasn’t it? Kaylin built as much of a home as she could for herself, time and again, and losing any part of it was like losing peace and the hope of safety. What Teela wanted didn’t—hadn’t—mattered. Kaylin had always assumed that they wanted the same things. They were both Hawks. They were both good at their jobs.
But they weren’t the same people; they weren’t even the same race. There were things Kaylin had done that she’d never shared with Teela; she’d never shared them with anyone, except perhaps Tara, and that, by accident. And there were things that Teela had done that she’d never shared, either, and maybe for the same reason.
“Teela,” Kaylin said, distinctly, “I love you.”
Teela looked as though she was about to hurl a volley of angry Leontine, and Kaylin turned as the dragon finally landed.
* * *
He was not a dragon now. He was not small. She couldn’t even understand how he’d landed, because there wasn’t enough room in this small, fountain-dominated clearing to support him. He didn’t crush the Lord of the West March; nor did he crush Nightshade. Kaylin, however, found the lack of light and air problematic.
He had, she thought, no face. But he had eyes, and they were the same as they’d always been, writ large. Writ impressively large. Large enough that she should have been able to see her reflection in them. What she saw, instead, was something that looked like words.
He turned his gaze on Nightshade; Nightshade didn’t seem to be aware of his presence, but Teela was. Kaylin didn’t understand what the creature who was no longer dragon wanted from Nightshade until she realized that she could no longer hear all of the threads of the story he’d been speaking.
Her eyes rounded. “No!”
She heard his voice, his rumbling response; it was no longer a roar. She thought it almost—almost—contained words, but they weren’t words she would ever be able to understand. In a panic she shoved her arms in front of his eyes, which now seemed to exist without sockets. If he understood what she was offering—if she did—he paid no attention, and none of the marks—not a single damn one—rose to feed itself to him.
He was going to eat the stories.
He was going to devour them, and leave her with no way of telling what needed to be told. And she knew that if he did, she would never save Teela. She understood that the green was in danger, that Alsanis was all but exhausted, that the lost children were a threat to their former people—and she didn’t care.
What she cared about was Teela.
Think, Kaylin. She reached past the creature, although it was difficult as he appeared to be wrapped around her like a gigantic, uncomfortably heavy blanket with eyes. She reached and she began to choose. Not the silence, although that was a story of its own. That one, she could give to the creature.
Not the Ancients. No, wait—one small strand of their story was sharper and heavier than any other strand appeared to be. She drew it into her hands and wrapped it around her arms, as if the spoken word and the marks could be held in the exact same way. But the rest, she fed to the creature.
; It was hard. She didn’t know what would happen to the pieces of history that she rejected—for she understood them as history now; they were the foundations upon which Teela stood, at least figuratively. She heard Alsanis’s name. She missed some of its beginning, but she understood enough to know that he was built by the Ancients. By two. She couldn’t hear their names, but understood that an echo of them existed in the history itself.
And she heard grief, she heard farewells. She heard the promise of eternity, and the threat of it. She caught those almost reflexively. To the dragon, she fed the story of the forests and the insects and the brooks and streams, shielding Alsanis from his hunger. Shielding the story of his grief. She couldn’t save the story of his brothers; she had no sense of what they had been before Alsanis became Hallionne, because the creature devoured it.
He devoured, as well, the story of the Dragons. The real Dragons. Sanabalis’s people. She panicked and shouted at him, and lost more words; she couldn’t afford it. She knew it. But she felt that she couldn’t move as fast as the creature now could; she couldn’t see whether or not something was important. She couldn’t assess it in time.
But she caught bits and pieces of the war. Of the Hallionne at war. Of the green at war. Of the Dragons and the Barrani and the weapons forged in the green. She let the weapons go. She let the wars go. She kept only the bare essentials because the stories of the wars were so long and complicated. She thought maybe they would feed the creature enough that he would stop.
Instead, he seemed to grow.
“Kitling—”
“I know, Teela!” But not, apparently, enough not to shut the hells up and ignore all other distractions.
She looked into the creature’s eyes. She could almost step into them, they’d grown so large. She didn’t. She could see the words they contained, now. The words were harder and more angular than the letter shapes she thought of as True Words; they were not golden, not blue. Silver, she thought, or gray, but strangely insubstantial. They looked like—like smoke.
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