Cast in Sorrow coe-9

by Michelle Sagara

  She was used to this. It was a familiar enough pain that it was almost a comfort. It didn’t involve helplessness; it didn’t involve cowardice. It wasn’t about death and the endless silence that followed it. It was just—heat. A little like burning. But it was a pain that sometimes conferred power.

  Today, she took it in both hands. She understood what the name she had saved lacked, even if she could never put it into words. The thought made her smile because putting power into words was exactly what she intended to do. It was, she realized, like healing. Very like healing. The name knew its exact form and shape; it was injured, yes, but it retained enough of itself that she could press it between her palms and feel what it now lacked.

  She began to heal it, palms pressed flat against each other. As she did, her palms warmed; the heat from the name was entirely unlike the heat that permeated the rest of her skin. The creature’s great eyes—and it seemed to be all eyes, now—looked at her hands with interest. She tightened her grip. No. This is not for you.

  He roared, but she’d pretty much had enough; she roared back.

  Around them, history passed in streams; he had momentarily forgotten to, oh, eat them. Kaylin, on the other hand, had forgotten to catch them and bind them. But this was what her life was like: moments of intense focus, and moments of reaction. It had a beat and a rhythm that she both despised and accepted.

  Hands cupped around Mandoran’s name, she released it. And it hung in the air, emerging from the flat of her palm in a pale, pale gold that had dimension. It wasn’t large, or at least it didn’t start out that way; it couldn’t have, confined to her palm. But she held the creature back, somehow, and she watched as it drifted, at last, into the green.

  The other ten had appeared on their own, first as ghostly images of themselves—as real as the glass statues in the Hallionne’s nightmares. But they had taken on form and substance and color, becoming as real as Teela while Kaylin watched. Mandoran did not do that. The name, his name, drifted toward them, as if it were part of an ancient tale, rendered in dragon voice.

  They saw his name. Their eyes took on the gold of the name itself. They were silent, arrested; even Teela turned her head to see what had caught their attention, although no one even attempted to speak. Her eyes widened, as well, becoming, in that instant, as gold as the eyes of the people she had trusted and loved so much she had gifted them with knowledge of her name.

  Mandoran coalesced around his name as Teela rose. She stumbled. She stumbled and she opened her lips on a name that Kaylin couldn’t hear, but nonetheless knew. And then she looked at Kaylin.

  At Kaylin, who was standing beneath a tree, the long skirts of the dress she’d worn for weeks now seeping—literally seeping—into the ground beneath her feet. Teela’s eyes went from gold to green to blue in such rapid succession they seemed to be all of these colors, and none of them. And then she turned back to her mother, but this time, she ran. The stiff distance, the immobility of grief and knowledge, seemed to have deserted her entirely.

  Or maybe, Kaylin thought, it was Mandoran’s presence. He was the twelfth, here. They were complete. She could be the Teela she’d been the day her mother had tried to rescue her daughter. She could leave centuries of experience and wariness behind. She caught her mother in her arms.

  And this time, Kaylin thought, there was no father, no High Court. Maybe this was a better story.

  The creature’s eyes were now as tall as Kaylin, and in them, she could see a stream of words, of language, that was in all ways too complicated, too big, too other for her. True Words sometimes made her feel small and insignificant, but not in the same way. She heard Nightshade’s words, and she gathered them, but even as she did, she looked at the stories held in the eyes of something so large it might have devoured whole worlds—for she couldn’t see a body at all; she might have been an insect standing on the bridge of a nose so vast she couldn’t conceive of it as anything but land and sky.

  On the day the twelve had come to the green it had been sunny. Clear. The trees had whispered and the Barrani had heard their ancient voices and considered themselves blessed. But it wasn’t a blessing; it was a warning. Not a threat—there was no menace in it, but there was sorrow. Grief. Loss.

  On the day that the green had chosen to speak to the gathered and expectant members of the High Court, it had not spoken of power. She understood that it had never knowingly spoken of power. Instead, it spoke of loss. It spoke with the voice of Alsanis because it heard what Alsanis did not say; it struggled to understand what it heard. It spoke with the voice of Orbaranne, and the voice of Bertolle; it spoke with the voice of Kariastos. These were part of the green and yet separate from it; they heard the thoughts and the will of green and they interpreted it for those who came to seek their shelter.

  It spoke of their weeping. It spoke of their pain. It spoke of the need they denied. They had made their choice. They had chosen one desire over another. They had locked themselves into the existence of the Hallionne, and they had done so gladly. But the sorrow had grown in their voices, and the joy of making the right decision—if there was ever any such thing—was only barely enough to sustain them. They chose to sleep.

  Sleeping, they controlled far less of their voices; when they dreamed, they were closest to the green. And so the green heard. It heard, but it didn’t understand.

  On that single day, when all such speech, no matter how difficult, was allowed, the green spoke to the Barrani of the West March because the Barrani might understand what the green itself did not: loneliness. Abandonment. Grief. Love.

  On the day Teela and her companions had come to the green, these were the heart of its story. And on that day, Teela’s mother had died. The lost, the other eleven, then understood that they faced danger, death—or worse—and that they were meant to face it. They had been given to the High Court to be forged, as all significant weapons were, in the heart of the green; if, like poorly tempered blades, they shattered, it signified only failure.

  They were children, at heart.

  Maybe, Kaylin thought, as tears fell unhindered down her cheeks, people were always children at heart. What the green asked, they heard. They felt it all. It was so much in tune with who and what they were, they had nothing to temper it with. They had no way of resisting. The green, for that moment, was of them, like them. There was no home and no safety for them in any other place...so they clung to the green, and when the story was done, they held on as tightly as the living possibly could.

  Kaylin doubted a mortal could have done it; there was nothing with which to anchor themselves to the green.

  They found freedom in Alsanis. They found freedom in the green. But not love, not from the green; it wasn’t living. It wasn’t a person. If it moved, it moved slowly; if it changed, if it gathered knowledge, it was slow, as well.

  Only Teela had been left behind. Teela had heard the green’s story, and she had felt its resonance as strongly as her kin. She felt the loss, the shock of it, and the echoes, and the certain sense of its eternity, more strongly. She understood—she’d understood it then—what it meant for the people whose lives and names she had shared.

  Only Teela was left behind.

  Only Teela.

  The green had devoted the whole of its power to protecting Teela from itself. In exchange for the life, for the word, at the heart of her mother. But Teela’s name was connected to the names of the other eleven. They formed a bond, yes; they also formed a chain.

  If they had not trusted each other with so much hope, and so much youthful optimism, the eleven would have vanished into the green and the things that lay beyond it. They couldn’t. Because they lived and the words lived, and the bindings, so tenuous, held them. They were aware of Teela. And Teela? Was aware of them.

  And they had waited. They had searched. They had troubled the green and the Hallionne. They understood that the world was made of words. That the living were. That everything that they had ever touched or shaken or destroyed h
ad come from the words of the Ancients. But in all those words, in the ones they could touch and the ones they only barely infer, they couldn’t find the words they needed to free Teela. To bring her...home.

  They never stopped trying.

  It was Eddorian who suggested their final solution. It was Eddorian who pointed out that entire worlds had been created from nothing, as laboratories for the Ancients, those absent creators who, like any neglectful parents, had spawned and moved on. If worlds could be created, if words that distilled the essence of love and hate, war and peace, birth and death, could define the fates of whole races, the words themselves had power.

  They only needed to find the words that would allow them to re-create one small, isolated event in the past. They needed to save Teela’s mother’s life. The rest were inconsequential. If Teela’s mother did not die in the green, Teela would not now be trapped and unreachable. Teela would, as the rest of them, finally be allowed to leave. She would be with them.

  But...they had a Barrani understanding of power. They understood that the Hallionne had almost unlimited power within a small, focal point, and they had attempted to unmake Orbaranne in order to gain that for themselves. They wanted to change one small event. One small event, one minute, one hour in one life.

  The green did not want Orbaranne’s death. No more did it wish to lose Alsanis, and strangely enough, the eleven didn’t wish to lose him, either. He was their cage, yes, but he was also the only home they had. They had grown into their confinement; they had played in the limitless possibilities of the space he governed; they had rested at his heart.

  And yet, without power, they would never have Teela back.

  They needed new words. They needed new possibilities. They needed, they realized, to destroy the green. It was the only other option available.

  Kaylin shook her head. She walked away from the tree, the eyes of the creature following her. They were larger now; they were taller than Kaylin. They no longer looked like eyes to her, they were so large.

  “Yes,” Mandoran said, which surprised her. “We tried. We tried to summon a familiar. We failed. We tried again, and we failed.”

  Kaylin blinked. She felt—she heard—history continuing to unfold around her and she let it go now. She heard the green’s voice, the green’s incomprehensible voice, and she knew that today, the story the green told was the continuation of that earlier story. But now, the green understood a little bit more.

  “And now, you have brought yours. Teela knows you,” he continued, looking slightly surprised.

  “What—what is a familiar?”

  He smiled. It wasn’t a friendly expression; it was full of the usual Barrani condescension. “Do you not understand, yet? Look at him, Chosen. He shows you all that he is now.”

  She’d been looking; it was hard not to. She could see the words coiled in him, and they were words without end. They weren’t True Words. But they were words that had movement and strength and depth; they had shape and form. They were made of shadow and smoke and the type of light that strikes from a distance, like the light on forest floor.

  “Do you understand?”

  And the sad thing was, she did. In the familiar, in the small dragon, in whatever the small dragon was part of, she saw the words he contained. Some of them were words that felt familiar, shadows of True Words. Shadows of names. Some were words she was certain she would never see in life. And all of them were waiting.

  All of them. If she spoke these words, if she asked the familiar to speak them, they would be almost true. Even thinking it, she saw the light ripple and change; she saw iridescence give way, at last, to gold.

  And she understood why sorcerers of legend had risked entire worlds to summon such a creature. Because those sorcerers could speak the emerging words. They could, for a moment, be gods, be Ancients. They could change the course of history. They could remake a world. Nothing was beyond them because in the space the familiar occupied, that he was part of, all things were possible. All words were true.

  All words could be true.

  She lost the thread of the story then.

  Because all things were possible. Because history could be changed. Because if she had the familiar and his power, Jade and Steffi would never need to die. They would never have to die. She could rewrite it all: her mother’s death. Or Steffi’s and Jade’s. Severn’s choice. Everything. She could remake the fief of Nightshade. She could remake the fiefs entirely. She could change the world so that the pain she’d suffered need never be suffered again.

  And even thinking it, words emerged, as strong, as golden, as names in the Lake of Life.

  She turned to Mandoran, and was surprised to get a faceful of Teela instead.

  That, and two hands, one on either shoulder, and a lot of teeth-rattling. Teela was blue-eyed and angry. She was not the child who had come to the green to be blessed and empowered. She was the Hawk. She was the Hawk, except there were tears on her cheeks and her lips were trembling.

  She had never come so close to striking Kaylin.

  Kaylin didn’t know Teela’s name. Teela had never trusted her with it, not the way she’d trusted the eleven. But she knew that Teela wanted what they wanted: in the end, she wanted to be free. In the end, she wanted to join the only people she had truly loved.

  Yet she was angry at Kaylin, right now, right here, for even thinking it—because she’d always known what Kaylin was thinking, from day one. She’d often belittled it because that was what Barrani did.

  “Do not make me hit you,” Teela said through clenched teeth. She threw one backward glance at her mother, now suspended, blood no longer running from multiple wounds. “Do not make me do this. I have seen this day every day of my life, kitling. Every. Single. Day. It drove me to kill my father, the single act I refuse to regret in a long history littered with regrets.

  “Do you understand? This made me. It made me what I am now. Whatever you profess to love about me—it comes from this.”

  Mandoran came to stand beside Teela; he put a gentle hand on her arm. “Teela—” And then he stopped, his eyes widening.

  Teela’s eyes widened, as well.

  Mandoran turned to the others, who stood frozen as if holding breath. “I can—I can hear her. I can hear Teela!”

  “What. Did. You. Do.” Teela grabbed Kaylin’s left hand; there was no longer a mark on her palm. She froze, looking into the eyes of the familiar; eyes that now seemed to stretch halfway up to the sky, the words there multiple and endless.

  “I—”

  “Kaylin.”

  “I healed it, Teela. The name. I—I healed it.”

  Teela let go of her hand. She closed her eyes. Then she turned and threw her arms around Mandoran’s neck; he laughed, although he was clearly surprised. Kaylin would have spoken, but there was something in the hug that made her feel like a voyeur. She wasn’t part of Teela’s life; not the way these people were.

  But she understood what Teela’s anger meant, what Teela was trying, around the shape of her own pain, her past, and her grief and loneliness, to tell her.

  And Kaylin turned, at last, to the words.

  Chapter 27

  “I know,” Kaylin said to a creature that was no longer small, no longer a dragon, no longer simply an annoying but unique pet. “I know what you are, now.”

  She felt the rumble of his voice; she felt the voice of the green. She understood that the moment was almost done, and she understood what she had to do, because she understood that it was all she could safely do.

  She approached Terrano first; he frowned, the way any Barrani with little experience of mortals would. She tried not to hold it against him. She wasn’t surprised to find that he wasn’t solid; he had no flesh, nothing to impede the progress of her palm as she pressed it against, and then through, the center of his chest.

  He frowned and stepped back. No. His lips moved; nothing else did.

  Kaylin closed her eyes. “We don’t have time for this. You can sta
y, Terrano, or you can go. But you can’t live between, like this. The word at the heart of your existence here, the word the green has tried to somehow preserve, belongs here. Leave it, and go, or stay with it and become it.”

  “Terrano,” Mandoran said.

  But Terrano shook his head, his lips quirking up in an odd smile. “I can’t go back. There’s nothing for me. My family is dead now. I didn’t even kill them,” he added, without a care in the world, and without any sign of grief. “I waited for Teela. But I waited so we could leave together. There are worlds out there,” he added. “Not like this one. Different. Better. We can be anything. We can be nothing. I won’t. I won’t do it. I don’t want it.” Terrano was part of Teela. Teela was part of Terrano. “Save her mother. Save her, and she won’t lay her curse on Teela.”

  “It wasn’t a curse.”

  “It was. Save her.”

  And at this moment, it didn’t matter. “I can’t do what you ask.”

  He laughed. “You are the only one who can.”

  And she wanted to. She wanted to do it because if she could, she could save all her own dead. There would be no ghosts to lay to rest. There would be no paralyzing, self-destructive guilt, no self-loathing, no loss.

  “This is the lie,” she told Terrano softly. “I didn’t understand how lies could be told with True Words. And they can’t. Everything you can say with a True Word is itself. But we don’t speak True Words. We don’t speak true language; we speak its echoes. We dimly understand the shape of the words—but they don’t mean the same thing to two different people. They can’t.

  “This is the lie,” she continued. She turned to the giant eye of the familiar. “I can see what you want. Can you see it? It’s there. And beside it, the heart of what I want. The only thing I’ve truly, desperately wanted in my life; the only thing I would die for.