Cast in Honor

by Michelle Sagara

  This time, she felt her hand dip beneath the surface of her own forehead, as if her skin were liquid. She had to try three times; the first two attempts were disturbing enough she froze. But the third time, she felt the pinprick edges of something against her fingers and palm. She cupped the word carefully and withdrew it, and it expanded to fill her hand, gaining dimension and weight.

  The names were not sentient—not in a way that Kaylin understood sentience. But she felt, holding it, regret and worry. She silently apologized for not visiting the Lake to take it home. If she’d said it out aloud, Teela would smack her when she could finally reach her. Teela, after all, forgot nothing.

  She lifted the word.

  The cloud parted. The word didn’t leave her hand.

  It wasn’t enough, she thought. Yes, she carried it, the way she carried the other marks—but in the end, it had a place that wasn’t a patch of Kaylin’s skin. It wasn’t of her. Or rather, it wasn’t part of her duties as Chosen. Duties that she had never understood.

  She understood them now, but not in a way she could easily put into words. Ironic, really. Severn should have been Chosen. He made a lot less noise, but when he spoke, it meant something.

  Maybe the words were given to you because you can speak so freely, Severn pointed out.

  Fine. But I can’t choose words well.

  Why do you have to choose one?

  Because there’s some part of the story that’s incomplete. This made sense to Kaylin.

  How do you know that?

  I don’t know, Severn. I just... It’s just...

  A feeling. It was just a feeling. It was intuition. She raised her right arm; her right hand held the only True Name in the room that wasn’t already occupied. Her left hand was free, and it grew colder. Her cheeks stung, and the air drew the breath out of her lungs, froze her nostrils. Only the hand that held the name felt any warmth at all. Kaylin did not consider this a particularly good sign.

  She glanced up at a cloud of translucent words, made from her own breath and the bitter cold.

  * * *

  Kaylin.

  I’m moving as fast as I can—

  The body is getting colder.

  So was the room. Her arms were shaking enough that it was harder to see the brighter, closer marks on her skin; her hands were curved in loose fists that wouldn’t hold anything competently. Her right hand still held the name because it was the only source of warmth in the room.

  But even that warmth was fading.

  Kaylin—

  She touched her arm; her own marks stopped their slow traversal of her skin. The rune she slid her shaking fingers over felt almost brittle to the touch. For one long, held breath she was afraid that she had waited too long. It was frozen. It would not move.

  “Kaylin.” Like the words of breath and mist, her familiar was all white, an ice that implied endless cold and death. She couldn’t see his eyes. “I do not know why you were Chosen; were it not for my presence, you would be lost here.” He gestured at the mark on her arm; it rose. It rose and expanded, becoming dimensional as it hovered above her arm.

  “I cannot touch you here,” he said, voice quiet. “It would destroy you.” He looked at the words that weren’t hers in the darkness, as if reading them. “Do what you must do, but do it quickly.”

  “Can you—”

  “No, Kaylin. I can touch neither you nor the tale that is told; what was written here was not of me; it is not mine. I could destroy it. I could refashion it—but then it would be a different story, and not the story of the one you call Gilbert.

  “And if I did that, you would also perish. You will perish, regardless. You are not Barrani, not Dragon, not any of the older races; you will age and you will die.” He spoke now, as if to himself.

  Kaylin reached out for the word he had freed from her skin.

  “But time, to you, is a prison from which there is no escape, except one. You do not feel its immediacy.”

  He was wrong. She did. She knew better than anyone what too late meant.

  She listened as she moved. Gilbert’s words, revealed by breath and cold, were an arm’s length away, no more, but they seemed to remain inches in front of her, no matter how hard she strained to reach them. The shuddering didn’t help.

  She had never been so cold in her life.

  There was warmth waiting for her—and food, and family—if she could complete the pattern in front of her. She had a home now. She had a place to go. She cursed in quiet Leontine and lifted the rune that had come from her skin into place; it took four attempts.

  She knew when it had successfully joined the mass of the words of ice because gold spread across white, seeping into it as if it were ink on a tablecloth. It spread. What had been mist and ice became, at last, true words as she understood them.

  Sadly, they didn’t make the room any warmer.

  There was only one thing that could do that. She held it in her hand: life, in the paradigm of the Ancients. It had to go to a body she couldn’t see or touch herself.

  Think, damn it. Just...think.

  The name in her hand had been created for the Barrani, but it was the only name she had to offer Gilbert.

  She had never asked the Consort how names were transferred to the babies that straddled the boundary between life and death, as all Barrani newborns did. The Barrani were understandably protective about the Lake of Life. Any mention of it caused Barrani eyes to darken by several shades, and the resultant blue was uncomfortable. Or worse.

  She had a suspicion, though. It involved being able to touch the body. She had no idea how to do that here; she couldn’t even see it.

  She needed to be where Severn was. She closed her eyes and returned her awareness to him; to his vision. He was looking at the body that was not a corpse, but not quite a statue; his hands remained gently spread across its chest.

  She could feel ice and stone. She could feel them as strongly as she could feel the True Name in her own hands. She could see his hands clearly, but she couldn’t see her own. She didn’t try. Instead, she apologized to her partner and tried to move his.

  She lifted his right hand. She flexed his fingers. Curved them into a fist. Opened the hand again and examined the scars across his right palm. Cupped that palm and held it steady until it felt like her own hand to her.

  “Corporal?” Tain’s voice.

  Severn didn’t answer.

  Severn? Severn!

  I’m here. It’s bloody cold.

  Severn was where Kaylin was. She felt a moment of pure panic; both of his hands clenched in involuntary fists.

  Come back. Come back to you.

  Silence.

  Severn—come back right now. She was terrified; the fear was sudden and sharp and too visceral to be cold.

  He didn’t reply.

  She looked up at Teela, at her familiar blue eyes, at the subtle shift of her brows. “Severn’s not here,” she said.

  Teela’s eyes narrowed into perfect edges. “Kitling, what are you doing?”

  “I’m here—Severn’s where I was. He won’t—he won’t come back. How do I make him come back?”

  “Ask and hope he agrees.”

  “Tried that.”

  “If I understand what’s happening, you’re not the person who gets to make that decision—you can fight, but it will cause you both immense pain at a time when you cannot afford it.” Teela exhaled. “You’re here for a reason. Please tell me you’re here for a reason.”

  Teela’s irritation was so familiar, so normal, it steadied the younger Hawk. “Yes.”

  “Then do whatever it was you came here for. Do it quickly.”

  For one heartbeat, she couldn’t remember. Severn’s hands unclenched; Severn’s lungs took in air, held it for a b
eat and exhaled it. She lifted her right hand, cupped it; lowered her left. She meant to place it squarely in the center of the figure’s chest, but it drifted up, toward its closed eyes instead.

  “I think I need three hands.”

  “You’ve only got two. Make do.”

  She lowered the right hand. Severn’s hand, unlike her own, did not cup or carry a name. She brought his right hand to the center of the figure’s chest. With the left, she tried to pry the middle eye—which was set slightly higher in the figure’s face than the other two—open. She was surprised when it worked.

  * * *

  At first glimpse, the eye socket was missing an eye. That would probably have been for the best, because a second, steadier look made it clear that the eye itself was a dark, round obsidian that did not reflect light at all. There were no flickers in its depths to suggest that it was chaos or Shadow, but it seemed to move, very slowly, beneath the fingers that held the eyelid open.

  Kaylin.

  She exhaled. “I need my body back.”

  I’m not sure how to leave it.

  You’re lying.

  He wasn’t.

  Kaylin had had nightmares that made more sense than this. She snarled a long Leontine phrase that made Tain’s ears twitch.

  Can you see the word in your—in my—hand?

  Yes. It’s the only light in the room.

  Kaylin had had nightmares that were less upsetting. There are words right in front of you.

  They’re not words that I can see.

  “Hope—can you still see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why in the hells can’t he see them? He’s behind my eyes!”

  “I do not know, Kaylin.”

  “Kitling, what are you trying to do?”

  “Heal Gilbert.” She had come in search of Gilbert’s name. She was almost certain she’d found it. She’d hoped that somehow, the Chosen could finish a story, or at least make what she could see of it complete.

  But the words were in a place that no one else could reach except her familiar. She’d made the faint, almost ethereal figures solid. Golden. They were words now, not the ghost or the memory of words. But that didn’t finish the story. The isolation and the cold hadn’t come to an end.

  What had she expected? Gilbert was not like the trapped spirit of an ancient Dragon. Gilbert’s life was not over.

  She’d taken the single name she had managed to preserve from her forehead, because there was a body here that could contain it. Until she’d seen it, using the True Name hadn’t occurred to her.

  But that name and this body were not in the same place. No, she thought, frowning. They were in the same place. They were like the murder victims. Real and not real. Present and not present.

  “I couldn’t see the victims with your wing plastered to my face.”

  Silence.

  She had looked through her familiar’s translucent wing many times. She had seen things that she couldn’t see on her own. She had gone places she wouldn’t have gone. It had never occurred to her that seeing them did not immediately make them real and accessible.

  She’d thought of Hope’s wing as a way of seeing through illusion, of getting to the truth of what was actually there. She’d assumed that what she was seeing through his wing was the truth, that there was only one.

  But what if it was only her perception that was the bottleneck? Then she needed to change that. She needed to change it now. She wasn’t certain that she could change it while caged in Severn, and thinking that, she once again felt his presence, heard his interior voice.

  She was angry and relieved, and swung wildly between the two.

  I could hear you, he said. I could always hear you. You were becoming too quiet. Too distant.

  So you decided to take over my body while it was—

  Dying?

  The word hung in the air between them; she shoved it aside. She had done what she needed to do, in Severn’s body. She needed to do the rest in her own.

  * * *

  It was cold. It was cold enough that pain had given way to numbness, and the numbness to something that felt like distant warmth. She knew this was not a good sign. Her hand, her right hand, was folded around the name as if to protect it. That had clearly been Severn’s choice, not hers. She knew it wasn’t necessary.

  With Severn’s help, with the bridge of a True Name between them, she could see the two rooms that were both real. She wondered if this was what Mandoran and Annarion dealt with all the time. If they could—with one set of eyes—see both rooms. Kaylin usually couldn’t. She could see one or the other, with help.

  She lifted her right hand, cupping the name; she turned. She turned in two bodies: her own and Severn’s. His arms were longer, and he was taller; the vantage through which he viewed the inert form on the slab was higher up. His reach was greater; she had to adjust it, to adjust her own leaden arm, to compensate for the stiffness of her native limbs and the way she wanted to fold them in around her chest to conserve body heat.

  Her head hurt. Her eyes watered—or maybe those were Severn’s eyes; she was almost certain tears of her own would be frozen.

  But she moved her hands—no, their hands—in unison. Severn steadied her because he was also there. She felt warmth that was not like heat as she brought the name to its future vessel. She didn’t place it, as she’d originally intended, in the center of the body’s chest. Instead, she carried it all the way to the third eye, the peak of the awkward triangle.

  Light was reflected in what now looked like an obsidian orb. Light, shape, form. The name did not shrink; it did not change shape. The eye did. It grew. Kaylin held the name steady, but that took effort. She wasn’t the only one who noticed; she could hear Tain’s sharp intake of breath.

  The eye expanded, darkness widening until it occupied most of the form’s forehead. The other two eyes remained closed, and the body remained motionless. Kaylin should have found it disturbing, but didn’t have the mental energy for it. Or for anything other than what she was doing: holding herself, and the single word, steady.

  She had thought what occupied the third eye socket was obsidian. As it expanded, she realized she’d been wrong. It was, or seemed to be, a very viscous liquid, like an oil. She turned her right hand over and let the name go.

  It fell slowly. Had the black liquid sprouted tendrils to grab it and drag it down, Kaylin would have found it less disturbing somehow. She watched as golden curves made contact with what had taken the form of an eye, and watched them sink. It seemed to go on forever.

  Forever, she didn’t have.

  She lowered Severn’s arm and set both of his hands against the lip of the exposed slab, as if by so doing she could shore up her own weight. But if they shared a vision, they didn’t actually occupy the same body; her own knees buckled.

  It didn’t matter. Standing was no longer required. The darkness that absorbed the name she had carried from the West March expanded as she watched.

  It took everything with it.

  Chapter 15

  “Kaylin.”

  The voice came from a distance. Kaylin had the futile hope that it would stay there.

  “Kaylin. Kaylin. I know you’re awake.” Mandoran’s voice grew louder. “Teela’s pissed off. It’d be a huge help if you opened your eyes.”

  “Is she pissed off at me?” Kaylin asked. As an experiment, she tried opening her eyes. They were sticky, and the light in the room was too damn bright.

  “I think she’s pissed off at Gilbert. And if it’s any incentive, Bellusdeo’s eyes are almost bloodred.”

  Kaylin sat up. This was not the smartest idea, but someone caught her before she regretted it too badly. Mandoran. The light in the room—which she forced herself to endure—was sunlight. She blink
ed, lifted her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Where am I?”

  “In Gilbert’s house. Upstairs.”

  “And there are no beds upstairs?”

  “Not in this room, no. Severn suggested a different room, but Gilbert didn’t think that was a good idea. Did I mention that Bellusdeo’s eyes are red?”

  “Yes.” Kaylin had been lying across a very ugly rug. It was a shade of green that would probably make anyone feel nauseous, and if that didn’t, it was fringed in bright orange. Orange. She looked at her hands. They were hers. They were no longer Severn’s.

  Severn.

  She tried to push herself off the ground and failed a second time. “I’m here,” Severn said, his voice coming from somewhere behind her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “He’s standing, and Teela’s not worried about him,” Mandoran replied.

  “He’s also capable of speaking for himself.”

  “When he can get a word in edgewise.” It was true that Severn wasn’t very chatty on most days. “Teela’s worry is like a big wall of silence.” He paused, lifting his head. “She’s coming over.”

  When Teela failed to materialize, Kaylin frowned.

  “Oh, she’s not here,” Mandoran said.

  “She left?”

  “You’ve been out for two days.”

  “Two days?”

  “The Dragon’s eyes didn’t start out red.”

  “Two days. Why didn’t you wake me? Marcus is going to tear my throat out!” Or worse, fire her.

  “You can field this one,” Mandoran said, over Kaylin’s head.

  “We attempted it,” Severn said.

  Kaylin digested that statement and assessed her physical condition. Her arms, when she lifted them, trembled. Her legs ached. Her mouth felt as if she’d spent the previous night drinking with Teela and Tain. And her stomach, not to be outdone, growled.

  Mandoran snickered. She glanced at him. His eyes were almost entirely green.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Now she’s pissed off at you.”

  “Thanks. A lot.”