“So it’s magic.”
He frowned. “You have a way of robbing words of their splendor,” he told her.
“If I had a choice—” I’d rob the Castle of splendor, as well. Who wants a home where the rooms change and the front door is an invitation to nausea? But she thought better of her choice of words because there was something about the Castle that suggested intelligence—and most intelligent beings could be rather easily offended by practical suggestions, in Kaylin’s experience.
“In general, you don’t,” was the quiet reply. Lord Nightshade had navigated one forbidding face of the Castle as he spoke. Kaylin reached out every so often to touch the seams between huge slabs of worn stone, as if seeking the reassurance of weakness. She couldn’t actually imagine that there was another way in—but perhaps the designers of the Castle had left another way out.
When Nightshade stopped, he stopped a fair distance from the walls, by the side of a well. It was old and disused; there was a pump arm that was more rust than metal, and if there had ever been a bucket on the chain that hung slack—and rusted over—it had long since decayed.
She expected him to keep moving.
He clearly expected her to stop. She did, because he was leading, and following from the front had never worked all that well for her.
But when he didn’t speak or start walking again, she wilted. “This?” she asked, pointing at the well.
“This.”
She looked down. It was very, very dark. Dusk didn’t lessen the shadows, but Kaylin had a suspicion that full noon wouldn’t make much of a dent in them, either. “I don’t suppose you brought a lamp?”
“No.”
Neither had she. She leaned over, balancing her weight on stone that looked as if it should crumble. It didn’t. Along the sides of the well were rungs that had seen better days—probably the same days the pump had. She lost sight of them to darkness. “I was going to ask you if I could use the back way instead of the front one,” she told Nightshade as she swung her feet over the well’s lip.
“You may not have the same desire once you’ve entered the back way.”
“I don’t have the desire now, and I haven’t even started.” She pivoted and placed her feet on the closest rung, slowly surrendering to gravity. The rung held. She grimaced, and stepped down, and down again, until the rungs carried all of her weight. The rust made the bars rough and patchy, as if some metalworker had thought to mimic tree bark. Hanging on the rungs, she looked up at the large circle stone made. Beyond it, Nightshade was watching. “You’re going to follow me?
In response he lifted a hand almost carelessly, upending his palm just above her. Fire flared almost white. It began to descend slowly, until it was just below Kaylin’s feet. Light, she thought. She felt absurdly grateful.
“In a manner of speaking. The Castle cannot keep me out,” he added. “Nor would it seek to try. And where you go, I am not entirely certain I can follow.”
Gratitude was so capricious. “This is like the Tower in the High Halls, isn’t it?”
“Very good, Kaylin. Possibly the most intelligent question you’ve asked about the Castle. It is like and unlike the Tower in the High Halls. Had you not passed the test of those Halls, I would not now allow you to take the risk you are taking.
“I am not even certain that you could enter, were that the case. But you have surprised my former kinsmen. Surprise me now.”
“And if I don’t?”
He didn’t answer.
This is stupid, she thought, stepping down again. This is completely stupid. Why in the hells am I even trying so hard to get into the damn Castle?
Because there wasn’t a good answer—hells, she’d have settled for a bad one—she kept on going. The light was welcome at least twice—because at least twice, the rungs had fallen free, leaving a gap that might have killed her otherwise. She wasn’t tall, but she stretched, balancing her weight entirely with her hands while her feet struggled for purchase.
The darkness above her, however, grew until she could no longer make out the mouth of the well. Could no longer see Nightshade.
She didn’t trust him. She didn’t like him. But she would have felt better had he accompanied her, because the Castle was his in some way, and she couldn’t quite believe that he would knowingly kill her.
She could, however, believe that she could die here.
Everything, she thought, gritting her teeth in frustration, everything was a test of some kind. The Barrani knew no other way. You could prove yourself worthy, or you could fail.
There were whole days where even the concept of proving herself worthy was tiring. It was a pointless test. When she helped the midwives, it was different. It was the best fight she knew: she faced death, and she won. The fact that it was someone else’s death—usually a stranger’s—didn’t change the fact. In some ways, it made it stronger.
She stopped her downward crawl.
Was this really any different?
The Castle had denied her because she still carried something that she couldn’t even see, let alone touch. It was linked to water. And somehow, the water was now linked to Donalan Idis, the man who almost certainly held a captive Tha’alani child. He was an Arcanist, which in Kaylin’s vocabulary was just another synonym for death.
She wanted to talk to Nightshade.
She wanted to know what change the Castle had sensed.
Neither of these were good enough reason to be here, clinging to the side of a well that hadn’t seen water in decades, by the look of it. But the best thing that Marcus had ever taught her—perhaps because it was something she wanted to hear—was to trust her instincts.
The middle of a fight, he used to say, was not the time to worry about the nicety of your stance. You fought as well as you could, you hoped that it was enough—if you had time for even that much thought. You want to survive, he’d told her. Trust your instincts. Don’t second-guess them until the fight is over.
Then you can dissect your performance to your heart’s content.
What if I don’t remember enough of it?
Trust me—you come close to death, you’ll remember how you stepped out of its way.
He’d been right, of course. Marcus was almost never wrong. Kaylin took a deep breath. And then, before she could second-guess herself, she let go.
CHAPTER 16
It was a long drop. However, since she had no wings—and if she could have corrected one birth defect, it would have been the one that made her human, not Aerian—long was relatively fast. She had no time to regret her decision; no time to second-guess what had come so instinctively to her. She had time to register falling as a very unpleasant sensation that implied that her stomach had stayed put when everything else had dropped—but even that didn’t last very long; not even as long as the darkness did. Nightshade’s gift of light apparently had to descend the hard way; gravity didn’t mean much to it.
But if she had managed to shock Nightshade, he gave no sign of it at all—and she would have felt it, because she wanted to. So much for being grown-up.
What she felt instead was water.
Water surged up to meet her as she plummeted, feet-first, into what was obviously a disoriented tunnel. But the water was strange. It was both clear and luminescent; she could see its shape. It was a giant hand, unadorned by rings, its palm wider and flatter than the length of spray that served as fingers. It was not a fist, and she felt an absurd sense of gratitude as she passed into the mound of its palm.
It gave with her weight—it could hardly do anything else—but it had moved up to meet her in midfall, and it also began to drop, matching its speed to hers, until she could land in its center and notice that it was water, and not ground. Clint, on one of his early flights with Kaylin wrapped snugly in his arms, had made clear that water, from the height Aerians chose to fly at, was not a lot more forgiving than stone when it came to breakable things—like bones, for instance. Clint was always gentle; he had threatened
to drop her when she’d made it clear she didn’t believe him, but he had never actually done it.
Now, years later, she believed him—but the days when she could play with his flight feathers and beg him to carry her over the city were almost gone. She missed them; that was the truth. She missed what he would willingly do for her orphans in the Foundling Halls. She had never thought it would be possible to miss being a child.
But if she had stayed young, she could not be here, doing what she was doing: trying to save the life of a child.
And that was why she was here, and if she had forgotten it for even a minute, she clung to the certain knowledge as fingers of liquid wrapped themselves around her tightly and bore her down.
She expected that they would come to rest near land, and in that, she wasn’t mistaken. But she could see land—such as it was, it was such a pathetic patch of dirt—only because the water shed light; shed it and contained it. She could push her arm through the liquid; she could certainly push her head through it, because breathing was kind of important, and it was the first thing she made certain she could do.
But the water was content, for a time, to hold her, and while it was cool, it was pleasantly cool. The days this time of year were anything but.
It had to be water, she thought, as she lifted a hand to her unadorned throat. The essence of water.
You could live without food for a lot longer than you could live without water. You couldn’t live at all without water, according to the midwives. It was in water that you were conceived, in water that you grew, and only when water broke did you stand a decent chance of being born and surviving the experience.
But you couldn’t breathe water; you could easily drown in it; you could fall into it and break your neck.
Yes, the water said.
She startled and jumped, sending little eddies through the hand that held her. “Who said that?”
You already know.
And she did, too. But if her life with the Hawks had prepared her for all sorts of grim magic—and give the frosty, stiff-necked old teachers this much, it had—it hadn’t prepared her for this. Her whole body vibrated with the syllables.
“You can talk.”
Yes.
“Could you always talk?”
Not in this way, Kaylin Neya. And were you not Chosen, never to you.
Kaylin nodded.
You have come late to this game, the water added.
“I don’t generally play games.”
No.
She started to say something, thought the better of it. The hand that held her had joined itself to the current of a river that ran in a narrow groove. Rock lip could be seen on either side, proof that the river’s passage had slowly worn away stone. Kaylin didn’t particularly want to be part of the grit that helped to further wear stone down, but the water had other plans for her; she stayed in the middle of the current, occasionally jolting up or down as the riverbed did. “I have a question,” she said as she watched the darkness go by.
The silence was, as they say, deafening. So much for conversation. Kaylin, on the other hand, wasn’t one to let silence go by unhindered.
“If I came late to the game, what have I missed?”
But like so many people she could privately rail against, it seemed content to offer criticism without actually offering any useful advice.
Oh, what the hells.
“Do I look fat in this?”
As far as castles went, the one Nightshade called home was definitely less ornate than most. Big caverns and scant light usually had that effect. The river in which she’d been traveling as if it were some sort of bumpy, elemental carriage, came at last to a stop in what was essentially a dingy lake. The water still glowed, and the fleet shape of moving shadows far below her feet told Kaylin that some things shunned light. The fact that they weren’t comfortingly small shapes made her a little uneasy, but only a little; although nothing she touched seemed solid, she didn’t drop. And given that she was wearing armor, she should have.
But natural laws and magic seldom coincided. It seemed to Kaylin that magic was one way of breaking all natural law. Maybe that was why she, Hawk at heart, hated magic so much. It couldn’t be pinned down, and analysis was so much guesswork. How could something be just a tool—as the Hawklord often tried to call magic—when it was so unpredictable and wild?
It is not just a tool, a voice said.
And Kaylin knew, hearing it, that she had just discovered the essence of water.
But the essence of water didn’t speak as water, and in the faint light cast by liquid, Kaylin could see where the river butted up against the smoothed flat of damp rock. Could see, as she squinted, that above that damp patch of solid ground—ground that she was slowly approaching—something stood, arms at rest, waiting for her to arrive. As if it had always waited, would always wait.
She saw robes that were at once all colors she had ever seen, and at the same time, none; saw light in those colors that faded and blended, one into the other. Rainbows were like this, but rainbows were transparent, thin, and easily lost to the turn of the head, the passing whim of cloud.
And this was different. The light and color had taken the shape of robes, and those robes fell, like yards of insanely expensive fabric, from slender shoulders, blanketing cold, dark rock, and turning it, for a moment, into something that signified all of the earth, its hidden diamonds, its endless crevices.
Hair trailed down the back of these odd robes, and the hair, unlike the robes themselves, was as dark as the water the Hawklord said lay at the bottom of the seas in the distance. Dark—not black, not blue-black of midnight, but deeper than that.
Staring ahead, Kaylin barely registered the fact that what was now beneath her feet was solid rock; that the water that had caught her in her graceless fall and had carried her here like some enchanted boat, had now fallen away, joining again the rapids of the underground river.
And when this being turned, light resolved itself into a face that Kaylin realized she had expected to see. Not consciously, never that—this was magic, after all, and magic had its own imperative, its own wild logic.
The girl who had spoken her name what felt like years ago, in the garden of a man known as the Keeper, met her gaze and held it until Kaylin looked away.
Had to look away, there was so much in those silent, dark, wide eyes.
“Kaylin,” she said, and lifted a translucent hand, as if she were a ghost.
As if, Kaylin thought, she had already failed her, and this was all that was left.
She should have been angry. She knew she should have been angry. All her fear, all the silent terror, the pressure of the need to rescue some helpless child—it had all been wasted to a…a trick. She could no more rescue this girl than she could rescue all the dead children in the fiefs another lifetime ago; could no more rescue her than she could rescue the children who were dying even now, unable to call for help, unheard.
And yet…And yet…
She took a step forward toward the girl, whose eyes were dark and bruised, and as she did, she realized that the light she had thought emanated from water came, instead, from the hollow of her own throat. What lay there beneath her fingers—the fingers raised almost involuntarily—was the pendant she had received as a burden from the ghost of a Dragon in the Imperial Archives. It was real, here. That should have told her something.
“Yes,” the girl replied, in the same soft voice that had spoken her name. “You can see me because you wear the pendant. If you were wiser, you would be able to use it, and possibly to use it against me. I do not know.
“I remember the Guardian,” she added, never looking away from Kaylin’s face, although Kaylin frequently looked away, for seconds at a time, from hers. “I remember his voice. The ripple of it carries still.”
“You killed him,” Kaylin said bitterly.
“Yes. I was younger then,” she added, as if that made any sense.
“You’re not a child,�
� Kaylin snapped, letting anger speak for her, because otherwise, she had no words. “Children don’t kill.”
“Children can’t kill. They are too weak. Your children,” she added. “And I…was…not as I am now. I was aware,” she added. “But awareness…It was a small eddy in a large current. I was young,” she said again. “And also old, Kaylin.”
“You look like a child now.”
“I am not.”
“You choose to look—”
“You perceive,” the soft voice said. “It is your gift.”
“And the Dragon’s?” She touched the pendant again.
“He was strong. He called you, Kaylin.”
“He called a few thousand years too early.”
“But you came.”
“He was dead. I came late.”
“He was dead, but he did not surrender his burden, and because he did not, the waters subsided in time.”
“Did you want him dead?”
“No.”
“But you killed him.”
“Yes.”
“And the city—”
“Yes.” And the water lifted its hands to its face, and Kaylin surrendered then: she saw a young, frightened girl, and no matter how much her inner voice screamed in outrage, she could see nothing else. And maybe, she thought, as she walked toward the girl, if she were honest, it was because she didn’t want to.
She reached out for the girl with her arms, and drew her into their circle.
And the light at the base of her neck became fire, and the shadows—and Kaylin’s awareness—were burned away in an instant. She lost sight of the water, the cavern, the light—and last, lost hold of herself, sinking into a different kind of depth.
Remembering what Evanton had told her before she surrendered: Water is deep.
She had dared currents before, and would again—but they had been water, and the currents now…were the memories of a different life. It swallowed her whole.
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