Probably.
Then maybe you shouldn’t stay.
We are not faring well against one of these ancestors, he replied. If you do not succeed in whatever you now attempt, we will face two. I would not grieve at your death; it is not for your sake that I am willing to take this risk.
“I don’t want Ynpharion to die for this,” Kaylin told the Consort. She spoke, of course, with Ynpharion’s mouth.
“If you were willing to actually take control of him, Lord Kaylin, if you were willing to use the power of his name as any one of my people would, it would not be necessary; I would not have to trust Ynpharion; I would only have to trust you. But you are not immortal; he is. Even if you gave me your binding, blood oath, it would last only until you died. And then, Ynpharion—with this knowledge—would be free.”
“Then don’t give him the knowledge. I’ll work it out on my own.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
White brows rose. To Ynpharion, the Consort said, “You understand the difficulty Lord Kaylin poses?”
“I would not have believed that she would be difficult in this precise fashion had I not experienced it so completely. But yes, Lady. I am willing to take this risk. Lord Kaylin, however, does not consider it a risk; she feels that she is demanding— or rather presiding over—my execution.”
“She is naive; she is not a fool.”
Kaylin, for the first time since this fight had begun, attempted to force Ynpharion to move. To move toward the doors that lead out of the chamber and away from the secret that the Consort was willing to share—with her.
She cursed him in four different languages when he fought her for control of his body; pain blossomed behind her eyes. Had she not been crouching, she would have fallen. In the dark. Onto stone.
The Consort chuckled. “She is trying to force you to leave.”
“Yes,” Ynpharion replied, through gritted teeth.
“And you are fighting her for the chance to serve—and die.”
“Yes.”
“She does have that effect, even upon the Lord of the West March. Her touch is light, Ynpharion—but if she is determined, you will both suffer. I am not entirely certain that she will win—but I am not certain that she will not. With Kaylin, incentive changes everything.”
“She despises me,” he replied, his voice far less smooth than it had been.
“Yes. And you despise her. But she is a Hawk, and she has learned that even people she despises are worthy of both life and the protection the Laws grant.
“Lord Kaylin, let me make this easier for you. I can read this word.”
Kaylin froze.
Ynpharion, unhindered by the driving force of her will, turned once again to face the Consort. She felt his surprise. No, it was more than surprise; it was shock.
“Its form is not clear enough that I can read it with certainty; there is some chance that I am in error.”
“You can—you can read—”
“Yes. It is a truth that is never acknowledged. Were it, I might be master of every single child that I chose to waken. Every one. You understand why Ynpharion’s life is now in danger. Why I sent even the High Lord from this room.”
Kaylin did.
“Understand, then, that there is a reason that it is a difficult and arduous process to find someone who might replace me. Any man or woman of power can rule. But to wake the children, to give them life, to let them go without binding or constraining them—no. To see the names and the meanings, to choose them, and to return them to their parents without ever speaking the words that will bind them forever in servitude and slavery, is no simple thing for people of power.
“Not among our kin. I am not certain that even among yours it would be so simple—but your births and ours are not the same. You can stop attempting to assert your will, now. Ynpharion knows.”
“It has long been suspected.” Ynpharion’s voice was soft, hushed.
Does she know all your names?
Do not ask, Lord Kaylin.
“I do not know all the names,” the Consort continued, as if Kaylin had spoken. “To speak a name, to absorb the whole of its meanings and workings, is not the same—for the Consorts—as choosing one. It gives us intuition; it gives us hope. But if you are afraid that I might look at any of the children who have left my arms and speak their names, it is both a reasonable fear and unfounded.
“And Evarrim is correct. True words are not true names. There is a difference in their function. When words such as the words at...Helen’s...heart have served their purpose, they do not return to the Lake, wherein they might, in the fullness of time, wake to life again. I will tell you the story of this word.”
“Is it a name?”
“No. No, and yes.”
* * *
The ghost of a word rotated. Kaylin squinted, as if squinting would make the trailing strands of mist more solid. Ynpharion was predictably unimpressed.
“You have done this before,” the Consort continued.
I haven’t.
Ynpharion didn’t repeat her disagreement. What you can do with almost unforgiveable impunity, I cannot.
“I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have. If you had not, Ynpharion would not be in this room, and I would have no way to reach or speak with you. Ynpharion did not surrender his name to your keeping.”
It was true. He hadn’t. Kaylin had physically grabbed it. She had reached for it, in the strangely metaphysical interior of the Hallionne Orbaranne. She had held it in her hands, and she had spoken what she held without ever deliberating on how.
“This is not a true name—not in the Barrani sense.”
“Dragons have—” Kaylin bit back the words.
Ynpharion was shocked anyway. How is that you have managed to survive thus far?
“If you are correct, and you are standing in the heart of the Ashwood Tower, the Tower itself is—or was—willing to allow you entry. She will not work against you deliberately; she may have defenses that will act without conscious intent. You will not have time.”
“And if I—if I speak this word the way I spoke the other names—”
“Yes. If you speak this word in that fashion, you will invoke it. I do not think you will have control over what you have invoked—not in the way names give control—but you may have access to them. Or you may give the building itself access.”
“The building was damaged—Evarrim is right about that.”
The Consort lifted a hand. “No more. Listen, now.”
And Kaylin did.
* * *
She didn’t expect to hear singing, but the Consort sang, lifting her arms as she began. She adorned syllables with length and depth, elongating them and extending them. Kaylin had seen her do exactly this on their journey to the West March. She had, once, joined her in song at Nightshade’s behest. But he’d been singing harmony, and she’d been following it; his voice was much, much stronger than hers.
Pretty much anyone’s was; the best Kaylin could say of a good singing day was that she’d mostly stayed on tune. She understood what the Consort wanted. Reaching out— carefully—she cupped a word she could no longer see between the palms of her hands. To her relief, it was physically there. What she couldn’t see in this darkness, she could still touch.
She closed her eyes to listen; Ynpharion’s, however, remained open. The word in the mirror didn’t shift or change—but it wouldn’t. It was a Records capture of a moment in time. She wanted to know how the Barrani Arcanists—they had to be Arcanists—had found it at all, but didn’t ask; she concentrated, at last, on the song, and the way it made her feel.
Ynpharion was surprised—or outraged. He attempted to mostly keep this to himself. He kept this distaste for her very, very inadequate mimicry of the C
onsort’s song to himself as well, although she could sense its edges. This was the worst thing about having his name: no one wanted to feel self-conscious on the inside of their own head.
And she couldn’t afford it. The ground shook. The tremor beneath her legs told her it wasn’t the High Halls this time. She could hear Mandoran’s raised, furious voice: it held desperation, and a touch of fear.
What she heard, his enemy could hear.
And she needed to focus, now. On the song. On what the song said to her. On what she made of it on the inside of her thoughts. She needed, nasal, off-tune voice notwithstanding, to sing it. To sing it as if she meant it.
She hadn’t done this with Ynpharion. She hadn’t done it with Nightshade or Lirienne. Bellusdeo, and the recreation of her name hadn’t required it either, although she no longer even knew what Bellusdeo’s name was.
But the Consort had sung a similar song to the Hallionne, and it was the song of their awakening. Helen was a building. Helen was not, as the Hallionne had been, asleep—but the Hallionne Kariastos had been theoretically asleep when he’d lifted the water from the riverbed and taken the form of an elemental Dragon. Making dinner for a handful of guests was probably nothing in comparison.
Kaylin sang. Yes, her voice was thin and scratchy, and yes, it didn’t have the fullness of the Consort’s—but she was alone in a dark cave. No one was going to throw stones at her to get her to shut up. She had Mandoran’s voice for company, and it was dangerously intermittent. She hoped the small dragon was helping. Somehow.
And then she gave up that hope for the song that she now sang. It had words, but she knew that she would never understand them the way she understood any other language she’d been forced to learn. And it didn’t matter. She understood that this song was part plea, part pain, and part desire—not as Bertolle’s song had been; it was less earthy but, for Kaylin, more felt. She spoke to Helen; she sang to Helen. Because in some ways, Helen had been sleeping.
But Helen had chosen sleep.
Helen had destroyed parts of her physical self so that she could continue to sleep: so that she could live with Hasielle, and all the mortal tenants who had followed. Helen had remained sleeping—in the way the Hallionne did—while she waited for Kaylin to find her.
Kaylin needed a place, but she wanted a home. She had wanted a home since her mother’s death. She had found only one, and it was gone. Evanton had sent her to Helen. Helen had opened the door.
And she would be damned if some ancient, ancestral, bloody Immortal closed it in her face—because Helen didn’t want her to leave, and at the moment, Helen’s was the only voice that counted. Helen wanted from Kaylin what Kaylin wanted to give; Kaylin wanted what Helen offered.
The marks on Kaylin’s arms began to brighten. The marks on the ground didn’t. Kaylin sang. She caught syllables; she held notes. Into the extended ones, she let loose with the force of all the things she didn’t have words for, because she didn’t have words.
The single word that she had chosen to place at the heart of the rest grew warm against Kaylin’s palms. She held it as if it were Helen. Something this size and this shape she could carry—and had. She could protect it, if it was necessary.
But she couldn’t give Helen back what Helen herself had destroyed. She could probably empty her skin of marks, and they wouldn’t cover enough ground. Helen had chosen, long, long before Kaylin’s birth; what she was now had come from those choices, good or bad. Kaylin couldn’t judge her—how did one even start to judge a building?—and didn’t try.
This word was not the word the Consort sang. It was almost that word. It was as dense and finely written. But this word was of Kaylin, and this word was for Helen. Kaylin had songs of her own, half-remembered. Song made her emotional; it always had; you could say things in song that no one in their right mind would ever put into words—not unless they were four years old.
The word, however, was glowing faintly. It wasn’t gold—it was a pale gray, which was one of the colors the marks on Kaylin’s skin often took.
Give the Lady my thanks, Kaylin told Ynpharion. I think—I think I can handle it from here on.
Handle it quickly, was his curt reply. He withdrew, or allowed Kaylin to withdraw. He really didn’t enjoy being in contact with her. She didn’t blame him. Then again, she didn’t, as he pointed out, have time.
* * *
The songs she finished with were not songs she would have sung had anyone but a child been present. No one else was here. This room—this vast cavern—was Helen’s, and if Helen slept here, if she slept as buildings slept—this was the equivalent of the small rooms that foundlings occupied in Marrin’s halls.
Kaylin sang. She sang softly, because that was how these songs were always sung. It didn’t matter if the parent—or guardian, in Marrin’s case—was terrified and facing imminent death; the only fears that leaked into these songs were the quiet, unspoken fears for the child. Fear of what the future held. Kaylin could still remember—dimly—the feel of her mother’s arms and the sound of her voice.
When she offered these songs in the Foundling Hall, she offered comfort, because it’s what she’d taken—and still took—from the memories. She offered Helen, at the end of the Consort’s song, this song of her own; the thunder and strength of Kaylin’s attempt at the Barrani voice dwindling—but not dying—into the end of the day. Into Elantran words and a vocal range that anyone who could speak could manage.
But that was a lie: it wasn’t a song of her own. It was a song her mother had sung. And a song that her mother’s mother had sung to her, when she had—impossible though it had been to believe at the time—been a child herself. There was history, in this song. It wasn’t ancient; it didn’t come from a time when gods—if that’s what they were—walked the world. It wasn’t a song to waken sentient buildings to prepare them for war. It was a quiet song. A child’s song.
But she remembered that the Hallionne had sung to the Consort—and that song, in the end, had been very like the one she sang now.
She even lifted the rune that she had placed as she sang, forgetting—for just one minute—that it was not an infant, not an orphan, not a child abandoned on the steps of the Foundling Hall.
The gray light began to pale as it grew brighter. It passed from ash-gray to brilliant white, and from that almost blinding white to blue—blue edged in the gold that the marks on the floor had originally shed.
The cavern remained dark; the light from this single word illuminated only Kaylin and the stone directly beneath her. The ground shook.
Any time you want to do something, Kaylin! Mandoran shouted. He wasn’t, of course, in this room. She didn’t hear his voice as she heard Ynpharion’s, or any of the voices that she knew because of a true name; she heard it as if he were standing in the vicinity of her shoulder. And shouting. In her ear.
She resisted the urge to shout back; she was certain her voice wouldn’t reach beyond the cavern.
Squawk.
“All right, all right, I’m coming.”
One word. One word at the heart of a building that had once been a Tower. Helen had made choices that Tara had not. She had learned to live; she had learned to become home to people very like Kaylin in what they were searching for. Maybe she couldn’t go back. Given the damage she’d done to the runes on the outer periphery of this giant circle, there were things she could no longer do. Kaylin wasn’t certain what those things had been.
But it didn’t matter. This was Helen as she was. And this Helen, unlike the original one, had offered Kaylin something she desperately wanted.
She understood Tiamaris, she thought, although she knew her understanding was a tiny, tiny echo of his—a whisper in comparison to Dragon roar. She wanted a home that was hers. And she wanted to be able to protect her home. She wasn’t doing this out of a misplaced sense of responsibility—or w
orse, guilt. If she had to make a final stand—for any reason—this is where she wanted to do it.
Home had once been her mother. If her mother moved, home moved with her; she was always at its heart. And maybe Kaylin had been looking for a mother, in some ways, all these years. She was twenty. She was almost twenty-one. She was old enough to have children of her own.
Ynpharion was both astonished and disgusted at the very idea. In his opinion—his elderly, condescending opinion—Kaylin was a child. Children did raise children.
She knew she could push him out; she could wall herself off. She was too surprised at the intrusion of his thoughts to immediately lash out. He was listening. He was better at listening than Kaylin was.
You do not guard yourself against displays of weakness.
You’re wrong, Kaylin told him. She drew the single word away from the cradle she’d made of her arms. I do. But I don’t consider this weakness.
She set the rune down, afraid that its new light would once again gutter. It didn’t.
Kaylin—idiot!—get out of there! Mandoran shouted. The ground shook; she wasn’t certain, given the timing, that it wasn’t because of the force of his voice—he could have been a bloody Dragon, he was so damned loud.
And there was really only one thing to do when a Dragon was screaming orders in your ear: obey. Her legs were already in motion before thought could catch up; she was racing—in the dark—toward the nearest wall. Which she couldn’t see.
The farther away she got from the center of the room, the more the ground trembled. She was afraid, for a moment, that large chunks of ceiling that she couldn’t see would crush her. The floors had curved slightly in toward the center—but they’d been smooth; there had been nothing to trip on, and nothing that required coordinated jumping to clear. She hoped. She hadn’t really bothered to take a good look at any part of the cavern that hadn’t once contained engraved words.
She reached wall, walking the last few yards. When her palm was against rock, she turned toward the one source of light in the cavern; the gentle glow of her own marks had faded while she’d sung.
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