Cast in Sorrow

Chapter 18

“What,” Teela said, when Kaylin began to move again, “do you recognize?”

“It’s probably nothing,” Kaylin replied.

“I cannot believe that you expect me to bare my figurative soul when you cannot even bring yourself to answer the most obvious of questions. If you are going to demur, at least learn to lie with some competence; give me the option of feeling less insulted.” She batted the top of Kaylin’s head.

“Sorry. I don’t want to think about it because I’m hoping I’m dead wrong.”

“And what are the odds against that?”

“Generally pretty high. Just—not here.”

“Exactly. What do you recognize?”

“When I woke the Consort the first time—after she absorbed the nightmares—I spent a lot of time floating around a sky full of stupid words. I mean, they were in theory my words because they’re all over my skin—but you know, larger and floating in the sky. I knew I had to choose one mark.”

“Knowing you, I’m surprised you managed to do it.”

Kaylin reddened. “I took two.”

“Ah. That sounds more realistic.”

“When I had them, the small dragon kind of dived. Toward a pit. It looked small. It wasn’t. It was huge. It was—” She frowned. “I think, if you could take the sides of the pit and flatten them, they’d be much larger than Elantra.”

“So you’re saying this pit is a lot farther away than it looks.”

“I’m saying I really, really, really don’t want this pit and that one to be the same, because I don’t have wings in reality, and I can’t fly.”

“This is not reality, in case you were wondering. It is—think of it as the inside of a Hallionne’s heart. I believe you did spend some time at the heart of Bertolle. You will find, if it is necessary, that you will either be able to fly, or I will.” She frowned. “What else are you not telling me?”

“The pit is where I saw them,” Kaylin whispered.

Teela did not pretend to misunderstand her.

“I think—I’m sure—I know who Sedarias was. And this isn’t really getting us to water—” Kaylin fell silent.

“Let me guess,” Teela said. “There was a fountain there.”

Kaylin nodded. “The Consort was by the fountain. She was—she was singing to it, the way she sang to Kariastos and Bertolle and Orbaranne.” She bit her lip and stopped moving.

“Kitling—”

“I saw you there. You were there. But—you were made of ice, where they were made of glass—and Teela—”

“Don’t feel compelled to share the rest; I no longer require it.”

“What I don’t understand is, what was Iberrienne trying to do to Orbaranne? I don’t think he meant to just destroy her—or rather, he wanted something from the process.”

“That is not the only thing you don’t understand.”

“Well, no. But—if Iberrienne was somehow doing it because of Eddorian, he was doing what the lost children want. What do they want, Teela?”

“This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t know. They don’t want what I want, because, Kaylin, I have the name I was born for.”

“It’s got to be something to do with names. With True Words. I don’t get it.” Kaylin ground her teeth.

“You are such a Hawk.” It was said with amusement, affection, and a touch of frustration.

Teela slid an arm around Kaylin’s shoulders and began to drag her toward the distant pit. It made Kaylin feel young again, but without the resentment and the insecurity. Her feet left a short trail in the dirt.

The pit was not a cavernous, flattened, cylindrical city—which was both a relief and a disappointment. It was much larger than it had looked at a distance, but it wasn’t larger across than the city in which Kaylin made her living. It was, on the other hand, pretty bloody dark, and as it had no architectural enhancements that Kaylin could see; there weren’t convenient stairs leading down.

“Is this where we’re supposed to be, do you think?”

Teela gave her A Look.

“Sorry.” She walked to the edge of the pit.

“You’ll be careful, right?” Teela said, joining her. Neither of the two Hawks were particularly height sensitive; they could hug the edge of the pit in relative safety.

“I’m always careful.”

“I cannot believe the things you can say with a perfectly straight face. That was serious, wasn’t it?”

Short of jumping, there didn’t seem to be a way down, and neither of the Hawks carried rope. “You know—if this is the green’s attempt to have a conversation, I wish it’d just use words, like the rest of us.”

“You really, really don’t,” was Teela’s grim reply. “Think before you speak.”

Kaylin glanced at the sky. “Please tell me those are not clouds.”

“I could, but you frequently complain when you think I’m lying.”

“Did they just roll in when I said—”

“You know, kitling, you’ve seen a lot of the noncorporeal world. You’ve walked the outlands. You’ve walked the between. You’ve seen the heart of the Hallionne. Given the number of years you can actually expect to live—on average, and ignoring your total lack of basic caution—you’ve seen more than many of the Barrani who call the Vale home.

“Why do you still expect things to make sense?”

The storm clouds did not shed rain. They did shed a lot of lightning, and the resultant thunder was almost a physical sensation, it was so damn loud.

Lightning struck the ground ten yards in front of Teela.

“Things are going to get ugly,” Teela said without looking back at Kaylin, who came to stand beside her.

“Why?”

“Can you not see them?”

Kaylin squinted as lightning changed the color of the sky. “See what?”

“The nightmares,” she replied. “The nightmares of Alsanis.”

The thing Kaylin hated most about Hallionne space or Tower space was this: people saw different things. They walked in different versions of reality. What Teela saw, Kaylin couldn’t see. Lightning, yes. Clouds. Thunder. But not the nightmares. She’d seen what the nightmares did to the Consort, and she had no doubt at all that they could do the same—or worse—to Teela.

“How many?”

“Maybe a dozen,” Teela replied, her face still turned toward the sky. “They’re moving so quickly it’s hard to count them.”

“Are they heading this way?”

The Barrani Hawk’s smile was grim. Grim and resigned. “Yes.”

Kaylin closed her eyes. She meant to open them, but the moment her eyes were closed, the lightning became insignificant, as did the pit; it was the thunder she heard. And the thunder had a voice. It spoke words. They weren’t words that she understood, not immediately—but she could pick out the rumble of deeply roared syllables.

The dreams of Alsanis spoke what Kaylin heard as Elantran. Not that many of their words made solid sense—but they could speak. They had never spoken like this. The thunder’s voice was a roar of pain. Of pain, of anger, of loss, of denial. It wasn’t one voice; it was many.

Many, she thought. The nightmares of Alsanis had never spoken aloud, not in a way that Kaylin could hear. “Teela!”

“I’m here.”

“Can you hear them? Can you hear what they’re saying?”

Silence. Well, on Teela’s part; the thunder didn’t stop.

“Yes, kitling.”

“Do you understand it?”

“Yes.”

Kaylin’s eyes flew open. Teela had lifted her hands to the sky. Kaylin grabbed the left one and yanked it down to her side, which took real effort; mortal strength was not a match for Barrani strength—not when the Barrani was determined. “What are you doing?”

Teela looked down at Kaylin, and Kaylin saw that her eyes were now a deep purple, tinged with the blue that spoke of either anger or fear. “What I should have done, kitling. What I should have done years ago.”

“This is not what you should have done!”

“I tried. As harmoniste, I tried to call their names. I tried to insert them into the story I was given.”

“What story?” Kaylin shouted. “What story were you given?”

“Does it matter? I couldn’t hold the whole of it. I could only barely choose something that made sense. Some path out of the chaos. But what I wanted was to tell the story of the lost. To call them back, somehow.”

Kaylin tried to yank Teela’s right arm down. She was now afraid because she still couldn’t see the nightmares. She could hear the thunder’s voice, but she was no longer certain that the thunder and the nightmares were one.

“I tried, kitling. But the truth is, I never left this place.”

“Yes, you did. You left it, you left it whole, you came back to Elantra. You came to the Hawks, Teela—you came—”

“To you?”

“To me.”

Teela’s eyes were still purple. She looked gaunt. And young, Kaylin thought. She looked young. Teela lifted her arms again. “What you did for the Consort, you cannot do for me. You cannot see what I see, not here.”

“Let me try!”

Teela shook her head. “You will, kitling. You are harmoniste. Nightshade is Teller. Perhaps you will hear what I couldn’t hear. Perhaps your mortality will allow you to see clearly what I could not see.” She staggered; her hands clenched in fists.

Kaylin placed one hand on the back of Teela’s neck. At any other time, she wouldn’t have dared; Teela, like the rest of the Barrani, had a loathing of healers that skirted the edge of murderous rage. What she couldn’t see, she couldn’t feel—but she hadn’t attempted to heal the Consort when the nightmares had landed.

Teela staggered again.

“Teela! Teela!”

“I wanted to give them peace. I wanted to save some part of them. I wanted—” Teela shook her head, staggering again, her arms falling slowly, as if she could no longer bear their weight. “Remember this, kitling: there is no way back. There is no way out but through.”

“This isn’t the time for stupid philosophy—Teela!”

Teela shuddered, and Kaylin knew that she would not stop. The nightmares that Kaylin couldn’t see were the only thing that mattered here.

“No,” Teela said, her voice a whisper. “But it’s me, kitling, or it’s you. The nightmares of the Hallionne visit someone when they choose to fly.”

The marks on Kaylin’s arms were gray and flat. Nothing about this storm brought them to life. Nothing about Kaylin’s growing desperation did, either. When Teela fell to her knees, Kaylin dropped to the ground beside her, hand still attached to the back of her neck. But there was nothing physically wrong with Teela; nothing that could be healed.

Kaylin had always thought—had always believed—that if she had been there, if she had been at her home the night of the worst loss she had ever endured, she could have done something. Something. Anything. But there was nothing she could do here. Whatever it was that attacked Teela, she couldn’t see it, couldn’t fight it. She tried. She tried to place the backs of her hands over Teela’s shuddering palms; she tried to catch the nightmares before they touched her.

But she couldn’t. They didn’t touch her. They didn’t suddenly become visible, and they didn’t become the eagles the Barrani called dreams. She saw Teela’s face lose all color; only her eyes retained any—and it was purple, the color that Kaylin had almost never seen. There was no green in them; nothing that spoke of happiness or peace.

Kaylin opened her eyes. She opened her eyes to the gray-green sky and the pit, and she understood that the pit itself had taken the rough shape and outline of a word—a word whose elements had somehow been obliterated, but in which the ground had retained a sense of what had once occupied it.

She caught Teela in her arms, tightened them.

“What have I told you about crying?” Teela whispered.

Kaylin told her what she could, in Leontine. “I don’t care about the green. I don’t care about Alsanis, either. I don’t care about the lost children—I’m sorry, I don’t. I care about you.” She sucked in air that felt heavy and electric—and dry. “We’re somehow in Alsanis, aren’t we? Somehow? We’re attached to the Hallionne.

“And this is not where we belong.”

“Kitling—”

Kaylin raised both her face and her voice, and she shouted into and above the thunder. “We ask for and accept the judgment of the green!”

The ground fell out from beneath her. She tightened her arms around Teela and held on for all she was worth.

Really, as drops went, it wasn’t terrible. But holding on to someone who was, for all intents and purposes, deadweight made negotiating a safe landing impossible.

“You,” Teela said—because she was still conscious, somehow, “are an idiot.”

“Whatever.” Kaylin was afraid, for one long moment, to let go.

“Oh, I’m here,” Teela told her grimly. “I’m glad you think that breathing is optional.”

Kaylin let go. Her arms, however, had stiffened, and her hands were shaking as she tried to pry her fingers off Teela.

“You cannot leave well enough alone, can you?”

“It wasn’t bloody well enough, okay?” Kaylin got to her feet. She was shaking, and she thought she might never stop. Teela’s color hadn’t improved any. “How many?”

“Pardon?”

“How many did you absorb?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Don’t give me that look. If you want to commit suicide, you’re going to have to do it when I’m not standing right behind you. Here.” She put an arm around Teela’s back, shoving herself under the Barrani’s left arm and levering them both off the ground. “I don’t know how long the path from here is, but we need to walk it. If we have to walk it in the dark, fine. We’ll do that.”

“Remind me to strangle Nightshade if we somehow manage to survive this.” Light flared in the tunnel. It was a familiar tunnel, of rough rock, low ceilings, and unpredictable widths. “You’re certain that your presence here—so soon after you got ejected—is not going to anger the green?”

“No.”

“Do you understand the reason such an escape is so seldom used?”

“Yes.”

“Then—”

“Are we dead?”

“Kitling.”

“Are you?”

“Demonstrably not.”

“Then we’ll deal. One step at a time.” She wanted to scream at Teela. Or swear. She contented herself with a few Leontine phrases, but her heart wasn’t in them and they sounded pathetic, even to her ears.

“You’re shaking.”

Kaylin said, “So are you.”

Teela chuckled. “We make quite the pair, don’t we?”

Kaylin didn’t reply.

The tunnels were the tunnels that Kaylin remembered, which was good. The first branch, on the other hand, reminded her that this was like a coin toss on which your whole life depended—which was bad.

“No, I don’t know which way to go,” Kaylin said, before Teela could insert a sarcastic comment. “Save your breath.” She meant it, too. Teela’s breathing was labored. Teela, who could sprint across the damn city and back without breaking a sweat. “If you want a say, stay awake.”

“You understand that we’re judged in entirely different ways by the green, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You may accept the green’s judgment. You may leave. What if the green doesn’t choose to release me?”

“I’m not leaving without you.”

Teela laughed. “I wish you could have met them,” she whispered.

“Given Barrani attitudes toward mortals at the time, I’m not sure it would have worked out well—for me.”

“There is that. But I think you would have liked them. Well, maybe not Sedarias, not immediately.” She closed her eyes. Opened them, but not all the way. “Allaron would have liked you. He liked small, helpless creatures. Of all of the candidates, he was the most inexplicable.”

“What do you mean?” She knew, in cases like this, it was important to keep a person talking.

“Most of my kin are of a height, as you’ve complained about on any number of occasions. We are of a height, of a general build, our weight is roughly the same. There is far less variance among my kin than there is among yours.”

“He was really tall, right?”

“Yes.”

Kaylin nodded. “I think he was the second statue. But the thing about the statues—to me—is that they all looked very individual. Most of the Barrani look the same, at least on the surface. It’s like you’re twins, except, you know, more numerous.”

“Allaron was large. He was stronger than most of the children his age. He was capable of astonishing feats of strength—but he was often quiet. Of the twelve of us, he was the most reticent. He would have liked you. He wouldn’t even have complained much. You don’t see our young,” she added. “The children are very seldom raised in the city; they are kept away from the High Court until they are of an age where they might survive it.”

“You were—”

“Yes. I was raised at Court. My father was a very powerful man; not for my safety would he deny himself the strategic arrangement of his place at Court. I spent some time in the West March with my mother, and he allowed it—at the beginning.

“But not at the end. He distrusted the Vale; he found the people of the West March rustic. None of us, once the plans were set in motion, were allowed to spend our childhoods in the more traditional environments. We were meant to excel in all things. We began our training early, and we were kept at it.

“Allaron was, as I said, strong. But all of his ferocity was in appearance. My father despised him.”

“His own father?”

“His own father hoped that exposure to the rest of us would toughen his son up. I believe that’s how mortals would express it.” Teela closed her eyes again, and this time, the light that made the path navigable faltered. “Which way?”

“Right.”

“The other right?”

Kaylin cursed. “Fine, left, then.”

“Terrano had a sense of humor that you might have appreciated. He was—what is the Elantran word again? Clown?”

“A clown, but yes.”

“He laughed a lot. He found things constantly delightful or amusing. Sedarias found Terrano very difficult to deal with—she had less of a sense of humor than Tiamaris.”

“Did he have the typical Barrani sense of humor?”

“He had not yet developed the more refined edges, but he was Barrani.”

“What did Terrano say to you?”

“They regret leaving me behind. It confused them, I think. They were changed. I was not. They felt that they had betrayed me, in some fashion, by abandoning me.” She grimaced. “And I felt that I had done the same.”

“You didn’t—”

“My mother died in the greenheart. My father and his kin killed so many there.” She closed her eyes again, and this time, it took her a lot longer to open them. “Blood is forbidden in the heart of the green.”

Kaylin nodded.

“Do you understand why?”

“No, but I can make an educated guess.”

Teela had the strength to snort, although her breathing continued to be labored. “The reason it’s forbidden is that the will of the dying, expressed through blood, has power in the green. It isn’t about a random life—it’s about your own life. People who are unwilling sacrifices don’t generally have the welfare of the green or its people at heart.”

“Do I want to know how that was learned?”

“Probably not.”

“Your mother died—”

“Yes. My mother, who had the blood of the Wardens in her veins. My mother, who could speak with Alsanis, who was welcomed—always—into his heart. She bled to death on the green. She asked for only one thing, kitling. Only one. That I be preserved. That I be unchanged, untransformed; that I remained myself.

“She was not the only person who died that day. The will of the others was harder, harsher; they wanted to preserve the green against the depredations of outsiders and people who did not live in—and of—it.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard their dying thoughts. I heard their dying wishes. I heard the fear they felt—for us—when we were taken to the greenheart. I heard the hope that the recitation would pass without altering us; we were too young, too unformed. The Vale had no ambitions for us.

“And I heard our parents. We all did. I heard what they wanted. I heard what they desired. I heard their contempt for everything in the green except its power.

“We knew, by that point,” she added. Her eyes were closed. Kaylin was afraid she wouldn’t open them again. “We knew what the Warden and the Guardian feared. We knew that we were an experiment. If it was successful, we would, of course, be coveted and valued. We were not, in any way, valuable in and of ourselves. They didn’t see us; they saw their own desires.”

“Had we been older,” she continued, “had we been, in truth, adults, this would not have surprised us. It wouldn’t have wounded in the way that it did. Even the Barrani have the naive hope that mortal children know. We do not know it in exactly the same way, but when young, we believe in the promise of...affection. We learn.

“Just as you learn. You don’t have to live with the truth for as long.”

“Did you know?” Kaylin asked, before she could shut her mouth.

“Did I know what?”

“Did you know that your friends would kill every member of the High Court they could get their hands on before the Hallionne shut them in?”

After a long, labored pause, Teela said, “Yes.”