Cast in Sorrow

Chapter 21

The path ended abruptly, giving way to tall, dry grass. The water didn’t pause; she continued. Because she was carrying Teela, so did Kaylin. Watching the water walk over the dry grass was a revelation. In the water’s wake, the grass became the color of Kaylin’s dress, and small flowers began to push themselves out of the dirt, budding and blossoming as if seasons existed beneath her feet.

It was striking; it was even beautiful.

“Look, can you tell me something? I don’t understand how the green and the Hallionne are connected. I’d swear when we activated the wards we entered Hallionne Alsanis—but the wards exist in the heart of the green. To reach you at all we had to drop through Alsanis and into the tunnels.”

You think of the green as a place. You think of the Hallionne as places. They are not that. They are, in a much larger way, like your cities and your citizens. They are not all one thing, not all the other; the Hallionne are bound by the words that form the reason for their existence, but they are not fixed as you are. And yet, Kaylin, some part of them once was.

The green, never.

They are part of the green. The green is part of what they have become.

“And the lost children?”

They are also part of the green. They are part of Hallionne Alsanis.

“But...they’re trying to destroy the Hallionne.”

Yes. They understand, in part, the nature of words. But they do not understand in full. The pit that you see as an outline of a word is their attempt to tell a tale. We are almost there.

But Kaylin knew, because in the distance, she could hear singing.

This was like, and unlike, her first trip through the nightmare of Alsanis. The Consort’s voice was unmistakable; the song, however, was different. It took Kaylin one long minute to understand why, and when she did, it confused her. The Consort was singing in High Barrani. Given the extension of syllables and vowels, it wasn’t immediately clear, because the songs the Consort sang to the Hallionne also contained similar vocal sounds.

But the sounds were words that Kaylin could actually understand. She saw a ring of standing trees—or of things that looked, at a distance, like trees. They weren’t. They were stone structures, but branched, rooted. Something about them made Kaylin very uncomfortable.

Above these nontrees, the dragon roared. Kaylin was afraid that he would breathe; before she could shout at him, he did.

She shouted something different instead, and the singing banked sharply. Clearly this song was not like the songs of awakening.

Grey mist hit the strange stone grove, billowing at the edges like cloud, not fire. Where it touched stone branches, the branches melted, running like molten rock toward the ground. But they burned nothing they hit; instead, they shimmered, like silver liquid. The water passed over them without concern. Kaylin wasn’t as brave; she leaped over the small rivulets that seemed to flow, like giant, exposed veins, into one small pool.

The Consort stood on the other side of this network of tiny streams, but as the cloud spread, they surrounded her. She didn’t touch them, either. Instead, she looked at the water. No, Kaylin thought, at what the water held.

The Consort’s eyes darkened as she finally met Kaylin’s gaze. She was either angry or afraid, and opened her mouth; she shut it before she spoke.

“Lady.” Kaylin fell to one knee.

But the Consort shook her head with obvious impatience. “Not here. At Court, yes. But not here. Do you know what you’ve done?”

“We came to find you.”

“And you could not come here with any other Lord?”

“Teela wouldn’t stay.”

The Consort’s expression softened. “No,” she said at last. “She wouldn’t, would she? And no one of us, not even the High Lord himself, could command her when she did not wish to obey. It was never wise to make the attempt.” She watched as the trees finished melting.

“How did you get here?”

“The dreams of Alsanis.”

Kaylin blinked. “I don’t understand.”

The Consort’s smile was bitter. “No. No more do I.”

“I doubt that.”

“Do you imply that I lie, Lord Kaylin?”

“Clumsy of me. I’m not usually that subtle.”

To her surprise, the Consort laughed. Kaylin thought she would never understand the Barrani. “Great harm was done here when An’Teela was a child. You know of it.”

“I know what’s said.”

“Teela is of the Warden’s bloodline.”

Kaylin nodded.

“As was her mother. The Warden’s bloodline is dear to the green; it is gifted. Its gift does not extend beyond the green and the Hallionne; it does not touch the High Court in any significant way. But the green hears the Wardens and Alsanis speaks with them.”

“He doesn’t anymore.”

“Ah, but he does. The nightmares come to the Warden.”

“Unless you’re here?”

“It is my privilege,” the Consort replied. Kaylin privately thought it wasn’t much of a privilege. “While I am in the West March, I can ease the Warden’s burden. The nightmares of Alsanis are strong, and they are painful. The Warden can bespeak them, at times, and he can calm them, when they can be calmed at all.

“Of late, that has been seldom. Yet without the Warden, the whole of the West March would suffer their pain. Very, very few would survive it.”

“You—”

“Yes. I am aware that I had some difficulty. It was perhaps hubris on my part. I believe Lord Barian would have endured in a way I could not without your aid. It is for this reason there has always been a Warden. There will always be a Warden. No politics of the High Court can alter that.

“The nightmares and the dreams are entwined. You think of them as shadow and light, but they are perspectives, Kaylin. They come from the same place. The dreams of Alsanis brought me here.”

“To save you?”

“No. In the end, no. It is to save them.” She turned, then, and gestured at the rivulets that once had been trees. “And you have brought Teela. The green has been waiting. Alsanis has been waiting, as well. Understand that the green is wounded. It is not dying, Kaylin; that is not the nature of its existence; it will not die. Nor is it injured in the way you and I might be injured.”

“Why did they bring you here?”

The Consort, however, frowned. “What,” she asked, her voice chillier by several degrees, “is on your left palm?”

Kaylin held out her hand.

The Consort caught it, pulled Kaylin almost off her feet, and examined it; she did not touch the mark. But her eyes, when Kaylin looked at her face, were gold; gold with a heart of pure green. She let Kaylin’s hand go. “Do you understand what you’ve done?” she asked, voice soft.

Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “No. No, and maybe yes. I saw the word. I knew it was a name. And it seemed—fragile. If words can be fragile.” She thought of Iberrienne. “I was afraid to leave it where I found it, so I gathered it up and took it with me when I left. I didn’t—I didn’t leave myself room for doubt. I thought I was helping, somehow.”

“You have seen the Lake of Life,” the Consort replied.

Kaylin nodded.

“But you have also touched it, Kaylin. You have touched it, and you have taken words from its depths. You carry one within you; you carried part of one to my brother. What you see is not what the rest of my people will see, not even here. I think Teela might have, but she could not have done what you have done.” There was a brief hesitation, and then the Consort said, “No more could I. I am not Chosen. I am Consort; I am guardian of the names by which my kin know life.

“But you are a vessel. A container. You are the parchment on which the words might be both written and preserved. What will you do with the name?”

“I don’t know. It’s not—it’s not like the other words. It’s not like the other name.” Kaylin tapped her forehead. “It doesn’t react the way the marks I carry react.”

“No. It wouldn’t.”

“Because they’re not dead?”

“Because they are not dead. They are not of their name, but they cannot fully escape it. Not while Teela lives.”

“They don’t want to kill her.”

“No. No, they do not. They want to save her. Teela doesn’t wish to be saved. But she doesn’t wish to be free, either. And so, she is here. And you are here. And I, in the end, am here with both of you.”

“Did you expect this?”

The Consort shook her head, her eyes shading to the green-blue that was normal for Barrani. “When I chose to accompany you I was angry with you, yes. But I was also concerned. Calarnenne has history with the green. I believe you now understand what it is.”

“I don’t. I know it has something to do with the lost children.” She hesitated. “But—so did Iberrienne.”

“There is much loss, yes. Do you understand Barrani youth? It is—like mortal youth—a time of optimism and idealism. It is a time when we do not believe in caution, but choose instead a hope that is not leavened by bitter experience. That follows, with the passage of time. The things we love—and hate—in our youth, the losses we take, the deaths we endure—they scar us in ways that later loves and later losses do not. Those, we expect.

“I cannot judge, Kaylin. Were either of my brothers lost to such a gamble as the High Court chose to take, I do not think I would ever have recovered. I would function, yes. I would go on. But the rage and the hatred I felt for that High Court would never dim. Mortals forget, and that is a kindness, although it does not seem so to you, and perhaps never will. We do not. We remember whenever we choose to think about the past at all. We can almost walk in it, it is so real.

“I do not know what occurred between the twelve; I know only that were Teela to die, they might at last be free. Free to be or do what, I cannot say. They are not Barrani now—but they are not entirely other.”

It struck Kaylin then that the Consort suspected the link between the twelve. She suspected that Teela knew the true names of the eleven; that the eleven, in turn, knew hers. She almost asked, but couldn’t. It wasn’t her secret to tell.

“If Teela died, and the eleven were freed, what would happen to their names?”

“Do you not know? No, perhaps you don’t. You have seen the Lake, and you have touched it, and it has left you marked or changed—but you are not Barrani, and will never be Barrani. There are things you cannot understand. Their names will be lost to us. They will not return to the Lake.”

Even hearing it felt like a blow to Kaylin. “Can you—”

“Can I preserve them?” The Consort closed her eyes. “I cannot do what you have done, no. But yes, in some fashion, were I to see what you have seen, I might strengthen them in a different way. I see the Lake, Kaylin. I see it all the time. It exists in the High Halls, and I may approach it physically—as you did. But it exists, for me, wherever my people exist.” She took both of Kaylin’s hands in hers.

“Is that why they want you?”

“Yes. They feel that they might approach that Lake through me. They cannot,” she added. “Not even changed as they are. I will not survive the attempt, but they cannot succeed.”

“They don’t believe that.”

“No.”

“They’re trying to take the words and remake them.”

“Yes. They are like your infants; they are trying to speak as gods. They are trying to use the words in a way that the words cannot be used. They are trying,” she said, voice soft and sad, “to lie in a language in which lies cannot be spoken.”

“Why are they even—” Kaylin stopped. “Do they understand that that’s what they’re trying to do?”

The Consort’s smile was deeper; it was tinged with an approval that Kaylin shouldn’t have wanted, but did anyway. “You understand. No. They believe that any thought that can be expressed—no, any desire—is true in and of itself. You see the words that they attempt to speak. What do they look like to you?”

“Like the shadows of words, but—worse.”

“Yes. All desires exist; there are words that speak of those desires, those words are true. But not all desire is reality. They believe that what the Ancients desired, they could bring into being by simply...speaking. Writing.”

“Bleeding,” Kaylin said, automatically.

The Consort said a long nothing.

“Lady, what is it that you think they want?”

“I would guess, if I could, that they wish to transform Teela as they themselves were transformed. I do not know. I do not understand the whole of their spoken tongue—they have created a language, the way the young sometimes do. I understand only parts of it, and not with clarity.”

“And your song, the song you were singing when we found you?”

She glanced at the edge of what was no longer stone grove. “A lullaby. They do not hate me,” she said. “Nothing they now attempt is personal.”

“Would you kill them if you could?”

“Yes. But not with joy, Kaylin, and with no sense of triumph. I understand what Teela’s mother asked of the green. But in the end, this is the result. The green is scarred, Teela is scarred, and the lost children exist in a state that is neither life nor death. But I think this time, we will have an ending, one way or the other.” She looked up as the water drew close, carrying Teela, cradling her as the fire had done.

“What happened to her?”

“She did what you did—she absorbed the nightmares of Alsanis. I couldn’t do what I did for you because I couldn’t see them. At all.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. I told you—I couldn’t see them. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her physically, and I can’t—I can’t touch her.”

“I would think it suicidal to try.”

“She’s unconscious. She can only kill me if she wakes up.”

The Consort touched Teela’s brow.

“Can you see her name?”

The Consort said, “Never ask that question of me. Never ask it again. It is not safe.”

“For me, or for you?”

“For either of us, Kaylin. Do you understand the position of Consort is not hereditary?”

“It was—”

“No. I am offered the opportunity to take the test first; it is a courtesy. I could have refused, without dishonor; I did not. Had I failed, I would have died, and a search for a suitable candidate would have begun. My bloodline gives me no affinity; it gives me nothing special. The test that we face—a test you did not—is not short. It is not a decision made in a moment. There are spaces in which Barrani might live that are nonetheless not the world to which we were born. In those spaces, time has less meaning—but no Barrani, no Dragon, no mortal, can undo the past. We move forward. The testing that I underwent began before you were born. Were I to undergo such a test now, it would end long after you died—of the old age that takes all mortals, sooner or later.

“Some fail the test almost immediately. Some take decades to make the first, false step. There is no going back. No one of us understands what the test entails, Kaylin, until it is far too late. My mother passed. I passed.” She smiled. “I passed in—how do you say it? Record time?”

“That’s how we say it.”

“My father, of course, was proud. Proud. I was his daughter.”

“Your mother?”

“She grieved.”

“I...don’t understand.”

“She had undergone the same testing, Kaylin. She knew what both passing—and surviving—in such a short time meant. The Lake chooses; it is not kind in its choice. I am not...the daughter my mother hoped for. I am not harsh enough, not strong enough. But I am not so weak that I could fail. I am not so weak that I could not sacrifice almost everything I loved in order to safeguard the source of all life. But I am weak enough that such sacrifice would never be made for any other reason.” Her smile was both fragile and self-conscious, yet it looked strangely at home on a Barrani face. “I am not even determined enough to hate you for what you were willing to risk.”

“She thought you’d be hurt. By your life.”

“No. She knew I would be. She was Barrani, and Consort—but she was my mother. Even among my kin, the relationship is not without significance.” She looked up at the sky, where the dragon hovered. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked, voice soft. “Is this like your refugees, somehow?”

Kaylin very much wanted to say yes. She chose to say nothing instead.

“What has your familiar done to the trees?”

“They weren’t really trees.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No.” Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know.”

The Consort’s smile was rueful. “Perhaps I should have accepted the nonanswer. Come. Whatever he has done, he has done; the binding that kept me here has faded.” Before Kaylin could speak, she added, “They were here, but they were not here. They are children, Barrani children, at heart.”

“They’re not Barrani.”

“No, Kaylin—they are not. But they are not entirely other. They cannot be both—and they have tried. They do not think they are different; they think they are more powerful, less limited, but still essentially what they were.” She closed her eyes. “You must leave Teela here.”

Kaylin’s jaw dropped. She didn’t bother to close it without letting words fall out. “I am not leaving Teela here.”

“Yes, Kaylin, you will. She is here, in the end, because of you—but this is where she must be. I am sorry. You anger me so often, I am surprised that I am able to feel compassion for you at all—but I do. Teela came here as harmoniste, once. She came, and she survived. But she failed. She failed and the dreams of Alsanis were dark for a century.

“What you feel for Teela, we do not feel; not in the same way. It is closest to what the lost feel. You wear the blood of the green, although you are like the youngest and least controlled of our children. But you are Chosen. You have drawn me from the nightmares of Alsanis when none of my kin could. You have come to me in the scar of the green, and because you have, we will be able to leave.”

“I couldn’t have come here without Teela.”

“No.”

“I won’t leave her.”

“Then we will never leave.” The Consort slid her hands behind her back. “And I admit that I am...weary. I am weary of the grief of both the green and Alsanis. I am weary of the loss and the fear of loss. I am not in pain. If I cannot leave, the failure, in the end, will not be not my fault. That is a terrible thing to confess, is it not? As long as it is not my fault, I can be at peace with failure.”

Kaylin stared at her.

“You have felt it yourself.”

And she had. “Why can’t you leave without me?”

“Because without you, Chosen, we will fail.”

“Fail what?”

The telling, the water said, unexpectedly joining a conversation Kaylin hadn’t even been certain she could hear. You are harmoniste. The Lord of the West March will speak, Kaylin; the Teller will expand upon every possible strand of the story he chooses to begin. No story has only one beginning, and no story has only one end. No story has only one strand; it involves the lives and the possibilities of so many that you will never even meet. Understand your audience when you begin to choose. Understand who the story must reach, and why. You have seen the wound at the heart of the green. You do not fully understand what it is or why it has waited; you must.

The green cannot wait forever; the lost speak sorrow and grief and untruth in their rage and their pain. The joy they know is too fixed and too slight; it feeds nothing but despair.

You are Chosen. You have told stories before. It is your nature.

The dragon roared. Kaylin looked up; he spun around in a large circle, and then, slowly and deliberately, landed. He was not small. He would never, she was afraid, be small again.

Teela is part of this place. She is part of its wound. She is loved by the green, and the green grieves for her. She has given it no cause for joy and none for hope—but the green hopes. I will guard your Teela, as I have guarded the blood of her kin for so many of your centuries.

“And if I fail? If I fail, will you give her back?”

The water did not reply.

“Eldest,” the Consort said. She tendered the water a flawless Barrani obeisance. She caught Kaylin’s arm. “Understand your own question, Lord Kaylin.”

Kaylin said nothing.

“Success is not yours alone; nor is failure. But if you fail, the green will succumb. The names of the lost will be lost. Teela’s name will be lost in a like fashion. But perhaps, in the end, she will be at peace. This is where she must be if there is any hope of success. And you, Chosen, must be at the heart of the green—in our world. The story you tell, the story you hear, the truth and the lies—they will be evident nowhere else. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“The heart of the green exists in our world. It is not easily reached because it is a window into the worlds that exist beyond our reach. We cannot see as the green sees. We cannot feel as it feels. We cannot speak as it speaks; that was never to be our gift. But we can touch the green, and the green can—in that moment, at that time, touch us in a fashion. It listens, Kaylin.

“Our names were created for our world. True Words were created for our world. While we bear them, we might traverse the wilderness, but they cannot exist without flesh; we keep them safe. We are their roots and their connection to their origins.”

The dragon roared.

Kaylin said, without thought, “He has no name.”

“No. And I cannot understand him. But the eldest does. The green does. He is not of our world. Nor can he be, as he is. I do not know if he will be able to leave the green, but if he can, I am not certain he will not be more of a threat, in the end, than your Devourer.” She sounded oddly unconcerned as she held out both of her hands and took Kaylin’s. “I am sorry, Lord Kaylin. We cannot wait. They know what has happened, and they come now.”

“How—how do you know that?”

“I hear the green.” She lifted her face, raised her perfectly, clear voice, and spoke three words.

The world hardened instantly around them; the ground cracked and dried beneath their feet. They stood by the small basin of an empty fountain.

Except the fountain wasn’t empty; the basin was full, the water rippling as water from above trickled into it.

“Lady!”

Kaylin turned, her hands numb the Consort was holding them so tightly. The Lord of the West March practically knocked Kaylin over in his rush to his sister’s side. He felt her outrage, and ignored it, the rage and the worry and the fear of hope overwhelming anything as small as her offense. He caught his sister in his arms, lifted her off her feet, and half dragged Kaylin with her, because the Consort still had a death grip on the Hawk’s hands.

He saw the color of the Consort’s eyes, and the sharp pitch of relief banked. He glanced at the water, at the miracle of water in this place, and then, as the Consort did, he raised his eyes to the sky.

Hovering above them and casting the outline of shadow over the whole of the clearing was the small dragon. Except, of course, he wasn’t small now.

It was Severn who said, Where is Teela? He was the only one who asked, and he didn’t ask out loud.

Kaylin yanked her hands free of the Consort’s, and the Consort allowed it. She turned, almost blindly, toward Severn because she knew where he was: by her side. As close to her as the Lord of the West March was. He didn’t hug her; he didn’t pull her off her feet. She wasn’t the Consort, in the end.

But when she met his expression, he did lift an arm, and she tucked herself beneath it, turning her face toward his chest. He said nothing. He asked no further questions. Not about the dragon that had captured the attention of every Barrani present; not about the Consort, whose rescue was the one thing that brought joy and relief to them all, no matter their rank or political affiliations; not about the water.

The eagles of Alsanis were sitting on their dead-tree perches.

“It is not the time,” they said in unison. “Lord of the West March, Warden, we will lead your people out of the green. We will return three days hence; the Teller and the harmoniste must come to the green.”

“And the rest of us?” the Lord of the West March all but demanded.

“Those who will take the risk, bear witness. Understand that the risk is as great as it has ever been for your kind. Only four must venture into the greenheart at the appointed hour: the Teller, the harmoniste, the Lord of the West March, and the Warden.”

The dragon roared, and the eagles cocked their heads toward the sky. Birds couldn’t frown; their beaks were fixed and hard. But the eagle on Kaylin’s right said, “You should not be here.”

The dragon roared again; Kaylin lifted a free hand to cover her ear. The other, she pressed farther into Severn’s chest. She didn’t close her eyes, and because she didn’t, she saw the heads of the eagles swivel in her direction.

“So be it,” they said. They didn’t sound happy. “Three days, Chosen.”