Beneath her feet, the shadows swooped and darted, their flight patterns interwoven with the patterns of feathered wings. They had no obvious beaks, no obvious faces, but their song came from somewhere, and it echoed. Given that there was nothing for sound to bounce off, this was impressive.
But no, even that was wrong: there was. The runes that graced over half of her skin had expanded outward in the shape of a sphere, and the sounds of raised voices were caught and returned by each element they touched. The shadows flew through them, rather than around; the flight path of the eagles was therefore far more constrained.
She almost opened her eyes when the small dragon bit her ear-again. It was more a nibble than an actual bite; she turned automatically in his direction and saw, to her surprise, that he was present in this vision. His body was composed of the same translucent flesh, and his eyes were the same black opalescence. But his wings seemed both more amorphous and larger; they were, she realized, very like the wings of the shadows above in shape and size; they passed through her, although his claws did not.
The only thing Kaylin couldn't see was the Consort.
The small dragon warbled and nudged her cheek. Kaylin opened her eyes.
* * *
Nothing changed.
She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the odd sky, occupied as it was by runes and birds and their cast shadows, remained firmly fixed in her vision; she turned, and turned again, looking up and down as she did. She was no longer in the Consort's room.
Lirienne.
There was no answer.
Nightshade?
Silence. She inhaled slowly, counting to ten. The small dragon bit her ear. This time it was harder, and his warble was higher. Exhaling, Kaylin nodded, remembering what she had so reluctantly set out to do. She began to sing. She had faint hope that her actual body-she had no doubt she still had one-was silent in the halls of the Lord of the West March. Barrani voices were clear and resonant and she had never heard one sing off-key, not that song was common.
Mortal voices, not so much, and Kaylin's was on the bottom end of that scale.
But this wasn't about the quality of voice. It wasn't even about the words; she could have chosen words at random, the syllables of the eagles made so little sense. It was about harmony. About tone. It was about rhythm. It was about emotion, because even if she couldn't understand a single word, she felt she understood intent.
There was a desolation, a yearning, and an emptiness in this song. No, not emptiness, but an awareness of loss, of all that had been lost and might never come again. It was hard to listen carefully with her eyes open, and as closing her eyes didn't apparently change a damn thing, she gave up trying.
The eagles flew. The shadows flew. Their song soared and plummeted, as if it were the sole expression of everything they were. Maybe it was. She couldn't understand more than the emotion behind the long, winding words-and she probably didn't understand all of that, either. Just enough.
She became aware, as she watched, that her marks were stationary. So was she. While the eagles flew, while the shadows darted, she was as fixed in place as any of the marks. The small dragon's claws curled into her collarbone, and she grimaced; her song banked briefly while she struggled not to swear.
She was mostly prepared when the dragon's wings began to flap; they were silent, their movements suggesting power and grace. Kaylin began to move. Her flight was unwieldy; it had none of the grace or speed of the dreams or nightmares. But the slow, steady climb took her closer to the nearest of the floating marks.
It was larger than she was. She could see every detail of its full shape; on her arm, it was flattened and almost lifeless in comparison. It seemed natural that it shed its brilliant, golden light; it was like sun-but it didn't burn and didn't blind. At least, not yet. It felt almost alive as she reached out to touch it. She couldn't read it; it was too large for that. She couldn't intuit its meaning.
But she had come here to find the Consort.
The marks that adorned her skin were like a miniature world around her. They were individual glyphs, differing in shape and size, in simplicity and complexity. They were very like images that might be called up in Records for her inspection. And she knew, again, that she had to choose one.
She didn't have time to waffle, but to make a decision based on-on nothing, really, when so much rode on the outcome, was almost paralyzing. She let her hand fall away. As it did, the rune faded from sight. She nodded to the small dragon and began her awkward flight toward the next one.
* * *
Every time she failed to choose a mark, it vanished. When this had happened a dozen times, she realized that the marks were returning to her skin. They were still glowing, and frankly, when they were part of her skin, they were warm. With so few reattached, it was uncomfortable; she had no doubt, when she was done, it would be painful.
But she'd live with the pain if she could wake the Consort.
Hells, she'd live with the pain at this point if she could find the Consort. The sky was full of wings and runes and nothing else; the birds circled; the shadows circled. The Consort was nowhere to be seen. Kaylin forced panic to take a backseat again; it was hard because it kept trying to grab the reins and set the course. She inspected rune after rune, wondering if this many of them could truly fit on her skin.
Every so often the small dragon bit her ear to catch her attention; it was always when she had forgotten to keep singing. Had he not been her only viable form of movement, she'd've bit him back.
The sky was slowly becoming an empty space; the flight patterns of the dreams and the nightmares of Alsanis had become less complex with the reabsorption of each word. Kaylin still hadn't found the one she was looking for-and she was terrified that she hadn't because she didn't know what she was looking for.
She had never been good with words.
Oh, she could be a smart-ass. Almost a decade with the Hawks would have that effect on anyone. But when it came to important things? She couldn't choose the right words to save her life. She blurted, if she could get them out at all. She tripped over them, even though she knew what she wanted to say. Or at least knew what she wanted to convey.
It was simple to know what she felt.
It was hard to make other people understand it. Words were sometimes more of a barrier than a bridge, especially because it was so easy to choose the wrong ones. It was just as easy to hear the wrong ones-to think she understood what the other person was trying to say to her. To hear what the words meant to her, not what they meant coming from someone else's mouth.
She was not the right person to be choosing words.
She stilled, frowning. These weren't Elantran words. Or Leontine or Barrani or Aerian, either. These were True Words. In theory, if she chose the right word, there was no way to misinterpret it. It had no hidden meanings, no barbed cultural contexts, no past associations she could trip over like a clumsy toddler. It would convey the whole of what she meant, not more, not less.
This would have been comforting if she knew what she was supposed to mean. Or if the cost of failure wouldn't be so high. Without the right word, the Consort wouldn't wake.
And without it, Kaylin thought, as she bypassed four more runes, Kaylin wasn't so certain that she'd find her way back herself. Opening and closing her eyes didn't shift or change the scenery much; she was still here.
She stopped singing. The dragon, predictably, complained. She traversed sky, listening to the songs of eagles and their shadows, on wings that weren't hers and never would be. As she did, she passed more of the floating marks and they vanished in her wake, dwindling and returning to her skin. She heard the sorrow and the loss and the yearning carried by the voices of dreams and nightmares. She understood them in a way that didn't encompass words, they were so much a part of her life.
She'd heard that-and desire-in the Consort's song of wakening, in the lee of the Hallionne Bertolle. She'd even joined the Consort, singing the part Nightshade would have taken had he been there. Desire-the desire she'd heard-wouldn't touch this emptiness. Not in Kaylin's life. She hesitated. This wasn't her life, was it? It was the Consort's. The Hallionne's.
But it had been left to Kaylin to choose a word that would somehow respond to it. Kaylin's choice. Kaylin's imperfect choice. She stopped when there were only two runes in the whole of the sky. The eagles and the three shades continued to fly, their path unimpeded by obstacles, their voices soaring and diving as they did.
She didn't understand how to say these words. Any of them. But as she looked at the two that remained, she understood what they meant.
They were almost of a size; their shapes were different. In the first, the long, straight line of the rune was central; the looping adornment to one side of that line was complex; the dots to the other side, and the single stroke at its height, a frame.
The second rune had no central element that she could see; it was a balance of delicate squiggles, dots, slender strokes. Its shape suggested a cohesion that closer approach dispelled.
Both were luminescent gold. Broken into components, they shared several base shapes-but it was the combination that made them so distinct. The combination, she thought, and the essential meaning. It was to the more complicated, delicate rune that she drifted.
She could almost hear it as she approached. It seemed to sing-or at least to hum, as she could make out no distinct syllables-in time and in tune with the dreams and nightmares. It was at the heart of their song; it was isolation, writ large and made strangely compelling. Seeing it, hearing it, she felt that she understood the song in a way that she hadn't before. If she could speak it or sing it, she was certain that whoever was listening would know that she did, at last, understand.