Cast in Sorrow (Luna Books)(38)

She had no idea what she was saying, or why.

But for just a moment, one clear, perfect moment, she could see her mother's face. She could see it so clearly she lost all ability to form words. She couldn't recall her mother's actual face anymore. She hadn't been able to do it for years. She could remember being held; she could remember some of the songs her mother sometimes sung to her.

Her mother's face was so clear. Kaylin forgot the tree. She forgot the healing. She forgot the shadows and the infection and even the Barrani.

She had never seen her mother the way she looked at her now. Had her mother somehow lived, she would still never have seen her like this: she was a young woman. She was-to Kaylin's eye-not much older than Kaylin now was. She had-Kaylin remembered it only now-a long scar, pale and slender, down the right side of her jaw. Her hair was as dark as her daughter's, and her skin was only slightly paler; her eyes were so brown the pupil was lost to them.

Her hands were slender, and her arms; she was underfed. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks slightly hollow, their bones high and pronounced. She wore the nondescript, poorly fitted clothing that anyone in the fiefs wore.

But...she was smiling. She was smiling, her lips turned up at the corners, her eyes gentled by expression. She was smiling at Kaylin.

They could have been sisters.

Is this what Teela saw when she remembered her mother? A woman, much like herself? A woman who had loved her and who she'd loved in return?

A woman, Kaylin thought, throat thick now, that she could never actually touch again, that she could never grow to know better? She tried to etch this image into her mind, into her memory-her imperfect, mortal memory. Because this woman was alive. She had been alive.

Yes. You remember and you do not remember. You see and you do not see.

Kaylin didn't look away from her mother. She lifted a hand and let it drop. She couldn't touch her mother; her mother was dead. Gone. This was a gift-a strange gift-and she'd always been aware that asking for more was just asking for trouble. Asking for anything usually was.

No, Kaylin, daughter of Averneya, it is not.

No face, no body, appeared to accompany a voice that was so resonant she trembled at each syllable, as if she were caught in it, as if it came from the very center of her body. She turned to look for Serian, and saw no one.

"Serian?"

She is safe, for the moment. You have come to the heart of the green wearing our blood. What do you attempt?

She felt, as the voice filled all conscious thought, ridiculous and small. She had touched a tree. It was as much a tree as the Hallionne were buildings. "I'm trying to-to heal you."

Ah. I am wounded. It is regrettable.

"What hurt you?"

The green, was the softer-the much softer reply.

Kaylin hated confusion, especially when it was hers. "Aren't you the green?"

We are. But we have taken a wound, Kaylin. It has bled, and it has festered since the day it was dealt us; it has not closed.

"Can I heal it?"

She heard-felt-laughter. We can barely feel your touch. You are not of the green; were you not clothed in some part of ourself, we would not feel you at all. Healing us, as you are, is beyond you.

She felt completely deflated, but rallied. "If it's beyond me, then why am I here?"

She felt confusion for the first time. Not doubt, nothing as large as that. No, this was sort of like the look adults got on their faces when small toddlers were attempting to speak and their words all came out in repeatable gibberish.

Kaylin attempted not to feel the frustration of the person uttering the repeatable gibberish.

You asked for the judgment of the green.

She turned to look at the small dragon because unlike Serian, he was still with her. He yawned. In the darkness, that companion now spread his wings and held them, rigid, to either side. One of those sides covered Kaylin's eyes.

It wasn't dark here. And she wasn't standing in front of the hollow of a damaged tree.

* * *

She was standing on the banks of a river. She lifted her face and the river vanished because the thin membrane of wing didn't follow her eyes. She lowered her face again. The banks of the river were silvered gray-it was night.

She took a hesitant step and realized she could no longer see the bubble that had protected her from the explosion. And gravity. So much of her life since the Devourer had been like this: a waking dream. The problem with Kaylin's dreams was that they could turn, in an instant, with the slightest of gestures or sounds, into full-on nightmare.

And nightmare was here. Across the sand and rock that hedged the river's flow was a dark patch. Even at this distance, it had a consistency that had nothing to do with riverbanks. It also pooled beneath a very ordinary streetlamp. Kaylin frowned and glanced at the small dragon. She began to walk, cautiously and quietly, toward the lamp. She knew she was being stupid-no streetlamp in her own city would be incentive to approach a small, roiling mass of chaos.

As she walked, she continued to speak. Caution replaced frustration. "My companion was born in the heart of a magical storm; he hatched after it had passed. When he's with me, I can sometimes see things I wouldn't normally see."

You are like the Barrani, my distant children. You exist in one place, at one time.

"Yes. You don't."

I am like-and unlike-your Hallionne. My purpose is less circumscribed. But I exist across all planes, and in all places.

"Then the injury-"

Yes. It exists here, in this place.

"Where is this place?"

The green.

"If this were the green, Serian would be here."

She is here. She is not in the here you are in. Chosen, if you desired it, you could see her. You could be where in the here she occupies.

Kaylin had drawn close enough that she could see the hanging lamp clearly. She could see the chaos across which its light fell, but for a moment, the chaos wasn't as important as the light because what lay in the center of the globe was not fire.

It was a word. It was a True Word.

Where the light fell across black and roiling shadow, it fell in strips. It fell in patterns. They were familiar to Kaylin-and they should be. They were very like the marks that adorned over half her skin.                       
       
           



       Chapter 14


The small dragon was silent. He wasn't draped across her shoulders, either; he looked like he meant business.

"We need to get that word," she told him softly.

He nodded, and lowered his wing. The landscape went dark immediately.

"You're right. It's going to be a pain in the butt. Can you deal with the shadow?"

He failed to hear the question. Fair enough; on bad days in the office, so did Teela. She took it as a definitive No. The small dragon lifted his wing again.

The landscape hadn't changed in the interim. She was ten feet from the amorphous boundary of the chaos mass; the lamppost was in its center.

"Why," she said, directing her question to the invisible but encompassing presence in which, she suspected, she walked, "Is there a name here? Why is it trapped like that?" To Kaylin's eyes, it was captive. It moved, elements of the whole battering ineffectively against the globe, like a trapped moth.

Or a trapped bird.

The voice, like the small dragon, failed to hear the question. It was the most pressing question Kaylin now had. The word seemed small and almost forlorn, which was ridiculous. But it seemed diminished somehow by its cage.

All such words are caged. And all such words are cages.

Where it cast light in the shape of itself, the shadows were clearest; colors shone and moved beneath the bands of the rune's form. They seemed, in the light, to have a consistent texture-and the chaos in the fiefs didn't. And in the fiefs, wherever it was possible, the shadows spread. They infested land, buildings, and people; the people died.

Here, they touched nothing but lamppost-and ground. They didn't appear to respond to Kaylin's approach, either. Small mercies. She inched closer. The urgency to flee the tunnels, to escape them, to somehow be of use in the battle above, had bled away. She felt she was suspended in time; that time, here, had no meaning.

But the word did.

She thought it belonged, not to a lamppost in the middle of nowhere, but to the Lake of Life. It belonged in the keeping of the Consort. It was a name. Kaylin had no idea how to distinguish between True Names and True Words; five minutes ago, she would have said there wasn't any difference.

She didn't believe that now; she couldn't make herself believe it. It was a name, and she couldn't leave it here. "I think," she said, "it's time to breathe."

The dragon said nothing. She was two feet away from the edge of the chaos, and she realized, watching it, that it reminded her of something beside the deadly shadow in the heart of the distant fiefs. It reminded her of Wilson, Hallionne Bertolle's lost brother. It reminded her of the brothers she hadn't tagged with an inappropriate name; they had become almost exactly this in the race through the outlands, creating something that had form and substance in a sea of gray fog and nothing.

That path had kept them together. It had probably saved their lives.

"Or not."

The dress that had caused her so much trouble was now sleeveless. It looked like a summer shift. Everything else about it remained the same, but the marks that had been partially obscured were completely visible. She grimaced. It was the least of her problems now; she'd worry about it later.