Cast in Sorrow (Luna Books)(68)

"You are certain?"

"You can hear the green. You," she said softly to the Consort, "can hear the shadows. I can hear the water." She could. Its voice was so quiet it might have been easy to miss it, but it was here.

The only thing missing was Teela.

No, she thought. Not the only thing. She turned to look down the path that had led them here, but wasn't surprised when she couldn't find it. Sometimes, there was no way back. She couldn't see the dragon. She couldn't hear him.

She started to ask, but stopped when the Lord of the West March came to stand beside her. He didn't look at the fountain. He didn't look at Kaylin. Instead, he began to speak. She glanced at his face, and saw his eyes: they were midnight-blue. Which made sense because she didn't recognize the voice he spoke with, and she didn't recognize the words he spoke, either.

No, Nightshade said. He didn't approach Lirienne; instead, he walked to the base of one of the trees, just as Teela had done only the day before. It is time, Kaylin.

But-but nothing's been said, there's been no...

It is time. Can you not hear him?

She could. She couldn't understand a word. She glanced at the Consort; the Consort's eyes were now the color of her brother's, although she spared Kaylin one sharp glance which clearly said "Move your butt." But minus the vulgarity.

Kaylin made her way to the same tree she'd stood beside. Or at least a tree that stood in the same relative position. She lifted a hand to touch its bark, but noticed that Nightshade hadn't.

She'd never been clear on the role the Lord of the West March was supposed to play. She didn't understand the difference between his role and the role of the Teller; couldn't understand why the green needed two. Until she heard Lirienne's voice.

It was not, in any way, his voice. It wasn't Barrani. It was storm's voice. It was, she thought, the voice of the green-but channeled into sound by the form that momentarily contained it. She couldn't understand a single word of it. She wondered if it always came through like this.

She had expected that the regalia would be like the stories told by Sanabalis and the Arkon in the tongue of the Ancients. She'd secretly expected to see words form, the way they had when she'd first heard the story of the birth of the Leontines. But Lirienne's voice was not Sanabalis's.

It was storm without form, without cloud, without lightning or rain.

Yes, Nightshade said.

Can you understand a single word he's saying?

He didn't answer. She looked across the red, red water of the fountain, and met his gaze; above his eyes, the gem in the center of the Teller's crown was radiating light. She hoped it wasn't radiating heat in equal measure.

Her own dress-the magical, revered blood of the green-was glowing with iridescent light; she wasn't even surprised when the light separated from the cloth and grew. It reminded her of night sky on very rare evenings. But it changed the shape of the circle built around the fountain; it changed the color of a landscape that was, finally, green.

She heard Lirienne's voice. She touched his thoughts briefly and shied away; they were so discordant, they clashed with the syllables leaving his mouth in a steady stream of thunder. Nightshade's were less chaotic, but no easier to untangle; she stopped trying when he, too, began to speak.

She understood what Nightshade was saying, or rather, she understood the words: he was speaking in Elantran. It was just Elantran that made no sense. Individual words were clear as a bell, but they didn't seem to go anywhere; they weren't grouped in a way that implied sentences, or even muddled thoughts. He could have read a dictionary with just as much effect, except there at least the words would have some hierarchical order.

She listened. She listened, trying to pick out individual words, aware that her role as harmoniste was, in theory, to shape story, to build a coherent narrative from the strands offered her by the Teller. She didn't even recognize the words as strands of different stories; perhaps they were. Perhaps they were coming in all at once and Nightshade was able to parse single words as they passed by; perhaps he could see sequences and had no other way of containing them.

It wasn't going to help her. She wore a funny dress. She had thought the dress would give her some sort of power, some built-in influence, that would at least make the job possible. At the moment, it wasn't. Her visible marks, however, were glowing a bright, bright silver. Without thought, she removed the jacket Lirienne had given her, and dropped it by her feet.

She was surprised when the jacket touched the stone at her feet and disappeared, fading from view as if being worn had provided the only anchor for its substance. She looked away from Nightshade, and saw that Lirienne still occupied the space directly between them. She couldn't see anyone else.

We're here, Severn said. It was the first time she'd been able to hear anyone when the green had decided to relocate her. We can see you. He paused, and then added, Don't forget to breathe.

She closed her eyes. Nightshade's voice became clearer, but the mishmash of random words didn't make more sense. Think. Think, Kaylin. She didn't worry about Lirienne; he was Nightshade's problem. Nightshade was somehow pulling strands of related story from the flow of the green's words. She wanted to know how, but knew it didn't matter.

She was supposed to make sense of what Nightshade said. To somehow choose the words that would give form and shape to the green's story. To scratch the surface of it, somehow, while still presenting as much of it as humanly possible. She blinked. She let go of Nightshade's voice for a moment as she considered this.

The transformed, the lost, the elementals-they existed in spaces that the living couldn't. They probably had stories of their own-stories that made no sense to anyone else. Certainly not Kaylin or the Barrani. Their worlds overlapped, but a person who could live in ten places simultaneously was not telling a story that someone who could live only in one could understand.

But the people gathered here, in the heart of the green, were living. They were solid. They had forms that didn't change at whim. They needed food, air, water; some of them needed sleep. They could see the world they lived in; they couldn't simultaneously see the outlands and whatever else existed for the Hallionne.

The recitation was a story-a communication from something that was not living, not in the way people lived. It encompassed what the green knew. She thought that what Nightshade was drawing from it was what the living could know. She heard it in Elantran because it was her mother tongue.

She understood, as Nightshade continued to speak, that she was the end-point. What she said, what she managed to capture, what she managed to convey, was meant to be heard by those who bore witness. She didn't understand how that was meant to change people, to nudge their names, to shift their perceptions. And it didn't matter.

The marks on her arm, silver and bright, began to pulse.

She listened. She listened as if her life depended on it. She tried to pull sense from words, tried to find sentences, bits of thought, even of intent, as Nightshade spoke. He wasn't shouting, but his tone wasn't measured; the beats of the same words differed, sometimes in emphasis, sometimes in intensity.

The light from the dress slowly spread. The light from the gem in the Teller's tiara spread, as well. Nightshade and Kaylin stood beneath the bowers of two trees, at the center of a growing radiance. The two spheres-for it seemed to Kaylin that the light now traveled in spheres-met at the Lord of the West March.

It was light, multihued, and bright; it wasn't solid.

But where it touched, it shattered.

* * *

She felt the impact and staggered; shards and splinters flew out from the point of collision, and she lifted her arms to protect her eyes. They struck those arms, and she felt a visceral panic as they pierced skin; they hurt. She was not allowed to bleed on the green.

But when she lowered her stinging arms, she saw that they hadn't been cut. Her marks, the marks that defined her as Chosen, were glowing more brightly-but there were no wounds. She looked across to Nightshade, but her eyes didn't make it that far.

She could see the Lord of the West March, but there were now three of him; they stood in the same spot, almost in the same pose, but they overlapped. And at their back, the fountain had shifted, as well. At its center, suspended above the basin as if she were essential sculpture, was Teela.

* * *

Her eyes were closed. Her skin was paler than usual. Her arms were raised, palms splayed flat above her head, as if she were holding up the sky. Her mouth was moving, but at this distance, Kaylin couldn't hear her words; they were drowned out by Lirienne's and Nightshade's. Nightshade's had shifted; she could now hear streams of sentences, overlapping each other, as if he spoke simultaneously from several mouths.

She tried to listen; she had eyes for Teela, and only Teela. She wanted to know what Teela was trying to say. She wanted to run from the lee of the tree and climb up the basin to get the Barrani Hawk down. She didn't. She started to move and she heard-to her surprise-the rumbling roar of angry dragon.

His voice overwhelmed all other voices. Even her own.

Teela's eyes snapped open, her lips still moving, her arms bending slightly as if the sky had gained weight.

Kaylin left the tree. Her dress did not stop glowing; neither did her marks. She headed straight for Teela and stopped only when the dragon roared again. She could see his shadow across the whole of the fountain and the trees; she looked up as he descended.

The descent was lazy, desultory; his wings were spread in a glide. But she could no longer see sky through them. She couldn't, she realized, see them as wings at all; their edges were fraying, like the edges of old pants.