Cast in Sorrow (Luna Books)(69)

His voice, she recognized; it shook the earth beneath her feet.

Teela's eyes widened; she lifted her face to look up at the underside of the dragon. She lowered her face, her eyes rounder; they narrowed as if she had only now become aware of where she was.

Of, Kaylin realized, one of the places in which she was standing. "Teela!"

Teela's head snapped around so quickly, she'd have whiplash. Her eyes widened. Predictably enough, she looked unhappy to see Kaylin. "What are you doing here?"

There was only one answer to that question; the problem was that Kaylin wasn't doing the job. She was here as harmoniste. She was here to untangle the bits and pieces of story that Nightshade was now throwing, in discordant harmony with himself, in her direction.

And she knew, looking at the Barrani Hawk she thought of as family-privately, where it wouldn't offend Teela with sentimentality-that Teela was at the heart of the story, somehow. But...it began before her birth. It began before the birth of the Hallionne. It began when the Ancients walked, and possibly before they did; it began with silence.

She could hear that silence now, although words were wound around it. Nightshade's voice became clearer, stronger; she couldn't sense him in any other way.

"Kitling, go back."

Kaylin shook her head and lifted a hand to stall Teela's lecture. Teela was afraid-for her. The fear felt like a little bit of home. And that was the point, wasn't it? Kaylin built as much of a home as she could for herself, time and again, and losing any part of it was like losing peace and the hope of safety. What Teela wanted didn't-hadn't-mattered. Kaylin had always assumed that they wanted the same things. They were both Hawks. They were both good at their jobs.

But they weren't the same people; they weren't even the same race. There were things Kaylin had done that she'd never shared with Teela; she'd never shared them with anyone, except perhaps Tara, and that, by accident. And there were things that Teela had done that she'd never shared, either, and maybe for the same reason.

"Teela," Kaylin said, distinctly, "I love you."

Teela looked as though she was about to hurl a volley of angry Leontine, and Kaylin turned as the dragon finally landed.

* * *

He was not a dragon now. He was not small. She couldn't even understand how he'd landed, because there wasn't enough room in this small, fountain-dominated clearing to support him. He didn't crush the Lord of the West March; nor did he crush Nightshade. Kaylin, however, found the lack of light and air problematic.

He had, she thought, no face. But he had eyes, and they were the same as they'd always been, writ large. Writ impressively large. Large enough that she should have been able to see her reflection in them. What she saw, instead, was something that looked like words.

He turned his gaze on Nightshade; Nightshade didn't seem to be aware of his presence, but Teela was. Kaylin didn't understand what the creature who was no longer dragon wanted from Nightshade until she realized that she could no longer hear all of the threads of the story he'd been speaking.

Her eyes rounded. "No!"

She heard his voice, his rumbling response; it was no longer a roar. She thought it almost-almost-contained words, but they weren't words she would ever be able to understand. In a panic she shoved her arms in front of his eyes, which now seemed to exist without sockets. If he understood what she was offering-if she did-he paid no attention, and none of the marks-not a single damn one-rose to feed itself to him.

He was going to eat the stories.

He was going to devour them, and leave her with no way of telling what needed to be told. And she knew that if he did, she would never save Teela. She understood that the green was in danger, that Alsanis was all but exhausted, that the lost children were a threat to their former people-and she didn't care.

What she cared about was Teela.

Think, Kaylin. She reached past the creature, although it was difficult as he appeared to be wrapped around her like a gigantic, uncomfortably heavy blanket with eyes. She reached and she began to choose. Not the silence, although that was a story of its own. That one, she could give to the creature.

Not the Ancients. No, wait-one small strand of their story was sharper and heavier than any other strand appeared to be. She drew it into her hands and wrapped it around her arms, as if the spoken word and the marks could be held in the exact same way. But the rest, she fed to the creature.

It was hard. She didn't know what would happen to the pieces of history that she rejected-for she understood them as history now; they were the foundations upon which Teela stood, at least figuratively. She heard Alsanis's name. She missed some of its beginning, but she understood enough to know that he was built by the Ancients. By two. She couldn't hear their names, but understood that an echo of them existed in the history itself.

And she heard grief, she heard farewells. She heard the promise of eternity, and the threat of it. She caught those almost reflexively. To the dragon, she fed the story of the forests and the insects and the brooks and streams, shielding Alsanis from his hunger. Shielding the story of his grief. She couldn't save the story of his brothers; she had no sense of what they had been before Alsanis became Hallionne, because the creature devoured it.

He devoured, as well, the story of the Dragons. The real Dragons. Sanabalis's people. She panicked and shouted at him, and lost more words; she couldn't afford it. She knew it. But she felt that she couldn't move as fast as the creature now could; she couldn't see whether or not something was important. She couldn't assess it in time.

But she caught bits and pieces of the war. Of the Hallionne at war. Of the green at war. Of the Dragons and the Barrani and the weapons forged in the green. She let the weapons go. She let the wars go. She kept only the bare essentials because the stories of the wars were so long and complicated. She thought maybe they would feed the creature enough that he would stop.

Instead, he seemed to grow.

"Kitling-"

"I know, Teela!" But not, apparently, enough not to shut the hells up and ignore all other distractions.

She looked into the creature's eyes. She could almost step into them, they'd grown so large. She didn't. She could see the words they contained, now. The words were harder and more angular than the letter shapes she thought of as True Words; they were not golden, not blue. Silver, she thought, or gray, but strangely insubstantial. They looked like-like smoke.

They looked very much like the words that she had seen in the outlands when Iberrienne had attacked Hallionne Orbaranne. The words were not True Words, not in any sense that she understood them. But they weren't the words that Iberrienne had tried to use at the heart of the Hallionne Orbaranne, either.

She thought she understood.

When she heard Nightshade begin to speak of words, of language, of a language of power and birth, she caught the threads of the story without conscious thought, folding them around herself as if they were now a part of her. Her arms burned, and her eyes teared, and she looked at herself in the creature's eyes, and saw that the marks on her arms were as insubstantial and smoky in reflection as the words that existed at the heart of what she'd thought were simple, if gigantic, eyes.

And she heard about the blood of the Ancients; she heard about the words around which they'd carved and created the world in which Kaylin now lived. It was one of many such worlds, all contained, all built, on similar words, each of which told a story. They were, Nightshade told her, words meant for these worlds. They existed only here, were meant to exist only here. They defined and created solid spaces-the spaces between two people, the spaces between birth and death, between seed and sapling and tree.

They defined time. They defined its passage.

The creature spoke.

He spoke as Kaylin caught this one thread, and buried it; he pulled at it. She could feel him as if he were a giant, intelligent vortex into which all meaning must vanish.

She didn't understand his purpose. She didn't understand why anyone would want to summon something that ate words, that consumed meaning. He was here, yes. But this was not where he belonged.

She understood why fire was summoned; she understood water. Even earth and air made sense to her-but they were inextricably linked to this world. Fire, water, earth, and air existed without will in everyday life. There was no echo of the small dragon, the large dragon, or the creature it had become, in Kaylin's world. What ate words? What devoured meaning?

And yet, somehow, this creature or one part of it, had been summoned before.

Why?

What did it mean?

"Kaylin!"

She didn't shout. She had, she realized, been gathering strands of history as if they were objects. Those that spoke to her in some way, she kept. She didn't question why; it was entirely instinctive, but at this moment, she had nothing but instinct to guide her. She wasn't surprised to discover that the stories about words and language had drifted into stories about life. About birth. About the first rough attempts to create something small and contained that was nonetheless independent enough that it could live and grow and create in a diminished fashion.

There were rules, she thought. Life had rules. Not the ones parents handed down; not even the ones the Emperor did, although flouting those generally ended the life they were meant to govern. The words that gave life-the names-were True Words. But they were more. She couldn't quite figure out how; they didn't change. But they grew, nonetheless. It was the act of living that altered them, in subtle ways strengthening some part of their essential meaning.