On the day the twelve had come to the green it had been sunny. Clear. The trees had whispered and the Barrani had heard their ancient voices and considered themselves blessed. But it wasn't a blessing; it was a warning. Not a threat-there was no menace in it, but there was sorrow. Grief. Loss.
On the day that the green had chosen to speak to the gathered and expectant members of the High Court, it had not spoken of power. She understood that it had never knowingly spoken of power. Instead, it spoke of loss. It spoke with the voice of Alsanis because it heard what Alsanis did not say; it struggled to understand what it heard. It spoke with the voice of Orbaranne, and the voice of Bertolle; it spoke with the voice of Kariastos. These were part of the green and yet separate from it; they heard the thoughts and the will of green and they interpreted it for those who came to seek their shelter.
It spoke of their weeping. It spoke of their pain. It spoke of the need they denied. They had made their choice. They had chosen one desire over another. They had locked themselves into the existence of the Hallionne, and they had done so gladly. But the sorrow had grown in their voices, and the joy of making the right decision-if there was ever any such thing-was only barely enough to sustain them. They chose to sleep.
Sleeping, they controlled far less of their voices; when they dreamed, they were closest to the green. And so the green heard. It heard, but it didn't understand.
On that single day, when all such speech, no matter how difficult, was allowed, the green spoke to the Barrani of the West March because the Barrani might understand what the green itself did not: loneliness. Abandonment. Grief. Love.
On the day Teela and her companions had come to the green, these were the heart of its story. And on that day, Teela's mother had died. The lost, the other eleven, then understood that they faced danger, death-or worse-and that they were meant to face it. They had been given to the High Court to be forged, as all significant weapons were, in the heart of the green; if, like poorly tempered blades, they shattered, it signified only failure.
They were children, at heart.
Maybe, Kaylin thought, as tears fell unhindered down her cheeks, people were always children at heart. What the green asked, they heard. They felt it all. It was so much in tune with who and what they were, they had nothing to temper it with. They had no way of resisting. The green, for that moment, was of them, like them. There was no home and no safety for them in any other place...so they clung to the green, and when the story was done, they held on as tightly as the living possibly could.
Kaylin doubted a mortal could have done it; there was nothing with which to anchor themselves to the green.
They found freedom in Alsanis. They found freedom in the green. But not love, not from the green; it wasn't living. It wasn't a person. If it moved, it moved slowly; if it changed, if it gathered knowledge, it was slow, as well.
Only Teela had been left behind. Teela had heard the green's story, and she had felt its resonance as strongly as her kin. She felt the loss, the shock of it, and the echoes, and the certain sense of its eternity, more strongly. She understood-she'd understood it then-what it meant for the people whose lives and names she had shared.
Only Teela was left behind.
Only Teela.
The green had devoted the whole of its power to protecting Teela from itself. In exchange for the life, for the word, at the heart of her mother. But Teela's name was connected to the names of the other eleven. They formed a bond, yes; they also formed a chain.
If they had not trusted each other with so much hope, and so much youthful optimism, the eleven would have vanished into the green and the things that lay beyond it. They couldn't. Because they lived and the words lived, and the bindings, so tenuous, held them. They were aware of Teela. And Teela? Was aware of them.
And they had waited. They had searched. They had troubled the green and the Hallionne. They understood that the world was made of words. That the living were. That everything that they had ever touched or shaken or destroyed had come from the words of the Ancients. But in all those words, in the ones they could touch and the ones they only barely infer, they couldn't find the words they needed to free Teela. To bring her...home.
They never stopped trying.
It was Eddorian who suggested their final solution. It was Eddorian who pointed out that entire worlds had been created from nothing, as laboratories for the Ancients, those absent creators who, like any neglectful parents, had spawned and moved on. If worlds could be created, if words that distilled the essence of love and hate, war and peace, birth and death, could define the fates of whole races, the words themselves had power.
They only needed to find the words that would allow them to re-create one small, isolated event in the past. They needed to save Teela's mother's life. The rest were inconsequential. If Teela's mother did not die in the green, Teela would not now be trapped and unreachable. Teela would, as the rest of them, finally be allowed to leave. She would be with them.
But...they had a Barrani understanding of power. They understood that the Hallionne had almost unlimited power within a small, focal point, and they had attempted to unmake Orbaranne in order to gain that for themselves. They wanted to change one small event. One small event, one minute, one hour in one life.
The green did not want Orbaranne's death. No more did it wish to lose Alsanis, and strangely enough, the eleven didn't wish to lose him, either. He was their cage, yes, but he was also the only home they had. They had grown into their confinement; they had played in the limitless possibilities of the space he governed; they had rested at his heart.
And yet, without power, they would never have Teela back.
They needed new words. They needed new possibilities. They needed, they realized, to destroy the green. It was the only other option available.
Kaylin shook her head. She walked away from the tree, the eyes of the creature following her. They were larger now; they were taller than Kaylin. They no longer looked like eyes to her, they were so large.
"Yes," Mandoran said, which surprised her. "We tried. We tried to summon a familiar. We failed. We tried again, and we failed."
Kaylin blinked. She felt-she heard-history continuing to unfold around her and she let it go now. She heard the green's voice, the green's incomprehensible voice, and she knew that today, the story the green told was the continuation of that earlier story. But now, the green understood a little bit more.
"And now, you have brought yours. Teela knows you," he continued, looking slightly surprised.
"What-what is a familiar?"
He smiled. It wasn't a friendly expression; it was full of the usual Barrani condescension. "Do you not understand, yet? Look at him, Chosen. He shows you all that he is now."
She'd been looking; it was hard not to. She could see the words coiled in him, and they were words without end. They weren't True Words. But they were words that had movement and strength and depth; they had shape and form. They were made of shadow and smoke and the type of light that strikes from a distance, like the light on forest floor.
"Do you understand?"
And the sad thing was, she did. In the familiar, in the small dragon, in whatever the small dragon was part of, she saw the words he contained. Some of them were words that felt familiar, shadows of True Words. Shadows of names. Some were words she was certain she would never see in life. And all of them were waiting.
All of them. If she spoke these words, if she asked the familiar to speak them, they would be almost true. Even thinking it, she saw the light ripple and change; she saw iridescence give way, at last, to gold.
And she understood why sorcerers of legend had risked entire worlds to summon such a creature. Because those sorcerers could speak the emerging words. They could, for a moment, be gods, be Ancients. They could change the course of history. They could remake a world. Nothing was beyond them because in the space the familiar occupied, that he was part of, all things were possible. All words were true.
All words could be true.
She lost the thread of the story then.
Because all things were possible. Because history could be changed. Because if she had the familiar and his power, Jade and Steffi would never need to die. They would never have to die. She could rewrite it all: her mother's death. Or Steffi's and Jade's. Severn's choice. Everything. She could remake the fief of Nightshade. She could remake the fiefs entirely. She could change the world so that the pain she'd suffered need never be suffered again.
And even thinking it, words emerged, as strong, as golden, as names in the Lake of Life.
She turned to Mandoran, and was surprised to get a faceful of Teela instead.
That, and two hands, one on either shoulder, and a lot of teeth-rattling. Teela was blue-eyed and angry. She was not the child who had come to the green to be blessed and empowered. She was the Hawk. She was the Hawk, except there were tears on her cheeks and her lips were trembling.
She had never come so close to striking Kaylin.
Kaylin didn't know Teela's name. Teela had never trusted her with it, not the way she'd trusted the eleven. But she knew that Teela wanted what they wanted: in the end, she wanted to be free. In the end, she wanted to join the only people she had truly loved.
Yet she was angry at Kaylin, right now, right here, for even thinking it-because she'd always known what Kaylin was thinking, from day one. She'd often belittled it because that was what Barrani did.