“I have no idea why I ever thought this was a good idea,” Kaylin said as she left the patio table, Severn in her wake.
“Which part?”
“Any of it!”
“They had nowhere else to safely go.”
“You mean the cohort?”
“Any of them. The danger to Bellusdeo wasn’t physical—or not purely physical. But she had nowhere to go, either.”
“I just—”
“Wish everyone could get along?”
She nodded.
He shrugged. “We’d both be out of jobs if that was a realistic possibility. And on most days you love your job.”
“I want to leave my job outside of my home.”
Severn shrugged. “Training room?”
“Parlor first.” She was reasonably certain the cohort wouldn’t actually kill each other, and she was absolutely certain Emmerian wouldn’t injure Bellusdeo, possibly even in self-defense. No.
She understood why Mandoran had risked his life to interfere with Bellusdeo in the Tower; she understood what the danger he’d faced then was. She wanted to make certain that it wasn’t happening again.
The door to the parlor was closed; no smoke trailed out from the space between door and jamb. If Bellusdeo and Emmerian were fighting, no evidence of that was clear.
Until Bellusdeo roared.
Kaylin reached for the door. Severn caught her arm and shook his head. “She’s angry, she’s not enraged. They’re having a discussion. It’s the cohort we need to see.”
Helen’s voice didn’t tell them to stay put, which confirmed Severn’s opinion. She did, however, caution them about the avenues of safe approach.
“What does that even mean?” Kaylin demanded, as she jogged towards the closet door that led to the expansive training rooms.
Helen didn’t answer. Then again, she didn’t need to. Kaylin opened the door into a field. A battlefield, apparently, given the broken standards that awkwardly adorned it. There were as yet no bodies, but grass had been stripped from the earth by the passage of many feet—some of them hoofed, by the look of the damage. “Wrong room.”
Severn was looking at the banners. He turned back toward the door and exhaled, shoulders slumping.
There was no door. Of course there was no door.
Kaylin let out a stream of Leontine invective.
“She did warn us.”
“I want more information in my warnings. Damn it.” Kaylin listened for the sound of clashing armies, clashing forces, that these banners implied. Severn, however, walked to the nearest. Kaylin had missed it; the pole had been sheared in half at an angle, and the cloth lay across the ground. He lifted it.
It was, to Kaylin’s eye, Barrani.
“It’s Carmanne’s standard. Serralyn’s family.”
“She’s not here.”
“I don’t think this is an entirely physical fight.” He carefully flattened the standard and then rolled it up, as if it were a carpet. “Helen?”
A small wagon appeared to the left of where Kaylin was standing. Helen herself didn’t speak.
They picked their way across this field of standards; some listed; some were slashed or torn. At each, Severn paused to retrieve the cloth, or what remained of it, and at each, he named the Barrani family that it signified, adding the names of the cohort as necessary.
Each name added to the weight of Kaylin’s worry, enlarging it. She liked the cohort. As a group. As individuals. Even Sedarias. She liked what they had built; that they had chosen to trust each other, that they were willing to kill and die for each other.
This was the downside of that. The air fairly thrummed with enraged betrayal.
She stopped.
Air did not thrum with enraged betrayal. But she felt it, simmering in the earth beneath both of their feet. This was a battlefield, yes—but Kaylin was almost certain it was a battlefield of one.
Kaylin spoke a single name out loud. “Sedarias.”
A hand reached out and clamped itself over her mouth. She drove her elbow backward. Connected with nothing. The hand was disembodied. One of the cohort, then. She didn’t know which one; she’d never taken the time to memorize what their hands looked like. She nodded.
The hand fell instantly away from her mouth.
Speaking far more quietly, Kaylin said, “This is Sedarias’s battlefield.”
“It is.” It was Terrano.
“I thought you were at the Academia.”
“I was—and I’d much rather be there. But Mandoran said it was serious.”
Severn stood, and put another banner in the wagon. He glanced back, but there was no visible sign of Terrano; even the hand had vanished.
“Are we going to find your family’s banner here?”
“Probably. Farther in.”
“Farther in?”
“This is a large, flat field, like a circle. The edges are all cliff.”
“She’s down the cliff.”
“Yes.”
“Which direction?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Where is everyone else?”
Silence.
“Helen?” No answer. Kaylin wondered if they were even contained in Helen anymore. It was a thought that made her very uneasy.
“She’s here,” Terrano’s voice said. “But it’s harder for her to communicate with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you brought him with you.”
“What?”
“You—you’re not normal, you know that, right? You’re as human as the rest of us are Barrani.”
“But you are Barrani.”
“Sure,” he said. It sounded like a no. “I’d tell you to send him back, but you can’t; Helen’s entire focus is on protecting Severn. I think you could do it, but she’s not certain, and she is certain Severn’s death will cause severe fractures in this current iteration of reality.”
Kaylin wasn’t stupid. “Because of me.”
“Because you’ll be upset, yes.”
“Will Sedarias try to kill us?”
“No.” It sounded like a yes. “Come on, we need to find Mandoran.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes.”
“In Sedarias’s head, for want of a better word?”
“Yes—but that’s normal for us.”
“This battlefield is not normal.”
“Actually, it is. Some of us are better at words than others. Some of us are excellent at words—but only as weapons. Guess who’s the latter?”
“This is what it always looks like?”
“To me, yes.” Terrano exhaled. “You need to remember something—both of you need to remember it. I don’t see what you see. But I see what Severn is doing. It’s complicated. We’re looking at the same things, but...we’re not interpreting them the same way.”
“If vision were interpretative, the law would be in serious trouble when it came to witnesses,” Kaylin said.
“Most people don’t have the flexibility to even see what you’re looking at now. We’re seeing what Sedarias sees. There’s no way to tell you how to interpret if you...can’t already do some of that on your own.”
“So, can we fly here? Because jumping down the side of a cliff isn’t likely to be healthy.”
“Tell me about it,” Terrano said, a note of resignation in an otherwise tense voice. “You don’t have to jump. I’m sure there are stairs somewhere.”
“In a cliff?”
“Somewhere. I’m taking the fast way down.”
“We’re going to look for safe.”
He snorted. “It’s Sedarias. You’ll be looking for a long damn time.”
When Terrano was gone and the rest of the banners had been collected and carefully placed in the small wagon, Kaylin poked Hope. He was seated, not draped across her shoulders, but didn’t look particularly alert.
“We need to get down to wherever Sedarias is.”
He nodded.
“Can you help?”
I can.
“Will I have to sacrifice something for it?”
No. This is something you could do yourself.
Without stairs or wings, Kaylin didn’t see how.
Hope snorted. He pushed himself off her shoulder, hovering in the air for a moment in front of her face. Here, those marks have a greater weight and meaning. Remember that.
“Hope—I don’t even understand where here is. If Helen is somehow stabilizing things so that Severn survives here, we’re obviously still in Helen somehow. But Terrano seemed to think that this was all Sedarias. Those two things don’t line up to my pathetic, tiny, mortal mind.”
Severn glanced at Hope, who seemed to be waiting for something. “Helen creates the rooms for her tenants and guests; those rooms are a merging of what Helen is, at base, with what they need. There’s already a lack of distinct separation in our interactions. This is...more difficult.”
“Sedarias has taken control of some part of Helen?”
“Or Helen has, for reasons of her own, ceded that control to Sedarias in this space. It’s probably a containment measure.”
Hope squawked. He then landed.
“Can we take that control back from her?”
“I wouldn’t try it unless we had no other options.” He watched Hope as Hope began to transform.
Hope’s adoption of the draconic form—that’s the way Kaylin thought of it—was not similar to watching either Bellusdeo or Emmerian. Hope seemed to expand, rather than transform. His body was already translucent, glass-like in appearance; it was far less disturbing to watch a familiar face warp and extend—almost as if it were stretched to a breaking point that never quite arrived.
Hope’s transition seemed far less painful, far more natural.
Climb, Hope told them both. I will carry your wagon.
Kaylin scrambled up on his back; Severn took a seat behind her. True to his word, he carefully grasped the wagon in much, much larger feet, and lifted his bulk into the air with the movement of enormous, translucent wings.
“Can you see Sedarias?”
“Not yet.”
“Terrano?”
“We couldn’t see him when he spoke to us.”
It was a fair point. She couldn’t ask Hope to place a wing across her face; he’d flatten her. Terrano had said the rise of the plain that looked very much like a battlefield after a war had been fought was at the height of a flat peak; that it was cliff all the way down. Seen from the air, he was right. What she didn’t see, as Hope circled this edifice of rising stone, was anything at all that resembled stairs.
Terrano—and Mandoran—had ways of reaching the ground; the landscape itself wouldn’t otherwise try to kill them. But it was going to be work, regardless.
“Can you see Mandoran?” She couldn’t. “He’s likely to be where Sedarias is.”
“No sign of Mandoran. I’d wait on Terrano’s signal.”
“You think he’ll remember to signal us?”
She could feel Severn’s nod from the inside; she couldn’t see it because she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head.
Hope felt no need to land quickly, possibly because the peak was so high. Rock was the landscape, all the way down; Kaylin couldn’t see an end to the drop. There was no distant patch of greenery, nothing that visually implied that life existed anywhere but the flat plain they’d left. There, at least, evidence of plant life remained, even if much of it had been destroyed.
Severn’s eyes had always been better than hers; she wasn’t surprised when Severn said, “There. Start there.”
“What’s there?”
“A river.”
Hope turned, slowly, to the right, still intent on descent.
The river was much wider than it had looked from above, which wasn’t hard; from above, Kaylin hadn’t seen it. As they approached, it seemed to widen and lengthen, rushing in a way that made swimming or rafting guaranteed suicide. Rocks and wood had been carried in the current, and rocks had worn away at the stone that served as its partial tunnel; there was no shore here.
Hope flew in the direction of the current, following the water so closely the spray dampened his passengers.
Kaylin glanced once over her shoulder; the peak could no longer be seen.
She thought of the portal paths, their natural gray emptiness, the nothing that was somehow the potential out of which the Towers could create everything. Sedarias had done that here. But Terrano’s reaction implied it wasn’t deliberate; it was a state of mind.
Why had the battlefield been placed at the top of a peak? It was the highest standing peak in this bleak landscape. She understood the symbolism of the fallen banners: Sedarias felt betrayed by those who had been, and who were, the only family she had ever known.
Family, in the sense that Kaylin defined it. Kaylin had tried to build a family in the absence of the one she was born to; she’d been drawn to people who would, or could, provide her with some of what she had desperately missed.
Sedarias hadn’t had any of that; her upbringing—given her sister and brother—had been a deadly version of every man for themselves. She had killed both of them in the end, not for reasons of politics or power, but survival. But she was now An’Mellarionne, and power came with the title, if she could survive long enough to hold it.
She’d been taught not to trust; most of them had. Annarion, however, had never stopped trusting his brother, which is why his anger at his brother’s behavior cut him so deeply. Teela had killed her father because she loved her mother, who had died at his hands.
Family, Barrani family, was complicated.
Maybe there was no other way to express it than the way Sedarias had chosen to express it: as a war, a battlefield, a place of conflict and only conflict.
She realized then that she didn’t know what Severn’s childhood had been like; that it had never truly occurred to her to ask.
“You did,” he said, proof that her thoughts were heard, even if they weren’t voiced. “But you were young, when we first met. In your memories I was always there. I was part of your family.”
And now was not the time to ask. She therefore dutifully bit back a flood of questions and turned her thoughts, once again, to Sedarias. What did Sedarias want? What had she wanted when she had first offered eleven strangers the power of her True Name?
What had she tried to do with the power of theirs?
Ah. Yes. That was the question.
“Family is difficult,” she said aloud.
“All the best,” Severn said quietly, “and all the worst. Sedarias’s birth family offered nothing but the worst by our standards. To the Barrani, it might have been considered best.”
It was not. Kaylin was surprised to hear Nightshade’s voice. She couldn’t tell if this was because Helen let him in—which she sometimes did—or if Helen was so distracted the basic securities had been loosened.
I believe it is the former. She is aware that she is not Barrani, and her experience of Barrani was not...what yours is. Sedarias’s family would be considered extreme by many of our kin. All comments of weakness aside, your own understanding of her in the context of her cohort might prove more valuable than the opinion of her people. This is impressive, he added, the texture of the interior voice changing.
Impressive?
It is a wilderness as harsh as any we have had to endure. I have never attempted to create something of this scope within Castle Nightshade. I admit I am tempted to try. But you are now speaking to the wrong person.
Who should I be speaking to?
Terrano, but I perceive he is not present. He was not, however, the person I meant to suggest.
Please don’t say Ynpharion.
Silence.
He only ever talks to me when the Consort insists on conveying information, or when he thinks I’m an idiot. He’s not going to want to talk to me about Barrani happy families.
No. I doubt very much he will desire to talk about unhappy families, either. But I believe he may have information that would be of use.
And not you.
And not me, no. I had very little conflict with either my mother or my father, while they lived. With my cousins, with my aunts, yes—but they were not considered family unless we were at war.
Kaylin sagged in place. Ynpharion won’t want to talk to me about this.
No. But you might infer some of it from his general attitude.
Which is judgmental.
Yes. It is, however, similar to Sedarias’s—or to what Sedarias would be had she had neither true power nor the cohort. She took a risk. But Kaylin, Ynpharion took a risk, in the end, as well. As the one who has knowledge of True Names you have never been a threat. But the Consort? She is Barrani.
She loved her brothers. They loved each other.
And still does, yes. But Ynpharion is not her brother. Perhaps, in time, the risk will—as you say in Elantran—pay out. Regardless, he took that risk. And in my estimation, there is some pride for him in that.
He didn’t do that for me.
Nightshade said nothing for long enough, Kaylin thought he had withdrawn. No. But you needed to be in contact with the Consort; it was a matter of importance to the High Halls, and he knew it. He could talk to you, but he could not make decisions, and admitting that a mortal held his True Name would have been a public humiliation beyond his fragile endurance.
And you don’t care.
And I do not care. There was amusement in those words. Unlike those who wish they did not, it is of little relevance to me. I am outcaste. I have nothing at all to lose.
But Nightshade was a power.
Was? a familiar voice snapped. Calarnenne is a power. He wields one of The Three. He was known for his prowess in war, and none who rose to challenge him survived it. In his fashion, he shares renown with An’Teela.
How long have you been listening?
Subjectively? Decades. Ynpharion was frustrated. This was almost a comfort, because Ynpharion appeared to have only one state: frustration.
That is not true.
Fine. Anger and resentment, too.
You have never understood.
I’ve always understood, she snapped back. You’re not a power. Fine. I spent all of my life until I arrived in the city being even less of a power than you. Maybe it’s a shorter period of time—but my whole life is a short period of time compared to yours. I know what it’s like to be terrified that I won’t even survive. But I also know what it’s like to fear starving to death—to be so damn hungry there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do for food. Do you?
Silence.
You don’t.
You’re Chosen, he finally said, the words a grudging acknowledgment of the truth.
Now, yes. And that cost me. It cost fourteen children their lives.
More silence. It occurred to Kaylin, as the waves of anger began to abate, that this was not what Nightshade had had in mind.
Anger, Ynpharion said, is better than fear. If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. I had my life. I wanted to keep it.
Kaylin was silent. I didn’t, she finally said. I didn’t want to keep mine.
Ynpharion added a new emotion: surprise.
I wouldn’t throw it away, now. I like the life I have, the life I’ve found. But I didn’t build it—I tripped over it. And kept tripping. I didn’t know Helen. I didn’t know the cohort. I didn’t know Bellusdeo—or Nightshade, if it comes to that. I didn’t have Teela or the Hawks.
Is that what you believe?
Yes, because it’s the truth.
If the cohort has taught you nothing, it should have taught you this: truth is mutable, flexible, dependent on context. I was never Sedarias. Never.
Because you see her as a power.
Because she is a power. She always was. You think that her centuries-long fate somehow negates that truth. We know better.
Who is “we”?
Her people. The Barrani. She lived the life I lived, but she—
You survived it. So did she.
Silence, this one larger and louder. So did you, Ynpharion finally said.
I’m not Barrani.
Neither is Sedarias.
And you?
I am Barrani. I do not have the freedom that Sedarias gained for herself. I did not kill my brother or my sister; I did not kill my parents.
She didn’t kill her parents.
No. An’Teela killed her only living parent—and she is free.
And that’s what you want? The question itself was harsh, but the tone was not. It wasn’t meant as an accusation. For a moment, on Hope’s back, the wind howling in her ears and pulling strands of loose hair toward Severn’s face, she simply wanted to know more about him.
It’s not what Sedarias wants, he finally said.
What do you think she wants?
What you wanted. I think she started out wanting what you wanted. Your mother died when you were young—you didn’t want that. Neither did An’Teela. But An’Teela could build a life on vengeance. You didn’t have that. Sedarias did. But...Sedarias is not An’Teela.
Teela took the same risk the rest of the cohort did.
Yes, and she was abandoned. And she survived.
She wasn’t abandoned. They couldn’t escape, at the start. When they could, Teela was the first person they looked for. Kaylin shook herself.
I want what she built, Ynpharion said.
Have you killed your brother and sister?
I believe she would far rather have Annarion’s troubled relationship with his brother than the one she had with hers.
If you were Sedarias—I know you’re not—how would you reach her?
The battlefield was the loftiest point of this barren place. You thought of it as a place where a war had been fought—and possibly lost. I think...
She waited. It was hard.
I think that it is a place that is precious to her; the battle is always fought. What waits beneath it is what you now fly over: a barren, rocky landscape where even water causes damage. Her life, like my life, was a battle. And if I did not have her power, neither did my siblings. It is the battlefield that you must protect, and to which you must return her.
But I don’t want her to fight.
His chuckle was quiet enough that she might have mistaken his voice for another’s if it weren’t for the fact of the True Name that bound them.
She will always fight. And the person she fights now is herself. You are afraid that she attempted to use names she knows against those who hold them.
She was.
That she has not done it before—or often—is a symbol of the battlefield; it is herself she fights, because that fight was the whole of her childhood until she met the cohort.
Kaylin said nothing, willing him to continue.
But the risk taken was the hope. We are ridiculed for hope, and often it fails us and causes us to fail ourselves. She does not believe it. And she does believe it. Terrano did not seem surprised to be here. What he said is true: this is what Sedarias is like. He cannot know her name, she cannot know theirs, without this knowledge.
I don’t know anything about you, though.
No. But we did not begin as they began; it could never have happened. I could not have allowed it. Were I they, I might have. He doubted it. She heard the doubt clearly.
I want the war to end.
Yes. I imagine Sedarias does as well. But we are also products of the lives we have been born and bred to live. This is the best she can do, for now. Perhaps, in the Hallionne it was different; there, there was no family, no Barrani enemy, nothing that could disturb the peace they built. But she is An’Mellarionne, as she desired. Everything old is new and visceral again.
And Mandoran had betrayed her.
That is the nature of our lives. What she expects—what I expected—is betrayal. To separate her from that expectation would almost be to separate her from herself.
She’s had centuries of no betrayal. She wasn’t that old when she was sent to the green. More of her life has been defined by the cohort than her family.
Yes. He spoke no other words, but they weren’t really needed. Hope is pain.
Kaylin knew this. She knew it better than anyone. Ynpharion disagreed, but silently. Hope is necessary.
For how long? For how long must hope burden us when it causes nothing but pain?
I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I just know that I tried to die—by Hawk, because I couldn’t bring myself to end my own life. This was not where she had thought this literal descent into the mind of Sedarias would lead. And because she was talking to Ynpharion, emotions she would have bet had finally died reared their heads. The Hawklord gave me hope. And I’ve carried it since then.
He said nothing as she continued. And I’m glad I carried it.
Perhaps in time Sedarias will be—but what you see now is a direct consequence of that hope.
Mandoran hasn’t—
No. But if you truly understood her fear, you would know that it is the lens through which she views her world. She has been waiting for this.
Kaylin didn’t argue. Didn’t feel she could. But Terrano had seemed resigned, not surprised. Worried, not terrified. Perhaps they could do this.
But do what, exactly? Get her attention? Return her to normal? Force the cohort to hug and make up? She rolled her eyes hard enough she should have sprained them.
She didn’t understand the cohort. Knowing True Names hadn’t given her much insight, either. Every person whose True Name she knew was separate from her; they lived their own lives, they had their own responsibilities. She used the connection the way other people used mirrors: to reach out and speak to someone who wasn’t immediately present.
That was how it had started with the cohort; had they not been exposed to the regalia in their childhood, that’s probably how it would have remained, until and unless one of the twelve attempted to assert control over the others. Sedarias would have been her bet, for that.
But the attempt to exert control wasn’t control.
Severn had tried it with Kaylin. Once. And then he hadn’t spoken a word to her for weeks, as if the attempt—which she understood—destroyed any worth, value or self-respect he had. It had bothered her far less than it had bothered him, and in theory, she was the one who was affected by it.
And maybe this was like that: Sedarias had instinctively reached out to grab control, to force behaviors that she felt were in the cohort’s best interests. It felt more wrong, to Kaylin.
Severn tensed; his arms tightened briefly. Because it’s “only” you, in your own mind. You don’t ever think that should be done to someone else.
Not true. I can think of a lot of people I’d love to have taken over by people I actually trust. But she knew what he meant, or how he meant it. And if she had been willing to both accept and forget, why shouldn’t the cohort do the same?
Sedarias was part of them. Like...part of their thoughts, their way of thinking. Never separate. As prisoners in the Hallionne, they couldn’t be said to have had their own lives; only Teela did, and that was because she’d had no other choice.
But they were free, now.
Serralyn and Valliant were part of the Academia. Teela was An’Teela and a corporal of the Hawks. Terrano was...Terrano. That left Mandoran, Annarion, Allaron, Fallessian, Torrisant and Karian, the three who almost never spoke or interacted with any of the cohort except each other. And Eddorian, who had elected to remain with his brother in the Hallionne, but who was nonetheless aware of what his chosen family were doing.
At least one of the banners had belonged to Reymar, Karian’s family. Even if they interacted with no outsiders—except Helen—they had their own opinions and beliefs. And one had been Gennave’s, which was Eddorian’s; Eddorian, whose brother, like Nightshade, had searched for him. For him and power, and it was the latter that had gutted his mind.
What would she do if part of her mind rose against the rest of her?
How could she bring it back to normal? What was “normal” for the cohort and for Sedarias as part of it?
There, Hope said, an interruption she was almost grateful for. “Can you see it, unaided? There is a storm in the distance.”
Kaylin squinted. She then elbowed Severn rather than saying no.
Severn was silent for a long beat, as Hope began to pick up speed. “It’s Sedarias,” he said, voice flat. “Sedarias and Mandoran.”