What is the shape of Sedarias’s fear? Hope asked as he tensed beneath her.
The answer seemed clear: the battlefield, and beneath it, the barren, rocky emptiness—through which water still flowed.
Yes. And?
But there was no necessary and. Kaylin understood, before Sedarias became visible to her eyes, what the shape of her fear was; she understood it because she had lived it and passed—mostly—through it. It wasn’t the fear of isolation; it wasn’t the fear of betrayal, although Ynpharion hadn’t been wrong.
It was the certain sense that this was the only home of which she was worthy. This is what she deserved. The others? No. Even Terrano with his obsessions about the new and different had a spark of life or joy—ah, that word: joy.
Barren rock and the detritus of battle was what Sedarias had.
“Terrano!”
“I’m kind of busy,” Terrano, disembodied, replied.
“How much control do you have over this space?”
“What? Me? I told you—it’s Sedarias’s space. It’s her.”
But Kaylin shook her head. “All of you are part of it. All of you. She’s angry right now. I get that. But you’re part of her space. You’ve got as much right to control it as—as she does.”
“Dangerous and stupid at the same time. Well done.”
“I mean it!”
“Obviously. It’s not that simple. There are things Sedarias can do that we can all forgive because we’ve seen her and we know who she is. But there are things she’ll never forgive.”
“Does she hate Alsanis?”
“What?”
“Does she hate the Hallionne Alsanis?”
“I know who Alsanis is. I can’t even make sense of the question. Maybe try it in Barrani?”
“I need you all to do something.”
“To do what?” The skies, as they approached, were a vivid green-gray; the clouds had rolled across a clear, blue sky.
“To change the shape of this place. She’s afraid—this is about one fear. We need to remind her—”
He laughed, the sound both reckless and wild. “What in the hells do you think we’ve been doing?”
Kaylin lifted her arms; the marks had lifted themselves off her skin, surrounded it in a moving nimbus of light. Terrano understood. Which was frustrating, because once again, Kaylin didn’t.
“I like Sedarias,” she said, and she felt the base of her throat swell, as if the words were song. “I want to smack her, but I want to smack Mandoran most days. And you,” she added.
“I won’t feel left out if you don’t.”
“I don’t know all of you. But I’ve liked all of you. I think I envied what you’ve built, what you’ve made—because I saw the outside of it. Until yesterday. Until today. I didn’t understand that it’s work, right?” The light her marks shed was blue, not gold. “But I love Helen. She’s my home. Sedarias can’t keep doing this to Helen.”
Terrano didn’t argue.
Helen remained silent. But Helen was doing something incredibly important for both Sedarias and cohort, and Severn.
“Hope,” she said, “drop me in the middle of the storm.”
There is a danger, Hope said.
“You think?”
You don’t understand the nature of the danger, Hope replied.
“Is this something you could do in my place without killing Severn?” Severn was the only thing here that might serve as a sacrifice—and Kaylin would die first.
I cannot do it at all, Chosen, he replied, with a great and almost distant dignity. Get ready. I will drop you as you’ve requested, but I will need to be closer if you wish to survive it.
“This isn’t reality.”
Is it not? For Sedarias at the moment it is the only reality. It is a reality that is not mine, Chosen. It is yours and hers. It is the province of the living.
“Wait—what do you mean?”
But Hope had reached the height of the storm. He turned over, and Kaylin fell. So did Severn.
The heart of the storm was, from Kaylin’s vantage, a long way down.
“What are you doing?” Terrano practically screamed. His voice wasn’t directly beside her ear, but she caught a lot of colorful Leontine regardless.
She reached instinctively for Severn as she fell—whether to anchor herself or to somehow save him, she couldn’t say—but Severn was beyond her. Above her. And she could see Terrano’s hands beneath her partner’s arms. Severn was safe, for the moment.
Kaylin herself was victim to gravity. The marks on her arms provided no aerial buoyancy; she plunged toward the two people she could easily see: Sedarias and Mandoran. They both looked up as she approached at growing speed.
It was Sedarias who gestured, not Mandoran; Mandoran shouted in the same disgusted astonishment as Terrano. Kaylin’s descent slowed as she approached Sedarias; she could see the color of the Barrani woman’s eyes. They were obsidian with flecks of color, like black opals, a gem Kaylin had never liked: too hard, too much like the Shadows that threatened to destroy the city.
Sedarias’s expression rippled as Kaylin continued to fall; her focus—which had been on Mandoran—shifted slowly, as if she were struggling to move the entirety of her enraged and bereaved attention to where it needed to be.
And where it needed to be, Kaylin thought, was where they all wanted it to be: on Kaylin, and on Kaylin’s immediate survival. The rest of the conflict could wait the few seconds it would take to decide Kaylin’s fate.
The leader of the cohort lifted her arms, opening them; Mandoran, facing her, did the same. Kaylin could not recall why she had thought this was a good idea; she had intended for Hope to land.
As it was, the landing was going to be hers. She prayed that Terrano had managed to prevent Severn’s unintentional landing, but had no time to think anything else; she fell into Sedarias’s outstretched arms.
And fell through them.
She didn’t hit stone. Beneath Sedarias’s feet—and beneath Mandoran’s—there had been nothing but rock. There was no rock where Kaylin landed, if landing was even the right word. She looked down; there was nothing beneath her feet. But what she couldn’t see was solid. Solid, dark, far less unforgiving than the rocks.
“You shouldn’t be here, dear,” Helen said, her voice disembodied.
“Where is here?”
Her home didn’t answer.
“Are you an idiot?”
Kaylin turned in the direction of the voice. As she did she saw light: her marks. In the darkness they were the only thing she could see. “Often,” she replied.
“It’s no wonder Teela worries about you so much—you have a death wish. What were you thinking?”
Kaylin shrugged as the voice drew closer. “You really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?” Sedarias’s voice was a rumble encased by sharp edges.
“I was thinking that Mandoran might need some help.”
She could hear a second intake of breath, sharp but different from Sedarias’s.
“Mandoran? You think Mandoran needs help?”
“She’s really not as bright as she wants to be,” Mandoran said. He coalesced in this darkness, shining faintly. Sedarias could still not be seen. To Kaylin, brow folded, he said, “Seriously, what were you thinking? You can’t honestly imagine Sedarias would hurt me?”
“You’re not a patch on Sedarias. She’s powerful and martial. I wouldn’t worry if it was Bellusdeo; Bellusdeo could hold her own.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“I could,” Sedarias snapped, appearing at last, as Mandoran did. She was about three feet taller, and she looked down—and down again—to see both her chosen brother and her landlord.
“Could what?”
“I could have handled the Dragon.”
“I handled the Dragon.”
If a storm cloud had dropped lightning bolts without warning, Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Seriously,” Terrano said, appearing—as they appeared—in the darkness. He glanced at Kaylin’s arms, frowning. “None of us should have made any attempt to—as you put it—handle the Dragon.”
“She needed help, though,” Serralyn said. Serralyn, who was in the Academia with Valliant.
“If she can’t pass the Tower’s test, that’s to our benefit.” To Kaylin’s surprise, it was Torrisant who spoke.
“It’s only to our benefit if any of us can pass the test.” Mandoran again. Kaylin wondered, then, why she’d come here at all, but the marks continued to glow, the blue depths of their heart giving way to gold.
“What did you do with Severn?”
“What you should have done in the first place,” Terrano replied, although he didn’t look away from Sedarias. “He’s safe with Helen. Probably eating too, given the way she was fussing. You can’t just drag him into everything—he’s not suited to it.”
“I didn’t realize we were about to enter someplace dangerous. It’s Helen.”
“Well, now you know.”
“I’m kind of hoping this never happens again.”
“And I was kind of hoping that Allasarre was dead, buried and forgotten. We don’t always get what we want.”
“We can get that,” Sedarias snapped. Her eyes, still opal-like, were flashing, her translucent hands becoming fists. She was shaking, and the shaking seemed to make her body far less solid, less well-defined.
Terrano cursed. “Hold on,” he told Kaylin. “It’s about to get bumpy again.”
“Hold on to what?”
“Yourself.”
She understood the moment Sedarias began to speak; she could hear the syllables of a language that was both unknown and viscerally familiar.
Gods, she thought, does Sedarias always do this?
“She is speaking the names, dear. She hasn’t tried to use them yet. Even if she did, I wouldn’t allow the attempt to go uncontested.”
“Meaning you don’t think you could stop her.”
“Not permanently, no. But she means to be heard; she is shouting their names to get their attention.”
“She’s shouting them where anyone can hear them?”
“No, dear. I have always heard them. The only difference is that she’s shouting them where you can hear them. I’d suggest you cover your ears, but that’s not the way you’re hearing them. And that’s not what I think you should be doing, regardless.”
“What should I be doing?”
“Speaking to Sedarias.”
Kaylin was dubious.
“Don’t be, dear. Does her interest in the Tower threaten you?”
“No.”
“Does it make her your enemy?”
“No.”
“Bellusdeo’s enemy?”
“Maybe—at the outside—her rival, but enemy? No. Bellusdeo wouldn’t kill for the Tower. Well, she might try to kill the Avatar of the Tower, but no one else.”
“Yes. Speak to Sedarias.”
“The cohort—”
“It is too much a part of her at the moment; she cannot separate her concerns from theirs. It is why she is here, and why they are trying to reach her.”
“And I’m the outsider.”
“Inasmuch as an outsider has ever gotten this close to Sedarias, yes.”
“But you’re here!”
“Ah, no. No, I am not here in the way you are. She can usually hear my voice; she can certainly see the consequences of actions in my response. But she is not in a place I can now reach. You are.”
“And I’m in a place that can reach her, too.”
“Yes. You know what you have to do. You started it when you asked Hope to drop you into Sedarias’s storm. This is its eye.”
Kaylin didn’t ask how long they had. And she didn’t ask what she should, or shouldn’t, say. She understood that Helen didn’t know. She thought Helen was wrong. Helen understood people because she had to; she knew how to make them feel at home, and feel safe there. Kaylin had none of that ability. She couldn’t read minds. She couldn’t, unless someone communicated it, know what they wanted, what they needed, or worse, what would make them snap like dry kindling.
She had had to learn it the hard way. By observing—when observation was safe, or even possible. Or by making mistakes.
Even here, in the heart of Sedarias’s mind—and she had no other word for it, but hoped to hells that no one ever walked into her mind-space like this—she had no better sense of who Sedarias was, of what she wanted.
She probably didn’t want broken standards and crushed grass and an endless vista of stone; the only thing that implied life had been that grass. And the water, maybe. Kaylin had been following the rush of water to its eventual destination, and had found Sedarias before river met ocean.
Now she wondered where the water was going. Maybe it was headed to another cliff, and would become a waterfall.
Ugh. Water was easier to think about than Sedarias, here. If the cohort, who knew her and loved her and lived with her, didn’t know what to do, how could anyone assume she would?
But the marks on her arm were spinning like concentric, magical bracelets. So maybe it was time to really think instead of feeling hard done by. She turned to look in this eye of the storm; she had seen Mandoran and Sedarias; Terrano had been a disembodied voice.
As she looked, as the light cast by the raised runes on her arms brightened the stillness and alleviated the darkness, the two remained: Sedarias, Mandoran. Mandoran wasn’t obviously trapped—there was no cage, he wasn’t bound—but his feet touched nothing; Sedarias’s rested firmly on stone.
They were speaking. She couldn’t hear them. She could see Sedarias’s expression. And the back of Mandoran’s head.
“You really shouldn’t be here,” Mandoran said.
“Kind of getting that impression. Not sure you should be, either.”
“I can’t leave.”
“I know. Where are the rest of you?”
“You saw Terrano. Or heard him. The rest of us are here, as well.”
“But I can only see you—”
“Sedarias is very focused at the moment. Very.”
“And she can’t hear you.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” She could almost hear the eye roll.
“She hasn’t tried to cut you in two?”
He laughed; the laughter was wild and bitter. “Is that what you honestly believe?”
“She’s in control of the space. If she wanted you gone—”
“She never wants us gone.” His voice, stripped of sarcasm, sounded exhausted.
Kaylin found stone beneath her feet; the stone that didn’t seem to be supporting this iteration of Mandoran. Of the cohort, with the exception of Terrano, he seemed most comfortable off the ground—but not here.
She said, quietly, “Can you go away?”
Mandoran didn’t answer as Kaylin came to stand in front of him, facing Sedarias. Sedarias didn’t seem to see her.
“Not sure how this is going to go,” Kaylin said quietly.
“What are you going to do?”
“So just be prepared if Sedarias loses it.”
He laughed, the laughter wild. “You are insane. That’s the right word?”
“It’s the word you wanted, but I’d quibble right. Later.” She lifted her left hand, as if Sedarias were a very dangerous door ward and she didn’t want to risk the loss of the dominant one.
“I really think that’s a bad idea. Teela is now screaming her lungs out, metaphorically speaking.”
“Probably literally, too. Sorry.” She touched Sedarias’s shoulder.
The attention she wanted, she got. The stone beneath her feet shuddered; Kaylin thought it might break, and reminded herself that this space remained within Helen, and Helen was unlikely to let her die here.
She had Sedarias’s attention.
“What in the hells are you doing?” she demanded.
Sedarias stared at her, her eyes black opal, growing larger and wider in her face. She opened her mouth. No words came out. She tried again, as if she had forgotten how to speak, but understood the theory of it. The third time, she said, “Why are you here?”
“You’re hurting Helen. I want you to stop.”
“I am not hurting Helen. I am having a private discussion with my friends.”
“All eleven of them, yes. If this is your idea of discussion, I’m here to suggest that you try a different method.” Light pulsed around Kaylin’s lifted arm; the marks were glowing. No, Kaylin thought, they were speaking. She couldn’t understand what she heard as words. She wasn’t certain, but thought Sedarias could. At least some of it.
The ground cracked. The stone broke. But it broke beneath both of their feet.
Kaylin fell. So did Sedarias.
What lay beneath the crust of lifeless stone was not the darkness Kaylin had imagined—if she had truly imagined anything. There was light here—sunlight—and trees; there was birdsong and insect rustle and the movement of small feet, the lifted voices of...children.
Mandoran was no longer present. Or if he was, he was, like Terrano, invisible.
“Be careful,” Terrano said quietly. “Be very careful, here.”
Sedarias was staring at Kaylin. “Come,” she said, in a voice that almost defined the word hostile. Terrano sucked in a sharp breath, but said no more as Sedarias turned her back on Kaylin and started to walk away.
If this had been the world into which the door had led, Kaylin wouldn’t have had to be here at all; here, with a table, two chairs, and a large umbrella protecting the people who might occupy those chairs from an excess of sunlight in a clear sky. The only shadows here were cast by the branches of trees.
Sedarias sat.
Kaylin took the empty chair opposite her.
“Why are you here?”
“You destroyed the rock I was standing on?”
Sedarias’s eyes—still opal, but occupying the normal fraction of her face—narrowed. “I have not yet strangled Mandoran for his sense of ‘humor,’ and it is not entirely for lack of trying.”
Right. “Helen was worried.”
“I have not attempted to hurt Helen.”
“No. But the thing is, you don’t have to try to hurt her. Sometimes you can hurt people without even being aware they’re there. We call that collateral damage. But intent doesn’t cut it. What’s damaged is damaged. I didn’t mean to doesn’t count as a legal defense.”
“And you are here as a representative of Imperial Law?”
Kaylin exhaled. “No. No, and you know it.”
“You brought up law.”
She had. “Why didn’t you build this place instead?”
“Instead? It’s always here.” Sedarias looked away for the first time. “It’s always here but I cannot always reach it.”
Kaylin closed her eyes.
“You don’t have spaces like this one. You could; Helen would allow it. But you don’t. You let Helen be Helen. This space, Helen also allowed me to create. She likes it,” Sedarias added, voice soft. “I wish I had met her in my childhood.”
“She wouldn’t be the Helen you know now.”
Silence.
“What were you trying to do?”
“I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything. I was...angry. With Mandoran.” Before Kaylin could speak in his defense, she added, “And I suppose with Serralyn and Valliant as well. With Eddorian. With Teela.” She bowed her head again. “Terrano says I am always angry.”
“You’re not going to deny that, are you?”
“This was not created, this place, from anger.”
Kaylin opened her eyes. She looked at the trees, at the sky, at the surroundings. “No. But it’s not real, either. This, and the rock desert, neither are real.”
“You don’t understand Helen’s power, a Hallionne’s power, if you believe that. You could—were you any other mortal—die here. How much more real must something be?”
“Helen wouldn’t allow any of my guests to be killed anywhere within her boundaries.”
“No, perhaps not. No more would Alsanis, when we were his to jail.” Sedarias rose. “What would you rather see?”
“You,” Kaylin replied. “Your friends. My normal house.”
“Nothing about your house is normal. What Helen does to create your normal house is akin to what has been done here. You’ve seen our rooms.”
But it wasn’t the same. Kaylin couldn’t tell if Sedarias was lying or deflecting, or if she believed what she had said.
She can’t hear us.
She could, however, hear Kaylin. “Why don’t you trust them?”
Sedarias said nothing.
“I understand why you didn’t trust your family. I always wanted siblings. I never had any. Not really. But your family has convinced me that I might have been extremely lucky not to.”
This pulled a cold smile from Sedarias.
“But your brother is dead. Your sister is dead. You might have a whole host of cousins who inevitably join them, if your entire family culture is the same. I don’t know. I’m not Barrani and I can’t judge.”
“But you do judge.”
Kaylin shrugged. “I think it sucks, yes. I think the world is a better place without your relatives in it, yes. But I understand why you didn’t trust them. They would have killed you if you’d left them any openings. They tried when you didn’t.
“But they’re not the cohort. You gave each other your names.”
“That seems so significant to you,” Sedarias replied. “The True Names. The core of our identities.”
Kaylin nodded.
“Do you think that I offered mine because I immediately trusted them?” Clouds moved in across what had been clear sky.
“You were willing to take the risk.”
“I’d met them. I did not consider it a risk. Or perhaps I considered it a calculated risk. Do you think they gave me their names because they liked or trusted me?”
Since that’s exactly what she’d thought, Kaylin nodded.
“Honestly, it’s no wonder Mandoran is so fond of you—you’re beyond naive.”
“But you don’t understand why Teela also likes me.”
Sedarias’s jaw tightened, as if she was fighting to contain words, to keep them hidden. “They knew Mellarionne. They knew Teela’s family—the family whose very name she destroyed in her endless grief and rage. We are a people built on grief and rage. Those of weaker families gave me their names because they felt they had no hope of surviving if they did not.
“Do you understand? I demanded and offered a facade of vulnerability I never felt. Not one of them could control me. They offered me their names because they were afraid of me.”
Kaylin understood the heart of Sedarias’s fear, then. Fear—to Sedarias—had been the cause of the original bond. Mellarionne had been powerful and known, and Sedarias was of Mellarionne. She had come to the green because she had fought—and bested—those in her family whose goal was, and had always been, power.
“And they’re not afraid of you now.”
Sedarias looked down at the table. She did not answer.
Kaylin exhaled. “You’re wrong.”
“You think they’re afraid of me?”
“No, not about that.” Kaylin held up one hand. Words. She had to find the right words. Terrano had said Sedarias wasn’t good with words; neither was Kaylin. That just made it harder, because people who weren’t good with words required very specific words.
“I think you’re right—they were afraid of you. Or afraid of Mellarionne. Given what I’ve seen of your family, I’d be afraid too.”
“So you understand.”
“No, I don’t. That was centuries ago. I don’t know what they saw in you—honestly, I don’t. You’re mostly terrifying.”
“Only mostly?” Her voice was soft.
“You’re not safe to be around, not normally. Mandoran is. And so is Terrano, when he’s not trying to kill me.”
“Hey!”
Sedarias’s brows rose higher, and remained that way for a time; when they lowered, they lowered on very narrow eyes.
“You are such an idiot,” Kaylin whispered.
Terrano appeared fully for the first time since Kaylin had entered this space.
Sedarias was armored now, literally. Kaylin understood this, too. She could have cheerfully strangled Terrano. “You interrupted me.”
“He always does.” Sedarias glared at Terrano.
“I can leave if you let me?” Terrano’s attempt at puppy dog eyes was actually good.
“No, please, take a seat.”
“There’s no chair.”
“I know.”
Terrano rolled his eyes.
“I wasn’t planning on having an audience.”
“I don’t count!” He spoke Elantran. Kaylin realized he’d been speaking Elantran all along.
“I’m trying to remember that,” Sedarias snapped. “I could honestly kill you right now.”
Terrano nodded as if she were talking about the weather.
“If you were going to kill him, he’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”
“We needed him.”
“And now?”
“Why don’t you finish what you were saying before he interrupted you?”
Kaylin nodded. “I was saying—”
“That I’m unsafe. I’m frightening.”
“I was saying that it’s not always safe to be around you. Given today, you can’t argue with that.”
“I didn’t try.” Sedarias was also speaking Elantran.
“But...if I were one of your cohort—and I’m not, and I can’t be—”
“Do not say it,” Sedarias snapped at Terrano.
Terrano shrugged, but kept quiet.
“I would trust you with my life.”
Sedarias stared at her in silence.
“I mean: you’re not safe to be around, but you would always keep me safe. They don’t stay with you because they had no choice. Terrano did have a choice. He didn’t have to come back. He did.”
“It wasn’t necessarily for me—”
“Bullshit.”
Both Terrano and Sedarias stared at her again, for entirely different reasons. Kaylin reddened. It was, not surprisingly, Sedarias who spoke first.
“There were twelve of us. It’s not because of me—we fought all the time. We still do.”
Kaylin turned to Terrano. “You tell her,” she said.
“Well, but, she has a point. It’s not just Sedarias I missed. All of us are part of the same whole—all except Teela. She doesn’t quite know how to fit in.”
“She probably doesn’t appreciate the attempts to make her fit in, either,” Kaylin said, thinking about the various cohort arguments—all removed, when they could be, to the training rooms as people disincorporated in their emotional distress. “But she went to the green with me for you. For all of you. You were, besides her mother, her biggest loss, her biggest regret.
“And he has you back. It’s difficult—but it’s always been difficult to fit eleven different people into one space.
“They’re not afraid of you, Sedarias. They haven’t been afraid of you for a long time. Afraid for you isn’t the same. Yes, I agree, they probably traded names because they thought you were a threat. And I know that one: you give the dangerous people what they want so they don’t notice you and you don’t die. But you’re always waiting for the moment you can flee.
“Not fight: flee. And you know this. You can’t avoid knowing it. That’s what you’re afraid of: the flight. You’re afraid that they’ll leave because they’re not afraid anymore and they don’t need you.
“You’re afraid that’s already what’s happening. Serralyn and Valliant. Mandoran.”