Do you even understand what the praevolo is?
Did she?
She understood what she’d heard, but was aware she hadn’t heard all of it. Even if she had, she probably couldn’t reconcile it with the Moran that she’d known for years. She knew the title had significance for the Aerians. Clint had convinced her of that, not in words, but in actions. The way he treated Moran right now was almost embarrassing for the sergeant.
Kaylin had sympathy. She would have found it excruciating, herself. When you worshipped someone, you placed a burden on them. You expected them to live up to your ideals, expected them to be worthy of your worship. And who could do that?
Not Kaylin. She was uncomfortable when people recognized her marks and called her Chosen, because she knew they had expectations of her, even if she had no idea what they were. She meant something to them—but actually, no. Her marks meant something. Her marks defined her.
And Moran was defined by her wings.
Kaylin could see her take flight. She shouldn’t have been able to see any such thing. There were oddly colored walls between her and the Aerian—but those walls were like windows where Moran, and only Moran, was concerned. Kaylin could see her. She could see her wings.
And her wings were fire, her wings were air, her wings were gold and silver and platinum. They were larger than any natural Aerian wings; they reminded Kaylin, in span, of the wings of the pretender, the outcaste. But only in span. In no other way were they alike.
And she was suddenly certain that the Aerians could see Moran take flight. That they could feel the thrill of it, the joy of it, and the desperate need for it. But Moran didn’t tell them to flee, didn’t tell them to evacuate their homes.
“I don’t think Moran is evacuating the Aerie,” she told Mandoran.
“Then what is she doing?”
“...Flying. Now shut up and get me to Bellusdeo.”
* * *
Getting close to Bellusdeo was almost impossible. Mandoran hadn’t exaggerated: the Emperor and the golden Dragon had cornered the outcaste. Gold and indigo surged forward and back against a scaled, black background. The outcaste was enormous. Kaylin had never seen him so large. His wings had grown, and grew again as he raised them; the halls were the color of night.
And she realized that she was seeing him as Mandoran saw him; she wasn’t certain why.
“You’re with me,” he told her. “And it is really difficult to keep you here. I need to let you off.”
She nodded, and felt stone slam into her feet, as if she’d been dropped from a moderate height. She was already bending into the drop, trying to control it.
Tain appeared almost instantly.
“I need to get to Bellusdeo,” she shouted. She had to shout. If he’d been mortal, he wouldn’t have heard, regardless.
He looked even more dubious than Mandoran had.
“She’s been injured.”
“She’s given better than she’s received.”
“She’s been injured by Shadow—I think the outcaste is deliberately fighting a delaying action. He wants it to take effect.”
Tain paled. He didn’t ask if she was certain. He didn’t have time. The familiar swooped down and landed to one side of her. He had to—he was the size of a Dragon.
She didn’t try to mount him. She couldn’t reach Bellusdeo on his back. He seemed to understand this; he didn’t speak. Nor did he attempt to place a wing over her eyes—at this size, he’d probably break her cheekbones. Instead, he took to the air, and when he’d gained enough height, he reached down for her with very large claws.
* * *
She dangled above the floor of the cavern, which now looked like normal rock. The odd glow of light that Mandoran appeared to have followed had vanished. She could no longer see the Barrani; she couldn’t see Annarion, either. She half wished large and majestic was his normal small and squawky size.
I cannot be, he replied. There is too much here to contain.
He was talking about the darkness that Kaylin could no longer see.
Yes. Mandoran is perceptive. He sees what is there. And he is not entirely wrong: The outcaste Dragon and Teela’s chosen kin have similarities. But they are not the same.
“Did he just call Shadow?”
Yes, Kaylin. The Towers will prevent most of those from obeying that call.
Kaylin hesitated.
The familiar frowned. Or rather, she felt as if he had frowned; she couldn’t see his face. She couldn’t see any of him except for the claws across her shoulders. He was attempting to maneuver himself above the golden Dragon. Kaylin didn’t actually give much for her chances if she was dropped onto the Dragon’s back without the Dragon’s permission.
* * *
She could scream her lungs out and not get Bellusdeo’s attention at the moment. The golden Dragon was practically berserk. Her wings were high, and she used them to effect against the Aerians who had served as guards to the outcaste. The Hawks stayed well away from her. They’d seen her fight, and they knew she could take care of herself.
But she broke the other Aerians with a wing slam, and Kaylin wasn’t going to fare any better if she couldn’t get the Dragon’s attention. She was afraid now.
She was afraid because, carried as she was by the familiar, her vision had shifted. The shift was subtle, and entirely unlike having a small wing draped over her eyes; she saw the cavern as a cavern, she saw the outcaste as a Dragon; she saw a gold Dragon, an indigo Dragon—and in the distance, she could see two Dragons hovering. There wasn’t space for them to join the fight without causing trouble for Bellusdeo and the Emperor, but she could almost see their anxiety.
She could see some Aerians. She could no longer see Moran; she assumed that Moran was deeper in the Aerie, and at this point, Moran wasn’t her problem.
Bellusdeo was. She could see the wound Bellusdeo had taken. It wasn’t, as Mandoran had said, a significant wound. Bellusdeo had taken worse in the fight above the High Halls—and that injury had slowed her down. This one? She’d barely notice it, and clearly hadn’t.
But Kaylin noticed it. She could see it, not as a wound—although it did bleed—but as a net, a thing that was spreading slowly, subtly, from the point of entry into the rest of Bellusdeo’s body. She had said that the outcaste was fighting a delaying action; it had been a visceral hunch. It was fact now.
Whatever he’d wanted from Bellusdeo all those centuries ago, whatever he’d wanted when Bellusdeo had first appeared as a Dragon above Elantra, he still wanted.
And Kaylin was certain that whatever he wanted for Bellusdeo, she didn’t. She needed to touch the golden Dragon now. And she needed to survive it. She wasn’t at all certain that she could accomplish the first and guarantee the second—but if she died, she couldn’t heal the wound.
I can help, the familiar said.
How?
What Mandoran and Annarion do, I can do.
Yes, but I can’t—
You are with me, Kaylin. You are part of the world that I touch. Mandoran’s clothing does not remain behind when he transitions; Annarion’s weapons do not disappear.
She’d never thought about that before.
Your marks are glowing.
I know. She hesitated. She’d felt this before: the tingling, and the weight. I think I’m about to lose some of them. Even as she thought it, marks began to lift themselves from her skin; they passed through the cloth that usually hid them from public view without tearing anything.
They did not cohere; they traveled slowly out from Kaylin, their trajectory affected by the movement of the dragon familiar, as if they were simply large, golden landmarks, drifting weightless in the currents of a room that was such a fury of sound there should have been gales.
Kaylin flinched as Bellusdeo’s wing rose and swept in a scythe of motion toward the familiar.
Blink, he told Kaylin.
She had, of course, attempted to throw herself out of the way. She hadn’t received any training in aerial combat—beyond witnessing it when she could sneak into the Aerie in the Halls—and her survival instincts were honed for ground work. The dragon familiar, however, had both of her shoulders in his figurative hands; throwing herself out of the way had done precisely nothing.
Get ready, he said while she was trying to remember to breathe. The great, slashing arc of Bellusdeo’s wing should have sent her flying in the opposite direction—at best. It seemed to pass through her instead, but she felt it anyway.
Yes, I’m sorry. There will be bruising. I do not think anything is broken.
He roared. He roared, and Kaylin vibrated with the sound, the sensation of sound. It was like, and unlike, the usual Dragon roars. The familiar’s voice caused the floating runes to vibrate in a way the regular Dragon roars didn’t.
“Kaylin!” She turned, or tried, as she heard Mandoran’s voice.
The Aerian guards that had survived were now aiming for her.
* * *
“Can everyone see me?” she asked the familiar, as she was jerked to the side to avoid becoming a large pincushion for spears.
No.
“But they can?”
Demonstrably. I believe they are aware of what you intend. How much injury are you willing to risk?
“Just get me down to Bellusdeo.”
As you wish. There was a pause, a lurch, and something that felt a lot like an uncontrolled drop, as the familiar obeyed. But remember, Kaylin—there is always a cost.
She accepted the cost—whatever it was—as she landed. The dragon familiar’s claws clung, for one moment longer, to her shoulders as Bellusdeo bucked at the sudden addition of an unfamiliar weight; Kaylin screamed her lungs out just to stop the Dragon from breaking her.
And even in her rage, Bellusdeo somehow heard it. Kaylin wasn’t certain how, and didn’t question it, because she didn’t have time. Her hands descended to the flat, hard surface of golden scales—scales that were a little too warm to be comfortable, but not hot enough to scald or burn.
“Mandoran—”
The black Dragon breathed. His fire was a focused beam, more like a stream of liquid than breath, and it was aimed in its entirety at Private Kaylin Neya. But the familiar had collapsed in on himself; he was small again, and he was perched stiffly on Kaylin’s shoulder; the stream of fire split to either side of Kaylin as if she were a rock and it were water.
And that was as much as she had time for. She focused on Bellusdeo’s so-called minor injury, cursing the golden Dragon as she did.
* * *
I heard that, Bellusdeo said. The healing built a bridge between them; it was like, and unlike, a True Name bond. And it was the single biggest reason why immortals usually refused to be healed.
Sorry.
You are not.
Well, no, I’m not. He goaded you. He tried to enrage you. It was just as much an attack as his fire or anything else about it—and you let him. My drillmaster would have eaten you for lunch if he’d seen you do that.
Oh?
If he could enrage us, we got the worst dressing-down ever. Hawks—and Swords—can’t afford to let their anger or their tempers decide the battle. Other people, yes—but we wear the damn tabard. We lose control, and the tabard suffers. The Hawks suffer. Now can you shut the hells up and let me heal you?
Bellusdeo was the only immortal Kaylin knew who would. She didn’t like it—none of the immortals did—but a lot of her dislike was measured in the cost to Kaylin, and not the exposure of her own secrets, her own interior life.
I have nothing to hide now—because I have nothing. I am not Emperor. I am not the leader of my flight. I am not the Queen of the mortals. I have—
Maggaron. And me. Now—
There. She’d found the point of entry. And she felt the Shadow as if it were in her literal hands; it was cold enough to freeze. It was sharp enough to cut. And it did both.
* * *
The power that had been funneled, slowly and subtly, into the slight wound Bellusdeo had taken became fully focused in an instant. It was no longer attempting to lay down a structure to support itself within the golden Dragon; it was trying to remove Kaylin.
She shut her teeth, hard, to muffle the sounds the pain caused. The Dragons were continuing to roar, continuing to fight—but Bellusdeo had, if gracelessly, allowed the Emperor to take the forefront in their two-pronged attack.
And I resent it.
Kaylin heard the golden Dragon at a great distance. Everything was at a great distance. She could no longer see or hear her familiar. She could no longer see or hear anything. No, she thought, that wasn’t entirely true. She could see Shadow. She could see darkness. She could see the glimmer of light that implied that color was dangerous. And she could hear a word, a whisper of a word, as if it were being repeated, out of sync, by a chorus of ragged voices. Ragged, desperate voices.
She remembered, then. She had seen the outcaste before. She had seen his Name.
And she couldn’t hold it. She couldn’t hold enough of it to use it; it was too large. It wasn’t really a word; it wasn’t a paragraph, or even a page. It was a whole damn book. She might be able to tell someone else what the book was about—but to repeat it, word for word, with intent and will?
Not a chance.
She wondered what happened to those who tried to use the True Name of someone who was, in the end, more powerful than they were.
Nothing good, Ynpharion said, startling in the sudden appearance of his voice. His name, she knew. She could speak it, call it, use it.
You could, he agreed. You are both stronger and weaker than you think. Do not try to speak his name if you cannot contain even the shape of it.
What’ll happen?
You will be his. The name is a bridge, Kaylin. It is a contested bridge. When you have knowledge of the name, you bring an army across it. If you engage the powerful, they come with their own army. There is no guarantee that you will win that fight, and if you lose—the bridge still exists.
She thought the outcaste knew this. He was probably reminding her of his name on purpose. Because she’d be desperate. Or overconfident. And, in truth, she was one of those things. But when faced with Dragons and immortals, she’d never, ever been the other. She had been so far down the bottom of so many hierarchies, the people at the top had probably never been aware of her existence.
That’s how she’d survived. And she intended to survive now.
Ynpharion, who had a lot to gain if she died, approved. Then again, he probably considered most of mortality only slightly more important than earthworms.
Less. The Consort, however, considers you necessary to our people.
But you don’t agree.
What I think doesn’t matter. She has my Name. This was said with pride. And even if she did not, what she considered a necessity would move me regardless. She is the Lady. She is the mother of our people. And she is concerned.
You’re telling her everything that’s happening here?
Yes. She wishes to know. And your control over what you reveal is deplorable. It takes more effort not to hear you than the inverse. If you intend to contest the outcaste, do not do it with his name. Not yet, and in my opinion—
Which I haven’t asked for.
—not ever.
The part of Kaylin that sometimes said, Oh, yeah? Take this, reared its ugly head. She squashed it. Just because Ynpharion was condescending and arrogant didn’t mean he was wrong.
She felt Shadow surge beneath her hands; she saw the slender, subtle lines of it withdraw from where they’d spread in Bellusdeo’s body. If it had been because of her healing, she would have been happy. It wasn’t. They were regrouping, changing the line of defense and offense. All of that line was now Kaylin, but the power itself was still anchored in Bellusdeo’s body.
In her blood.
Bellusdeo wasn’t particularly happy about this. Let go of me.
Kaylin shook her head and willed herself to ignore the increasingly frantic Dragon. If Bellusdeo wanted to, she could shrug—with some force—and shove Kaylin off her back. Short of that, Kaylin wasn’t going anywhere until she was done.
This Shadow had no will of its own. It wasn’t inert, exactly, but it was a tool; it moved at the will of the outcaste. He could direct it, and defend against the attacks of two Dragons, without apparent effort.
Kaylin’s marks were a steady, almost blinding gold. Her skin burned with the heat of the light shed. But they were words. They weren’t a net, the way the outcaste’s Shadow was. They had the power inherent in True Words. But the nature of True Words wasn’t elastic. It wasn’t malleable the same way Shadow was.
That was the strength of it: it wasn’t malleable by Shadow, either. But she felt the tendrils of Shadow as if they were needles; they pierced her skin, bit into her flesh and expanded like grappling hooks. She reminded herself that she wanted this. The more the Shadow focused on her, the less there was in Bellusdeo.
She had no idea what the outcaste had intended for her roommate; she assumed it wasn’t good.
“Kaylin, what in the hells are you doing?” Mandoran shouted.
The small dragon—and he was small again—squawked just as loudly in her ear. She didn’t answer either of them. Shadow had spread up, through the palms of her shaking hands. She could no longer let go of it, even if she wanted to. It had not, however, entirely let go of Bellusdeo.
Kaylin said, “I’m sorry, this is going to hurt.” She wasn’t certain if Bellusdeo would hear her or not. Focusing through her own pain, she looked at shapes: specifically, the Dragon’s and her own. The injured body knew its correct shape, its correct state. But the transformed flesh didn’t; Shadow changed the base state. It changed the concept of healthy. What might remain in its wake as its new, best self was not what had existed before the incursion.
This was true of Bellusdeo.
It was also true of Kaylin. Changes were being made in the flesh of her hands, in the length of her fingers, in the color of her skin. They occurred instantly, the way wounds did when your opponent was armed with an edged weapon. The outcaste didn’t care what happened to Kaylin.
But this implied that he did care what happened to Bellusdeo; that the changes wrought in her would be subtle and careful and deliberate. What he wanted from Kaylin was her death, which was the opposite of what she wanted. It hadn’t always been.
She absorbed his Shadow almost by default, allowing it to enter; she dampened her resistance slightly while she worked to isolate it. She did not want to have to cut off her hands—but she wanted to free Bellusdeo of its taint, and there was really only one way to do that.
She removed a chunk of the Dragon’s flesh.
* * *
Bellusdeo did not roar, but Kaylin could feel the Dragon shudder beneath her. She could feel her own power struggling to replace what she had removed. The Shadow did not immediately react. The outcaste had yet to notice what she had done. At any other time, she would have found this interesting.
Not now. Now, she wrenched her hands up, and free, of Bellusdeo.
All of the Shadow was now hers. No, that wasn’t right: it was in her, but it wasn’t of her. On the very, very few occasions she had managed to hold the name of fire in her mind for long enough to light a bloody candle—when lighting one the normal way would take minutes at best—the fire had been no part of her. It had responded to her, but it hadn’t invaded her.
If Shadow was like fire—or any of the other elements—it was necessary to maintain control. But control in this case was the outcaste’s, not her own.
There was, however, one flaw with this. Shadow was unlike fire, or the rest of the elemental powers. To control fire, she had to know its name, and its name was the whole of it, at greater and lesser sizes.
Shadow was not part of Evanton’s garden. Shadow was not part of the Keeper’s duties or responsibilities. Shadow had no name, no central, single truth at its core upon which all other truths about it were built.
To the familiar, she shouted, “Get me away from Bellusdeo!”
* * *
He shifted out of the small form without materially altering his position on her shoulder. What should have broken or crushed that shoulder made no difference at all. He was Dragon-sized, but he did not fill space the way natural Dragons did. And yet he was solid enough to grip her shoulders in his feet, and solid enough to remove her from the complicated chaos of Dragons at war.
She trusted that he wouldn’t drop her, and that was as much thought as she could now spare. She had the Shadow within her hands, and within her arms, and it was no longer trying to spread: instead, it had begun its act of transformation. She wasn’t certain that she could cut off her own hands. If she could manage that, she wasn’t certain she could regrow them. She could reattach limbs, if she was on the scene in time—but she had never regrown a missing appendage before.
She cursed the Emperor—silently—and the Hawklord, then. They frowned heavily on experimentation with healing powers. They allowed her to use them only under the condition that they not be made aware of them; their cooperation was entirely in the way they turned a blind eye.
None of that was helpful now.
But the marks on her arms were. If the flesh to which they were attached on most days was being transformed in some fashion, these words weren’t. They were inert, immovable. The Shadow didn’t touch them—but it did try. She felt tendrils break, needlelike, from her forearms to wrap themselves around the runes.
The light of the marks dimmed slowly.
The color of the Shadow didn’t change.
* * *
She knew the moment the outcaste realized what she’d done because he roared in raw fury. No other sound in the cavern was as solid, as all-encompassing, as his voice; she vibrated with it. He collided with the Emperor in a sudden physical rush; Kaylin heard the clangor of scales colliding with scales, all but indistinguishable from the sound of a sword doing the same.
She could hear only one such sound, and she had a pretty good guess which sword it was.
The Shadow itself continued its strange incursion. It hurt a lot less, which was probably a bad sign overall. The familiar dropped her somewhere near Mandoran, and away from the wings and tails of the Dragons. She looked up to catch a glimpse of the Aerians.
There were no Aerians.
None of the ones that had served the outcaste in his Aerian form. And no Hawks, no Moran. The air was empty.
She turned to Mandoran to demand an explanation and stopped. He was staring at her hands, his expression a mixture of fascination and horror—but mostly horror.
“What are you doing?” he demanded again. “Get rid of that!”
Since she’d been trying to do exactly that, this wasn’t helpful. It was annoying, though. And annoyance was better than fear or uncertainty.
“If you’d care to help?” she said, voice loaded with almost lethal sarcasm.
“Eeew.”
She almost laughed. Or punched him. She decided against the punching because she wasn’t certain what the Shadow would do to Mandoran, and she really did not want Mandoran to be reshaped and redefined by the outcaste who lived at the heart of Ravellon.
But if Mandoran was squeamish—and clearly he was—he wasn’t a coward. “Teela,” he said in an ominous tone of voice, “was right.”
“Oh?”
“You’re never boring.” He reached out with both hands, flinched, and then grabbed the Shadow that had pooled around Kaylin’s hands, seeking further entry. “And Tain might be right as well—and I’ll kill you if you ever tell him I said so.”
“Bordeom is underrated?”
“Yes. Apparently there is too much of a good thing.” His eyes were a bright shade of...gray. It was not a Barrani color. Kaylin didn’t consider this a good sign, but said nothing. Or tried. “What are you doing?”
“I’m—Helen calls it phasing. Remember how Annarion fought the ancestor outside of the Barrani Halls? This is like that, but without the swords.”
“And where am I?”
Mandoran twitched. His hand moved through the Shadow as if it were a very thin liquid.
“In both places. There, where the Dragons are. Here, where the Shadow is.”
“Here,” an unfamiliar voice said, “where the Dragon is.”
Both of them looked in the direction of that voice. A man was standing maybe five yards to Kaylin’s left, where the literal tail end of the Emperor had been.