Cast in Sorrow

eagles and their shadows, on wings that weren’t hers and never would be. As she did, she passed more of the floating marks and they vanished in her wake, dwindling and returning to her skin. She heard the sorrow and the loss and the yearning carried by the voices of dreams and nightmares. She understood them in a way that didn’t encompass words, they were so much a part of her life.

She’d heard that—and desire—in the Consort’s song of wakening, in the lee of the Hallionne Bertolle. She’d even joined the Consort, singing the part Nightshade would have taken had he been there. Desire—the desire she’d heard—wouldn’t touch this emptiness. Not in Kaylin’s life. She hesitated. This wasn’t her life, was it? It was the Consort’s. The Hallionne’s.

But it had been left to Kaylin to choose a word that would somehow respond to it. Kaylin’s choice. Kaylin’s imperfect choice. She stopped when there were only two runes in the whole of the sky. The eagles and the three shades continued to fly, their path unimpeded by obstacles, their voices soaring and diving as they did.

She didn’t understand how to say these words. Any of them. But as she looked at the two that remained, she understood what they meant.

They were almost of a size; their shapes were different. In the first, the long, straight line of the rune was central; the looping adornment to one side of that line was complex; the dots to the other side, and the single stroke at its height, a frame.

The second rune had no central element that she could see; it was a balance of delicate squiggles, dots, slender strokes. Its shape suggested a cohesion that closer approach dispelled.

Both were luminescent gold. Broken into components, they shared several base shapes—but it was the combination that made them so distinct. The combination, she thought, and the essential meaning. It was to the more complicated, delicate rune that she drifted.

She could almost hear it as she approached. It seemed to sing—or at least to hum, as she could make out no distinct syllables—in time and in tune with the dreams and nightmares. It was at the heart of their song; it was isolation, writ large and made strangely compelling. Seeing it, hearing it, she felt that she understood the song in a way that she hadn’t before. If she could speak it or sing it, she was certain that whoever was listening would know that she did, at last, understand.

It was larger than I’m lonely. It was larger than I’m alone. Choice and consequence and acceptance and pain were tied into it, part of it. This was loss, the result of loss; the result left when something whole had been shattered, and the pieces imperfectly swept away.

Yet there was no anger in it; no resentment, no desire for vengeance or destruction. It was—it was like a dirge. A funeral dirge. It was a farewell, a goodbye, uttered by the people who remained behind. Behind, Kaylin thought, and alive.

She skirted its edge, and then turned, almost blindly, toward the other word.

She couldn’t hear it, from here. She didn’t know what it meant. She glanced at the small dragon; he was staring pointedly at the side of her face. His tongue—solid, now, where the rest of his body wasn’t—flickered out to touch her cheek, and she realized she was crying. Normally, this would embarrass her. Here, it didn’t matter. Tears had no meaning to dreams, to nightmares.

She moved away from the rune; she had not dismissed it and it did not fade as she left; she could feel its light and heat as she rose above it and moved to the only other True Word in this sky.

Unlike the first rune she’d approached, she thought this one was silent. It didn’t hum; it didn’t have a voice —if voice was even the right word. It stood aloof from the song that moved around it, carried by invisible thermals. Kaylin almost dismissed it.

But something about its shape was familiar. Something about the whole of its three-dimensional form felt right. Right? she thought, grimacing. Right for what, exactly? This would have gotten her zero on any test she’d been forced to write to enter the Hawks; it wouldn’t have even gotten part-marks. It may have gotten derision and criticism.

It’s not about instinct, she could hear Teela saying—at a remove of too many years. She sometimes wished she knew Teela’s True Name, because Teela’s voice occupied so much space on the inside of her head anyway.

You’ve got decent instincts. Most people do, even mortals. But instinct isn’t law. It certainly isn’t Imperial Law. You don’t get to kick down a door or break through a window because it feels “right.” That usually leads to demotion or dismissal, if the Emperor’s in a good mood.

So I shouldn’t trust my instincts.

Did I say that? Honestly, kitling. You put words in the mouths of everyone around you; we probably don’t need to speak at all—you can carry both sides of the conversation. Understand, however, that they’ll both be your sides. You need to trust your instincts. And then you need to be intelligent about proving the truth of them to people who don’t have the same reaction you do. We call it covering your ass. It’s an important component of Hawk work.

Did she understand what this rune signified? No. And staring at it wouldn’t give her that understanding. She needed to approach it more closely, and she needed to hear it over the competing songs that filled the air.

* * *

What she felt, as she approached, was the warmth of sunlight on a still, cold day. It was the hearth fire in Marcus’s house, when the Leontine kits were sprawled in one messy, living fur heap in front of it, and invited her —by more or less tackling her, knocking her over and dragging her—to join them.

Kaylin couldn’t imagine living with Marcus’s Pridlea; his wives, although she loved them, were terrifying. But from the first night he’d taken her home, she’d felt as if she almost belonged.

“I don’t suppose,” she asked the small creature who was both her passenger and her only form of locomotion, “that we could take both of them?”

The dragon said nothing. He didn’t even warble. When she hesitated, he bit her ear again. She growled. Marcus’s kits would have choked with laughter at the sound she considered a growl.

She wanted this word. She wanted what it reminded her of. She realized she had no single word to describe it. It didn’t matter. She knew that it wasn’t home, not exactly, but it was close: welcome, warmth, acceptance. Acceptance of Kaylin, a human, in a home meant for Leontines. Acceptance and a place for her. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even the promise of love.

But love could grow in a space like that if it was freely offered and freely accepted.

If she could only choose one word, it would be this one.

Thinking that, she looked over her shoulder. Only one? Was that what she had to do? Her arms ached; her legs ached; the back of her neck was burning. Only the mark on her forehead failed to cause pain, probably because it was singular.

In the absence of clear rules—hells, in the absence of murky ones—there was instinct. There was previous experience. Using the power granted her by the marks allowed her to heal—but healing didn’t change the marks themselves.

But freeing the trapped spirit of an ancient, dead Dragon had: one rune had vanished. Interacting with the Devourer had, as well—but she’d lost more.

Yet she’d also gained marks. She couldn’t be certain that they hadn’t always been there; she felt that they were emerging with time. Only the mark on her forehead was one she had chosen—and she hadn’t consciously decided to add it to her skin; she had been in a panic because she didn’t want to see it destroyed.

There were no rules.

She turned away from the rune that offered warmth across so many spectrums, and once again faced the one she thought of as mourning. She hadn’t examined it as closely because she didn’t want to return to what it evoked in her. Mourning was not the right word. Grief, maybe. But even that felt thin.

She reached out and placed a hand around one of the thinnest of the curved lines that comprised the rune that meant almost-home. When she started to move, it came with her. She was surprised that it had no weight, no drag; it wasn’t small and it appeared—to her eye—to be very solid. But it didn’t fade away; it didn’t return to its place on her skin—wherever that was.

Nor did the other rune disappear; it waited.

I don’t want to go there. But want or no, she went; the wings were not, in the