Cast in Sorrow

end, her wings.

* * *

There are places no one wants to revisit.

Kaylin was afraid of this word and what it meant, even though she’d seen enough at first glance to get the gist of it. This was not a word she wanted to define anything. The one that she now carried with her, yes. But not this one.

The dragon was singing. The eagles were singing. Their voices had flattened into a single thing; she could no longer hear harmonies or the subtle shifts that indicated multiple voices. Her own voice was silent.

She had been to so many dark places in her life. She had suffered so many losses. She had lost the only home she had known, but had never lost the desire for, the need for, a home. She had lost her family. She had lost the person on whom she had most relied. She had become something she hated, and stayed there for long enough it was still hard, on some days, to look in the damn mirror.

“I don’t want to do this,” she told the small dragon. But she flew toward the rune anyway. “I mean it.”

His squawk was turned to song and not to what often sounded like angry, harping lecture—absent intelligible words.

And she realized that it didn’t matter. She couldn’t understand the thing if she didn’t examine it. She probably couldn’t understand the whole of its meaning, regardless; she wasn’t an Ancient or an Immortal, or the distant relative of a world-devouring creature. This wasn’t, and would never be, her language; her understanding would always be imperfect.

But...the rune itself seemed so personal. It seemed, for just a moment, to be part of her, exposed, writ large. Since closing her eyes made no difference in this space, she gritted her teeth instead. She was angry.

But she’d been angry at herself, on and off, for a long time. Anger didn’t control her actions anymore; it just made long, hard days longer and harder. What she’d done in the past, she couldn’t change. She could refuse to make the same stupid choices; it wouldn’t stop her from making different stupid choices in the future. If she learned something from them—if she survived for long enough to learn something—she could narrow the stupidity options. She was human; she would never narrow them to zero. But no one did. Even the Hawklord made mistakes.

On most days, she pulled herself up off the ground from her figurative face plant, and kept moving, reminding herself that it was normal to make mistakes. Everyone had to fail sometimes. On some days, no.

And she could see failure in this rune. Failure. Loss. Grief.

But she couldn’t see rage, self-loathing, the desire to lash out and break everything in sight. She couldn’t see what she’d felt when she discovered the death of the two children she had known and loved best.

No, that wasn’t quite right. She could. She just couldn’t see all of what she’d felt. She couldn’t see her own sense of betrayal at Severn’s hand. She couldn’t see her certain sense that if it were not for her, both girls would still be alive. There was no self-loathing.

There was loss. Isolation. A hint of choice—but it was a choice that would be made, again and again, a defining choice. It was...it was like responsibility. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was duty. It was defining duty. It was as strong as her sense of duty to the Hawks.

Yes, she hated the bureaucrats. She hated the stupid regulations that seemed to serve no purpose, unless one wanted criminals to get away. She hated parts of Elani street, her regular beat. But she loved the work. She loved the sense of purpose it gave her life.

Would she still love it so much if every Hawk she knew and worked with now were dead and gone? Would she feel the same sense of purpose if she were the only one left to do the work? Would she still do the work? Could she?

Loss. Grief. Shades of things Kaylin could understand if she rearranged parts of life on the inside of her head.

She turned to the small dragon. “We’re taking them both.”

His eyes widened, although given their size in the rest of his face, it was hard to tell. She reached out for the rune, and gripped it firmly in her right hand, the left being occupied. She wasn’t certain what to expect, but it was warm to the touch; as warm as the first rune had been.

Only when it was firmly in hand did the singing suddenly stop.

* * *

The silence was intimidating because it was so complete. She turned to look at the eagles; they were hovering in place; even the path of their flight, interwoven as it had been with the shadows, had disappeared. They were facing Kaylin. Since the shadows had no faces, it was harder to tell what they were looking at, if they looked at anything at all.

Barian had called them the nightmares of Alsanis.

She stood suspended in the air, her hands on two runes—not one. Nothing besides movement and sound had changed; the runes were still visible, and much larger than they had been on her skin. She’d hoped that the choosing of the words was the end of her responsibilities. When a mark had lifted itself off her skin in the dusty back rooms of the Arkon’s personal collection, the Dragon spirit trapped there had flown free.

Clearly dead Dragons and Imperial libraries had nothing in common with empty, gray sky, although Kaylin personally thought they had a lot in common with nightmares. The two words did not collapse or merge; they stayed pretty much where they were.

But the eagles didn’t. The shadows didn’t. The sky didn’t fall away from Kaylin’s feet; they did. They suddenly folded wings and dropped in a dead man’s dive. Kaylin kept her hands on the runes and glanced at the small dragon.

He warbled.

“I don’t like it.”

As was often the case, what she liked—or didn’t—made no difference. Her companion hissed and folded the wings that had allowed her to move freely—if slowly—in what was nominally sky. Weight returned. Given weight and nothing to wedge it between or hang it from, so did falling.

She tightened her grip on the words she had chosen, but they didn’t hold her up; they came with her. After a few seconds of panic, and the realization that she couldn’t streamline her own dive while attached to the words, she accepted the fact that she could do nothing but go along for the ride.

She just hoped that the landing wouldn’t be fatal, and that it would bring her closer to the absent Consort.

Chapter 9

She fell for what felt like an hour before she saw the first sign of actual geography. As landscape went, it wasn’t promising: it looked like a small, dark pit. From this vantage, she couldn’t see bottom.

As she approached the pit, she realized that small was the wrong word. It was huge. She thought it the size of a city block, and revised that as she fell; it was the size of a city. A large city. When she finally reached its upper edge, she wasn’t surprised she couldn’t see bottom; she could no longer see the whole of its shape.

Turning—which was difficult—she saw the sky recede as she continued to fall. The small dragon dug claws into the skin below her collarbone, and she cursed him in Leontine.

The Leontine bounced back in an echoing, strangled kitten sound—the usual result of the combination of human throat and the deeper Leontine curses. She chose a few of the less throaty words instead, and then, for good measure, switched to Aerian. It was the Aerian that caught her attention, probably because she mangled the pronunciation less. The echo was not attenuated. It wasn’t stretched. It was almost exact, and it continued as she dropped.

She spoke in her mother tongue and listened to herself, growing quieter as syllables bounced off walls so distant they should never have reached them at all.

She then switched to Barrani. All languages had useful words, but it was hard to swear in High Barrani. Kaylin had always believed that High Barrani was the language of Imperial Law because it was the most stilted,