Cast in Sorrow

didn’t have the tree’s name. But she had three of her own: the name of her birth, Elianne. The name she’d chosen when she’d escaped that early childhood, Kaylin. And the name that she had taken from the Lake. It was the most significant of the three—if you happened to be immortal.

But Kaylin wasn’t. She was a groundhawk. She served the Halls of Law. She struggled, every day, to believe in justice and that law. Some days, it was harder than others. Some days, it was blessedly easy.

Hello, I’m Kaylin. Kaylin Neya.

There was no answer. Not that she expected words, because usually there weren’t any. She touched—was certain she was touching—the tree. She tried to get some sense of its form, of its natural, healthy shape, because that’s what bodies knew.

But she touched nothing.

Kaylin is the name I chose for myself. I’m mortal. I can choose the name I answer to. Neya is the short form of my mother’s name. Her name was Averneya, but no one ever used it, not even me. I didn’t call her by name. I called her Mother.

She had no idea what she was saying, or why.

But for just a moment, one clear, perfect moment, she could see her mother’s face. She could see it so clearly she lost all ability to form words. She couldn’t recall her mother’s actual face anymore. She hadn’t been able to do it for years. She could remember being held; she could remember some of the songs her mother sometimes sung to her.

Her mother’s face was so clear. Kaylin forgot the tree. She forgot the healing. She forgot the shadows and the infection and even the Barrani.

She had never seen her mother the way she looked at her now. Had her mother somehow lived, she would still never have seen her like this: she was a young woman. She was—to Kaylin’s eye—not much older than Kaylin now was. She had—Kaylin remembered it only now—a long scar, pale and slender, down the right side of her jaw. Her hair was as dark as her daughter’s, and her skin was only slightly paler; her eyes were so brown the pupil was lost to them.

Her hands were slender, and her arms; she was underfed. Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks slightly hollow, their bones high and pronounced. She wore the nondescript, poorly fitted clothing that anyone in the fiefs wore.

But...she was smiling. She was smiling, her lips turned up at the corners, her eyes gentled by expression. She was smiling at Kaylin.

They could have been sisters.

Is this what Teela saw when she remembered her mother? A woman, much like herself? A woman who had loved her and who she’d loved in return?

A woman, Kaylin thought, throat thick now, that she could never actually touch again, that she could never grow to know better? She tried to etch this image into her mind, into her memory—her imperfect, mortal memory. Because this woman was alive. She had been alive.

Yes. You remember and you do not remember. You see and you do not see.

Kaylin didn’t look away from her mother. She lifted a hand and let it drop. She couldn’t touch her mother; her mother was dead. Gone. This was a gift—a strange gift—and she’d always been aware that asking for more was just asking for trouble. Asking for anything usually was.

No, Kaylin, daughter of Averneya, it is not.

No face, no body, appeared to accompany a voice that was so resonant she trembled at each syllable, as if she were caught in it, as if it came from the very center of her body. She turned to look for Serian, and saw no one.

“Serian?”

She is safe, for the moment. You have come to the heart of the green wearing our blood. What do you attempt?

She felt, as the voice filled all conscious thought, ridiculous and small. She had touched a tree. It was as much a tree as the Hallionne were buildings. “I’m trying to—to heal you.”

Ah. I am wounded. It is regrettable.

“What hurt you?”

The green, was the softer—the much softer reply.

Kaylin hated confusion, especially when it was hers. “Aren’t you the green?”

We are. But we have taken a wound, Kaylin. It has bled, and it has festered since the day it was dealt us; it has not closed.

“Can I heal it?”

She heard—felt—laughter. We can barely feel your touch. You are not of the green; were you not clothed in some part of ourself, we would not feel you at all. Healing us, as you are, is beyond you.

She felt completely deflated, but rallied. “If it’s beyond me, then why am I here?”

She felt confusion for the first time. Not doubt, nothing as large as that. No, this was sort of like the look adults got on their faces when small toddlers were attempting to speak and their words all came out in repeatable gibberish.

Kaylin attempted not to feel the frustration of the person uttering the repeatable gibberish.

You asked for the judgment of the green.

She turned to look at the small dragon because unlike Serian, he was still with her. He yawned. In the darkness, that companion now spread his wings and held them, rigid, to either side. One of those sides covered Kaylin’s eyes.

It wasn’t dark here. And she wasn’t standing in front of the hollow of a damaged tree.

* * *

She was standing on the banks of a river. She lifted her face and the river vanished because the thin membrane of wing didn’t follow her eyes. She lowered her face again. The banks of the river were silvered gray —it was night.

She took a hesitant step and realized she could no longer see the bubble that had protected her from the explosion. And gravity. So much of her life since the Devourer had been like this: a waking dream. The problem with Kaylin’s dreams was that they could turn, in an instant, with the slightest of gestures or sounds, into full-on nightmare.

And nightmare was here. Across the sand and rock that hedged the river’s flow was a dark patch. Even at this distance, it had a consistency that had nothing to do with riverbanks. It also pooled beneath a very ordinary streetlamp. Kaylin frowned and glanced at the small dragon. She began to walk, cautiously and quietly, toward the lamp. She knew she was being stupid—no streetlamp in her own city would be incentive to approach a small, roiling mass of chaos.

As she walked, she continued to speak. Caution replaced frustration. “My companion was born in the heart of a magical storm; he hatched after it had passed. When he’s with me, I can sometimes see things I wouldn’t normally see.”

You are like the Barrani, my distant children. You exist in one place, at one time.

“Yes. You don’t.”

I am like—and unlike—your Hallionne. My purpose is less circumscribed. But I exist across all planes, and in all places.

“Then the injury—”

Yes. It exists here, in this place.

“Where is this place?”

The green.

“If this were the green, Serian would be here.”

She is here. She is not in the here you are in. Chosen, if you desired it, you could see her. You could be where in the here she occupies.

Kaylin had drawn close enough that she could see the hanging lamp clearly. She could see the chaos across which its light fell, but for a moment, the chaos wasn’t as important as the light because what lay in the center of