Cast in Sorrow

the globe was not fire.

It was a word. It was a True Word.

Where the light fell across black and roiling shadow, it fell in strips. It fell in patterns. They were familiar to Kaylin—and they should be. They were very like the marks that adorned over half her skin.

Chapter 14

The small dragon was silent. He wasn’t draped across her shoulders, either; he looked like he meant business.

“We need to get that word,” she told him softly.

He nodded, and lowered his wing. The landscape went dark immediately.

“You’re right. It’s going to be a pain in the butt. Can you deal with the shadow?”

He failed to hear the question. Fair enough; on bad days in the office, so did Teela. She took it as a definitive No. The small dragon lifted his wing again.

The landscape hadn’t changed in the interim. She was ten feet from the amorphous boundary of the chaos mass; the lamppost was in its center.

“Why,” she said, directing her question to the invisible but encompassing presence in which, she suspected, she walked, “Is there a name here? Why is it trapped like that?” To Kaylin’s eyes, it was captive. It moved, elements of the whole battering ineffectively against the globe, like a trapped moth.

Or a trapped bird.

The voice, like the small dragon, failed to hear the question. It was the most pressing question Kaylin now had. The word seemed small and almost forlorn, which was ridiculous. But it seemed diminished somehow by its cage.

All such words are caged. And all such words are cages.

Where it cast light in the shape of itself, the shadows were clearest; colors shone and moved beneath the bands of the rune’s form. They seemed, in the light, to have a consistent texture—and the chaos in the fiefs didn’t. And in the fiefs, wherever it was possible, the shadows spread. They infested land, buildings, and people; the people died.

Here, they touched nothing but lamppost—and ground. They didn’t appear to respond to Kaylin’s approach, either. Small mercies. She inched closer. The urgency to flee the tunnels, to escape them, to somehow be of use in the battle above, had bled away. She felt she was suspended in time; that time, here, had no meaning.

But the word did.

She thought it belonged, not to a lamppost in the middle of nowhere, but to the Lake of Life. It belonged in the keeping of the Consort. It was a name. Kaylin had no idea how to distinguish between True Names and True Words; five minutes ago, she would have said there wasn’t any difference.

She didn’t believe that now; she couldn’t make herself believe it. It was a name, and she couldn’t leave it here. “I think,” she said, “it’s time to breathe.”

The dragon said nothing. She was two feet away from the edge of the chaos, and she realized, watching it, that it reminded her of something beside the deadly shadow in the heart of the distant fiefs. It reminded her of Wilson, Hallionne Bertolle’s lost brother. It reminded her of the brothers she hadn’t tagged with an inappropriate name; they had become almost exactly this in the race through the outlands, creating something that had form and substance in a sea of gray fog and nothing.

That path had kept them together. It had probably saved their lives.

“Or not.”

The dress that had caused her so much trouble was now sleeveless. It looked like a summer shift. Everything else about it remained the same, but the marks that had been partially obscured were completely visible. She grimaced. It was the least of her problems now; she’d worry about it later.

She took off one boot and placed it at the edge of the puddle; it was the only thing she could throw that wasn’t a weapon, and she didn’t have enough of those.

She watched the dark sludge beneath it. She wasn’t surprised when it started to move, bubbling beneath the very green leather. She was, however, surprised when it inched away, leaving a gap through which sand and a few rocks became visible. Those and the boot itself.

Said boot hadn’t been devoured, and it hadn’t—as far as she could see when looking through dragon wing —been transformed. It was still a boot. On the other hand, she thought, as she bent, stretched, and caught it in two fingers, the boots had come with the dress.

She slid her foot back into it, squared her shoulders, and began to walk into the dark mess. Almost everything in her direct experience screamed retreat; her feet were steady but her steps were hesitant. They were also small.

Around her feet, iridescent color rippled and surged away. Only where the light of the word—the name— touched it, did it remain solid beneath her feet. She reached the lamp, and discovered once again that height—or more specifically the lack of height—was a disadvantage. She could touch the globe with the tips of her fingers, and it swayed. It didn’t fall into her hands.

What do you seek to do?

She lowered her hands. “I don’t understand why it’s trapped here, but I want to take it with me.”

The silence was longer and deeper. Do you understand what it is?

“It’s life,” Kaylin replied. And to her eyes, for a moment, it was. It suggested movement and fragility and energy and bursting pride; it suggested quick wit and quick temper. Eyes narrowed, she stared as it revolved; it stopped struggling against its confinement, as if it were suddenly aware of her.

As if it were holding its breath.

What you desire has been tried.

“Not by me.” She turned her arms; the marks were glowing. They were the same color as the name that floated above her fingertips, but flat, confined in a different way.

Can you speak the name?

“That’s not the way it works.” But looking at it, she thought it might if she stared for long enough. “Can you?”

No, Chosen.

She blinked. “Why is it here?”

It is safe here. It is safe only here. Too much has been changed.

She bit her lip. Teela hated it when she did that, but Teela wasn’t here.

She is.

Kaylin froze. She looked at the name, but the name—it wasn’t Teela’s. It couldn’t be.

No. You are harmoniste. Take the name, but understand that it is one of the words that you must examine, one of the many, many choices you must make. The Teller will speak, harmoniste; but you will take the words that he speaks and you will choose a path that touches those words you feel must be touched. It is almost time.

“It’s so not time.” She lowered her hands. “When you say Teela is here, is she here the same way Serian is?”

She is here as you are here. She speaks, Chosen. Can you not hear her?

“No. No, I can’t.”

And you cannot hear him, either.

She looked at the name he referred to; as she did, the globe began to descend, floating as if almost weightless until it rested in her cupped palms. The glass was not glass; it was warm, and it felt almost like skin, but it dissolved as it met hers; the name did not. She shifted the position of her hands, cupping the name, enclosing it.

It bit her.

She didn’t even curse. She’d taken two words from the Lake of Life—not that it had looked at all like a lake to her at the time—but neither of those had felt like this one, and in theory, one of the two was hers.