Cast in Sorrow

herding Teela toward the center of the room; Teela was having none of it. If the creature were larger, it wasn’t faster. It was as fast, but the momentum gained when rushing made it harder for the creature to maneuver.

Teela didn’t have that problem.

Light was reflected off the whole of the creature’s face. Kaylin guessed that the only damage done in this melee would be to the edge of the sword, and she grimaced when Teela struck again; she hated the sound of metal against stone.

The creature’s eyes were small and inset into the black bulk of a face that was mostly jaw; it moved fast enough Kaylin couldn’t get a direct shot at them—but she tried anyway. When Teela’s sword bounced for a third time, the creature’s neck elongated, its jaws snapping instantly, and loudly, shut at the spot where Teela had been standing. Teela slid sideways and they closed on empty air; the Barrani Hawk brought her weapon down across a momentarily closed jaw, with enough force to drive its head into the ground.

Kaylin threw her second dagger at the creature’s exposed neck.

It stuck its landing.

“Teela!”

Teela didn’t answer, but she’d seen. As the creature raised its head again, its neck retracted; the dagger Kaylin had thrown was dislodged, and clattered to the ground. Kaylin watched it fall; it wasn’t in the best position for retrieval.

She cursed; if she’d been Barrani, she’d have a sword, and the next time it extended itself she could attempt to remove head from neck.

If the creature hadn’t been so adept at fighting on two fronts—when, admittedly, the second front was Kaylin and almost insignificant—Kaylin would have taken the time to watch Teela in action, because Teela in action had some of the deadly, beautiful grace of—of Dragons. She couldn’t. If she wasn’t causing damage, she was drawing fire, and if she wanted to continue to do so, she had to make sure none of it caught her.

She ducked and rolled when something flew at her face, and realized only when it landed that it was the small dragon.

“Wing!” she told him, leaping. He dug claws into her shoulder, which was fair—she wasn’t certain he’d still be attached otherwise. His squawking was lost to the fury of bestial roar. She didn’t need to hear his complaint; clinging to a shoulder while balancing one open wing was difficult.

He pretty much plastered said wing to her face when she flattened herself against the wall, facing the creature’s side. He was a good fifteen feet away, but she’d had experience fighting shadow one-offs, and knew the flank was no guarantee of safety; he could sprout an extra head with no warning. But she took the moment to look.

She froze, but the creature’s lunge at Teela carried him farther away; he didn’t take advantage of her momentary stillness.

He had a name.

She could see it as clearly as she had seen Ynpharion’s, in his altered form. This creature’s physical shape was larger; fur had been supplanted by obsidian, but it preserved a lot of the same characteristics; four legs, huge jaws. It also sported a tail that was split, and terminated in at least three strands. They etched grooves in stone when the creature had tried to cut Kaylin into several pieces with it.

“All is forgiven,” Kaylin said, still staring.

The dragon said nothing.

“I don’t think I can grab this one.”

The nothing was somehow louder and frostier.

She hadn’t lied. The name that she could see was twisting and shifting in place. It was golden, as most words were—but its light was uneven, brighter in some of the components, and so weak it could barely be seen in others. All around its shape and form was shadow; the shadow, however, was green. As green, seen through the mask of dragon wing, as the creatures eyes now were.

Iberrienne.

It was, she was suddenly certain, Iberrienne.

And his name, like Ynpharion’s, was shadowed, twisted. The transformation went deeper; the name was larger. A thought occurred to her then: Ynpharion, drawn back by the use of his name into his Barrani life and Barrani self, had loathed Iberrienne.

But what if Iberrienne himself were corrupted in exactly the same way? What if he, too, had been changed? He wasn’t so changed that he hadn’t attempted to kill Bellusdeo, the only known, living, female dragon. Nor so changed that he couldn’t move among the Lords of the High Court and the Arcanists.

Whatever the transformation’s power, it had to work on what it had. She highly doubted she’d care for an uncorrupted Iberrienne.

The small dragon bit her ear, hard.

Teela hadn’t slowed; neither had the creature. Kaylin had a weapon she could use against him. She just preferred him to be dead. But it wasn’t going to happen soon, and soon was necessary. No one knew where the Consort was.

And so she began to gather what she thought of loosely as syllables. Ynpharion’s name had been a name. Iberrienne’s was only barely that. She could make out what she thought its shape had once been, but she couldn’t be certain—and lack of certainty would get her nothing, in the end. Nothing but his rage if she came just close enough.

Teela could keep this up for another hour, in Kaylin’s opinion; possibly longer if she pushed.

Just how long had Iberrienne been compromised? What had he been promised, and what, before he had listened to some unknown tale of ancient malice, had he hoped to achieve?

He wasn’t as young as Kaylin had assumed—but she realized she’d made the assumption because he seemed so impulsive. He had the visceral hatred of Dragons that only the older Lords of the High Court held.

That melting part of his name was a stroke, not a squiggle; it was meant to tuck in, turn up in a slight slope at the end farthest from Kaylin. The center of the word was unbalanced, as words often were, but the light there was the most familiar. She started there.

Syllables gathered, but she realized, as she amassed them, that they weren’t, in any real sense, syllables at all. She heard them as syllables. She heard them as Barrani words. But Nightshade was called Calarnenne by any member of the Court who didn’t wish to offend the Consort. What she said, when she spoke his name, was not what they heard. What they said was too thin; it was flat.

Kaylin spoke something that had dimension and strength; it had shape, it had depth, it had structure. The syllables weren’t sounds; they were blocks or bricks. If they interlocked in the right way with her intent and her will, they had form.

And that form was a cage.

The marks on her arms were glowing; she felt the mark on her forehead join them. Only the mark on her hand remained as it looked: red, wet with sweat, untouched by light. The small dragon crooned and nudged the side of her face with his head; she felt it at a great remove.

She hated the green wisps of smoke. She hated the purple flame. She hated the vulnerability that ownership introduced—because, damn it, it did. But Ynpharion had remembered. Iberrienne would remember.

And she needed to know what had happened to the Consort.

The syllables snapped into place; she opened her mouth and as she spoke them and they sounded, to her ears, like thunder.

Iberrienne.

Chapter 15

He roared. She felt it as a physical sensation, like an earthquake. The ground beneath her feet broke, cracks