Cast in Sorrow

Teela, however, was looking at the pillar. She mouthed a name.

“There are twelve,” Kaylin told her.

“Of course there are.” Teela glanced up at the fire as he lifted her.

“Does the green have nightmares?”

“You ask the oddest questions.”

“It keeps my mind busy. What did he mean, Teela? Did you understand him? What was he hoping to fix?”

Teela laughed softly. “They left me behind. My mother’s life blood was meant to buy my safety—and it did. It did that. But my friends don’t see it as safety. They see it as abandonment. They left me. They went where I could not follow. Had I stayed in the Hallionne, had I stayed with them, they might have been able to do for me what was done to them.

“But my father escaped, and took me with him.”

“Would you have stayed with them?”

“Does it matter? I’m here. I can’t enter the Hallionne. If the green considers me unworthy, I will never leave the green. I am tired, kitling. You were right,” she added.

“About what?”

“That is not what Terrano looked like. The statue, though, is.”

“How did you recognize him?”

“I knew his name. I knew him. I don’t know why he looks different, now; I imagine he—like most of us in our distant youth—had insecurities about his physical presence. He is no longer confined to that form; he has choice.”

“Does he?”

“Demonstrably.”

Kaylin frowned. “I’m not so certain about that. Iberrienne didn’t, in the end. Ynpharion didn’t. Whatever they absorbed, whatever they agreed to, it changed them in some fundamental way.”

“It would have had to—they could transform.”

“It changed what they wanted, Teela.”

“And are our desires so fundamental? Is that what defines us?” She shook her head. “You will have to lead, kitling. I will have to trust you.” Teela smiled at Kaylin’s expression. “I don’t think doubt will serve you well in the green. It slows you down, it teaches you not to trust yourself. I understand my own doubts and my own weaknesses, in this. They are constraining, but they have claws here; I cannot escape them.”

“Except through me.”

“Yes.”

Kaylin exhaled. “Let’s go.”

* * *

She had to stop at the twelfth pillar, and she was relieved to find that it, unlike the other eleven, was one great column that seemed to almost hold up the sky. There was no likeness of Teela here.

“No,” Teela said, as if reading her mind. “But there are twelve.”

“I just think it’s weird that they’re pillars. I don’t understand the symbolism. I think I understand why they were made of glass in the nightmare—it makes more sense to me.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re empty. They’re vessels. Whatever made them real, for want of a better word, is all but gone.”

“But not gone.”

Kaylin lifted her left hand, exposing the mark; it was the only one that hadn’t changed color. “But these pillars kind of hold up the roof.”

“You are looking for too much logic.”

“There’s nothing wrong with logic.”

“No—but you’re trying to understand a book when half of it’s written in a language you’ve never heard, let alone read. You’re missing half of the story because it’s not a story you can inhabit in any way. The Hallionne are not mortal. The green is not mortal. You are.”

“You’re immortal—do you understand it any better than I do?”

Teela shook her head. “The green and the Hallionne don’t differentiate between your kin and mine. Oh, they understand there is a difference—but to them, we are locked into our shapes and we exist in an entirely superficial way. We live in the world. We are of it.”

“And they’re not.”

“No. They exist in a space of their own. They overlap many roads. I think that visitors sometimes came to the Hallionne from the outlands.”

“We did.”

“Yes—but in an emergency. We don’t, and can’t, live there. If not for Bertolle’s...brothers...most of us would never have arrived at Orbaranne. You would. Nightshade. I’m tempted to say the Consort.”

“And you?”

She didn’t answer, but turned her face up toward the light because there was light now. It was sunlight. It was the type of sunlight that artists painted, the type that fell through branches into the quiet of forest floor. The forests without insects and burrs and things that were all thorn with a tiny bit of root beneath. An arch opened up in the wall at the end of this gigantic hall, and it framed—at last—green.

Kaylin could see trees; she could see grass, or at least wildflowers. She could hear the trickle of water in the distance, which implied either river, brook, or possibly fountain. She could see sky, and the sky was the normal azure.

“I think we’re almost there,” she told Teela.

Teela nodded and closed her eyes.

* * *

There was no sun in the sky, which was the first oddity. Kaylin was so grateful to see life—or at least its imitation—that it took her some time to realize what was missing. There were no insects or birds. In all, this should have been idyllic.

It wasn’t. It was giving her hives. The marks on her arms were glowing brightly. Of course. When they could have been useful, they’d been flat, gray, and lifeless.

She viewed the garden from a terrace. The terrace, like the hall itself, suggested Barrani architecture, and a path led from both the height and the base of its steps. Kaylin hesitated. She looked to Teela for an opinion; Teela was utterly silent.

The fire set her—carefully—down. I will leave you now, Chosen.

“I’m not—”

You are. I have been in this place before; it is peaceful, but it is not mine. Go. My part of this story is told.

“I can’t carry her.”

You can, if you must. Come back to the Keeper’s garden when you are done. There are stories to be told.

* * *

The fire took warmth with him. Kaylin didn’t need it, not here—but Teela did. She knelt beside the Barrani Hawk she’d known and envied and—yes—loved for so much of her life. And she was afraid—that was the truth. She hadn’t understood, at her mother’s deathbed, what death meant. Severn had.

But she’d learned. It was endless. It was loss. It was loss every day. It was an emptiness and a permanent lack of warmth.

Teela had been nothing like her mother. Teela was Barrani. Teela was immortal. Teela had taken her places her mother would never have taken her; had forgiven things her mother would never have forgiven. She wasn’t always kind. No, scratch that, she was almost never kind. It wasn’t her way. But she was solid. She was—mostly—safe.

And she wouldn’t wake up.

Kaylin shook her. She shouted. She whispered. She even pleaded—because Teela couldn’t hear her. That