“Unless you’re here?”
“It is my privilege,” the Consort replied. Kaylin privately thought it wasn’t much of a privilege. “While I am in the West March, I can ease the Warden’s burden. The nightmares of Alsanis are strong, and they are painful. The Warden can bespeak them, at times, and he can calm them, when they can be calmed at all.
“Of late, that has been seldom. Yet without the Warden, the whole of the West March would suffer their pain. Very, very few would survive it.”
“You—”
“Yes. I am aware that I had some difficulty. It was perhaps hubris on my part. I believe Lord Barian would have endured in a way I could not without your aid. It is for this reason there has always been a Warden. There will always
“The nightmares and the dreams are entwined. You think of them as shadow and light, but they are perspectives, Kaylin. They come from the same place. The dreams of Alsanis brought me here.”
“To save you?”
“No. In the end, no. It is to save them.” She turned, then, and gestured at the rivulets that once had been trees. “And you have brought Teela. The green has been waiting. Alsanis has been waiting, as well. Understand that the green is wounded. It is not dying, Kaylin; that is not the nature of its existence; it will not die. Nor is it injured in the way you and I might be injured.”
“Why did they bring you here?”
The Consort, however, frowned. “What,” she asked, her voice chillier by several degrees, “is on your left palm?”
Kaylin held out her hand.
The Consort caught it, pulled Kaylin almost off her feet, and examined it; she did not touch the mark. But her eyes, when Kaylin looked at her face, were gold; gold with a heart of pure green. She let Kaylin’s hand go. “Do you understand what you’ve done?” she asked, voice soft.
Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “No. No, and maybe yes. I saw the word. I knew it was a name. And it seemed—fragile. If words can be fragile.” She thought of Iberrienne. “I was afraid to leave it where I found it, so I gathered it up and took it with me when I left. I didn’t—I didn’t leave myself room for doubt. I thought I was helping, somehow.”
“You have seen the Lake of Life,” the Consort replied.
Kaylin nodded.
“But you have also touched it, Kaylin. You have touched it, and you have taken words from its depths. You carry one within you; you carried part of one to my brother. What you see is not what the rest of my people will see, not even here. I think Teela might have, but she could not have done what you have done.” There was a brief hesitation, and then the Consort said, “No more could I. I am not Chosen. I am Consort; I am guardian of the names by which my kin know life.
“But you are a vessel. A container. You are the parchment on which the words might be both written and preserved. What will you do with the name?”
“I don’t know. It’s not—it’s not like the other words. It’s not like the other name.” Kaylin tapped her forehead. “It doesn’t react the way the marks I carry react.”
“No. It wouldn’t.”
“Because they’re not dead?”
“Because they are not dead. They are not of their name, but they cannot fully escape it. Not while Teela lives.”
“They don’t want to kill her.”
“No. No, they do not. They want to save her. Teela doesn’t wish to be saved. But she doesn’t wish to be free, either. And so, she is here. And you are here. And I, in the end, am here with both of you.”
“Did you expect this?”
The Consort shook her head, her eyes shading to the green-blue that was normal for Barrani. “When I chose to accompany you I was angry with you, yes. But I was also concerned. Calarnenne has history with the green. I believe you now understand what it is.”
“I don’t. I know it has something to do with the lost children.” She hesitated. “But—so did Iberrienne.”
“There is much loss, yes. Do you understand Barrani youth? It is—like mortal youth—a time of optimism and idealism. It is a time when we do not believe in caution, but choose instead a hope that is not leavened by bitter experience. That follows, with the passage of time. The things we love—and hate—in our youth, the losses we take, the deaths we endure—they scar us in ways that later loves and later losses do not. Those, we expect.
“I cannot judge, Kaylin. Were either of my brothers lost to such a gamble as the High Court chose to take, I do not think I would ever have recovered. I would function, yes. I would go on. But the rage and the hatred I felt for that High Court would never dim. Mortals forget, and that is a kindness, although it does not seem so to you, and perhaps never will. We do not. We remember whenever we choose to think about the past at all. We can almost walk in it, it is so real.
“I do not know what occurred between the twelve; I know only that were Teela to die, they might at last be free. Free to be or do what, I cannot say. They are not Barrani now—but they are not entirely other.”
It struck Kaylin then that the Consort suspected the link between the twelve. She suspected that Teela knew the true names of the eleven; that the eleven, in turn, knew hers. She almost asked, but couldn’t. It wasn’t her secret to tell.
“If Teela died, and the eleven were freed, what would happen to their names?”
“Do you not know? No, perhaps you don’t. You have seen the Lake, and you have touched it, and it has left you marked or changed—but you are not Barrani, and will never be Barrani. There are things you cannot understand. Their names will be lost to us. They will not return to the Lake.”
Even hearing it felt like a blow to Kaylin. “Can you—”
“Can I preserve them?” The Consort closed her eyes. “I cannot do what you have done, no. But yes, in some fashion, were I to see what you have seen, I might strengthen them in a different way. I see the Lake, Kaylin. I see it all the time. It exists in the High Halls, and I may approach it physically—as you did. But it exists, for me, wherever my people exist.” She took both of Kaylin’s hands in hers.
“Is that why they want you?”
“Yes. They feel that they might approach that Lake through me. They cannot,” she added. “Not even changed as they are. I will not survive the attempt, but they cannot succeed.”
“They don’t believe that.”
“No.”
“They’re trying to take the words and remake them.”
“Yes. They are like your infants; they are trying to speak as gods. They are trying to use the words in a way that the words cannot be used. They are trying,” she said, voice soft and sad, “to lie in a language in which lies cannot be spoken.”
“Why are they even—” Kaylin stopped. “Do they understand that that’s what they’re trying to do?”
The Consort’s smile was deeper; it was tinged with an approval that Kaylin shouldn’t have wanted, but did anyway. “You understand. No. They believe that any thought that can be expressed—no, any
“Like the shadows of words, but—worse.”
“Yes. All desires exist; there are words that speak of those desires, those words are true. But not all desire is reality. They believe that what the Ancients desired, they could bring into being by simply...speaking. Writing.”
“Bleeding,” Kaylin said, automatically.
The Consort said a long nothing.
“Lady, what is it that you think they want?”
“I would guess, if I could, that they wish to transform Teela as they themselves were transformed. I do not know. I do not understand the whole of their spoken tongue—they have created a language, the way the young sometimes do. I understand only parts of it, and not with clarity.”
“And your song, the song you were singing when we found you?”
