Cast in Sorrow

She glanced at the edge of what was no longer stone grove. “A lullaby. They do not hate me,” she said. “Nothing they now attempt is personal.”

“Would you kill them if you could?”

“Yes. But not with joy, Kaylin, and with no sense of triumph. I understand what Teela’s mother asked of the green. But in the end, this is the result. The green is scarred, Teela is scarred, and the lost children exist in a state that is neither life nor death. But I think this time, we will have an ending, one way or the other.” She looked up as the water drew close, carrying Teela, cradling her as the fire had done.

“What happened to her?”

“She did what you did—she absorbed the nightmares of Alsanis. I couldn’t do what I did for you because I couldn’t see them. At all.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. I told you—I couldn’t see them. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her physically, and I can’t—I can’t touch her.”

“I would think it suicidal to try.”

“She’s unconscious. She can only kill me if she wakes up.”

The Consort touched Teela’s brow.

“Can you see her name?”

The Consort said, “Never ask that question of me. Never ask it again. It is not safe.”

“For me, or for you?”

“For either of us, Kaylin. Do you understand the position of Consort is not hereditary?”

“It was—”

“No. I am offered the opportunity to take the test first; it is a courtesy. I could have refused, without dishonor; I did not. Had I failed, I would have died, and a search for a suitable candidate would have begun. My bloodline gives me no affinity; it gives me nothing special. The test that we face—a test you did not—is not short. It is not a decision made in a moment. There are spaces in which Barrani might live that are nonetheless not the world to which we were born. In those spaces, time has less meaning—but no Barrani, no Dragon, no mortal, can undo the past. We move forward. The testing that I underwent began before you were born. Were I to undergo such a test now, it would end long after you died—of the old age that takes all mortals, sooner or later.

“Some fail the test almost immediately. Some take decades to make the first, false step. There is no going back. No one of us understands what the test entails, Kaylin, until it is far too late. My mother passed. I passed.” She smiled. “I passed in—how do you say it? Record time?”

“That’s how we say it.”

“My father, of course, was proud. Proud. I was his daughter.”

“Your mother?”

“She grieved.”

“I...don’t understand.”

“She had undergone the same testing, Kaylin. She knew what both passing—and surviving—in such a short time meant. The Lake chooses; it is not kind in its choice. I am not...the daughter my mother hoped for. I am not harsh enough, not strong enough. But I am not so weak that I could fail. I am not so weak that I could not sacrifice almost everything I loved in order to safeguard the source of all life. But I am weak enough that such sacrifice would never be made for any other reason.” Her smile was both fragile and self-conscious, yet it looked strangely at home on a Barrani face. “I am not even determined enough to hate you for what you were willing to risk.”

“She thought you’d be hurt. By your life.”

“No. She knew I would be. She was Barrani, and Consort—but she was my mother. Even among my kin, the relationship is not without significance.” She looked up at the sky, where the dragon hovered. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked, voice soft. “Is this like your refugees, somehow?”

Kaylin very much wanted to say yes. She chose to say nothing instead.

“What has your familiar done to the trees?”

“They weren’t really trees.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No.” Kaylin hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know.”

The Consort’s smile was rueful. “Perhaps I should have accepted the nonanswer. Come. Whatever he has done, he has done; the binding that kept me here has faded.” Before Kaylin could speak, she added, “They were here, but they were not here. They are children, Barrani children, at heart.”

“They’re not Barrani.”

“No, Kaylin—they are not. But they are not entirely other. They cannot be both—and they have tried. They do not think they are different; they think they are more powerful, less limited, but still essentially what they were.” She closed her eyes. “You must leave Teela here.”

Kaylin’s jaw dropped. She didn’t bother to close it without letting words fall out. “I am not leaving Teela here.”

“Yes, Kaylin, you will. She is here, in the end, because of you—but this is where she must be. I am sorry. You anger me so often, I am surprised that I am able to feel compassion for you at all—but I do. Teela came here as harmoniste, once. She came, and she survived. But she failed. She failed and the dreams of Alsanis were dark for a century.

“What you feel for Teela, we do not feel; not in the same way. It is closest to what the lost feel. You wear the blood of the green, although you are like the youngest and least controlled of our children. But you are Chosen. You have drawn me from the nightmares of Alsanis when none of my kin could. You have come to me in the scar of the green, and because you have, we will be able to leave.”

“I couldn’t have come here without Teela.”

“No.”

“I won’t leave her.”

“Then we will never leave.” The Consort slid her hands behind her back. “And I admit that I am...weary. I am weary of the grief of both the green and Alsanis. I am weary of the loss and the fear of loss. I am not in pain. If I cannot leave, the failure, in the end, will not be not my fault. That is a terrible thing to confess, is it not? As long as it is not my fault, I can be at peace with failure.”

Kaylin stared at her.

“You have felt it yourself.”

And she had. “Why can’t you leave without me?”

“Because without you, Chosen, we will fail.”

“Fail what?”

The telling, the water said, unexpectedly joining a conversation Kaylin hadn’t even been certain she could hear. You are harmoniste. The Lord of the West March will speak, Kaylin; the Teller will expand upon every possible strand of the story he chooses to begin. No story has only one beginning, and no story has only one end. No story has only one strand; it involves the lives and the possibilities of so many that you will never even meet. Understand your audience when you begin to choose. Understand who the story must reach, and why. You have seen the wound at the heart of the green. You do not fully understand what it is or why it has waited; you must.

The green cannot wait forever; the lost speak sorrow and grief and untruth in their rage and their pain. The joy they know is too fixed and too slight; it feeds nothing but despair.

You are Chosen. You have told stories before. It is your nature.

The dragon roared. Kaylin looked up; he spun around in a large circle, and then, slowly and deliberately, landed. He was not small. He would never, she was afraid, be small again.

Teela is part of this place. She is part of its wound. She is loved by the green, and the green grieves for her. She has given it no cause for joy and none for hope—but the green hopes. I will guard your Teela, as I have guarded the blood of her kin for so many of your centuries.

“And if I fail? If I fail, will you give her back?”

The water did not reply.

“Eldest,” the Consort said. She tendered the water a flawless Barrani obeisance. She caught Kaylin’s arm.