Cast in Ruin (30 page)

He was afraid now. He was afraid of failing her. No, he was afraid of what his failure had already cost her. He was overjoyed to see her alive—but terrified, as well. He did not want to kill her. He did not believe whatever it was he would do
would
kill her, but he couldn’t be certain.

He was also terrified that he couldn’t even do that much, because he could feel his body sliding out of his conscious control. She could feel it sliding out of
hers.
And she had it. She had it if she was willing to use it. What he wanted, what he was—it didn’t matter; it made no difference to what she could or couldn’t do. The whole of who he was, of who he had ever been, was irrelevant.

Kaylin
hated
it.

But hating it, she accepted it; there was no other way. Because what he was didn’t matter to the Outcaste, either.

It matters,
she heard Maggaron say.
It matters, Chosen. To you. You’ll do what’s necessary no matter how
much
you hate it because it
does
matter.

Yes.
Yes, Maggaron. Thank you.

His hand closed around the hilt of the sword with almost no resistance; this meant the Dragon in the skies wanted it, as well. Maggaron turned toward Bellusdeo, and this, too, met with no resistance. But when he lifted the sword he now carried, he suddenly froze.

He froze because the Outcaste did
not
intend for Bellusdeo to die here. That was information that she was certain someone would be interested in—providing they survived. The air was thick with smoke; she could taste it. Kaylin didn’t open her eyes because there was nothing she could do about it.

Maggaron turned like a drunken pillar toward—her. His blade moved—his blade, with glowing runes now edged in black, and he lifted it, struggling against its weight, the imperative of a motion he didn’t want. He moved slowly enough that she could dodge, and she did. Even at the speed of his sword, if it connected, the results wouldn’t be pretty.

Severn stepped in front of her, his hands around a chain that formed a translucent circle in the air in front of them both. “Don’t,” he told her. “I’ll handle the Ascendant. Do what you have to do—but do it quickly.”

Fire strafed the ground to one side of where they stood; it was orange and white, and the stones reddened as it passed. But it didn’t come close enough to force either of them to flee because Bellusdeo was in its path, as well. Her eyes looked bruised now. Fear touched her face, and took root. “Chosen,” she said, her voice too thin, too mortal. And then, “Maggaron.”

He swiveled toward her, and then jerked away; he couldn’t speak. But he wanted to—he wanted to speak so badly the inability came close to breaking something in him. She saw it, felt it, understood it—and understood that it didn’t matter, either. Broken, whole—he would do what she ordered him to do, if she had more force of will than the Outcaste.

This was how he had lived. He might have ended his life—she saw and felt it clearly in the moment—but even that wasn’t allowed him. He had retreated as far inside himself as a person could go; she was honestly surprised he had emerged at all. But he had—for long enough to expose what he knew, not what he
hoped
she might see and take: his name.

Was that all that was left for him? Not freedom, not the ability to think and act on his own recognizance, but rather a transfer to a different master, a different person’s ultimate control? She
hated
it. Everything she had ever been afraid of when the word
Tha’alani
had been spoken in her presence Maggaron was living—that, and worse.

“Kaylin!”

She leaped forward as fire once again strafed the street, but it wasn’t necessary; Severn’s twisting chain caught it and it dissipated. Her brows rose, and her mouth opened on a question, but closed before the question escaped. He’d told her to do what she had to do, and he was
there.

“Yes,” he said, although he watched the sky. “This much I can do.” For just a minute, she saw Severn in duplicate: Severn now, Severn years ago. She saw his expression shift, the younger man’s more serious, more intent.
I need to be able to protect someone.
She couldn’t see who he was speaking to, couldn’t hear what that unknown person’s answer was.

She shook her head, blinking the vision of the younger Severn out of existence.

Now, in a totally different darkness, she turned and she leaped toward Maggaron, still struggling—and failing—to control the sword of the Ascendant. She wasn’t an Immortal; she had twenty years to his centuries. She had no desire for power except as it came in the form of the Hawk. But when she
did
desire power, did it matter if she was twenty or two thousand? Her reasons were at least as good as the Outcaste’s—hells, they were
better.
She grabbed Maggaron’s solid, shaking arm in one hand and almost left the ground.

She grabbed the pommel of his sword with the other.

Light enveloped the three of them—sword, Ascendant, and Hawk—as her marks suddenly flared. It was as if a flash of lightning had chosen to respond to the bursts of fire across the streets—except the lightning didn’t fade into thunder and storm. It grew. It spread until it encompassed not only the three, but also two others: Bellusdeo and Severn.

Bellusdeo was staring at Kaylin. Or at the marks that adorned her exposed arms; Kaylin couldn’t really tell the difference. She spoke, she spoke quickly—but it was a confusion of strange syllables and cadences that Kaylin’s ears couldn’t parse. Maggaron cried out, and Kaylin tightened her grip.

No,
she said.
I’m sorry.
She slid her consciousness into his limbs, into his chest, his mouth, his lungs. They became, for a moment, extensions of her, and they felt entirely natural, as if she’d been born in two bodies, not one, even though one was eight feet tall. She felt the Outcaste’s presence, as well, but his was shadow and hers? Hers was a light so harsh it burned shadow.

Mine,
she snarled.

Mine.

She heard the Outcaste’s roar; felt, for a moment, his fury—and his fear.

Taking Maggaron’s arms, Maggaron’s hands, she readjusted her grip on a sword that, if his story were true and complete, came
from
Bellusdeo. She didn’t tell him what to do because it wouldn’t have made a difference: she did it instead, using his hands and not her own. She drove the sword into the standing woman who still stared, wide-eyed, at Kaylin.

It was slow. Kaylin had killed with daggers before. She’d killed with the inexplicable and terrible power granted her by the marks. But she hadn’t had much training with swords, and using a sword like a dagger wasn’t optimal. Bellusdeo staggered; she would have fallen, but the sword held her up, and as it entered her farther, Bellusdeo reached up and grabbed the blade in both hands. Blood trailed suddenly out of the corner of motionless lips.

Maggaron was screaming on the inside of his own head.

But Kaylin was screaming on the inside of hers. She watched as Bellusdeo’s eyes began to slide shut, and she almost let go of Maggaron. But that would have been a simple act of cowardice, and it would have given Maggaron over to the Outcaste who waited.

“Kaylin,” Severn said, voice low and urgent. “Don’t close your eyes. Watch. Watch the sword. Watch Bellusdeo.”

She wasn’t even aware that her eyes
were
closed; she opened them. Opened them to see the runes on the blade itself: they were changing. Dimming, yes, but their shapes were wavering as she watched. She still held the sword’s pommel and she slid her hand down the hilt and toward that blade in a panic, as if by touch she could somehow preserve them.

But that was impossible.

Worse, she felt Maggaron begin to slip away. Not by dying—that would have been a blessing for him—but somehow she was losing her grip on his body. His thoughts, which had been so loud with pain and fear and self-loathing, began to quiet until she could no longer hear them.

“Maggaron!”

He looked down at the sound of her voice. His eyes were very wide and very blue—but it was a Norannir blue. They were his own. He turned toward Bellusdeo and whispered her name.

Kaylin did the same. Bellusdeo was smiling—at Maggaron. “Thank you,” she said, her voice thin as paper. Kaylin let go of Maggaron—not the sword—and reached for Bellusdeo; it wasn’t hard because Bellusdeo and the sword were practically in the same place now.

When she touched the woman’s shoulder, she felt the shape of a word, rather than the curve of flesh over joint. She almost yanked her hand free, because she’d felt this once before: in the High Halls of the Barrani, when she had touched the Lake of Life. Of course, at the time it had looked like a desk. Maybe for Dragons it looked like a woman?

No. No, Bellusdeo
was
alive. She wouldn’t remain that way for long. Not if Kaylin couldn’t do something. She left her hand where she’d placed it, and closed her eyes. This time, she saw nothing, but the sense, the feel, of a word remained in her palm. Not a long stroke, not the missing element of the High Lord’s name, but rather something more refined, more delicate, and infinitely more complicated. She moved her hand slowly, hoping she wasn’t touching anything embarrassing while she was at it. If she was, Bellusdeo was too absorbed by the sword in her midriff to care.

Yes, the shape was more complicated. But it wasn’t the shape the runes on the sword’s blade had had—Kaylin would have bet her life on it. Was, she realized, doing exactly that. She could feel the heat of fire and the blackness of rage, but she couldn’t see them on the wing. That worried her, but not as much as what she sensed as her touch ranged farther.

The shape of this word was wrong.

Oh, it was written—if true words could be said to be written at all—but it had been written in a hurry, a scrawl; the meaning was sketchy and open to interpretation. She stopped moving. She’d had the thought before actually thinking. How could its meaning be open to interpretation when she didn’t even know what it
meant?

But it
was.
She looked to Bellusdeo, her eyes widening. “How—no,
where,
did you find your name?”

Bellusdeo closed her very mortal eyes. “You understand, Chosen. I…did not, until it was too late.”

“No, I
don’t
understand.” Her hands hurt; the lines and the swirls were shifting beneath them, as if they were slightly unstable.

“He found us. He found us, and he showed us the way.” She glanced skyward, although the sky was no longer visible to Kaylin’s eyes. She knew that Bellusdeo referred to the Outcaste, and felt cold although she could hear the sharp crackle of flames to either side. “We went to where the words were, at his guidance, and we found our names. We found,” she added with a bitter grimace, “our adult forms. We were young, then—and proud, so proud.”

“Where—where did he lead you?”

“Through the darkness. Through the heart of the shadow that lies in all worlds.”

“And you
followed
him?”

“He was an Elder, and he was strong; we were not yet adult, and we were lost. He was not unkind. He led us to our names. They
are
True Names. But they are not true words.”

“And if you lose them?”

Bellusdeo did not answer the question, although she continued to speak. “We discovered his treachery, in time; he could
see
the shape and the form of the names we had chosen for ourselves. It was not simple; it took him time and effort—but he could see. We despaired.” Her voice was soft and even, but thinning as the syllables passed. “But we discovered that even his treachery was flawed; the words themselves were mutable and they were not entirely contained.” She glanced at Maggaron, and her expression softened.

Kaylin’s hardened. She was, for just a moment, furious—with the Arkon, with Sanabalis. Tiamaris escaped her rage because Tiamaris was young and quite possibly ignorant. Then again, maybe not, because he
had
a name. She needed to know to what lake—metaphorically speaking—Dragon children approached to achieve the fusion of form that was their version of adulthood. And she needed to know it
now,
or yesterday.

She couldn’t, of course. The Dragons were fighting, quite possibly for their lives, in the skies above. The struggle on the ground might also define and save lives—or conversely, lose them—but they had no time for it. “What’s happening to Maggaron?”

“The name is leaving him,” Bellusdeo replied. “It is leaving the sword; it returns, at last, to me, where it will be made whole.”

“But you said he can—”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I am doomed, regardless, Chosen. And Maggaron is not. He has lived as less than slave for far too long. I knew where he had traveled. I knew what he had found. I had hoped—” She opened her eyes. Whatever hope she had had, it was gone.

CHAPTER 21

“You wanted to free him.”

Bellusdeo nodded. She lifted a hand to his face, and Kaylin saw that his face was wet. She understood why she could no longer control him. But neither could the Outcaste. The sword beneath Kaylin’s hand began to dwindle in size, the runes running down the blade as if they’d been written in liquid that hadn’t had time to dry.

“Chosen,” Bellusdeo said quietly.

Kaylin had often felt like a fraud in her life—as a Hawk, as an adult—but never more than she did now. “I’m Chosen,” she said bitterly. “But I’ve no idea what that
means,
or what it’s supposed to mean.”

Bellusdeo nodded, as if she’d heard it before. Maybe she had. “I have only met one other who bore marks similar to the ones you now bear. They were not the same marks,” she added. “Were it not for his intervention, we would have fallen to Makkuron long ago. The Chosen helped us to understand what we might achieve, and he told us that it wouldn’t last.

“But he told me that I might find another of his kind. I searched,” she added. The sword was now the size and shape of a dagger—or a letter opener. It was also translucent. “We all searched while we could. He searched, as well—for us. But the Norannir found you. And when they did, we gambled. We, who no longer had the power of flight, or the freedom of it.”

“Why—why did they all look like you?”

“Because we are one. We have always been one. Even our names were interconnected in ways that the enemy could not fully perceive, and this bought us much time. He is coming,” she added, lifting her face again, her hands still cupped around Maggaron’s.

“He can’t have you.”

“I fail to see what will stop him if they cannot.”

Kaylin said, sharply, “I can.”

Hope was cruel. It could be an act of torture far more profound than despair. It could cut, and cut, and cut—no one knew this better than Kaylin. She’d tried, in the dark months of Barren, to divest herself of hope entirely, because hope led to pain so directly there were grooves in the path between them.

This, she now inflicted on Bellusdeo.

Kaylin’s arms were white. The light shed by the marks on them was now so brilliant she couldn’t see skin; she had to squint to make out the individual forms themselves. She swallowed; the sphere that had grown up around them shuddered, and dents appeared in its rounded height, the shape and size of very large claws.

Bellusdeo flinched at the sight of them. Then she grimaced and drew the very small dagger from the wound in her chest—a wound that was still bleeding. The dagger became a sword—a sword made of glass, or something just as transparent.

“Lady,” Maggaron said, his voice breaking between the two syllables. “Let me.”

“I cannot anymore, and you know it. Maggaron, you have served me well. You have always served me well. But it is time.” He took the sword anyway and set it down on the ground.

What the hells was good about being Chosen, anyway? Kaylin had demanded that Maggaron be allowed to accompany them, and for what reason? Instinct? Fine. But he was here, Bellusdeo had taken a mortal wound, and she had somehow freed him from the curse of a name. The Dragon carried a sword that no longer looked like the sword of an Ascendant, and it was clear to both Kaylin and Maggaron that she meant to use it.

It was clear to both of them that she wouldn’t last long. Oh, she’d survive. The Outcaste didn’t want her dead. But would her life be any better, in the end, than Maggaron’s had been?

Kaylin looked at her exposed arms in an almost helpless frenzy.

Kaylin.

Severn, I don’t know what to
do.

Don’t panic.

She laughed. It was not a happy laugh. The claw-shaped indentations had grown in number, and there were a few new ones that looked as though they might be teeth. But bigger. She felt the ground shake as she heard the Outcaste’s roar, and then the sudden incursions stopped.

“Bellusdeo, can you—can you transform now?”

“Transform?”

“Into your Dragon form.”

“Not yet, Chosen—but soon.”

“No!”

They both glanced at Maggaron.

“Tell her, Lady.”

“Enough, Maggaron.”

He fell silent. Into his silence came words, and to her surprise, Kaylin was speaking them. She was speaking them just as Sanabalis had once done when he had told the Leontines the ancient story of their birth. There were two words, she thought as she watched them form; she felt their weight in the back of her throat as she struggled to vocalize them. Human throats had clearly not been designed with this in mind.

The words pulled themselves out of the air, gaining shape and size by feeding on the light that Kaylin shed. She’d seen something similar before; she recognized the parts of the runes: the vertical strokes, the horizontal strokes, the dots that crowned them, the squiggles that seemed to flutter at the edges. What she hadn’t seen before, however, was their placement: they formed
around
the Ascendant and the Dragon—if either one of them truly fit the descriptions by which they’d lived anymore—like the pristine bars of a golden cage; a songbird’s cage in a rich man’s house.

Kaylin frowned because she understood that this was an answer, and she couldn’t make sense of it.

No, wait… It wasn’t an answer.

It was a story. It was a smaller story than the one that had given birth to the Leontine race, but it was a story nonetheless. It wasn’t
her
story; it was defined by Bellusdeo and Maggaron. No, she thought as more words began to form around them, it was defined by more than just those two. But they were here now. The other runes floated in the air, rotating and gleaming as they touched one another. They could clearly see them as well as Kaylin could—which the Arkon had implied wasn’t possible unless Kaylin touched them. Then again, the last time she had touched the words she’d seen, they’d been
his
words. He’d spoken them.

Here, they were hers.

Bellusdeo lifted a hand and touched one of the interwoven runes. As if she were a glass vessel, the light from the rune began to fill her, or perhaps to drain into her. She turned in wonder to Kaylin, Dragons fighting and roaring above their heads, and said nothing, but her eyes were pure gold. Kaylin was aware that gold was the happy color for Dragon eyes—or for anyone who happened to be
in
the company of said Dragons—but she’d never seen a gold like this.

Bellusdeo reached out with the hand that wasn’t touching the word and Maggaron clasped that hand, dwarfing it in his own. Kaylin wasn’t surprised to see that same golden light touch him—but it didn’t fill his eyes; it didn’t change his skin color; it surrounded him like a halo. Without thinking, Kaylin said, “No, Maggaron. That one’s not yours.”

She cursed as she realized that without their bond, her words would sound like a crash and clatter of syllables and nonsense. Except they didn’t. Come to think, Bellusdeo had understood every word she’d spoken. She’d understood, in turn, every word the Dragon had spoken, as well. Maggaron turned to her, unaware that he shouldn’t understand what she’d just said. “Mine?” he said, looking mostly confused.

Kaylin nodded. “It’s that one. No, the one to the right, the one that’s large and very bold.” But also spare and simple.

He hesitated, and then turned to Bellusdeo. Bellusdeo smiled for him. At him. Kaylin felt a pang of inexplicable envy at the sight of it.

“You’ve been part of each other for a very long time,” she told them both quietly. Not even the renewed roar of Dragons could drown out the words. “I don’t know how it’s changed you. I don’t even know if it has. But that rune—that one’s Maggaron’s. Touch it.” When he hesitated, she added, “Just touch the damn thing. I know you’re humble and you’re modest—but we honestly don’t have time for either right now.”

Maggaron
still
hesitated. Bellusdeo reached up and smacked him. The gesture was so at odds with her expression Kaylin was almost shocked. She started to say something and the words bottomed out as she
felt
Severn’s sudden pain. She wheeled and saw that he was standing far, far too close to a melting patch of ground. His weapon’s spin wobbled before he gritted teeth and righted it.

Without thought, she reached for him, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him back—and into the light of the words she’d spoken. He tensed as she wrapped her arms around his chest; she could feel his heart beating beneath her glowing arms; could feel his chest rise and fall. “Stay here,” she told him. “Just stay here. Stay with me. It’s—it’s sort of safe.”

His weapon slowed; he must have been injured, because it
also
clattered.

“It’s proof against the fire,” he told her.

“
You’re
not.”

“No.”

She closed her eyes. She could smell fire and sweat and, of all things,
soap.
But she could hear words. Feel them. She opened her mouth and began to speak again, and this time, the words were visible; a thing above and beyond her, but rooted in her, as well, as if they were the crowning branches of a very tall, very ancient tree, and she was, well, dirt.

She opened her eyes and slowly released Severn. Turning to Maggaron, she saw that he had one hand on the thickest and brightest of the vertical strokes of the rune Kaylin had called his. His other hand was still wrapped around the hand of the woman—or Dragon—that he’d served all his life. Kaylin had no idea how long that life had been.

But his eyes began to shift color as he held both the woman and the word. They became gold, as well; gold, however, wasn’t the Norannir happy color. Brown was. “Lady,” he whispered.

“Chosen,” Bellusdeo also whispered.

“It’s a story. No, it’s
the
story,” Kaylin told them both.

“And you are the teller of the tale?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell us its ending, who was there at the beginning.”

“I can’t tell you how it ends, not really; I think…I—I think I can tell you how it finally begins.”

She didn’t know what she was doing. She knew she was making it up as she went along. She wasn’t Rennick, the Imperial Playwright; she couldn’t throw out the bits that didn’t work—in an ever-increasing pile—and start it again. But she knew, watching the two, Ascendant and Dragon, that they were linked, and she knew, as well, that every single rune she had spoken was part of Bellusdeo.

She counted them.

There were ten.

She really didn’t understand how words and names worked; she realized that. She
had
a name and she didn’t understand what that meant for her, either. Then again, she didn’t understand bureaucracy, and she theoretically worked at the behest of the most powerful bureaucrat in the Empire: the Emperor himself.

“You said that you were always one. The nine of you.”

“Yes.”

Kaylin took a deep breath. “Then I understand, Bellusdeo, what the rest of the words say.”

Bellusdeo wasn’t stupid. Her eyes rounded as she, too, counted words that were jostled up against each other in their confined—and comforting—circle. “Chosen—this isn’t possible. There is now only one of me.”

“Yes. But there were nine, and each and every one of those words is yours.”

“How can you know this?”

“I don’t know. How can you know how to transform? I
know it.
It’s here,” she added, lifting her arms and exposing the runes. “Will you trust me?”

“I already have—with my life. With his. But I do not know how I can do what you ask. I am
one;
they are
nine.
”

“The others—”

“Are dead. You cannot wake them; they do not sleep.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were nine, Bellusdeo—and you must be nine again.” Kaylin wanted to smack herself to stop the flow of words, because even if she was the one who’d said them, they made no sense if she thought about them for two seconds. Which was about all the time she had.

She cursed—in Leontine, which apparently didn’t get translated into ancient and eternal words—and approached the circling runes. She grabbed the ones she could reach and began to push them together, as if the spaces between the individual elements that comprised them were spaces that could be filled by elements that had never been part of their original form at all. As if they were cards and she was shuffling them back into a single deck again before she started to deal them.

She could
feel
Severn wince at the analogy, and it made her laugh.

Bellusdeo was watching her with eyes that were widening as Kaylin worked. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then pulled herself closer to Maggaron. That might not have been what she intended, but in her current form—and at her current weight—that was what happened. She held the rune she had first touched, and she told Maggaron not to let go of his.

Kaylin found that the runes did collapse into each other—but not easily, and not without strain. It was like moving furniture into an apartment that started out empty; it got progressively harder to work with as it filled. Hard wasn’t the same as impossible; she reminded herself of this as her arms began to tire; reminded herself again as they started to tremble with exertion. The runes, however, hadn’t collapsed into a messy pile of random scribbles, as she’d half feared they might. They had a different shape, a different form, a different density. Some of the lines thinned, some shrunk, some bent—but always in a way that suggested a pattern, an emerging whole.

She wished writing reports worked the same way.

The light had drained out of the marks on her arms as she’d worked; she knew this only because she’d paused for a moment to massage them. The marks were still glowing—but only very faintly. She wouldn’t honestly have been surprised had the marks simply vanished with their light, but for perhaps the very first time she would have felt a twinge of regret at the loss.

Sadly, they weren’t the only thing the light left; the barrier that had stood as a slender but absolute wall against fire, smoke, and rock that was close to melting had also dimmed. Frustrated, frightened, she cursed herself, wondering if it was somehow
her
power, in the marks, that had maintained that shield—and if it was something she could have learned to do consciously if she’d been a better student.