Cast In Fury (23 page)

“Fair enough. Neither do I.”

They made their way through a section of street so crowded it made the landscape unrecognizable. But the burned-out building that formed an inverted dais for the Dragon Lord was unmistakable.

Dragons in their human forms were not formidably tall, and Sanabalis was probably the shortest of the five Kaylin had personally met. She couldn’t see him until she cleared the living wall, and that took a little effort. Not as much as she had thought it would, when she was thinking about anything but his words.

And when she did clear the last of the Leontines, with Severn as her familiar—and yes, comforting—shadow, the words were the only thing she could think about.

Because she could see them.

They weren’t like written words. They weren’t like printed words. They weren’t like the words in ancient, expensive texts that were so ornamented she couldn’t even recognize them. They weren’t, in any sense, like words at all—but they
were
the words he was speaking.

“What do you see, Kaylin?” Severn asked.

She shook her head. “Words,” she said. And then, aware that she was telling him nothing at all of use, she added, “They don’t look like words, Severn. If you saw them, I don’t think you would think of them
as
words. They’re like—light. No, not quite light—but it’s the closest I can come.”

“Light? Not fireworks.”

“No—those wouldn’t look or feel like words. Not magelights, either. They—look like…ghosts.”

He waited.

“Like the ghosts of light. They’re not quite here, they’re not quite gone. They—they’re moving, but…” She shrugged. “They don’t look like our ghosts.” She was aware that she was giving this particular Hawk a description as frustrating as any description ever given to some poor sod in Missing Persons.

“If you had seen them without hearing them, would you recognize them as words?”

She considered this carefully, and then nodded. “I think so. It’s hard to separate them from Sanabalis. But I think so.”

“Why?”

Since
I don’t know
was not useful, she struggled to be of use, and only partly for Severn’s sake. Some people loved a mystery. None of those people had ever been Kaylin. She needed to know things, and she needed to understand what she knew.

When it was relevant.

At last she said, “I feel them.” She took a breath and then continued. “I’m not even sure that what I’m seeing isn’t part of that. They
feel
like words to me.” And then she stopped. “They feel like words…”

“Not like Elantran words.”

“Nothing like our words, no. We pick and choose. Our whole language is a patchwork quilt. Every word can be jumbled with other words, and we make sentences that we understand—but people hearing them will also understand them, and the understanding won’t be the same. This is…”

He waited.

His whole life, the life that she had known, he’d been damn good at waiting. He’d told her once that he was so good at waiting because she was so bad at it, as if they were two halves of a whole.

Seven years, he had waited for her. And she had gone on in painful, furious ignorance.

“They’re like…Barrani names,” she whispered. “They don’t look like them, but they have that solidity to them. Some sense of a meaning so complete that everyone who
could
understand them at all would understand the
same thing.
You couldn’t lie in a language like that. Because it’s what it is, not more, not less. I
didn’t
understand the Barrani names when I touched them in the High Halls, but they didn’t care.”

“Words don’t generally care,” he told her. It might have been flippant, if said in any other tone. It wasn’t.

“No. In one way, they’re very much alike—I understand neither, but I feel as if I should. As if I
could,
if I just tried harder. Worked at it.”

“What is he saying, Kaylin?” Severn asked, again, in that serious tone.

This time, she could almost touch it. The meaning, not behind the words, but of the words themselves. Her body ached with it. Hurt with it. She realized, even as she thought that, that it wasn’t her body—it was her
skin.
She reached for the arm that didn’t sport a golden shackle, and fumbled with the buttons, unable to take her eyes off either Sanabalis or the moving, ethereal stream that seemed to surround him.

She pulled the sleeve up.

She heard the momentary gap in Severn’s breathing, and managed to lift her arm so she could see it without moving her head. The marks were glowing a faint, luminescent blue, and it seemed to Kaylin that they were moving somehow, the swirls and strokes and dots coming apart and coalescing again.

Severn caught her hand and forced her arm down. Her sleeve, tugged by gravity and the weight of fabric not suited to the heat and humidity of Elantran summer, fell again. He buttoned it shut.

He had said nothing.

But Sanabalis
did.
He turned, his speech not faltering. His eyes were a color so close to glowing white that she took a step back; she had never seen a similar color in any of the races she’d met.

It was as if his single glance were a bridge that could be crossed. Without thought, she took a step forward, and then another. The third was interrupted by Severn, his arm around her shoulders heavy and at the same time almost otherworldly. “Kaylin,” he whispered, his lips tickling the lobe of her ear.

She wanted to nod. She wanted to pay attention. Or to tell him that he was tickling her.

But she moved again anyway, drawn to Sanabalis.

Drawn, she realized, to what had been said, to what was being said now. And when the light moved, when the words, so ghostly and so strange, suddenly turned toward her, she thought she would never move again.

But she did.

Sanabalis continued to speak, but as he did, he lifted a hand. It looked…like his hand. But it looked, for a moment, like a Dragon’s claws, like a Leontine’s paws. It was both solid and changing, as if shape were as fluid as language.

And he clearly meant for her to take that hand.

She lifted her arm. It was the hand that Severn held, and there was a moment of awkwardness—of something stronger and more desperate—before he let go. Before he moved to her side, and gently engaged her other hand.

She was almost afraid to raise the hand he had surrendered; she was afraid to see in it what she now saw in Sanabalis. But she only knew one way of conquering fear, and that was to charge into it, blindly.

If charging could be this hesitant, it was what she did now. She placed her hand, palm down, across his. It looked like a child’s hand in the hand of a large man.

Then Sanabalis continued to speak, and after a moment, she realized that he was once again at the center of the words and their odd, moving light. So was she. They drifted past her upturned face, swept across her cheeks, touched strands of her hair. She could feel them, moving around her. And across her skin.

She opened her mouth, and it opened to silence; she could feel her lips move, but nothing escaped them. Here, there was no need for
her
words. Her words, as she had said to Severn, were imperfect, flawed vessels that explained so little.

But she wanted them anyway: her words, her own voice.

Even when Sanabalis looked down at her again, with his pale, platinum irises, so much like the whites he almost seemed to
have
no eyes.

His hand was Dragon scale beneath hers; it was callused skin; it was hard, ebon claw—all and none of these things.

And hers? She thought it was just her hand. There was no hidden form waiting to leap out, no other self to call on.

No feathers, she thought. No flight feathers. No freedom from gravity: just Kaylin. But she hadn’t always been just Kaylin. She had been Elianne, in the fief of Nightshade. And elsewhere.

She waited until Sanabalis was finished.

It seemed to take forever. It seemed over too quickly. Caught between these things, she was silent.

But when his voice stopped, the words stopped as well, melting in sunlight, in a morning in the streets of Elantra, as so much magic did—with the added bonus of there being no corpses.

“So,” the Dragon Lord said, speaking in measured High Barrani again, his voice the voice of her teacher. “I believe I told you to
remain in the carriage.
”

“I tried,” she said quietly, the more so because she realized how stupid it sounded.

“And you failed.”

“I heard you,” she told him. “I heard…the words. I—”

“She was moving before she realized she was moving,” Severn said, as if he had not just interrupted her flail for a better excuse.

“So,” Sanabalis said again, heavily. “What did you hear, Kaylin?”

“You. Speaking. I didn’t recognize the language.”

“No.”

“But it sounded as if I
should.
”

His brows drew together in a furrow that changed the lines of his face. “And what did you see?”

She shook her head. “Words,” she said, aware of how lame that sounded. “But the Leontines—”

The Leontines had, at last, moved to make way for the Elders that Severn had caught a glimpse of, when perched at the height of a carriage she could clearly make out over the heads of the crowd. The horses were nervous, but they were Imperial horses all, and the driver kept them as still as one could expect.

Adar was at the head of the approaching delegation, his fur tinted ivory by sunlight. The golden Leontines stopped before they crossed the threshold of the ruin; the gray-furred Leontine stopped just within its boundaries. But Adar, white furred, blue eyes the color of sky, continued to walk. As if a Dragon Lord held no fear for him.

As if he owned the Quarter, which, technically, he couldn’t. He was, however, the racial version of a castelord, and if the Leontines didn’t live like the rest of the populace, she was fairly certain he understood the laws that overlapped.

She was surprised when he bowed.

“First Son,” Sanabalis said gravely.

“We welcome you.”

“It has been long indeed since I have walked among your children,” Sanabalis replied, his voice still grave and level. “And I have missed their company.”

“And we have missed yours, Eldest, and with greater cause. These two,” Adar added, indicating Severn and Kaylin with a minimal movement of his head. “They are yours?”

“She is my student,” the Dragon Lord replied. “And as is the case with so many of the young, she sees leashes and cages where there are none.”

The Leontine made a sound that was kin to a chuckle—but with more growl and fang in it.

“And she came to our Quarter at your behest?”

“She came without my knowledge.”

“Ah.”

“Therefore no regrets for your treatment of her—whatever it was—should be offered. But had she not come, First Son, things would have gone ill.”

Adar bowed his head. When he lifted it, he squared his shoulders. “I was not vigilant,” he began.

Sanabalis lifted a hand. “Let us repair to your seat, and discuss what must be discussed there. There are too many ears in this crowd.”

“You had but to ask, Eldest, and they would have cleared the streets at your command. But you told the oldest of our stories, and they listened.”

“Yes,” Sanabalis said, passing a hand over his eyes. “And it was long in the telling, and tiring. Forbid them this site,” he added, “and leave me for a moment. We will join you when we have finished our work here.”

The very Leontine bark that cleared the streets caused Kaylin to grimace in recognition. It wasn’t a familiar voice, but the words were familiar words. The fact that they were obeyed more or less instantly—any crowd contained stupid people and stragglers—would have made Marcus green with envy. Or whatever color it was Leontines turned when envious.

But when they had gone, Sanabalis sat down heavily on the burned-out flooring. “That was unwise of me,” he said. “And no doubt word will travel. It has been a very, very long time since I have attempted to speak the language. I’m surprised they recognized it.”

“If they heard what I heard—”

“They heard only part of what you heard, if I’m any judge,” he said. “And I
told you to wait in the carriage.
”

“Yes, Sanabalis.”

“Meek doesn’t work on me unless it’s consistent.”

“Yes, Sanabalis.”

He frowned. “For what it’s worth, I’m grateful that you handed me this difficulty.”

“Because of the Leontines?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think.” He ran his hands over his eyes again, after which his eyes were orange, but ringed with dark circles. She had never seen Sanabalis look so tired.

“Have you seen this done before?” he asked Kaylin as he pushed himself off the ground. Soot clung to the back side of his robes, but Kaylin didn’t fancy her chances of surviving the simple act of brushing it off.

“About a hundred times.”

“Good. Did you pay attention?”

She nodded briskly. “We needed the information.”

“What did you see?”

It wasn’t the question she was generally asked. “Me?”
I’m not a mage
started and died on her lips. “I don’t think people generally see anything,” she said, punting.

“I didn’t ask you what other people saw—or did not see. I asked what
you
saw.”

She hesitated, and then surrendered. “A sigil,” she told him. “Like a mark or a thing made of fire—but it wasn’t fire and it wasn’t light.”

“Was it always the same?”

“No. But if it did look the same, the magic was performed by the same person.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

“You neglected to mention this to your superiors.”

“Hells no. I told the Hawklord,” Kaylin said.

“Ah. I imagine he has that discussion in his personal records.”

“He usually does.”

“Very well. You’ve seen the magic performed.”

She nodded.

“And you’ve seen the results,” he asked.

She nodded again.

“Watch now,” he told her quietly, “and tell me what you see.”

“But you’ll see it—you’re the mage.”

“Ah. No, Kaylin. What you saw on those occasions is
not
what the mages saw.”