It was also true of Kaylin. Changes were being made in the flesh of her hands, in the length of her fingers, in the color of her skin. They occurred instantly, the way wounds did when your opponent was armed with an edged weapon. The outcaste didn’t care what happened to Kaylin.
But this implied that he did care what happened to Bellusdeo; that the changes wrought in her would be subtle and careful and deliberate. What he wanted from Kaylin was her death, which was the opposite of what she wanted. It hadn’t always been.
She absorbed his Shadow almost by default, allowing it to enter; she dampened her resistance slightly while she worked to isolate it. She did not want to have to cut off her hands—but she wanted to free Bellusdeo of its taint, and there was really only one way to do that.
She removed a chunk of the Dragon’s flesh.
* * *
Bellusdeo did not roar, but Kaylin could feel the Dragon shudder beneath her. She could feel her own power struggling to replace what she had removed. The Shadow did not immediately react. The outcaste had yet to notice what she had done. At any other time, she would have found this interesting.
Not now. Now, she wrenched her hands up, and free, of Bellusdeo.
All of the Shadow was now hers. No, that wasn’t right: it was in her, but it wasn’tofher. On the very, very few occasions she had managed to hold the name of fire in her mind for long enough to light a bloody candle—when lighting one the normal way would take minutes at best—the fire had been no part of her. It had responded to her, but it hadn’t invaded her.
If Shadow was like fire—or any of the other elements—it was necessary to maintain control. But control in this case was the outcaste’s, not her own.
There was, however, one flaw with this. Shadow was unlike fire, or the rest of the elemental powers. To control fire, she had to know its name, and its name was the whole of it, at greater and lesser sizes.
Shadow was not part of Evanton’s garden. Shadow was not part of the Keeper’s duties or responsibilities. Shadow had no name, no central, single truth at its core upon which all other truths about it were built.
To the familiar, she shouted, “Get me away from Bellusdeo!”
* * *
He shifted out of the small form without materially altering his position on her shoulder. What should have broken or crushed that shoulder made no difference at all. He was Dragon-sized, but he did not fill space the way natural Dragons did. And yet he was solid enough to grip her shoulders in his feet, and solid enough to remove her from the complicated chaos of Dragons at war.
She trusted that he wouldn’t drop her, and that was as much thought as she could now spare. She had the Shadow within her hands, and within her arms, and it was no longer trying to spread: instead, it had begun its act of transformation. She wasn’t certain that she could cut off her own hands. If shecouldmanage that, she wasn’t certain she could regrow them. She could reattach limbs, if she was on the scene in time—but she had never regrown a missing appendage before.
She cursed the Emperor—silently—and the Hawklord, then. They frownedheavilyon experimentation with healing powers. They allowed her to use them only under the condition that they not be made aware of them; their cooperation was entirely in the way they turned a blind eye.
None of that was helpful now.
But the marks on her arms were. If the flesh to which they were attached on most days was being transformed in some fashion, these words weren’t. They were inert, immovable. The Shadow didn’t touch them—but it did try. She felt tendrils break, needlelike, from her forearms to wrap themselves around the runes.
The light of the marks dimmed slowly.
The color of the Shadow didn’t change.
* * *
She knew the moment the outcaste realized what she’d done because he roared in raw fury. No other sound in the cavern was as solid, as all-encompassing, as his voice; she vibrated with it. He collided with the Emperor in a sudden physical rush; Kaylin heard the clangor of scales colliding with scales, all but indistinguishable from the sound of a sword doing the same.
She could hear only one such sound, and she had a pretty good guess which sword it was.
The Shadow itself continued its strange incursion. It hurt a lot less, which was probably a bad sign overall. The familiar dropped her somewhere near Mandoran, and away from the wings and tails of the Dragons. She looked up to catch a glimpse of the Aerians.
There were no Aerians.
None of the ones that had served the outcaste in his Aerian form. And no Hawks, no Moran. The air was empty.
She turned to Mandoran to demand an explanation and stopped. He was staring at her hands, his expression a mixture of fascination and horror—but mostly horror.
“What are you doing?” he demanded again. “Get rid of that!”
Since she’d been trying to do exactly that, this wasn’t helpful. It was annoying, though. And annoyance was better than fear or uncertainty.
“If you’d care to help?” she said, voice loaded with almost lethal sarcasm.
