“We wouldn’t be here if the water hadn’t thought we could do something.”
“Meaning you have no idea.”
* * *
The moment they cleared the threshold, the doors which had opened so invitingly rolled shut. They didn’t slam, though.
“No,” Alsanis said. His Avatar was waiting patiently. “I am Hallionne now, not prison, and my guests are free to leave should they so choose. That, however,” he added, staring at Terrano’s cupped hands, “is not a guest.”
“Can I let it go now?” Terrano asked, as Kaylin said, “Is it safe?”
“It is safe.”
“But—”
“It is too small and too insignificant to alter my structure in any meaningful fashion. Terrano and his kin were far more likely to cause difficulties—”
“And it took us centuries.”
“Indeed. You were guests,” he added quietly. “Available options to deal with you were not the same as the options open to me in regard to your captive. The thing you carry is causing you pain,” he added, his expression one of concern. “Release it.”
Terrano practically threw it from his hands.
It careened in the air as if it were drunk, wobbling in what might have been an arc of flight. But the wings that had seemed, in shape and size, butterfly wings were something different now. They were silvered, hard, dense; they seemed to make flight itself very difficult.
Terrano had said that the butterfly bit him. Kaylin wondered, idly, if it were vampiric in nature.
“No,” Alsanis replied. “It did not absorb. It attempted to infect, to alter.”
Bellusdeo turned the color of old cheese, which didn’t suit the red of her eyes.
“It cannot effect Terrano in that way,” the Hallionne continued. Very quickly. “But Terrano reversed the flow of that infection; the Shadow is now infested with...him.” He turned, just as quickly, to the Lord of the West March. “No, he is not like the Shadow. Perhaps, were he the Lady, he might have some hope of becoming such a force—but it would be the work of millennia, and I do not think, in the end, he could achieve it.”
“Whowantsit?” Terrano demanded. “I hate being told what to do. I hate having to tell other people what to do. It’s boring and frustrating. They don’t understand half of what I say. Or more. There isso muchto see. So much to try. So muchto be.”
“But you are here.”
He exhaled. “They’re here. No, theywerehere. I heard Sedarias.” He grimaced. “You’d think, after a lifetime of hearing Sedarias, I’d be happier with the silence. Ask Mandoran,” he added, not bothering to look in Kaylin’s direction.
“She called you?”
“I think...she tried.”
“And you came.” The Hallionne’s voice was warm.
Terrano said nothing for a long beat. Kaylin thought he would say nothing. She was wrong.
“I can’t hear them,” he finally whispered. “I can’t hear them at all, anymore.” Something in his voice spoke of loss, of grief, of the confusion it caused; it cut Kaylin, hearing it, because she knew how he felt. And wished that she didn’t.
“No,” Alsanis said, in the softest of voices. “You left your name here; you understood that it would be a cage. And Terrano, you were not wrong. The words are a cage. But cages have other names, and there are some creatures that cannot survive outside of them. Songbirds, for example.”
Kaylin looked at Terrano’s slumped shoulders. She realized that he had been part of the cohort for almost all of his existence; that he had heard their voices, their thoughts, as if they were part of his own. Teela alone had been sundered from the Hallionne and her kin.
“He can’t be what he wants with a name,” Kaylin said, hazarding a guess.
“I do not know what he wants to be—but he cannot hear them or see what they see the way he once did. And you should understand this, Chosen.”
She nodded, watching the flying creature as its shape continued to change. It was disturbing—but it was no more disturbing than watching the effects of Shadow’s infestation. “Could you maybe stop that?” she said to Terrano.
