Kaylin put the bleeding hand flat against the stone, and pushed.
23
A cut to the palm or the arm was nowhere near the worst of the injuries she’d sustained in the line of duty, but the only advantage her assailants got from those injuries was the hope that they might slow her down. This was different and she knew it.
Her blood seeped instantly into the stone, as if the stone itself were entirely illusory. It crawled—there was no other word for it that wasn’t more disturbing—toward the web that spread from the tip of the sword, and met up with its strands, as if it were a small stream joining a large river. There was almost no visible difference between the two; only by tracing the lines back to their respective sources could Kaylin differentiate.
She’d hoped that somehow she would have control over her own blood, her own part of that moving web; she didn’t. She started to lift her hand, but her familiar bit her ear again, harder this time.
Past her left shoulder, purple fire blossomed. It splashed across an invisible barrier. The Barrani woman shouted a warning, then; she was angry. Or afraid. With the Barrani, it was often hard to separate the two. It took Kaylin a moment, vision split, to understand what was happening: the woman was screaming at the man to stop using the purple fire.
“I’m fighting aDragon!” he shouted back, dodging the very unpurple draconic breath. Which is more or less what Kaylin would have said had she been the person in midair without one of the three Dragon slaying swords to hand. But as the ground shuddered beneath her knees, almost knocking her over, the woman’s concerns made more sense.
“She’s afraid his actions will engage the interior protections,” Terrano remarked. Both of his hands were in the air, palms facing out, as if he were intent on surrender.
“That barrier—that was you?”
“You’re not a Dragon; the fire will kill you if you don’t move out of its way. We should have help soon. And Sedarias will be really, really angry if you die here.”
“Why?”
“Because then she’ll have to deal with Mandoran and Annarion.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault!”
“You really haven’t spent much time talking with Sedarias.”
Purple fire gave way to purple rain. Terrano cursed and changed his position.
“Do you recognize them?” she asked.
“I’m a little bit busy now. Ask me later.” He grimaced as some of that rain passed just to his left, and seared an ugly line through his tunic. Kaylin remembered that Terrano’s current clothing was now much closer to Dragon armor than anyone else’s. It was like another skin.
Bellusdeo took to the air. Although she was a much larger target, she wasn’t much slower in full Dragon form than the Barrani Hawks; she made the most of her agility.
The Barrani woman moved as if the sword were a tether. But Bellusdeo’s breath was a ranged weapon, and Terrano was right: something was happening within this room.
“Is Alsanis going to know that Bellusdeo isn’t a danger?”
“You’re watching her and you’re telling me she isn’t dangerous?”
“I mean it, Terrano.”
“Yes. He’ll know. Because Bellusdeo is a guest he’s already accepted, and she’s fighting to protect herself from intruders. Unless everything collapses here, he will not harm her.” The last words were spoken in much slower, less frenetic Barrani. “Now stop talking anddosomething.”
Kaylin opened her mouth to tell him that she’d already done what she could, but managed to snap her jaws shut before the words escaped. Terrano, not an Arcanist, could provide magical protection; Bellusdeo could provide the necessary attack. What Kaylin was doing—what she was supposed to do—could be done by neither. She didn’t have to be a Dragon or an Immortal to be useful.
And Terrano was right. Useful had a short lifetime.
She lifted her hand to check the cut and the flow of blood while the familiar chittered like a bird trying to imitate an insect. The web came with it. She froze, staring at the strings that had been unmoored from beneath the surface of stone.
And she remembered the glove of shadow lace that had covered her hand during the defense of Moran’s Aerie, hundreds of miles away. She remembered how it had come into existence: she had been attempting to prevent Mandoran from being possessed by Shadows that were worming their way into his body.
The familiar crooned.
She had prevented that possession by wrapping those strands around her hand, and in the end, those strands—inert—had remained. They reminded her, in some fashion, of the marks—but they had faded into invisibility. Bellusdeo, sensitive to all things Shadow, could not detect them, and everyone had assumed that they were gone. Even Kaylin.
Kaylin spent entirely too much time in wishful thinking.
