Instead of laying her palm back against the rumbling ground, she raised it, and the strands of webbing that had looked so much like blood vessels gone bad elongated; moving her hand, she began to wrap those strands around her palm. The odd thing was, it didn’t hurt. She felt almost nothing at the movement. Although she could see the strands as she gathered them, she couldn’t feel them at all.
Nor did the woman holding the sword notice, at first.
The motion of the ground beneath Kaylin’s knees had passed from tremors to waves—kneeling on it was like standing on the surface of moving water. But worse. The Barrani woman tried to drive the sword farther into the ground, and at first, it seemed she was successful. But Kaylin could see the way the ground itself moved around the swordpoint, as if avoiding it; what was no longer stone, although it still appeared that way, was creating a sword-shape pit, or sheath, for the weapon itself.
Three things happened at once.
* * *
Someone shouted her name—the words came at what felt like a great remove. The voice was familiar, but to hear it any more clearly, Kaylin would have had to tell Bellusdeo to shut up, which was never going to happen.
The Barrani woman realized that the sword was no longer penetrating the surface of the Hallionne’s core.
And the cohort suddenly gained solidity. Kaylin noted the latter only because she could see them, now; they were standing much closer to the Barrani woman and her sword than they had been. The air in the room, which was thick and hazy, had all but rendered them invisible, at least to Kaylin’s eyes; the color they seemed to be gaining as the seconds passed made them all appear more real, more present.
They wore no obvious armor, but three carried weapons—weapons that gained in color and substance as their bearers did.
The stranger looked up, instantly aware of them, although her shoulders were still bent in the attempt to either withdraw the sword or push it through the impromptu casing. She shouted for her partner, but her partner—while surprisingly not dead yet—had a Dragon to worry about, and the Dragon wasn’t playing. Much.
Kaylin continued to rotate her hand, to wind thread by thread of an ugly, terrifying web around it. She understood that at base it was Shadow, that Shadow was transformative, that it was poison—but she also understood that what she was doing was having some positive effect. And if she couldn’t imagine what the Barrani would do with the power of a Hallionne, she was pretty damn sure she—and the laws she served with her life—wouldn’t like it.
Allaron, the easiest one to spot because he was abnormally tall for a Barrani of any gender, stepped neatly in front of Sedarias, as if Sedarias were in need of protection. Sedarias said something—barely audible but sharp as a knife—and he stepped to the side to let her pass, falling in beside her as if they were partners of long-standing. When Sedarias lifted an open hand in the region of Allaron’s chest, Kaylin frowned.
She couldn’t see what Allaron’s response was until he moved; hehandedSedarias his sword. It was a sword that had, to Kaylin’s eye, been scaled for his personal use; it looked far too large for Sedarias, unless she meant to wield it in two hands.
She didn’t. If she dressed the part of a lady of the court, she was nonetheless Barrani; arms that looked deceptively slender were perfectly capable of bearing that sword as if it were a long knife. The Barrani Hawks didn’t carry swords; none of the Hawks did. Clearly the cohort had been trained to their use. And of course they had. The entire purpose of their visit to the green had been to somehow transform them into super soldiers for use in the Draco-Barrani wars.
The Barrani woman let go of the sword she’d been so keen on protecting; had she not, she would have lost her head; Sedarias didn’t open with either discussion or negotiation. Or words. Kaylin had seen Barrani attempt to kill each other, and had always been surprised by the amount oftalkthat could happen before they got down to business. Sedarias didn’t bother, and Kaylin both admired this and found it disturbing.
The cohort ringed the two; although other blades existed, no other blade was lifted, by which Kaylin understood that this was somehow personal; Sedarias recognized the woman, which made her very old, in Barrani terms. Well, as old as Teela, at any rate.
Given that the woman’s sword was still buried in stone, this seemed unfair—but fairness of a certain kind had never been the Barrani way. And in truth, Kaylin’s experience of life in the fiefs stopped her from being outraged. When faced with probable death herself, she’d never been one to stand on honor, either.
She shifted her opinion, however, when the woman spoke a lightning crack of a word. Purple fire rose beneath Sedarias, lapping at the material of her skirts, and probably at the feet beneath them. Sedarias leapt instantly out of the circle in which they burned, but some of the fire clung to her clothing. Someone—Eddorian?—shouted a warning; there was no way to know if Sedarias heard it.
And, come to think, it was unlikely that the warning had been shoutedtoSedarias, which meant the incoming danger was aimed at someone whose True Name Eddorian didn’t know.
She jumped up, her hand cocooned with strands of darkness, to see Terrano. Beneath his feet, as Sedarias’s, purple fire blossomed. He lowered one hand, and kept one raised as rain of the same color fell. He was pale, his clothing was singed, and the fire seemed to struggle to entrap him, to cling to him. “Don’t worry about me,” he told her, although his gaze was drawn to the fire at his feet. It was a larger circle than the one that had opened at Sedarias’s feet, and the color was subtly different.
As it spread, Kaylin realized why it was wider: it was also meant to encompass her.
Whatever she was doing was obviously having some effect—and if the Barrani woman considered it dangerous, it was positive, at least for Alsanis. Kaylin started to wind faster, and finally spared a frigid glare at her familiar.
Her familiar sighed. Loudly. He smacked her face with his extended wing, as if to drive a point home: he couldn’t leave her shoulder to do anything else if shewantedto be able to do what she was doing, because she couldn’tseethe threads without his intervention. “It doesn’t matter if I can see them or not,” she snapped. “I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Terrano said, through clenched teeth, “You are anextremelyunintelligent person. Do you honestly think that all he’s doing is letting yousee?”
Since the answer was more or lessyes, Kaylin failed to give it. But she didn’t glare at her familiar again, didn’t demand to know why he wasn’t helping Terrano shield them, and didn’t send him buzzing off after the golden Dragon whose injury would probably end her career.
Bellusdeo was roaring between breaths, which meant she was still alive. She was conversant with magic and at least rudimentary magical protections, and she fought like the warrior queen she had once been, before the Shadows had finally devoured her world. If there was anyone deserving of worry here, it wasnotthe Dragon.
She heard someone call her name again, and this time, her hand almost cramping because she hadn’t stopped once, she recognized the voice. At any other time, she would have frozen; now, she workedfaster, which shouldn’t have been possible.
It was theConsort. It was the Consort’s voice.
The thought that the Consort washere, that she was in the West March, or worse, in the embattled Hallionne, was almost terrifying. This was not the place for the only woman who could bring life to an entire race. And the cohort were here. Terrano was here.
Seething with fear and frustration, Kaylin turned to the familiar, but as she opened her mouth, the landscape suddenly changed. As if it had been shattered, the whole of the visual look of this enormous, open space broke, shards falling away to reveal something entirely different. The stones beneath her feet gave way, in an instant, to more earth-like dirt, and the giant, bladed words disappeared, to be replaced at random intervals by the trunks of looming trees. Above her head was sunlight, and beneath her feet, the greens and browns of the forests in the West March.
