“Do you know what you intend to do?”
“No, of course not. This is a thing we call seat-of-the-pants, Hope. Now, hush.” She concentrated on Nightshade. She formed an image of him in her mind, which was surprisingly difficult; there were too many. She had no idea what he was wearing now, and no idea of what his surroundings were; the image that came most easily to mind was the audience chamber in Castle Nightshade, and that was definitely the wrong locale. She could seeMeliannos, though. It wasn’t a simple long sword; it was too large, too visually unwieldy, for that.
His eyes were blue. His hair was Barrani black. His skin was pale and, unlike Kaylin’s, unmarked, unblemished. He was death. He was death for anyone who lived in the fiefs who dared to treat him without appropriate respect. His was the shadow that Castle Nightshade cast.No, she thought. But she couldn’t shake the image, the visceral acknowledgment of all her childhood fears.
This was not all that Nightshade was, but it was truth. Nightshade—like any living, thinking person—was capable of more than one truth.
Her cheek grew warmer, and the skin beneath the flower symbol began to ache. It was like, and unlike, the pain magic caused the rest of her skin. Or maybe it was exactly the same thing: the mark itself a more mundane magic than the rest of the marks on her skin caused a more extreme reaction when it was activated.
She was aware of the exact moment when her skin began to blister from the physical heat of the mark; she had no mirror but she was certain the flower was glowing. The light caused heat. The heat caused injury. Annarion was going to see it and lose all his hair—at best. Maybe she should have considered that before making the attempt.
Thinking of Annarion, she reformulated the image she had built, detail by detail, in her mind’s eye. Nightshade entering the foyer ofherhome. Nightshade speaking with Helen, whose eyes had flickered into obsidian. Nightshade speaking with Annarion, Annarion’s stiffness barely masking pain and the anger that came from it.
Annarion, his brother. Annarion, the family member for whom he had become outcaste because he would not surrender his search. She could not see Nightshade as Annarion did; she had no memories of the man Annarion thought was buried beneath the rubble of experience and time. Had he been like Teela? No. Like Sedarias? Probably more likely.
But...no. No. Sedarias loved the cohort, even iflovewas not a word she would condescend to use, because it implied weakness. She had no idea what a young, idealistic Nightshade might look like; no idea what he might sound like. In Kaylin’s mind, the wordidealismwas just a condescending way to saystupid. She’d heard it a lot.
What she knew, what she was certain of, was that Nightshade had loved his brother. And that her Nightshade, the man who could kill someone for failing to bend head quickly enough, retained that love, that affection. It hurt him. She couldn’t fail to notice the pain—no one who lived in the house could. When the two clashed with words, their voices carried everywhere; it was impossible, even with Helen’s intervention, not to hear some of the argument.
Not even Nightshade was proof against the pain love caused.
No, she thought, it wasn’t the love that caused pain. It was the expectations. The hopes and dreams that surrounded it. The breaking of those dreams.
Kaylin understood the allure of dreams: they were hope. But she understood how those hopes broke in the face of reality. She’d experienced it herself, because she’d truly, viscerally, believed that crossing the bridge, that standing on the other side of the Ablayne, would free her. She would walk into a magical world where people didn’t starve and weren’t so constantly hungry and desperate they would eat anything that didn’t move—even if they had to make sure it didn’t move first.
And she’d learned.
The dreams weren’t real, because on either side of the Ablayne, the streets were occupied bypeople. A perfect world didn’t exist because perfect people didn’t exist. There were crimes here—some of them horrific. There was poverty; the warrens were practically the fiefs in miniature, but without the advantage of an obvious fieflord, an easily found source of power.
Nightshade wasn’t a nightmare; he was a person. Annarion wasn’t the beloved child of Nightshade’s memories. He was a person. Kaylin had seldom seen Nightshade as a person before. Maybe she hadn’t looked. Maybe she hadn’twantedto look. Knowing too much was a straight passage to the death that guaranteed silence.
But even if he had marked her for his own purposes—and of course he had—not all of those purposes were malignant. He thought he could use her. He thought he could use the power of the Chosen to somehow free his brother. And shehad.
But that led to this, in the end. Nightshade didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to be understood. He didn’t want to be vulnerable. Kaylin understood this, as well. It was what passed for survival, in the fiefs.
It wouldn’t pass muster here.
She pulled her hand from her cheek, grimaced at the trace of blood on her fingertips. She could heal this with the only power of the Chosen she could voluntarily and deliberately use. But before she started, she stopped. Now was not the right time. She reached for Nightshade, literally lifting her hands and opening the one that didn’t contain a dagger, turning her palm to the ceiling and to the light.
In the distance, casting a very short shadow that implied he was standing directly beneath the source of that light, she could see Nightshade.
“Where is he?” she asked of Hope.
“Does it matter? You have found him. Call him now.”
Nightshade.Nothing in his stillness implied that he could hear her.
“I can make myself heard,” Hope told her. On the surface, the words were an offer, but beneath the surface, they were a warning. Kaylin was not one of nature’s optimists. She shook her head.
“Can Spike see him?”
Spike clicked.
“Can youreachhim?”
He clicked again, but whirred a bit, as well.
“He is uncertain that that will produce the results you desire.”
