Kaylin frowned. “My job? You’re the one with the gigantic, glowing sword!”
“Apparently, I’m not the only one.” She glanced at Kaylin and her eyes narrowed. Of course they would. Kaylin’s cheek was bleeding. But a bleeding cheek and a reminder of the mark was lower on the priority list than bestial, former Barrani.
Teela offered Nightshade a very controlled nod. But she said, “Lord Calarnenne.”
“An’Teela,kyutheto my brother. I am at your service.”
“Kaylin,” the Consort said.
Kaylin almost shrieked. These weren’t the Ferals of her distant childhood, no—they were larger and far more cunning. She raised her hands—both weaponless now—and turned them toward Teela.
Teela rolled her eyes. “Use your head,” she snapped in a corporal’s voice.
Kaylin’s reaction, since she was a private, was almost immediate. She snapped into position and reached for her familiar’s wing. Her familiar who wasn’t sitting on her shoulder, and whose wing therefore couldn’t be pulled up like a mask.
Behind her she heard a warm chuckle. “Yes,” Hope said, as if she’d spoken out loud. “I believe the Consort wishes to redeem them, if that is possible.”
“She wants me to do what I did to Ynpharion.”
“For Ynpharion, yes. You have said yourself that people are not all of one thing or all of another. You are aware that Ynpharion’s desire for both power and freedom was not the whole of his thought or will. But it dominated the moment in which he was either transformed or taught to transform, and it became the entirety of his thought; all else was forgotten.”
She did not want to somehow be in possession of three more names; the chorus on the inside of her mind was loud enough.
“You do not have to hold the names,” Hope said quietly.
“Then what am I supposed to do with them?”
“You are Chosen.”
She had never hated that word quite as much as she did at that moment, burdened by the expectations of the people who surrounded her. How in the hells was she supposed to touch names that were behind bristling rows of fangs? She was fond of keeping her body parts attached, and she needed her throat for trivial things like breath.
You’ve done it before, Ynpharion said with far less patience than even Teela had shown.
She closed her eyes, as she had done in the safety of her dining room at Bellusdeo’s command. She wasn’t doing what she had done while racing through the Hallionne Orbaranne; there, she had seen the landscape beneath her feet—it just hadn’t been the same as the one she could see when she didn’t have Hope’s wing plastered to her face. Closed eyes always made words easier to see. They made words easier to hear, as well—even Elantran words—but people took it badly if she closed her eyes to listen to them.
She could see the words on her arm. She could see the light cast by Hope. As her eyes became accustomed to being closed, she could see the shapes of words across the edges of two blades, one in Teela’s hands, one in Nightshade’s. These were not words in the same way the marks on her arms were—they were transparent and elongated, trapped and stretched in a form that implied weaponry, even in the dark.
They grew brighter as she turned toward them, darker when she turned away. She turned away. She could hear Severn, Ynpharion, Nightshade. They were breathing—to be expected—but she couldn’t hear the breathing of the rest of her companions. When she turned in the direction of that familiar noise, she could tell whose breath, separating them easily. She couldn’t see their names.
How had she seen Bellusdeo’s name? What had she done differently? She turned away from the people she knew, and looked toward the end of the hallway, where the three waited, holding their ground and blocking the Consort’s progress. Although they had been snarling and growling before she’d closed her eyes, she could not hear their voices now.
“My eyes are closed, right?”
“Yes,” Hope replied.
“And I’m not plugging my ears.”
“No. But you are concentrating now on an entirely different type of sound. You can hear those name-bound to you. You cannot hear the creatures you refer to as Ferals because you are not listening to the noises they actually make.”
“And I can hear you.”
“Yes. You can hear me.”
“Why don’t you do this all the time?”
“Because it is somewhat taxing. Teela carries a sword. She carries an impressive sword. She can—as you have seen today—wield it, but while you have seen it before, you have never seen it used. It is a weapon. It exacts its price. There is a time and a place for weapons, but she does not, in spite of the conflict she expects, wield it constantly. I am like her sword.
“To do ‘this,’ as you call it, you have collapsed states of existence into each other.”
