“Because I’m Chosen.”
“Because,” he agreed, “you are Chosen. When the Lady carries names to the newborn, does she take and keep the knowledge of those names? Do those names have power when they are not wed to the living, as they were intended to be?”
“They have to have some power, or the newborn wouldn’t wake.”
Hope made a frustrated noise that almost sounded Leontine.
The Lady wishes to know what you are attempting to do.
Tell her I’m trying to figure out how not to be saddled with more people like you, Kaylin snapped.
Noted, he responded, his interior voice stiff and almost neutral.
I can carry the names, she thought.But how can I carry them without separating them?She hadn’t removed Ynpharion’s name from his body; she had touched it, grabbed it, taken the knowledge of it. She had given in to her immediate desire—survival, which was perfectly reasonable—but she hadn’t literally removed the name.
She’d taken the name of a bisected Feral before it was devoured. Butthatname hadn’t come with syllables that could be spoken, could be pronounced. She had caught it, and slapped it almost literally on the closest available patch of skin, where it had stuck. And she had used it, later, to stabilize Gilbert’s physical form in her own reality. It had been a type of healing.
The name hadn’t been returned to the Lake. Maybe it would one day, if Gilbert died. She didn’t know. But she’d felt none of the Consort’s rage or sorrow at its loss. If the names had been created to breathe life into still, sleeping bodies, it had done a variant of its job.
The carrying of names that were still in use seemed impossible—the two goals were mutually exclusive. She couldn’t carry something that was demonstrably still being used. Hope knew this. She was certain he knew it. Which meant he either assumed she was capable of things that couldn’t be done, or she wasn’t looking at this the right way.
“Everything,” Hope said softly, “is metaphor. What you see now is a metaphor. It is something you’ve built to allow you to navigate byways that were never meant for your kind. Remember that.”
She understood what he meant by metaphor, but it was difficult. Kaylin wasn’t an Imperial mage. She wasn’t an Arcanist. She was a ground Hawk. A Hawk. Her job wasn’t to make metaphors of things. It was to assess evidence, examine crime sites, prevent new crimes from happening if at all possible. To do that, she had to be firmly grounded in reality; she had to become aware of how her own life led to inevitable prejudices; she had to question some of her own experiences. But those experiences, conversely, made a lot of her job easier.
Marcus had drilled pragmatism into her head. He’d made certain she understood what her job was, what her responsibilities were; he’d made clear that he expected her to live up to both—but also made clear that he thought shecould. She’d needed that, and clung to it.
She was accustomed, however, to trusting what she’d seen, heard, touched. She’d built that confidence over seven years, sometimes rockily. This was going against every lesson she’d learned in that time.
No, she thought, straightening her shoulders. Noteverylesson. She had a job to do here. She had a responsibility. It wasn’t the job she’d been trained to do—but that didn’t matter. If Severn and Teela faced these Ferals in this narrow space, they weren’t going to escape unscathed. Not even Teela. Nightshade could back them up—but only if one of them fell, or fell back. It wasn’t like the forest. The walls couldn’t be strategically placed or moved around.
She could make the difference.
But...no pressure. She grimaced, straightening her shoulders again. She didn’t know what she could do. She had been afraid, for years, of what the marks might signify. Children had died because of these marks—murdered in some sacrificial, sympathetic magic that would allow someone else to define their shape, altering what had been placed there by—by someone or something.
She understood that that fear wasn’t useful. The guilt wasn’t reasonable. But fear and guilt weren’t rational responses; what she made of them was. Or could be.
She walked toward the names of the Ferals. As she did, the bodies of creatures that were, or had been, Barrani became clearer, more well-defined. The eyes that looked ahead—the Barrani eyes—began to waver. They hadn’t seen her before. They couldn’t see her easily now. But they could sense her presence, as if she were the faintest of starlight that could only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes.
Kaylin approached the left-most Feral. As she did, Hope followed, and with him, the halo of light his wings shed. She watched the ground beneath the Ferals’ feet, where the deep well of Shadow lay. Illumination did not gentle it; it brought out the hidden swirls of chaotic, moving color that implied life. But the shadows cast by the bulk of the Ferals themselves did change in the light; they became longer, but more defined.
They were human shaped. No, she thought, Barrani shaped. Some knot of tension in her neck and shoulders dissolved. She didn’t ask Ynpharion if her physical body was moving. It wasn’t. She could feel her hands, clenched in too-tight fists by her sides, could feel her legs, slightly bent at the knees. But she could also feel her hands as she lifted her left arm. Barrani eyes in bestial faces flickered. She heard distant growls. No; shefeltthem. The Ferals were silent.
She reached for the name and realized she couldn’t actuallyseeher own arm or her hand. She could feel them; she could see the name; she could see the Ferals and the Shadow and the light. She cast no shadow herself. Her eyes were closed, and she was afraid to open them, afraid to be in the real world having achieved nothing. Metaphors, she decided, werehard.
Hope had said she could open her eyes here. But the things she could see with her eyes closed—the words, for instance—she had always been able to see with her eyes closed. She wasn’t seeing them with her actual eyes. Later, she thought. Later, when she was in the safety of her own home, surrounded by people who were not trying to kill her, she would try opening her eyes.
She reached for the name again, focusing only on the sigil. As she did, it grew larger.I’m approaching it, she thought.It’s not changing size.The size, however, was necessary to see what she’d missed at a reasonable distance; as the word grew larger, cracks appeared across the bold, solid lines. Colors bled into the light, changing it. Darkening it.
She could see the source of that darkness. It was a slender thread of Shadow, narrower than infant’s hair. No, she thought, not a single thread; there were more—but all were very fine. She could break them just by passing a hand through them. And she did. Her left hand. The hand which was sometimes gloved in a lace made of Shadow.
She held the sigil in the palm of her right hand; she broke the small filaments with her left. The small filaments, however, reached up from the Feral’s body, like rising fur, to replace what she’d broken. The third time she tried, she cursed; she could feel Leontine rumbling in a distant throat not mean for Leontine.
Carry the name, he’d said.
Carry the name without taking it. Carry the name without hearing the truth of its syllables. She’d done that, once. She done it for the High Lord; she’d done it for herself. But she’d taken the name from a metaphorical desk; she’d dipped her hand into a distant lake without realizing what she was doing. If she carried the name, wouldn’t she effectively be killing the person it currently inhabited?
“Yes, Chosen,” Hope said. “But they will return, in the end. They will be born as Barrani.”
