Stopped. “Let me walk that back,” she finally said as a different understanding crashed into the first. Communication was often like this, though: stumbling, tripping, getting up again. Moving, however clumsily, forward.
She didn’t need totellthe Tower a story. He’d heard all the stories. He was aware of them. He could hear the Consort—could hear her, especially now, as she sang. Her song resonated in corners Kaylin’s voice couldn’t reach. She could see the words almost vibrate with the force of that song, with the strength of it; could see the way the power poured into the singing was like water poured into parched earth.
Kaylin couldn’t sing. She couldn’t voice whatever it was the Tower needed to hear. But that’s not what the Tower needed from her right now. What it needed was only that she listen. What it needed was to be heard.
To be heard.
She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t ask for its life story. She didn’t ask for anything now; she simply waited to listen to whatever it was the Tower wanted to say. What it wanted to be heard. Shecouldhear now. In this space, she could listen and the Tower could be certain that its words would reach her.
She didn’t know what Towers needed to say. She didn’t know how they felt isolation; it seemed strange, even given her experience to date, that buildings could feel isolated. But most of the buildings she was familiar with weren’t actually alive.
She wondered, briefly, if the Tower, like Alsanis, had come to feel protective of the very thing it had caged. To Alsanis, the cohort had become almost like family. He cared for them. She was certain he missed them. Certain that some of them missed Alsanis, although they had spent centuries searching for an exit, some way to escape him.
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
It also wasn’t accurate. The words at the heart of the Tower, vibrating with the rhythm, the sound, of the Consort’s song, began to move. They didn’t immediately leap up or away; they rotated in place, shifting slightly up or down until Kaylin stood at the heart, the center, of their formation.
She lifted her arms—she had to, because one hand was still attached to part of one word—and as she did, the word she was touching grew brighter. Bright enough that she needed to squint to even look at it, which, sadly, was impossible. Her vision here was a metaphor; it wasn’t physical. Her own marks were pulsing slightly; she could look at them, and did.
She was listening. The Tower was speaking. The words it spoke weren’t words she knew or understood—but as always, with True Words, they felt familiar, as if she could understand them if she worked a bit harder, listened a bit more intently. She tried. She had spoken True Words before, but never without help; she had simply repeated—with effort—what she’d heard spoken into her ear by people who had mastered the art of speaking at least parts of this lost tongue, this ancient language.
Even then, it had been a struggle; the syllables had slid off her tongue. She’d lost the verbal shape of the word a dozen times. It wasn’t like speaking Elantran. It would never be like speaking Elantran. And right now, it wasn’t her job to speak; she had to listen. She had to hear.
No, she could hear. She was listening. But she couldn’t understand any of it. She was frustrated; the Tower could speak to Kaylin. It had been speaking to Kaylin the moment she touched the word. Whatever it needed her to hear, it could make clear a different way. She almost asked.
She didn’t. Because it occurred to her, vibrating as she was with the Consort’s song and the movement of the Tower’s words, the syllables of which continued, that it couldn’t. Whatever needed to be said, it had these words, True Words, with which to say it. She wondered—not for the first time—if the words of the Chosen had been a mistake on the part of the Ancients. There were vessels thatcouldunderstand this language, and if they didn’t, they had centuries—or forever—in which to learn. Centuries in which to experiment with, to understand the mechanics of, the marks themselves.
The intelligence with which to learn.
Kaylin hated to be treated as if she were stupid. Sheexpectedit, but hated it, regardless. And yet, in the heart of the Tower, she accepted that she was stupid.
“No,” Hope said quietly. “You are ignorant. They are not the same.”
They were, to Kaylin.
“You learned to speak Barrani. You learned to read it, to write it. You were not stupid; you were ignorant. You are not ignorant of that now.”
“It’s not the same thing. Anyone can learn to speak Barrani!”
“Ah. I will say this, and only this—” She doubted that very much, given past experience. “You believe that anythingyoucan learn,anyonecan learn, because you feel, on some level, that you are stupid or incompetent. If you can do it, anyone can do it. But...you resent people who therefore can’t do what you can do, because you do not believe it has value.”
“I do!”
“No, Kaylin, you don’t. How valuable can it be, if anyone can do it? You could be replaced by anyone. And your fear, of course, is that you will. If you can’t make yourself seem worthy or special, there’s no reason that you’ll be needed. By anyone.”
She started to argue. Shewantedto argue. Argument here was impossible. Hope was right. All of her fears were exposed here, but she’d only made it this far because she’d exposed—and accepted—everything. The ugly bits. The things she was ashamed of. No one but Kaylin was here to judge them, because the Tower wouldn’t.
The Tower wouldn’t. What it needed to know—even the first time—was what she could do. What she was willing to do. Hating things, fearing things, were part of who she’d always been. It was what she did with them—or didn’t do with them—that defined her, in the Tower’s eyes.
Maybe in everyone else’s eyes, as well.
She bit her lip; she tasted blood. She didn’t feel pain. Instead, she concentrated on the sound of syllables, rolling around her, above, beneath and through. She didn’t attempt to speak the words. She attempted to understand them—because words had meanings.
She wasn’t prepared for the results, because on some level she could achieve understanding. She couldn’t—in Elantran, or any tongue she knew—convey to anyone else what the words meant to her. She couldn’t convey it toherself, not clearly, not in a way she could ever share with anyone else.
But she thought, for a moment, that she did understand what the Tower was telling her. It was a blend of things—of emotions, sheared for the moment of context. It was the flickering impression that life might give had she lived it constantly blinking. It was like seeing something so strange, so large, so outside of her prior experience, that she had no way to describe it. The words she could choose might convey her emotions, but they couldn’t convey the vision. They couldn’t make clear what had caused those emotions in the first place.
But...these were words.
