“He can tell the difference!”
“Not for me.” Terrano’s smile was lopsided, but Kaylin couldn’t see a lot of it; there appeared to be a lack of solid ground anywhere he tried to set her down. “If you’re going to do something, give me some warning.” He grunted. “Andnowwould be a pretty good time to start.”
Purple fire was not the same as the regular variety; it wasn’t the same as imitation draconic fire, either. She felt the heat of that in an entirely different way. She had a sword, and the sword itself seemed immune to both varieties of fire.
She wished, for just a second, that she had aname. Not even a True Name, just...something to call the Adversary, some way of identifying it as asomeone. Was he an enemy? Yes. But that wasn’tallhe was. And if he hadn’t lied—and she felt, on some visceral level, that he hadn’t—he didn’t have a choice about his enmity, either. He had even less of a choice than she herself had had in the fief of Barren, in the darkest time of her life.
Choice.
Survival.
Lifting her voice, she said, “Offer me a choice!”
And everything in the air—purple fire, orange fire, lack of solid ground—stilled instantly, as if frozen.
“You are here. You have already made your choice.”
She shook her head. “You know that’s not true. I chose to be here—but that wasn’t a choice offered mebyyou. It was the Tower’s choice, in its entirety. I am here. You are here. Offer me a choice.”
Terrano’s arms loosened, but he didn’t remove them, even if Kaylin’s feet were once again on firm “ground.” It could change in a moment, in less than a moment. She glanced at him, and he said, “Teela would kill me if anything happened to you and I somehow survived it. If she didn’t, I think Mandoran would. That was smart, by the way.”
He could have done her the favor of not sounding so surprised.
Something about the miasma tightened, thickened; something about the air chilled, although frozen fire seemed to radiate heat, regardless. She waited, sword in hand, armor glowing, skin orange-red, and words—so many words—floating up around her, as if allowed movement in the stillness that had otherwise descended.
She knew where they should be, and knew that they would never return to the Lake while they remained trapped here. They would remain trapped here until the Adversary himself was no longer trapped or bound. He had almost escaped, once. He might escape today. It was her job and her duty to stop him.
It was, in theory, her job and her duty to stop petty criminals, as well—street beggars, pickpockets, petty thieves. And sometimes she did that job—but she hated it. It made her feel like a hypocrite. She’d done things similar—done worse—to survive. She hadn’t killed hundreds or thousands, which should have made a difference, but didn’t.
If she’d been the Adversary, she wouldn’t have had the choice.
Was choice freedom?
It hadn’t felt like freedom at the age of five. Or ten. Or thirteen. All of the choices she’d seen were between a bad fate and a terrible one. Between her ability to eat and someone else’s. Even now, choice felt like freedom only because she was certain she could live with the consequences.
The words that he had captured, the remnants of the people to whom he’d offered his choice, such as it was, swirled around him in greater and greater number. Maybe that’s all choice was, in the end. There weren’t alwaysrightchoices. Just wrong and less wrong.
Was this, then, the choice he offered? Kill, and return the names to the Lake? Kill, and give him the only freedom he had known since his birth—ifbirthwas even the right word? Or leave him here, to offer the same choice and the same death to those who would come after?
The Tower was a Test of Name. It had to be. But it hadn’t always tested like this. Regardless, if it was the choice he offered her now—She drew a breath. No. It was the choice she could see, had seen; it wasn’t theonlychoice. Kaylin understood, then, why the Tower had sent her. Why Hope and Spike both felt she had to be here.
The names were, somehow, speaking. To her. She wondered if the Adversary had ever heard them at all; if they were in some fashion both captive and companion in his long imprisonment. This wasn’t where they belonged. Here, they could not grant life to the newborn. They could make no new stories, raise no new voices, walk no new paths.
And yet, even thinking that, she felt this wasn’t entirely true. They were words. They told, in some fashion, stories. True stories, small stories, each individual rune—and there were hundreds—a small, intense containment of the life, of thelives, that they had made possible. The lives they would make possible, should they return to the Lake, wouldn’t be the same lives. She didn’t understand how they could be both True Words and yet become the start of such entirely separate existences.
And she understood, as she lifted her arms—causing Terrano to curse and shift his hold—where these words must go before they returned to the Lake. Because words were stories. They told the beginning, the long middle, the end.
The True Names that fluttered like desperate moths around the figure of the Adversary paused, stilled and then moved toward Kaylin’s upraised arms. They moved around her, pressing as close to her as skin allowed; her own marks seemed to be a barrier or a shield that they could not yet penetrate. They didn’t come to rest on her exposed skin—but the fire might have made that hard. It didn’t burn the marks of the Chosen.
When she spoke next, she spoke in High Barrani. “You who offer choice at its darkest, its harshest, you who offer dreams that become nightmares, from a cage you did not build and did not choose—choose now.”
“Icannotchoose—”
“No,” she told him, certain, her arms glowing so brightly she could barely look at them. “Youcan. I am Chosen.” Her voice dropped. “And I will tell your story, here. I will tell it now, with the words I was given.”
Silence. It was the silence, not of held breath, but of breath drawn slowly.
He spoke. He spoke, and she couldn’t understand a word he said, not with her ears, not the way she understood Barrani or Leontine, Aerian or Elantran. But she understood it, anyway. She understood it the way she understood the wordless tears of her fellow Hawks at the funeral of their fallen. She understood it the way she understood the screams of a woman soon to become a mother. She understood it the way she understood shared laughter.
