Even shared silences had meaning and emotion, robbed of words.
Some of the names that surrounded her rose. And some of the marks of the Chosen joined them. The armor made for her by the Tower began to fray and dissolve, but the sword remained. She spoke, or rather, the words spoke through her; she understood what she wanted, in that moment, for this creature—mass murderer and Shadow, prisoner and slave.
The names moved like a flock of birds in a distinct formation above her head. Her arms ached, and her skin burned—but it wasn’t because the fire was unleashed; the pain was caused by the intensity of the marks of the Chosen themselves. As if they all wanted to rise, to leap out, tofinishthis story, this telling. She shouldn’t have been able to discern which of the words were the marks of the Chosen, and which were the captive names, but she could. And it didn’t matter.
She knew, as she watched the words begin to shift their formation, that there were only choices made of—built on—the actions of the past; of the long-ago past and the imperfect creators who had given the Adversary what passed for life to Shadow; of his part in the war that had trapped him here; of the long test, the long offering of choices—bad and worse—and the countless deaths that had come as a result of that. No ending she could offer him could alter the past.
But no. The ending she told here was an ending that existed because of the threads of a past she would never fully understand; they were what she had to work with, even with the words she’d been given.
The part of her that lived for the Hawks wanted some semblance of justice. This creature had been responsible for hundreds—thousands—of deaths. His death wouldn’t change his crimes, but it was what he deserved.
She believed that. It was true.
But everything he’d said caused her to hesitate. She’d heard the justifications of criminals for most of her working life—and she’d used those justifications herself, in a past she still hated to think about on the bad days. In that past she had killed. In that past she had given information to the fieflord of Barren, and he’d killed based on it. She had hunted those who were weaker or stupider because she’d been terrified of death.
Until it had gotten too hard, the burden of guilt and self-loathing too heavy to carry.
She had come to the Halls of Law to die.
If there was justice in the world, if justice were the only thing that mattered, shewould havedied there. She had tried—and failed—to end her life. It had never occurred to her that the Hawklord wouldn’t do what she was too much of a coward to do for herself: end that life. Put her out of misery. Because if she was dead, the pain would stop.
She had done nothing to deserve the chance the Hawklord had given her. Nothing to deserve the foundations he laid so that one shaky teen could stand on them, could find her footing. He wasn’t her father—she’d never had one—but he was as close as she could come: distant, wise, worthy of both respect and obedience.
It was an ending that she hadn’t foreseen. An ending that she didn’t intend. In no universe, no daydream left her, had she imagined that she wouldbecomea Hawk. Yes, he’d offered her a choice—but he’d offered her a choice she could never have conceived of on the day she’d finally wound up her ragged courage, her resentment, her disgust with herself, and gone to the city to die.
She looked into the heart of dense mist—understood, by the movement of flying words, that this was the heart of the Adversary. She felt a hand touch her shoulder and nodded, although she didn’t look away. Terrano.
“Chosen,” the Adversary whispered. He stilled, or the miasma did. “Hurry.”
Lifting the sword that was left in her hands, she took the steps—across solid ground—to reach the heart of the Adversary. She readied the weapon, raising it slowly—her weapons master would have bitten her head off at both the approach and the way she left herself wide open—and brought it down.
The blade cut the mist, splitting it in two. There was no resistance to the golden edge; she might have been waving the sword—badly—in plain air, as if practicing a strike. It didn’t matter. She had created a wound in the miasma, one her eyes couldn’t detect but her instincts told her was there. As if to shore up that instinctive belief, the words dived down—and in.
She didn’t even lower the blade. It vanished the moment its edge struck the cloud that was the Adversary’s potential form—all of his potential forms.
Terrano’s arms were once again around her midriff. She stiffened, but didn’t tell him to let go. Her entire body tingled and ached; she could hear Terrano’s soft cursing as if his mouth was practically inside her ear.
The words vanished, absorbed, their light once again shuttered. As they dimmed, she heard them: they were louder by far than any spoken True Word had ever been, as if given voice for the first time.
Terrano grunted and cursed. She was almost proud of him: he used Elantran words. He began to haul her backward. “We need to get out of here, you idiot!” She’d have to teach him Leontine sometime. She thought, given his ability to shift form, he could really use it.
“Kaylin!”
That wasn’t Terrano’s voice. It was...Mandoran? As the echoes of the last of the True Words died away, some hearing returned. Terrano’s voice became much, much louder, the insistence and panic it contained finally reaching the rest of her mind.
She blinked, looked up and then looked down—to where the floor once again wasn’t. Up didn’t have better news to offer, though—because parts of the ceiling were collapsing in the regular way.
She would have leaped out of the way, but without ground, nothing would give her the momentum necessary to carry her to safety.
“She’s heavy, right?” Mandoran said. “We should have let Allaron come.”
“He’s busy,” Terrano snapped. “Do something useful for once!”
Mandoran obliged, coming to Kaylin’s right as Terrano readjusted his grip and moved to the left. She didn’t ask them what they were walking on, in part because she probably wouldn’t understand the answer.
“You need to learn how to move,” Terrano added, groaning. Kaylin could even see why. There was no bridge. There was a large, expansive gap of nothing, with colored bits kind of flitting back and forth as if they were alive. She couldn’t see what lay beyond it; she hoped it was what remained of the cavern—if anything did. “You’ve done it before—you’ve phased into slightly different space. You just need to find a space that has floor.”
“You’re not flying?”
