She didn’t even feel him leave her shoulder, and once again closed her eyes.
That is not wary.
When she closed her eyes, she caught the thread of the word; understood that this was not the whole of it, and waited until Killian began again. This time, the sound was clearer, perhaps because she had struggled to match it. But she understood what she was doing wrong and cringed.
This time, when she opened her mouth, she began to sing.
Kaylin’s singing was...not good. It had never been good. Out of kindness to her friends, she kept it to herself. Her lousy voice was so low on the list of things those friends had time to care about at the moment, she forced herself to work past the bitter self-consciousness. Now wasnotthe time for it.
Singing was better. The extension of syllables suited song more than it suited speech; it felt more natural. There was, about the joining of voices—even when one of them was hers—something harmonious. The background of roaring and thunder could almost be percussion, if the percussionist was bad. It was easier to sing a note than it was to speak a long, extended syllable.
Notes had tone. The only reason Kaylin tried to sing—when she was relatively certain it wouldn’t offend anyone—was that songs contained emotions; she could return to a song in different frames of mind and be drawn almost instantly into the immediacy of the feelings it invoked. Even if she didn’t know all the words by heart.
She could hum. She did hum. As she did, as she felt the melding of Killian’s voice and her own, she was enmeshed in a wash of emotion for which she had no words.
Starrante’s word was a song.
It was a song of welcome and grief, of loss and unexpected joy, of things broken and things mended and made whole. Her own words couldn’t have conveyed half of what she now felt, but they would have been irrelevant. She found she was crying as she sang; she lifted hands, turning them palm up, as if to catch something—or to offer it.
She shifted her voice, shifted her volume; breath came naturally in the small pauses between syllables. She let the melody carry her and surround her. She had heard words from this language spoken before; they had never sounded like this. But maybe those words had been echoes of words like this one; shadows of the story that had brought the Leontines to life as a people.
This was not the story of a people; it wasn’t as grand and extended as that. It was not an act of creation—and yet, on some level, it was. This was a song she had never heard before, and would now never forget.
She put her own emotions into the syllables as it progressed; put the weight of those feelings—lightness and joy, heaviness and rage—into her enunciation of the syllables, as people did when singing. She made of it something personal. She hadn’t created it, wasn’t certain how someone else would sing it, and at the moment didn’t care. She could hold on to this.
She could hold it, beginning to end, in her head.
When Killian’s voice fell silent, she noticed the lack of his guidance. But she no longer needed it. She didn’t think, didn’t panic, didn’t heal in any way that she understood—but she could see her own marks gently glowing as she focused on what she’d learned.
This time, on her own, she sang.
The rune on the cover of a book made of ice began to rise. It rose as the marks of the Chosen did. She reached out to touch it; it was now solid between her palms, and they’d recovered enough that she could feel its surfaces against her skin.
She wasn’t expecting the rune to pull away. She wasn’t expecting the book to fly off her lap. She opened her eyes without thought, her voice dying into stillness as she met the midnight-blue eyes of Candallar.
She moved, throwing herself out of the range of the spell that her skin told her was coming. But she moved in the direction of the book. Candallar had, she thought, kicked it or sent it flying in some purely physical way. She didn’t reach the book first; the Arkon did.
The Arkon had not moved.
Purple fire scorched the floor where Kaylin had been seated. The Arkon snapped a single Draconic word that reverberated down Kaylin’s spine. The specific meaning was lost, but the tone made clear that he intended Kaylin to get behind him.
Fire followed her steps; purple lapped at her legs. It didn’t burn; it numbed. She stumbled into the Arkon’s left arm, and he caught her before she could hit the ground. All around him, she could see a luminous, faint sphere.
So could Candallar.
“Leave them!” he shouted, although he didn’t take his eyes off the Arkon—and Kaylin. “What we want ishere!”
The Arkon exhaled a narrow plume of fire; it blossomed across Candallar’s chest without apparently burning anything. Candallar, however, shouted no further instructions to his distant companions.
No, he focused on the two people in front of him, and on the three books one of them now carried.
“You do not have permission to be here,” he said, his voice a curious blend of ice and fire. His eyes widened slightly as his words died into a silence battered by distant roars and combat. Those eyes narrowed as he spoke the words again:you do not have permission to be here. The words echoed and repeated as if Kaylin were hearing them spoken by more than one voice.
“Neither do you!” Kaylin shouted back.
This time, his eyes narrowed until they were almost closed. He lifted a hand, and in it, Kaylin could see something that looked like a rod—small, compact, not terribly useful for fighting. It seemed ceremonial.
He pointed the rod at Kaylin.“Leave.”
