Michelle Sagara - Cast in Sorrow

The dragon descended.

It was a good damn thing the gap in the shattered wall was so large; descent didn’t cause him to lose any of his impressive size. She thought his eyes were the size of her fists, and deliberately avoided looking at his jaws or the curve of claws that seemed to pass through the ground, rather than sinking into it.

But she reached out and touched the space between what would have been dragon nostrils, which would also have been courting dismemberment if this were any other dragon. He met her gaze and blinked.

“He ate one of my marks,” she said, turning to the Consort. “When he first hatched. I don’t think it counts as naming him, but I think—I think it must have provided some sort of anchor.”

“That would explain much. It will not satisfy Lord Evarrim.”

“Nothing satisfies Lord Evarrim.”

“Do you remember what the word was?” the Consort asked. She hesitated for a long moment, and then lifted her hand and set it just below Kaylin’s. “He is not warm.”

“No. I don’t remember what the mark was; if we were in the city, we could dig it out of Records by process of elimination.” She didn’t ask if it mattered; she now believed it did. “How long do you have?” she asked him.

He shook his head, dislodging their hands. Alsanis’s brother approached. He didn’t bow, as he had bowed to the Consort; he met—and held—the dragon’s gaze. “Time,” he finally said, “does not mean, for us, what it means for your kind.”

“Mortals?”

“No. The living. He does not intend you harm; he very much wishes the opposite. But he chose to wear the jess of your mark, Chosen, and he has all but consumed it.”

She didn’t point out that eaten had a specific meaning, because she doubted, for the small dragon—or the large—it did. “Can I give him another one?”

“Yes.”

But of course, no marks rose from her skin, and she really didn’t think that biting off a chunk of her arm would have the same results.

Kaylin was accustomed to the interior of sentient buildings. Judging by the interior of this one, Alsanis was no longer sane. If the exterior wall had resembled shadow-imbued crystal—albeit somewhat malformed—the interior did not match. Here, the ground was uneven, and it was only barely ground. There were patches of what she would bet were sky to the left, shimmering slightly in the uneven light.

Nothing cast that light.

Interspersed with that sky was jagged rock, but the rock itself seemed to be composed of layers of detritus; Kaylin thought she could see a door jutting out from one large, flat curve. She definitely saw windows, and most of them weren’t in walls. Then again, she couldn’t actually see many walls.

The Consort linked arms with Kaylin, to Kaylin’s surprise.

“You have a tendency to get lost,” she said, smiling slightly. “And while it generally has interesting results, I would like to be lost with you should it happen.”

“You don’t—”

“Oh, not for your sake. The men worry; it is unpleasant. What do you see, Lord Kaylin?”

“Everything. I mean—a bit of everything. There’s a pillar, there—it’s broken. There’s a half wall that melts into gray mud. There’s an...arm, I think. I can’t tell, it doesn’t end in a hand. In the distance, I think there are mountains. There are windows in the ground to the far right—or holes that open into sky, because there also seems to be a lot of sky. That one’s raining. I don’t see much furniture, and I don’t see any other people.”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No; I hear them, though. Can you hear Alsanis?”

Kaylin shook her head. “You do?”

“I do. The lost are with him.”

“All of them?”

The Consort frowned. “I cannot be certain; I cannot count voices.”

“Do you hear—do you hear Teela?”

“No. But that is not a bad sign; were I to hear her from this remove it would mean that we are too late.”

Alsanis’s brother shook his head. “What you fear is impossible, Lady.”

“Oh?”

“Every Barrani in the West March—every Barrani the green might touch—will be altered and lost to you first. Teela cannot be touched.”

Kaylin frowned. After a long pause, spent picking her way over what looked like stone slats, she said, “Why?”

“The price was paid, Chosen. It was paid in life’s blood—Teela is beloved by the green; it feels always, and only, the affection and the terrible fear of her mother, and it has accepted the geas that death placed upon it. No harm, no change, will come to Teela while she stands upon the green.”

Kaylin almost missed a step. She said, quietly, “The children are trying to destroy the green.”

“Yes. They themselves are confined by their attachment to Teela. If she cannot join them while the green exists, they will destroy the green. It will,” he added softly, “destroy them; that is Alsanis’s fear.”

Kaylin didn’t understand why he cared.

“No, you do not. He has labored here these many centuries, with no respite, to find some way of preserving them. They are his guests. He hears their voices. They are not what they were when they came to him; they are not what they might be were they free. But he cannot confine all of what they have become. He cannot speak in a way that moves them; they are too intent upon what they see and hear. They will not be moved.

“Can Teela talk to them?”

“She cannot speak—”

“I mean, can she change their mind? Can she convince them to—”

“To what?”

“To stop trying to destroy the green.”

“An odd question.”

“It’s not—”

“Do you not think Teela desires what they desire?”

“No!”

The Consort’s hand tightened. “Lord Kaylin. Kaylin. It is often more complicated than simply yes or no. Teela was raised with children who were lost to the recitation. They were not rivals. They were not from the same lines; they were not in competition with each other. Had they been blood kin, it is unlikely they would have become as close as they did.”

“There is no way Teela wants the green to be destroyed!”

“No. But I am not so certain, were there not another way, she would not join them. Can you be?”

“Yes!” Kaylin pulled her arm free of the Consort—or she tried. The Consort was Barrani, and she didn’t want to let go. There’d probably be bruises. Teela had certainly left similar ones in her time. And probably for the same reasons. Kaylin knew what she wanted the truth to be. But she’d known Teela for less than a decade. In Barrani time, she was just a passing acquaintance. She fell silent.

It didn’t last. “Where are you taking us?”

“To the heart of Alsanis,” Alsanis’s brother replied.

Kaylin developed a healthy respect for the Tower of Tiamaris as she attempted to follow Alsanis’s brother. Tara kept the halls wide, the ceilings tall, and the windows even and long. The floors were either stone or wood, and they didn’t sag or change texture unexpectedly beneath passing feet. Chunks of roof did not suddenly liquefy and fall on the group like a wet, rotting corpse. Doors did not rear up like frothing, panicked horses and attempt to drop on her visitors, and the landscape wasn’t filled with the sounds of screaming, weeping—or laughter that made screaming and weeping sound good in comparison.

There weren’t any doors between the hole in the wall—a hole that pretty much vanished from sight when they’d walked what Kaylin estimated was ten yards—and their unseen destination.

But there were wards.

The first time they encountered one, the Consort froze. Kaylin could see her eyes darken to pure midnight. The Warden was likewise on alert—but Nightshade, Iberrienne, Lirienne, and Ynpharion didn’t appear to be as upset.