Michelle Sagara - Cast in Sorrow

She was, she realized, both cold and tired. The sun didn’t feel warm. Nothing did, except dragon wings—and they weren’t wings now; they were too soft, too pliant, too shapeless.

She turned toward the water. It rose in a familiar column, a familiar shape. When it lifted an arm, extending a hand, Kaylin made her way across the very mundane, very solid, heart of the green. She lifted a hand in turn and placed it across a liquid palm.

He is not as we are, a familiar voice said. Her eyes were the color of every patch of water Kaylin had ever seen, simultaneously. They were open, rounded slightly in a way that suggested concern. Concern and stillness.

“I know.”

You must answer his question, Kaylin. The form and the shape he takes now has no mooring. It will be all things at once. All things, and nothing.

“What kind of nothing?”

The water failed to answer. Tell him, she said instead, the stories you tell us in the Keeper’s garden. Tell him what he is to your kind.

Kaylin exhaled. One hand in the water, she lifted the other; folds of translucent warmth rose and fell as she shifted position. Teela was standing apart from her cohort, watching as Kaylin was slowly engulfed in a cocoon that could be more felt than seen. She’d had whole days like this, when bed and sleep and silence were the only options that offered any comfort at all. She didn’t think often of Steffi and Jade; she shied away from it now because it always cut. It always would.

But thinking of them left the same, invisible bruises. Because she knew she’d made the right choice and it didn’t feel right. It felt wrong. All the if-only, all the what-if in her life had come back to this: it was done, and nothing she could do could change it. But...she could have. Because she had him and he could. And she couldn’t grasp the words. No—that wasn’t true. It was a lie. She could have. She could have taken that risk, could have spoken the lie in a way that made some sort of truth of it.

And she hadn’t.

And she wouldn’t.

How did you live with that? How did you look yourself in the mirror without seeing the face of a coward and a liar?

The small dragon bit her ear.

She inhaled. Exhaled. You lived with it the same damn way you’d lived with the deaths and the failure the first time. Badly. Badly, at first. But it was just another thing to hate. Just another thing to survive. She’d done it before, but honestly? She’d been so certain that she couldn’t. She’d been waiting for life to end, too afraid to end it on her own.

And she wasn’t that child anymore.

“I can’t give you words that won’t come,” she told the small dragon, looking up at the face of the water as she spoke. “But I’m not sure they would bind you anyway. I’m not sure they would give you form or shape or whatever it is you need. I’m not a sorcerer. I’m not immortal. I’m nowhere near ancient—although I’m going to feel like I am tomorrow. If I wake up.

“I understand how you relate to my life—my small, tiny life. You’re my dreams. You’re my daydreams. You’re my what-if’s. You’re the way I torture myself at night, when sleep won’t come, or sleep won’t stay.”

The small dragon was utterly still; he might, for a moment, have been made entirely of glass.

“But without some of those dreams, without the pain and the what-if, without the guilt, I wouldn’t be a Hawk. When I was five I couldn’t even imagine crossing the bridge. I stood on the outside of a life I thought I wanted, but I couldn’t make myself walk over the river. I don’t know what’s possible, most of the time. Hells, on a bad day? I feel like walking across the street safely is impossible.

“You’re not hope,” she continued. “Because when I think of Steffi and Jade, I have none. I have the dreams of who they might have been if they were still alive. I have dreams about arriving in time to save them. You know what those dreams are. You saw them. You heard them.

“But you’re the place hope comes from, and sometimes, that’s the only thing that keeps me moving. So. I need you in my life. I need you like fire or water or air or earth. Without what you are, I’d be dead a dozen times over. More.”

The small dragon tilted his head to one side. His eyes were now the size they’d been for almost all of his short life, or at least the part of it that overlapped with Kaylin’s; his wings were not. But they thinned as she watched; she saw them as gauze now, but they were as long as the skirts of the reformed dress.

“I don’t want to live without you, because I don’t think I can. I don’t think anyone can, not even Teela.”

“I heard that.”

Of course she had.

“But I don’t know how to chain you. I don’t know how to cage you. I don’t know how to control you or keep you—”

He bit her ear again.

She briefly considered strangling him. His wings tightened, but they were so thin now, they had no strength. Yet they were warm. She let the water go, and gathered an increasingly tattered cape around her shoulders and her arms, hugging it as if it were fabric and she were a child again.

But she wasn’t a child. She wasn’t surprised to see the wings slowly vanish, but their warmth remained as the small dragon sat up on her shoulder and yawned.

“Kitling.”

She looked up at Teela, whose eyes were now blue. Happiness—no, joy—apparently didn’t last long.

“What is he doing?”

Kaylin frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Can’t you see them?” Teela said something about survival instincts in distinctly uncharitable Leontine. She marched over to Kaylin, her boots striking stone hard enough to break it. She caught both of Kaylin’s wrists. “What are you holding in your hands?”

Kaylin started to say “wings,” but fell silent; she was holding strands of multicolored light. They were becoming insubstantial, even as she tightened her grasp. “Mostly...nothing.”

Teela shook her. “Look at your marks. ”

She did, and her eyes widened. The marks were no longer the dark, coal-gray they were when they were inactive. Nor were they gold or blue. They were multihued and scintillating; they looked very like black opals; like the eyes of the small dragon.

The small dragon hissed. It was the continuous exhalation that passed for laughter in winged lizards. And he was that now. He looked unchanged.

She poked him. He bit her finger, but not hard enough to break skin. He did hiss at Teela, in an entirely less amused way, when she failed to let go of Kaylin’s wrists.

It was never about names, the water said, from a remove. You are mortal, Kaylin; not even the Ancients could contain the whole of the elemental you hold in your hands. They did not try.

“But what is he now?”

What was he when you found him? He is not less. He is, I think, more. But he has chosen. He has named you.

“But—”

It is not a name in the Barrani sense of the word, no. But the story you told him was the story he chose. He will not be what he almost became, she added softly. His power is dependent upon yours, and you are...mortal. But while you allow it, he will remain with you.

“If I ask him to leave, will he leave?” He bit her ear.

I have one task to perform for the green. There is one other mortal who waits in the greenheart; he waits for you. Tell him to come to the waters of my fountain.

“Why?”

He will understand. Or perhaps he will not; the greenheart is not what it was when last he ventured into it. She lifted a hand again. Come home. Ybelline is concerned.

“About me?”