Michelle Sagara - Cast in Ruin

“Kaylin.” Tiamaris’s voice was the low rumble of moving earth. “Step back across the border.”

Kaylin frowned. From where she was standing, she could no longer see it—not that it had ever been all that clear when there wasn’t a small army of Shadows waiting along its edge. “Can I bring him with me?”

Smoke—a literal stream of it, forcefully expelled—eddied around her feet. Before the fieflord could follow it with words, Mejrah approached Kaylin, her hands lifted and turned palms out as if to imply that she was helpless. She spoke to the armored man, her voice low enough that it broke on syllables.

The man, still facing Kaylin, moved his head toward the old woman. His expression as he did could have broken stone hearts. Mejrah, however, turned to Kaylin and spoke rapid, agitated words—none of which made any sense. Language lessons had never seemed so profoundly important; unfortunately, no one present was yet expert enough to teach them.

“What is she saying?” Kaylin asked Maggaron.

“Can you not understand her words?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I could.”

His brows rose in genuine surprise. “But—you are Chosen.”

“I can’t walk on water,” she replied tersely. “And you clearly understand her. What did she say?”

“She wishes to know if what you have done is stable.”

“Tell her I have no idea.”

He did. Kaylin was running through Leontine phrases in her mind.

“She asks if you know who I am.”

“Tell her—” Kaylin bit back the flippant response. “Does she know who you are?”

He didn’t repeat the question; instead, he nodded. When he began to speak again—to Mejrah—Kaylin listened. But she listened, if it were possible, with her hands; she listened to the word that she hadn’t released. It was warm, and it was bright; if she looked at it too long it burned itself into her vision, the way the sun could at the wrong height.

“Ascendant,” Mejrah said. Kaylin could hear two words overlapping each other as the older woman spoke. It wasn’t cacophony, but it was disturbing. “How is it that you come to be here?”

“Do you not understand? You are here.”

“We came through the emptiness. We—all of our people that could be gathered—walked the gray space and the hungering void. We are here. But you…” She hesitated.

“I fell in battle.”

“Yes. On plains far from these streets and this…city. But even here, the Shadows exist.” This last was said with resignation and bitterness.

“Yes.”

“They are not so strong here; the war in these lands has barely begun. We will fight,” she added, her voice a low growl.

Maggaron’s smile was sharp and brief. He raised an arm in salute.

But the older woman was not yet done. “We did not think to see Ascendants again. How did you travel here?”

“I…did not travel here.”

Mejrah was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was harder—but it was also more brittle. “How is it that you command the darkness? How is it that you fight at the behest of our enemy?”

He flinched and turned away from her—but turned back as if shorn of will. “There is truth,” he finally said, “in the stories of the Ancients. The Shadows spoke my name, and they knew me, and when they bid me follow, I could not disobey for long, although I did struggle. I came, at last, to the heart of the Shadow—and it is the heart of the world, Mejrah. What I have seen—what I have touched—” He fell silent. “I have fallen. But there is beauty and majesty in the Shadows; there is—there could be—freedom.”

“If you were free,” Kaylin asked, “would you stay in the Shadow?”

His smile was bitter. “No, Chosen. There is no freedom for me now. What they have, they hold, and they will hold it—”

“Until they’re destroyed.”

He shook his head, and his face developed the expression that Kaylin most loathed: pity. “They cannot be destroyed. They are eternal; they live and breathe and move and change. They defy death, just as—”

“As you do.”

“No, Chosen. Their will is stronger than any other force they have encountered. They live in the web of the knowledge of worlds, and they feed from it. They move along its strands, and they change whatever they touch. They speak all languages, they can live in any environment. They require no breath, no warmth, no food.”

“If they were that powerful, all worlds would already be Shadow. All of them. We can fight them. There are people here who are also powerful and ancient.” She was acutely aware she wasn’t one of them.

He did not speak; instead, he looked toward Tiamaris and Sanabalis. And then, to her great surprise, he bowed. His armor clanked. She wondered, given its weight, if he’d be able to stand up again without teetering, because she doubted she could have. “They are Dragons,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He rose with an enviable ease. “They are the firstborn, and the oldest. Do you not understand what they are?”

A brief memory of Diarmat’s first class came to mind. It was hard to feel any awe for someone you wanted to strangle so badly. “They’re Dragons,” she said.

“Kaylin.”

Kaylin turned to the fieflord. His eyes weren’t orange; they were an unfortunate shade of red. Sanabalis was now standing by Tiamaris’s side; his eyes were orange. And unlidded.

“I have his name,” she told them. And then, after a pause, “He has one.”

The two Dragons exchanged a glance. Sanabalis said almost gently, “I do not believe that is possible if he is of the People.”

“Why?”

“They are mortal. They age and they die.”

“So am I, and I have one.”

The Dragons exchanged a more familiar glance. It was Tiamaris who answered. “And that is, of course, information that is best shouted loudly at the edge of a fief, where Shadows are dominant.” His breath was a plume of bright-colored flame. “Do you hold his name?”

“Yes. But so do they.”

“They?”

Actually, that was a damn good question. She didn’t have an answer, but hazarded one anyway. “The Shadows.” Frowning, she added, “What does happen if more than one person holds a true name?”

“It depends,” Tiamaris replied. He glanced at Sanabalis, and Kaylin could almost see him passing the question off.

Sanabalis ran a hand through the long strands of thin beard. “It would depend. Let us assume that you speak of only two entities: yourself, in this case, and the Shadow. If you have opposing goals—and again, we will assume for the sake of simplification, that this is true—you will exert the force of your will upon the name.

“The name will not break; it is not a physical object. But the man will be pulled in two directions. The best that can be achieved in that case is that he will be rendered immobile and will do nothing.”

“And the worst?”

“You sleep. You are easily distracted. You are not accustomed to enforcing your will and your desire upon others. I do not believe any of these three things can be said of your enemy. Kill him, if it is possible for you to do so; leave him, if it is not. If he follows you now—and I believe he will—there is no guarantee that he will not turn upon you, or upon any of us, the moment your will flags.

“And he will be dangerous then. The power that he can easily reach will be lessened, but he will be able to draw it; he will be a window from the heart of the fiefs into the fief of Tiamaris, and we are already undermined by some Shadow we cannot yet locate.”

She turned back to Maggaron. He smiled. It was not a happy smile, but unlike most smiles one saw in the fiefs, it wasn’t cruel, either. Bending at the knee, he retrieved the sword that had fallen between them. “Chosen,” he said. “Learn to speak the tongue of the People. Ask Mejrah what the Ascendants are, and how they are born.