06
She wasn’t certain if Terrano contacted Teela or not, but Teela skidded around the corner. She carried her greatsword in one
hand, and with the other, she grabbed Kaylin by the arm.
Hope squawked, then.
“Next time,” Teela said, through clenched teeth, “we bring Mandoran.” She sheathed her sword and reached for Terrano with
her free hand. She could touch Terrano. Kaylin tried with her free hand; she couldn’t.
“Torrisant?” Terrano said. His voice was weaker. “He’s better at this than you are.”
Kaylin felt something—sharp, hot—travel up her arm.
“He says he’s better at doing what you do—but Mandoran is far better at taking something with him when he sidesteps into different
planes.”
Kaylin turned to stare at Teela.
“Terrano can’t come to where we are,” the Barrani Hawk explained. “He’s been trying. There’s only one option left. You have
to go to him.”
Kaylin tried, three more times, to grab Terrano’s hand; each time, her hand passed through his. In the background, Teela cursed.
Her grip on Kaylin’s arm was white-knuckled.
“I’m trying to connect the two of you, if I can get everyone else to shut up and let Mandoran speak.” Her expression was venomous, which wasn’t fair—Kaylin wasn’t the one being distracting.
Squawk. Squawk.
Teela inhaled slowly. She exhaled slowly as well. She’d been forced to sheathe her sword in what had become a combat zone.
If Terrano had been injured—and demonstrably he had—it meant that Teela could be attacked just as easily.
Kaylin could see Terrano’s injury; if he wasn’t solid, he was close enough. She stopped even trying to talk to Teela as she
concentrated on reaching the most chaotic of the cohort members. Teela was right. Whatever Kaylin was doing to reach the space
Terrano occupied felt like a series of sharp, harsh, full-body slaps. When Kaylin had been with Mandoran, she hadn’t even
noticed the shift. None of that mattered. She continually tried to connect with Terrano’s hand—which she could clearly see. Her hand
passed through his each time.
Teela cursed. Kaylin cursed. Terrano said nothing, which wasn’t like him.
“What did they hit you with?”
Terrano’s mouth moved. Kaylin couldn’t catch the syllables. Or make sense of them. She’d heard him clearly before; it felt
like Teela was moving her in the wrong direction.
“Are you ready?” Teela clearly wasn’t finished trying. “I think I’ve finally found the right place to shift.”
Kaylin nodded while Hope squawked.
If she couldn’t hear Terrano, she could hear Teela, who was cursing—in Leontine—as she tried to move Kaylin into synch with
Terrano. Terrano continued to bleed. Hope’s voice was louder than Teela’s in full Leontine, but Kaylin couldn’t understand
his words; they clearly weren’t meant for her.
She couldn’t cover her ear to preserve hearing; Hope was on the same side as the arm Teela had grabbed, and the Barrani Hawk wasn’t letting go.
Kaylin had had worse injuries in the line of duty, but she knew this was going to bruise.
And she knew Teela couldn’t let go until the moment Terrano could be physically touched.
If she’d sometimes envied Terrano his ability to slip between planes as a way out of physical danger, she repented. What she
needed to know was why he couldn’t come back.
No. What she needed to know was the extent of Terrano’s injuries. The rest could wait.
Hope squawked loudly. He then bit Kaylin’s ear.
Kaylin would have swatted him away but didn’t want to lose part of her earlobe. She cursed. Teela had brought her closer to
Terrano, and she could see what had injured him. Or rather, she could see the Shadow seeping out of his wound, a faint black
mist.
Bellusdeo would have reduced them all to ash. Teela might even have let her.
“Don’t let go! I’ve healed Shadow damage before,” she snapped at the Barrani Hawk as she felt Teela’s grip loosen slightly.
“I had to do this in the West March when the Consort was under attack! Don’t step back—give me enough time, and I can fix
it!”
Teela’s brief hesitation vanished. “Remind me,” she said through gritted teeth, “to strangle Mandoran when next we meet.”
“Worry about who or what attacked Terrano. Worry about the Barrani who attacked Nightshade. Figure out if they’re the same
people.”
She continued to attempt to grab Terrano’s hand. She lost count of the number of times she’d tried when she finally managed
to touch him. His skin was hot, almost feverish, and the wound he had taken finally came into sharp relief. She hadn’t been able to touch Nightshade, and the unspoken fear that Terrano would likewise be proof against the Marks-driven healing was put to rest.
“Do you have her?” Teela demanded of the pale, injured Terrano.
Terrano nodded, as if he didn’t trust himself to say more.
“Good. I have to go.” She released Kaylin’s arm.
Kaylin caught both of Terrano’s hands in a tight grip, entwining her fingers with his strongly enough that both of their knuckles
were white.
This is not a place you should be, her familiar said. She could understand him, here.
“If you can find a way to drag Terrano back to where I should be, I’m all ears.”
You know the answer.
She cursed him, choosing the more easily pronounced Aerian phrasing. “Terrano, can you hear me?”
He nodded. He was sweating, which was common given intense pain—but the sweat itself was disturbing. Kaylin couldn’t tell
if this was a function of the plane on which they were both standing, or of Terrano himself. She glanced beyond Terrano; there
was no one immediately chasing the Barrani.
She then turned all her attention to Terrano.
He was too hot. She wasn’t often allowed to touch Barrani with an intent to heal, but she knew feverish skin on contact.
“Hope—bite me hard if something attacks us.”
Something is already making that attempt. You should not be here. You do not have time.
“I can’t leave him here. We’ll lose him.” She closed her eyes. She had always closed her eyes when trying to heal severe injuries,
and she’d learned to leave minor cuts and scrapes alone. The Marks flared to life on her arm—gold, not the more subtle blue
they sometimes adopted. They remained where they lay, but she’d always been able to see them clearly when her eyes were closed.
Their light covered her arms and edged toward the tops of her hands. As it did, it expanded to enwrap Terrano’s hands in the
same bright glow before inching its way up his arms, his shoulders. She didn’t always see the light of the Marks when they
touched others, but was well aware that the rules in the plane on which she stood might be different. No, they definitely
were, no might about it.
Terrano’s body wasn’t the normal Barrani body, from her brief experience with those. But it felt cohesively like Terrano to her touch, to her Marks. The fear of Shadow and its contamination diminished. When she had dealt with Shadow-spawned
injuries before, she could feel the way they warped and shifted the physical flesh itself in an attempt to remake the person
to whom that flesh belonged.
She didn’t sense that here—but she could see the fine, fine mist of Shadow rising from Terrano’s injury. She couldn’t feel
any of it in his body.
Hope bit her, but not hard enough to draw blood or cause pain; he was disagreeing in the most convenient way possible.
She found the wound from which the Barrani youth had been visibly bleeding; it was a deep stab into the Barrani’s right side
and had pierced a lung. Blood pooled in the right lung, beneath what passed for air here.
“Don’t think about that,” Terrano managed to get out. “That’s part of the trick.”
Hard not to think about it when she was examining his entire physical body. Terrano could carry on arguing while he was on
death’s door, he was so stubborn—and it wouldn’t do him any good. She didn’t ask him how he knew what she was thinking. Maybe
she would, later. Or maybe she’d been muttering as she worked, because sometimes she did do that. It had really, really annoyed fellow students in her classes.
The wound wasn’t her biggest worry; it was the lingering taint of Shadow.
But that Shadow hadn’t transformed or warped Terrano’s physical body in the way it had the Barrani in the distant West March.
She’d expected she’d have to cut away large chunks of his flesh and force her power to rebuild it properly. That didn’t happen here.
The Shadow continued to rise, as if Terrano were breathing from the wound, not his mouth. She couldn’t deny what she saw.
If she felt no Shadow in Terrano, it was here.
It is, Chosen. You must leave.
She shook her head. “Not without the idiot.”
“Gee, thanks.”
The Shadow was mist, visible in the light of the Marks. “Can you see the Shadow?”
Terrano grunted. She assumed it meant yes. “You?”
“It’s not—it’s moving. It’s coming from you—from the wound.” She frowned and poured her power into that wound. She was almost
afraid to heal it; if she did, would that Shadow remain trapped within Terrano?
“Just stop the bleeding,” Terrano snapped. “I can handle the rest.”
“How?”
“Trust me.”
“Did this come from the wound?”
Silence.
“Terrano?”
“Yes?” His eyes looked like normal Barrani eyes to her, but they’d shifted to the side, as if Terrano refused to meet her
gaze while answering the question.
Oh.
“You could have joined us,” she said through clenched teeth.
Terrano said nothing.
“But you’re carrying something you don’t want to let loose.”
“Maybe you could waste less of your time talking and spend some of it healing?” Mandoran had arrived.
Kaylin liked Mandoran but had never felt so grateful to see him in all the time she’d known him. “I don’t think we can safely
bring him back.”
“No kidding,” the Barrani replied. “I think the Norranir are having some effect—I’m not sure how it works, but Bellusdeo said
it definitely did. The drums, the beat of them, seem to slow the progress of Shadow.”
“Can you tell me what hit him?”
Terrano began to cough out blood.