27 #3
“And they chose to be so transformed?”
She nodded again. “I think, maybe, time doesn’t pass for them unless they’re with Nightshade. In his way, he cares for them.
But it’s not a way I could ever accept. My whole life isn’t Nightshade—and it would never be Nightshade, even if I could convince
myself I loved him.”
“I doubt you could join that statuary, regardless. You bear the Marks of the Chosen. You have Hope. What do you, Chosen, sorcerer,
Hawk, want to do?”
“I want to kick his ass out of bed. I want him to wake up, to be healed, and to figure out what the hells is going on in the
Barrani High Court.”
Annarion coughed. To Kaylin’s surprise, he was almost laughing. How long had it been since he’d done that?
“Honestly,” she said to him, “I want the two of you to stop fighting. I want you to forgive him because you’re the only other
person I could say, with no hesitation, he loves. And the fighting seems like a waste of love, because it’s clear you love
him, still. You’re not ready to cut him out of your life, and he’s willing to endure your anger and disappointment until you
can see beyond it. I understand the disappointment. I get it. But there’s more than just disappointment there.”
“Do you think he’ll know what’s happened?”
“He’ll know what’s happened to him. If nothing else, it gives us more information. This is bigger than your brother—but he’s
central to some of it. The first time I encountered Barrani who’d ditched their names was in Nightshade. And if our enemies
consider Nightshade enough of a threat they’d send war bands into the fiefs, he’s someone we need.”
That much she could accept.
She bore the Erenne mark, but she’d always been a fraud.
She’d never been his. Would never belong to anyone, even if she grew to love them.
History informed his place in her thoughts—near-starvation, cold, cold winters, hunting Ferals, the thugs that intermittently roamed the streets collecting the equivalent of protection money from people who had so little of it.
She learned to live with fear; fear guided her. She could pretend it was caution—but at this remove, there was almost no difference
between the two. Nightshade was his fief; his fief was Nightshade. She couldn’t separate them and had never tried. She had
accepted the Erenne mark because she’d grown up with no real choices when confronted with people in power.
But she’d refused the High Lord’s offer to remove it.
She wasn’t certain why. She’d felt hesitant; it had been instrumental in saving her life and might in the future. She wasn’t
a fiefling anymore. She didn’t have to fear the fieflord and his band of thugs. She genuinely liked Andellen—enough that she
was willing to ask the High Lord to allow him to enter the High Halls, even if his oaths were sworn to an outcaste.
Was that all? Was that hesitance just a blend of fear and familiarity and pragmatism? The mark had changed the way the Barrani
who served Nightshade treated her. Even if she were still a denizen of the fiefs, that would remain true; it was a form of
protection, there. It was probably a red flag in the High Court itself, which would make it far less useful—but she’d managed
to avoid the High Halls in her normal life.
The situation with the Lake wasn’t normal. The situation with Nightshade and the Consort wasn’t normal. The inability to interact
with the namebond was definitely not normal.
And having Nightshade as an emergency tenant? Not normal, either.
Would she have brought him here at all if it weren’t for Annarion? Would she have gone flying to his rescue—his possible rescue—if
Annarion weren’t living with her?
She exhaled.
Yes, she would have run to his rescue. But she would have run to Andellen’s rescue; she would have run to the cohort’s rescue—and had. She would run as if the hells had been unleashed if Severn were in danger.
What was love, after all? Was it sexual attraction? Was it desire? Possessiveness? Impulse? What did Androsse mean when he
said she had to accept the Erenne mark?
She looked at Nightshade. He was breathing, but his breath was shallow. Once he had been the fieflord, a person whose displeasure
was almost a guarantee of death. Now he was Annarion’s brother. The Consort’s support from the shadows. But he wasn’t Kaylin’s
in any way. She didn’t want him to be hers.
The Ancients had chosen Kaylin. Nightshade had chosen Kaylin. Both had applied marks she didn’t understand to her skin. But
she didn’t love the Ancients. She couldn’t know them. Couldn’t communicate with them. They’d chosen and they’d left. Nightshade
was an echo of the same thing.
“Serralyn, ask Androsse why the mark could be placed on my cheek at all. I didn’t accept it as an act of communion. I didn’t
accept it as anything other than the fieflord’s will. And I spent a lot of my life cursing the fieflord’s will. Is it only
the power differential that defines the mark’s placement?”
“Androsse says that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
“I don’t think the Barrani truly know any other way. Present company excepted,” she added.
“Starrante thinks the power differential was possibly the deciding factor. He’s speaking slowly and carefully—Androsse has
some history with the Erenne mark, and he’s even touchier than usual.”
Kaylin had no trouble acknowledging that Nightshade was the greater power.
Yvonne would be, absent the Marks of the Chosen, the greater power.
Barrani were Immortals. They had forever in which to amass knowledge.
They were physically more naturally fit, immune to the need for sleep; they didn’t even need to eat as often as Kaylin did.
Did she envy them? Yes. On bad days, she envied them a lot. But she wasn’t Barrani. She wasn’t Immortal. She wasn’t born Chosen.
But she was Chosen, now. And she bore the Erenne mark; if it had required communion or permission, it couldn’t have been placed
on her cheek without her consent.
Androsse’s advice was impossible to follow. She couldn’t bring to the Erenne mark the emotional resonance the mark had once
required. It wasn’t in her. Had she been younger, it might have been. Nightshade’s power, a sign of Nightshade’s favor, was
armor. He knew far more than her; he could make decisions that could keep her safe. She would have been far less likely to
starve, and far less likely to be Feral food.
But she was no longer a fiefling. She wasn’t that starving, homeless child. She would never be as powerful as Nightshade,
but she had chosen to use her power in defense of people who had even less power than she had. The Hawk. She’d chosen the
Hawk. She’d chosen to believe—however imperfect they were—that the Imperial Laws were better protection, better foundations,
for daily life; that they made it harder for the powerful to prey on the powerless.
That maybe, if the laws were followed and enforced, the powerless would—as Kaylin had—find their power, grow into it, become
stronger as themselves.
The Erenne mark was a sign of the imbalance of power, a way for the powerful to coexist with the far less powerful without
overwhelming them. Love might have been the motivation for the creation of that binding spell—but it wasn’t a necessary condition.
It couldn’t be. How could anyone love what they feared so much?
Kaylin inhaled slowly, as if counting. She exhaled the same way. She couldn’t touch Nightshade with the power of the Marks of the Chosen; she’d tried. Helen didn’t need to protect her from the namebond—or hide the details of her daily life—because it no longer reached him.
She couldn’t be what the first Erenne had been. She wasn’t an Ancestor. She wasn’t Barrani. She wasn’t Immortal. He hadn’t
marked the mortals in his statuary. They’d come to him—they were happy to spend their lives waiting, untouched by time—and they’d given everything.
She couldn’t.
But if she could have, he’d never have placed that mark on her cheek.
In return, he’d offered her his True Name. She’d never tried to command Nightshade with the power of that name, and she never
would. Partly because she was certain to lose any contest of will.
But . . . the name had been a vulnerability. Maybe that had been his way of balancing the implications of the Erenne mark;
the mark was his, but in return, she knew his True Name. Right now, she couldn’t call it. Any vulnerability was theoretical.
Maybe Barrani who were otherwise reasonable would actually appreciate the magic affecting Nightshade because it would protect
their names from being used against them. But it didn’t prevent the affected Barrani from accessing the source of both their
life and their power: their True Name.
And it couldn’t prevent Kaylin from accessing the source of her power: the Marks of the Chosen. It prevented her from using
that power on Nightshade. But if Androsse had given the wrong advice, not all of it was useless.
It wasn’t Nightshade Kaylin had to change. The Erenne mark was on her skin; it was part of her space, part of a place her
power could touch. It was the mark itself that had to be altered.