29 #2
from the Barrani norm: the woman who would become the Lady. The current Consort of the High Lord. He had been drawn to her
because, in her, he found some of the warmth and affection he found in Annarion. But she was drawn to him for the same reason.
If you attempt to unseat your parents now, you will die. If you die, your brother will die. There is no one within Solanace who will protect him. Her tone was bitter, which was unusual—maybe because she was young. There’s no one in my family that would, either. Not yet.
That will change. It will change. My brothers remind me of you and your brother. But they have the same power we have.
Almost none.
Almost none, in the time when Nightshade wasn’t outcaste, his brother wasn’t a member of the cohort, and the Consort wasn’t
the Consort.
Kaylin tried to focus on the healing. Most of the thoughts that flowed into her as she healed were almost incidental; they
came through the channel of her power. These weren’t that; they were far too strong, far too immediate. She felt as if she
could join the two who spoke, huddled in the garden, their voices low, their gazes watchful.
She felt that even in this private moment, worry and fear and anger causing a collapse of shoulders, she could have touched
them. She could have reached out with both arms, drawn them in toward each other and toward her, and neither would have pushed
her away.
You still have us, the young woman said. You still have me.
No. Your parents are the High Lord and his Lady.
But I’m not them. We’re not them. I’m Ellorinel. You’re Calarnenne. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to be a different
person. I won’t, either.
Kaylin had a terrible feeling, a premonition of doom.
When healing, she accepted the blending of memories as part of the process. She had never consciously attempted to separate
or distance herself from the person she was healing. She touched their memories; she was certain they touched hers. This was
not a memory she wanted to touch, to know.
Calarnenne, look at me. Look. I trust you. I trust you as much as I trust my brothers.
You shouldn’t. But even as he spoke the words, she felt an odd glow, a terrible relief; it wasn’t without fear, without dread—but it was
almost as strong.
She forgot the damage done to him by the poison—the organs that were near to failure, the odd way blood flowed throughout
his body. She’d been correcting them, rebuilding damaged connections. Had he been human, had he been mortal, she’d have been
examining him in the morgue.
You should not do this, he said.
Kaylin screamed the same phrase silently, trying to separate herself from his memory. Trying to preserve her ignorance—to
leave it in the realm of suspicion. This younger Nightshade wasn’t a person she knew. He had a home, a family he disliked,
and at least one friend.
One friend, eyes green; Kaylin could see her pale hair, could see the strength of determination in her expression. It contained
eternity. And she saw the woman’s eyes shift from green to the lambent gold that was Barrani surprise. The surprise faded
as green overcame it. The woman laughed, delight in the sound.
He had offered her the truth of his name—a truth it was never safe to offer, as if to forestall her, as if to make his escape
before she could offer him the same truth, the same vulnerability.
Annarion would have made this choice.
I would not take this risk, the young Barrani woman said, if you were not who you are. Time changes all things. I know it does. I cannot see the future. I cannot see where our lives
will diverge. But the person you are now is worth preserving. Do not become what your parents tell you you must become. Do
not surrender your kin without a fight.
By kin, she meant Annarion.
By risk, she meant her name. Her True Name.
Ynpharion would kill Kaylin if he knew that she knew it; the Lady had never taken that risk with Kaylin and never would. But absent choice, the consequences were profound. Kaylin didn’t want to know.
She healed by instinct; she’d never had to work at healing the way she’d had to work at lighting a candle. She just did what
she did; it came naturally. When she reached out to heal, she held the whole person in her hands. The barriers that separated
two individuals vanished.
She’d healed Bellusdeo before; had seen parts of Bellusdeo’s history. She hadn’t chosen which parts. She hadn’t searched for
memories. Some came to her, as if life was a stream; as a healer, she had to stand in that stream. She couldn’t avoid seeing
something, but there was no reason, no choice, in what she saw.
That had to change.
That had to change now, because her entire body reverberated not with Nightshade’s True Name—which she already knew—but the
Consort’s. She heard the Consort’s True Name. She felt it as a blow, as a warmth, as a sudden door that opened into endless
possibility, endless trust.
She knew the names of other Barrani. She knew Nightshade’s name. But she had never felt, in the gaining of that knowledge,
what Nightshade felt in that long-ago past.
She wondered if this was what the cohort had felt when they, as a group, had chosen to take the same risk. As if the world
had, for a moment, opened up into endless warmth, endless trust. She had never felt that way about the names she’d been given—maybe
because those who’d allowed her that glimpse were so certain of their own power, they did so without fear, without a true
sense of risk.
Ynpharion was the lone exception; he hadn’t offered.
He’d hated her with an intensity she hadn’t experienced before, even in occasionally heated office politics.
That hatred had been whittled down to grudging resentment, until the moment he had offered the Consort his name.
He understood that he was the link between Kaylin and the Lady he would have died in a heartbeat to save.
She wondered if Severn had felt the way Nightshade did when she had casually offered him the name she had taken from the Lake
for herself.
And she wondered all of this while she worked to fix the things that were broken in Nightshade. The invasive, inimical magic
was so faint that, were it not for the damage it had caused, she wouldn’t have noticed it as foreign. She removed it, eradicating
it as she repaired the injuries it had caused.
Wondering, as she did, what it might have been like to be the Consort, to be the source of so much joy, however brief the
moment in their lives.
The Consort had never stopped trusting Nightshade. She had never stopped believing in what she had seen, what she had known,
that day. He hadn’t seen her since the moment he was ejected from the High Court—not until the regalia. And she had been the same woman, when they had at last crossed paths, that she had been on the day she had offered him the
knowledge of her name.
Nightshade could hide his own thoughts. There was almost nothing she could read that he would not allow. But this knowledge
was poison to the Lady. If it were known, it would damage her in far too many ways. He did not speak to her through the namebond.
He isolated the bond, and the truth of the bond, moving further away from the naivete and idealism of distant youth.
What she had given him he could not keep. But he could never keep it, in the end: she was the heir to the Lake. If not Consort,
she was the Lady, as her mother had been. Her mother, who had not prevented the children from being sacrificed to the green.
His naivete, his idealism, had been all but destroyed when Annarion had been sent to the green—and he had been sent while Nightshade was on the frontlines of the war.
Everything he had done in the long years between that loss and the regalia that had finally brought his brother’s freedom, he had done for the sake of the only family he graced by that word: Annarion.
Annarion, whose sense of rage and pain and betrayal reminded him of the man he had once been. Nightshade had destroyed the
home of his childhood without care; home was, and had been, Annarion.
Kaylin, stop. It wasn’t a command; it was a request.
She wanted to stop. She wanted to withdraw, to give him privacy, to forget everything she’d seen and heard. I’m not done yet. If the source of this affliction was magical in nature, the magic’s still there.
I am capable of diffusing it on my own now.
I’ll be the judge of that.
Then judge, but judge quickly.
When this is over, I’m going to suggest a new course be taught in the Halls of Law. She focused on that. On the existence of magical poison. On its possible use. Something had penetrated skin, which was how
poison generally worked if it wasn’t offered in food. This hadn’t been. Maybe Nightshade was immune to regular poison.
Maybe the poison was a backup in case the war bands failed. And they had.
She understood assassination; she usually understood its motivation. She didn’t understand why an outcaste fieflord was so
important. This was almost foreign.
But the magic that was also foreign lessened as she uprooted it, gathering it around her hand as if it were thread. No healing
had ever been like this. The damage to the organs, she repaired; it was the magic itself that was much, much harder to remove.
But she felt, as she worked, that it was the most important task. She could not leave it spread inside Nightshade’s body,
a fine web waiting for its hungry spider.
Kaylin. Severn’s voice. He added no words, but they weren’t necessary.
She found the last thread—what she assumed was the last thread. If I don’t finish this, they’ll just grow again, she told Nightshade. They’ll spread again. They’ll wrap themselves around your heart, your lungs, your kidneys—and they’ll squeeze.
He should already be dead.
If you’re actually awake, and you believe the magic that almost killed you is so trivial, you can help me eradicate it.