30 #2
“Helen, I need you to ask Terrano—privately—if the created space our enemies are using can be safely collapsed. Is he standing
in it, now? Are any of the cohort?”
“Only Fallessian, Teela, and Severn,” Helen replied. “Everyone else is outside its perimeter. There is a danger to standing in that space for any length of time; we’ve tried to get Fallessian to withdraw.”
Tried implied both attempt and failure.
“Why is it safer for Teela and Severn?”
“They’re older.”
Severn was certainly not older than Fallessian.
“They are more fixed in themselves. They have made choices, and those choices have helped them define who they are and who
they must be. They are not immune to change—but they are less easily altered.”
The same could be said of Nightshade, and that hadn’t saved him.
“He was not fighting on that path.”
“If Severn can get Teela and Fallessian to leave, can we collapse the space?”
“Terrano believes it can be done.”
“But he thinks it’s a bad idea.”
“None of us understand how that space came into being,” Helen replied. “We exist as one plane, one facet, of the creations
of the Ancients when they walked both this plane and all the others. Those planes overlapped, and some of their creations
lived in a way that bridged them. In the deep planes of the world, sentiences that you will never encounter made their homes
and built their civilizations. Terrano is, of the cohort, the most unanchored. He knows what he can navigate and what he can’t;
he can alter his physical form to obey the laws of the planes into which he steps.
“This, he says, is entirely unlike that. It’s like an artificial tree, not a natural one. Those unfamiliar with trees might
consider them identical. The path can accommodate Barrani who can’t do what Terrano or the cohort can do. They haven’t shifted
in place at all; they are physically as present as Nightshade or An’Tellarus. He believes they will perish; he is, he says,
fine with that.
“But he feels there’s a danger. It’s the danger that flows in the wake of destroying a very large glass window.
It’s very difficult to crack a window and remove pieces of that glass safely.
He can’t think of a way to subtly collapse the space, and that means detritus.
He can’t say for certain that detritus won’t be harmful. ”
“If we can collapse the space and kill them all,” Kaylin said, “they’ll think twice about ever trying this particular method
of invasion again.”
“They are likely to be dead.”
“The people in charge almost never risk their own lives.” She thought of the attack on the Academia. “Can Terrano collapse
it, though?”
“He says no.”
Meaning he’d tried. She doubted he was fighting alongside the cohort members who could really handle a weapon.
“He thinks you might be able to do it.”
“Did he happen to give you any clues as to how?” Kaylin didn’t try to keep irritation out of her voice; it was better than
panic.
“No, dear. He said you figure it out.” That sounded more like Terrano.
But she had managed to reach Nightshade. The magic in his body, the magic that had attempted to destroy his insides, was part
of this other space, this other plane. It was part of the Shadow that had attempted to do the same thing—she was certain of
that now—to Terrano.
But Terrano hadn’t been where Nightshade was; he’d been on that narrow constructed path—and he hadn’t moved off it until Kaylin
had reached him. That meant within the path, the Shadow that divided Nightshade and Kaylin—or the Consort and the Lake—didn’t have that effect. No, she was
sure it was more complicated. Terrano could talk to the cohort on that path; he could talk to Serralyn from it.
She stopped. That wasn’t important right now.
Something she had done had allowed Nightshade to return to what passed for normal for a centuries-old fieflord who also wielded
one of The Three. Something.
The Yvonnes had followed Kaylin into the very large, cavernous room, with its rough stone walls and its uneven floor. She
couldn’t see their feet at all—if ghosts of this nature even had feet. But she was afraid that they did; she could see ankles. The feet rested below the surface of the stone. This was where
Helen was both her strongest and her most vulnerable. This was the seat of her power.
If the Yvonnes noticed, it didn’t show. But they stopped at the edge of the circular formation that contained True Words,
and as Kaylin watched, they spread out around that circle and then lifted their arms. They locked hands.
Kaylin was on the inside. The Yvonnes were positioned to look inward, not out.
“I don’t think I can do this from here,” Kaylin said. “I’m not in contact with anything.”
“You are carrying something in your hand. Hope can sense it; I cannot. But I am aware of what you can see. What do you carry,
Kaylin?” Helen’s question was gentle and measured, as if it had been asked in a classroom and not an emergency.
“I don’t know.” But she held the orb up. The threads that had been pulled from Nightshade—the threads that had spread throughout
his comatose body—had been absorbed by the orb; it looked the same as it had looked when she had first taken it from wherever
it was Terrano had been.
But she’d never seen it in this house. She’d never seen it, as she did her Marks, with her eyes closed. She hadn’t seen it—before—through
Hope’s wing. Something had changed, or was changing, and it was happening here, where Helen was the most vulnerable.
She held the orb up, and saw, as she did, that the eyes of the Yvonnes followed it.
They could see what she held. But in their eyes, the reflection of that orb was much, much brighter; it changed the color of their eyes.
It changed the pallor of their skin. Ghostly skin seemed to gain the warmth of flesh tones that had been absent, as if their Barrani roots were reasserting themselves.
Mrs. Erickson had seen them as ghosts—as ghostly ghosts, which the dead didn’t look like most of the time. Maybe that was
because they weren’t actually dead. Maybe it was because they’d never been alive. Yvonne herself was alive. The many Yvonnes
had, according to Severn, been surrounding the real Yvonne without harming her.
They would have hurt Severn if he’d allowed it. If they had appeared to be Yvonne, they weren’t. They’d taken her form, her
shape, for reasons that weren’t clear to Severn. If he didn’t understand it, Kaylin wasn’t going to—not right now. But he
had found Yvonne, found the many Yvonnes, in the heart of the green, in a place even the most respected of the Wardens had
never seen. They were Shadows to Severn. No one who grew up in the fiefs thought of Shadow as anything but death.
Not all Shadows were death. Kaylin knew that. If these Shadows, these ghosts, these Yvonnes had existed to guard and protect
the Yvonne who was in Nightshade’s guest room, they couldn’t be enemies.
She felt Nightshade’s brief flash of anger. She hadn’t really missed that. But he could lecture her later.
If you survive. If Helen does.
Definitely angry. Or disgusted. Sometimes it was hard to separate the two.
She exhaled. As the orb remained in her uplifted palm, the Yvonnes continued to stare at it. None of them blinked. Even if
their eyes had been normal Barrani eyes in appearance, the lack of any blinking would have been disturbing.
But not so disturbing as what happened next: all of the Yvonnes opened their mouths, as if they were part of a harmonious choir.
No words emerged, no song, no harmony; it was a storm of sound, syllables, notes, oral textures, overlapping and crashing into each other.
Kaylin would have lifted her hands to cover her ears if one of them hadn’t been occupied.
The orb in her hand began to vibrate as the sound of the Yvonnes touched it, coming from all directions. It began to wobble
as if it were an egg. Kaylin almost dropped it in her shock.
Squawk!
“I don’t want something to hatch!”
Squawk. Squawk.
She would have argued. Opened her mouth and drew breath to do exactly that. But the sound of cracking stone filled any small
space left between the sounds of the Yvonnes.
Helen cried out a warning in a language that felt like a physical blow. The Yvonnes replied in actual concert, the cacophony
of different sounds blending and cohering into one extended cry. Kaylin’s Marks, suspended above her skin, began to lose their
gold, as if the power at their core had cracked the surface of their shapes to reveal what lay within them.
She’d never seen the Marks like this before. Couldn’t tell if it was in response to the Yvonnes or Helen’s warning.
None of the cohort entered this room. None of the guests did, either. But something had broken the floor just ahead of where
Kaylin stood; she could see the crack clearly; beneath it was darkness. She knew the stones with engraved True Words were
just an appearance. But as the crack began to expand, she wondered what would happen if the stones themselves broke; the crack
had appeared between words.
She’ll die, Severn said, the words sharp with worry.
We can’t come to you. He wanted her to leave; she felt that clearly—as if he’d spoken the actual words.
But he knew she couldn’t. She understood that no one else would come to her rescue—or Helen’s, more importantly—here; they couldn’t reach the space that Kaylin now occupied.
The only person in residence who could was Kaylin.
Kaylin, and whatever it was that caused these cracks to form.
She looked to the Yvonnes as the Marks of the Chosen grew larger. Although they weren’t attached to her skin at the moment,
she felt their weight, their feverish heat; she would have closed her eyes if she thought it would help; she squinted instead.
The light was so bright, the dim Yvonnes could only barely be seen.
But the orb in her hand remained visible, blocking light, quivering with sound.
“Hope—tell me that this isn’t some kind of weird egg.”
Hope said nothing.