Cast In Fury (43 page)

And all around the Leontine, black and misty, shadows twisted, forming symbols that her movement swept aside. She was staring at Kaylin, and she didn’t so much turn as…shift in place, her face emerging, always, in Kaylin’s direction.

Orogrim had launched himself into—and almost through—Nightshade’s guard. More than that, Kaylin couldn’t risk watching. She understood what Nightshade’s death here would mean: the fief would be without its Lord. And without its Lord, she very much doubted that the
other
Dragon would stay so obligingly out of the fight.

If he was. She could hear the rumble of his voice, the forced play of syllables muted by Tiamaris’s roar. The Imperial Dragon’s wings were edged in shadow—or blood—but he didn’t take to the skies. That he could wasn’t in question—that he didn’t said something about the nature of boundaries.

But if he hadn’t been here, they’d be dead. All of them. It made her wonder how there were enough Barrani left standing for
three
Draco-Barrani wars. She had taken two deep gouges—fast, clean cuts, like knife wounds. She was certain she’d done worse in return, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did. They couldn’t carve their way through the two Leontines—it was like trying to cut water. They
flowed
back into shape, no matter what you hit them with.

This
was what the Dragons feared.
This
was why Sanabalis was perfectly willing to kill an infant. She saw it clearly, understood it perfectly. The fear. The truth of the fear.

What had Sanabalis said, that day the Leontines had flocked to him as if they were obedient puppies? What had he told them?

She dodged, pivoting and lifting her arms as the Leontine sailed past, caught by gravity and momentum. She heard the heavy landing, saw it, was already off her feet and rolling along the ground. She felt the slice of claws cut her cheek, was grateful it wasn’t her forehead. She wasn’t wearing anything that could absorb the blood fast enough; it would fall right into her eyes, and she couldn’t afford that. Not and survive.

Kaylin!

She couldn’t look, couldn’t take her eyes off the Leontine. But she could listen, and above the sound of blade against claw and flesh, louder than the forced grunt of breathing and exertion, she heard the howls on the wind.

Ferals.

But worse, far worse, was the answering howl that left two Leontine throats in unison. The Leontines were talking to the Ferals. And the Ferals, Kaylin knew, were listening.

She needed to
think.
But she also needed to be alive to do that. And the Leontines weren’t tiring, or if they were, it didn’t slow them at all. Kaylin, on the other hand, was human. She could keep this up for another ten minutes, twenty—but her movements would lose edge and speed, would eventually slow just enough that there wouldn’t be any more movement.

How many,
she thought.
How many Leontines will hear what you hear and be changed the way you’re changed?

How many more would it take? These two, she thought, were enough. Even the Swords would have trouble containing them; they’d cut their way through Elantra, riding on the fear their presence evoked.

Her whole body ached now.

She turned just a little bit too slowly, and a claw passed through her upper arm, skidding across bone. She bit back a cry as Severn’s blade came down across the arm the Leontine had extended to cause the injury.

The massive jaws of Tiamaris snapped in the air as the Leontine melted away.

It would be back, and in the meantime, she was losing a lot of blood. She grimaced, standing as Severn glanced at her. He couldn’t put up his blade to bind the wound.

But he didn’t have to. Because the pain had cleared her mind, shutting down fear, panic, the possibilities of a future that might never arrive.

She dropped a dagger into its sheath and, clutching her arm, steadied herself.

What had she said to Sanabalis?

I’ll tell them a different story.

She wanted to close her eyes or plug her ears; it was hard enough to tell a story without the certainty of an audience. She did neither; she needed to see. Because she could—the shadows that were both dense and diffuse around both Leontines had begun to make sense: They were words. Something, someone, was telling them a story, just as Sanabalis had done when he had visited the Leontine Quarter. It was a different story, and the words were harsher and more frightening—but in the end? Words.

Like the words that were written across half of her skin. She didn’t understand them; she never had. But she owned them. And knowing this, she used them now.

“Marai!”

A name. Just a name, a mortal conceit given to a living, breathing infant. Not a name in the Barrani sense, or the Dragon sense; nothing that was required to
give
life, or to sustain it. A Leontine name was
not
a soul—if you believed in souls, and if you believed that Barrani and Dragonkind possessed them.

But it was something that you grew into, and in the end, it was part of what you chose to become.

“Marai, listen to me.”

The great, dense shadow that was half Leontine, half beast, and a menagerie of things in between, stopped. Just—stopped. And then its—no, her—great head turned, and a growling started behind a row of teeth that looked like it belonged in a dozen animals at that same time.

The Ferals were on the border now, and then, just as the Leontines, across it. Tiamaris breathed on them. She heard their howls of pain and fury—more fury, really—before she let her attention shift. They were, for once, someone else’s problem.

Marai’s body was already angled toward Kaylin, and the arm that Severn had lopped off had already reasserted its existence. Her claws were as long as swords now, but they suited the cast of her hands, which were also grotesquely large.

What did she know about Marai?

Almost nothing. She faltered, and the Leontine crouched, gathering to leap. “Severn, no,” she shouted, but it came out in a whisper, in a sound so thin she couldn’t even be certain it was heard; she could hardly hear it herself.

She could hear, more clearly, the keening of
Meliannos,
and wondered how in the hells she’d missed it the first time she’d seen it in Nightshade’s hand.

She could hear, much more clearly, the syllables of Nightshade’s true name, and she knew damn well she hadn’t tried to say
that.
Louder still, distinct and deadly, the syllables of Makuron’s name, the name Nightshade had guessed that she knew. She did.

But it was so long, so complicated, so terrifyingly dense, she couldn’t have spoken it had she tried—it would be like trying to read the whole of Rennick’s play out loud in a single breath.

And blending with these things, the syllables, the tone, the texture of the name she had taken for herself in the halls of the High Court, where the Barrani were given life. She did not speak this, either.

She spoke Marai’s name again, but the speaking felt wrong; she knew what she was trying to say. What she said she couldn’t even hear.

But Marai did. Around her, like a shroud, the strokes and lines of something that might be language to gods, grew sharper and harsher. The misty quality, the smudged movement, was gone. Those words, Kaylin thought, were speaking. No, that wasn’t right. But it would have to do.

She wished, briefly and uselessly, that she had asked Sanabalis what the story of the Leontine origin actually was. Not the gist of it, but the words. Because she had Marai’s attention, and in the space of at least two minutes, that attention was not focused on ending her life as quickly as possible.

“Marai,” she said again. And then, taking a breath, giving up any attempt to force her lips to conform to what she
thought
she was saying, she added, “You were loved.” Because that felt right, to her.

“Loved?”
Orogrim’s harsh voice. What she had said to Marai, he had heard. It had stilled him in the same fashion, but the eyes he turned on Kaylin—not Leontine eyes, not even close—were burning like Dragon fury.

She risked a glance at Nightshade. Saw that he was bleeding, that his perfect skin had taken gashes. But his expression was neutral, and he met Kaylin’s glance and offered the slightest of nods.

“Yes,” Kaylin replied.

“We were almost destroyed at birth,” he snarled. “And we are
hunted
now by those who would destroy us. What love in that?”

But she shook her head. Her hair was matted and sticky, and the movement was graceless. She could feel the whole of her arms, her back, her thighs, throbbing as if the skin had been peeled back and everything beneath it lay exposed to air.

“When the Leontines were created,” she said softly, “they were loved.”

His snarl matched his eyes. He tensed to leap, and Marai lifted one of those misshapen hands in warning. Her eyes were the color of night—a quiet, cloudless night.

“They will kill us,” she said, speaking for the first time. Sibilance in the phrase, hissing that cut the ear, as if hearing it were exposing a vulnerability.

Kaylin ignored the comment, but it was hard. It had always been hard to ignore the truth. “But the Old Ones didn’t understand their creations. They had hopes for their future. Maybe plans—I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” She hesitated and then said, “We birth children, and we love them, but we
don’t
know them. We don’t know who they are because they’re almost not anything. They’re helpless, and we protect them with everything—
everything
—we have. But we have to wait, to see who they are, who they’ll become, what their choices will be.”

“They feared us,” Orogrim said coldly. He was inching closer to Marai, and his lips were moving. As they did, the Shadows tightened, and Marai’s form shifted.

“Yes,” Kaylin said quietly. Her voice stilled the shifting. The word felt Elantran—but wasn’t. “They did. Look at yourselves. Tell me that they were wrong. Tell me that you don’t intend to kill us. Tell me that you won’t leave the fiefs and return to your people and kill those who will not follow you.

“We’re mortal. We
know
death when we see it.” Most of the time. “We fear it, and we kill before we can be killed. It’s ugly, but it’s what it is. The Leontines were loved,” she continued.

“And we are not Leontine?” Marai asked.

“You were not killed,” Kaylin replied softly. “You were not hunted.”

“They would kill my son.”

And those were the magic words, Kaylin thought. “No,” she replied. “Not while I live, they won’t. I gave you my word, Marai. Whether or not I now regret it doesn’t
matter.
He is
not
what you now are. And I will do everything in my power to make sure he
never
becomes it.

“Is this what you wish for him?” Kaylin said. “Look at yourself. You’re covered in blood—some of it mine, some of it—” she gestured widely “—theirs. Is this what you want for Roshan?”

“I want his survival,” Marai said. Her voice changed as she spoke, becoming almost familiar. “And I will do anything, as you said, anything at all, to ensure that.”

“He will be powerful,” Orogrim told her. “We will tell him the truth, and he will be free.”

“To do what?” Kaylin countered. “To live in the Shadows? To kill his kin?”

“I…have…not…killed my kin,” Marai replied. Her face was changing now, the fur paling, the fangs receding into the shrinking line of her mouth.

“Orogrim has,” Kaylin said. And then she stopped because her brain had caught up with her mouth. And she understood, finally, what the tainted meant. What they could do. “Marcus’s friend. You never met him—”

“I met him,” Marai told her slowly.

“But he’s—”

“I have no Pridlea. I met him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Marcus killed him.”

“No, Marai—he was dead before he met Marcus.”

“He
was not dead.
”

“What’s life?” Kaylin said urgently. She felt Severn’s restless movement.
Yes,
she snapped, along the invisible line that bound them,
I know this is not the time for a philosophical discussion. I have a point, and this is the only way to make it.

She felt the odd shape of his smile, his half smile. It caught her by surprise, but…she clung to the feel of it anyway.

“Marai, what does
life
mean? Everything that the Elder knew or believed, everything he loved—all the stupid things, all the smart ones, all the ugly and beautiful moments—they were wiped away entirely by Orogrim’s words. The words weren’t strong; they weren’t spoken here, at the heart of the oldest of the Shadows. But they were strong enough. His body still moved, his mouth still spoke—but everything that made him what he was, like or hate it—was destroyed.”

“That will not happen to our son,” Orogrim told Marai. “You know this to be true.”

“No, it won’t. That’s what makes you special,” Kaylin said. “It’s not the taint. It’s the fact that, in the end, with enough power behind him, Orogrim’s son could remake the whole of your race. It wouldn’t be Leontine anymore, but it
wasn’t
Leontine to start with. Your people—your sister—would be as different from Leontines as the Leontines were from the animals out of which the Old Ones made them.

“And they wouldn’t have much choice,” Kaylin added. “But
you
do. Your son will. Orogrim does.”

“They feared rivals.”

“No,” Kaylin said wearily. “They feared the loss of what they’d brought to life. Not more, not less. But life is unpredictable. There are those born who can not only hear the words, even if they don’t understand them. They can
use
them.”

Kaylin took a deep breath.

And as she did, Makuron the Outcaste cried out in fury, his wings expanding in the darkness. Black fire filled the sky, and even before it lifted, she saw that he had crossed the border.

Orogrim smiled. Nothing about him had changed. The prominent jut of too many fangs glistened. But Marai hesitated. She stood in the light of the moons, one just shy of full, the other a perfect, silver circle.