The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (48 page)

Some things were deeper and larger than words. Even, it appeared, some words themselves. As she spoke it to herself for the first time, she saw the name form, and in its broad lower stroke, she saw the currents of ocean, the height of tides, the depth of the still pond in Evanton’s Garden. The shape of the stroke didn’t change; it was bold and clear.

As she repeated the name, the center strokes formed above the lower, broad stroke, and in these, she saw the cold, hard stone of Castle Nightshade; the polished marble of the High Halls; the enduring tower from which the Hawklord ruled. Again, the shape of the stroke didn’t change, but it was almost a window, and it contained—perfectly—some part of her experiences. Across it, vertically, were two more lines. She was not surprised to see that they differed in color and texture from the first two; one was like new fire, and one, like sunlight, and above them both, drifting in a more delicate weight, something that invoked either cloud or smoke.

But the word wasn’t finished; the four strokes that comprised the center were decorated by three central dots, and then a trailing row to one side, and a squiggle to the other. These, too, had texture, but they were opaque to Kaylin; they showed her nothing of either herself or her experiences. Or perhaps she hadn’t had the experiences that would make them clear yet.

Even so, she saw the word as clearly now as she had ever seen another word, and she felt it not quite as her own, but not entirely separate from her. She turned to Severn, and said, “I’m ready.”

He nodded. “Will you stand and wait?”

“Yes. I think—I think Effaron will be able to open the portal. If I had to guess, he’s probably started
something
at the front of the train.” She glanced meaningfully at the hidden marks on her arms. Taking a deep breath she turned her back upon the refugees; even if they moved slowly, their stride was long enough to carry them farther away as she stared into the unchanging gray. Not all of the strangers left, however; four—all men—remained. They were armed, but they held their weapons as if they knew they were only there for comfort.

Drawing a deeper breath, Kaylin opened her mouth and shouted her name into the gray void. Her true name. It sounded, in the distance, like thunder, and it echoed across the whole of the plain as if it were storm.

Come,
she thought, as a wind rose for the first time across the faceless plain.
Come home.

She looked at the gray that contained the roaring of syllables and the thunder of voice, and it looked darker to her eyes. Darker, but not cohesive. “He’s coming,” she told Severn.

Severn, however, was busy. He was untwining the chains of his weapon from its resting place at his waist. “I did try to talk you out of this, didn’t I?” he asked, with a small smile.

She laughed. “What is it that you love about me?”

He froze for just a second, no more. Kaylin felt the hesitation—and the links of the chain—more than she saw them; she was watching as the storm’s eyes suddenly opened. She could see them; they were huge. They scanned the ground—if ground was a word that could be used here—and then stopped as they fell upon her.

“It’s not a rhetorical question,” she continued, as she met those huge and ancient eyes.

“No.” He planted his feet slightly apart, standing behind her. He had her back, here. He always had her back.
I’ll tell you,
he added.
If it’s necessary, I’ll tell you.

She nodded. The gray of the landscape solidified as she watched. She opened her mouth and snapped it shut on whatever stray words were seeking escape as the storm hit.

CHAPTER 27

She held her name. She held the shape of the strokes, long and short, thick and thin, and she held what they contained. They weren’t large enough—the Devourer was
huge.

It rose—and rose, and rose—as it gained substance. No,
substance
was the wrong damn word. It gained something like
shape,
but it was shaped the way glass was: it had form and lines and even something that might suggest texture, but she could still see through it. What she wanted to call black wasn’t a color. It was an absence. It was emptiness given solidity. Even the eyes that met hers, grazing her as if she were a flea, contained that emptiness.

And the desire to fill it, and have peace.

Devourer. Devourer of worlds. How many worlds had died to appease an ancient and endless hunger, to no avail? How many names—of people, of places—had he somehow emptied in his endless quest? And why names? Why words?

As if to answer, her arms and her legs began to ache; the marks on them burned, as if they were being newly branded. She looked down at her arms, and she could see—through the pale cloth—the glowing sigils that she both hated and had learned, with time and experience, to rely on. They were as much a part of her as the name she’d chosen for herself from the Barrani High Halls, and she understood them about as well.

But the Devourer saw them as clearly as she felt them, and the storm—if it was that—grabbed her, lifting her into the air. Or into more gray. There was no wind here, no sun, no earth, no rain; it was empty of everything familiar.

Everything but Severn.

Is this your world?
she thought, although her body was already tensing for physical combat.
Is this the whole of the world you can create for yourself?
Its response was to reach
through
her, as if she were no more real than the rest of the gray. But as it passed through, it touched the weakly moored name she carried, and it froze there for just a second. And then, as if it were a giant hand, it closed.

The word compressed under the pressure of its grip, the lines crowding in on each other and bending into slightly different shapes. Kaylin started to fight this shift, because she’d done it once before, in the Tower of what was now Tiamaris. But…this was different. It
felt
different. The pressure wasn’t attempting to rewrite or revise; it wasn’t changing any meaning. It was gathering and it was as clumsy as a bull might be if it were trying to pick berries.

It didn’t hurt. The name was part of her, but it didn’t sustain who she was. She started to tell Severn as much, but the Devourer spoke again, and this time she could understand what he said.

Where? Where? Where are they? Where am I?

She had no answer to give. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have been able to speak, because the pain started then.

She was only tentatively attached to her true name; her true name was therefore only tentatively attached to her. But what had started as gathering became a type of frenzied unmaking as the Devourer sought to reduce the runic symbol to its component parts. Pain clouded understanding; it always had. What she had prevented herself from doing when the creature had first touched the word, she now struggled to do in earnest: to hold it together, to keep its identity. Strokes and dots just didn’t add up to much without a pattern.

She gave the name its meaning, as she struggled. She found the parts of her that were already part of it, and she brought them forward. She
knew
, if she didn’t think too damn hard, what the shape of the word was. Pain clouded thinking, as well.

But it was ultimately going to be a losing battle; she’d seen it before, and she knew its outcome. She lost focus, lost all sense of the self the name defined—wanted to retreat to a self that it didn’t. But before she could instinctively do so, she heard a familiar voice. Severn was afraid.

He was afraid for her. But his fear was measured, controlled.
You asked me why I love you,
he said, speaking along the bond of her unfamiliar name.
You’ve never asked before.

She bit her lip, tasted blood.
No.

Why?

She didn’t know. Couldn’t—talk about silver linings—think for long enough to answer the question.
I don’t know.
He accepted it. He always accepted it.

You were afraid.

She was always afraid of something. Right now, it was pain. The pain receded and returned in waves as the name dimmed inside of her. Severn’s voice grew softer.
Yes.

He didn’t ask her why, this time.
You were afraid that I loved something I’d made up, something that doesn’t actually exist. That I didn’t—and don’t—see you.

She said nothing.

I see you, Kaylin. You were afraid of what you’d done in Barren. No, afraid that if I knew what you’d done, I’d stop. We’d all stop.

She’d said as much. And he had discovered what she’d done for six months of miserable life when she’d given in entirely to pain and fear.

I’d guessed. I watched you, when you were with the Hawks. I know how they train. Some of the stuff you knew, you didn’t learn from them. But I knew…when you ran…that you might not survive. I tried to find you. I knew what you must have been feeling, and what that might cause. When I first found you, in the Hawks, I watched you. I thought I must have been wrong, or you must have been lucky.

And after?

It didn’t matter. I learned that the choices you make when you aren’t afraid or in pain aren’t that much different than the choices you made when we lived together in Nightshade. This doesn’t mean you’re a child, to me; you
have
changed.

The name was so dim it was almost translucent. Severn knew. His words were more urgent, and they came faster.

You don’t expect people to be what you aren’t. You don’t expect them to give you what you can’t give. You don’t judge them—all right, you do, but you don’t let the judgment form the basis for the rest of your life. Your sense of self-worth isn’t based on a hierarchy of who’s worth less.

What you do have, you give. You always have. You give your time to the midwives. You give your time to the Foundling Halls. You know what it’s like to have nothing, but you don’t make it an excuse to resent anyone else you meet who
has
something.

But she did those things for
herself.
Because the midwives’ guild and the Foundling Halls made
her
happy. She felt as if the name itself was so thin, so slight, she could only barely grasp it.

He grimaced, and he shifted direction.
I love you,
he said,
because you get lost everywhere you go. You’d get lost heading to the change rooms if you didn’t practically live in the Halls. I love you be cause you lose or misplace anything that isn’t actually attached to your person.

I love you because if you can’t be on time to save your job or your life, you
will
be on time to save anyone else’s. I love that you can’t place a smart bet unless you’re lucky.

She almost laughed. She did snort.

I love you because you’re afraid of anything that’s strange or different, but you hate being afraid, so you charge ahead
anyway.
I even love you because you’ve never lost the habit of thinking the future is at most a day away. That has to change,
he added,
because I fully intend that your future will go on for years.

He shook his head.
I love the fact that you live in the moment. I love the fact that when you
do
figure out how wrong you’ve been, you change and you grow. I love that you’re so easily, predictably outraged—by Elani street, by Margot and her stupid sign. I love that you say what you’re thinking.

And I love that you never give up. You suffer setbacks, you find your feet, and you keep moving. It doesn’t matter how impossible something looks. You throw yourself at it, time and again. You give everything you have, and then, when you’ve got nothing left, you find more. Betting doesn’t count.

She did laugh, then.

She laughed, and the pain and the fear slid through her as if it could no longer find purchase. The Devourer stopped speaking. He almost stopped moving; she could sense him; she could
almost
touch him. He was still, on the other hand, an almost amorphous cloud with large eyes.

No, not eyes. They were landscapes. Deserts: sand and snow. Nothing moved in them at all. But they watched her as if they could—for just a moment—see
her.

Severn’s words fell like water in her own personal desert, like the turning of the seasons on snow. She
wanted
them, and knew it. But it was the smaller words, the words that described what she believed about herself that she held on to; the other words were too large, and too intimidating.

But he hadn’t finished.

It doesn’t matter
why
you do it. It doesn’t matter whether or not you do it only for yourself. It’s how what you do affects others, in the end, that counts. I don’t love you because I have the ideal Kaylin—or Elianne—in mind. I don’t love you because I expect you to live up to some vision of perfection. I love the things about you that you don’t see, or don’t love yourself.

You make every place you stop for more than ten minutes a home, Kaylin. I want that. It’s never been my gift. I stop in the doorway, aware of all the ways in which I don’t belong, aware of the ways in which my presence alone could be an interference. You walk in, head straight to the kitchen, start piling up dishes. You ask what has to be done. More often than not, people tell you.

Sometimes what they told her was: get out. She laughed again, but it was rueful. And the Devourer almost shuddered at the sound—because it
was
a sound.

Most people make the Hawks their job, or even the start of their career. You’ve made them family. You live with them. You fight with them. You fight for them. You ignore their foibles as if they were the drunk uncles you can’t get rid of. You don’t know
how
to treat your work
like
work, and you never have. Even when you were thirteen, you tagged along like someone’s younger sister, trying not to get underfoot.