“Now, you face it.” Kaylin heard thunder in her voice.
Lightning followed.
* * *
The wings of the outcaste were not wings: they were Shadow. They were a Shadow whose shape, whose form, he obviously controlled. Those wings snapped up, folding as lightning streaked past him. His hair flew in its aftermath; his eyes were the color of light.
Kaylin’s arms and legs were glowing, bright; symbols rose to ring her. They encompassed Moran, as well. Moran didn’t appear to notice.
The outcaste didn’t, either. Kaylin was irrelevant to both of them. The small dragon—and he was small now, and attached to her left shoulder—squawked and lifted his wing.
Kaylin shook her head.
He smacked the bridge of her nose, hard enough her eyes smarted. She blinked back tears and looked through the translucent flap. The outcaste’s wings were Shadow—which she’d expected. She expected the rest of him to somehow conform to that. Hewasn’tAerian. He wasn’t mortal.
He wasn’t a Dragon, either.
Shadow had a multiplicity of forms, or a lack of form; it shifted in place. It was malleable in some fashion, and that fashion differed from creature to creature. There were one-offs—as they were called in the fiefs—who could have multiple jaws, eyes, legs; they might have horns or wings that didn’t provide flight. They looked like bodies that had been randomly chopped up and stitched together, except that they moved and spoke.
Sometimes they spoke intelligibly.
Had the outcaste looked like a one-off, Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised.
He looked instead like a...god. Like an Ancient.
She froze in place, almost afraid to attract his attention; she could see nothing else of significance in the sky, where she floated beside Moran. She could see nothing of significance anywhere else, either.
He was there, and that was all that mattered.
He frowned, his glance sliding momentarily off Moran to meet Kaylin’s gaze. She drew breath, but she had no words. She could see his name.
She could see his name and she knew that she was not seeing the whole of it; that she might look at it, study it, for a lifetime and still not see enough of it to attempt to speak it. She knew that even the attempt would end in her death, because the attempt seemed profane.
And she knew that this name was not the one she had seen in the fief of Nightshade. It was not the same shape. It didn’t have the same weight. It was, in its entirety, too large. She thought it might be the name of a world, shrouded as it was in Shadow and darkness.
His eyes were words. She had seen them as trapped lightning without the small dragon’s wings; she saw them differently now. She almost raised a hand to push the small dragon’s wing away, but she had enough of his attention, and she was determined to do nothing at all that would attract more of it.
But his eyes narrowed—or the shape of them changed—as he looked down on her. And he did look down. It wasn’t a figurative description. He frowned; she felt instantly ashamed of whatever it was she had done to earn it, too. The rest of her anger at this reaction tried to assert itself and failed.
He held out a hand, the movement jerky; it was both a command and a struggle.Chosen.
She started to move. She started to obey, and she struggled to regain control of herself, of her visceral reactions.
* * *
Moran slid an arm around her shoulder, and the impulse died. Kaylin reached up and shoved the familiar’s wing away from her face, almost dislodging him. Her shoulder, in case of magic and its possible offensive use, was exactly where she wanted him to be—but not if she had to look at the outcaste. Not that way.
This way, he looked Aerian. This way, he looked like an enemy, an arrogant, powerful man. This way, she could fight him, despise him, pity him or hate him, because all of these things seemed relevant.
She didn’t know what Moran saw when she looked at the outcaste, but it didn’t matter. As soon as Moran placed that arm across Kaylin’s shoulder, Kaylin was in Moran’s space, and Moran’s space was the Aerie and everything that comprised it: the sky, the caves, thepeople.
Flight and its power here were thepraevolo’s.
Thepraevolodid what she’d been born to do: She denied the outcaste flight.
* * *
Or she tried.