He dropped five feet, maybe ten, but the grip of gravity faltered. He had called himselfpraevolo. Aerians—some Aerians—had believed him. Since he didn’t have the wings, he had to have had something that would convince them of the truth of his claim.
He halted his own downward progress. Looking up at Moran—and he had to look up—he smiled. Kaylin braced herself as he opened his mouth.
He didn’t breathe. He spoke.
The marks that now hovered above her skin began to glow. This wasn’t unusual. But Kaylin could understand, or could at least recognize, the language the outcaste spoke.
He was reading the words.Herwords.
* * *
The familiar’s claws pierced her shoulders. She knew this only because she felt the pain that followed the clean incisions, and turned to glare at him. And froze.
What was seated on her shoulder should have broken it, it was so large. She knew the familiar could change size and shape, she’d seen it often enough. But this shape was not the large, translucent Dragon. Nor was it almost Aerian. It was disturbingly cloud-like. She had seen Shadow coalesce in just this way: it had edges and distinct shapes that seemed to be clashing against each other, as if for dominance, and none of those shapes made sense.
She had never seen it in her familiar before.
The words rose as the outcaste continued to intone them. As if they were somehow his. As if what she had seen through the wing of the familiar was true. And if it was? If he was somehow an Ancient, a thing that spawned whole worlds? These were his words. This was his language. It had been written across more than half her body without her permission.
The words had never been hers. She was Chosen, yes—to carry them, to bear them. She only barely understood their use.
She felt the lull of his voice, the odd rightness of it. These were his words.
But the pain in her shoulder grew sharper and colder, and the thing that now inhabited the left of her body, the right being occupied by Moran, grew darker. There were colors in that deepening haze, and those grew brighter. No,brighterwas the wrong word. They felt lurid, out of place; they made light disturbing.
She reached up to pull the claws out, but there were no claws. Of course there weren’t. There was Shadow, and it threatened to spread the way the other Shadow had.
“Let go of me,” she told her familiar, speaking an Elantran so thick it was practically inaudible.
I am yours. She felt the words; she shuddered with them. She couldn’t hear them otherwise.
She wanted to deny it, but it had been true since the moment she’d been handed an egg by a justifiably shattered parent. It had been true since he’d hatched. He had tested her, and that had caused pain—but not this pain. Not this fear.
He spoke.
The outcaste spoke.
She realized only slowly that they were saying the same thing. The words flared; they grew larger as they detached themselves.
The outcaste turned from Moran to Kaylin. “Chosen,” he said. He repeated the single word, and Kaylin realized that it wasn’t what he was saying. It was what she was hearing. True Words.
No, the familiar said. It was denial. It was the heart of denial, the visceral meaning of it. But it was not spoken in rage or fear. It was a word. It was a True Word.
She closed her eyes, and this was a mistake. The words that surrounded her—words that usually took up residence on her skin, as part of it—were still visible. They’d always been visible when she closed her eyes.
But the outcaste was visible in the same way. The familiar’s presence was more profoundly wrong. She looked away. There was no ground beneath her feet, and no Aerian beside her.
No, therewasan Aerian beside her. Moran, as translucent as the small dragon usually was, remained to her right, her wings luminous, her eyes the color of sunlight on water. The Shadows surrounded her flight feathers, her hands, her arms, but they weren’t part of what she was.
She was Aerian.
And she turned to Kaylin, and said, in Aerian, “What’s wrong?” In a very familiar, very sergeant-like tone. Kaylin wanted to weep with relief at the sound of it. Things had gone to hell, but Moran was still sergeant to Kaylin’s private.
“The outcaste is reading my marks.”
“Will reading them give him control over them?”
Would it? That was Kaylin’s fear. She knew the marks had power. They gave her the power to heal. They gave her the ability to stand where she was standing now, neither here nor there, but in both places at the same time. The only times she had chosen to use the words deliberately, she had struggled to divine their meaning, because without meaning, she couldn’t find the place they were meant to be.