That much she could accept.
She bore the Erenne mark, but she’d always been a fraud. She’d never been his. Would never belong to anyone, even if she grew to love them. History informed his place in herthoughts—near-starvation, cold, cold winters, hunting Ferals, the thugs that intermittently roamed the streets collecting the equivalent of protection money from people who had so little of it.
She learned to live with fear; fear guided her. She could pretend it was caution—but at this remove, there was almost no difference between the two. Nightshade was his fief; his fief was Nightshade. She couldn’t separate them and had never tried. She had accepted the Erenne mark because she’d grown up with no real choices when confronted with people in power.
But she’d refused the High Lord’s offer to remove it.
She wasn’t certain why. She’d felt hesitant; it had been instrumental in saving her life and might in the future. She wasn’t a fiefling anymore. She didn’t have to fear the fieflord and his band of thugs. She genuinely liked Andellen—enough that she was willing to ask the High Lord to allow him to enter the High Halls, even if his oaths were sworn to an outcaste.
Was that all? Was that hesitance just a blend of fear and familiarity and pragmatism? The mark had changed the way the Barrani who served Nightshade treated her. Even if she were still a denizen of the fiefs, that would remain true; it was a form of protection, there. It was probably a red flag in the High Court itself, which would make it far less useful—but she’d managed to avoid the High Halls in her normal life.
The situation with the Lake wasn’t normal. The situation with Nightshade and the Consort wasn’t normal. The inability to interact with the namebond was definitely not normal.
And having Nightshade as an emergency tenant? Not normal, either.
Would she have brought him here at all if it weren’t for Annarion? Would she have gone flying to his rescue—his possible rescue—if Annarion weren’t living with her?
She exhaled.
Yes, she would have run to his rescue. But she would haverun to Andellen’s rescue; she would have run to the cohort’s rescue—and had. She would run as if the hells had been unleashed if Severn were in danger.
What was love, after all? Was it sexual attraction? Was it desire? Possessiveness? Impulse? What did Androsse mean when he said she had to accept the Erenne mark?
She looked at Nightshade. He was breathing, but his breath was shallow. Once he had been the fieflord, a person whose displeasure was almost a guarantee of death. Now he was Annarion’s brother. The Consort’s support from the shadows. But he wasn’t Kaylin’s in any way. She didn’t want him tobehers.
The Ancients had chosen Kaylin. Nightshade had chosen Kaylin. Both had applied marks she didn’t understand to her skin. But she didn’t love the Ancients. She couldn’t know them. Couldn’t communicate with them. They’d chosen and they’d left. Nightshade was an echo of the same thing.
“Serralyn, ask Androsse why the mark could be placed on my cheek at all. I didn’t accept it as an act of communion. I didn’t accept it as anything other than the fieflord’s will. And I spent a lot of my life cursing the fieflord’s will. Is it only the power differential that defines the mark’s placement?”
“Androsse says that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
“I don’t think the Barrani truly know any other way. Present company excepted,” she added.
“Starrante thinks the power differential was possibly the deciding factor. He’s speaking slowly and carefully—Androsse has some history with the Erenne mark, and he’s even touchier than usual.”
Kaylin had no trouble acknowledging that Nightshade was the greater power. Yvonne would be, absent the Marks of the Chosen, the greater power. Barrani were Immortals. They had forever in which to amass knowledge. They were physicallymore naturally fit, immune to the need for sleep; they didn’t even need to eat as often as Kaylin did.
Did she envy them? Yes. On bad days, she envied them a lot. But she wasn’t Barrani. She wasn’t Immortal. She wasn’t born Chosen.
But she was Chosen, now. And she bore the Erenne mark; if it had required communion or permission, it couldn’t have been placed on her cheek without her consent.
Androsse’s advice was impossible to follow. She couldn’t bring to the Erenne mark the emotional resonance the mark had once required. It wasn’t in her. Had she been younger, it might have been. Nightshade’s power, a sign of Nightshade’s favor, was armor. He knew far more than her; he could make decisions that could keep her safe. She would have been far less likely to starve, and far less likely to be Feral food.
But she was no longer a fiefling. She wasn’t that starving, homeless child. She would never be as powerful as Nightshade, but she had chosen to use her power in defense of people who had even less power than she had. The Hawk. She’d chosen the Hawk. She’d chosen to believe—however imperfect they were—that the Imperial Laws were better protection, better foundations, for daily life; that they made it harder for the powerful to prey on the powerless.
That maybe, if the laws were followed and enforced, the powerless would—as Kaylin had—find their power, grow into it, become stronger as themselves.
The Erenne mark was a sign of the imbalance of power, a way for the powerful to coexist with the far less powerful without overwhelming them. Love might have been the motivation for the creation of that binding spell—but it wasn’t a necessary condition. It couldn’t be. How could anyone love what they feared so much?
Kaylin inhaled slowly, as if counting. She exhaled the sameway. She couldn’t touch Nightshade with the power of the Marks of the Chosen; she’d tried. Helen didn’t need to protect her from the namebond—or hide the details of her daily life—because it no longer reached him.
She couldn’t be what the first Erenne had been. She wasn’t an Ancestor. She wasn’t Barrani. She wasn’t Immortal. He hadn’t marked the mortals in his statuary. They’d come to him—they werehappyto spend their lives waiting, untouched by time—and they’d given everything.
She couldn’t.
But if she could have, he’d never have placed that mark on her cheek.
In return, he’d offered her his True Name. She’d never tried to command Nightshade with the power of that name, and she never would. Partly because she was certain to lose any contest of will.