This Erenne mark drew no power from Kaylin. All of the power that sustained it must come from Nightshade himself.
She could, with effort, follow the trace of magic that led from her mark to the man who had placed it there—but it was hard work, and it required intense focus. Noise broke that focus. Light broke it. Even the Marks of the Chosen were a disruption. Thinking that, she noted the golden glow of the Marks diminished as if responding to her irritable thought. It left the darkness behind closed lids.
It left a single, very dim light, so faint it might be an illusion brought about by her need to see it. The color was odd. The Marks of the Chosen were often gold—a warm gold—or blue; they were sometimes a haze of white light in which individual words blurred. This was a green-tinged ivory; it reminded Kaylin of the green.
Even thinking of it, she felt the movement of words, the impulse of story—something yet to be given voice but building as if it were a gathering storm.
Nightshade couldn’t tell the story, but the story needed to be told. That was the power of, the demand of, the green—something that existed without the need for True Words, although True Words were spoken during theregalia. The words, Kaylin thought, were offered by the Teller and the harmoniste—the green had no easy way of communicating with anyone else.
She could see Yvonne, ghostly and pale, images of her face overlapping. She couldn’t see anyone else because her eyes were closed. Even her Marks were visually silent.
But the green thread that led from the Erenne mark, so slender it evoked spiders and other things Kaylin often found pointlessly disturbing, continued past Yvonne. Through her. Had she moved? She’d been standing in the corner.
She hasn’t moved, Severn said.
Kaylin felt her shoulders relax at the sound of that voice.But the thread doesn’t seem to be going to where Nightshade is.
Follow it. Follow it for as long as you can.
Kaylin nodded. She expected to lose that thread as it passed through Yvonne; she hadn’t expected that these blurred, overlapping images would suddenly separate as she approached. She moved toward them, wondering if her body was moving, too.
No.
Can you hear voices?
No.
They’re not quite voices. I can’t hear words. It’s more like the murmurs of a crowd.As she moved, she added,There’stoo much low-level noise to hear individual words.She exhaled.I can’t tell the mood of the crowd.
She’d seen mobs form, crowds transforming, through fear and anger, into something dangerous and unpredictable.
Severn wanted to join her.Is the noise directional?
She shook her head. Frowned.It’s louder in the distance—behind me.She could hear, absurdly, the sound of a sword being drawn. It wasn’t Severn’s.
No. It’s Teela. Helen was right: there are intruders. Fallessian has let Terrano go, if you hear a second sword. The third is Sedarias.He hesitated, which was unusual when things were starting to heat up.The fourth is An’Tellarus.
Kaylin didn’t understand why swords had to be drawn. They were all standing within Helen’s perimeter. Nothing should be able to make it into the manse itself. But Helen had mentioned a possible avenue of attack.
Kaylin was already in a state of heightened tension; she knew time was rapidly evaporating. And she knew that the slender thread she could barely see was the answer, if she could follow it through to its end. An end that should be Nightshade, except it was going in the wrong direction.
Or maybe the power of the Erenne mark wasn’t derived entirely in the space in which people mostly lived. Maybe the thread that ran from Kaylin to Nightshade passed through something else. Given Yvonne’s presence, and the Teller’s Crown, and the dress—which she’d stupidly worn to impress An’Tellarus—Kaylin could guess what that something was.
She did what she always did when nothing made sense: she kept moving forward. Moving was better than fear. Anything was better than fear.
Even the ghostly Yvonnes in their multiple forms were better, although she sucked in air when they began to separate, each copy a perfect representation of the Yvonne that Kaylin had met in the real world. Their eyes were flat, though; they lacked pupils. Their color was a muted shade of green—like forest green, if forests were dark with lack of sunlight.
Those eyes were turned toward her, and they moved as she moved, although they reflected nothing. But the Yvonnes stood to either side of the slender thread, as if they were human walls meant to protect it and to emphasize its existence. Their mouths moved as if they were speaking, and sound emerged—but it was wordless, almost keening, although their expressions were placid, even neutral.
Severn said there had been multiple Yvonnes when he’d found her—Shadow Yvonnes. If these were somehow the Yvonnes he had destroyed to reach the real Barrani woman, Kaylin shouldn’t trust them. But they had been in the green. They had been, according to Severn, the test of the weapon he now bore.
Had the green made guardians of them?
Had they somehow remained, nebulous and unseen by all save Mrs. Erickson, as guardians of Yvonne? Why were they here at all?
They didn’t move as she approached them; they didn’t move as she passed by, following the barely visible thread of power that flowed from the Erenne mark to an unseen destination. She could hear steel clash as it struck steel. Her arms began the slow burn that announced the unwanted presence of magic.
The magic of the green had never affected her that way. Nightshade’s mark hadn’t, either. She froze for one moment, and everything wavered: the many Yvonnes, the absence of light in the Marks of the Chosen, and the slender thread that was still, somehow, attached to her.