Before Kaylin could react, those tendrils shot out as if they were quarrels; they hit not Kaylin but the orb in her hand. Theorb around which the poison that had almost killed Nightshade was twined. The orb that had been Shadow until Hope had chosen to breathe on it. They struck the orb with force; had they not come from all the Yvonnes, the orb would have gone flying from her hand. But all the Yvonnes had done this, and they had been spread in a perfect circle around the area that Kaylin needed to protect.
The orb began to glow—ifglowwas the right word; it darkened, but a nimbus of light surrounded that darkness. Kaylin recognized the color: it was the same as the Marks of the Chosen. Around the orb, those Marks began to rotate, as if the orb, not Kaylin, were their anchor.
What was more disturbing was the Yvonnes. They began to lose form, cohesion, shape, as if the tendrils were their insides, and those insides were being emptied. The orb absorbed it all. Kaylin shouted at the Yvonnes. She told them to stop—not for her sake, but for theirs. As if they were actually people. As if they were sacrificing themselves needlessly.
They couldn’t hear, or maybe it was more than that: her words, her concern, made no sense to them. Mrs. Erickson hadn’t seen them as people the way she did the other dead—even the ghosts Kaylin saw as words. She probably couldn’t converse with them. She certainly couldn’t command them if they couldn’t understand or interact with her.
But this was the first thing they had done that felt like a deliberate sacrifice of literally all that they were: there was no coming back from this.
Severn understood. He didn’t argue with her—but he was too pressed by Barrani invaders. He’d adjusted well to the space—probably better than Kaylin had. She wondered if it had something to do with his weapon, because he wielded it fully; the chains were unwound, one blade in hand and one spinning, a wall of metal with gaps for air and blood.
Helen said there were two forces attempting to take root inher domain. One of them must be the green. The other, the Barrani Shadow. Kaylin wore the harmoniste’s dress. Yvonne had come from the green. The green had sent Yvonne to the shores of the Lake of Life.
Kaylin felt cold as the orb in her palm suddenly froze in place; white spread from its surface as if emerging from the roiling mass of Shadows it had drawn in. The shape of the orb remained round, but the surface, glowing brightly, looked like an opal—a white opal. Even as she watched, she understood that it was becoming an egg. An egg that shouldn’t hatch.
But it would; as the last of the Shadows that had erupted from the circle of Yvonnes disappeared, the orb began to tremble. It might have been because Kaylin’s hand was no longer steady; the ground was trembling, and cracks were spreading. She frowned even as she squinted; the Marks of the Chosen had not returned to her arm. But those that remained on her skin were the same overly harsh white.
She knelt.
She placed her free palm against the trembling, cracking stone. What she could not initially do for Nightshade, she could do for Helen. Helen was injured. Kaylin was a healer. She didn’t know if the healing originated in the Marks of the Chosen, as she’d assumed; the Arbiters’ research implied that healing existed—if rarely—without the Marks.
But she could use the power of the Marks to heal Barrani, Dragons, and mortals. Children. Adults. People with injuries that would otherwise be fatal. Helen was a sentient building—but she was aperson. She was a person Kaylin had grown to love; she’d always trusted her.
Helen was home. But home wasn’t something that existed in isolation. Home was built of more than a single person. If Helen was Kaylin’s home, Kaylin was Helen’s—for now, for as long as she survived. It was because of Helen that Kaylin could offer the cohort safe homes, could house Bellusdeo when theBarrani High Court wanted her dead. It was because of Helen that Mrs. Erickson had a home, when her dead children had been so afraid of leaving her alone.
Helen could not die here. Yes, Helen had attacked her own core in the distant past. She’d injured herself, broken the threads that kept her memories intact. Kaylin began to push the healing power of the Marks into Helen’s stone floor. She didn’t ask Helen’s permission; Helen made no attempt to deny her. They were a home built of two people, and Kaylin’s attempt to protect her home was wanted, needed.
But the power that flowed into the heart of Helen flowed, at the same time, into the orb.
The bright, harsh glow of the floating Marks faded—as did the Marks themselves; she couldn’t tell whether or not they’d returned to her skin, and didn’t have time to check. She could feel something push back against the healing itself; it almost reminded her of Nightshade’s body and the roots spread throughout it.
“Terrano asks that you continue what you’re doing. Whatever it is.”
What was she doing? She was healing Helen, but power flowed from both of her hands. She couldn’t sense Helen the way she had Nightshade. She couldn’t sense the orb. The egg. It was the beginning of possibility—and hatching might be the end. But it felt as if both of her hands were somehow touching the same thing.
The orb had absorbed the entirety of the Yvonnes. Not even the faint hint of their outlines remained. But if the egg was absorbing Kaylin’s healing power, it was also absorbing something else. Something outside of her.
For one panicked moment, she thought it was Helen.
Kaylin!
Kaylin.
Two voices.
“I am not connected to the egg you hold,” Helen said, as if to calm three people’s sharpening fear. “Terrano is right. If what you carry was born in, and of, Shadow and Hope’s breath, it is not yet strong enough. You are stabilizing something. And the egg is drawing in what remains of the Shadows that sustain the path upon which our enemies stand.”
The orb was absorbing the infestation of the Shadow under the Barrani command? Good. But it also appeared to be absorbing the healing that Kaylin meant for Helen.
Everyone who was still alive was safe because Helen remained the master of her domain. But Kaylin could feel the power of the Marks of the Chosen pass through her, as if the Helen she hoped to preserve had become a sieve. Helen was far more complicated than any Barrani Lord, even one as old as Nightshade.
She felt, as she desperately sought to heal the injuries to a being so vast and Immortal, that it was Kaylin who was being examined, Kaylin who was in some fashion being overwhelmed. That it wasn’t the Marks of the Chosen alone whose power was being used.
There was another power. As if to acknowledge that, the Marks of the Chosen began to glow a familiar green color, the edges of the runes ivory. She might have expected it; she wore the dress the green granted those who were its intermediaries.
She was touching the green. The green was here. Helen was here. Kaylin was here. And the green held a power so ancient even the Arbiters didn’t understand it. It offered that power now, wordless; she reached for it instinctively. Reached for it, joining it to the healing power she had always used.
The cracks in the floor began to close, the words engraved in them to brighten. Had that been all, she would have been grateful, if exhausted.