She could see her hands.
She could see the intricate lace of black on one of them.
She understood.
Kaylin!Overlapping voices. Distant voices. Voices she knew. She heard Helen’s voice. She heard Nightshade’s. She heard Severn’s. Over them, around them, she heard familiar cursing, familiar beloved invective. Terrano.
She had no words to offer in return; she had a silence built of fear and determination. She stood on the edge of hope, the edge of despair—really, was there that much difference? If she failed, she would fall. If she succeeded, she would fall. Where she landed defined what she needed to do.
She reached for the tendrils of Shadow she could now see so clearly. Reality faded. She could see Helen’s floor as gray, lifeless stone. It reminded her of the buildings in the border zones of the fiefs.
Yes.Hope’s voice.
Yes.The hatchling’s.
It was the hatchling’s wing that revealed Shadow—but the Shadow itself was like flickers of fire, small streams of water, damp soil; it existed, but it didn’t seem sentient. The Yvonnes were gone. What was left of them was this new lizard, far more physical, far more present, than Hope.
She no longer held the orb—the egg—in the palm of her hand, but the egg’s weight rested on her left shoulder, almostunbalancing her as she shifted her stance to accommodate it. She then reached out for the closest tendril of Shadow.
It was a thread. It reminded her of Wevaran webbing, it was so slender. If she blinked, it vanished, and she had to work to reassert her vision. But she’d had to do that with the magic of the Erenne mark as well. Throughout, the Yvonnes had helped her, forming a tunnel, a passage that she could traverse to reach Nightshade. Or to reach enough of him that she could heal him and send him into the battle.
What will had created the Yvonnes? What will had driven them to Kaylin’s aid? Not Yvonne. Kaylin would have bet her own money that Yvonne had been unaware of their existence until Mrs. Erickson had seen them.
Light rose from her legs, her chest—a green-gold light. The green.
But there was no story being told—not in the words of the Ancient, wild green. She could hear it in the clang of steel against steel, the sharp explosion of spell against spell, the whistle of a weapon chain that broke spells before they landed. She could hear it in the shouts and commands of unfamiliar voices. It was an unfolding story of its own. She wanted it to end—butendhad many meanings, and she was terrified of the wrong one.
She knew the silence of death. The absence. The loss of warmth.
She’d found a home. She’d built a family. The Barrani were attempting to destroy that—and they couldn’t do it the usual way. Nightshade’s near death was the Barrani norm. Anything their enemies did here could be prosecuted under the full force of Imperial law. But prosecution didn’t bring back the dead. She knew it. She’d known it for years: her job was to bring criminals to justice—but that didn’t repair the damage they’d done.
She caught Shadow strands and began to pull them, to windthem around her gloved hand. The hatchling growled and bit her ear—much harder than Hope usually did, but probably not hard enough to remove part of her lobe. She didn’t like that the immediate result was a shift in color; the threads themselves were multihued: purple, dark turquoise, blood red. She understood that these were what she needed to pull, to gather.
The Shadow-created tunnel was a tapestry; it was the colored flecks and threads that seemed to hold it together. She pulled and they came, with resistance, to her hand. But she saw, as they did, that they weren’t threads. They weren’t like whatever became laced gloving. They felt like... vines. Like stems.
She was unprepared when they grew buds, and utterly silent when the buds immediately blossomed. The shape of the bloom was familiar; the color wasn’t. These were the flowers, in green and white, that Mrs. Erickson had worn as a wreath; they were the flowers that had bloomed in the ruins of a displaced mansion.
But these were blooms of livid, brilliant colors, and the colors seemed almost liquid in the way they moved across the shape of petals. She continued to gather them, continued to uproot them. She was almost afraid to put them down, but they eventually grew too numerous to easily carry.
Hope squawked loudly in her right ear.
The hatchling hissed, digging dark claws into Kaylin’s collarbone as if to stand its ground. Hope’s neck craned forward, and he began toeatthe flowers. The hatchling hissed in obvious rage, and his neck, less graceful, snapped forward as he lunged to do the same. If they could have done it without unbalancing Kaylin, it would have been better, but at least the flowers weren’t touching Helen.
“Anymore,” Helen said, her voice stronger. She sounded worried. To be fair, she often did—it was familiar and comforting, even in this odd space. Perhaps especially in it. “I believe you must continue what you’re doing as quickly as youcan. But I caution you strongly against feeding the hatchling any more of your blood.”
The hatchling, having bitten her ear—and the ear did sting—was busy making short work of the flowers; droplets of different colors trickled down its jaws. Hope was a far tidier eater. What Kaylin uprooted, the two ate—snapping and hissing at each other as if they were siblings afraid that the other child would get more.
Hope seldom ate. Here, he was voracious. So was the much weightier hatchling. Kaylin continued to uproot these odd flowers, and the two continued to devour them as they blossomed. The hatchling snapped at her hand once in an effort to get to a flower first; it bit her finger twice for the same reason. It didn’t happen a third time because Hope bit the hatchling, hard. The wings were the only reason they couldn’t fully engage; one of each was still plastered, like a mask, to her eyes.
Kaylin put a hand between their snouts before they could resume fighting. She could feel the air grow cleaner as she worked, could almost feel the touch of sunlight, of warmth, even if she couldn’t see it. Her Marks were faintly luminescent, and Hope shone with the same light; the hatchling didn’t. He radiated a red darkness—the kind of darkness she could see in broad daylight if she closed her eyes.
Its eyes, however, became an almost milky white as it ate. The stems that Kaylin pulled from the stone ground continued to bud and blossom in her hands, and the two—Hope and the hatchling—continued to eat as if they were ravenous, starved pets owned by a neglectful master.
One of them seemed to gain substance and weight as it ate. Kaylin noticed, as the flowers were consumed, that the silence was also consumed; the hush, the wall that had kept all sound out, was being weakened as she worked.
The hatchling finished eating first. Hope continued, squawking at the hatchling in disgust, annoyance, or concern—she couldn’t tell which. But she’d made her way around the rough circle the Yvonnes had traced by their chosen positions. She had handled the stems with care, pulling them up by the roots before they budded and blossomed. It made no sense, but she’d given up on sense.
Only one stem resisted. It felt no different to the touch than any of the others, but she couldn’t pull it up as easily; it felt almost as if something was pulling it from the other side.