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“These are my halls,” he said coldly. “And not even a Dragon may enter them with impunity.”
“But he’s been here before.”
The fieflord raised a brow. “How do you know that, little one?”
“I’m not called ‘little,’” she replied. She wanted to snap the words; they came out sounding, to her ears, pathetic.
“And what are you called now?”
“Kaylin. Kaylin Neya.”
His other brow rose. And fell. “Interesting. Yes, you are correct. Tiamaris has indeed visited the Long Halls. If any could find their way in, uninvited, it would be he. But I think, for the moment, he is content to wait. It will keep your Severn alive.”
“He’s not mine,” she said. And I don’t want him alive. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words to the fieflord. Didn’t want to know why.
He held out a hand.
She tried to ignore it. But she found herself lifting hand in response. As if this were a dream. He took the hand; his skin was cool. Hers was damp.
“These are the Halls of Nightshade,” he said quietly. “Come. There are things here I wish you to see.” Without another word, he led her from the room.
She expected the doors to open into a hall.
So much for expectation. They opened instead into what must have been a forest. Not that she’d seen forests—not up close—but she’d seen them at a distance, when Clint had taken her flying to the Aeries of his kin. Here, the trees grew up, and up again, until they reached the rounded height of a ceiling that she could only barely glimpse through the greenery.
She walked slowly, her hand still captive to the fieflord’s, but he seemed to be in no hurry. And why would he? If he didn’t manage to get himself killed, he had forever. Time meant nothing to him.
At his side, in waking dream, it could almost mean nothing to her. She touched the rough surface of brown bark, and then moved on to the smooth surface of silver-white; she touched leaves that had fallen across the ground like a tapestry, a gentle riot of color. All of her words deserted her, which was just as well; she didn’t have any fine enough to describe what she saw.
And had she, she wouldn’t have exposed it. Beauty meant something to her, and she kept it to herself, as she kept most things that meant anything.
“There is no sunlight,” he told her, as if that made sense. “But outcaste or no, I am still Barrani Lord—they grow at my whim.”
“And if you don’t want them?”
He gestured. The tree just beyond the tip of her fingers withered, twisting toward the ground almost as if it were begging. She stopped herself from crying out. It was just a plant.
She didn’t ask again, however. And she kept her wonder contained; she looked; she touched nothing else. He had offered her a warning, in subtle Barrani fashion. She took it.
“Where are we going?”
“To the heart of this forest,” he replied. “Be honored. Not even my own have seen it.”
“Your children?”
His brows drew in. “Are you truly so ignorant, Kaylin?”
“Apparently.”
His hand tightened. It was not comfortable. Another warning. But he chose to do no more than that, and after a pause, he surprised her. He answered. “I have no children. I am outcaste.”
Outcaste was a word that had meaning for Kaylin, but in truth, not much. Although one human lord served as Caste-lord for her kind, the complicated laws of the caste did not apply to the rank and file. It certainly didn’t apply to the paupers and the beggars who made a living—or didn’t—in the fiefs. The Leontines, the Aerians and the humans—mortal races all—were not defined in the same way by caste; they were more numerous, and their lives reached from the lowest of gutters to the highest of towers. Not so, the Barrani.
“I spoke simply of my kin, those who chose to follow me. The forest speaks to them, but it speaks in a language that is … not pleasant to their ears. They will not hear it, and remain. And I am unwilling to release them.
“I release nothing that is mine.”
She said nothing for a while. For long enough that she found the silence uncomfortable. Not awkward; awkward was too petty a word. “Did you build this?”
“The forest?”
“The … Long Halls.”
“No.”
“The castle?”
“No. I have altered it over the years, but in truth, very little. It was here, for the taking.” His smile was thin. “I was not, however, the first to try. I was the first to succeed.”
“It had other occupants?”
“It had defenses,” he replied. “And I forget myself. You ask too many questions.”
“Questions are encouraged, in the Hawks. When they’re not stupid.”
“Indeed. Here, they are not. The answers can be fatal.” He stopped in front of a dense ring of trees; their branches seemed to interlock at all levels, as if they had deliberately grown together. She didn’t like the look of them. But then again, at the moment she didn’t like the look of herself, either. What she could see, that is; the dress, the funny shoes, the bold, black design on her arms. She drew her arms down.
His hand came with one. “You do not understand the marks you bear,” he said, his voice a little too close to her ear.
“And you do?”
“No, not completely. But I understand some of their significance. In truth, I’m surprised that you still survive.”
“Why?”
He smiled, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he lifted his hand and touched the trees that barred their way. They shuddered. There was something terrible about that shudder, something that looked so wrong she had to turn away. It was as if the trees were silently screaming.
But they parted. Like curtains, like great rolling doors, their limbs untwining, their trunks shifting. Roots moved beneath her feet—or something did. She really wanted to pay less attention.
“Come,” he said, when there was room enough for passage.
Her hand fell to her hips, and came up empty. Daggers, of course, were someplace else. But the desire for them, the reflex, was still a part of her. And it was growing stronger.
“Nothing will harm you here,” he told her, the smile gone. “You bear my mark. You are in my domain.”
I’ve lived in your fief for more than half my life, and it wasn’t ever safe. But she said nothing. And it was hard.
The trees were not as thick as they appeared; the darkness of their branches curved above like a roof or a canopy, but it lasted a scant ten feet, and then it was gone.
They stood in a great, stone room, beneath the outer edge of a domed ceiling that gave off a bright, green light. And as they walked toward the center of the room, that light grew brighter, changing in hue. She looked up; she couldn’t help it.
Above her, carved in runnels in the smooth, hard stone, were swirling patterns that were both familiar and foreign. She lifted a hand. An arm.
“Yes,” the fieflord said quietly. “They are written in the same tongue as the mark you bear. It is known as the language of the Old Ones.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“No one does. There is not a creature alive that can read the whole of what is written there. But I have never seen the writing glow in such a fashion. I believe that the room is aware of your presence.”
“But who—or what—are the Old Ones?”
His frown was momentary, but sharp. But he surprised her. “Once,” he said softly, “you might have considered them gods.”
“But the gods—”
The derision was there in the cold expression the word evoked. “Mortal gods?” He shrugged. “Mortal gods are mortal. They exist at the whim of your attention, and your attention passes quickly.”
She didn’t like the room. He continued to walk; she stopped. But although he was slender, he pulled her along, her feet scudding stone. Dignity forced her to follow, given how little of it she had.
She forgot the ceiling, then.
The floor itself was alive. Where she stepped, light seemed to squelch like soft mud, and it flared in lines, in swirling circles, in patterns.
“Here,” he said softly, and stopped. “Go no farther, Kaylin. And touch nothing if you value your life.”
If she’d valued her life, she’d have stayed out of the fiefs. She nodded.
In the center of the room, laid against the floor in sapphire light, was a large circle. It didn’t surprise her much to see writing across it. She couldn’t read it, of course; it was almost the same as the writing that was carved high above her head. But it was different. It seemed to move.
“This is the seal of the Old Ones,” he said quietly, “and from it emanates the power that defended the castle against intruders.” Against, she thought, the fieflord.
She stared at the seal. The writing seemed to sharpen, somehow. Light flared, like blue fire, and it grew in height along the patterns that had birthed it. She watched as it reached for the ceiling. Watched, forgetting to breathe, as the light from the ceiling dripped down.
When they touched, she cried out in shock, and then in pain; her arms were on fire.
“Stay your ground,” the fieflord said, but his voice seemed to come from a distance—a growing distance. She reached out almost in panic, and was instantly ashamed of her reaction.
She would have reached out for Severn that way, once. And she’d already paid for that. She made fists of her fingers.
“Kaylin,stay your ground.”
Her tongue was heavy; too heavy for speech. She wanted to tell him that she was staying her damned ground, but she couldn’t, and probably just as well.
The light was a column now.
She felt it, an inch from her face, from her hand. Her hand was moving toward it, fingers twitching, as if pulled by gravity. She’d fallen once, from a great enough height that she’d had time to think about just how much of a pain gravity was.
She’d choose falling any time.
She heard the fieflord. She felt his presence. But her hand moved, continued to move. Her skin touched blue fire. Blue fire touched her.
For just a moment, she could see, in the pillar of light, something that looked like a … man. The way that the Barrani fieflord did. But worse. She could not make out his features, and she knew that she really, really didn’t want to.
Her hand sank through the light.
She heard a single word.
Chosen.
And then a different light flared; the golden manacle slammed into the pillar and it refused to move farther. She pushed against it with half of her weight and none of her will. She was losing ground.
She cried out; she couldn’t help it. Years of training fled in the panic that followed. She could see only light, could hear only the indistinct murmur of a stranger’s voice, could feel nothing at all beneath her feet. She had feared the night all her life; this was worse. Her feet were moving. Toward the light, toward the pillar, toward what it contained. She bit her lip, and she tasted blood.
And then, just before she entered the column, before she lost herself entirely, the shadows came, and they came in the shape of a dark, precise crest.
She didn’t recognize it. It didn’t matter.
She hit it and froze.
The light scraped against its edges, seeking passage the way sun does through stained glass. But this lattice offered nothing; it wasn’t, as it had first appeared, a window. It was a wall.
It was a wall with something written across it. She stared at it as the light flared, brighter now, and she understood the word in the same way she understood hunger, pain or fear: instinctively.
She could still taste blood. She could not feel her lips. But they moved anyway. Barrani was one of the languages that the Hawklord had insisted she study, and if she hadn’t been his most apt pupil, she’d learned. She’d always learned any real lesson he’d decided to teach her, even the ones that scarred.
Her lips moved over the syllables; she had to force them. She couldn’t make a sound, but it didn’t matter.
Calarnenne.
The light went out.
“My apologies,” the fieflord said softly. His arms were around her waist, his face against her neck. Black hair trailed down her shoulder in loose, wild strands. Pretty hair.
She tried to speak.
He lifted a hand and pressed his fingers gently against her lips. “No more,” he said softly. “You have done enough. I have done enough. Come. We must leave this place.”
Her knees collapsed.
Teela would have laughed at her. Tain would have shaken his head. But the fieflord did neither; he caught her before she hit ground, lifting her as if her weight were insignificant. He cradled her against his chest, and because he did, she saw blood well against the soft fabric of his odd tunic.
It was hers. Her cheek was bleeding.
“I … can walk.”
He smiled grimly. “You can barely speak,” he said, “and if you touch the ground again, I am not certain that I will be able to stop you from touching the seal.”
There were so many questions she wanted to ask him.
