Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(60)

“This is not healing,” Kaylin almost shouted.

“Then stop,” Mandoran told her.

She would have if she’d any idea how. But the eyes formed a layer between her feet and the Shadow that would transform them, and that Shadow seemed like a very, very large pool. She left those eyes alone, for the sake of self-preservation.

The rest, she continued to close. After half a dozen such closures, she no longer hesitated. After a dozen she finally noticed that the marks on her arms, which were still glowing brightly, had begun to develop dimension. They were still attached to her skin, but they were attached to her skin the way Gilbert’s human appearance was attached to his body: they were part of Kaylin, and yet at the same time separate from her.

“How did you get here?” she asked Gilbert as she worked. “You said you crossed the bridge.” She closed an eye.

“That was not entirely accurate.”

“No kidding. Did you come underground?” Another eye. And another.

“As you have surmised, yes.”

“You didn’t find Kattea underground.” She reached for the eyes that hovered above her head, as if closing them would give her more space.

“No. I found it difficult to find Kattea at all.”

“Were you looking specifically for her?” She crouched; more eyes closed. With them went some of the light in the room. The balance of the light now resided in her marks. They hurt.

“No. I was simply looking for someone who existed in this time and place. Time is a dimension and an anchor. To people like you, who are wed to it, it is unavoidable. It is part of your essential nature. Without time, you do not exist.”

“And you do.”

“Yes, Kaylin Neya. I do. So, too, does your Lord.”

She bristled; her hand froze. “If you’re referring to Nightshade, he is not my Lord.”

“I feel his presence only when I am near you, but I find your language so limiting, I may be expressing myself poorly.”

“Very, very poorly,” she replied. “The floor—”

“Yes?”

“It’s not—it’s not stone anymore.”

The shape of Gilbert’s open eyes changed; she could almost trace the expression—confusion, possible frustration—from the subtle narrowing. He asked a question—or at least it sounded like a question by the intonation.

The familiar answered in the same language. Kaylin couldn’t name it, but she recognized it; it was the language the Arkon had chosen to speak to Mandoran. It was, however, a language that Kaylin thought, with time, she could learn; it didn’t have the enormous weight and echo of true words.

“The floor does not look different to my eyes,” Gilbert said. “There are patches of your city that do—but they are not areas I can navigate.”

More eyes shuttered. Kaylin’s arms began to burn. It wasn’t pleasant. The words seem to be struggling to escape her skin, but it was almost as if they were trapped, and the burning was a simple consequence of their attempt to break free.

This had never happened before.

Then again, no healing had ever worked this way, either. The fact that she could see her familiar made it clear that she was not entirely in the space she had occupied before she had taken Gilbert’s hands in her own. She was in a place that Annarion and Mandoran occupied if they didn’t focus properly. They at least looked normal, for Barrani.

*

“Choose.” Like the eyes, the voice seemed to come from all around. It did not sound like Gilbert’s—but maybe it was. Gilbert had a thousand eyes; he quite possibly had a thousand mouths, as well.

She had chosen words before—in a dream, or in what she thought of as a dream. This was not the same. That choice had been painless, and the words had been giant representations of themselves, things that could not fit on her skin.

She had needed them. She had known it, the way one knows anything in a dream.

But that dream had profoundly affected the reality it wasn’t a part of. She had apparently skipped the dreamlike state that had made the entire endeavor of choosing words somehow safer. This was reality.

“Kaylin.” Her familiar’s voice brought her back to herself.

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”

“Choose a word.”

“But I—”

“Choose a word, Chosen, or lose them all. If Gilbert has time—and he does, although not in a fashion that you would understand—you do not. Were it not for those words, you could not be here at all. Choose.”

“You can read them—you choose.”

“If I could, I would make that choice for you. But it would change all of the bindings that hold us together, and in ways that you would not, in the end, appreciate. You live, as Gilbert said, in time; once you have made a choice, taken an action, there is no way to undo it, no way to return to what existed before.”

“I think I like it better when I can’t understand you.”

He smiled.

Her arms ached. So, now, did her legs, her back, the back of her neck—any part of her skin that was marked. She wondered if her entire body was bulging the way her arms now were. Probably. She could only see her arms.

What purpose did these words serve, in the end?

What purpose did any words serve? The Barrani Lake of Life was a repository of true words—those that could become names. These words weren’t the same—and even thinking it, she realized that the lone mark on her forehead did not burn or struggle to escape her skin. So: the words she bore, and had born, were not True Names. They didn’t grant life. They didn’t wake stone.