Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(68)

She looked up at Teela, at her familiar blue eyes, at the subtle shift of her brows. “Severn’s not here,” she said.

Teela’s eyes narrowed into perfect edges. “Kitling, what are you doing?”

“I’m here—Severn’s where I was. He won’t—he won’t come back. How do I make him come back?”

“Ask and hope he agrees.”

“Tried that.”

“If I understand what’s happening, you’re not the person who gets to make that decision—you can fight, but it will cause you both immense pain at a time when you cannot afford it.” Teela exhaled. “You’re here for a reason. Please tell me you’re here for a reason.”

Teela’s irritation was so familiar, so normal, it steadied the younger Hawk. “Yes.”

“Then do whatever it was you came here for. Do it quickly.”

For one heartbeat, she couldn’t remember. Severn’s hands unclenched; Severn’s lungs took in air, held it for a beat and exhaled it. She lifted her right hand, cupped it; lowered her left. She meant to place it squarely in the center of the figure’s chest, but it drifted up, toward its closed eyes instead.

“I think I need three hands.”

“You’ve only got two. Make do.”

She lowered the right hand. Severn’s hand, unlike her own, did not cup or carry a name. She brought his right hand to the center of the figure’s chest. With the left, she tried to pry the middle eye—which was set slightly higher in the figure’s face than the other two—open. She was surprised when it worked.

*

At first glimpse, the eye socket was missing an eye. That would probably have been for the best, because a second, steadier look made it clear that the eye itself was a dark, round obsidian that did not reflect light at all. There were no flickers in its depths to suggest that it was chaos or Shadow, but it seemed to move, very slowly, beneath the fingers that held the eyelid open.

Kaylin.

She exhaled. “I need my body back.”

I’m not sure how to leave it.

You’re lying.

He wasn’t.

Kaylin had had nightmares that made more sense than this. She snarled a long Leontine phrase that made Tain’s ears twitch.

Can you see the word in your—in my—hand?

Yes. It’s the only light in the room.

Kaylin had had nightmares that were less upsetting. There are words right in front of you.

They’re not words that I can see.

“Hope—can you still see them?”

“Yes.”

“Why in the hells can’t he see them? He’s behind my eyes!”

“I do not know, Kaylin.”

“Kitling, what are you trying to do?”

“Heal Gilbert.” She had come in search of Gilbert’s name. She was almost certain she’d found it. She’d hoped that somehow, the Chosen could finish a story, or at least make what she could see of it complete.

But the words were in a place that no one else could reach except her familiar. She’d made the faint, almost ethereal figures solid. Golden. They were words now, not the ghost or the memory of words. But that didn’t finish the story. The isolation and the cold hadn’t come to an end.

What had she expected? Gilbert was not like the trapped spirit of an ancient Dragon. Gilbert’s life was not over.

She’d taken the single name she had managed to preserve from her forehead, because there was a body here that could contain it. Until she’d seen it, using the True Name hadn’t occurred to her.

But that name and this body were not in the same place. No, she thought, frowning. They were in the same place. They were like the murder victims. Real and not real. Present and not present.

“I couldn’t see the victims with your wing plastered to my face.”

Silence.

She had looked through her familiar’s translucent wing many times. She had seen things that she couldn’t see on her own. She had gone places she wouldn’t have gone. It had never occurred to her that seeing them did not immediately make them real and accessible.

She’d thought of Hope’s wing as a way of seeing through illusion, of getting to the truth of what was actually there. She’d assumed that what she was seeing through his wing was the truth, that there was only one.

But what if it was only her perception that was the bottleneck? Then she needed to change that. She needed to change it now. She wasn’t certain that she could change it while caged in Severn, and thinking that, she once again felt his presence, heard his interior voice.

She was angry and relieved, and swung wildly between the two.

I could hear you, he said. I could always hear you. You were becoming too quiet. Too distant.

So you decided to take over my body while it was—

Dying?

The word hung in the air between them; she shoved it aside. She had done what she needed to do, in Severn’s body. She needed to do the rest in her own.

*

It was cold. It was cold enough that pain had given way to numbness, and the numbness to something that felt like distant warmth. She knew this was not a good sign. Her hand, her right hand, was folded around the name as if to protect it. That had clearly been Severn’s choice, not hers. She knew it wasn’t necessary.