Terrano said nothing for a long beat. Kaylin thought he would say nothing. She was wrong.
“I can’t hear them,” he finally whispered. “I can’t hear them at all, anymore.” Something in his voice spoke of loss, of grief, of the confusion it caused; it cut Kaylin, hearing it, because she knew how he felt. And wished that she didn’t.
“No,” Alsanis said, in the softest of voices. “You left your name here; you understood that it would be a cage. And Terrano, you were not wrong. The words are a cage. But cages have other names, and there are some creatures that cannot survive outside of them. Songbirds, for example.”
Kaylin looked at Terrano’s slumped shoulders. She realized that he had been part of the cohort for almost all of his existence; that he had heard their voices, their thoughts, as if they were part of his own. Teela alone had been sundered from the Hallionne and her kin.
“He can’t be what he wants with a name,” Kaylin said, hazarding a guess.
“I do not know what he wants to be—but he cannot hear them or see what they see the way he once did. And you should understand this, Chosen.”
She nodded, watching the flying creature as its shape continued to change. It was disturbing—but it was no more disturbing than watching the effects of Shadow’s infestation. “Could you maybe stop that?” she said to Terrano.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to transform the Shadow.”
“Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do. It’s what you’re doing.”
Bellusdeo, however, said, “What are you trying to achieve, exactly?”
“I’m trying to free it.”
Freedom had never looked so unappealing. “What were you trying to do to Ynpharion?”
“Oh, that was different.”
She could feel Ynpharion in the back of her thoughts; the Hallionne had clearly allowed those thoughts entry. He promised freedom. Ynpharion’s presence was a ghost, a whisper. There was yearning in it, which surprised Kaylin. You have always been free.
Since freedom, for half her life, had included serious danger of starvation or freezing to death, Kaylin bridled. She didn’t think about all of the other things that freedom had included in that childhood, because most of them had been the freedom to die.
“I’ll stop now,” Terrano added, with an undercurrent of smug that really did remind Kaylin of Mandoran. She had the sudden, visceral desire to take Terrano home to Helen, where the rest of the city would be safe from him, and where he could see some of his friends again.
But Alsanis said, “He is not, now, what they are, Lord Kaylin. He is not what they are trying so desperately to be, to remain. I do not think your Helen would have the ability you ascribe to her. But...he is correct. He is done.”
She watched. The butterfly—badly drawn and not quite solid—was gone. In its place was something that looked like a sphere—with glittering spikes, most of which were silver. It had no eyes, no wings, nothing that suggested that it should be capable of flight. But fly it could; it drifted toward Terrano. He held out a palm, and it came to land, once again, in his hand.
Only once it nestled there did it reveal actual eyes. And teeth. Because it opened its mouth and screeched. The screech felt like it contained words, but Kaylin’s hands were already covering her ears in an attempt to muffle the noise.
*
“What is it?” Bellusdeo asked. Her eyes were once again a darker orange. If she did not trust Terrano, she did not suspect his intent; she understood that Terrano was a walking, natural disaster. Those could easily kill the unwary, sometimes by the thousands, but there was no intent in earthquakes or hurricanes.
And regardless, earthquakes or hurricanes were unlikely to harm a Dragon.
Terrano frowned. It was a long, slow, fluid motion which changed more than the lines of his face. The screeching continued as he stared at it.
“What is it—”
“Be quiet. I can’t hear it if you talk.”
Since Kaylin could barely hear her own voice above the high-pitched, unpleasant whine, she stared at him, but she did as he asked. The familiar whacked her face with one extended wing, and she sighed. Loudly.
Terrano frowned. At this rate, he was going to tell her to stop breathing. But she obeyed the familiar’s unspoken command; she looked through his translucent wing.
What she saw in Terrano’s hand was entirely different than what she saw when she relied on only her own eyes. For one, it wasn’t the size of a fruit pit. It wasn’t spiky. It remained an odd silver, but the silver was illuminated and glowing. No, worse, pulsing. The pulse was irregular, unlike a heartbeat. But that wasn’t the worst thing about it. It was the size, the shape, of a man. No, an older child. The face, however, was diffuse, as were all elements about it except the thing Terrano had his hand around. It was as if Terrano had shoved his hand into a living person’s chest, and cupped it around their heart, except the living person wasn’t screaming in terror or pain.
“They are not in pain,” Alsanis said. Kaylin noticed that the Hallionne didn’t get told to shut up.
“Ah, no, Chosen. I understand the nuance of voice and pitch.”
“Is this what you see?” she asked.
“I cannot see what you see. But I believe you are now seeing what I see, with small variations. It is...not what I expected. His heart is what you see without your familiar’s aid, but you see it askew. It is his heart that was infested.”
“What is he?”
“I do not know, Lord Kaylin. Ah, apologies. Kaylin.”
You must learn to accept the title that comes with your position; it is one of the very few advantages you have, Ynpharion said.
Where I came from, an advantage was an invitation to robbery. Or worse.
It is not so different, here—but it signals, to the would-be thief, that there are consequences.
She would have answered, but at that moment, the stranger looked up to meet her eyes, through the veil of familiar’s wing. She realized one of the disturbing things about him was that he had no eyelids.
The second disturbing thing was the eyes he did have: they looked like...bee eyes. Or bee hives. Like something was living in them that might emerge at any minute. She wondered, as she controlled a shudder, what he saw when he looked at her. As if in reply, the marks on her arms began to glow.
19
He opened his mouth; he had no teeth. Where teeth might have been, he had fine, multicolored filaments; they moved in a wave that appeared to reflect light. She could see that the form and shape he now wore was diffuse, amorphous; that it suggested life—or rather, life as Kaylin knew it—without actually being it. She tried to concentrate on it anyway, because everything else screamed wrong to her. And he wasn’t the one who had his hands in someone’s chest, wrapped around their heart.
If it was even his heart.