“...Good point.”
Hope bit her ear, but she didn’t feel it; the tingling across the surface of her skin—the skin that bore the marks of the Chosen—became painful. This was both good and bad. Good, in that they probably wanted to go in the direction of the magic, and bad because: pain. Sedarias was only barely visible, as were the two who had followed her; the rest of the cohort stayed with Terrano, but they were all turned as one toward their distant leader.
Kaylin wondered if Mandoran had elected to accompany Annarion because it meant he could get away from Sedarias—but she was always in his thoughts anyway. Literally.
As expected, Kaylin’s arms began to hurt; the sleeves of her shirt and the legs of her pants now caused acute pain if she so much as twitched. Given that she was riding a Dragon who wasn’t exactly placid and still, there was a lot more than just twitching. But as she started to count in Leontine—one of the first vocal exercises she’d learned, to the great amusement of Marcus’s kits—the ground appeared.
*
If she’d had any doubts about the speed at which Bellusdeo had been flying, they were shattered, because they couldn’t have approached ground any faster if they’d been falling. But the gold Dragon was not a fledgling, and she veered what felt like inches from the surface, changing her angle to avoid collision. Kaylin’s stomach still felt like it was hundreds of feet above them as the Dragon roared. And breathed.
Fire fanned out across the landscape, changing its color in a brief burst of orange and yellow. In the midst of those flames, a Barrani voice shouted a warning. It was a little late. Or maybe not; the fire had not consumed him and he clearly wasn’t screaming.
Sedarias gave the Dragon the side-eye, but nodded grimly when their eyes met. Terrano slid off the Dragon’s back—or tried. Kaylin’s familiar flew at his face, and his instinctive backward movement resettled him.
“I don’t think he wants you to leave. Whatever you’re doing for the cohort is working—for them. But I think he’s trying to tell you that the rest of us may need to move.”
“I can’t fight from here.”
Kaylin shrugged. “Neither can I. But he clearly considers the possibility that you’ll be lost—to us—more of a danger.” Before he could reply, she added, “Without you, we’ll lose the rest of them. You’re what’s keeping them here.”
This mollified him, but only enough that he looked sulky and not as determined. “They’re not staying put.”
They weren’t. Sedarias walked directly into the line of Bellusdeo’s open jaw. She reached out to touch the underside of the Dragon’s jaw; her hand passed through it, which seemed to satisfy some unspoken curiosity.
“The things that are likely to kill us—”
“Kill you.”
“—kill the rest of us aren’t likely to hurt them.” But even saying it, Kaylin wasn’t certain. “And I think we’ve found our two Shadow controllers.” She did not, however, see the Shadow itself. “Do you know where we are?”
He said nothing, and not just because he was sulking; his eyes had shifted to opalescent black, which was possibly her least favorite eye color, ever.
“Can you hear your namebound?” he asked.
Kaylin shook her head.
“That’s unfortunate.”
“We’re at the Alsanis end of the portal path?”
“No. This is Alsanis.”
*
Kaylin believed Terrano, but wanted to argue with him anyway, because she could not sense Alsanis at all. She expected the wild chaos of the portal paths by this point, but did not expect to find them within the Hallionne himself. Lifting her left arm, she rolled back her sleeve, almost weeping as she did; she felt as if she were peeling off the skin itself.
The marks across her arms were now an odd shade of gray blue. They were glowing, but the glow was faint and muted. On some occasions the symbols lifted themselves from her skin, as if they had life and will of their own; this time, they remained flat. She rolled the second sleeve up to join the first as Bellusdeo followed in Sedarias’s wake.
“Is Allaron carrying a sword?”
“He is,” the Dragon rumbled.
“So are the other two,” Terrano added.
“What does he expect a sword to do, in his state?”
No one answered. Bellusdeo, however, spoke three sharp words, and Kaylin clenched her jaws to keep a small scream from escaping.
“Apologies,” the Dragon said.
Kaylin barely heard her. Something had shifted in the wake of Bellusdeo’s spell, and she could see both the ground and what lay across it far more clearly. Her heart, such as it was, sank, and if her stomach had finally rejoined the rest of her, she almost wished it hadn’t. They were standing on stones; the stones were large, smooth and perfectly interlocked.
And there were words written across their surfaces.
As Bellusdeo continued her forward movement, those words began to rise, the flat inscription gaining volume as the lines, squiggles, and dots that comprised them asserted their existence in three dimensions. Kaylin sucked in air. Terrano was right, but in the worst possible way. Yes, this was Alsanis—but this was the heart of Alsanis. These were the words that defined him; the words that gave him absolute power within his own boundaries. The words that gave him life.
They were dark, not golden, and the edges of their various lines gleamed in a way that implied they were sharp enough to cut.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kaylin told the gold Dragon.
“I’m willing to entertain better suggestions.”
“I think we need to walk very, very carefully here.”
“Implying that I can’t.”
“You can walk carefully at your size, yes—but the gaps between the words here aren’t obligingly hall width. And I wouldn’t bet on Dragon scale as a defense against those edges.”
“How did the Barrani evade them?”
“Hells if I know.”
The familiar squawked.
“We are not going to walk through this mess holding hands as if we were Kaylin’s foundlings,” the Dragon replied, in her iciest voice.
Terrano grimaced. “Can I improvise?” he asked the familiar.
The familiar snorted, the gesture a miniature version of Bellusdeo’s, with smoke. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Terrano eyed the small cloud and grimaced. “Seriously?”
Squawk.
“Don’t look at me,” Kaylin said, when Terrano did swivel his glare. “I can’t understand him.”
The gold Dragon, however, could, and she collapsed once again into a gold plated warrior princess. “Next time,” she told Kaylin, “I am bringing a sword.”
*
“How can he even be your familiar if you can’t understand him?” The gleaming field of risen words didn’t seem to bother Terrano at all. The fact that those words appeared to be in the innermost sanctum of Alsanis didn’t, either. No, the only thing that seemed to be of concern were the cohort and the distance that had grown between them.
“I can understand him some of the time,” she replied, trying not to feel defensive.