“You’re not a Dragon; the fire will kill you if you don’t move out of its way. We should have help soon. And Sedarias will be really, really angry if you die here.”
“Why?”
“Because then she’ll have to deal with Mandoran and Annarion.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault!”
“You really haven’t spent much time talking with Sedarias.”
Purple fire gave way to purple rain. Terrano cursed and changed his position.
“Do you recognize them?” she asked.
“I’m a little bit busy now. Ask me later.” He grimaced as some of that rain passed just to his left, and seared an ugly line through his tunic. Kaylin remembered that Terrano’s current clothing was now much closer to Dragon armor than anyone else’s. It was like another skin.
Bellusdeo took to the air. Although she was a much larger target, she wasn’t much slower in full Dragon form than the Barrani Hawks; she made the most of her agility.
The Barrani woman moved as if the sword were a tether. But Bellusdeo’s breath was a ranged weapon, and Terrano was right: something was happening within this room.
“Is Alsanis going to know that Bellusdeo isn’t a danger?”
“You’re watching her and you’re telling me she isn’t dangerous?”
“I mean it, Terrano.”
“Yes. He’ll know. Because Bellusdeo is a guest he’s already accepted, and she’s fighting to protect herself from intruders. Unless everything collapses here, he will not harm her.” The last words were spoken in much slower, less frenetic Barrani. “Now stop talking and do something.”
Kaylin opened her mouth to tell him that she’d already done what she could, but managed to snap her jaws shut before the words escaped. Terrano, not an Arcanist, could provide magical protection; Bellusdeo could provide the necessary attack. What Kaylin was doing—what she was supposed to do—could be done by neither. She didn’t have to be a Dragon or an Immortal to be useful.
And Terrano was right. Useful had a short lifetime.
She lifted her hand to check the cut and the flow of blood while the familiar chittered like a bird trying to imitate an insect. The web came with it. She froze, staring at the strings that had been unmoored from beneath the surface of stone.
And she remembered the glove of shadow lace that had covered her hand during the defense of Moran’s Aerie, hundreds of miles away. She remembered how it had come into existence: she had been attempting to prevent Mandoran from being possessed by Shadows that were worming their way into his body.
The familiar crooned.
She had prevented that possession by wrapping those strands around her hand, and in the end, those strands—inert—had remained. They reminded her, in some fashion, of the marks—but they had faded into invisibility. Bellusdeo, sensitive to all things Shadow, could not detect them, and everyone had assumed that they were gone. Even Kaylin.
Kaylin spent entirely too much time in wishful thinking.
Instead of laying her palm back against the rumbling ground, she raised it, and the strands of webbing that had looked so much like blood vessels gone bad elongated; moving her hand, she began to wrap those strands around her palm. The odd thing was, it didn’t hurt. She felt almost nothing at the movement. Although she could see the strands as she gathered them, she couldn’t feel them at all.
Nor did the woman holding the sword notice, at first.
The motion of the ground beneath Kaylin’s knees had passed from tremors to waves—kneeling on it was like standing on the surface of moving water. But worse. The Barrani woman tried to drive the sword farther into the ground, and at first, it seemed she was successful. But Kaylin could see the way the ground itself moved around the swordpoint, as if avoiding it; what was no longer stone, although it still appeared that way, was creating a sword-shape pit, or sheath, for the weapon itself.
Three things happened at once.
*
Someone shouted her name—the words came at what felt like a great remove. The voice was familiar, but to hear it any more clearly, Kaylin would have had to tell Bellusdeo to shut up, which was never going to happen.
The Barrani woman realized that the sword was no longer penetrating the surface of the Hallionne’s core.
And the cohort suddenly gained solidity. Kaylin noted the latter only because she could see them, now; they were standing much closer to the Barrani woman and her sword than they had been. The air in the room, which was thick and hazy, had all but rendered them invisible, at least to Kaylin’s eyes; the color they seemed to be gaining as the seconds passed made them all appear more real, more present.
They wore no obvious armor, but three carried weapons—weapons that gained in color and substance as their bearers did.
The stranger looked up, instantly aware of them, although her shoulders were still bent in the attempt to either withdraw the sword or push it through the impromptu casing. She shouted for her partner, but her partner—while surprisingly not dead yet—had a Dragon to worry about, and the Dragon wasn’t playing. Much.
Kaylin continued to rotate her hand, to wind thread by thread of an ugly, terrifying web around it. She understood that at base it was Shadow, that Shadow was transformative, that it was poison—but she also understood that what she was doing was having some positive effect. And if she couldn’t imagine what the Barrani would do with the power of a Hallionne, she was pretty damn sure she—and the laws she served with her life—wouldn’t like it.
Allaron, the easiest one to spot because he was abnormally tall for a Barrani of any gender, stepped neatly in front of Sedarias, as if Sedarias were in need of protection. Sedarias said something—barely audible but sharp as a knife—and he stepped to the side to let her pass, falling in beside her as if they were partners of long-standing. When Sedarias lifted an open hand in the region of Allaron’s chest, Kaylin frowned.
She couldn’t see what Allaron’s response was until he moved; he handed Sedarias his sword. It was a sword that had, to Kaylin’s eye, been scaled for his personal use; it looked far too large for Sedarias, unless she meant to wield it in two hands.
She didn’t. If she dressed the part of a lady of the court, she was nonetheless Barrani; arms that looked deceptively slender were perfectly capable of bearing that sword as if it were a long knife. The Barrani Hawks didn’t carry swords; none of the Hawks did. Clearly the cohort had been trained to their use. And of course they had. The entire purpose of their visit to the green had been to somehow transform them into super soldiers for use in the Draco-Barrani wars.