Ynpharion was annoyed. Annoyed and awed. You feel the presence of the High Lord.
Yes. But she felt the pull of all of them. She felt their weight. It was a weight she had taken on in ignorance the first time; it was a weight she had required to save a life; a weight she had given, willingly; and a weight she had taken without permission.
She held on to all of them. She wove them together. They were her tether.
She turned to Mandoran once again, and she looked at the word that he carried. It was not part of him, but at the moment, it was not separate.
She listened.
She listened to the voice of the stone.
She listened to the sound of Annarion’s sword, of Bellusdeo’s sword; she listened to the crackle of the Arkon’s fire, the Arkon’s magical focus.
And then she cut herself off from each, one at a time, concentrating until the only sound that remained in the room itself was the quiet, constant hum of a single word. She strained to hear it, because she couldn’t move—and neither could Mandoran.
Her voice was thin, weak, when she lifted it. It was hesitant, which annoyed at least three of the people whose voices she could not—and did not want to—silence. She knew. She knew that hesitance was very much like silence; it was like the wrong word, the wrong language. She strengthened her voice. She began to struggle with syllables, with stringing them together in a continuous shift of sound. With speaking as if the spoken word had meaning.
And this annoyed only one man.
Shouting, he said, is not a sign of strength. It is a sign, perhaps, of bravery or foolishness—but not strength.
You say it.
She felt his annoyance. It was bad. But she understood, as well, that the High Lord couldn’t see the word. He could see what she saw, but only to a point. It was like Teela and Mandoran or Annarion. They were willing—sometimes eager—to explain, to let her see, but their explanations made no sense to her. Teela couldn’t process them.
She let panic go. Of all the weights she carried, it wasn’t one she could afford. She looked through Gilbert’s eyes—the ones that were open. Gilbert’s eyes couldn’t see the word there, either, which made no sense.
It is your word, Kaylin, the familiar said. It is a word absorbed from you.
*
The word hung in the air, at roughly the same height Mandoran’s forehead had been from the ground. She listened again. She strained to bring the sound closer. The word drew closer instead. In shape, in size, it seemed simple, but as it approached, she saw that it was more complicated than it had appeared at a distance. The single line that underlay the whole wasn’t actually a line; it was a composite of strokes, of lines that appeared to move in the same direction.
Closer, she could hear it. It was like a chorus of sound. She had one voice, and she faltered again. She could not repeat what she heard. Not all of it. Not all at once, if ever. But...if this was like a chorus, there had to be a melody. And that, she thought, she could follow.
Kaylin. Severn’s voice. It was thinner, quieter, than it normally was. All of their voices were. She wanted to tell them to shush, to let her listen. She didn’t, because Kaylin realized that was where it would start: these were the voices that connected her, in some fashion, to a world outside of Gilbert’s eyes and Gilbert’s power. If she lost them, she would never find her way back.
They couldn’t see what she saw. They couldn’t hear what she heard. But they could see some part of her, and at least one of them could see it more clearly than she could see it herself. She willed them not to let go of it.
She couldn’t see cloth, as the familiar had described it, and that made her task harder. But she looked at the word, and only at the word, and she felt her panic recede. The marks on her arm were visible, even though her eyes were closed; they were the only other thing she could see.
No.
No, that wasn’t true. She could see the Arcanist. His eyes were closed; he looked waxen, graven, a thing of stone. She wouldn’t have said he was alive, because she could see no hint of breath, no motion at all. She could see no sign of life in him.
This was significant. Had she been able to feel the beat of her own heart, it would have been fast. But she felt oddly disjointed now, as if her own body was no more alive than the Arcanist’s. Her eyes were closed, of course. She shouldn’t have been able to see him. Yet his image filled her vision—as did the glowing marks on her skin.
But she had always been able to see words.
How had she taken Ynpharion’s name? He hadn’t chosen to expose it or offer the knowledge of it to her. She hadn’t carried and completed the name that would define both his place in the world and his power in it, as she’d once done with the High Lord. She had taken it because she could see it. She could touch it. She hadn’t had to speak it at all.