She closed her eyes, in part because her marks were now glowing so brightly that they hurt to look at, and in part because Gilbert’s eyes were doing the same thing. “Should I be able to choose which word leaves me?”
“Can you not? If you cannot, how can you use the power you’ve been granted? How can you fulfill the responsibility that comes with it? The words are your power. Without them, you are merely mortal.”
Kaylin was more or less used to this, but still found it annoying. Annoyance, on the other hand, was better than fear; she held on to it because it was familiar. Eyes closed and holding the coldest hands in the world, she let her awareness expand.
Chapter 13
If Kaylin did not heal immortals often, she did have some experience. She didn’t expect Gilbert’s body to conform to the rough shape and functionality of her own. She did expect to at least find wounds, because Barrani wounds and Dragon wounds had a lot in common with merely mortal ones, and in general, bleeding implied that kind of injury.
Gilbert was not Barrani; he wasn’t a Dragon. He had chosen to adopt the appearance of a mortal—possibly for Kattea’s sake. It wasn’t, however, a simple illusion.
Gilbert’s appearance was in some ways like Kaylin’s skin. It was attached to him. It was part of the whole, not separate from it. But the whole was not simple interior—organs, muscle, bone; the skin didn’t contain the rest of him. Even had it, she would have found it disturbing. She didn’t expect Shadow to be living and organic. She expected it to be...well, shadowy. Deadly.
This...wasn’t like that. Parts of Gilbert were physical; they were almost what his form suggested. But they didn’t...attach to each other in a way that suggested those parts had an actual function. If Kaylin could look at the contents of a working stomach—she’d seen the dissection of a dead one in the morgue—she imagined they would look similar to Gilbert’s body. Except for the things that a stomach couldn’t contain.
She wondered, queasy now, if that was what his interior was—a collection of the things he’d swallowed, consumed and only partly digested. As a living body, this one didn’t work. And yet it was alive. She could sense that much.
A body knew its healthy state. Kaylin’s healing wasn’t like doctoring or surgery. Had it been, she would have failed the first time she tried; she’d been twelve or thirteen, and she’d had no words for any of what she did. The words, the knowledge, had followed from the time she’d spent on a stool in the morgue at Red’s side.
The morgue would not give her the words for what she touched now.
Kaylin often felt fear when she healed, but this fear was different. It was visceral. Gilbert felt wrong. He was alive, yes—but in his case, life was inimical, dangerous. She was afraid to heal him, because at the core of the mess that was Gilbert, she felt and touched traces of the unpredictable Shadow that grouped in the heart of the fiefs, traces of the Shadow that crossed the boundaries created by active Towers, and in so doing, transformed the landscape and the living they encountered. Shadow was death. Shadow meant nothing else, to Elantra.
Shadow, however, was part of Gilbert.
It would have been easy to assume that the Shadow existed in Gilbert as contamination. As something that needed to be cut out and excised in order to save his life. It wouldn’t be the first time Kaylin had had to do it. But she’d known then. She had known what Barrani health looked like. She’d been able to see the Shadow corrupting the Barrani body it infested and knew that if it wasn’t stopped, nothing Barrani would remain.
But she did not understand what healthy Gilbert looked like. Her power—if power had sentience—didn’t understand it, either.
Squawk.
Annarion was definitely here. Mandoran was probably with him.
“I need to heal him,” she told the familiar, without opening her eyes.
Squawk. Squawk.
“He apologizes for intruding,” Gilbert said, his voice so close to her ear, his mouth might have been plastered to the side of her face. “He feels you will need...help.”
“Did he happen to say what kind of help?”
“No, Chosen. I believe he expects you to understand.”
And after a long moment, she did. It did not make her day any better. “He’s here to help contain you. The other two are somehow with him because they need to be within range of him or...”
“Or?”
“I can’t explain it because I’m not them. You probably understand it, if he’s here.” To the familiar, she said, “I don’t know what he’s supposed to be when he’s not—not injured.”
Squawk.
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t usually have to know. The—the patient’s body knows.”
“And Gilbert’s doesn’t.” This was Mandoran. Kaylin didn’t open her eyes.
“No.”
“Do ours?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never been allowed to heal either of you. The only Barrani I’ve healed wanted to kill me for it.”
“I wouldn’t,” Mandoran helpfully said.