“Chaos was a whisper. Law was a shout.”
“But whispers and shouts use the same words.”
Silence.
Kaylin was bloody tired of silence.
*
All of the words seemed to strain upward, as if they needed the space—and looking at them carefully, Kaylin thought they did. They had developed a rough dimensionality; they looked like glowing welts.
“Gilbert, can you see the marks of the—of the Chosen?”
“Yes. I do not think anyone in this room could miss them.”
“Can you read them?” Into the silence that followed, Kaylin added, “I need an answer. I’m not asking for the good of my health.”
“I can...hear them.”
“Pardon?”
“I can hear them, Chosen. They move too quickly to be easily read.”
They weren’t moving at all, not that they weren’t trying. She exhaled. The eyes beneath her feet were now the only eyes she had not closed. If her familiar was right, the Shadow she saw was not actually present; it was the visual artifact of Gilbert’s prior memories.
As she closed the remaining eyes, breath half-held, she thought of every other time the marks on her arms had been somehow used. Twice they’d been eaten. She discarded those; she didn’t think Gilbert could devour the words themselves. She didn’t understand how the words could be physical, could provide sustenance. They weren’t, like True Names, singular. They were mostly like awkward tattoos.
The word on her forehead, rescued in the Outlands, was the only one that wasn’t straining against her skin. It was also the only one Kaylin was certain was unique. It had the power to wake Barrani babies. To bring them to life.
The rest of the marks were not like that one, although they looked very similar to the naked eye. But if they weren’t like that, they were just...components of language. She couldn’t read them; it hadn’t occurred to her, when they had first appeared over half her body—they’d spread a bit since—that they were words.
Something twitched in her memory. She turned and caught it before it escaped; it was a feeling, an instinct. She had been in this place before.
When? She had certainly never met a sentient Shadow that wasn’t trying to destroy everything in its surroundings. She had never touched one voluntarily; the idea of healing one was so foreign, it was almost laughable. She knew what Shadows did.
But she had known what the Tha’alani did once, as well: they were evil mind readers who tore a person’s darkest secrets from them. Everyone had known that about the Tha’alani.
And everyone had been wrong. So wrong.
No, it’s different. I was afraid of the Tha’alani for no reason. The Tha’alani aren’t like the Shadows. They don’t kill. They don’t blackmail. They don’t judge. The Shadows do destroy. It’s different.
She shook her head, trying to clear it, but the doubts clung. She had never walked into Ravellon. She had only seen what walked out of it. Was it too much to believe that not everything that lived there was evil?
Everyone had their own story. Her eyes narrowed as she rose, turning the thought over. Everyone had their own story.
Kaylin had known very little about Dragons. She’d learned a lot more when Bellusdeo crashed into her life—but she still tripped up, because Dragon was a word that had weight; it was almost mythic. Myths did not have bad days. They didn’t have good ones, either. They didn’t suffer loneliness, isolation, despair; they didn’t have desires. Myths were not alive.
The word Shadow, like the word Dragon, existed as a modern myth. And at base, myths were...stories.
She struggled with this. She had never thought of Shadows as individuals until she had met Gilbert. And were it not for Kattea, she would never have made the attempt to heal him. But if she thought of Shadows as people—with their own lives, their own stories, their own reasons...
Silence.
The last of the eyes beneath her feet closed.
Chapter 14
Kaylin breathed a sigh of relief when she did not fall into the whorls of chaos below her.
Cautiously, she looked around the room. She could see Mandoran, Annarion and her familiar; she could see walls, a bed and the very disturbing floor.
She could not see Gilbert.
The walls of the room hadn’t changed the way the floor had; the bed was still a bed. The desk was still a desk; it was a bit battered and dinged, suggesting age. But the shelves nearest the desk drew her eye. Kaylin had noted there were books on them when she’d first entered.
It was to the books she now looked. She didn’t trust the floor, but she trusted her familiar. She walked across the room, her gaze fixed to the spines of Gilbert’s many volumes.