In Gilbert’s reality, the rules were different. Inhaling, she focused on her memories. Her hands had fallen below the hard surface of the table, and she had—eventually—found a word whose shape and weight seemed right. Here, there was no search. She only had one word, of the many, that could function as life.
This time, she felt her hand dip beneath the surface of her own forehead, as if her skin were liquid. She had to try three times; the first two attempts were disturbing enough she froze. But the third time, she felt the pinprick edges of something against her fingers and palm. She cupped the word carefully and withdrew it, and it expanded to fill her hand, gaining dimension and weight.
The names were not sentient—not in a way that Kaylin understood sentience. But she felt, holding it, regret and worry. She silently apologized for not visiting the Lake to take it home. If she’d said it out aloud, Teela would smack her when she could finally reach her. Teela, after all, forgot nothing.
She lifted the word.
The cloud parted. The word didn’t leave her hand.
It wasn’t enough, she thought. Yes, she carried it, the way she carried the other marks—but in the end, it had a place that wasn’t a patch of Kaylin’s skin. It wasn’t of her. Or rather, it wasn’t part of her duties as Chosen. Duties that she had never understood.
She understood them now, but not in a way she could easily put into words. Ironic, really. Severn should have been Chosen. He made a lot less noise, but when he spoke, it meant something.
Maybe the words were given to you because you can speak so freely, Severn pointed out.
Fine. But I can’t choose words well.
Why do you have to choose one?
Because there’s some part of the story that’s incomplete. This made sense to Kaylin.
How do you know that?
I don’t know, Severn. I just... It’s just...
A feeling. It was just a feeling. It was intuition. She raised her right arm; her right hand held the only True Name in the room that wasn’t already occupied. Her left hand was free, and it grew colder. Her cheeks stung, and the air drew the breath out of her lungs, froze her nostrils. Only the hand that held the name felt any warmth at all. Kaylin did not consider this a particularly good sign.
She glanced up at a cloud of translucent words, made from her own breath and the bitter cold.
*
Kaylin.
I’m moving as fast as I can—
The body is getting colder.
So was the room. Her arms were shaking enough that it was harder to see the brighter, closer marks on her skin; her hands were curved in loose fists that wouldn’t hold anything competently. Her right hand still held the name because it was the only source of warmth in the room.
But even that warmth was fading.
Kaylin—
She touched her arm; her own marks stopped their slow traversal of her skin. The rune she slid her shaking fingers over felt almost brittle to the touch. For one long, held breath she was afraid that she had waited too long. It was frozen. It would not move.
“Kaylin.” Like the words of breath and mist, her familiar was all white, an ice that implied endless cold and death. She couldn’t see his eyes. “I do not know why you were Chosen; were it not for my presence, you would be lost here.” He gestured at the mark on her arm; it rose. It rose and expanded, becoming dimensional as it hovered above her arm.
“I cannot touch you here,” he said, voice quiet. “It would destroy you.” He looked at the words that weren’t hers in the darkness, as if reading them. “Do what you must do, but do it quickly.”
“Can you—”
“No, Kaylin. I can touch neither you nor the tale that is told; what was written here was not of me; it is not mine. I could destroy it. I could refashion it—but then it would be a different story, and not the story of the one you call Gilbert.
“And if I did that, you would also perish. You will perish, regardless. You are not Barrani, not Dragon, not any of the older races; you will age and you will die.” He spoke now, as if to himself.
Kaylin reached out for the word he had freed from her skin.
“But time, to you, is a prison from which there is no escape, except one. You do not feel its immediacy.”
He was wrong. She did. She knew better than anyone what too late meant.
She listened as she moved. Gilbert’s words, revealed by breath and cold, were an arm’s length away, no more, but they seemed to remain inches in front of her, no matter how hard she strained to reach them. The shuddering didn’t help.
She had never been so cold in her life.
There was warmth waiting for her—and food, and family—if she could complete the pattern in front of her. She had a home now. She had a place to go. She cursed in quiet Leontine and lifted the rune that had come from her skin into place; it took four attempts.
She knew when it had successfully joined the mass of the words of ice because gold spread across white, seeping into it as if it were ink on a tablecloth. It spread. What had been mist and ice became, at last, true words as she understood them.
Sadly, they didn’t make the room any warmer.