What had she expected? Gilbert was not like the trapped spirit of an ancient Dragon. Gilbert’s life was not over.
She’d taken the single name she had managed to preserve from her forehead, because there was a body here that could contain it. Until she’d seen it, using the True Name hadn’t occurred to her.
But that name and this body were not in the same place. No, she thought, frowning. They were in the same place. They were like the murder victims. Real and not real. Present and not present.
“I couldn’t see the victims with your wing plastered to my face.”
Silence.
She had looked through her familiar’s translucent wing many times. She had seen things that she couldn’t see on her own. She had gone places she wouldn’t have gone. It had never occurred to her that seeing them did not immediately make them real and accessible.
She’d thought of Hope’s wing as a way of seeing through illusion, of getting to the truth of what was actually there. She’d assumed that what she was seeing through his wing was the truth, that there was only one.
But what if it was only her perception that was the bottleneck? Then she needed to change that. She needed to change it now. She wasn’t certain that she could change it while caged in Severn, and thinking that, she once again felt his presence, heard his interior voice.
She was angry and relieved, and swung wildly between the two.
I could hear you, he said. I could always hear you. You were becoming too quiet. Too distant.
So you decided to take over my body while it was—
Dying?
The word hung in the air between them; she shoved it aside. She had done what she needed to do, in Severn’s body. She needed to do the rest in her own.
*
It was cold. It was cold enough that pain had given way to numbness, and the numbness to something that felt like distant warmth. She knew this was not a good sign. Her hand, her right hand, was folded around the name as if to protect it. That had clearly been Severn’s choice, not hers. She knew it wasn’t necessary.
With Severn’s help, with the bridge of a True Name between them, she could see the two rooms that were both real. She wondered if this was what Mandoran and Annarion dealt with all the time. If they could—with one set of eyes—see both rooms. Kaylin usually couldn’t. She could see one or the other, with help.
She lifted her right hand, cupping the name; she turned. She turned in two bodies: her own and Severn’s. His arms were longer, and he was taller; the vantage through which he viewed the inert form on the slab was higher up. His reach was greater; she had to adjust it, to adjust her own leaden arm, to compensate for the stiffness of her native limbs and the way she wanted to fold them in around her chest to conserve body heat.
Her head hurt. Her eyes watered—or maybe those were Severn’s eyes; she was almost certain tears of her own would be frozen.
But she moved her hands—no, their hands—in unison. Severn steadied her because he was also there. She felt warmth that was not like heat as she brought the name to its future vessel. She didn’t place it, as she’d originally intended, in the center of the body’s chest. Instead, she carried it all the way to the third eye, the peak of the awkward triangle.
Light was reflected in what now looked like an obsidian orb. Light, shape, form. The name did not shrink; it did not change shape. The eye did. It grew. Kaylin held the name steady, but that took effort. She wasn’t the only one who noticed; she could hear Tain’s sharp intake of breath.
The eye expanded, darkness widening until it occupied most of the form’s forehead. The other two eyes remained closed, and the body remained motionless. Kaylin should have found it disturbing, but didn’t have the mental energy for it. Or for anything other than what she was doing: holding herself, and the single word, steady.
She had thought what occupied the third eye socket was obsidian. As it expanded, she realized she’d been wrong. It was, or seemed to be, a very viscous liquid, like an oil. She turned her right hand over and let the name go.
It fell slowly. Had the black liquid sprouted tendrils to grab it and drag it down, Kaylin would have found it less disturbing somehow. She watched as golden curves made contact with what had taken the form of an eye, and watched them sink. It seemed to go on forever.
Forever, she didn’t have.
She lowered Severn’s arm and set both of his hands against the lip of the exposed slab, as if by so doing she could shore up her own weight. But if they shared a vision, they didn’t actually occupy the same body; her own knees buckled.
It didn’t matter. Standing was no longer required. The darkness that absorbed the name she had carried from the West March expanded as she watched.
It took everything with it.
Chapter 15
“Kaylin.”
The voice came from a distance. Kaylin had the futile hope that it would stay there.