Cast In Secret (35 page)

It gave with her weight – it could hardly do anything else – but it had moved up to meet her in midfall, and it also began to drop, matching its speed to hers, until she
could
land in its center and notice that it was water, and not ground. Clint, on one of his early flights with Kaylin wrapped snugly in his arms, had made clear that water, from the height Aerians chose to fly at, was not a lot more forgiving than stone when it came to breakable things – like bones, for instance. Clint was always gentle; he had threatened to drop her when she’d made it clear she didn’t believe him, but he had never actually
done
it.

Now, years later, she believed him – but the days when she could play with his flight feathers and beg him to carry her over the city were almost gone. She missed them; that was the truth. She missed what he would willingly do for her orphans in the Foundling Halls. She had never thought it would be possible to
miss
being a child.

But if she had stayed young, she could not be here, doing what she was doing: trying to save the life of a child.

And that was
why
she was here, and if she had forgotten it for even a minute, she clung to the certain knowledge as fingers of liquid wrapped themselves around her tightly and bore her down.

She expected that they would come to rest near land, and in that, she wasn’t mistaken. But she could see land – such as it was, it was such a pathetic patch of dirt – only because the water shed light; shed it
and
contained it. She could push her arm through the liquid; she could certainly push her head through it, because breathing was kind of important, and it was the first thing she made certain she
could
do.

But the water was content, for a time, to hold her, and while it was cool, it was pleasantly cool. The days this time of year were anything but.

It had to be water, she thought, as she lifted a hand to her unadorned throat. The essence of water.

You could live without food for a lot longer than you could live without water. You couldn’t live
at all
without water, according to the midwives. It was in water that you were conceived, in water that you grew, and only when water broke did you stand a decent chance of being born
and
surviving the experience.

But you couldn’t breathe water; you could easily drown in it; you could fall into it and break your neck.

Yes,
the water said.

She startled and jumped, sending little eddies through the hand that held her. “Who said that?”

You already know.

And she did, too. But if her life with the Hawks had prepared her for all sorts of grim magic – and give the frosty, stiff-necked old teachers this much, it had – it hadn’t prepared her for this. Her whole body vibrated with the syllables.

“You can talk.”

Yes.

“Could you always talk?”

Not in this way, Kaylin Neya. And were you not Chosen, never to you.

Kaylin nodded.

You have come late to this game,
the water added.

“I don’t generally play games.”

No.

She started to say something, thought the better of it. The hand that held her had joined itself to the current of a river that ran in a narrow groove. Rock lip could be seen on either side, proof that the river’s passage had slowly worn away stone. Kaylin didn’t particularly want to be part of the grit that helped to
further
wear stone down, but the water had other plans for her; she stayed in the middle of the current, occasionally jolting up or down as the riverbed did. “I have a question,” she said as she watched the darkness go by.

The silence was, as they say, deafening. So much for conversation. Kaylin, on the other hand, wasn’t one to let silence go by unhindered.

“If I came late to the game, what have I missed?”

But like so many people she could privately rail against, it seemed content to offer criticism without actually offering any useful advice.

Oh, what the hells.

“Do I look fat in this?”

As far as castles went, the one Nightshade called home was definitely less ornate than most. Big caverns and scant light usually had that effect. The river in which she’d been traveling as if it were some sort of bumpy, elemental carriage, came at last to a stop in what was essentially a dingy lake. The water still glowed, and the fleet shape of moving shadows far below her feet told Kaylin that some things shunned light. The fact that they weren’t comfortingly
small
shapes made her a little uneasy, but only a little; although nothing she touched seemed solid, she didn’t drop. And given that she was wearing armor, she should have.

But natural laws and magic seldom coincided. It seemed to Kaylin that magic was one way of breaking all natural law. Maybe that was why she, Hawk at heart, hated magic so much. It couldn’t be pinned down, and analysis was so much guesswork. How could something be just a tool – as the Hawklord often tried to call magic – when it was so unpredictable and wild?

It is not just a tool,
a voice said.

And Kaylin knew, hearing it, that she had just discovered the essence of water.

But the essence of water didn’t speak
as
water, and in the faint light cast by liquid, Kaylin could see where the river butted up against the smoothed flat of damp rock. Could see, as she squinted, that above that damp patch of solid ground – ground that she was slowly approaching – something stood, arms at rest, waiting for her to arrive. As if it had always waited, would always wait.

She saw robes that were at once all colors she had ever seen, and at the same time, none; saw light in those colors that faded and blended, one into the other. Rainbows were like this, but rainbows were transparent, thin, and easily lost to the turn of the head, the passing whim of cloud.

And this was different. The light and color had taken the shape of robes, and those robes fell, like yards of insanely expensive fabric, from slender shoulders, blanketing cold, dark rock, and turning it, for a moment, into something that signified all of the earth, its hidden diamonds, its endless crevices.

Hair trailed down the back of these odd robes, and the hair, unlike the robes themselves, was as dark as the water the Hawklord said lay at the bottom of the seas in the distance. Dark – not black, not blue-black of midnight, but deeper than that.

Staring ahead, Kaylin barely registered the fact that what was now beneath her feet
was
solid rock; that the water that had caught her in her graceless fall and had carried her here like some enchanted boat, had now fallen away, joining again the rapids of the underground river.

And when this being turned, light resolved itself into a face that Kaylin realized she had expected to see. Not consciously, never that – this was magic, after all, and magic had its own imperative, its own wild logic.

The girl who had spoken her name what felt like years ago, in the garden of a man known as
the Keeper,
met her gaze and held it until Kaylin looked away.

Had to look away, there was so much in those silent, dark, wide eyes.

“Kaylin,” she said, and lifted a translucent hand, as if she were a ghost.

As if, Kaylin thought, she had already failed her, and this was all that was left.

She should have been angry. She knew she should have been angry. All her fear, all the silent terror, the pressure of the need to rescue some helpless child – it had all been wasted to a… a trick. She could no more rescue
this
girl than she could rescue all the dead children in the fiefs another lifetime ago; could no more rescue her than she could rescue the children who were dying even now, unable to call for help, unheard.

And yet… And yet…

She took a step forward toward the girl, whose eyes were dark and bruised, and as she did, she realized that the light she had
thought
emanated from water came, instead, from the hollow of her own throat. What lay there beneath her fingers – the fingers raised almost involuntarily – was the pendant she had received as a burden from the ghost of a Dragon in the Imperial Archives. It was
real,
here. That should have told her something.

“Yes,” the girl replied, in the same soft voice that had spoken her name. “You can see me because you wear the pendant. If you were wiser, you would be able to use it, and possibly to use it against me. I do not know.

“I remember the Guardian,” she added, never looking away from Kaylin’s face, although Kaylin frequently looked away, for seconds at a time, from hers. “I remember his voice. The ripple of it carries still.”

“You killed him,” Kaylin said bitterly.

“Yes. I was younger then,” she added, as if that made
any
sense.

“You’re
not
a child,” Kaylin snapped, letting anger speak for her, because otherwise, she had no words. “Children don’t kill.”

“Children
can’t
kill. They are too weak. Your children,” she added. “And I… was… not as I am now. I was aware,” she added. “But awareness… It was a small eddy in a large current. I was young,” she said again. “And also old, Kaylin.”

“You look like a child now.”

“I am not.”

“You choose to look – ”

“You perceive,” the soft voice said. “It is your gift.”

“And the Dragon’s?” She touched the pendant again.

“He was strong. He called you, Kaylin.”

“He called a few thousand years too early.”

“But you came.”

“He was dead. I came late.”

“He was dead, but he did not surrender his burden, and because he did not, the waters subsided in time.”

“Did you want him dead?”

“No.”

“But you killed him.”

“Yes.”

“And the city – ”

“Yes.”
And the water lifted its hands to its face, and Kaylin surrendered then: she saw a young, frightened girl, and no matter how much her inner voice screamed in outrage, she could see
nothing
else. And maybe, she thought, as she walked toward the girl, if she were honest, it was because she didn’t
want
to.

She reached out for the girl with her arms, and drew her into their circle.

And the light at the base of her neck became
fire,
and the shadows – and Kaylin’s awareness – were burned away in an instant. She lost sight of the water, the cavern, the light – and last, lost hold of herself, sinking into a different kind of depth.

Remembering what Evanton had told her before she surrendered:
Water is deep
.

She had dared currents before, and would again – but they had been water, and the currents now… were the memories of a different life. It swallowed her whole.

In the darkness – and it was dark, and worse, it was the type of dark men cause – she heard the screaming, and it woke her because it
burned
at the back of her mind: the screaming, the brief, terrified screaming, of the children. And oh, she could gather their pain; she’d done it before. She had had to do it before, because
that
was her gift: the gathering of pain, the stanching of mortal wound in this insignificant way. And she
did
it because there was nothing else she could do. She could not save life. She
could not
even bear witness.

All she could do was deny the enemy these few moments of cruelty, the satisfaction of the deaf.

And that was not enough. Sooner or later they would learn that she had done it. Sooner or later, they would figure out that they could cause their precious pain if they
took the children farther away
.

She felt the voices of her kin, much closer. They would be the valuable prisoners, she thought, swallowing bile. She knew the end of the story. They would – like she – hear the cries of the children, and the cries would wound them, scar and cripple them, until they broke. But they would not die, although they might wish it. They would
serve
.

And she?

She lifted a hand in the darkness; felt the weight of manacles, like thick adornments. The end and the beginning.

But the hopelessness, the guilt, that had already begun to cripple the others broke her in a different way. She would not serve
these
masters. But maybe, just maybe, she would serve the masters that drove them in their endless fear and rage and cruelty. In the darkness, touching the minds of her kin, learning the truth behind the old stories, the grim stories, she broke her vows. The vows of a healer. The vows of a peaceful man.

What the children had suffered would not be in vain.

She would
make
the enemy pay.

For if her gift was the taking of pain, and by its absence, the giving of comfort, she was
also
cursed. They had come, the Feladrim; they had come seeking
power
. She would
show them power
.

For she had touched their warriors, been touched by their warriors, and she knew – as her people refused to know – that there was only one way to stop them. Fill the night with their screams and the screams of
their
kin.

Not that way, not that way, Uriel – that way lies madness
.

“There is no other way!” She could feel the words, in her throat; she could not speak them any other way. Her people had no way of conveying all she felt; no safe way. “They want power – I’ll show them
power
.”

And the fire came at her call, then; fire such as the world had seen only at its savage dawn. She felt it take her, the fire, and she welcomed its heat, its ancient hunger – for its hunger was like her own.

Uriel, no!

But there was no denial. They could not touch her, here – her people
or
her enemies. The Tha’alani could speak to each other, without the necessity for touch, if they were close enough. But they could not
stop
her with just their thoughts, their useless pleas.

She was done with peace. She was done with mercy. The screams that followed in this night to end all dawn carried pain and fear – and she laughed at the sound, and her gift – the gift for which she was known, the gift for which she was revered – deserted her entirely.