Cast in Deception by Michelle Sagara
Both Lirienne and Barian froze as Bellusdeo crossed the courtyard to join Kaylin. The Dragon’s eyes were a dark orange. She carried no weapon; Dragon armor didn’t include swords. But they weren’t really necessary for Dragons. She couldn’t exactly bow well in the armor that she now wore, but ditching the armor—while it seldom seemed to cause Bellusdeo any embarrassment—wasn’t an option at the moment.
“Lord of the West March. Lord Barian.” She couldn’t bow, and didn’t make the attempt. “Terrano?”
They were staring at her, but there was, in their regard, both respect and something that might have been admiration. Kaylin did not understand the Barrani, and thought she never would. She had expected anger, fear, hostility.
Lirienne bowed to the Dragon. “We are unharmed,” he said quietly. “You considered this a danger?”
The Dragon exhaled. “I do not know what you’ve been told about my life before my return to these lands, but most of it was spent fighting Shadow. And that small creature was very like the small Shadows sent ahead to scout communities that were not—yet—infested.” She lifted her head. “Terrano?”
“Here,” Terrano replied. His voice echoed, and Kaylin felt a sudden, sharp chill in the air.
Damn it, she thought.
Bellusdeo’s eyes were almost red, because Dragon eyes were not quite the same as human eyes, and she caught sight of Terrano before Kaylin did. He didn’t seem to notice her.
He was, unfortunately, not the Terrano of very recent memory; he was oddly, darkly beautiful, his limbs literally shining, as if they were composed of polished steel. Or silver. His eyes were completely black, and his clothing drifted off his shoulders and toward the ground in a moving swirl of color. A continually moving swirl.
His hands were cupped, as if around a sphere. “We’re going to have to move inside,” he said, entirely unaware of the way everyone was now staring at him. “I don’t think I can hold it for long.”
* * *
“What is she so angry about?” Terrano asked. He had drifted—and that was the right word for a movement that did not resemble walking at all—toward Kaylin, but stayed on the side of her that the familiar didn’t occupy.
“She’s not angry,” Kaylin replied. She kept her voice low, but knew that Bellusdeo and the Barrani would catch every single word. “She’s worried.”
“Well, yeah. I’m not sure how this thing got in—”
“About you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Not about your health. About what you might do.”
He stopped. “I’m not going to do anything. To any of you. I have no reason to try to hurt you.”
“You did, once.”
“And I explained that.”
Kaylin believed him. Lirienne, however, was far more suspicious and remote. “You know you look like a silver statue with moving skirts for legs, right?”
His expression literally rippled with his confusion. “Do I?”
Bellusdeo snorted smoke. But her eyes retreated from the dangerous red into a more neutral orange. Not a pale orange, though. “Yes.”
“Ugh. Look—I’m sorry. I can’t really try to mess with my form while I’m containing this Shadow bit; I think I might lose it. It’s...not really happy, and it’s been trying to sting me continuously. And no, it only looks like a butterfly. It’s got teeth.”
“You realize that you look very, very similar to one of the more impressive Shadows?” the Dragon asked, her tone casual. Her eye color remained a steady orange.
“Not to me, I don’t.” He didn’t particularly like Dragons, but could force himself to speak to one—or so his impression implied. “What exactly about me looks like Shadow?”
Both of the Dragon’s brows rose. “Would you like to field this question?” she asked of Kaylin.
“...Not really.”
Squawk.
Fine. “It’s your form.”
“The silver statue bit?”
“Silver isn’t the word I’d use—unless silver is mostly black, but shiny anyway. No, it’s the fact that you don’t really have a fixed form as far as the rest of us can tell. You could probably just sprout a dozen arms—or heads, or whatever—if you felt like it.”
“Yes? And?”
“Shadow does that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
He continued to walk, as if concentrating, and as he did, his skin tone shifted from shiny, polished metal to something that looked far more natural. His arms, however, remained as they were: silver, reflective, hard. “That’s how you tell the difference?”
“Yes. Normally.” But she thought of Gilbert. And she thought, as well, of the Hallionne Bertolle’s brothers, who thought of physical form the way rich people thought of clothing. Maybe he was now like those ancient brothers.
“It’s not Shadow.” Terrano was clearly annoyed. “We’re tied to the forms of our birth by other things. But we mostly can’t access our inherent power. Or we couldn’t, before.”
“And you can now.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“This is what you did to Ynpharion.”
“I didn’t do anything to Ynpharion that he didn’t want done. Surely you must see the advantage in being able to control one’s shape?” The doors that Terrano approached led directly into the Hallionne, and they were open, as if Alsanis was holding out his arms for the return of the prodigal. It was an odd thought, but Kaylin didn’t think she was wrong.
“How do you see Shadow, then?” she asked.
“It’s part of a web,” he replied. “If you look hard, you can see it as it lies across the landscape. This?” he added, lifting his cupped hands, “is attached by a strand. It doesn’t exactly have a will of its own. No, that’s wrong. It has some initiative, some ability to adapt to its setting. But it doesn’t have its own personality.”
“I would think some of you have far more personality than is good for anyone,” Bellusdeo said.
“Annarion doesn’t.”
“No. He’s responsible. Mandoran, however, more than makes up for it.”
Terrano chuckled. “Just wait until you meet everyone else.” The amusement faded almost as quickly as it had appeared.
“We’ll find them,” Kaylin said.
“How can you, if I can’t?”
“We wouldn’t be here if the water hadn’t thought we could do something.”
“Meaning you have no idea.”
* * *
The moment they cleared the threshold, the doors which had opened so invitingly rolled shut. They didn’t slam, though.
“No,” Alsanis said. His Avatar was waiting patiently. “I am Hallionne now, not prison, and my guests are free to leave should they so choose. That, however,” he added, staring at Terrano’s cupped hands, “is not a guest.”
“Can I let it go now?” Terrano asked, as Kaylin said, “Is it safe?”
“It is safe.”
“But—”
“It is too small and too insignificant to alter my structure in any meaningful fashion. Terrano and his kin were far more likely to cause difficulties—”
“And it took us centuries.”
“Indeed. You were guests,” he added quietly. “Available options to deal with you were not the same as the options open to me in regard to your captive. The thing you carry is causing you pain,” he added, his expression one of concern. “Release it.”
Terrano practically threw it from his hands.
It careened in the air as if it were drunk, wobbling in what might have been an arc of flight. But the wings that had seemed, in shape and size, butterfly wings were something different now. They were silvered, hard, dense; they seemed to make flight itself very difficult.
Terrano had said that the butterfly bit him. Kaylin wondered, idly, if it were vampiric in nature.
“No,” Alsanis replied. “It did not absorb. It attempted to infect, to alter.”
Bellusdeo turned the color of old cheese, which didn’t suit the red of her eyes.
“It cannot effect Terrano in that way,” the Hallionne continued. Very quickly. “But Terrano reversed the flow of that infection; the Shadow is now infested with...him.” He turned, just as quickly, to the Lord of the West March. “No, he is not like the Shadow. Perhaps, were he the Lady, he might have some hope of becoming such a force—but it would be the work of millennia, and I do not think, in the end, he could achieve it.”
“Who wants it?” Terrano demanded. “I hate being told what to do. I hate having to tell other people what to do. It’s boring and frustrating. They don’t understand half of what I say. Or more. There is so much to see. So much to try. So much to be.”
“But you are here.”
He exhaled. “They’re here. No, they were here. I heard Sedarias.” He grimaced. “You’d think, after a lifetime of hearing Sedarias, I’d be happier with the silence. Ask Mandoran,” he added, not bothering to look in Kaylin’s direction.
“She called you?”
“I think...she tried.”
“And you came.” The Hallionne’s voice was warm.
Terrano said nothing for a long beat. Kaylin thought he would say nothing. She was wrong.
“I can’t hear them,” he finally whispered. “I can’t hear them at all, anymore.” Something in his voice spoke of loss, of grief, of the confusion it caused; it cut Kaylin, hearing it, because she knew how he felt. And wished that she didn’t.
“No,” Alsanis said, in the softest of voices. “You left your name here; you understood that it would be a cage. And Terrano, you were not wrong. The words are a cage. But cages have other names, and there are some creatures that cannot survive outside of them. Songbirds, for example.”
Kaylin looked at Terrano’s slumped shoulders. She realized that he had been part of the cohort for almost all of his existence; that he had heard their voices, their thoughts, as if they were part of his own. Teela alone had been sundered from the Hallionne and her kin.
“He can’t be what he wants with a name,” Kaylin said, hazarding a guess.
“I do not know what he wants to be—but he cannot hear them or see what they see the way he once did. And you should understand this, Chosen.”
She nodded, watching the flying creature as its shape continued to change. It was disturbing—but it was no more disturbing than watching the effects of Shadow’s infestation. “Could you maybe stop that?” she said to Terrano.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to transform the Shadow.”
“Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do. It’s what you’re doing.”
Bellusdeo, however, said, “What are you trying to achieve, exactly?”
“I’m trying to free it.”
Freedom had never looked so unappealing. “What were you trying to do to Ynpharion?”
“Oh, that was different.”
She could feel Ynpharion in the back of her thoughts; the Hallionne had clearly allowed those thoughts entry. He promised freedom. Ynpharion’s presence was a ghost, a whisper. There was yearning in it, which surprised Kaylin. You have always been free.
Since freedom, for half her life, had included serious danger of starvation or freezing to death, Kaylin bridled. She didn’t think about all of the other things that freedom had included in that childhood, because most of them had been the freedom to die.
“I’ll stop now,” Terrano added, with an undercurrent of smug that really did remind Kaylin of Mandoran. She had the sudden, visceral desire to take Terrano home to Helen, where the rest of the city would be safe from him, and where he could see some of his friends again.
But Alsanis said, “He is not, now, what they are, Lord Kaylin. He is not what they are trying so desperately to be, to remain. I do not think your Helen would have the ability you ascribe to her. But...he is correct. He is done.”
She watched. The butterfly—badly drawn and not quite solid—was gone. In its place was something that looked like a sphere—with glittering spikes, most of which were silver. It had no eyes, no wings, nothing that suggested that it should be capable of flight. But fly it could; it drifted toward Terrano. He held out a palm, and it came to land, once again, in his hand.
Only once it nestled there did it reveal actual eyes. And teeth. Because it opened its mouth and screeched. The screech felt like it contained words, but Kaylin’s hands were already covering her ears in an attempt to muffle the noise.
* * *
“What is it?” Bellusdeo asked. Her eyes were once again a darker orange. If she did not trust Terrano, she did not suspect his intent; she understood that Terrano was a walking, natural disaster. Those could easily kill the unwary, sometimes by the thousands, but there was no intent in earthquakes or hurricanes.
And regardless, earthquakes or hurricanes were unlikely to harm a Dragon.
Terrano frowned. It was a long, slow, fluid motion which changed more than the lines of his face. The screeching continued as he stared at it.
“What is it—”
“Be quiet. I can’t hear it if you talk.”
Since Kaylin could barely hear her own voice above the high-pitched, unpleasant whine, she stared at him, but she did as he asked. The familiar whacked her face with one extended wing, and she sighed. Loudly.
Terrano frowned. At this rate, he was going to tell her to stop breathing. But she obeyed the familiar’s unspoken command; she looked through his translucent wing.
What she saw in Terrano’s hand was entirely different than what she saw when she relied on only her own eyes. For one, it wasn’t the size of a fruit pit. It wasn’t spiky. It remained an odd silver, but the silver was illuminated and glowing. No, worse, pulsing. The pulse was irregular, unlike a heartbeat. But that wasn’t the worst thing about it. It was the size, the shape, of a man. No, an older child. The face, however, was diffuse, as were all elements about it except the thing Terrano had his hand around. It was as if Terrano had shoved his hand into a living person’s chest, and cupped it around their heart, except the living person wasn’t screaming in terror or pain.
“They are not in pain,” Alsanis said. Kaylin noticed that the Hallionne didn’t get told to shut up.
“Ah, no, Chosen. I understand the nuance of voice and pitch.”
“Is this what you see?” she asked.
“I cannot see what you see. But I believe you are now seeing what I see, with small variations. It is...not what I expected. His heart is what you see without your familiar’s aid, but you see it askew. It is his heart that was infested.”
“What is he?”
“I do not know, Lord Kaylin. Ah, apologies. Kaylin.”
You must learn to accept the title that comes with your position; it is one of the very few advantages you have, Ynpharion said.
Where I came from, an advantage was an invitation to robbery. Or worse.
It is not so different, here—but it signals, to the would-be thief, that there are consequences.
She would have answered, but at that moment, the stranger looked up to meet her eyes, through the veil of familiar’s wing. She realized one of the disturbing things about him was that he had no eyelids.
The second disturbing thing was the eyes he did have: they looked like...bee eyes. Or bee hives. Like something was living in them that might emerge at any minute. She wondered, as she controlled a shudder, what he saw when he looked at her. As if in reply, the marks on her arms began to glow.
19
He opened his mouth; he had no teeth. Where teeth might have been, he had fine, multicolored filaments; they moved in a wave that appeared to reflect light. She could see that the f
If it was even his heart.
“Chosen,” he said. She could hear the word, could feel her body reverberate with the two syllables. The high-pitched, painful shriek was gone.
She opened her mouth to reply, but words deserted her; her mouth was too dry, her throat too constricted. She forced herself to breathe normally. Wondered what she was inhaling.
“There is danger, here.” He looked away, to Terrano. “I am...free? I am free. If you release me, I will not harm you, and I will not return to Ravellon.” The word he used was different; Kaylin could hear the clashing overlay of syllables, but it didn’t change the heart of what he’d actually said.
Terrano hesitated.
“It is safe,” Alsanis said quietly. “They will do no harm to me.”
Terrano let go. As he did, Kaylin saw that his hand was bleeding. The person that he’d caught and held in its insect shape remained standing; he made no further attempt to flee. But he turned to the Avatar of the Hallionne, and lifted his hands in a complicated dance of motion that seemed deliberate, graceful.
It took a moment for Kaylin to realize that this was his version of a bow: a gesture of respect. What surprised her was Alsanis; he lifted his hands in a motion that, while far less fluid, appeared to be almost the same.
“It is a greeting,” Alsanis said, glancing at Kaylin. “An old greeting. Words once had different meanings, different textures, and to speak them at all required power and will, focus and certainty; they were not unlike bright, beautiful cages. There are reasons why you cannot speak that ancient language. And no, Lord Kaylin, it does not come easily to even one such as I.”
She wondered where he’d seen that greeting, where he’d learned it, what etiquette schools—and here, an image of angry Diarmat, not that there was any other kind, filled her mind—he had been forced to attend.