Cast in Flight by Michelle Sagara
“You fear your power,” he continued. “I once feared mine. I do not fear it now. You were created to sustain the Aeries. You were created to sustain the flights. No permission was asked. It was assumed. You were different. You were blessed.” The tone of the last word implied the opposite of its meaning.
Moran’s expression rippled briefly, and Kaylin knew why: that blessing had cost her her childhood and anything that had made it safe. It had almost cost her her life. No permission had been asked, true. No permission had been granted. She had been marked as different from the moment she was born.
The Hawks hadn’t loved or revered her for that difference; she had been treated with a kind of wary deference Kaylin had always assumed was due her rank in the Halls, her position in the infirmary. Kaylin had never found her welcoming or kind, but that wasn’t her job—her job was to deal with the injured, and to force them, as she could, to get better.
“You are praevolo. No one else in any flight in the Aerie could become what you are. You have the power now. Will you live as you lived before? Will you be hemmed in by the simple fact of your birth? They welcome you now—but they did not always welcome you. Many would have seen you die.”
The outcaste said nothing that Moran wasn’t thinking.
But beneath his feet, Kaylin heard the rumble of Dragon. It was Bellusdeo.
The outcaste looked down at her. The gold Dragon seemed to be welded to the ground—and struggling to change this. “You could be so much more than you are,” he said to her. “You could have true freedom of the skies. You could be the mother of a race that is not beholden to the dead, to the whims of the flights—even if only one remains.
“You could have freedom. What you have now is only a step up from servitude and bondage.”
She roared. There were syllables in it.
Moran, however, lifted one hand. “Perhaps, had you come to me and spoken of this choice and this freedom, my answer would be different. But you—as they did—chose for me. Or against me. You saw the power. Perhaps you understood the mechanics of it in a way that I did not or could not. But what you wanted was what they wanted: control. You did not particularly care if that power came to you through my death. I was of no consequence, no value, to either my flight or those who accepted you.
“But you are right in one regard. I am me. I am a Hawk. I am a sergeant. I am an Aerian. The power that I did not want and did not ask for is nonetheless mine—by design. And by choice. I accept it. I accept what it means.
“Do you understand what wakes the praevolo?” she asked.
The skies were simultaneously full of movement and hushed with stillness.
He did not answer. Three beats passed before she made clear that the question was entirely rhetorical. “Danger to the race. You were here, as was he,” she added, indicating the Arcanist, “before my birth. What you discussed, what you attempted, the plans you made—those were responsible for me. For my birth. And for the deaths,” she added. “You wanted power.
“Now, you face it.” Kaylin heard thunder in her voice.
Lightning followed.
* * *
The wings of the outcaste were not wings: they were Shadow. They were a Shadow whose shape, whose form, he obviously controlled. Those wings snapped up, folding as lightning streaked past him. His hair flew in its aftermath; his eyes were the color of light.
Kaylin’s arms and legs were glowing, bright; symbols rose to ring her. They encompassed Moran, as well. Moran didn’t appear to notice.
The outcaste didn’t, either. Kaylin was irrelevant to both of them. The small dragon—and he was small now, and attached to her left shoulder—squawked and lifted his wing.
Kaylin shook her head.
He smacked the bridge of her nose, hard enough her eyes smarted. She blinked back tears and looked through the translucent flap. The outcaste’s wings were Shadow—which she’d expected. She expected the rest of him to somehow conform to that. He wasn’t Aerian. He wasn’t mortal.
He wasn’t a Dragon, either.
Shadow had a multiplicity of forms, or a lack of form; it shifted in place. It was malleable in some fashion, and that fashion differed from creature to creature. There were one-offs—as they were called in the fiefs—who could have multiple jaws, eyes, legs; they might have horns or wings that didn’t provide flight. They looked like bodies that had been randomly chopped up and stitched together, except that they moved and spoke.
Sometimes they spoke intelligibly.
Had the outcaste looked like a one-off, Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised.
He looked instead like a...god. Like an Ancient.
She froze in place, almost afraid to attract his attention; she could see nothing else of significance in the sky, where she floated beside Moran. She could see nothing of significance anywhere else, either.
He was there, and that was all that mattered.
He frowned, his glance sliding momentarily off Moran to meet Kaylin’s gaze. She drew breath, but she had no words. She could see his name.
She could see his name and she knew that she was not seeing the whole of it; that she might look at it, study it, for a lifetime and still not see enough of it to attempt to speak it. She knew that even the attempt would end in her death, because the attempt seemed profane.
And she knew that this name was not the one she had seen in the fief of Nightshade. It was not the same shape. It didn’t have the same weight. It was, in its entirety, too large. She thought it might be the name of a world, shrouded as it was in Shadow and darkness.
His eyes were words. She had seen them as trapped lightning without the small dragon’s wings; she saw them differently now. She almost raised a hand to push the small dragon’s wing away, but she had enough of his attention, and she was determined to do nothing at all that would attract more of it.
But his eyes narrowed—or the shape of them changed—as he looked down on her. And he did look down. It wasn’t a figurative description. He frowned; she felt instantly ashamed of whatever it was she had done to earn it, too. The rest of her anger at this reaction tried to assert itself and failed.
He held out a hand, the movement jerky; it was both a command and a struggle. Chosen.
She started to move. She started to obey, and she struggled to regain control of herself, of her visceral reactions.
* * *
Moran slid an arm around her shoulder, and the impulse died. Kaylin reached up and shoved the familiar’s wing away from her face, almost dislodging him. Her shoulder, in case of magic and its possible offensive use, was exactly where she wanted him to be—but not if she had to look at the outcaste. Not that way.
This way, he looked Aerian. This way, he looked like an enemy, an arrogant, powerful man. This way, she could fight him, despise him, pity him or hate him, because all of these things seemed relevant.
She didn’t know what Moran saw when she looked at the outcaste, but it didn’t matter. As soon as Moran placed that arm across Kaylin’s shoulder, Kaylin was in Moran’s space, and Moran’s space was the Aerie and everything that comprised it: the sky, the caves, the people.
Flight and its power here were the praevolo’s.
The praevolo did what she’d been born to do: She denied the outcaste flight.
* * *
Or she tried.
He dropped five feet, maybe ten, but the grip of gravity faltered. He had called himself praevolo. Aerians—some Aerians—had believed him. Since he didn’t have the wings, he had to have had something that would convince them of the truth of his claim.
He halted his own downward progress. Looking up at Moran—and he had to look up—he smiled. Kaylin braced herself as he opened his mouth.
He didn’t breathe. He spoke.
The marks that now hovered above her skin began to glow
He was reading the words. Her words.
* * *
The familiar’s claws pierced her shoulders. She knew this only because she felt the pain that followed the clean incisions, and turned to glare at him. And froze.
What was seated on her shoulder should have broken it, it was so large. She knew the familiar could change size and shape, she’d seen it often enough. But this shape was not the large, translucent Dragon. Nor was it almost Aerian. It was disturbingly cloud-like. She had seen Shadow coalesce in just this way: it had edges and distinct shapes that seemed to be clashing against each other, as if for dominance, and none of those shapes made sense.
She had never seen it in her familiar before.
The words rose as the outcaste continued to intone them. As if they were somehow his. As if what she had seen through the wing of the familiar was true. And if it was? If he was somehow an Ancient, a thing that spawned whole worlds? These were his words. This was his language. It had been written across more than half her body without her permission.
The words had never been hers. She was Chosen, yes—to carry them, to bear them. She only barely understood their use.
She felt the lull of his voice, the odd rightness of it. These were his words.
But the pain in her shoulder grew sharper and colder, and the thing that now inhabited the left of her body, the right being occupied by Moran, grew darker. There were colors in that deepening haze, and those grew brighter. No, brighter was the wrong word. They felt lurid, out of place; they made light disturbing.
She reached up to pull the claws out, but there were no claws. Of course there weren’t. There was Shadow, and it threatened to spread the way the other Shadow had.
“Let go of me,” she told her familiar, speaking an Elantran so thick it was practically inaudible.
I am yours. She felt the words; she shuddered with them. She couldn’t hear them otherwise.
She wanted to deny it, but it had been true since the moment she’d been handed an egg by a justifiably shattered parent. It had been true since he’d hatched. He had tested her, and that had caused pain—but not this pain. Not this fear.
He spoke.
The outcaste spoke.
She realized only slowly that they were saying the same thing. The words flared; they grew larger as they detached themselves.
The outcaste turned from Moran to Kaylin. “Chosen,” he said. He repeated the single word, and Kaylin realized that it wasn’t what he was saying. It was what she was hearing. True Words.
No, the familiar said. It was denial. It was the heart of denial, the visceral meaning of it. But it was not spoken in rage or fear. It was a word. It was a True Word.
She closed her eyes, and this was a mistake. The words that surrounded her—words that usually took up residence on her skin, as part of it—were still visible. They’d always been visible when she closed her eyes.
But the outcaste was visible in the same way. The familiar’s presence was more profoundly wrong. She looked away. There was no ground beneath her feet, and no Aerian beside her.
No, there was an Aerian beside her. Moran, as translucent as the small dragon usually was, remained to her right, her wings luminous, her eyes the color of sunlight on water. The Shadows surrounded her flight feathers, her hands, her arms, but they weren’t part of what she was.
She was Aerian.
And she turned to Kaylin, and said, in Aerian, “What’s wrong?” In a very familiar, very sergeant-like tone. Kaylin wanted to weep with relief at the sound of it. Things had gone to hell, but Moran was still sergeant to Kaylin’s private.
“The outcaste is reading my marks.”
“Will reading them give him control over them?”
Would it? That was Kaylin’s fear. She knew the marks had power. They gave her the power to heal. They gave her the ability to stand where she was standing now, neither here nor there, but in both places at the same time. The only times she had chosen to use the words deliberately, she had struggled to divine their meaning, because without meaning, she couldn’t find the place they were meant to be.
But understanding their meaning hadn’t given her more power. It had allowed her to use them as she hoped they were meant to be used.
“I don’t think so.”
Moran gave her a look that was pure sergeant. She returned a look that was visceral private.
“True Words can be True Names. But that is not what your words are.”
“You are wrong,” the outcaste said. And he spoke in High Barrani. But he continued to intone the words as he did, without pause.
So did the terrifyingly strange familiar. Was this what he was? Was small and squawky like the heart of Shadow? She fought panic; his Shadow entered her, flowed into her, in a way that the other Shadow couldn’t. And why? Because she’d fought it. Because he’d fought it, for her. She looked down at her hands and blinked.
They looked gloved, in this space. They looked like pretty lace gloves. She lifted her hands again. Crossing her arms, she placed a hand just above each collarbone.
The pain ebbed.
The familiar continued to chant. He might not have noticed her at all.
“That Name,” she told the outcaste, “is not your Name.”
His eyes widened; his recitation stumbled.
She had been afraid that speaking the words would give him power over them. She had assumed that the familiar’s recitation was supposed to provide balance—as if she were a rope, and this were tug-of-war. But that wasn’t the way language worked. True Names, maybe. But not True Words. Not these words.
The familiar continued to speak, and Kaylin swallowed hesitation and fear, containing them. She began to speak the words as well, to echo the familiar’s steady, slow reading.
Unlike either the familiar or the outcaste, she couldn’t read them and speak at the same time. But it seemed important to her that she speak, that she follow the familiar’s lead.
You couldn’t own words. You couldn’t own language. You might invent one, but to speak it, you shared. You couldn’t control what anyone else made of the language; couldn’t define how they spoke, when they spoke, or what they spoke about. Only when they were with you did you have that control, because conversation involved two. Or more.
Speaking these words didn’t change them. They weren’t True Names. They had existed before Kaylin—long before Kaylin—and they would exist after she died. She wasn’t the words. The words weren’t hers. But the skin they were on? That was.
The outcaste could speak. He could recognize the language that even the Arkon struggled with. But it was a kind of language. Speaking it didn’t change its essential nature, because speaking it couldn’t. People spoke words in order to communicate.
“Private.”
Or intimidate, or invoke emotion. Often conversations caused more confusion, not less; people used the same words in different ways, and therefore heard them and weighted them in ways the speaker might not have intended.
These were True Words. In theory, such misunderstandings weren’t possible. In theory, the words had meanings, and those meanings did not, could not, change. But...if these were True Words, if True Words could be spoken as if they were just another language, like Barrani or Aerian, there’d be no need to have the words attached to her skin, or the skin of any of the Chosen before her.
Regardless, the skin was her damn skin. While the words occupied it, they were as much hers as anyone’s. The marks rose as the recitation continued.
One of them was devoured, slowly, by the shadow on her left. The outcaste’s voice dipped again, as his eyes widened. They were orange now. They looked truly Draconic.
“What are you allowing
“It’s not the only time he’s done it,” Kaylin snapped back, losing the thread of the familiar’s steady voice. “But you know what? He needs permission. He doesn’t take what’s not offered. He doesn’t lie about what he is or what he wants. He doesn’t try to give a young Dragon a fake name so he can control her!”
Bellusdeo roared. She couldn’t see the gold Dragon, but she could hear her so clearly she lifted her hands to her ears.
The outcaste lost the thread of Kaylin’s words, lost the focus on Moran, lost height. It was to Bellusdeo that he looked; he could see what Kaylin couldn’t. “Is that what you think?” he roared. Kaylin shouldn’t have understood a word of it. She almost wished she couldn’t. “Is that what you think I was trying to do?”
Bellusdeo roared again, longer and louder. After a pause, she said, “Sergeant dar Carafel, let. Me. Fly.” This last was in Elantran, but spoken with all the depth and fullness of an angry, red-eyed Dragon. “...Please.”
“I cannot allow you to continue your fight in the Southern Reach. Enough damage has already been caused that this landing area has become unstable. If you fight here, you might destroy half the cliff face before you’re done. If only that. If you wish to fight, you must do so well clear of the Reaches.” She paused, and then added, “The outcaste is a matter of the Dragon Caste Court. There is a reason no one interferes in the wars of the Dragons, and I would not interfere now were the cost of inaction not to be paid by my people.”
The outcaste continued to look at Bellusdeo. “I did not destroy your sisters.”
“The Shadow—”
“I did not destroy them. I freed them. I freed all of you. You were one mind. You were nine existences. The walls between each diminished you and what you could be. As long as one of you existed, nine existed. How do you think you were saved? I did not intend to control you. I did not intend to subvert you. Child, I—”
She roared bloody murder. The floors shook. The walls shook.
Moran’s lips compressed into a single—and very familiar—line. She flicked her wings. Both the outcaste and the enraged gold Dragon flew out of the Aerie, if by flight one meant “were thrown.”