Page 108 of Cast in Conflict

“Can you see Sedarias?”

“Not yet.”

“Terrano?”

“We couldn’t see him when he spoke to us.”

It was a fair point. She couldn’t ask Hope to place a wing across her face; he’d flatten her. Terrano had said the rise of the plain that looked very much like a battlefield after a war had been fought was at the height of a flat peak; that it was cliff all the way down. Seen from the air, he was right. What she didn’t see, as Hope circled this edifice of rising stone, was anything at all that resembled stairs.

Terrano—and Mandoran—had ways of reaching the ground; the landscape itself wouldn’t otherwise try to kill them. But it was going to be work, regardless.

“Can you see Mandoran?” She couldn’t. “He’s likely to be where Sedarias is.”

“No sign of Mandoran. I’d wait on Terrano’s signal.”

“You think he’ll remember to signal us?”

She could feel Severn’s nod from the inside; she couldn’t see it because she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head.

Hope felt no need to land quickly, possibly because the peak was so high. Rock was the landscape, all the way down; Kaylin couldn’t see an end to the drop. There was no distant patch of greenery, nothing that visually implied that life existed anywhere but the flat plain they’d left. There, at least, evidence of plant life remained, even if much of it had been destroyed.

Severn’s eyes had always been better than hers; she wasn’t surprised when Severn said, “There. Start there.”

“What’s there?”

“A river.”

Hope turned, slowly, to the right, still intent on descent.

The river was much wider than it had looked from above, which wasn’t hard; from above, Kaylin hadn’t seen it. As they approached, it seemed to widen and lengthen, rushing in a way that made swimming or rafting guaranteed suicide. Rocks and wood had been carried in the current, and rocks had worn away at the stone that served as its partial tunnel; there was no shore here.

Hope flew in the direction of the current, following the water so closely the spray dampened his passengers.

Kaylin glanced once over her shoulder; the peak could no longer be seen.

She thought of the portal paths, their natural gray emptiness, the nothing that was somehow the potential out of which the Towers could create everything. Sedarias had done that here. But Terrano’s reaction implied it wasn’t deliberate; it was a state of mind.

Why had the battlefield been placed at the top of a peak? It was the highest standing peak in this bleak landscape. She understood the symbolism of the fallen banners: Sedarias felt betrayed by those who had been, and who were, the only family she had ever known.

Family, in the sense that Kaylin defined it. Kaylin had tried to build a family in the absence of the one she was born to; she’d been drawn to people who would, or could, provide her with some of what she had desperately missed.

Sedarias hadn’t had any of that; her upbringing—given her sister and brother—had been a deadly version of every man for themselves. She had killed both of them in the end, not for reasons of politics or power, but survival. But she was now An’Mellarionne, and power came with the title, if she could survive long enough to hold it.

She’d been taught not to trust; most of them had. Annarion, however, had never stopped trusting his brother, which is why his anger at his brother’s behavior cut him so deeply. Teela had killed her father because she loved her mother, who had died at his hands.

Family, Barrani family, was complicated.

Maybe there was no other way to express it than the way Sedarias had chosen to express it: as a war, a battlefield, a place of conflict and only conflict.

She realized then that she didn’t know what Severn’s childhood had been like; that it had never truly occurred to her to ask.

“You did,” he said, proof that her thoughts were heard, even if they weren’t voiced. “But you were young, when we first met. In your memories I was always there. I was part of your family.”

And now was not the time to ask. She therefore dutifully bit back a flood of questions and turned her thoughts, once again, to Sedarias. What did Sedarias want? What had she wanted when she had first offered eleven strangers the power of her True Name?

What had she tried to do with the power of theirs?

Ah. Yes. That was the question.

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