Page 169 of Cast in Conflict

“Kaylin?” Bellusdeo said, voice a rumble.

“It’s all Shadow,” she snapped. “Something’s grabbed Mandoran and I’m trying to—to pull him out.”

“What? What’s grabbed him?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if he caught a spear—”

“I’m not deaf,” Mandoran said. His voice was slurred, difficult to hear; there was an odd echo to the words.

“Fine—you tell us. Just don’t let go.” She closed her eyes again. Eyes closed, she could see Mandoran, or at least the top half of him; the rest was enveloped in something. To Kaylin’s eyes, that something didn’t have the visual characteristics of Shadow, not here; eyes opened, it was Mandoran himself who looked like he was slowly transforming, or slowly being transformed.

She prayed as loudly as possible that Bellusdeo couldn’t see him. Mandoran in this state might be able to survive Dragon breath; she was almost certain it would pass harmlessly through him.

Kaylin was more certain that that wasn’t going to be true of either her or Terrano.

Free me. Kaylin blinked. Kill me.

The voice sounded like Mandoran’s; the words overlapped each other. She could pick apart overlapping sentences when she was in the middle of a crowd that might, at any moment, transform into a mob, and she applied that training now.

“Say that again,” she told Mandoran.

“Say what?” Terrano shouted in her ear.

“Not you—Mandoran, say that again.”

“Say what?”

She wanted to shriek. The pressure of time was becoming an almost unbearable weight—worse, by far, than Mandoran. Her hand was numb. Mandoran’s voice, wrapped around the same two words Terrano had spoken, was once again an odd, echoing sound, filled with words that he hadn’t spoken.

Words.

Language.

She understood them. She understood them because both Terrano and Mandoran were speaking her mother tongue. But the overlapping words, the eddies, the echoes...weren’t Elantran.

Free me.

Kill me.

The words were clearer. The texture was clearer. They weren’t Elantran. She couldn’t identify the language—but she understood it. Understood, in the end, what it must be. She wasn’t surprised when the skin on her arms, her legs, her back, began to tingle.

No, she was surprised, because the “allergy to magic” problem rarely occurred when Shadow was involved. This tingle became pain, as it usually did—but pain implied magic in the here and now, magic cast with intent, by people nearby.

“Hope!”

I have you.

“Someone’s casting something—”

An’Teela. And Sedarias. It will not hit you.

“No—it’s different!” she shouted.

Hope did not reply. No one did.

She opened her eyes. Hope wasn’t with her. Neither was Terrano; she could no longer feel his arms around her. But she didn’t need them to prevent a very messy fall; she was standing on firm ground. The ground itself was stone, not dirt; there was no grass here, although she could see the hint of weeds that implied dirt beneath the stone.

The weeds, however, were purple.

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