Page 174 of Cast in Conflict

“About as normal as you ever do.”

“It felt like fire.”

He nodded. “It’s gone, though.”

“What’s gone?”

“The tear.”

He was right. The non-weed she had been examining was gone; what was left was a small tendril of upright Shadow. She had an answer, of a sort: it was a tear in the fabric of Shadow. But she had no idea what the collapse of that tear meant, and given it was her own hand—her right hand—she had to struggle not to panic.

Panic was useless here. Caution was good. But being here at all defied every possible definition of cautious she could think of.

Heal, Severn said. Panic later.

She nodded. This was her own body. These were the marks of the Chosen. She could—and did—use the power to heal; she could use it to see if there were any changes in her body, any attempts to change it.

She remembered healing injured Barrani, near the West March. She remembered that the Shadow or chaos that had been left in the wake of injuries done by forest Ferals had not felt foreign, although it was. The injury or the damage done by that Shadow was transforming the body into which it had been injected, attempting to establish a new “normal” that didn’t match Barrani normal.

She really didn’t want to have to cut off her own hand.

But her hand seemed...normal. In pain, yes, but normal. The muscles, the tendons, the bones, even the skin—normal. Except for the pain. She cursed more viscerally as she opened her eyes and examined the palm of her hand.

A new mark now resided across the mound of her palm. A new word.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered.

“Don’t look at me. I’ve never met a Chosen who wasn’t you, and I know even less than you do.”

The mark was complicated; it reminded her, in some ways, of the outcaste Dragon’s name—a name she could see because he’d exposed it to her, probably hoping she’d be stupid enough to try to say it, try to use it to control him. She could barely manage simpler runes; she knew she couldn’t manage his.

And if she couldn’t, the attempt would mean that the person enslaved would be Kaylin, not the outcaste. The mark on her palm—her right palm—was purple; its delicate edges resembled glass or glass shards. It did hurt—but all of her skin did.

“Maybe we don’t try to examine the tears,” Mandoran said. He looked up, and then added, “On account of there being none left.”

She rose, very carefully not making a fist of her right hand, and looked down the street. Mandoran was right. There were no more non-weeds. They had, she thought uneasily, served their purpose. The buildings that overhung the street began to retract, as if their odd shapes were overlapping carapaces.

“This is...not good,” Mandoran said.

“You think?” She tightened her grip on his hand, and turned back; the street continued for as far as the eye—or her eyes—could see. But it widened; what passed for light here both brightened and darkened as the hue of that light changed.

Kaylin decided she really didn’t like the color green—not when it was blended with a livid purple. It hurt to look at. Especially when it was captured perfectly in Mandoran’s eyes; they didn’t look like Barrani eyes in any way, except the base shape—and even that was too large, as if the light was emanating from Mandoran himself and it was struggling to fully escape.

No.

She drew on the power of the marks of the Chosen to reach into Mandoran a second time. She knew what he should feel like.

No, that wasn’t true. Barrani normal, she knew—because Barrani normal, Barrani bodies knew. It was the same with mortal bodies, Aerian bodies and Leontine bodies. She was certain she could heal the Tha’alani as well, if it came to that. But the cohort were not Barrani. They could mimic it convincingly—and did—but when they lost control of their emotions, they lost control of the mimicry. There were things the cohort could do that most of their kin couldn’t.

She didn’t know what normal, for Mandoran, was.

And to be fair, she didn’t know if normal for Mandoran was normal for any of the rest of his cohort. She couldn’t tell if what she was now touching was Mandoran as he was supposed to be, or Mandoran, contaminated.

But she was certain that whatever it was he’d been hit with had somehow led them here, and here was not where either of them wanted to be.

She’d come here because she had listened to the voices that appeared to overlap Mandoran’s; she’d come because the words spoken were not the words that Mandoran was simultaneously speaking. If those words were Shadow’s words, things made no sense—because she now carried a new mark on her palm, and it was, to her eye, a True Word.

As were the words that she had heard.

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