Page 125 of Cast in Atonement

I don’t know. The usual. Wing it. Can you see Evanton’s feet?

I can.

I can’t. But I think Evanton has made use of the malleability of the environment to create a space, a patch of land, that conforms to the rules of his garden. It’s not his garden—that’s probably why he’s exhausted. But I think the Ancient understands some part of what Evanton is trying to achieve, and he accepts it.

Severn didn’t ask why she believed it; Evanton was alive.

I don’t suppose you see Terrano anywhere around here?

He wouldn’t remain in a space that’s meant to contain him, Severn replied. It was meant as a comforting possibility. Kaylin understood and didn’t argue, but she didn’t feel particularly comforted.

She didn’t have time to worry about Terrano, even if she had the inclination; the ground beneath her feet began to rumble—no, to undulate—as if it were both solid and liquid simultaneously. She looked up to see Evanton; his face was a mask of focus and concentration, his hands clenched in fists by his sides.

Hope said, Hurry, Kaylin. Whatever you intend to do, you must do it as close to now as possible.

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The marks that she saw as large, floating runes began to shudder in place; it took her a few seconds to realize their movements matched the tremor of the ground beneath her feet, beat for beat. Hope, translucent, seemed to become almost attenuated, the lines of his body that were clear and hard softening, as if he would be absorbed by the outlands in his entirety.

Hope roared, a note of disgust in the sound. Kaylin swallowed, understanding his meaning: She was to focus on the Keeper. Not Hope.

She let go of Severn’s hand; she thought he would remain with her. She was no longer going anywhere. If Mandoran was right, if she walked between planes without realizing that was what she was doing, she’d meant to take him with her as she walked. But this was where she had to be, and he was here.

He unsheathed both of his weapons; they seemed almost transparent, but the chain that bound them wasn’t. He then turned to Hope, to Evanton, planting his feet firmly in the space that they occupied. He didn’t approach the Ancient, that towering giant who seemed, standing as he did above Evanton, like a world unto himself.

Evanton’s feet remained submerged in the pale, gray loam, and he struggled to maintain his footing.

No, she realized. Not his footing. He was struggling to maintain his control over the miasma of potential that was the outlands. She wondered, for the first time, if the elemental garden was formed from the same material. It would explain what Evanton was now doing: he had control over some element of that potential because the garden was necessary, and the garden required a Keeper.

What she didn’t understand was the presence of the green.

Severn’s certain identification of the flowers she couldn’t see without Hope’s wing made clear that somehow the strands Azoria had woven so delicately and carefully so as to draw power of some kind from the green—without also drawing attention—had altered. Maybe the connection required control, and Azoria, dead, had none.

Maybe the green had become aware of Azoria’s incursion.

But if it had, why was its power now prevalent here? Why did her marks somehow reflect the green? And why had the miasma that she’d seen when she’d stepped beneath the first arch remind her so much of Shadow?

Did it have something to do with death, with the dead? With what the Ancients became when they died? Was that what Evanton was trying to contain?

Kaylin!

Right. What Evanton was trying to do wasn’t her responsibility. What she was trying to do, was. It was the only thing she had control over, the only thing she could do that might somehow help. The usual problem applied: she had no idea what she was doing, what she was supposed to be doing. Hope believed she could do something. Evanton believed it.

And the Ancient believed it as well.

Being with the Hawks had taught her to assess, to research, to investigate; had taught her that knee-jerk reactions weren’t always the answer. Sometimes knee jerk was emotional, personal, a reaction—not an instinct. She’d trusted her instincts, but separating them from her reactions had always been difficult.

Now? There was no knee jerk if she didn’t count panic, and she didn’t. There was nothing to take personally; the only thing making her feel small and inadequate was herself—and she didn’t have time for it. Second-guesses and self-loathing could come later, if there was a later.

That left only instinct.

It was the instinct that had guided her early attempts at healing. It was the instinct that she fell back on every subsequent time she had struggled to use her power to save a life—even an ungrateful, resentful, Barrani life. She wasn’t healing anything, but she felt that same instinct guide her.

And that instinct had always been defined, not by Kaylin, but by the injured person. The injured body. The outlands, as far as she knew, was not a body. It wasn’t alive. But the marks, in their ivory-edged green glory, seemed, as the ground continued to shudder in an oddly rhythmic time, to want to somehow take root there, as if this was where they belonged. This place, this time, beneath Evanton’s feet. And the Ancient’s.

Marks had left her skin before; she wondered if these marks—all of the visible ones pulsing with the same color—would leave in the same way. She closed her eyes, as she often did when she tried to heal the injured.

She could still see the marks; they were the only thing she could see.

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