Page 157 of Cast in Atonement

“I am,” Kaylin replied. “Mostly. Mrs. Erickson likes him.” Her eyes narrowed. “Does that mean you know where he is?”

“No. But the green does, and the green appears to have taken your appeal to heart.”

“Evanton—how can you speak with the green? Is it something you can teach me?”

“It depends. Do you plan to become the Keeper in the future? No? Then no, it is not something I can teach you. It’s not something I could teach, regardless. The green accepts your request by law of equivalent exchange. She will make certain Terrano returns. But she requires your attention now.”

“Mrs. Erickson has the ghosts.”

“Mrs. Erickson cannot do what must be done on her own.”

“You can’t help her?”

“There is a reason you are wearing the dress, not me.”

Kaylin exhaled and turned to Mrs. Erickson. She could see the ghost words circling Mrs. Erickson’s arms. They formed a second circle there, above the wristlets of flowers.

But it wasn’t these ghosts that held Kaylin’s attention. The dead Ancient began to radiate bright, uneven light.

“They’re tears,” Mrs. Erickson said, voice soft.

27

Kaylin had already accepted that she couldn’t see as Mrs. Erickson saw; she certainly didn’t see the odd, shaky light as tears. “What about the other ghosts?”

“They were unhappy with me, and I don’t blame them.” The reply was gentle. “But they’re much calmer now. You can see these as words, can’t you?”

Kaylin nodded.

“Can you see the Ancient that way?”

“I didn’t, before,” Kaylin began. She stopped as she considered the question more carefully. To her eyes, the Ancient had looked like a giant—taller than even the Norranir. But it was the words that Azoria had bound, and the words from which she had drawn power, attempting to force them into shapes that weren’t natively theirs.

“I think, if you can, it’s important,” Mrs. Erickson continued. “I can’t see them the way you do.”

“If you couldn’t see them the way you do, I don’t think any of the rest of us could do anything,” Kaylin said softly. She closed her eyes; it had always been easier to see words with her eyes closed. Her own marks had always been clearest that way, but she found that the ghosts she’d carried with her could also be seen clearly, where they rested in Mrs. Erickson’s hands.

What was less clear to Kaylin was the dead Ancient. Because she could see the Ancient with closed eyes; the irregular light that had made her uneasy was gone. What remained was a pale blue-gray glow, roughly in the shape of a giant; she could see arms, legs, the outline of chest, and even head. The regular features of a face were lost—those weren’t visible behind closed eyelids.

But in the pale blue-gray glow, she could see, if she focused, differences in the light; brighter objects interspersed with emptiness. She could see words, but they weren’t very clear to her eyes. She frowned. The ghosts from the palace hadn’t been clear, either. They didn’t glow; they looked like words written in smoke or mist, wavering like a mirage if she approached them too closely.

The Ancient was far more solid than the ghostly words had ever been to Kaylin’s eyes. She could see, as she approached, that the interior of the shape of the body was composed entirely of words; they formed the bulk of the body. At first, she thought they were like her marks, but as she drew closer, she realized that was wrong.

The Ancient’s words were far, far more complicated in shape and structure than the marks of the Chosen, taken individually, were. She had seen similarly complex words before, although she’d never made an attempt to speak them, to pronounce them. In at least one case it wouldn’t have been safe.

She didn’t have safety concerns in the same way now; she simply accepted that the Ancient’s words were beyond her immediate grasp. But if they remained that way, she wasn’t certain she could be of any help to Mrs. Erickson.

She turned back to look at Mrs. Erickson, wondering if she’d actually moved from the old woman’s side at all. The space here was so distorted, she couldn’t tell—and after a moment, she forgot. The flowers that decorated Mrs. Erickson’s wrists and fingers seemed to be growing as Kaylin watched, and the wreath that sat upon her gray-white hair had become a crown of platinum and emerald. She could see trailing filaments, like very delicate vines, growing out of those flowers; it made her distinctly uncomfortable.

Azoria had bound one flower into the twelve-year-old Imelda’s hair, braiding it in a specific way that Serralyn had said was once used for binding ceremonies in the West March; Kaylin had assumed she’d meant weddings. She wasn’t nearly as certain of that now.

When the vines touched Mrs. Erickson’s face, Kaylin reached out for them almost without thought. She’d meant to stop them from sinking into the older woman’s skin; she hadn’t intended to uproot them or remove the wreath from where it now sat.

But the moment she touched them, they thickened, they gained substance, if not weight. She could feel their texture, and she could smell newly turned earth.

Oh. The plants that had seemed to uproot themselves in an attempt to adorn Mrs. Erickson hadn’t actually uprooted themselves at all. They were still planted in the green, still connected to it. Just as the single flower Azoria had twined in Mrs. Erickson’s hair decades past had somehow maintained a very slight, very shallow connection to the green.

Kaylin gently separated out the disparate tendrils; she placed one root against each of the ghosts and was only a little surprised when they wrapped themselves around the body of the words, made manifest and physical by the power of the green—or the power of the Chosen. The words became brighter, the gold edging growing over the green until they seemed all of gold.

---