Page 160 of Cast in Atonement

“Can it wait?”

“No, I don’t think it can. When the Ancient is reborn—and he is being reborn now—we won’t have his power. And I don’t think we’ll have the power of what the Keeper called the green, either. I believe Kaylin can ultimately help Bellusdeo, but it must be now.”

The arm around her waist left then.

“The Ancient—or the green—will allow Bellusdeo’s passage; it won’t build a wall that can’t be surmounted.”

Kaylin didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to. Bellusdeo’s voice, she could easily hear. The Dragon was panicked and infuriated. Kaylin knew what the color of the Dragon’s eyes must be; seeing them wouldn’t change anything.

But when Mrs. Erickson, whose hands were now empty, reached for Bellusdeo’s, Bellusdeo became visible. Bellusdeo and all eight of her sisters. None of them spoke, but Bellusdeo didn’t, either. They had accepted possible eternity as invisible ghosts the moment they understood the damage the Ancient could do. Because they had all served a vanished kingdom in a dead world.

It was Bellusdeo herself who was the shattered wreck; Bellusdeo who had felt the deaths of all her sisters as the permanent loss it had become. Bellusdeo who had—what did they call it?—survivor’s guilt.

Mrs. Erickson was a font of affection. Bellusdeo was older by far, but to Mrs. Erickson they were all children. It was no surprise that she’d come to care so much for Bellusdeo in such a short time; Bellusdeo had been entirely open with Mrs. Erickson. Far more so than she had with any other person she’d encountered.

The flowers of the green did not disconnect from Mrs. Erickson; the almost imperceptible roots the green had bound around the words of the Ancient remained there. But some of those slender roots spread from the rings on Mrs. Erickson’s fingers, trailing between the hands of the old woman the green had chosen as the Teller to the Dragon whose hands she had clasped.

Kaylin turned to Bellusdeo, letting one of her hands fall away.

“Do not stop,” Evanton said. Or shouted. She felt his voice as an earthquake.

But she heard the rumbling of a different tremor, and heard, for the first time, the almost living voice of what had once been dead. It was striking, and very different. The Ancient understood what Mrs. Erickson desired for Bellusdeo, and it seemed as if the green did as well.

The Ancient spoke.

Let her do what she must; she is Chosen for a reason. And I am no longer what I was; what she needed to achieve for our sake, she has achieved. This is my gift of gratitude to her, to Imelda, and to the boundless green.

Kaylin therefore placed the one hand she’d freed from the Ancient’s skin against one of Bellusdeo’s hands. They formed a triplet: Imelda Erickson, Kaylin Neya, and Bellusdeo.

She could feel Bellusdeo’s True Name. The True Name she herself had helped Bellusdeo and Maggaron form. A name that would not be encumbered by the Outcaste, who had played a part in the loss of her sisters.

She had forgotten at the time what a True Name was. What the essence of a True Name meant. She knew now. She knew that Bellusdeo’s name had not been fully whole. Here, in this space, wearing this dress, attached to an old woman whom the Avatar of her home had loved instantly, she could sense the subtle nuance, the subtle absence.

The name itself would not change; it was what it had always been meant to be. Just as True Names did not entirely define the character of the Barrani they brought to life, the True Name of the gold Dragon did not entirely define who she had become. It should have, because the spirits of the women who had lived with their partial names should have been part of Bellusdeo from the beginning of her adult life.

Sensing the dead, sensing the living, seeing the connection, Kaylin worked. The Ancient was no longer her concern, and Evanton would be very angry about that later. But Bellusdeo was one of Kaylin’s people, and if you couldn’t make time for your friends, if you couldn’t reach out to help them when they needed you most, what did friendship mean?

Bellusdeo didn’t argue. Maybe she couldn’t. Two of her sisters did immediately.

But they were dead, and they couldn’t actually harm Kaylin, who otherwise would have been smart enough not to anger a Dragon. Nor could they persuade Bellusdeo, because the gold Dragon couldn’t hear them, no matter how very desperately she wanted to.

Losing her sisters was like losing limbs—and given what Kavallac had said about the birth of an adult female Dragon, it probably was. She was both Bellusdeo and at the same time incapable of being, or feeling, whole.

Kaylin saw the ghosts of her sisters begin to shimmer, even the ones who were mouthing dire warnings, saw the way their growing lack of visual substance followed the binding threads of the green, and poured as much power into Bellusdeo as she could access. This wasn’t healing in the traditional sense. It required focus and intent, just as healing the Ancient had. This wasn’t about what the body needed. The body had always known its correct shape, its healthy state. Kaylin had healed the gold Dragon before, and she’d done it the normal way, if healing could be considered normal.

This was nothing like that, because it wasn’t the body that was damaged, torn, broken. This required deliberation, understanding; maybe there was no natural shape for a living person’s soul. A body could live without its soul—Jamal’s had, even when he had been shut out of it by Azoria.

Kaylin froze for one long moment. What she was doing—was it different? In the end, she wanted Bellusdeo to be happy. To be whole. To finally become what she should have become. And that meant the touching of the ghosts that were already attached; it meant the knitting of the disparate sisters—two of whom thought this was far, far too risky—into that whole.

It is not the same, a familiar voice said. Hope. If you cannot trust yourself, trust those who can. This is healing of a nature that I have never seen attempted. I lend you now what power I can—but it is limited, as it always is, by what you are willing to sacrifice.

You will be the first person I have ever served who is unwilling to sacrifice anything; your greed is boundless, but it never reflects your desire for power. You are healing Bellusdeo. Mrs. Erickson saw the sisters as ghosts. But, Kaylin, remember: she considered Amaldi and Darreno to be ghosts as well.

Kaylin exhaled. She now had hope, which could be bitter if it failed to blossom into reality.

She understood that she was running out of time; that the green and the Ancient could not remain in this place, and if they could, she couldn’t. Mrs. Erickson couldn’t. But regardless, she listened to the two who were afraid that the cost of integration might be the stability of the entire world into which they’d been born, and from which they’d been sundered.

“I can’t force this on you,” she told the two, whose birth names she didn’t know. “I won’t. I understand what should have happened to all nine of you: you would have merged into one person with many, many facets.”

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