made choices. His imperatives were different than Killian’s had once been. How had Killian survived? And if he had somehow managed to disperse himself between the demarcations of the fiefs, if he had somehow managed to preserve the Academia, why was he so limited?
What had she seen in the border zones that might answer these questions?
“Corporal.”
She grimaced. These were all questions that she felt needed answers—but Killian wasn’t here. She once again directed her thoughts toward reaching him.
She stopped searching when the Arkon began to speak.
* * *
If she couldn’t see the Arkon, she could hear him. His voice surrounded her. Without opening her eyes, she couldn’t tell where he was sitting or standing. She couldn’t hear his breathing, but without concentrating, couldn’t hear her own.
The syllables that rolled in were not in a language she knew, but he spoke a language she recognized. She almost opened her eyes.
“Are these my marks? Are you trying to read them out loud?”
He didn’t answer; to answer would have been to break the flow of his speech.
Her skin warmed as he spoke. She’d intended to try to listen to the marks on her skin, but the sound she could hear with her eyes closed had been swamped and overwhelmed by the sonorous bass of the Arkon’s voice.
She rolled up her right sleeve, exposing the marks on that arm. The rest were on her back or legs, and unless their lives depended on it, she had no intention of removing her shirt or her pants. The Arkon’s voice didn’t change, possibly because reading—or speaking—words like this took effort and time.
But as she listened, she knew which of the words he was attempting to express in sound, in syllable. She could see it clearly; it was on the inside of her left arm, which was exposed because she’d turned it up simply by opening her palm and holding her hand out.
As she’d done once before, she listened to the sound of a Dragon’s voice, and she joined her voice to his, not repeating what he said, but attempting to be part of it, to overlap it, two voices speaking one word, a slow syllable at a time.
The colors of the marks on her arms began to shift, the white gaining gold, the harsher, flatter light becoming the warmer as she watched. All of the marks, not just the one that the Arkon was, slowly and laboriously, speaking.
Were they all connected? They had her skin in common, but—were they somehow connected in other ways that she couldn’t see because she couldn’t quite understand them?
A single word wasn’t a sentence. A paragraph wasn’t a page. A page wasn’t a book.
Why did the marks of the Chosen exist at all?
The Arkon’s voice lapsed, but hers continued for several syllables; it was softer than the Dragon’s voice, and it was no longer deliberate. She realized as she caught the sound of her voice that she wasn’t speaking out loud; it was a deliberation of syllables that never made it to anyone else’s ears. Like thought, but without intent.
And yes, the words were, or felt, connected somehow; she slid into syllables, and then away. All of Barrani, Leontine or Aerian were ways to describe things. There were no words in Barrani for certain mortal concepts; no words in Elantran for some of the Barrani concepts. But they could be circumscribed, they could be described—it took more effort. The communication wasn’t exact.
These words were like those individual words: the concepts didn’t exist in the same way in any language she’d laboriously learned. But...they could almost be described.
She realized, as she thought this, that she had continued to speak, or not-speak, and as she finished, one word rose. It didn’t rise from her arms; it rose from the back of her neck, almost electrifying strands of hair, because no matter how careful she was, hair always fell out of its bindings in bits and pieces.
It was glowing. She could see it, even though in theory it was behind her, behind where her eyes were. It was a deceptively simply rune, two slashes, two dots beneath them; it was not as complicated as the one that shed light for them in this space.
She opened her eyes.
The Arkon was seated in front of where she remained crouched, palm flat against the floor. His eyes were a shade of gold that had no orange in it. And he was looking past her, above her head. She lifted her hand and turned. The rune was there;