Cast in Deception

by Michelle Sagara

  “No. But her imperatives are not the same as the ones which bind me.”

  Tiamaris watched her, but said nothing, and Kaylin thought that if Tara wanted to make the same adjustments that Helen had made to her own words, he might be willing to allow it.

  “He would,” Tara said, in a much softer voice. “But we were built where we stand for a reason, and while Ravellon exists, no such adjustments would be safe. I would not risk the fief he is building. I would not risk him.” And she walked across the room to join him, losing, as she did, the armor with which she had greeted the cohort. Her clothing settled into the familiar, baggy gardening clothes that Kaylin privately thought of as the garb of her true self, and to everyone’s surprise, Tiamaris gently laid an arm around her shoulders, and drew her toward him.

  It was hard to tell if he was her support, or she his, and Kaylin watched with something that was almost envy. Almost.

  * * *

  “This place stinks,” Terrano said, as they headed across the Ablayne. “It smells terrible.”

  Given the expressions of the cohort, most privately agreed, and Kaylin remembered Mandoran making a similar comment. Clearly, Mandoran was speaking to the rest of the cohort now. Severn was wearing his tabard. Kaylin was not wearing hers, as she had gone to visit Evanton after work hours. Although Tara could make clothing suitable for the Emperor himself, none of it persisted beyond the boundaries of the fief.

  Kaylin did fall in beside Severn, regardless. He was alert. So was she. So was her familiar, who had perked up as they left Tara, and was now watching the streets like a hawk. There were no obvious threats; indeed, the threat seemed to emanate from the cohort, and Kaylin remembered, as a patrol of mounted Swords approached, that the Barrani war band had caused the Swords to go on full alert.

  Severn, however, was uniformed, and was able to negotiate with the Swords; the cohort were not notably armored or armed. Their crime, such as it was, was being Barrani in highly concentrated numbers—and that was not, as Severn pointed out, against the edict of Imperial Law, which they all served.

  The Swords did form up around the Barrani, more for the sake of the much more nervous onlookers than the Barrani themselves, and the cohort therefore had a more or less official escort through the rest of the Elantran streets. Kaylin found herself scanning windows in the taller buildings, but the usual street thieves and beggars stayed well away from the Swords, and as the neighborhood began to shift toward the high-end mansions that were common around Helen, they ceased to be even a passing concern.

  I will inform the Consort that your lunatic plan was successful, Ynpharion said, the chill in his voice deeper than its usual frigid disdain.

  You do that, Kaylin snapped back.

  She points out that your dinner invitation is still viable.

  Kaylin almost dropped her jaw. You have got to be joking.

  No, Lord Kaylin, I am not. If you wish to withdraw that invitation—

  I already did!

  —feel free to send a message to the High Halls. Or better, deliver it in person.

  There is no way that she is coming here right now. We’ve just arrived, and she’s already tried to harm the cohort. There is no way.

  Silence. She would have berated Ynpharion further, but sensed that he was no happier with the message he had conveyed than she was. If she wanted to shout at the source of her actual anger, she couldn’t do it through Ynpharion.

  * * *

  She breathed again as they approached the gates that were Helen’s actual boundaries, and smiled when the gates rolled open without assistance. Although this type of magic was not unheard of in the city, it was definitely unusual. But unusual, according to the mostly silent Swords, was the word of the very, very long day. Only when the cohort had been delivered to the property line did the Swords peel off and return to their regular patrol route.

  Helen’s doors were open long before the cohort reached them, and Kaylin noticed that the cohort became more martial, not less, with the loss of the Swords. She didn’t tell them Helen was safe. If Mandoran and Annarion’s experience hadn’t made that clear to the cohort, nothing would. But she felt a bit bad for Helen, because Helen was social; she liked people, and liked guests.

  Kaylin walked directly to Helen as Helen opened her arms, enfolding her in a hug that was simultaneously soft as comfort and rigid as armor. She looked past Kaylin to the cohort; Kaylin couldn’t see her expression, but could hear it in her voice, anyway. “Welcome. The boys—I’m sorry, that’s what we often call Mandoran and Annarion—are waiting for you in the dining room.”

  “Teela’s not here?”

  “Teela received a summons,” Helen said, her voice flat and neutral, “and chose to honor it. She left some thirty minutes ago, heading to the High Halls.”

  Because if she went to the High Halls immediately, she could truthfully fail to answer most of the questions posed about the cohort’s arrival.

  “Yes, dear,” Helen said. “I believe that was exactly her thinking on the matter.” She paused. “Terrano?”

  Kaylin withdrew and turned toward Terrano, who was pretty much holding hands with Sedarias and Allaron. Or at least they were holding on to his.

  “I will not detain you or cage you. You are a guest, and in this house, guests are not prisoners. I won’t deny that cages do wait—metaphorically speaking—for those who enter without invitation or permission, but you are not one of them. Ah, speaking of which,” Helen added, “I believe you have a different visitor.”

  “Who?”

  “I would tell you his name, but I don’t think you could actually hear half of it. But I believe he said you named him Spike?”

  She’d forgotten Spike.

  “He apologizes,” Helen continued, “but he could not follow you into the Tower; he could not approach it following the path you took.”

  “Wait, did you just say he’s in a cage?”

  “It is a comfortable cage, but yes. I have the ability to make decisions of my own, and his story, while very chaotic and jumbled, seemed to me to be true. He explained how he met you. I was slightly uncertain until he told me the name you gave him.” She looked mildly disapproving.

  “He—his form here—is a kind of floating, spiky ball,” Kaylin explained.

  “I’ll let him out, then. He seemed to feel that you wished his company, and he owes you a great debt.”

  “Debt? Ummm, is he Immortal, by any chance?”

  “I believe you would consider him so, yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Because Immortals hate debt or obligation—it’s practically a threat.”

  Helen smiled and drew Kaylin into the house, where she was no longer blocking the door. As the cohort filed into the foyer, Helen said, to Bellusdeo, “The Arkon has been using the mirror almost continuously. I believe he is concerned.”

  Bellusdeo snorted.

  “And Maggaron is quite unhappy, at the moment.”

  The Dragon sighed. “Let me go talk to him. I shouldn’t have left without him, but it might have entirely depleted the elemental water if he’d come as bodyguard.”

  Helen froze in place. Her eyes went the shade of color-flecked obsidian that was natural when she forgot to put effort into maintaining her appearance. “Have you spoken with the Keeper?”

  “We’ve kind of been busy,” Kaylin said. “Have you?”

  “Teela and Severn did, separately. The Keeper did not, as we hoped, ask the water to intervene. Nor did the Tha’alani. The water acted entirely on its own.”

  Kaylin knew this.

  “Understand that the Keeper exists for a reason. I do not know if all worlds have a Keeper, but I have often imagined they must. The Keeper harmonizes the elements; it is because they exist in his garden that the world is stable. Were they to range free, they would destroy each other, or try, and in the process, we would p
erish.”

  Kaylin nodded, because this was more or less her understanding.

  “The water clearly feels that the danger is great enough to threaten them all.”

  “So: we have a Barrani war band, the threat of war, a High Court in revolt, Barrani Lords in collusion with a fieflord to enter Ravellon, and an elemental water that’s terrified enough of something that she grabbed me and threw me at the West March. And at the heart of it all: Ravellon.”

  “Yes, dear. You forgot the cohort.”

  “No, I really didn’t.” Kaylin headed toward the dining room, followed by a quiet Severn. Bellusdeo, true to her word, had gone to apologize to her Ascendant.

  * * *

  The dining room was not silent, but Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she couldn’t hear a majority of the conversation. Allaron had released Terrano, and had pulled up a chair at the table; his posture was far more like Annarion’s than Mandoran’s. The table was the centerpiece of the gathering, but that was fair; it was the centerpiece of most of the discussions that took place while Kaylin was at home.

  She was surprised to see that the cohort were very physical; there was almost always contact between the various members, even Sedarias. The stiff and very proper demeanor was shed in the presence of Mandoran and Annarion, and she sat beside Mandoran, an arm around his shoulders, her head tilted almost into his.

  But she wasn’t the only one. Two of the cohort were sharing a chair; several were holding hands or arms. They could have comfortably occupied half the space because they didn’t seem to have any hesitation about how much they overlapped. Terrano was included in their number, but Kaylin noted that, after the brief hug he had offered a smiling Mandoran, he had pulled his chair to the side, out of easy reach of any of the rest.

  She wondered, then, how much Mandoran and Annarion had adjusted their behavior as Helen’s guests. Wondered if, when she wasn’t in the room, they overlapped or huddled like this. This didn’t look like a Barrani gathering; had Kaylin’s vision been poorer, she might have assumed these people were Leontine kits, huddled in a pile near the hearth.

  And she wondered if Teela’s propensity for casual physical contact had been a memory of this, something she had lost for centuries—and that she had thought lost forever. She couldn’t imagine Teela entwined with this mass of the cohort, though. And she grimaced when she thought of Tain’s reaction.

  Helen came to stand beside her as she lingered just on the inside of the doorway.

  “They won’t consider your presence a disturbance,” Helen said. “If they need privacy, it comes built-in.” Her smile was slender but warm. “I think they are surprised at how much they missed each other. They’ve relied on their names for so long, their names are like the Tha’alaan to them. But the physical presence has weight, as well. They are happy.”

  “I think Alsanis will miss them.”

  “I am certain, in a fashion, he will. They did not resent him, in the end. He did what he could for them, for as long as he could. But Kaylin, they are all aware that you carried them for the last stretch of that road. You are not of them, but they consider you one of theirs. It is part of the reason Annarion has been so aggrieved.”

  “Nightshade wanted me to do what I did. I mean, he didn’t know precisely what it would be—but he wanted to rescue his brother.”

  “Yes. And I believe Annarion understands that. But you know better than anyone that there are some prices for rescue that you are not willing to pay.”

  Kaylin fell silent. Severn glanced at them both and then waded into the room. He pulled out a chair at the less crowded end of the table and took it, relaxing slowly into a seated posture that was very similar to Terrano’s. On Severn, however, it didn’t look unnatural.

  Kaylin was about to join him when Spike came careening through the hall, like a ball thrown by an angry drunk. He came to a staggering stop inches away from Kaylin’s face. Helen cleared her throat. Loudly. The familiar, however, looked bored and tired; he lifted an eyelid, looked at Spike, and let it close, his entire posture suggesting that nothing about this was an emergency.

  “I am here,” Spike said, as if the obvious needed to be stated. Kaylin stared at him, trying to figure out what he wanted. In the end, she lifted a hand—the left hand, because she was still capable of some caution—and let him settle into her palm, spikes and all. The spikes, however, didn’t hurt, and he weighed next to nothing. She could probably injure herself if she closed her own hand, but Spike didn’t seem intent on making her bleed again.

  “He injured you?” Helen asked. Except that her voice was colder and harder, and the question came across as a demand.

  “Probably my fault,” Kaylin said quickly. “I asked him if he could find me again. We kind of—never mind. You can just read my mind.”

  Helen presumably did. Her eyes had gone obsidian again, but nothing else about her appearance changed; she was staring at Spike as if vision alone would answer any remaining questions she might have.

  “Oh, it won’t,” Helen replied, although Kaylin had said nothing.

  “I’m not sure why he cut me. I kind of wish he’d cut my hand, instead; I can patch up the shirt, but...” She shrugged. She was lying; she’d given up on salvaging this particular shirt, but had not yet done the math that would allow her to afford a new one.

  “I understand why he cut you,” Helen said. “He wished to be certain that he could find you again.”

  “And he can find anyone he—”

  “Whose blood he has consumed, yes. He, by the way, is perhaps not the appropriate word. And no, he does not consume it the way your vampires would.”

  Kaylin flushed.

  “He is evaluating the metrics of the blood itself in a way that means he can be completely certain of his identification.”

  “You don’t do that.”

  “No, but it is not required. I have other methods of identifying you that Spike does not. If you would not mind, I would like to converse with Spike.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Helen’s voice shifted; she lost words, or rather, words as Kaylin understood them. Here or there she caught a syllable, but in the end it became almost painful to listen to—it was like the droning buzz of a bee hive, except that as more words were added, more bees arrived. In the end, Kaylin lowered her hand from the underside of Spike’s body, covered both ears with her hands, and retreated to the dining room.

  She figured Spike wouldn’t find the retreat insulting; she covered her ears whenever Bellusdeo spoke in native draconian—or at least she did if she had two free hands—and Bellusdeo didn’t.

  But the cohort were now craning their heads toward the door as Kaylin entered.

  “Can you understand what they’re saying?” Kaylin asked, as she retreated to the wall farthest from that open door.

  Sedarias shook her head. “But I think, with time and Spike’s input, we probably could.”

  “Can you ask for lessons when I’m outside of the house?”

  Mandoran laughed.

  Sedarias, however, took Spike’s presence as a sign. It was time to get serious. Kaylin watched the transformation of the cohort’s expressions. “Teela is at the High Halls,” she said, which was not what Kaylin had expected.

  “Is she under house arrest?”

  “No. At this late stage, they would not dare. They are, however, very interested in our arrival.”

  “Interested in an aggressive way? Or politely, politically, fictively interested?”

  “Our method of arrival has not been disclosed; questions are, of course, being asked, and possible explanations given.”

  “There are no good explanations.”

  “That just makes the proceedings more entertaining.”

  “Is Teela the one making stuff up?”

  “No. Teela is very angry, and when she i
s angry she is on her best—her most exquisite—behavior.”

  “Is Tain with her?”

  “Tain is with her. As one of four guards. He is not present as a Hawk, and he has no standing in the High Court. Teela is there as a Lord, and she is surprisingly adept at it.”

  “Surprisingly?”

  “Teela was always unusual.” Sedarias turned to the cohort, although it wasn’t necessary. “But while we were away, she grew. She’s angry,” Sedarias repeated. “And it’s never completely safe for Teela to be angry.”

  “Safe for who?”

  “Anyone, but mostly Teela.”

  Mandoran turned to Kaylin, his expression unusually grave. “We’re here for her. We’re here for each other. When our families threw us away—”

  “I wasn’t thrown away,” Sedarias said.

  “When the rest of our families threw away people too sane to demand the right to go to the regalia, we found each other. Teela doesn’t want Annarion to take the Test of Name because she can’t go. She’s a Lord of the Court.”

  Kaylin frowned. “But that means—”

  “Yes. You can’t go, either.”

  Helen came into the room, Spike floating by her left shoulder. “I think,” she told the cohort, “I should show you to your rooms. At the moment, Annarion and Mandoran are sharing. I was uncertain whether or not you would want to do likewise.”

  “Not if you let Mandoran design the room,” Serralyn said, pulling a face. But the cohort rose almost as a single person, and followed Helen as she led them out of the dining room and to the room which would become their temporary home.

  Terrano did not follow. He watched until the last of the cohort—Sedarias, as it happened—had exited the room. Only when she was gone did he sag in his chair, as if he’d been fighting to hold himself upright. Or together. Kaylin had no idea what to say to him; she only knew that she should say something.

  People in pain often had this effect on her, if she cared about them at all. And clearly, she did care about Terrano, which came as a bit of a surprise to her, given how they’d first met.