Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “And he failed to kill you. Instead, you gave him whatever information you had, and you chose to serve him.”

  Kaylin shrugged. “He pays me.”

  “Does he pay you enough?”

  “He pays me enough.” She kept the edge out of her words. Whoever this woman was, she was beginning to get on Kaylin’s nerves, the way bad office gossip did. Or Sergeant Mallory. “Not that it’s actually any of your business.”

  “You chose to enter the Tower.”

  “So? I choose to enter the Library—it doesn’t mean the Librarian gets to disembowel me and read my bloody entrails.” Not unless she tried to steal something or ended up breaking something, but that didn’t seem relevant at the moment.

  “If the Librarian chose to do so, and you had no means of preventing him, why not?”

  “Because the Law is the Emperor’s, and he expects his citizens to uphold it.”

  “You are not in your Empire now.”

  “I’m in yours, is that the idea?”

  The woman laughed, and her wings suddenly bent; she pushed herself up and off both throne and ground so quickly she might never have been there at all. But the air was alive with her; she seemed like dark light. No Aerian hovered the way she did now.

  “No, Kaylin, that is not the idea. You are in a Tower, and the Tower is not—yet—complete. What it does while it struggles is not dissimilar to what you did while you struggled,” Tiamaris said. His voice was muted, but clear.

  “With what?”

  “With your life.”

  Kaylin shook her head. “I’m not done struggling with that,” she said quietly, trying to get her mind around the concept of a Tower’s emotional drama.

  “No. Nor is the Tower. It will find what it seeks.”

  Kaylin nodded slowly. “It will,” she said, and this time, her voice lost the edge of irritation. “But I’m not it.”

  The Tower spoke, then. “You bear the marks, wild one. Complete us, and you will find everything you need here.”

  “I’m not so good with understanding what I need,” Kaylin replied. She glanced at the throne, and then up at the perfect, black wings of someone who looked almost like her. “I’m not even good at understanding what I want—it gets so confused. I know my daydreams,” she added. “But you can’t live on those, or in them. You’re a daydream, to me. This throne isn’t even part of what I—” She frowned. “Not since I became a Hawk. It’s not what I dream about. It’s even ugly.”

  “Take it. Make of it what you desire.”

  Kaylin looked at the empty throne. It was a fancy chair. It didn’t even look comfortable. “I don’t want it,” she said quietly. “You don’t understand.” As if a Tower could actually understand anything. Kaylin had, on bad days, talked to the walls before—but this time, they were instigating the conversation. “I don’t want—I’ve never wanted—to tell other people what to do. I’ve never wanted to control their lives. At most I’ve wanted to protect the lives that were—and are—important to me. Not more, not less.

  “Whatever you’re offering, it’s not for me. I’d have to be a different person to take it.”

  “But you could turn the Tower into a shelter.”

  Kaylin almost laughed, but it would have been on the wrong edge of crazy; she bit it back. “I admit I haven’t seen many Towers,” she said, when she could speak clearly again. “But shelter is not high on the list of what they do. A fortress isn’t a shelter. A fortress isn’t a foundling hall. It isn’t a midwives’ guild. It isn’t anything I understand, anymore.”

  “You’re a soldier.”

  “No. I’m a groundhawk. I uphold the Emperor’s Law, and when it’s been broken, I try to find the person who broke it and put him someplace where he can’t break it again. I don’t fight wars. I talk to people who also don’t fight wars. I don’t want more authority over their lives than I already have.”

  “If you have power—”

  “If I have that much power, it’s all my responsibility. Every single life I control becomes more my problem than I ever wanted it to be. What you’re offering—I don’t want. What I want, you can’t offer.”

  “And you do not desire these people to do your will?”

  “No.”

  “Do you not think you know better than they what is required?”

  Kaylin snorted. “We all think that. We also have days where we think we’re the only person who’s doing any damn work. That’s normal. I can even say I know what’s best for me, and mean it. But I clearly don’t, if you look at my life to this point. I try to learn from the mistakes. I try every damn day not to screw up. You know what? I fail a lot. Hopefully I fail less than I used to.

  “But I can’t have that kind of power if I’m going to screw up everyone else’s life with it. I’ve already destroyed so much with no power at all.”

  The stranger’s wings folded, and she fell; she hit the ground as if she, like the floor, were made of stone. Neither of them cracked, but the ground shook with the impact, and Kaylin fell to one knee in an attempt to avoid falling any other way. The throne listed to one side; part of the flooring had fallen, there, as if it were now made of cloth.

  “We have waited for you,” the stranger said, and Kaylin flinched. The voice was no longer hers, and no longer the serene and distant voice of a greater power. It was—and gods, this was so unfair—a child’s voice. As the stranger rose, her wings cracked, falling to either side like a fine veil of ash. Her skin lost the patina and hard shine of alabaster; it became, instead, the dark of bruising. She no longer looked like Kaylin, which was a mercy of a sort.

  She looked, however, like a child.

  CHAPTER 24

  She heard Severn’s intake of breath; it was as sharp, as immediate, as her own. She couldn’t even be certain it was for a different reason, and she raised both hands, as if to ward off a blow.

  To ward it off a different way, she said, “Don’t do this. I know you can look like whoever you want, and I know you know more about me than you could without magic. I’m fine with that.

  “You take either of those faces, either of those forms, and I will find some way to bring you down, brick by brick. I don’t care how long it takes.”

  The transformation stopped, as if it were part of a heated conversation that had not—yet—turned irretrievably ugly. The face was a child’s face, yes, but it was not Steffi’s and not Jade’s. This child now turned to Severn, who had not moved.

  “You killed them,” she said, in a child’s voice. “They trusted you, and you killed them.”

  He didn’t blink, didn’t flinch; he refused to play the Tower’s game. “Yes.”

  “You saved her,” the child continued, surprising Kaylin. “And she hated you for it.”

  “Yes.” His expression was harder and smoother than the walls.

  Kaylin wanted to deny the words. She couldn’t. What she said instead was, “I don’t hate him now.”

  “You waver in your purpose.”

  “I learn more, as I get older. If that’s wavering, that’s wavering. Killing him wouldn’t bring them back.”

  “Would you bring them back?”

  “Yes. But I can’t. And you can’t.”

  “No. I can kill him, though.”

  “You can try,” Kaylin replied, with a little heat.

  “I can kill him,” the Tower repeated, with the stubborn certainty of a child. “But you can stop me if you take the Tower.” And the slyness.

  She should have been afraid—for herself, for Severn. Instead, she felt frustrated and annoyed. It was a familiar feeling; she had to suppress it frequently in her visits to the foundling halls. The children there were similar; cocky, arrogant, in your face. They had so much to prove, and they wouldn’t understand, until years later, that the people they needed to prove it to were themselves.

  She’d been there. She knew it wasn’t pretty. She couldn’t remember being as insecure and stupid, but maybe sometimes memory was kind, although she
would have bet against it if someone had asked.

  “I can’t stay with you,” she told the girl, gentling her voice and—with effort—capping her irritation.

  “Why?”

  “Because I also have other responsibilities.” You might not be aware of what that word means. “You won’t be alone forever.”

  The child stared at her.

  “Someone will come. Someone who can survive your tests—”

  “My tests?”

  “You test people who walk through your doors.”

  “Test?” the child said again, looking very sincere in her confusion.

  “What you did to me, when I walked in.” She sucked in air; the confusion, like complete cloud cover, didn’t so much as break to allow a glimmer of illumination through.

  “What did I do? I spoke with you. It was hard. I tried to show you that I understood your pain.”

  Kaylin managed to keep her jaw from hitting the floor only because she’d spent so many years helping Marrin deal with foundlings of all ages.

  “Most people,” she finally managed to say, “don’t want that much understanding.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t understand or admit to their own pain. It makes life a lot easier.” Taking another breath, she said, “Look—” and stopped. “What is your name?”

  This time, the expression on the child’s face was completely clear: she was shocked. Her eyes rounded, and her mouth opened slightly. “I have no name,” she replied, as if the words were an accusation. “You know that.” As if the accusation might be missed if it were too subtle.

  “I’m sorry,” Kaylin replied, “but I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have asked, if I had.”

  “I’m waiting,” the child said, after a long pause. “I’m empty, right now. When I’m not, I’ll have a name.”

  Kaylin frowned. “You’ll have the same name as the person who lives in the—here.”

  The child nodded. Kaylin resisted the temptation to make up a name on the spot, but only barely. Given the names some of the kids chose for themselves—Dock came to mind—she was sure she wouldn’t do lasting damage.

  But the child said, “Name me, if you want.”

  “I can’t give you my name—”

  “You’re not even using your own name,” was the reply.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No. You’re Elianne. You’re Kaylin. You’re Erenne. You’re kyuthe. It’s all broken—you won’t put it all together.”

  “I don’t need to put it all together. And those are all things that other people call me because it’s convenient for them. Humans don’t have names the way Dragons or Barrani do. Or maybe Towers.”

  “Tower?”

  Kaylin looked at Severn, who shrugged the up-to-you shrug. Then she turned to Tiamaris and Nightshade, both of who were watching the girl as if she had a terminal—and communicable—disease. “Tiamaris,” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested Lord was both superfluous and entirely overly respectful.

  He raised a brow. “Yes?” When she frowned, he shook his head. “This is more speech than I have ever heard from a Tower, Private Neya. If you are about to accuse me of withholding vital information, believe that it was entirely a by-product of ignorance.”

  “Nightshade?” she said, managing a slightly more subdued tone.

  He did not take his eyes from the child, but did answer. “The Towers, as you call them, have always taken poorly to intrusion and to the use of magic. What they are, and what they were, we do not entirely understand. They are old,” he added, in a tone of voice that implied that compared to Kaylin, even he wasn’t.

  She looked back to the girl, who did not seem at all old now. Then she walked over to the circle in which the girl stood, and she knelt to bring their eyes to about the same level, leaving her hands, palms flat, in her lap. “Did you understand what you saw in me?”

  The child—dammit, no. “I’m going to call you—Tara.”

  Severn’s silence changed, but he said nothing. He recognized the name she’d pulled out of thin air—because it was the thin air of a past in which they had both been, for all intents and purposes, children. Her mother’s name.

  “Tara?”

  Kaylin nodded.

  “What does it mean?”

  The Tower’s avatar—if that’s what it was—had taken the shape and form of a human child. But it wasn’t a question that human children asked; it was probably a question asked by Dragonlets or young Barrani, not that she’d ever really laid eyes on either. What does it mean?

  But the Tower was, in theory, much older than either the Dragon Lord or the Barrani Lord who were present; old enough, and unschooled enough, that even her use of the word name meant something completely alien to Kaylin. Kaylin understood enough to know that she had to answer carefully, which was a pity, because she’d come up with the name on the fly, as she so often did.

  But really, was it so hard to answer the question that the Tower had asked?

  She glanced at Tiamaris and Nightshade, and winced. Yes, because it was embarrassing. Anger, you could expose. Rage. Even pain. But there were some things you protected, because you weren’t quite strong enough to endure the mockery that was certain to follow.

  She grimaced again. She wasn’t thirteen and bereft of a home anymore. She wasn’t that girl, even if twinges of her reactions remained.

  “Tara,” she said slowly, “means many things, to me. I don’t know if you’ll understand all the words I use.”

  She only looked like a child; she didn’t bridle at all.

  “It means home. It means hope. Warmth. Safety. It means love that asks nothing.” It means, Kaylin thought, loss. She didn’t say that.

  But the Tower said, “Loss?”

  Kaylin winced. If she hadn’t had experience with Nightshade’s ability to read her thoughts through the questionable gift of his mark, all of her hair would be standing on end.

  “Why?”

  “I’m human. We don’t like—no, let me try that again. What we think, what we do our best not to say out loud, is private. If we wanted other people to hear it, we’d say it. Out loud. When you answer my thoughts like that, you’re ignoring my attempt to maintain any sense of privacy, and you’re exposing things to anyone else who’s listening.”

  “You don’t want them to hear us?”

  Kaylin froze. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly and carefully. “No, I’m fine with it now. Please don’t do anything they’d regret later. Which is beside the point. I was telling you—”

  “What Tara means.”

  “Yes. But loss? When you have something special, when you have something good, you sometimes don’t recognize how important it is until it’s gone. When it’s gone—when it’s too late—you realize what you had, and you miss it. That’s loss, pretty much. And it’s that loss that’s in the name, for me. In a better world, I would never have had to experience it.

  “And if I dwell on the loss, you won’t understand why the loss was so bitter. So stop reading my mind and stop interrupting me.”

  “May I read your mind if I don’t interrupt?”

  “Since I can’t stop you anyway, yes.”

  The child smiled, and Kaylin, still kneeling in front of her, spoke as softly as she could about her mother—or about what she remembered. She had been young enough when her mother died that she had few solid memories now, and one or two of those involved her mother’s infrequent temper. She hesitated, and then shared those, as well, wincing but grinning as she did.

  “But I am not your mother.”

  “No. That’s not what the name is supposed to mean. It’s what the name means to me, and I want you to take the good parts of it—or all of it—and make it something different, something of your own.”

  “What is your name?”

  “You already said I don’t have—” She stopped, and then held out her hand. The child took it in both of hers. Kaylin did not feel up to explaining the manners behind
a polite handshake, because they really made no logical sense when you got right down to it. “My name is Kaylin.”

  “Kaylin.”

  “Yes. It’s a name I chose for myself. It was meant to be a lie,” she added. “But it was a lie I wanted to believe so badly, I’ve been busy ever since then trying to make it my truth.”

  “Can you make truth of a lie?”

  “I don’t know. When I was your age—I mean, the age you look—I would have said no. Now?” She shrugged. “Time will tell. I’m happier than I was, I think.” She hesitated. “You can make up a name, if you don’t like the one I gave you. I just wanted something to call you because I’m used to talking to children who have names—or at least names as I understand them.”

  “These things, in this name, are they good?”

  “To me? Yes. They’re some of the things I want, and I want them enough to try to build them, even on days when I’m certain I don’t deserve them.”

  “It is important to be loved?”

  If Kaylin could have handpicked an audience for this discussion it would never have included the Barrani Lord and the Dragon. It might not have included Severn, but that was less certain. But as she met the girl’s gaze, she was caught by it. In some ways, the Tower was—as Tiamaris had said—newly wakened. It was, in whatever ways a mystical creation of walking gods could be, in its infancy; it had confusion and uncertainty, even if it also read minds and cut to the heart of the worst of your fears and self-loathing just to expose them.

  “It’s important. For some people it’s too important. For some, it’s never been important enough. It’s not magic—it doesn’t make you a god or anything. It doesn’t cure the world of evils, and it doesn’t keep you fed. But…it takes the edge off of everything—envy, resentment, insecurity. More, it makes it easier to give to, or to care for, other people in turn.

  “I’m not good at explaining things,” she added. “I’ve never been good at it. But even if I don’t remember her well, I remember that she loved me. I don’t know—I guess I thought of her name because she was my home, and you’re a—a Tower. A building. But you could be someone’s home. Just not mine.