“Which in some people’s cases will be never.” At Kaylin’s expression, Mandoran added, “We can speak to each other. We can think at each other. We can share information so easily, information is central, like your Records, but contained to us. But there was a reason Terrano was the first—and the only—one of us to escape the Hallionne. I was close, I swear it.”
Terrano nodded. “You’d have been able to join me if you hadn’t been so lazy. You didn’t want it enough.”
Mandoran ignored this. “We’re not one person. We’re a dozen people, give or take, with access to the same knowledge. But we have different strengths and different weaknesses. And different tempers. Look, you know True Names, right?” He winced; no doubt Teela, Sedarias, or both, were telling him not to say that where anyone else could hear it. “But you’re not the people whose names you know. If you knew them for centuries—if you could imagine knowing them for centuries—would you become those people?”
The thought of becoming Ynpharion made her grimace. “No.”
“It’s the same with us. We’re all still ourselves. It didn’t surprise you to know that Annarion and I are completely different. You didn’t expect us to be the same person.”
“That’s because I live with you.”
“Yes. You’ll get more of an idea of what we’re like when you live with the rest of them, too.”
Kaylin looked around the training room.
“This isn’t the first time someone’s been shunted to this damn room.” He spoke with a broad grin, since the person who had most often been shunted here was Annarion. “It won’t be the last.”
“There’s a big difference.”
“Well, yes, there are more of us—”
“The Consort is coming to dinner.”
Teela was green. She looked queasy, her eyes underlined by dark, dark circles. Taking her life in her hands, Kaylin turned to the Barrani Hawk that was part of the cohort. “You couldn’t unconsciously lose cohesion—not like Annarion does. This is twice in less than a week. Why are you doing this?”
When Teela failed to answer, Tain cleared his throat. He would never have dared to ask the question Kaylin had just asked, but he wanted the answer. He wanted it badly.
Teela didn’t answer. None of the cohort did. Mandoran took a step back and Kaylin grabbed his arm before he dispersed through the nearest wall.
It was Bellusdeo who broke the awkward silence that had enfolded them all; she roared. Kaylin nearly jumped out of her own skin; so did Terrano. The rest of the gathered cohort were still.
“If you are going to interrupt other people’s conversation with your arguments,” the gold Dragon then said in a much more normal voice, “I suggest you at least practice to get it right. If you manage a genuine roar, you could probably blame the expression of rage on me, even if I’m not the actual source.” She smiled. There was teeth in it. “There has to be some advantage to living with Dragons, hmm?” To Kaylin, she said, “I’m going upstairs. I have a sick headache, and if I hear another half-hearted roar like the first one, everyone in this house is going to know what an angry Dragon really sounds like.”
* * *
“I think she does have a headache,” Kaylin offered when even the echoes of Bellusdeo’s heavier-than-necessary steps had died away. Kaylin was well on the way to a headache herself, because Bellusdeo had used full Dragon volume, and had given her no time to attempt to plug her ears.
It had, on the other hand, had an effect on the cohort. Terrano relaxed—marginally—when Bellusdeo left, but the rest of the cohort looked slightly embarrassed. Which was better than fire and fury.
“Did you guys always argue like this?” Kaylin asked them.
“‘Like this’ has different meanings,” Sedarias replied.
“That’s a yes,” Terrano added, weathering Sedarias’s resulting glare. “It didn’t matter. And it doesn’t really matter here, either. Helen contains them, just as Alsanis did. We didn’t have to worry about the harm we were doing to the environment, and we weren’t actively harming each other. We were...trying to be more emphatic. To make our points more clear.”
“I fail to see how turning into splashes of badly matching color is going to make anything more clear.”
“That’s because you have terrible vision, and that’s all you’re capable of perceiving. That is not what they were doing.”
“Could you join them?”
“Thanks, I spent centuries doing exactly that, and it’s the one thing I do not miss.”
Kaylin laughed. So did Mandoran. Sedarias, notably, did not. “We communicate that way when in states of emotional duress.”
Kaylin nodded, biting back a sarcastic comment.
“It is our way of making clear exactly what we mean, and why; it’s a way of emphasizing our personal contexts.”
That was so not what it looked like to Kaylin; it seemed more an attempt to overwhelm anyone else’s. She also kept this to herself. “If you’re finished, we’ve got a ton of paperwork to get through.”
“Serralyn is reading it now,” Sedarias replied. She seemed to redden. “And you are correct. We don’t have time for this.”
“Can you promise that you won’t do this—won’t come even close to considering it—while we have guests?”
“I can.”
“Can you do it so the promise actually has real meaning?”
Sedarias’s smile was chilly. “Yes, I can. You, however, cannot.”
The marks on Kaylin’s arms began to glow as Kaylin once again forced herself not to respond. Sadly, the marks were visible. Spoken words would probably have been better, even if they were snappish and sarcastic. “I’m not doing that on purpose,” she told the cohort.
The cohort, and Tain, were now staring at Sedarias, not Kaylin, even though Kaylin was the one with the glowing arms.
“Sedarias, dear,” Helen said, breaking a silence that had begun to stretch out to encompass everything, “I believe that Kaylin’s marks—and she really isn’t controlling what they currently do in any conscious fashion—disagree with that assessment. But I also think that the question she asked—not so much about oaths or promises, as about controlling the expression of your tempers—is the necessary question.
“It is not anger, fury, fear or any other emotion that defines you here. It is how well you control them. They are yours; they do not belong to anyone else. You will have your own priorities. Of course you will. But you cannot force others to adopt them.”
Mandoran coughed.
“Yes, dear,” Helen replied, although he hadn’t spoken. “I suppose that is one definition of power. But those people—the ones you do not destroy in your rage—do not adopt your priorities; they live in your shadows instead. They live in fear of you. And I don’t think I need to tell you that while I have no control over what occurs outside of my boundaries, I will not allow fear to be the fulcrum by which the people in this house move others.
“If for no other reason, Kaylin is my lord, in more archaic terms. And that is not what Kaylin wants from a home.” Helen’s Avatar turned to Sedarias. “Kaylin can, I believe, enforce a binding oath. It would harm her to do so and I will therefore ask that she refrain.”
“How would it harm her?” Sedarias demanded.
“How would it harm me?” Kaylin said. The words overlapped, which was always a bit embarrassing.
Helen’s Avatar frowned, her obsidian glance moving between the Barrani and the Hawk. It was therefore Mandoran who answered, although he glared at Teela as if demanding she do it first. “You force a binding oath on someone you don’t trust. The Barrani don’t trust easily, if ever. Had the High Court chosen to send us, as adults, to the regalia, we wouldn’t be here now. We would never have taken the risks we took back then. We wouldn’t know each other’s names. Look—you trust Teela, right?”
Kaylin nodd
ed. “With my life.”
“With your keys?”
“That’s different.”
He laughed. “You trust her, though.”
“Of course I do. She’s a Hawk.” Kaylin could practically hear Tain rolling his eyes beside her.
“Would you ask her to swear a binding oath?”
“Why?”
Mandoran now rolled his eyes. “That’s not an answer. Would you ask Teela to swear a binding oath?”
“Well, what exactly is a binding oath?”
He glanced at Sedarias with a very I told you so expression. “A binding oath enforces penalties should the person who has voluntarily entered into it break that oath. In some cases, and depending on the oath itself, it can kill.” He spoke Barrani. High Barrani. The language the Imperial Laws were written in. “Would you make that demand, if you could?”
“I trust her. If she promises to do something—”
“You cannot know all of a person’s intent, all of their concerns, all of the fears and duties that press down upon them. You cannot know all of their motivations, and assigning your motivations to them, while comforting, is generally unwise. If Teela, for reasons that you did not know, were to break her word, and the cost of doing so would kill her, would you force this on her?”
“No!”
“Mandoran,” Teela said out loud. “That is quite enough.”
But Helen said, “I believe you should allow him to finish.”
“You are Kaylin’s home,” Teela said, never moving her eyes from Mandoran. “I’m her friend. And I am doing Mandoran the kindness of offering a distinct warning.”
Tain tensed. Glancing at him, Kaylin saw his eyes change shade—they’d been blue to start with, and they became midnight blue. Oh. She was tired, she was stressed out, she was terrified about the consequences of the Consort’s arrival, she was worried for the entire cohort—except maybe Mandoran at the moment, because she wanted to strangle him—and the anxieties had made her stupid.
She moved her gaze from Tain to Teela, whose eyes were also midnight blue; the Barrani Hawk who was also Lord of the High Court and one of the bearers of the three dragonslayers was vibrating in place. Almost literally.
“Teela, the argument you guys were having?”
Teela failed to hear her, which was always deliberate. But she was looking at Sedarias. Allaron moved to stand almost in front of Kaylin, and when Kaylin tried to push him out of the way, he failed to budge. At all.
“Was it about me?”
Chapter 4
Teela didn’t answer. Neither did anyone else—not even Helen. There was a strain in the wake of the question that made the answer perfectly clear. Not everyone in the training room had been in agreement.
“What, exactly, were you arguing about? Is it something I did?”
“No,” Teela said. It was a snap of ice, a single word that implied death.
Kaylin exhaled slowly. The cohort—or those trapped here—had fully reassumed their physical forms, their Barrani identities, and she didn’t want to cause a repeat of the argument, which was clearly only finished for now. “Fine. We’ve got stacks of political fieldwork to read, and a Consort who, you may have forgotten, is going to descend on this house tomorrow.
“I can’t—or won’t,” she added, looking at her arms, which were still glowing, “force a binding oath on anyone. Helen wouldn’t like it—and to be fair, neither would I. But if this happens again, if it happens one more time, I’m going to refuse to let the Consort in when she does show up at the door.
“I’ll refuse to let the Arkon in, as well.”
“That would be politically very unwise,” Sedarias said, her tone only marginally less icy than Teela’s had been. “For you.”
Kaylin shrugged. “It’s not my life’s goal to become a powerful, political figure.”
“You are a Lord of the High Court.”
“On paper, yes. But what can they do to me? Toss me out?” Kaylin shrugged. “I can’t be made outcaste by the Barrani. I could possibly be made outcaste by the Human Caste Court, but our Court doesn’t work the way yours does. The Human Caste Court—the lords who comprise it—would have to know who I am. Even if they did, I’d have to accept the designation. And I wouldn’t. I’d invoke the law; I wouldn’t just sit around waiting to be kicked while they attempted to invoke laws of exemption.
“Shutting the door in the Consort’s face wouldn’t harm me. But letting her in without some kind of guarantee from the rest of you would possibly harm either her or you.” She folded her arms, adopting a Leontine maternal posture.
The silence extended for a while. Kaylin was issuing a threat, of a kind. Sedarias did not like to be threatened. But she did exhale—heavily—before she nodded. “Very well. Inasmuch as I can, I will give you my word that I will not...descend to this level of argument again.”
“Look—I don’t care if you’re screaming your lungs out at each other. I’ve spent what feels like months being woken up every night because Annarion and his brother are arguing. Just...not this. This—and your immediate and unexplained disappearance when Helen chooses to invoke the safety of the training room—will be major trouble.”
Sedarias’s nod was even stiffer than her previous words, but she did give it. Largely because she was practical, Kaylin thought. She couldn’t argue against any of what Kaylin had said, because the facts were the facts.
“People can argue against facts,” Helen said quietly. “And frequently in your history, they have.”
Yes, Kaylin thought with just a bit of embarrassment, but not Sedarias.
Sedarias bowed to Helen’s Avatar. It was a stiff, perfectly correct bow. “Thank you,” she said, as if the bow hadn’t said enough. “We are in your care, Helen. We will struggle to be worthy of it.”
Mandoran’s jaw dropped, but it remained attached to his face, and after a moment, he closed his mouth. Sedarias walked stiffly through the door to return to the dining room, and the rest of the cohort trailed after her. To Kaylin’s surprise, Teela was first in line. Mandoran would have been second, but Kaylin hadn’t let go of his arm, and had no intention of doing so.
She would have shooed Terrano up the stairs, but he lingered, as if waiting for the distance between him and the rest of his friends to grow.
“All right, spill.”
Or as if waiting for Mandoran’s discomfort. It was Terrano that Mandoran glared at, but that was fair; only Terrano was grinning.
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re going to let it slip sometime. Look—she’s right, and you know it. You guys can’t do this anywhere near the Consort. You can’t do it anywhere near the High Halls. There’s a reason I didn’t want to come here. Too many people. Too narrow a space to live—to truly live—in. But this is what you chose. You wanted to come home—but you’re going to destroy your home without even noticing it if you can’t...” Terrano stopped. Shrugged. “Doesn’t your mouth get tired?” The latter was a genuine question.
“Not mine,” Mandoran replied, his expression changing. He exhaled. Loosely clasping his hands behind his back, he looked up the stairs, which were now empty. “Yeah,” he said. “They were arguing about you.”
“I can—”
“It’s not about what you’re going to do. Or not going to do. It’s not really about your survival. I mean, yes, Teela is worried, and yes, she’s angry. She feels you’ll be dead in a couple of eye-blinks, and we could wait because we have forever. She likes you, you know?”
Kaylin nodded, but cringed. She knew it, yes. But stated that way it was embarrassing somehow.
“She’s lived in this world—this place that Terrano finds so narrow—for way longer than we have. We were born in it. We woke to it. We followed the rules of it—and of the powerful above us. But we did that for a tiny fraction of our lives. She did it for
all of hers. So she’s seen the powerful rise—and fall. She’s seen mortals, watched them age, watched them go from weakness to strength to weakness again, like the resonant wave of a struck bell.
“She knows you’re mortal. She knows you’re going to die. Mostly, she doesn’t think about it, unless she feels you’re taking stupid, unnecessary risks.” He flashed a grin. “Which these days is all the time. But she feels that this isn’t about you being stupid—this risk is about us being impatient. She thinks we’re not ready for the test.
“And, Kaylin, we aren’t ready. But Annarion is going to go, anyway. And if he goes, we’re going to go.”
“They’re fighting because Teela wants them to wait.”
It was, oddly enough, Terrano who snorted; Mandoran still looked uneasy. Terrano had not been part of the unspoken argument, although he’d certainly heard whatever was said in the dining room. “I forgot. Sometimes Mandoran makes the attempt to tell us things, but just doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.”
“Lazy, remember?” Mandoran replied. “She’s not one of us.”
“Neither am I, anymore.”
Mandoran flinched. “You are,” he said softly.
“I was,” Terrano continued. “I was part of you. I was part of you for longer than Teela. But I can’t hear any of you now. I don’t know what you’re saying to each other.” He exhaled again, which was a neat trick, because he hadn’t apparently inhaled first. “In theory, they’re fighting because Teela wants them to wait. Frankly, I’d guess half of them want to wait. The arguments make clear that they don’t have the self-control to hold things together in a meaningful way. Literally.” To Kaylin, he said, “You know that we mostly consider ourselves thrown away. Our lives were put on the line for a gamble. The gamble failed.
“You know that we exchanged True Names—which would have been unthinkable had we remained at home, had we not been considered expendable. We were a bit young, a bit raw, excited, terrified or heartbroken. All of those.” He shrugged; clearly he was not comfortable exposing this, although it was all well-known to Kaylin. “We only had each other.
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