Cast in Honor (The Chronicles of Elantra) (11 page)

“Because mine is mortal,” Kaylin countered. She turned to Annarion. “I can’t do this during working hours.”

He looked as if he was about to speak, but didn’t. “Does Helen charge you...rent?”

“Actually,” Helen replied, “yes, I do. I do not demand more than Kaylin can currently afford—but rent, such as it is, is a basic responsibility. It is not my intent to turn Kaylin into a walking child who is free from all material consequences.”

Bellusdeo’s smile inverted. “I do not believe you are—”

“You are a guest” was Helen’s serene reply. “Kaylin did not attempt to charge you rent when you lived with her before she moved here. While you were beneath her roof, you were her responsibility.”

Kaylin started to wave her hands in the air to get Helen’s attention.

“You always have my attention.”

“Bellusdeo’s never been my responsibility.”

“She is your friend,” Helen said, her tone making the statement a counter to Kaylin’s.

“Exactly.”

“Friends feel a certain responsibility for each other. Is that not why you are going to Nightshade?”

“I don’t think Annarion considers me a friend, exactly.”

Helen frowned.

“Annarion is
Teela’s
friend. Teela is
my
friend. I’m helping because—”

“I consider you a friend,” Annarion said in Elantran. “Even if you are not like Mandoran or Teela. I personally think you could be, but Teela has forbidden it, on pain of death. She’s only partially joking.”

Kaylin blinked. She felt oddly self-conscious.

“You’ve surprised her,” Teela told him.

“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Kaylin explained, feeling even more self-conscious.

Annarion frowned.

“Don’t ask me—ask Kaylin. Who can’t hear you if you don’t actually speak, remember?” Teela said. She folded her arms and leaned against the table. Tain joined her, speaking to her in a low enough tone that Kaylin couldn’t catch what he said.

“Perhaps Teela’s understanding of your tongue is better than my own,” Annarion said quietly. “But it seems to me that this statement is flawed. It is clear to me that you do not think you are lying; you must therefore be interpreting facts in a way that I cannot. What do you mean when you use the word
friend
?” All of the question was asked in Barrani except the one word. “If I say that I have few friends, among the Barrani, it would be inaccurate. In my life, I have given eleven people the whole of my name. I was not coerced. I was not threatened.

“Among my kin, eleven is a vast number. If by friend, you speak of that—the gifting of the name as a sign of absolute and unwavering trust, both now and in the future—then perhaps I am being presumptuous. But Teela has long considered you
kyuthe
, and you do not have her name. I have seen very little of your life, but Mandoran has seen more—and what he has seen, I have also seen.

“You have Corporal Handred. You have the Hawks. You have Bellusdeo. You have Helen. You love almost unconditionally—and that is reflected in those around you. When you say you don’t have many friends—”

Kaylin lifted both hands in surrender, hoping it would stop his words. She had never really attempted to enumerate her life in the way Annarion was clearly doing. When she looked at it from his point of view, she could see he was right. She hadn’t had many friends in the fiefs. She hadn’t lived there for more than seven years, but clearly her perception of who she was hadn’t shifted much.

Severn had often said she was too trusting. But the truth was—she desperately wanted to find people she could trust. She wanted to believe that people could be trusted. No one had ever specifically asked her what friendship, as a concept, meant to her. When she used the word, when she heard the word used, she assumed that it had meaning, like true words did.

But it was just a word; a mortal word.

“When I say that,” she finally told Annarion, “I say what I said when I was—was much younger. It was true, then. I didn’t have as clear a concept that sometimes even our own truths can change, with time. I’m not the person I was when I believed that. I’m not the person I was when I first arrived in Elantra. But you’re right to question it. It’s
not
true now.” She hesitated. “Where I grew up, if you had something special, you kept it hidden. You kept it to yourself. If you didn’t, you were likely to lose it. It could be stolen or broken. You never wanted to stand out. You never wanted to attract too much attention, because some of that attention would be bad.

“I think I say it now to protect myself. If I don’t acknowledge the things that are important out loud, where people can hear it, no one will take them away from me.”

Annarion lifted a brow in Teela’s direction. “She’s young,” Teela replied, with a shrug. “She never felt she had power—and only the powerful can claim power openly as a way of defending themselves. She is not Barrani. She wasn’t raised as we were raised—the scions of the powerful and the ancient lineages. She did not know her father; only his absence shadowed her life—if it shadowed her life at all, given the fiefs.

“We knew ours.” There was a curious, blue bitterness in Teela’s eyes and voice, and of course there would be: Teela’s father had killed her mother while Teela watched, helpless. The fact that her father had, in the end, died for that crime didn’t bring her mother back. Maybe it gave Teela a sense of peace or closure, but Barrani memory made that vastly more difficult.

Annarion said softly, “Yes.” His voice matched Teela’s eyes, and silence descended.

* * *

“I once envied people like you,” Tain surprised Kaylin by saying. He spoke, significantly, in Elantran. “People who had taken—and passed—the test of the High Halls.”

“Annarion hasn’t,” Kaylin reminded him, before she could bite off her tongue. What
no one
needed was an Annarion let loose in the High Halls. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

“I’m aware of that. Had Annarion returned from the green, he would have. His father, his brothers, his cousins—all were Lords of the Court.”

“Not all,” Teela replied. “Enough, Tain.”

“My father made no attempt to court power and significance in the High Halls,” Tain continued. “And for some part of my youth, I resented him for it. You would not have liked my father,” he added, for Kaylin’s benefit. “But I believe you would have liked him a great deal more than you would have liked Teela’s.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes. But I remember him clearly. Mortal memory is fragile, but it is not always unkind, in the end.”

Kaylin had never heard Tain talk about himself. Not like this. She tried to find something to say in return—something that might have the same weight and significance. She came up with nothing. “When did you meet Teela?”

The two exchanged a glance. “If I answer that, she’ll kill me. Or try.”

“She really will,” Teela added, looking even less amused, which, given her starting point, should have been impossible. “Go home. Annarion and Mandoran are not your responsibility—and before the words fall out of your mouth,
neither am I
.”

Tain grinned. Teela didn’t. Kaylin wouldn’t have gotten away with that expression, given Teela’s current mood—but she wasn’t Tain. She wanted to know their history, but told herself that having the knowledge didn’t really matter. Tain trusted Teela. Or maybe he just accepted her. There was no point in worrying about Teela—unless you wanted
angry
Teela.

Kaylin wasn’t Tain, but she understood that if she went into the fiefs with Annarion and Mandoran, Teela was going, too. She looked across the room to Severn, who had, as he so often did, remained neutral.

“I notice you’re making no attempt to ditch Severn,” Tain said.

Kaylin turned to stare at him. “He’s my partner.”

“So you want to leave a Barrani corporal and a Dragon Lord behind because it might be dangerous, but you haven’t even stopped to think about the hazards to a mortal.”

“He’s my
partner
, Tain.”

“Just checking. I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.”

* * *

Moran did not come back to the dining room, or any of the spaces Kaylin privately thought of as public, that night. Teela closeted herself with the two Barrani; Severn left, not quite dragging Tain out by the collar; and Bellusdeo went upstairs to talk with Maggaron. If Severn was Kaylin’s partner, Maggaron was—in as much as she had one—hers.

At this rate, they wouldn’t be investigating anything—they’d be launching a full-scale invasion. Small and squawky remained invisible. His negligible weight no longer adorned Kaylin’s shoulders, and he didn’t bite or chew her hair. She could hear him—silence was not in his character—but that was it. She was surprised to find that she missed him.

But Moran had chosen to stay at least one night.

Bellusdeo had not turned carpets—or Kaylin—to ash, and Mandoran hadn’t insulted Dragons once in her hearing. Some positive things
had
happened today. Kaylin mirrored the Imperial Palace—or tried to. The mirrors remained stubbornly reflective, and she remembered that Helen was still working on a “safe” connection—which meant, of course, that one didn’t exist yet.

She would arrange to speak with the Arkon tomorrow. She didn’t need to speak with Evanton again.

Anything else?

“I believe so, dear,” Helen, disembodied, said. “You have a visitor.”

“An emergency visitor?” Kaylin asked, thinking immediately of the midwives.

“You are likely to consider it an emergency, but no, dear. It’s only the Emperor.”

* * *

“You need to work on your Elantran,” Kaylin said, as she sprinted for the door. “Is Bellusdeo still awake?”

“She is in Maggaron’s room. Dragons,” she added, “don’t require sleep, as you may recall. You would like her to remain ignorant of the Emperor’s visit?”

“If that’s
at all
possible, yes” was Kaylin’s guilty reply.

“In general, I wouldn’t recommend it, given how sensitive she is about the Dragon Court—but I imagine you know best.”

Well, at least one of us does
, Kaylin thought
.
She answered the door. The Emperor, absent guards or Imperial Library pages, waited on the steps. Although he wasn’t pacing—wasn’t, in fact, moving much at all—everything about his rigid, perfect posture implied impatience.

She opened her mouth to invite him in.

“It is a lovely evening,” he said, before she could speak—and even if he was here informally, she knew far better than to interrupt or speak over him. “Shall we walk?”

* * *

“I did not intend to arrive without warning,” he told her, as the house faded into the distance. “But the usual methods of communication do not appear to be available.”

Kaylin grimaced. “Sorry. For the mirrors to reach
us
, we apparently require some sort of connection, and Helen doesn’t trust it. We’re trying to come up with a secure workaround.”

“I...see.”

“Strange things have happened with the mirrors before,” Kaylin felt obliged to point out. “It’s not a groundless fear.”

“I had hoped to speak with you more frequently, but I seldom have the leisure to visit. There are some difficulties—perhaps you are aware of one of them.”

Since it wasn’t a question, Kaylin waited.

“The Aerian Caste Court has petitioned the Emperor for willful and flagrant mistreatment of one of its citizens.”

Kaylin stiffened.

“Ah. You are, indeed, aware.”

“I’m not aware of what was
said
.” Moran was not nearly as shaky a topic as Bellusdeo. She hoped.

“They wish to have the sergeant removed from her duties.”

“The sergeant doesn’t wish to be removed.”

“Ah. I am to speak with Lord Grammayre on the morrow. Is this what he will tell me?”

“I don’t know what he’ll tell you. But I know that Moran doesn’t want to abandon her duties.”

“You are aware that she cannot fly?”

“Yes. I’ve offered to fix that, and she’s refused. It’s like she’s Barrani.”

“Her inability to fly is at the heart of the complaint.”

“She’s perfectly capable of running the infirmary without wings. The ceilings are too low for actual flight there, and she’s not a Sword; she’s not required to patrol. There’s nothing she can’t do—”

“Except return home at the end of the day.”

“...Except that, yes.”

The Emperor exhaled smoke. In that, he was much like Bellusdeo. “I assume, given your reaction, that you have already interfered.”

“If offering her a place to stay is interfering, then yes, I have. I’m well acquainted with the laws of Elantra, and the offer hasn’t broken any of them. She’s free to say no.”

“Given the tone of the envoy I received, she is only legally free to do so. Much of society is not governed by strict legality. You have offered her rooms in your manse?”

“Helen was fine with it, so yes, I did. She was living in the
infirmary
. I get that she doesn’t want to go home—I’m not sure I would, either, if I were her. But she deserves way better than a cot in the infirmary.”

“Ah. In that opinion, at least, you are of a mind with the envoy.” He smiled. It reminded Kaylin of how seldom he did so. “I confess that you seem to have had a...full...day.”

Kaylin didn’t miss a step, but it was a near thing. “I’ve had a day, yes,” she replied carefully.

“And Bellusdeo?”

“Bellusdeo reminded me once again that she’s a fully functional adult with a great deal more physical prowess and political know-how than I have.” She glanced at the Emperor, who appeared to be watching the street, aware that she wasn’t
in
her Dragon-proof home at the moment. “I’m sure you’re aware that she’s been observing the Hawks.”

He nodded.

“We were called in on an investigation on the Winding Path; she came with us.”

“Yes. So the Arkon said.”

Which answered Kaylin’s carefully unasked question. “Did he give you the details?”

“Yes.”

“Does he consider the situation to be dangerous?”

“I would say, in different circumstances, that he was merely curious.”

“But Bellusdeo’s involved.”