“He is not, however, likely to be available. I will therefore send Sanabalis.” He turned to glance off-mirror; he spoke, but the mirror did not convey the sound of his voice. “I expect a full report of any relevant information gleaned from either the Tha’alani or Tiamaris.”
“I can interrupt you?”
“You may even do so safely, for the duration.”
* * *
“I think he’s going to send Bellusdeo with Sanabalis,” Kaylin told Severn. She glanced at Gilbert. He had no difficulty keeping up with the two Hawks. Kattea had flagged, which was fine; Gilbert was carrying her. Kaylin suspected he would carry her anywhere, for as long as it was necessary.
The water’s silence made her uneasy. She could not believe that Gilbert intended to hurt Kattea—but what constituted harm, for Gilbert, was probably not even translatable into Elantran. Or any other language Kaylin knew.
“If,” she told him, as they continued their very brisk pace, “you see any other buildings of significance, let us know?”
He nodded. He had said very little since his encounter with the water’s Avatar, and seemed—for Gilbert—less confused and more grave. He stopped well short of the guard post occupied by the Tha’alani, and Kaylin thought it best to ask Ybelline’s permission—through direct mental contact with the guards—to dispense with the usually thorough inspection. Kattea flinched when one of the guards bent down to touch Kaylin’s forehead with the stalks that grew out of his own.
The guards themselves were not especially eager to touch the thoughts of an outsider, but knew their duties; they waited until Ybelline granted permission for Kaylin to enter the quarter.
One of them wore the tabard of the Tha’alanari—one who was capable of guarding their thoughts, or the thoughts they took in, from the rest of the Tha’alaan.
It was he who escorted them to Ybelline’s home.
* * *
The streets of the Tha’alani quarter were never empty; today was not an exception.
Kaylin had not visited while in possession of the familiar—and like Nightshade’s mark, small and flappy had become so much a part of her daily life she could almost forget he was there. To anyone who hadn’t yet seen a tiny, translucent dragon—which clearly moved on its own—the familiar was a delight and a curiosity.
Small children gathered by the side of the narrow road that wound its way through the oddly curved, rounded contours of the dwellings the Tha’alani favored. They were openly curious, and some, bolder than others, attempted to touch the strangers in the Hawks’ tabard. Some stepped back, clearly nervous.
“They don’t see a lot of outsiders,” Kaylin told Kattea, who had stiffened in Gilbert’s arms. “So they’re curious.”
Kattea clearly had the usual fear of the Tha’alani mind readers. Kaylin tried not to resent it, because she’d once felt that fear herself. But she did pause to let the bolder children touch her extended hands, and she did allow one hesitant child to brush her cheek—he was too nervous to truly connect—with the stalks on his forehead. If she’d once been as frightened as Kattea, she wanted to make clear that the fear was groundless, and there was no better way.
On the other hand, the small dragon was the star of the show today; all of the telepathic questions the children transmitted were about him. He was well enough behaved that he allowed them to touch him—but not with their slender, immature antennae. The children radiated delight and wonder so strongly, words would have been superfluous.
But Kaylin had come here for a reason, and if spending the day amusing small mind readers was actually a happy thing, it took up time they didn’t have. Their escort understood this, and the children melted away, some with obvious reluctance. No words, however, were exchanged. They weren’t necessary.
Ybelline was waiting for them. She wore very simple robes—yellow, fringed with purple—that flowed loosely down her shoulders and arms; the sheen of the fabric caught the sunlight, which reminded Kaylin that it was not actually that late in the day.
Ybelline’s jaw was tightly set; she smiled—because she smiled so often, it was practically her default expression—but her color was bad, and her eyes were darkly circled. Kaylin, who often hugged her, hugged her now for entirely different reasons. Ybelline’s stalks brushed Kaylin’s forehead and settled there.
Kaylin told her everything. Ybelline was Tha’alanari. What she saw in Kaylin’s thoughts, she could—with effort and discipline—keep out of the Tha’alaan. She showed Ybelline the three corpses that had been the start of her involvement; she showed Ybelline Gilbert, Gilbert’s basement and her attempt to heal him. She showed Ybelline the elemental water and told her what the water had said.
Her conscious memory was nowhere near as good as the memory Ybelline now touched, and Kaylin was perfectly willing to let the Tha’alani castelord rifle through all of it. She had no fear at all that Ybelline would judge her.
“Come with me,” Ybelline said, as she withdrew.
Kaylin hesitated, and Ybelline marked it. “I’m sorry. I want to introduce Gilbert and Kattea. Gilbert, Kattea, this is Ybelline—the castelord of the Tha’alani.”
Gilbert set Kattea down and offered the Tha’alani woman a very deep bow. It was not, strictly speaking, a Tha’alani greeting, but Ybelline interacted with enough people that she recognized it as a gesture of deep respect, regardless. Kattea’s stiff nod was less admirable and far more skittish—but this was something Ybelline understood, as well. Kaylin’s annoyance was deeper and lasted longer.
Then again, some of it was with her past self, and no one could get as angry with Kaylin as she herself could.
Gilbert offered Ybelline his hand. Kaylin stepped between them a shade too quickly. Ybelline, however, shook her head. “It is all right, Kaylin. It is a risk I am willing to take.”
“He’s not—”
“Yes, you’ve told me. But I have...done as I must. I have experienced my own death.” Her smile was slightly gray, but the resolve beneath it, unshaken. “Experiencing death is not, in the end, as terrifying as it seems at a remove; it is not fear, but fact.”
“Ybelline—”
“If you are not mistaken, he will help us. And if I am not mistaken, it is Gilbert’s help we now require.”
“It’s the ‘me not being mistaken’ part I’m worried about,” Kaylin replied.
Ybelline’s answering smile was deeper this time. “It is because you are young. If you do not trust yourself, that is...how do you say it? Not my problem.”
“That’s pretty much how we say it, yes.” Kaylin exhaled. “Gilbert, I’m not sure if you know the Tha’alani, or know about them.”
“Kattea fears them,” Gilbert said, which caused the younger girl to blanch. Then glare. “You do not.”
“No, I really don’t. If we could all communicate the way the Tha’alani do, I’d be out of a job. You will not find kinder or more understanding people anywhere, ever.”
“But you are still worried.”
Kaylin exhaled. “I am worried for them. When they speak to you, when they read your thoughts, those thoughts become part of what they know, and what they know is part of the Tha’alaan. Healing you...made it clear that you’re not like us. But if you’re different in the wrong way...”
“You are not castelord, Kaylin,” Ybelline said firmly. “And I am not a child to be protected when the future of my people—and yours—is imperiled.”
“I am not worried,” Gilbert said—to Kaylin. “It is frustrating; it is hard to make myself understood to your kind. What she knows—what she can know—cannot hurt me.”
“And if she touched your name?”
“That is not the way it works” was his quiet reply. He almost sounded regretful. He once again extended his hand; Ybelline took it. She hesitated.
“The functionality is withi
n the stalks?” Gilbert asked, correctly identifying the hesitation.
“Not entirely—but yes. They are not always necessary for the Tha’alani.”
His smile was slender, but genuine; she’d amused him. She certainly hadn’t amused Kattea. Kaylin placed a staying hand on the younger girl’s shoulder.
“You let her touch you,” Kattea whispered.
“Yes, I did. The thing about Ybelline is this: she can see everything about you—all the things you hate, all the things you regret, all the things you would never tell anyone—” with each phrase, Kattea’s body stiffened slightly “—but she doesn’t judge you. She will never hate you, even if you hate yourself. I know it doesn’t make sense to you,” she added. “But I’m not worried for Gilbert.”
“You’re worried for her?”
Kaylin nodded. “Not because I think Gilbert will try to hurt her,” she added. “But I’m starting to think that people—like us—aren’t meant to understand people like Gilbert. I mean, we’re not even built so we can. I think there are whole parts of him that make no sense to us, and will never make sense to us. We can think about him on the outside until it’s exhausting, but—we’re not inside of him.”
Ybelline stiffened, in a much more obvious way than Kattea had; Kaylin crushed the girl’s shoulder, realized what she’d done and apologized.
“Gilbert’s like us, in one way,” Kattea surprised her by saying.
“Oh?”
“Or maybe he’s only like me.”
Paying attention to Kattea was easier, at the moment, than watching Ybelline. If Kaylin had thought her wan and pale before, it was nothing to the color she now became. But Ybelline was right. Kaylin was a private. Ybelline was castelord.
“How is he like you?” Kaylin asked, forcing her eyes away from the Tha’alani and Gilbert.
“He’s lonely.”
“I don’t think Gibert gets lonely the way we do.”
Kattea folded her arms, her fear turning to annoyance. She radiated anger at what she assumed was condescension—and to be fair to her, it kind of was. “I think I know Gilbert better than you do.”
“You’ve known him for what, three weeks? Maybe four?” Kaylin bit back more words. “I’m sorry. I’m worried, and I’m cranky. Gilbert isn’t human. No, more than that, he’s not like any of the races you know. From what he’s said—and you’ve heard him say it—he was built for a purpose.”
“So?”
“What kind of crappy god builds loneliness into something that doesn’t need others to survive?” Her brain caught up with her mouth and shut it down.
Helen had been built with a specific purpose. Some of that purpose, Helen no longer remembered. Helen had never described herself as lonely, in the years—or centuries—before Hasielle, her very first tenant, had arrived. She hadn’t used the exact word, no. But she’d been drawn to Hasielle because Hasielle was the type of person to make a home of wherever she lived. To bring warmth or light or life to the space, just by being in it.
To keep Hasielle, Helen had destroyed parts of herself. She wasn’t, hadn’t been, in love with Hasielle—but the yearning for her had been visceral.
For how long had she observed Hasielle, without even speaking to her? For how long had she noted Hasielle’s cleaning and humming and cooking?
Kaylin looked at Gilbert’s profile. Gilbert might have been a cleverly painted statue. For how long had Gilbert been aware of Nightshade, in the dim recesses of an ancient building in the heart of the fiefs? At the beginning, he hadn’t even been aware of Nightshade.
But at some point in Nightshade’s captivity—and Kaylin could think of it in no other way—Gilbert had chosen to speak with, to communicate with, the fieflord. To do so, he’d had to invert himself. What inversion meant, Kaylin still didn’t know. She understood only that it was risky and voluntary.
She closed her eyes.
Gilbert is lonely.
Yes, only idiots would create something that got lonely. But...weren’t the idiots in part created because something wild and ancient and world-devouring...had been lonely? Maybe it was part of the essential nature of anything in the universe. Nothing existed in isolation. And maybe nothing wanted to. Not if it could think, move, feel.
Helen had observed Hasielle for a very small fraction of Helen’s overall existence. Thirty years? No. Less. Her decision to damage herself, to cut off her figurative limbs, had been arrived at without consultation with Hasielle. She had not, in any obvious way, revealed her presence, her sentience. She had gambled everything on Hasielle, on the hope that she could become the home in which Hasielle wanted to live.
Gilbert had actually spoken with Nightshade. He’d done so continually for three or four decades—if that was even accurate. And Gilbert had found Kattea; had rescued an orphan from the fiefs. A little girl whom he had not been built to even see—all because of that time with Nightshade.
“I’m sorry, Kattea,” she said—meaning it now. “I think you might be right.”
Kattea was young enough—barely—that the genuine apology made up for Kaylin’s earlier doubt. Kaylin turned to Gilbert, and the feelings of guilt evaporated as Ybelline’s knees buckled.
Chapter 21
She was there to catch the castelord; Gilbert hadn’t moved an inch.
It was hard to remember that they had anything in common; for one long moment, she wanted to deck him. But she didn’t have more than two arms and needed both. “Ybelline,” she said, urgent, her hands brushing the Tha’alani’s forehead.
Gilbert blinked. Well, he blinked with two of his eyes. The third eye, which had been more or less closed, snapped open.
“Yes,” he said, to thin air. “I see.”
Ybelline’s eyes were almost always gold; it was easy to think of them as normal—or normal human, at any rate. But when her lids fluttered open, they revealed irises of hazel. Kaylin could not remember what hazel meant in the Tha’alani; she imagined it wasn’t good. “I am...uninjured, Kaylin. Help me stand.”
Kaylin did so. Severn helped unobtrusively; Gilbert continued to stand, unmoving, as if people generally collapsed in his presence as a matter of course. Ybelline was not steady on her feet; Kaylin shifted position, sliding an arm under her arms and around her back, to brace her. Although she didn’t always notice this, Ybelline was not small.
“Come with me,” the Tha’alani castelord said. By default, this would have happened anyway, given that Kaylin was most of the castelord’s locomotive force at the moment. “Gilbert,” she added.
“Yes?” He didn’t actually look at her. Kaylin wasn’t certain what he was looking at, but whatever it was, he stared at it intently. The small dragon whuffled, apparently unconcerned.
“We’re leaving.”
“Yes?”
Kaylin snorted and looked to Kattea, who nodded and caught Gilbert’s arm. Gilbert blinked as she tried to move him—and failed. Kattea was not, however, a quitter. “Gilbert—we have to go with them.”
“We don’t,” he said, looking confused.
Ybelline turned to Kaylin and touched her forehead. He is not human. She used the broader word, the old Elantran one.
No. I—I trust him, though.
I think trust is almost irrelevant, Ybelline replied. But I will thank you for bringing him.
Given Ybelline’s collapse and continued shakiness, Kaylin had severe doubts that those thanks were deserved.
I am grateful. She was. It was so difficult to understand what I was seeing or hearing that it...removed me from the immediacy of so much death and so much fear. I am still...uncertain...that I understand what Gilbert attempted to tell me. I am also uncertain that he understood me.
He thinks he did.
Ybelline nodded. I do not think I will make that attempt again in the very near fu
ture. But oddly, it is safer to have Gilbert touch the Tha’alaan than it would be to have your Barrani Hawks touch it. Gilbert’s thoughts and beliefs would be very like a poorly structured dream—and we have those in the Tha’alaan, in number.
Where are you taking us?
To the long house, the caste hall. The Tha’alanari will meet us there. I have asked them to do what I have done. If I can touch the experience of death—and I can—I cannot examine it with the care we now require, not at any speed. At leisure, when this crisis is behind us, I may return to it. She meant it, too. But not now. We cannot, I believe, direct our future selves; their memories are much like our own: they are resigned almost instantly to a past we cannot change and must simply accept and understand.
If Kaylin adored Ybelline—and she absolutely did—she didn’t adore the other Caste Court officials even one tenth as much. In general, officials were the last people Kaylin was sent to speak with; they made her feel instantly defensive, and defensive Kaylin offended the officials. Things generally went downhill from there.
Ybelline, well aware of Kaylin’s discomfort, shook her head. “They are more hardened in their suspicions of outsiders, but they are aware that you are capable of touching the Tha’alaan on your own, and they have seen what you desire for, and of, it. They find you...ill-mannered and hasty, but they respect what you have done in the past.
“And regardless, they are the men and women who are willing to visit—and revisit—their own deaths in an attempt to make sense of what occurred.”
“Did Gilbert have anything helpful to add?”
“Not intentionally.” She glanced at Gilbert. “And perhaps I am also too hasty. But—and I’m certain this will not shock you at this point—I believe the Arcanist in his memories may have some light to shed on the difficulty.”
“You didn’t recognize the Arcanist?”
Ybelline fell silent, in all ways. Kaylin was genuinely surprised. “Ybelline—”
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