The Chronicles of Elantra Bundle

by Michelle Sagara

  “I’ve been here before.”

  Half an hour later, she was certain she could feel Severn’s exasperated laughter. But honestly, the last time she’d been here, she’d spent her time paying attention to other things—the children, the people who had stopped to stare as one large, single-minded crowd, the young man who had been their guide, and, if she were truthful, her own fear. She’d kind of followed Severn, and remembering the route was causing some difficulty.

  Today, there were other children, so it wasn’t a dead loss; she was stopped—or stopped walking—half a dozen times, just for the pleasure and indulgence of watching them laugh, or gape at her obvious disfigurement.

  She was not a person who loved to be touched, but pudgy, harmless fingers were in an entirely different country, and she could return the favor, lifting a total stranger and tucking him, for a moment, into the curve of her arms. This was not the childhood of her youth, but she didn’t want children to suffer that childhood, and it was oddly comforting—if she tried very hard not to think about the one missing girl—that this quarter existed.

  Finding Ybelline did not, in the end, prove a problem. Ybelline, leaving the oddly oblong rounded dome that served as a house, found her. And, given that she was knee deep in children at the time, and that they were touching the emblem of the Hawk just as often as they touched her stalkless forehead, it seemed somehow right to look up and see Ybelline standing, quietly, a safe distance away.

  Kaylin threw the children up into the air, caught them, each in turn, and then shoved them gently toward the waiting crowd of watchful—and amused—adults who would, with luck, keep them from running back too quickly.

  “Sorry,” she said, although the regret was more courtesy than real. She straightened out her tunic and tried to look more official.

  “Never apologize for bringing a moment of joy into their lives,” Ybelline replied gravely, her eyes smiling in a way her lips didn’t. “Their joy—and their sorrow—is so immediate and so clean, the Tha’alani often draw on it in times of trouble. It brings us peace. Even their fears do, because they are so easy to calm.

  “But come to my home, Kaylin. It is a better place to discuss anything of import.”

  Kaylin nodded, and, grateful for a guide, followed Ybelline. This time she made a careful note of how the streets turned, and in which direction; they weren’t laid out in a grid at all. If streets could meander, these ones did; you could probably spend all day walking across the damn street.

  But the house was familiar, with its odd door, its odd curves, its trailing greenery. Ybelline did not pause to unlock the door, but Kaylin would have been surprised had it been locked. Locked things were hidden things, and very, very few of the Tha’alani could hide in any meaningful way. She knew that now.

  Also knew that Ybelline was one of those few.

  She entered the house behind Ybelline, and they went to the sitting area that opened into a garden. Ybelline offered Kaylin a chair, and Kaylin took it with some gratitude. It was composed of woven strands of something that gave slightly as weight sunk into it.

  Then she sat there, groping for words.

  The ones she finally used were, “Donalan Idis.”

  Ybelline, seated across from her, actually flinched. “He is known to us,” she said wearily. Her skin was pale in the light of day, pale and slightly gray. This is what ashen meant.

  “No,” Kaylin said quietly, “it’s not an idle question. I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t a question,” Ybelline said, speaking more firmly. “But I know the name. We all know it,” she added. “It came to us in the nightmare years.”

  “Severn explained some of the history of the Tha’alani and the Imperial Court to me. I was young, when it happened.”

  “I do not believe you were born,” was the soft reply.

  “Very young.”

  This drew the slightest of smiles from the older woman. But her words were not happy words. “Why do you come asking of Donalan Idis?”

  “He was never found,” Kaylin said quietly. “But…I do know that he found Grethan when Grethan left the quarter.” She hesitated for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, but circumstances forced me to mention that one of the Tha’alani children had gone missing.”

  Ybelline nodded, looking unsurprised. “Had I not decided to trust you, Kaylin Neya, I would never have asked for your help. But this…this is worse than fear.”

  “We’re looking for him now.” She hesitated again, and then said, “The Tha’alaan remembers what Donalan Idis did?”

  “It remembers what he is,” was the low, low reply. “What he did—yes. That, too, is remembered.”

  “But how? He didn’t—according to our information—touch the Tha’alaan in any way.”

  Ybelline raised a golden brow. “Your researches are incorrect,” she said at last. “He did not intentionally touch it. But he was responsible for the selection of his subjects, and on one occasion, one of our most powerful members had cause to touch him. I think he hoped to explain the Tha’alaan to Idis—I think he thought that the explanation would stay his hand.”

  “He tried to explain the Tha’alaan by showing it to him?”

  Ybelline nodded. “There is no other way,” she said softly.

  Kaylin said, quietly, “The Tha’alaan contains the racial memories of the Tha’alani.”

  “Yes.”

  “How specific are those memories?”

  Ybelline said, after a quiet that filled the room with melancholy, “I heard the Dragon’s cry.”

  “And you understood it?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of these days you’re going to have to explain to me what brought the Tha’alani to this city.”

  “One of these days,” Ybelline agreed.

  “Do you understand Barrani, as well?”

  “Yes. All of us can, if we try. The children are not as conversant with the memories. They’re like…those black birds that like shiny objects. Magpies. But they will be changed by the Tha’alaan in time, just as the Tha’alaan will be changed, in small ways, by their lives.”

  “How easy is it to navigate these memories?”

  “They are not like your Imperial Records,” Ybelline replied. “They are not moved with a simple command, not at first. The young are aware of the Tha’alaan, they can speak to it, they can be comforted through it—but like everything else in their world, there is constant change. As they grow, as their capacity for thought grows and changes, they take to the Tha’alaan more naturally. The Tha’alaan watches them,” she added. “I think that is the wrong word. It does more than watch, but—I think that is the best translation I can come up with. The Tha’alaan is aware of our children. Aware, in some ways, that our children need time to develop some sense of themselves as other, or separate. It approaches infants very differently than it would approach an adult. Differently,” she added softly, “but in some ways, each first encounter is the same.”

  What do you mean? hovered on Kaylin’s lips, but didn’t leave; Ybelline was still struggling with words, and Kaylin had enough patience to be silent.

  “Children assume that what they see and know is all that is seen and known. When they are young,” Ybelline added. “At some point, they become aware that what they see and know is, in fact, different from what others see and know. It is at this age that they begin their struggle to encompass our past.

  “What they first reach for, in the vast depths of history and memory, are those memories and thoughts that are most like their own. What they first look for are those actions and experiences that they themselves understand firsthand. Does this make sense to you?”

  Kaylin nodded.

  “What the Tha’alaan might offer them, when they first touch these memories, are the experiences of those who were also present when the memory first touched becomes part of their awareness. In this way, the child learns that there are many ways of seeing the same event, and no one of those is wrong.”

/>   “And children like Grethan?”

  “We spoke to him, individually,” Ybelline said quietly. “And those of us who were strong enough could invoke the Tha’alaan for him. I do not know if this was a kindness, but it is what we have always done for the deaf.”

  “And not everyone can do this?”

  “No.”

  “But if you can all reach the Tha’alaan—if it touches all of you—”

  “To reach it, Kaylin, is almost to live in a different place. Your kind speaks of the weight of history, as if it were something to be borne. Imagine that you are living it—can you speak of it coherently at the same time? Can you speak of it in a meaningful way to someone who can only see or hear you?

  “At best, most of my kin can speak of it after. They can share their own experience. But the sharing of that experience is not the experience itself, and even then—it is not the whole of the Tha’alaan. The Tha’alaan responds to what it finds. It is not merely records, be they as detailed as you would like.”

  “It…responds to what it finds.”

  Ybelline nodded.

  “But—in the case of Idis—it could only be seen or touched through an intermediary.”

  Again, there was silence. Ybelline finally nodded.

  “Ybelline—what did he see?”

  Ybelline’s eyes were wide and round as she turned to Kaylin. She did not touch Kaylin, but Kaylin thought that she didn’t really need to. Ybelline had touched enough human minds in her time to understand people. Even deaf or insane ones.

  Finally, Ybelline moved. And closed her eyes. “That is not the question you must ask,” she said quietly.

  “I think I need an answer.”

  Ybelline shook her head. “Not to that question, Kaylin.”

  As if this were some sort of test. Kaylin had failed many tests in her time. But those tests hadn’t mattered. She said quietly, “What did the Tha’alaan see?”

  “Power,” was the single word she whispered.

  “What did the Tha’alaan offer?”

  “Power.”

  They sat opposite each other in silence. Ybelline was subdued, and seemed, to Kaylin’s eye, smaller and somehow more fragile. Conversation of the type that Kaylin was used to—where people used actual words that made noise—was, it seemed to Kaylin, left to her.

  She picked it up slowly and reluctantly, as if it were somehow harmful. “There are no Tha’alani mages,” she said quietly. “No Tha’alani Arcanists. No Oracles.”

  Ybelline nodded.

  “I always thought it was because they were Tha’alani. That’s not true, is it?”

  Ybelline shook her head.

  “So in the past there were mages?”

  She nodded again.

  “And their memories are part of the Tha’alaan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they speak often to your people?”

  “No.”

  “And your people don’t somehow find them?”

  “Some do,” Ybelline replied quietly. “And we watch them with care.”

  “Why?”

  Words slowly returned to the Tha’alani woman. “Because it was long ago, Kaylin. The world then was not what it is now.” She paused for a moment, and then said, softly, “And because those who touch those memories are touching the oldest part of the Tha’alaan.”

  “It didn’t always exist?”

  “No. Our early history is lost to us, except for that which survives in the Tha’alaan. The world was harsher, then. And so, too, were my ancient kinsmen.” She said, after some moments had passed, “When the Emperor chose to imprison members of the Tha’alani, when he chose to give them to Donalan Idis, the Tha’alaan was aware of it.

  “And it…responded. Like a parent,” Ybelline said, “whose child is threatened. Memories that had almost passed from view rose up, at the call to battle. Things that had never troubled our lives—any of our lives—suddenly broke into our dreams, and our waking visions. We call them the Nightmare years.”

  “But it didn’t last years—”

  “Kaylin, it did. You are the sum of your experiences, for good or ill. We are the same. There are some experiences that we were not meant to have, even in the Tha’alaan. And every waking Tha’alani who lived at that time experienced those things. Whole lives,” she whispered, “calling out for vengeance and battle. People who had never so much as raised a hand against another—people like me—now remember murdering those who stood against us. And we remember those deaths without pity, because we had none. We remember what it was like to commune with the elements, to break the earth at our whim, to summon fire, water and air. We remember the words that we spoke when towers toppled. We remember the size of the armies that waited upon our word.

  “And we remember watching those armies form.

  “To calm the Tha’alani at that time was not a simple task. But to do otherwise was to court our destruction as a people. Whatever we may have been, we did not war against Dragons.”

  And Kaylin, guided by only instinct, said, “but you could.”

  Bitterly, Ybelline nodded. She covered her face with her hands, and those hands were shaking. “In the quarter, there was anger unlike any anger that I have felt, before or after. And it was because of Donalan Idis. Because of Imperial ignorance. But those of us who were older, and who could extricate themselves from the Tha’alaan, did. And we could see with our own eyes, and feel only our own thoughts, and we met, and we discussed what might be done to preserve our people as we are now, and end the torment of those who had been taken from us.

  “If at one point in our existence we wanted or needed power, that time has passed.”

  “And Donalan Idis saw it.”

  “Yes, Kaylin.”

  “But he has power. And he would know that your people don’t. Why would he want—” She grimaced. Stopped speaking for a minute to let the nagging thought she couldn’t quite catch grow stronger. “There’s something I don’t understand.”

  “There is probably much that you don’t understand,” Ybelline said, but without any edge of condescension, without any pity. “I scarce understand it myself.”

  “Wait. When you said you could remember summoning—”

  “Yes,” Ybelline said starkly. Her back straightened, and her shoulders, and she lifted her chin slightly. Her eyes were still honeyed, but they were bright now, the pupils so small they seemed to have been swallowed by color.

  She lifted her hands, palm up, as if in supplication, and she spoke a single word.

  Fire appeared in the air above those hands, a fire that was shaped like an Aerian.

  Kaylin spoke a few words of her own, and not quietly.

  But what Ybelline did next stopped even that: the stalks on her forehead stretched out, and out again—and from the fire, small tendrils of ruby and orange and gold stretched out to meet them.

  CHAPTER 15

  Remember the essence of fire. Remember the name of fire. Remember the shape of fire.

  Hours—days—spent staring at the pristine wick of an unlit candle while a frustrated Dragon glared at her had not prepared Kaylin for this. Hells, throwing a fireball in the caverns beneath the hall of the High Lord hadn’t. She had risen to her feet, and her hand was on her dagger, when the fire turned to face her.

  And the fire was raging. She could see the way the heat distorted the air around its perfect shape. It was taller than either Kaylin or Ybelline—although that wasn’t hard—and infinitely more majestic. It carried a sword of flame, whose heart was blue, and no shield. It was almost a man, although heat blurred its features, the cast of its nonexistent bones.

  But not the color of its eyes.

  They were Ybelline’s eyes.

  “So,” the fire said, and it spoke with her voice, “you understand.”

  Kaylin did. “You could speak with the elements,” she said flatly. “In a way that none of us could.”

  “Yes,” Ybelline said quietly. “There are perhaps twenty-five
of the Tha’alani who could do what I am now doing—but not one of them has.”

  “And you can…keep this secret.”

  “It is because I can that I am willing to risk this at all,” Ybelline replied.

  “And he saw this.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he wanted it. Not the Tha’alaan. He must have known that that was beyond him. But this—the ability to be the fire…” She shook her head. “Can you put it away now?”

  “Yes. But it is more difficult than calling it forth. I am not the fire,” Ybelline said, her voice slightly louder. “And the fire is not me. But it is living, Kaylin. In its fashion. It thinks, but not in a way that you or I think.”

  Twenty-five. For just a moment, Kaylin could imagine what a city at war would look like after twenty-five such mages had joined the battle. “Tha’alani are supposed to find Barrani and Dragons difficult to read.”

  “They are very difficult to read.”

  “But fire’s easier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why exactly?”

  “I don’t know.” She folded her hands, slowly, together, and as she did, the fire dwindled. But the heat remained in the air, distorting it. “Possibly because there is only now, with fire.”

  Something about the way she said the last two words made Kaylin’s day worse. “And with the other elements?”

  “Earth is slower,” Ybelline replied. “Air is very, very hard to touch this way, and therefore much harder to control. Water, we do not—did not—call.”

  “Why?”

  Ybelline said nothing. And looked very much as if she would go on saying nothing.

  “Ybelline—have you heard the Oracles?”

  The Tha’alani woman shook her head and spoke slowly, as if speaking were difficult. “We were summoned to speak with one of the Oracles. A boy who paints. The Dragon Court has been concerned with the Oracles. I have…had my own concerns.”

  “They’re the same concerns,” Kaylin said urgently. “And I need to know about water. We have, according to the Oracles, two weeks of city left.” But something bothered her. Something Tiamaris had said…