Cast in Honor (The Chronicles of Elantra)

by Michelle Sagara

  “Helen, this is Moran. She’s a Hawk, and she’s in charge of the infirmary. As a sergeant. Moran, this is Helen.”

  “If it’s easier,” Helen said, extending a hand, “think of me as a particularly concerned landlord.”

  “Kaylin talks about you a lot in the office,” Moran replied, offering her the smile she seldom offered anyone in the Halls, except Caitlin. Her wings folded more naturally across her back, losing some of their height; her eyes settled into a comfortable dark gray. “This is a very impressive foyer.”

  “Do the Aeries have foyers?”

  “Not like this, but yes, there are areas that would serve the same function. The oldest of ours features more weaponry, though.” She seemed hesitant to elaborate further.

  “I was hoping,” Kaylin said, rightly guessing the reason for the hesitation, “that Moran could stay with us. Her wings were injured when the Barrani ancestors came to visit, and she can’t fly properly, so she either has to take a leave of absence—”

  “—or find a place to stay while she heals?” Helen was looking at Moran’s wings. Kaylin guessed that she was assessing them from a different vantage point—from the front, very little of the actual injuries could be examined.

  “Yes, that. And at the moment, she’s living in the—”

  Moran cleared her throat. Loudly.

  “Yes, I see. That won’t do. I do have rooms that I think might suit you, if you would care to look at them. I don’t, unfortunately, have a working connection to the mirror network yet. Kaylin has been quite vocal about the necessity. Would you also require it?”

  Moran’s smile in response was almost feline. “No, actually, having no mirror connection would be a godsend.”

  * * *

  Kaylin followed her guest and Helen, trailing behind. She wasn’t certain what she should be doing. Moran’s rooms would be her rooms; they weren’t part of Kaylin’s living space unless Moran specifically invited her in. But Helen was Kaylin’s home, and in theory, it was Kaylin offering hospitality. Would it be bad manners to tag along? Bad manners to hang back?

  Etiquette gave Kaylin a headache, in part because good etiquette demanded entirely different behaviors in almost exactly the same situations. And also because it was Diarmat who was teaching.

  She lagged behind, small and squawky across her shoulders like a wet blanket. He didn’t even lift his head when Moran opened the door Helen indicated. Her room was nestled between everyone else’s in the hall of doors; the door was adorned by a very simple, but obviously winged, person in silhouette.

  Kaylin wasn’t certain what to expect. She’d seen the Aerie in which Clint and his flight lived—or rather, she’d seen the large, public spaces the entire Aerie shared. It had looked like a giant cave, though with smoother walls and adornments. She didn’t recall windows, but didn’t remember the darkness of natural caves, either. She had no idea what Aerians did for kitchens; she knew they didn’t eat sitting in normal chairs, because their wings made it impossible.

  She had no idea how they slept. The fledglings slept in traditional bassinets, though with more padding. Other creatures with wings slept sitting upright—or hanging upside down, in the case of bats. She’d never been stupid enough to ask the Aerians whether they did the same thing. Or perhaps she’d just been too self-conscious about sounding stupid.

  Kaylin started forward and almost ran into Moran’s back. The Aerian was standing in the doorway, her right hand on the frame; her knuckles were white.

  “Moran?” Kaylin asked.

  Moran didn’t appear to hear her, which might have been because of the raucous noise of birds. Kaylin couldn’t tell if they were angry birds or not; she could only tell that there were a lot of them.

  Moran turned in the doorway to face Helen, who waited in silence. She then looked at Kaylin. “Did you know?” she asked, her voice entirely unlike the harsh bark the infirmary required.

  Kaylin shook her head. “I still don’t.”

  Moran stepped into the room, indicating by gesture that Kaylin should follow.

  * * *

  This was not a room in the traditional sense of the word; it only had three walls, for one. The floor was harder than the one in Kaylin’s room; it was stone. Flat stone, mind, that had obviously been worked—but still, stone. Kaylin’s habit of falling out of bed when nightmares were bad or the mirror barked did not lend itself to hard stone floors.

  The walls appeared to be made of stone, too—and the stone wasn’t cut stone or block; it was all of a piece. Arches had been worked into the walls, and Kaylin could see light from rooms to the left and right of this one. But this room was enormous. It was also not one in which Kaylin thought she could ever sleep, because it was missing a wall.

  There were buildings so decrepit in the fiefs that walls had come down. Tiamaris was fixing those, usually by destroying the rotting ruins and rebuilding from scratch, but Nightshade had never cared enough about the fief and its citizens to do the same—and having a shelter without walls was the same as having no shelter at all, when night fell.

  She said nothing. She knew Moran’s life in the Aerie was not her own life in Nightshade. Hells, it wasn’t her life in Elantra. But it shadowed her; it was so much a part of where she’d come from.

  Moran left Kaylin at the door and walked, wings lifting, toward the open sky that faced the rest of the room. The sky was city sky: it was dappled with clouds, but blue and bright, sun setting in the distance. Moran turned away from that sky to face Helen. Kaylin had never seen the expression her face now wore. It was almost uncomfortable to look at; Kaylin felt as if she was intruding on something incredibly private.

  Moran opened her mouth, but no words came out. She looked much, much younger than she did in the Halls. Without a word, she turned and left the entry room, walking to the right of where Kaylin stood looking out.

  When she’d left, Kaylin said quietly, “She has to stay here. She has to stay here.”

  “I am not a jail,” Helen said. Her voice was gentle. “I understand what you want to offer, and Kaylin, I am—as I have said before—happy to do so. Your Moran means you no harm; she is afraid that her presence here will cause it. I can’t convince her to shed that fear, because her presence will cause you no harm here. But it isn’t what happens here that she’s afraid of. It’s what happens outside of these walls.

  “She trusts your safety to me while you are here. I’m not entirely certain what you told her, but I don’t need to be. I cannot promise your safety while you are not within my walls—and you will not always be here. I accept that, or I could not have become your home. If she can live with the guilt, she will, I think, remain.”

  Moran came back. She looked frail, which again was discomfiting. She didn’t speak; instead, she walked directly through the arch opposite the one she’d just exited. She paused this time and said, “Kaylin, come with me.” She held out a hand. It wasn’t a command, but it also wasn’t the sarcastic barking that generally passed for requests in the Halls of Law from anyone who wasn’t Caitlin.

  Kaylin, almost mute, followed, thinking at Helen before she realized that Helen might actually respond to the thoughts—which would just humiliate a Hawk and an Aerian who were both accustomed to more privacy. Helen was mercifully silent.

  Chapter 8

  Kaylin looked across this new room to the pool at its center. Moran had removed her shoes, and her feet dangled in what did not look to be particularly warm water.

  Kaylin had seen the natural baths the Barrani liked, and this resembled them; there was rock and water. But the water was also open to the sky and the elements; the shape of the basin implied that rain actually fell here. So not Kaylin’s idea of a real room.

  “This,” Moran said quietly, “reminds me of my childhood.”

  “The other room reminds me of mine,” K
aylin replied. “But not entirely in a good way. I think I like actual walls.”

  “The Barrani influence everything,” Moran continued, without looking up. “My grandmother lived in quarters very much like these.”

  “You were fond of her,” Helen said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes. She represented sanity and safety to me in my early childhood. She was considered far too old-fashioned, too outdated; she lived like a—commoner? I think that’s the word.”

  “So?” Kaylin said. “I live like a commoner.”

  Moran nodded. “And yet you are Chosen and you number, among your friends, Barrani High Lords and Dragons. And a very cranky Leontine sergeant and his slightly more scary wife. My grandmother had none of these things. She had birth and bloodlines, but after the death of her husband, she leveraged neither. She moved out of the Reach and into the antiquated quarters she had known as a girl.

  “When things became...difficult...for my own mother, I was sent to live with my grandmother. I lived with her for four years, until her death.”

  Something about the way this was phrased made Kaylin tense. Moran didn’t appear to notice.

  “Her wings were different; they weren’t like mine. When I was young, I thought that perhaps I had baby wings and that the spots would fade with time.”

  “Like freckles?”

  “Yes. Exactly like—but mine never faded.” She turned her face toward the water and sat, silent, for a long moment. “I know I shouldn’t stay here.”

  Kaylin hoped that this meant she would.

  “The old quarters are gone. When my grandmother died, they were...remodeled. The Aerians have their own mages; they are not like Imperial mages. They...shape things; rock and wood and water. Most of the interior Aeries look like places the Barrani might live, if given the chance.”

  “They wouldn’t live here.”

  “No. Not here. I shouldn’t stay,” she said again. “But the truth is: I am injured. I will heal. But it won’t be instant. I would rather live in the infirmary than live—without any freedom—in the home of my flight’s leaders, and that’s where I would otherwise stay. But—” She drew in a sharp breath.

  “We’re going to give you a few minutes alone, dear,” Helen said. “We’ll be downstairs in the mess hall.”

  “She means dining room,” Kaylin added, slightly confused; Helen had never made this association before.

  “Moran understands the mess hall in the Halls; eating spaces in the Aerie are not quite the same, although practically speaking, they serve much the same function.”

  Moran nodded. She didn’t rise as Helen drew Kaylin away from the bath toward the exit, but she said, without turning around, “Thank you, Helen. I now understand exactly why Kaylin was so insistent that I convalesce with you.”

  * * *

  “But will she stay?” Kaylin asked.

  “I am not certain. I think she was unexpectedly moved by what she found when she opened that door, but she is not as young as you are.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She has experienced more, and that experience influences how she makes her decisions. Were she your age, but otherwise herself, there would be no question. She would remain. She would feel very indebted to you, however.”

  “No, she wouldn’t.”

  “No?”

  “She would feel indebted to you. But I think that’s going to be the case anyway. You’re my home,” Kaylin added, “but you’re not my slave. Most people don’t have sentient homes. You speak, think, interact like a person—because you are one. Moran won’t be able to see you as some part of me. I don’t, and can’t, own you. You’ve decided, for your own reasons, to let me live here; you’ve decided that you’ll accept my guests—even Imperial ones. You go out of your way—”

  “It is part of my essential function—”

  “—to make those guests feel safe and at home here.”

  “Mandoran and Annarion were willing to die to protect me,” Helen countered. “I could not in good conscience offer less. I would even be willing to house your Teela, but she is...less comfortable with my presence. She does trust me where you’re concerned, but she is afraid that the fact that she is not you, and not like you, would tell against her where I’m concerned. She thinks that I am very like Caitlin.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “I do not think so. I have not yet met your Caitlin.”

  “You’d like her.”

  “I hope, for your sake, that she likes me,” Helen replied. She led the way into the dining room.

  “Shouldn’t we use the parlor?”

  “This is a much larger room, and the windows are both bigger and brighter.” She frowned.

  “Problem?”

  “Teela and Mandoran are speaking to Annarion; he is not responding. Or rather, not well, and not with words. I should go.” Helen’s voice could be in two locations at once; that ability did not extend to her full, physical Avatar. Tara could, and the Hallionne could. But there was a lot Kaylin didn’t know about Helen and her capabilities.

  “I’ll wait.”

  The small dragon squawked, loudly, in her ear, and Kaylin said, “But he’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.” More squawking and one spiteful snap at the stick that kept Kaylin’s hair in place later, the small dragon was gone, flapping around Helen’s departing head in a circle of irritability.

  Kaylin took a chair and folded her arms on the tabletop; she dropped her head onto her forearms. She was exhausted. What she did know about Helen was simple enough: she trusted her. Everything else could wait.

  * * *

  The first person to enter the dining room was not Helen. Nor was it Moran, Teela or the other two Barrani. It was Bellusdeo. She was accompanied by Severn and Tain, who looked decidedly ill-at-ease.

  “The Arkon wants to see you,” Bellusdeo said without preamble.

  Kaylin lifted her head. She wondered how long she’d slept, because she had that slightly fuzzy brain that meant sleep had just been broken. “I like the Arkon, but when he wants to see me, it’s usually because he has a thousand questions. None of which I can answer. When I can’t answer, he gets cranky. He’s pretty much never cranky at you.” Unlike Diarmat. It was possibly the first kind thought she’d had about Diarmat—and that was upsetting in an entirely different way. She looked up; Bellusdeo was smiling. Her eyes were gold.

  Tain’s eyes, on the other hand, were blue.

  “Teela’s here,” Kaylin told him, although he hadn’t asked. “She’s arguing with Annarion.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Mandoran’s on her side.”

  “You think that’s going to change the outcome?” Tain snorted. “I honestly do not see the appeal of children.”

  “They’re not exactly children.”

  “I’ve lived with them. That’s exactly what they are. They might not appear to be young in the fashion of mortal children, but they have the fecklessness of Barrani youth, coupled with far too much power.”

  Kaylin remembered what Mandoran had said about living with Tain; he’d likened it to a dungeon, but less dark. She coughed to cover her amusement, because laughter wasn’t going to make Tain feel any better.

  “What are they arguing about?”

  “Nightshade.”

  Irritation drained from Tain’s expression. “What is Annarion going to do?”

  “Best guess?”

  Tain nodded.

  “He’s going to head into the fiefs.” She smacked herself in the forehead. “That’s what I forgot!”

  “You don’t intend to tell Annarion what Gilbert said, surely.”

  Kaylin blinked.

  “If you don’t want him charging into the heart of the fiefs, you’ll keep it strictly to yourself.�
�

  “I think it’s too late.”

  Tain pinched the bridge of his nose. This was the Barrani equivalent of smacking himself in the face.

  “I didn’t tell him—I haven’t seen him since I got back. I visited Evanton and endured a faceful of raging Leontine sergeant, and I’m trying to convince Moran that she wants to stay here instead of living in the infirmary for three months. If Annarion knows, it’s because Teela told him.”

  “If Teela told him, she has her reasons.”

  But if Kaylin told him, she wouldn’t? Kaylin glared at Tain; Tain ignored it. “I can’t think of any other reason they’d be arguing. Helen had to go downstairs to help out; she thinks Annarion’s close to losing it.”

  This did not change the color of Tain’s eyes any.

  “What were you thinking, bringing them back from the West March?”

  “I didn’t bring ‘them’; I brought Mandoran. He would have come on his own anyway, because Annarion was here. I didn’t expect—” She exhaled, thinking about Moran, and the Hawks that had not survived the ancestors’ attack. “I was thinking that they were Teela’s friends, that they were people she trusted and that she’d thought they were lost forever. I was thinking that it would be as if they were let out of jail after a really, really long sentence.

  “I didn’t understand what they were—or weren’t. But neither did Teela.”

  Bellusdeo said, “Leave her alone, Tain. What’s happened has happened. There was no malice or ill intent.”

  “They weren’t your losses.”

  “No?” Bellusdeo drew herself up to her full height, which was much more impressive than Kaylin’s.

  To Kaylin’s surprise, Tain looked away first. “Apologies,” he said—and even sounded as if he meant it, although Barrani were very capable liars. “I am worried—”

  “About Teela, yes. I imagine she appreciates it about as much as I would.”

  This startled a genuine laugh from the Barrani Hawk. “At least as much” was his rueful reply. “Teela’s family lost a lot to the wars, but I can see why she likes you.”