Cast in Deception

by Michelle Sagara

  “I believe it is immaterial. What she asked for, the Hallionne granted. I am with you, not the familiar. But that is not the question. How did she know to ask? If she does not, herself, have the ability to command the Water to do her bidding, how was she aware that you, at least, would be here at all?”

  To Kaylin’s surprise, Lirienne chuckled. Although his eyes remained blue, there was some hint of green in their shade. “Were it not for Lord Kaylin, they would not have emerged from the green as they did. Two of their number now dwell within Lord Kaylin’s home. If my sister was aware that the cohort encountered unknown danger, she can be forgiven for expecting—or suspecting—that Lord Kaylin would immediately become involved.”

  Bellusdeo raised a brow. “And also for assuming that she would be accompanied by someone who had not yet ventured into the Hallionne?”

  Silence. It was edged, sharp, suspicious.

  Kaylin rushed to fill it, although Bellusdeo was right; neither of them would get answers from the Lord of the West March, and there were other things that were, in the end, more pressing. “Someone found the cohort on the portal paths.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Demonstrably.”

  “What are the probabilities that their difficulties were caused by non-Barrani?”

  The Lord of the West March did not answer.

  Terrano, however, snorted. Loudly. He really did remind Kaylin of Mandoran; it made her wonder why Mandoran had stayed. On the other hand, the universe was probably safer for it.

  “If not the Lord of the West March, and not the Consort, then who?” Kaylin turned to Orbaranne’s Avatar. “Did any other Barrani Lord come to you with a request or a query?”

  Orbaranne looked to Lirienne, who shook his head. Unsurprisingly, the Hallionne failed to answer.

  “It wasn’t me,” Terrano said.

  “You’re not a Barrani Lord.”

  Terrano shrugged. “Neither are my friends.”

  “No. But they’re descending on my city—or they were—because they’re going to take the Test of Name. If they pass, they’ll be Lords of the High Court.”

  Terrano brightened at the thought. As he considered her words, his smile widened; in the end, he was laughing.

  The Lord of the West March was not. “Lord Kaylin.” He rose. “I ask that you speak with Terrano about the experiences of Annarion and Mandoran as they intersect with your city. I will retire for the evening.”

  * * *

  “Everything has changed,” Terrano said. Neither he nor Bellusdeo had eaten much. They retired to what Kaylin assumed was her room, given that Bellusdeo was in the Hallionne as an adjunct. Orbaranne, however, had allowed Terrano to enter as well, not a given in a Hallionne, whose duty was to keep guests safe, usually from each other. He flopped, chest down, across the nearest bed.

  “You better not have your boots on,” Kaylin told him.

  “Why?”

  “Dirt.”

  “You don’t have to clean it.”

  “And it’s rude.”

  “Rude.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Bellusdeo took a seat on the lounge chair by the wall, content to let Kaylin and Terrano maneuver for space. Only when they were done—for a value of done that had Terrano take off boots that Kaylin was almost certain were not actually real—did she speak.

  “I want you to talk to Lord Nightshade about what happened in his Tower. Don’t make that face,” she added, which was technically hard to say in Barrani. She tried Elantran, and Terrano’s face remained blank. Mandoran and Annarion had picked it up from Teela.

  “Why him?” he asked.

  “Because I have his name.”

  Terrano whistled. “I wouldn’t have thought that was safe. I guess I underestimated you.”

  “He gave it to me.”

  “...Or severely overestimated him.” Before she could speak, Terrano added, “Look we all knew each other’s names. It’s not about sharing names. It’s about who you share them with.”

  “You knew him?”

  “No. But we heard a lot about him from Annarion, who practically worshipped him.”

  Kaylin grimaced. “Not anymore. And believe that my house would be a much happier place if he did.”

  “They argue?”

  “They argue in my house, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because arguing in Nightshade’s castle almost destroyed the High Halls.” And before he could ask, she told him what had happened, or as much of it as she could clearly remember.

  “Kitling,” Bellusdeo said—a warning. Kaylin understood why. If the Emperor knew—if the Emperor understood—why the ancestors had attacked the High Halls, killing anyone that stood in their way...Annarion and Mandoran would be in trouble. The empire was his hoard. But there was no way that the Hallionne would speak with the Eternal Emperor. They were safe.

  And Terrano needed to understand. He listened, his eyes luminous although they were still obsidian. “They should have left with me,” he finally said.

  “Annarion didn’t want to leave.”

  “Sedarias didn’t want to leave. If she’d made a different choice, most of the others would have followed.”

  Kaylin hesitated.

  But Bellusdeo said, “Sedarias, of all of your cohort, was probably the one least changed.”

  “All of us were changed.”

  “What you could—and can—do changed, yes. But Sedarias, from all accounts, thinks like a Barrani Lord. Even now.”

  Terrano buried his head in the crook of his arms. “What’s the point?” he asked, his voice slightly muffled. “What’s the point in thinking like that?”

  “She is Barrani.”

  “What does that even mean? Her family abandoned her, same as ours. They were willing to throw us away because we might—might—become powerful. They thought they’d own us, if we did. And you know what?” He lifted his head. “We did become powerful. We are way more powerful than any of our parents. We’re powerful enough—” He stopped. Kaylin didn’t think he was finished, and waited. “Does she want to go home? Does she want to retake the lands that should have been hers?”

  “I think,” Bellusdeo said, her voice quiet and entirely free of emotion, “she wishes to reclaim the lands that should have collectively belonged to all of you.”

  “But why? We don’t need them. They’re no use to us, anymore. We don’t need to sleep. We don’t need to eat. We don’t need to breathe—well, not the way you do. We don’t need to hide under tall stone roofs. Or wooden ones. We don’t need any of it!”

  “Terrano,” the Dragon said, when he once again fell silent, “why are you here?” It was the question Kaylin had asked, and the question the Lord of the West March most wanted answered, but the way she now asked it transformed the words. There was a softness to them, a different kind of assumption—it wasn’t suspicion, though.

  He didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. She was a Dragon.

  “I was born between two wars,” she told him.

  He looked up, then.

  “We might be the same age. I was one of nine sisters in an aerie of grouchy Dragons. We were considered young for our age, and of course, fragile. We were fragile because—”

  “You were female.”

  Her brows rose briefly before she nodded. “You know that much.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Kaylin didn’t.”

  He snorted. “Mortal. You can’t expect any better.”

  The smidgen of sympathy Kaylin had almost started to feel vanished. But Bellusdeo merely nodded. “I was born on this world. But the aerie was lost to Shadow, and when we emerged—my sisters and I—we emerged to different stars, a different sky.”

  He lifted his head, placing his chin on his arms, arrested.

  �
��I was not as you were. We were not sacrificed on the altar of war. But we were lost, regardless. We—none of us—were adults. We were as helpless as Lord Kaylin. And I lost my sisters, one by one, to the Shadows. I lost them, we lost each other, searching for our names. I lost some because, in finding names, their center could not hold. They could not maintain cohesion of one form or the other.

  “Understand that Barrani make outcastes for political reasons, for personal gain. Dragons don’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “If we want political power, we kill our enemies.”

  “We do that, too,” he said, quickly.

  “We don’t look for consensus. We don’t attempt to gather armies. We try to kill our enemies. Or they try to kill us. I believe one of your historical High Lords called us barbarous savages, better than animals only because we were Immortal.” She shrugged. “Our outcastes are therefore above politics, or beneath politics; opinions differ. Enemies are personal. Outcastes are like terrifying natural disasters. One might feel threatened by an earthquake, and one does what one can to survive it—but one cannot take revenge against the earth.”

  “I think it’s been tried,” Terrano said. His animosity had faded; he was looking at Bellusdeo as if he’d only just seen her and didn’t quite understand what it was he was seeing.

  “Had my sisters and I remained in the Aerie, we would have come into our power naturally. We start out as the feeblest of the children; effort must be taken to preserve us. It is not an effort that is made for the males, because it is not required. When we do come into our power, however, we have far less difficulty controlling its use. I am curious about your Sedarias.”

  “Not mine.”

  Bellusdeo’s smile was brief, but genuine. “I confess I am fond of Annarion. I understand him. I understand his goals. I do not understand Mandoran.” She exhaled a bit of smoke. “But were they Dragons, both would be outcaste.”

  Before Terrano’s outrage could express itself in words—or worse—Bellusdeo continued. “To the Dragons, I believe I would be considered a borderline case; were I not female, were the Dragons not so few in number, safety would probably dictate my death.”

  “If they could kill you.”

  Her smile was deeper, and something in it implied serious fangs, although at the moment, she didn’t have any. “Indeed. I would not lie down and expose my figurative throat; I feel that I have as much right to exist as they do. But I would, wouldn’t I?”

  He nodded. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because the Barrani do not, and did not, do as the Dragons have done throughout our history. Barrani wake to one name. They live their lives, spend their existence, with that name. There are apparently those who attempt to divest themselves—deliberately—of their names. But absent that attempt, they are a single, indivisible whole.

  “Dragons are not. They come into the world with a single name, but that single name is half of what they require. They have the capacity to hold a duality of names—but they are not considered Dragons if they cannot meld the duality into a single whole.

  “Those who cannot are not considered dangerous. It is those who can that are.”

  “But...you all can.”

  “Yes, if we are adults, we can. But there are those who do not contain that duality. It is the foundation for their attempt to take more, to build more, to be more.”

  And Kaylin suddenly remembered the one time she had seen the outcaste Dragon’s name. It had been far more complicated than any other True Word she had ever seen. It had reminded her, not of Barrani, but...of a world. A small world.

  “You think we’re like that.”

  “No. I was, I admit, concerned. I do not know the names of your kin; I do not know the names of my own. But they are alive because of those names.”

  “And I’m not.”

  Silence again. “I did not find my adult name on my own,” Bellusdeo said. It sounded like a confession. “But it is mine, regardless.

  “But you did not return to your name. I do not know what you are. Because the Barrani are political, they will accept your cohort as Barrani, at least in public speech and interaction. But they know—as you do—that that is now only a small part of what they are capable of being.” She exhaled more smoke. “The world I grew up in, the world I ruled in its twilight, was destroyed by Shadow. And I see that Shadow in you.”

  He sat up.

  “But I see it in your Hallionne, as well. And it is...possible...that my understanding of Shadow is too narrow.”

  Kaylin’s jaw dropped.

  “Do I have something on my face?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Gilbert was of Shadow to me. Everything about him proclaimed him Shadow. He himself didn’t deny that he was from, and of, Ravellon. But—you were right about him.” She exhaled puffs of flame. “Understand, kitling. I lost everything to Shadow. Shadow that mimicked life, Shadow that was clever, subtle. We all made mistakes—because we hoped, or because we took risks that we should not have taken. It made me very, very risk averse, the costs were so high. And it’s possible—barely—that I destroyed people who might have been like Gilbert.”

  “And that bothers you?” Orbaranne asked, which surprised Kaylin. The Hallionne had been silent enough that she could forget she was in the room. Her Avatar materialized in such a way that she, Terrano and Teela formed the points of a triangle.

  “No one wants to think of themselves as a murderer,” Bellusdeo replied. “I could justify it. If I think about it now—and I do—I mostly do justify it. But there’s a reason Kaylin Neya is a private and not a queen.”

  “My risks don’t have the same cost.”

  Orbaranne said, “you are Chosen. Some of the risks you take might be very, very costly.” The Avatar bowed her head, and when she raised it again, her eyes looked like normal human eyes. “But some of the risks you’ve taken have saved us before. I...would like to be able to take risks.”

  But she couldn’t, Kaylin thought. Because she was what she was made to be; she was what she’d promised to be.

  “Yes, Chosen. You see Shadow in my eyes, but I am not a scion of Shadow; it was not Shadow that created me. It might break me, in some future. But it is not what I am.”

  “Is it part of what you are?”

  “Not in a way I understand. But...I see some of what you see because you see it. And Lord Bellusdeo, I...cannot think you are wrong.”

  16

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here,” Kaylin told Terrano, hands on her hips.

  “I’m not thrilled about it, either. Everything feels heavy and confining. All of the sound is wrong. I feel like I’m trying to speak around a mouthful of water.” Terrano’s eyes were a surprising shade of Barrani blue. He looked pensive, his smile absent.

  There was no water—no living water—in the Hallionne. There was water in the heart of the West March, and Lirienne had invited them, for a value of invitation that made the word equivalent to command, to his home.

  Kaylin had suggested they take the portal paths. She wanted to investigate them, and she wanted to begin a practical search in earnest.

  She received three instant refusals. The only person present who thought it was a reasonable idea was Terrano himself. Orbaranne had been willing to have Kaylin inspect the portal, and the foot of the pathway itself; she was unwilling to let Kaylin actually walk it. Bellusdeo considered it a terrible idea, given the continued absence of the cohort, and the Lord of the West March looked at her with blue eyes above an impatient grimace.

  So: no portal paths.

  Terrano offered to meet them at the Hallionne Alsanis, as he had investigations of his own to conduct.

  It was Bellusdeo who said, “Weren’t you driven off the pathways? Isn’t that why you disabled the Hallionne’s protections?”

  “I didn’
t disable them. I found a way past them.”

  “Which you implied you needed.”

  He was, of the cohort, most like Mandoran; if he hated Dragons, the hatred was impersonal and almost theoretical. “Is she always like this?” he asked Kaylin.

  “No. Sometimes she’s actually angry.” Kaylin was surprised at the interaction between the two, and wondered if Bellusdeo privately missed Mandoran.

  The four—Dragon, Hawk, Barrani ruler and uncertain—were stuffed inside a Barrani carriage which appeared to have magic wheels or something, because a road that should have jarred and bruised the carriage occupants felt smoother than expensively laid city streets.

  The overland journey, on the other hand, was not short. Terrano lasted maybe two hours, judging by sun position, before he swung himself through the window and out onto the roof.

  “He reminds me of Mandoran,” Bellusdeo said. “Did he really try to kill you?”

  “Not personally; he sent Ferals to do us all in, instead.” She hesitated. “Well, not Ferals exactly.”

  “What were they?”

  “I think they were Barrani. Some were. Or at least one was.”

  “He transformed them?” The Dragon’s eyes were orange.

  “I think—I think they might have transformed themselves. Look, it was confusing, chaotic and noisy. I don’t actually know what happened. But Terrano was working with—” She stopped and stuck her head out the window. “Hey!”

  “I can hear you perfectly well. You don’t have to shout.”

  “You were working with Arcanists, right?”

  “So?”

  “Do you know how many were involved? I mean—was there more than one?”

  “I didn’t count.”

  “So, more than one. Or Barrani education is even worse than the education I received. Did you pay any attention to names?”

  “If I couldn’t even be bothered to count, why would I know names?”

  “Because someone is responsible for the disappearance of your friends, and the sooner we discover who, the better.”

  Terrano shrugged. “I think it’s more important to find them.”