Cast in Deception

by Michelle Sagara

  “It is not surprising,” Helen’s voice said. The sound of it pulled Terrano from his thoughts, and he straightened in his chair again. “You have been living with two of his brothers. You’ve fought by their sides, more than once; they’ve come to your aid, and you’ve come to theirs, when there was no certain guarantee of survival. They are your friends. They are Teela’s family. They live in your house.

  “Terrano is one of them, to you.” Helen’s Avatar remained with the rest of the cohort; only her voice was present in the room.

  “I’m not,” Terrano said, voice low.

  “They don’t believe that,” Helen countered. “They are waiting for you, and Allaron is about to leave the room to remind you.”

  “Remind me of what? That he’s a giant, overstrong ox?”

  “I heard that,” Allaron said. “Look, I don’t care if you don’t want to stay. Sedarias is set on it. I never did understand why the two of you got along so well—you could not be more different.” He lowered his voice as he approached Terrano who was, to Kaylin’s eye, almost sulking. “You know what she’s like when she’s unhappy. Or maybe you don’t. But she’s been unhappy since you left.”

  “I can’t talk to her,” Terrano whispered. “I can’t talk to any of you, anymore.”

  “You can. You can’t do it the old way.”

  “I can’t hear any of you anymore. I don’t have—”

  Allaron’s large hand was gentle as he placed it firmly on Terrano’s shoulder. “You did hear us,” he said. “From wherever it was you went, you heard us. You came back for us. Without you, we would have been swept away. We understand. Sedarias thinks you’ve been listening with half an ear since you left.”

  “Half?”

  “Well, she thinks you never listened before, so half is still impressive.” When Terrano attempted to pull away, Allaron exhaled. “We are not suffering through Sedarias’s deep, personal pain when we have a host of Barrani Lords bent on our destruction. Even if you can’t speak to us and can’t hear us the way you did before, you’re part of our entire history. We’re here because of you. If you’d never started your experiments, we would never have been free. So you’re staying with us until this part is done. Got it?”

  “You know you can’t hurt me.”

  “Keep it up and I’ll at least enjoy trying. Come on. Everyone’s waiting.” Allaron leaned down, lowering his voice. “Mandoran wants you to teach him not to get stuck in walls.”

  “In walls?”

  “Seriously. He’s gotten stuck twice now. Or maybe three times.”

  Terrano laughed, then, his expression brightening. “He’s an idiot. I can easily show him that.” And he straightened his shoulders and let Allaron lead him to their room.

  * * *

  “Well?”

  Kaylin blinked. She had forgotten that Severn was in the room.

  “You’re worried.”

  “There’s a lot to be worried about. The Consort. The Emperor. The Barrani attempt to start a war. The Arcanists who cooperated with Terrano and the cohort before they’d finally been freed. Candallar. Ravellon.”

  Severn nodded, raising a brow. Kaylin had practiced raising a single brow for years, and hadn’t become proficient.

  “Diarmat’s report. If it’s not at Evanton’s, he’s going to reduce me to ash.” She would have continued, but Severn wasn’t buying any of it, even if all of it was true.

  It’s all true, he agreed. But it’s not what you’re worried about.

  It’s what I should be worried about.

  Yes.

  Severn was right, of course. At the moment, she was worried about Terrano. Terrano, who had tried to kill the Consort on Kaylin’s first visit to the West March. Terrano, who had abandoned his name and left his friends behind when Alsanis had finally released them all.

  That Terrano occupied none of her thoughts. But this Terrano? He seemed smaller, frailer, and lonely.

  “He’s with family. They won’t abandon him.” He rose and held out an arm. “You need sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day, and if we all survive it, the day after isn’t going to be much better.” He hesitated for one long minute as Kaylin stared at his arm. “I don’t know if Helen’s mentioned it, but I’m staying.”

  She stared at him.

  “Until the cohort leaves, one way or the other.” He hadn’t asked permission, but that would have just been awkward.

  Kaylin exhaled heavily, but nodded. She didn’t ask him anything either, for the same reason.

  Epilogue

  “I don’t care if you read my mind,” Teela told Helen, as she entered the foyer. “But at the moment, I do not care to discuss its contents.”

  “Not much to discuss?” A voice that was not Helen’s said.

  Teela looked up the grand, curving staircase. She had never had the heart to tell Kaylin that the younger Hawk’s sense of appropriate, cohesive architecture was terribly off. Terrano was perched on the left side of the stairs, leaning into the guide rails. He rose as she headed toward him.

  “Waiting for me?”

  “It was quieter.” Terrano hesitated. “You have your own room.”

  “Yes. I should warn you that I share it with my beat partner.”

  “He’s not here.”

  Teela exhaled. “No. He’s not here, at the moment. He had something else to attend.” Her lips compressed in a do not ask line as she looked at Terrano, the lone member of the cohort who had elected not to return from the green. And yet, here he was, looking much smaller, and much younger—to Teela’s eye—than either Mandoran or Annarion had, upon their arrival.

  She headed up the stairs, and Terrano followed her. “I am going to change,” she told him, without looking back. “I need, at the very least, a figurative bath.”

  “Spike arrived,” he told her, as if he, like Helen, could read minds. “He’s with Kaylin.”

  “And Kaylin?”

  “Sleeping,” Helen said. It was the first word she’d spoken since Teela’s arrival. Teela appreciated the silence. Nor did Helen tell Teela that she should be sleeping as well; the Barrani were not a race that required sleep, although they did at times require rest.

  She glanced once over her shoulder; Terrano waited, almost fidgeting. He would follow her to her own room if she did not tell him to leave.

  She didn’t tell him to leave.

  * * *

  Teela’s rooms were open to light and air, and the floors and walls were wooden. Lintels were carved, tall.

  “This looks like the West March,” Terrano said, as he entered.

  “What do your rooms look like?”

  He made, in Kaylin’s parlance, a face. “Like the High Halls. Or like Sedarias’s home.” Terrano didn’t ask why Teela’s rooms were different; he knew. These were the rooms in which Teela’s mother had been happiest, and in which Teela had therefore been happy. At a remove of centuries, she could not recall the emotion of happiness; she merely knew that it had existed.

  She wondered, then, about happiness, sorrow, hatred, love. She had Barrani memory; the slow decline of mortal memories did not plague her. She could remember every incident that led from the green to Helen. She could clearly remember her mother’s face, her mother’s voice, her mother’s quiet presence. But although she had those memories, she could not experience them as if she were, once again, that child.

  Not even here. She headed to the room with the large bath. Water was—of course it was—warmed and ready; she divested herself of the court clothing that she had grown to loathe, and slid immediately into the soothing waters.

  Terrano sat on the ground. The bath was built into the floor; it did not rise above it, as small mortal baths often did. He removed shoes—without actually touching them—and slid his feet into the water as well; his palms were flat to either side of him. He said n
othing.

  Teela understood that he would say nothing, until and unless she broke the silence. She therefore chose her words with care. “Thank you.” Her voice was soft. She stared at the surface of the water, at the eddies that did not break the stillness completely.

  “For what?”

  “For waiting.”

  “You didn’t seem all that happy to see me, that I recall.”

  “I was shocked to see you. I was—” Teela shook her head. “Understand that I am not considered young by any of the Barrani. A handful remember me in my distant youth—but it is distant, for both me and that handful.” She bent her head. “Mandoran told me that it was you. You believed that you could find me. You believed that you could bring me...home.”

  Silence.

  “I learned to live without you. I learned,” Teela continued, her voice still soft, shorn of edge, “to live the life that was left to me after the green. I was angry,” she added. “I hated my father, and I used the hatred to keep going. The first time—the first time I returned to the green, I had hope. I was chosen to play a part in the regalia. I believed—” She laughed, a brief, bitter bite of sound. “But you were still lost. Whatever role I was given, it was not, somehow, to free you all. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For failing you. For giving up. Because I did. I gave up on everything. I learned to live in isolation. I learned to live without your names and your voices. I made a place in the world that was my shape, and my size. But...I never forgot.”

  He was silent, lost in his own thoughts, his eyes becoming eyes that no Barrani naturally possessed; the color was wrong.

  “You never forgot. But you never gave up, either. I don’t approve of what you did, but at the same time, I am oddly grateful. You kept faith when I had all but lost it.”

  His expression was haunted. To Teela, he was the Terrano of that distant, irretrievable past.

  “What was it like?” he finally asked.

  And Teela, understanding the question he did not ask, said, “I think you’re starting to know. Only the two of us, now, have lived outside of what Kaylin calls the cohort.”

  “You’re not on the outside, anymore.”

  She closed her eyes. Opened them again, and gave up on the bath. Dripping water until she could reach towels, she held her breath, and when she chose to exhale, words accompanied it. “I am on the outside,” she said quietly. Before Terrano could protest—and he seemed very much of a mind to do so—she lifted a hand. “I can hear them, now. If I listen. And they can hear me, if I so choose.

  “You never did that. You never, ever shut them out.”

  He was staring at her as she turned fully to face him, his confusion evident on his face.

  “For centuries, I woke to the remembered sound of your voices. I woke to my own nightmares. Losing you all was like losing the best and most important parts of myself. I thought I would die. I expected it would kill me. It didn’t. It just caused pain.” Wrapped in towels, she headed toward her bedroom, bypassing Tain’s. “It caused pain and loss for a century. I think the reason I hated my father so much by the end was not just for his murder of my mother; it was for the murder of all the love that I had ever known.”

  His silence was textured now as he considered her words. She turned away from him, heading toward the bed, where she threw herself across its covers almost bonelessly, and rolled over to stare at the twining vines above her head.

  “I am part of the cohort. Because of Kaylin, because of you, because of the choices made, I am part of it. My name is known—to them, to the people to whom I willingly surrendered it.

  “But I am not the Teela I was when I did surrender my name. I didn’t grow with the cohort—as you did. I didn’t learn what the cohort learned. I didn’t become so enmeshed in the thoughts of the others that I could not always separate their thoughts from my own.”

  “There wasn’t any need to do that.”

  “No? Perhaps not. If all I was left, on the day my father pulled me from the Hallionne, was privacy, it’s a cage that I grew to rely on. To even, in some ways, depend on.” She held up an arm, and Terrano joined her. He was like a cat, she thought, or a puppy. She held him, as she would have held either. As she had sometimes held Kaylin on the nights when Kaylin’s nightmares had been too harsh, too extreme. She had always told Kaylin that this was practical—Kaylin without sleep was an absolute misery for anyone who had to endure her—but Kaylin had not entirely believed it. Probably because it wasn’t true.

  He curled into the arm she had held out, and she lowered it around him. The child that Kaylin had once been was not quite gone, but almost, and so quickly.

  “You didn’t want to stay,” she said softly, into his hair; he had buried his face, and therefore all traces of his expression.

  “I didn’t want to be caged,” he whispered. “I thought—”

  “You didn’t think.” She said it fondly; it was an echo of every word she had offered to one scrawny, angry, mortal. “You went out into the universe. You went out into the unknown. Sedarias wanted, so badly, to join you.”

  “She would have hated it,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “We would have been together, but only the way outsiders are. It’s the name,” he added. “It’s the name. Our names bound us. Our names transcended everything else. We were never truly isolated, because we were always attached. I don’t—” Silence, and tension, physical tension, in it. “I’m not part of them, anymore. They don’t say it. But they don’t have to say it. They try to make space for me—but I’m foreign now. I can’t hear them. Can’t think their thoughts; can’t make my own clear to them. They’re there. They’re alive. They’re like the people I knew—but it’s almost as if I can’t truly hear them, can’t truly see them.”

  “They were part of you,” she whispered. “They were only part of my dreams. I am not at home, in the end, with them, either. But Terrano—they’re here. The part of them that you occupied is still part of them. That won’t change.”

  “Did that help you?”

  She tightened her hold on him. “And I’m here,” she said quietly. “Outside in a different way.”

  “Can I stay with you, instead?”

  “You’ll have to put up with Tain.” And he would only know what that meant if he could hear Mandoran’s steady stream of complaints—and he couldn’t. “Yes. If you want, you can stay here. Sedarias won’t like it.”

  “She doesn’t like anything,” he murmured.

  And the strangest thing happened, as she held him, wanting to shield him from a pain and loss that was so entirely internal she had no hope of doing so.

  Terrano fell asleep.

  * * * * *