Moran returned the bow after another pause, in which her eyes lost their purple and returned to a more natural Aerian gray. With blue in it.
“You wished to speak with me.”
“Yes, I did.” She shook herself free of whatever it was she’d seen to distract her, and returned—with the force of a sergeant—to the job at hand. “One of your clients is a woman named Lillias.”
Evanton gave Kaylin the side-eye, but didn’t deny it.
“I’m sorry—the Emperor wanted to know, and I don’t tell the Emperor to get stuffed.” But that was mostly a lie. Moran had wanted to know.
“Did you not stop to consider that perhaps Lillias did not wish to be known? Did you give her gift to thepraevolo?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t take it,” Moran said, picking up the answer before Kaylin could fumble it. “I haven’t seen Lillias in years. I was told that she had passed away.”
“You did not believe it.”
“Oh, I believed it.” Moran’s eyes were definitely blue now. “Death might have been kinder.”
“Might it? You yourself cannot fly, or so I have been told. Would you prefer death?”
“On some days? Yes.”
Silence.
Evanton cleared his throat. “You are younger than you look,praevolo. If you desired flight, I am certain that Kaylin could heal your wing. She has healed more difficult injuries before, and the healing is harder the farther out from the original injury. You have not elected to do so.”
Moran said nothing.
“Why do you wish to speak with Lillias?”
Moran said more nothing.
“If you cannot answer that simple question, I am afraid I will send you on to your day’s work, while I go back to bed.”
* * *
“She saved my life,” Moran said. The words sounded as if they were being pulled out of her mouth by main force. “She saved my life when I was young. I should have died. I would have died. My grandmother did.”
“Ah.”
“I wasn’t old enough to understand the politics. I wasn’t old enough to understand the need for adoption. I wasn’t old enough to understand legitimacy, or more precisely, illegitimacy. I’m not sure I truly understood what had happened. Lillias grabbed me andflew.”
“To where?”
“To the ground. To the ground far beneath the Southern Reach. I want to speak with her because—” She paused. “I want to apologize to her.”
“For that, I will not break my own rules of good business.” He was frowning at Moran as if she were Kaylin in disguise. “You will have to do better, Sergeant.”
Moran looked almost as helpless in the face of Evanton as Kaylin felt in the face of most of life. It didn’t last. She shoved her inner sergeant to the forefront, straightened her back, her shoulders, the fall of her wings—even the injured one—and said, “I want to thank her.”
Evanton smiled then. “For?”
“For all of the obvious reasons. For saving my life, first among them.”
“In order for that to have value, you must consider your own life to have worth. Do you understand?”
She exhaled. “Yes, sir.”
