She did. She didn’t like what it said, but she did. Annarion could, when he fought, lose his physical shape; the battle defined it, not Annarion himself. Mandoran had gotten himself stuck in a wall, because he was trying to walk through it. “They’re not a threat.”
“Theyarea threat,” he countered, although his tone suggested that he would not immediately demand they be destroyed.
“They don’twantto have the trouble they’re having. They spent centuries trapped in a space in which form was a cage. They had to spend those centuries learning how to ditch that form in order to have any freedom at all.”
“I am cognizant of that. And they are, regardless, not a Draconic problem. In their entirety, and unless they threaten the Empire, they are a Barrani problem.”
Bellusdeo said nothing, but in her way, said it loudly enough that the Arkon looked warily in her direction. She then spoke. “You spend too much time thinking about things that are not, as you put it, your problem.”
The Arkon predictably ignored this. “To Draconic eyes, the outcaste appeared Draconic. He could move fluidly between his forms; he was therefore considered adult. His martial prowess was almost uncanny, and his resistance to the magic of the Barrani, second to none. It is not a wonder to me that any irregularities would be ignored.” The Arkon exhaled. “He was my friend. He was my friend, and I would have followed him into any skies, no matter what storm they contained.”
“And he was greatly altered by the war?”
“No, Bellusdeo. That is a polite fiction. He was not altered by it. If he was altered at all, it was in Ravellon. He was drawn to it, just as young Tiamaris was drawn to it.”
“Tiamaris is a Dragon,” Kaylin said, voice flat and a little on the hard side.
“Yes. No questions surround Tiamaris; he is young. The Shadows that fascinated him did not touch or alter him. He did not perceive them aspower, per se; he perceived them as a natural disaster. One that had will. He was not born to war, as we were; he was born in its aftermath. There were no great flights to which he might aspire. To Tiamaris, Shadow is the enemy; it is the battlefield. He studied, and he learned, to prove himself. And he has taken the Tower in Tiamaris to stand sentinel against the incursions that would otherwise destroy us.”
“You do not need to tell me the dangers of Shadow,” Bellusdeo said.
“And the dangers of the outcaste?” the Arkon asked. Given Bellusdeo’s expression, Kaylin wouldn’t have dared.
“Or that.” Her answer was chilly; her eyes were orange. Before the Arkon could answer, she raised her inner eye membranes, which slightly muted her eye color.
“Did you not hear him, on the day you emerged from the fiefs?”
Bellusdeo didn’t answer.
“He did not want your destruction. I do not believe he wants it now. I do not know what he found in Ravellon—or perhaps what found him there—but if he is driven, if he is no longer truly Dragon, some base part of that remains.”
“He almost destroyed me.”
“It is the way of our kind, when our wishes are thwarted. The Emperor is the shining counterexample. But I do not believe that destruction was his intent. You are female.”
If Kaylin had had a direct link to the Arkon she would have been screaming down it, about now. Then again, raised eye membranes and orange eyes were probably enough of a signal. She considered leaving the discussion, the room and, with luck, the library, before the two Dragons started speaking in their native tongue.
That would certainly distract them, Severn said.
“I believe he hoped—he intended—to share his new kingdom with you. I believe that he wished to have a clutch, and children of his own.”
“He destroyed my sisters,” Bellusdeo continued, her lips a thin line, her knuckles white.
“They are part of you, now. Perhaps he understood what you must become—I am more learned than he, but I would have made different assumptions. And I would, regardless, never have attempted to force a choice on you; I had enough experience with you in your youth to know how well that would have worked.”
Some of the tension left Bellusdeo’s expression, then. “Do you still think you can save your friend?”
“No. He is outcaste, and he is dangerous beyond belief. It would help me greatly to believe that there is nothing of my friend left in the outcaste. I cannot, sadly. And so I think he did not fully emerge as an adult by our standards; he was, in the interior of his thoughts, outcaste, always. He was everything I was not—everything most of us were not.
“But he was like mortal kin to the Emperor. It is a blow from which the flight has never fully recovered, and his death will not change that. And I wonder if he might not have become consumed by Ravellon if we had approached him as the private and her friends approach Mandoran and Annarion. He did not, in the end, belong with or to us; perhaps what he desired was a place that would truly be home to one such as he.”
Kaylin frowned; it was the thoughtful frown. “If all of this is true, why does he take the form of a large black Dragon? If I understand what you’ve said, he should be able to take different forms. I mean, if he’snota Dragon, if he’s found a place in which he can mostly be himself, why does he still choose the form of a Dragon?”
“I cannot answer that question,” the Arkon replied. “And it pains me, Kaylin.”
She was silent for a beat, an acknowledgment of the awkward nature of this kind of pain. But she was here for a reason.
“What does the outcaste have to offer the Aerians?”
