“Heal me,” Bellusdeo rumbled. “Which I’m certain you won’t imply was a waste of effort.”
Mandoran grimaced. “What are you doing withthatnow?” He was still staring at her hands.
Kaylin shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s like the marks of the Chosen—it’s on my skin. I can’t feel it. It’s not active.”
“Helen. Talk sense into her.”
“I have been trying, dear.”
Helen hadn’t said much—at all—about the Shadow gloves. This probably meant that Mandoran was thinking, and Helen was answering the part of the conversation no one else could hear. She was about to demand that she be included, when a chime sounded.
Moran rose.
“Yes,” Helen said. “It’s for you.” She turned and walked out of the dining room to answer the door. Moran hovered near the table.
“Who is it?” Kaylin asked.
“I believe her name is Lillias,” Helen replied. “And she believes Moran is expecting her.” To Moran, Helen’s disembodied voice said, “Should I show her to the dining room?”
“No! No. If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak with her in my rooms.”
“Of course I don’t mind.”
* * *
Kaylin rose as Moran left the dining room.
“Maybe they don’t want company?” Bellusdeo suggested. Dragon suggestions generally came across as commands.
“I—”
“I’m teasing. You’ve been fretting about Lillias ever since you first met her. Go on.”
Kaylin followed Moran and entered the foyer as Helen opened the door. Lillias stood on the other side of it, looking very uncertain. Looking, Kaylin thought, as uncertain as Kaylin herself would have looked if she’d had to stand at the door of this house while living in her own apartment.
Her apartment had been home. It had been convenient. But it had been what Caitlin called “modest” and what Teela called something vastly less complimentary. Without Evanton’s intervention, Lillias would never have come here. She would have walked halfway up the street, realized that it was far too fancy, far too snooty, for someone like her, and retreated. Kaylin, however, was dressed the way she always dressed; she was not fancy and not particularly well turned out, as Teela liked to call it.
“Lillias,” she said, channeling her inner Caitlin, and holding out both hands.
Lillias exhaled a few inches of stiff height. “Kaylin.”
“Did you see her?”
“Every Aerian in the city saw her. It was difficult to explain to my employer,” she added with a wry grimace. “I don’t usually drop everything and run out to stand in the middle of the streets.”
“Rooftops are probably better, at least in my experience. No wagons or carriages.”
“Experience which you do not need to share,” Moran told her. She came to stand beside Kaylin and said, to Lillias, “If you let her start talking that way, she won’t stop. You will hear all kinds of hair-raising stories about her childhood.”
Kaylin released the older woman’s hands, and Lillias held them out to Moran, who hesitated briefly before she took them. Moran bowed her head.
Lillias smiled down at her bent head, and then up—at Helen. “You’ve been taking care of the fledgling,” she said—in Aerian.
“I’ve done what I can. It is very seldom that I have Aerian guests.”
“She’s grown stronger. You should have seen her when she was a child.”
Moran’s head didn’t rise. It fell. It fell to Lillias’s shoulder and rested there.
