Terrano met the unnatural eyes of the Hallionne with unnatural eyes of his own. He didn’t draw blades; he didn’t turn his physical arms into weapons. But Kaylin thought he could. “Orbaranne. Hallionne. I don’t think he’s a danger—”
“Do you not understand the danger he does pose? I cannot hear the whole of his thought. I can hear fractions of it, but his thought is a multitude of voices, and not all of them are clear to me.”
Kaylin inhaled, remembering the forest Ferals. She exhaled, remembered the rest of the cohort. Especially the three that she knew. “Your eyes,” she said, to Orbaranne, “are exactly the same as his.”
Both Orbaranne and Terrano seemed surprised by this. Terrano was the only one who appeared to feel insulted.
“Isthathow you see it?” he demanded. “You think our eyeslook the same?”
Kaylin glanced at Bellusdeo; Bellusdeo shrugged. “I said it, didn’t I?”
“And you?” he demanded of the Dragon, which surprised Kaylin.
“They look the same to me. They are not the same shape—the Hallionne seems to have much better control of her physical dimensions than you do—but they appear to be black, with flecks of moving color. I would not hazard a guess as to the physical composition.”
Orbaranne, however, had lowered her swords. She was staring at Terrano as if she were truly seeing him for the first time, but her eyes were unblinking. Kaylin doubted she’d remembered something as trivial as eyelids when composing this particular Avatar.
“They are there,” Orbaranne replied, distracted.
To Kaylin’s surprise, she turned to Bellusdeo. She offered the Dragon a bow—which should have been impossible given the armor—before speaking again. “Your experience of Shadow is greater, in the end, than my own; I have knowledge, but Shadows are unique enough that that knowledge might not be relevant in all situations. What do you see?”
“As I told Terrano, I see what Lord Kaylin sees. When I ruled, I would have considered him a danger, but I would have considered you a danger as well.”
The Hallionne had not looked away from Terrano. The swords she was carrying vanished as she began to speak. Her words shook the floor. They might have shaken the walls; Kaylin couldn’t tell because her body was shaking, too. But Kaylin recognized the language that she couldn’t understand when it was spoken—and it was spoken at a volume that made her instantly cover her ears. Only Dragons spoke this loudly naturally.
Bellusdeo had Dragon hearing; she didn’t even flinch.
But Terrano’s eyes widened. He waited while the Hallionne spoke; her words seemed to continue forever, as if the speaking of True Words nailed them into place, made them solid, real, as eternal as mountain edifices. Only when the words had become echoes, only when the Hallionne’s lips had ceased their motion, did Terrano begin to speak.
It didn’t surprise Kaylin that he spoke the same tongue, although he spoke it as if it were his native language.
The Hallionne listened; she listened as if fixed in place, as if she were of stone. But when Terrano was done, she lowered her chin, lowered her arms, and transformed her armor into a loose drape of flowing off-white robe. The cave around them melted more slowly than the armor had, and when shape was reasserted, the color was different. This would be because there was no longer a ceiling; as far as the eye could see, there was sky, a deep blue with a smidgen of cloud.
Where the portal arch had come into being, a round series of concentric circles remained, and there was a splash of brown red that spoke of dried blood.
Orbaranne turned to Kaylin, then. “Lirienne will be with us momentarily. I apologize for my anger and my suspicion.”
“You’re—”
“I was not, as you once suspected, Barrani before I made the choice to become the heart of the Hallionne. I was mortal, as you were. I was young, and new to this world, this place. Suspicion, among our kind, is not an absolute requirement of survival.”
Kaylin shrugged, a fief shrug. “It doesn’t hurt,” she offered.
Orbaranne smiled, then. “Doesn’t it?” And she turned, once again, to face Terrano.
The speech seemed to have drained something out of him; he looked much more solid, much more real, than he had moments—or hours?—ago.
He shrugged, miming Kaylin’s gesture. But when he spoke, he spoke Barrani. “She asked,” he said, glancing toward the grassy plane that had taken the place of stone. “I answered.”
“The Lord of the West March couldn’t answer the way you did. I don’t think most of the Barrani—even the ancient Arcanists—could.”
“No?”
“No.”
Terrano looked away. “You learn a bit when you leave home.”
“That’s more than a bit.”
