“Annarion didn’t want to leave.”
“Sedarias didn’t want to leave. If she’d made a different choice, most of the others would have followed.”
Kaylin hesitated.
But Bellusdeo said, “Sedarias, of all of your cohort, was probably the one least changed.”
“All of us were changed.”
“What you could—and can—do changed, yes. But Sedarias, from all accounts,thinkslike a Barrani Lord. Even now.”
Terrano buried his head in the crook of his arms. “What’s the point?” he asked, his voice slightly muffled. “What’s thepointin thinking like that?”
“She is Barrani.”
“What does thateven mean? Her family abandoned her, same as ours. They were willing to throw us away because we might—might—become powerful. They thought they’d own us, if we did. And you know what?” He lifted his head. “Wedidbecome powerful. We areway morepowerful than any of our parents. We’re powerful enough—” He stopped. Kaylin didn’t think he was finished, and waited. “Does she want to go home? Does she want to retake the lands that should have been hers?”
“I think,” Bellusdeo said, her voice quiet and entirely free of emotion, “she wishes to reclaim the lands that should have collectively belonged to all of you.”
“Butwhy? We don’tneedthem. They’re no use to us, anymore. We don’t need to sleep. We don’t need to eat. We don’t need to breathe—well, not the way you do. We don’t need to hide under tall stone roofs. Or wooden ones. We don’t need any of it!”
“Terrano,” the Dragon said, when he once again fell silent, “why are you here?” It was the question Kaylin had asked, and the question the Lord of the West March most wanted answered, but the way she now asked it transformed the words. There was a softness to them, a different kind of assumption—it wasn’t suspicion, though.
He didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. She was a Dragon.
“I was born between two wars,” she told him.
He looked up, then.
“We might be the same age. I was one of nine sisters in an aerie of grouchy Dragons. We were considered young for our age, and of course, fragile. We were fragile because—”
“You were female.”
Her brows rose briefly before she nodded. “You know that much.”
“Of course I do.”
“Kaylin didn’t.”
He snorted. “Mortal. You can’t expect any better.”
The smidgen of sympathy Kaylin had almost started to feel vanished. But Bellusdeo merely nodded. “I was born on this world. But the aerie was lost to Shadow, and when we emerged—my sisters and I—we emerged to different stars, a different sky.”
He lifted his head, placing his chin on his arms, arrested.
“I was not as you were. We were not sacrificed on the altar of war. But we were lost, regardless. We—none of us—were adults. We were as helpless as Lord Kaylin. And I lost my sisters, one by one, to the Shadows. I lost them, we lost each other, searching for our names. I lost some because, in finding names, their center could not hold. They could not maintain cohesion of one form or the other.
“Understand that Barrani make outcastes for political reasons, for personal gain. Dragons don’t.”
“Oh?”
“If we want political power, we kill our enemies.”
“We do that, too,” he said, quickly.
“We don’t look for consensus. We don’t attempt to gather armies. We try to kill our enemies. Or they try to kill us. I believe one of your historical High Lords called us barbarous savages, better than animals only because we were Immortal.” She shrugged. “Our outcastes are therefore above politics, or beneath politics; opinions differ. Enemies are personal. Outcastes are like terrifying natural disasters. One might feel threatened by an earthquake, and one does what one can to survive it—but one cannot take revenge against the earth.”
“I think it’s been tried,” Terrano said. His animosity had faded; he was looking at Bellusdeo as if he’d only just seen her and didn’t quite understand what it was he was seeing.
