“No!” Sedarias all but shouted.
“I’m notthatstupid.”
“And how, exactly, am I expected to know that?” Sedarias dropped the stack of paper that had occupied most of her attention. “In the West March, the Consort made clear—to you—thatyouwere not at risk. Instead of accepting her offer of safety, what did you do? You ran across the outlands to the edge of the most feared city in our history—inanyhistory!”
“I’m not sure that you could have found what you needed to find without me. Youcertainlycouldn’t have entered the fief of Tiamaris—and that was my only hope.” She hesitated, and then added, “Well, we couldn’t have found our way without Bellusdeo, and there wasno wayshe was going to accept the Consort’s hospitality.
“And if I returned without Bellusdeo, I’d be an ash pile—at best. So I did the only smart thing. It worked, didn’t it?”
Mandoran reached across the table and placed a hand over the top of Sedarias’s left hand. This made Kaylin wonder if Sedarias were left-handed, but the gesture seemed to be intended to calm or comfort, not to restrain.
“Iknowall of this is above my pay grade,” Kaylin continued, gesturing at Diarmat’s report. “I’m aprivate. This is probably Hawklord territory. But the Hawklord isn’t living with the rest of you. I am. And she’s coming here. Because she is, I need to know this stuff. And before you decide what I do, or do not, need to know, consider this: I don’t think the way the rest of you do. I don’t have your experience. I’m never going to have it. This is my best shot at not screwing things up so profoundly we end up with Barrani war bands laying siege to Helen.
“You guys are Barrani and you remember everything. I can’t.Mortalscan’t.” She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, tilting it on two legs. “Because we can’t, and because I’m mortal, I have my own ways of hooking things together so they stay in place. Helen?”
Helen had agreed to have an entirely internal Records repository. Kaylin couldn’t have an internalmirrorconnection, but Records? For Helen, that was trivial.
“High Lord and Consort.”
“Would you like this to be full visuals, dear?”
“Umm, could you maybe make them like little chess pieces? We’ve got the whole dining room table.”
“I could indeed. I’m not certain, however, that a chessboard will have the required room.”
“No, but it could be useful. Just...leave the pieces off the board until we start a game?”
In the center of the table, two figurines appeared. They were disturbingly lifelike: a small Consort with her white, white hair, and a rather forbidding High Lord. “Add Lirienne.”
Sedarias opened her mouth. Shut it.
“He’s Lord of the West March, yes, but he’s also a Lord of the High Court, and he’s supported his brother and sister throughout both their tenure and his. He feels that the cohort will harm the alliances the High Lord’s rule—or at least his own—depends on.”
“He is not High Lord.”
Ugh. Helen created a figure of Lirienne in spite of Sedarias’s objections.
“Okay.” Kaylin looked at the documents that, not coincidentally, were now beneath the feet of the Consort. “They’re at the top.”
“That is not the correct configuration,” Sedarias began.
“They’re part of the same family, right? Let’s just put the family groups up, and then we can start to move them. Somehow.”
By the time Kaylin had named each of the twelve families that had offered a child to the green, the table was longer, which was not a bad thing. Nor was it a simple matter to sort out the structure of those twelve lines, because there were more than twelve families involved. Each of the twelve had strong connections with other, theoretically lesser, families.
There was disagreement about how the families should be structured around or against each other. Some of it was because of ego. Some of it was different assessments. And all of the cohort were aware that their centuries of absence meant they were operating on very little information. Or worse, onDragoninformation, which would have been unthinkable to all of them, had Mandoran and Annarion not lived with Bellusdeo.
The arguments were mostly silent; they broke the surface when Kaylin made a mistake, in one person’s opinion or another, and needed to be corrected. Unfortunately for the cohort, or perhaps for Kaylin, most of Kaylin’s so-called mistakes were not universally criticized. Sedarias’s corrections caused subsequent arguments.
Kaylin forgot why she’d started this exercise by the middle of it; given that Barrani didn’t need sleep, she wasn’t certain it was ever going to end.
“Memory,” Helen supplied, her voice soft. “You were attempting to demonstrate how you construct memories.”
Kaylin listened to the arguments she could hear.
“Mellarionne is almost of equal rank with the High Lord’s family. That’s not aguess, and it is notsentimental. It isfact.”
“Solanace is not first rank,” Annarion said. “It is considered of the first rank because it stands—or has stood—so close to the High Lord’s family for so long. Even when Mellarionne made its move, Solanace did not intrigue or join them.”
