He snickered again.
“I think you’d be like Mandoran, if you lived here, not Annarion. But that’s the point of all this, isn’t it?” She exhaled. “You could stay. You could stay here. Helen would be happy to have you.”
“She doesn’t know me.”
“No. But she trusts what you mean to Annarion and Mandoran, and she’s very fond of both of them.” She waited.
“It’s not the same,” he said, once again allowing his shoulders to curl. “I can’t hear them. I can’t talk to them.”
She didn’t point out that he could, because she knew what he meant, even if True Names had not had the same effect on her life.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he continued. “I—Look, we’re raised tobeoutsiders. We don’t value honesty. We don’t value earnestness. It’s death. That’s what we were taught, growing up: it’s death. Someone older and smarter will use whatever we reveal against us, or our families.
“But no one taught us to be ourselves. And ourselves were all we had.” He hesitated. “I wanted freedom. I didn’t want to come home. I couldn’t understand why Sedarias—whose political life started early and happened often—would want to come back. I think Mellarionne was the only family that had a kind of contest to see who’d travel to the West March, as if it were some kind of privilege. But the rest of our families threw us away.
“If I could still hear them, I’d never stay. You don’t know what the world is like. All the worlds. All the states. I haven’t seen most of them and I’ve barely scratched the surface.” His voice dropped. “But it’s so quiet out there. So quiet.”
“You came back for them.”
He nodded. There was no point in denying it. In the quietest voice he’d used yet, he said, “I missed them. I hate the silence.”
She bowed her head, turning her hands in her lap. “Why can’t you stay here, and—I don’t know, take vacations? Why can’t you experiment with form and place, the way Mandoran does?”
“I don’t belong here anymore. I can’t be part of them.”
“Sedarias wants you to stay. I think she’s most worried about you, out of all the cohort.”
“She doesn’t trust me. I mean—she doesn’t trust me to survive. She trusts that I won’t hurt them, of course. She doesn’t believe I’ve changed that much. I don’t think she believes I could.”
“And if you had a name? You could hear them. You could speak with them. I don’t understand why you couldn’t just...do whatever you’re doing now.”
“No. You don’t.”
“So tell me.”
“It’s the name. It’s the fact of the name. You have experience with the nameless—or those who’ve tried to escape the cage of their own names, right?”
She nodded.
“You thought it was stupid.”
She nodded again.
“You would. You don’t need the name.”
“If it weren’t for your names, you wouldn’t awaken. You wouldn’t be alive.”
“Yes. As infants, we have no other options. But we don’t remain infants forever, and we have forever, if we’re careful. But our names can be used against us.”
“They can be used in other ways, as well—you should know this better than most of the Barrani out there.”
He shrugged. “The name links us to this place. This state of being. It’s where you and your kind live; you couldn’t survive some of the places I’ve been. Or possibly you could, because of the marks of the Chosen—but not the rest of your kind. And not the rest of my kind, either.”
She stood, slowly. “I don’t want what you want.” Her voice was soft; it was a statement of fact. “And I don’t understand what you want. But... I understand the desire, theneed, to be free. You think of Helen as a cage.
“I think of Helen as home. Notahome, butmyhome. I understand that this isn’t the home you dreamed of, if you dreamed of one at all. I couldn’t make the whole of Elantra my home—I can’t imagine what your sense of home might be. Maybe homeisa cage. I can still leave it. I can go to work—which is definitelynothome—and come back. I need the work,” she added. “I need to be a Hawk. If you asked me to choose between being a Hawk and having a home, I’m not sure what I would choose.”
“Home,” he said, no doubt in his voice.
