“Shutting the door in the Consort’s face wouldn’t harmme. But letting her in without some kind of guarantee from the rest of you would possibly harmeitherher oryou.” She folded her arms, adopting a Leontine maternal posture.
The silence extended for a while. Kaylin was issuing a threat, of a kind. Sedarias did not like to be threatened. But she did exhale—heavily—before she nodded. “Very well. Inasmuch as I can, I will give you my word that I will not...descend to this level of argument again.”
“Look—I don’t care if you’re screaming your lungs out at each other. I’ve spent what feels like months being woken up every night because Annarion and his brother are arguing. Just...not this. This—and your immediate and unexplained disappearance when Helen chooses to invoke the safety of the training room—will be major trouble.”
Sedarias’s nod was even stiffer than her previous words, but she did give it. Largely because she was practical, Kaylin thought. She couldn’t argue against any of what Kaylin had said, because the facts were the facts.
“People can argue against facts,” Helen said quietly. “And frequently in your history, they have.”
Yes, Kaylin thought with just a bit of embarrassment, but notSedarias.
Sedarias bowed to Helen’s Avatar. It was a stiff, perfectly correct bow. “Thank you,” she said, as if the bow hadn’t said enough. “We are in your care, Helen. We will struggle to be worthy of it.”
Mandoran’s jaw dropped, but it remained attached to his face, and after a moment, he closed his mouth. Sedarias walked stiffly through the door to return to the dining room, and the rest of the cohort trailed after her. To Kaylin’s surprise, Teela was first in line. Mandoran would have been second, but Kaylin hadn’t let go of his arm, and had no intention of doing so.
She would have shooed Terrano up the stairs, but he lingered, as if waiting for the distance between him and the rest of his friends to grow.
“All right, spill.”
Or as if waiting for Mandoran’s discomfort. It was Terrano that Mandoran glared at, but that was fair; only Terrano was grinning.
“Why are you askingme?”
“Because you’re going to let it slip sometime. Look—she’s right, and you know it. You guys can’t do this anywhere near the Consort. You can’t do it anywhere near the High Halls. There’s areasonI didn’t want to come here. Too many people. Too narrow a space to live—to trulylive—in. But this is what you chose. You wanted to come home—but you’re going to destroy your home without even noticing it if you can’t...” Terrano stopped. Shrugged. “Doesn’t your mouth get tired?” The latter was a genuine question.
“Not mine,” Mandoran replied, his expression changing. He exhaled. Loosely clasping his hands behind his back, he looked up the stairs, which were now empty. “Yeah,” he said. “They were arguing about you.”
“I can—”
“It’s not about what you’re going to do. Or not going to do. It’s notreallyabout your survival. I mean, yes, Teela is worried, and yes, she’s angry. She feels you’ll be dead in a couple of eye-blinks, and we could wait becausewehave forever. She likes you, you know?”
Kaylin nodded, but cringed. She knew it, yes. But stated that way it was embarrassing somehow.
“She’s lived in this world—this place that Terrano finds so narrow—for way longer than we have. We were born in it. We woke to it. We followed the rules of it—and of the powerful above us. But we did that for a tiny fraction of our lives. She did it for all of hers. So she’s seen the powerful rise—and fall. She’s seen mortals, watched them age, watched them go from weakness to strength to weakness again, like the resonant wave of a struck bell.
“She knows you’re mortal. She knows you’re going to die. Mostly, she doesn’t think about it, unless she feels you’re taking stupid, unnecessary risks.” He flashed a grin. “Which these days is all the time. But she feels that this isn’t about you being stupid—this risk is aboutusbeing impatient. She thinks we’re not ready for the test.
“And, Kaylin, wearen’tready. But Annarion is going to go, anyway. And if he goes, we’re going to go.”
“They’re fighting because Teela wants them to wait.”
It was, oddly enough, Terrano who snorted; Mandoran still looked uneasy. Terrano had not been part of the unspoken argument, although he’d certainly heard whatever was said in the dining room. “I forgot. Sometimes Mandoran makes the attempt to tell us things, but just doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.”
“Lazy, remember?” Mandoran replied. “She’s not one of us.”
“Neither am I, anymore.”
Mandoran flinched. “You are,” he said softly.
“I was,” Terrano continued. “I was part of you. I was part of you for longer than Teela. But I can’t hear any of you now. I don’t know what you’re saying to each other.” He exhaled again, which was a neat trick, because he hadn’t apparently inhaled first. “In theory, they’re fighting because Teela wants them to wait. Frankly, I’d guess half of them want to wait. The arguments make clear that they don’t have the self-control to hold things together in a meaningful way. Literally.” To Kaylin, he said, “You know that we mostly consider ourselves thrown away. Our lives were put on the line for a gamble. The gamble failed.
“You know that we exchanged True Names—which would have been unthinkable had we remained at home, had we not been considered expendable. We were a bit young, a bit raw, excited, terrified or heartbroken. All of those.” He shrugged; clearly he was not comfortable exposing this, although it was all well-known to Kaylin. “We only had each other.
“We promised that we would have each other—but we’re Barrani.”
Kaylin thought about this for a moment, looking at her feet. “So...what you’re saying is that you only had each other, and in some way, the promise was that you would onlyeverhave each other?”
Terrano nodded.
