Had Kaylin’s hands not been full, she would have put up her hand, as if she were in class. “Why are you guys worried?”
The glance they exchanged was clear enough that it rendered words superfluous. It was Emmerian who answered, but he was an immortal. The answer had to be couched in words before it arrived, as if it needed a carriage.
“You have been told that the library is the Arkon’s hoard.”
Kaylin nodded.
“You have even survived the handling of an artifact from that hoard that vanished. You are still alive.”
Her nod was less patient.
“Have you never wondered at his collection? His attempt to hoard antiquities?”
“Not really. I mean, he’s the Imperial Librarian.”
Emmerian once again looked to Bellusdeo, but the gold Dragon was willing to leave the discussion in his hands.
“Let me then speak of Killianas. I am not Tiamaris, who is significantly younger than the rest of the Dragon Court. I did not, however, meet Killianas in my youth; my youth was a martial time.” He lifted his gaze, his eyes finding a blank wall.
After a moment, that blank wall grew a painting—a large framed painting. Emmerian smiled, his glance moving briefly to Helen. “Martial prowess was highly valued by both the Barrani and the Dragons. Martial prowess,” he added, “did not mean to us what it means to you; perhaps it means the handling of, the ability to handle, weapons of war—one of which would be magic. But in the absence of magic, we had the weapons to which we were born. Dragons breathe fire,” he continued. “But we are not all adept at its handling; the strength of flame, the length at which we can sustain it, are elements that we must train.
“I was young enough that the training itself was considered the highest priority. It is not easy to breathe fire while one dodges the arcane arts that are cast from below.” He put his hands together, and for a moment, bowed his head.
“I was not interested in war. I was interested in survival. I understood that the Barrani were far more numerous; that the Dragons—” He stopped, as if coming out of his reverie in time not to mention why Bellusdeo was so important to what remained of their race. “The war ended. Peace descended.
“Into this foreign land—this peaceful land—I walked as a stranger. I had spent my youth and my time becoming a warrior. This was not the place, now, for us. You were impatient with the classes the Hawks required you take. You are impatient with classes, even now.”
“And you weren’t?”
“As I said, we were devoted to the arts of war. And then there was no war.” He bowed head again. When he lifted it, he said, “To my surprise, the Arkon—who was almost a legend on the field of battle to those of us who were learning—did not take up the reins of power. He was friend to the Emperor, and friend to—” He stopped again. “But his love was given over to the fields of study that he had, in his youth, most enjoyed.
“Our war had destroyed so much, the damage incidental; Dragon breath, Barrani magic, could turn cities into broken ruins. And did. The Aeries of our birth were gone, and the stores of historical knowledge they had once contained, gone with them. He is Arkon because he preserved those relics of great historical import to our people, even when the war was at its height.
“Those he kept. He kept what he could find. He kept things once belonging to societies that had departed—whether to travel elsewhere or because the wars had left their lands unsustainable, I do not know. And he returned, at last, to his studies, many of which are still a mystery to me.
“But when I met him, he was no longer Lannagaros of the Flights; he was a legend in my mind, only. What I had wanted to be, he had been, and he had walked away from it the moment he could safely do so. It had walked away from me. I was, I admit, lost.
“He offered me a narrow path through his stacks, both literal and figurative. He woke in me a desire to turn my thought and attention to things other than the war that had defined me and defined what Dragonmeant. I will be in his debt for that for the entirety of my life.” He glanced at Kaylin, his lips turning up in a grin. “You have been remarkably patient. I am almost, you have my word, at your answer. But this is information that Bellusdeo did not know, and I believe it relevant to her, as well.”
“Kaylin will not interrupt you,” Bellusdeo said with the sweetest of her smiles—the one that carried the sharpest edge.
“The Arkon’s store of knowledge seemed vast to my younger self. It seemed endless; the exploration of it a work of decades, of centuries. I told him this one day. He fell silent, as he often does. But then he spoke. There was an Academia, a great school, that once existed just outside of the heart ofRavellon. It was there, in his youth, that he learned Barrani, that he met Barrani, that he exchanged sharp words and friendly words with others of his kind.
“He did not mean Dragons. He did not mean our people, although some of those were our people. It was there,” he added softly, “that he learned to read and to speak—with great difficulty—True Words. He spoke of it, spoke about it, with a longing and a passion the like of which I had never seen. His own collection, his hoard, was a pale shadow of that place, and his studies—as a singular scholar—even paler, an echo of the possibilities that once existed there.
“The Academia was destroyed.”
Kaylin wouldn’t have interrupted now, given the chance.
“Yes,” Emmerian said, as she hadn’t. “I believe that Killian, or Killianas, as Helen calls him,wasthat Academia. I believe the building you stumbled into was meant to house students—and did, in the years before the war. I believe it was the sorrow of that loss that drove him to become what he has become.”
“But...his hoard.”
Bellusdeo cleared her throat. “Lannagaros was always unusual. Intense and overfocused when caught in the trap of his own thoughts, his own questions. The elders in the Aerie complained constantly about it.” She smiled at the memory. “His concerns were not their concerns; they were appalled by his apparent interest in things of no use or no interest to them.
“He had very little sense of humor, and what he possessed was dry; he considered his studies, as he called them, of primary import. As if to study was to survive.” Her eyes closed, as if to shut out visual noise to all but the most ancient of her memories. “We were terrible to him. His studies, his ability shut out the rest of the Aerie, frustrated us.”
Kaylin snorted, and Bellusdeo opened her eyes. “It wasn’t the rest of the Aerie—it was you. His ability to ignore you frustrated you.”
