Kaylin had a new home, and she loved it.
The Imperial Palace was,
to many, the pinnacle of dream homes. But to Kaylin, it had been a
nightmare—one that she'd finally escaped. The Palace Guard no longer
lined the halls outside of her room, and her rooms were no longer so
grand or so fine that she felt as if she didn't belong in them. The
shutters on her windows—and they were shuttered, not barred—weren't as
warped as they had been in her old apartment, but the windows opened to
let both light and air in, when she desired it.
And best of all: Dragon arguments no longer woke her out of a sound sleep.
In
theory, Barrani arguments were quieter than draconic arguments, Barrani
throats being confined to the general shape and size, even if they were
immortal. Angry Barrani weren't exactly safer to be around, but at least they didn't demand attention half a city block away.
So much for theory.
The
Barrani engaged in this particular argument were in the same building.
Their shouts shook the floor, which shook her bed, which caused Kaylin
to sit up and scrabble under her pillow for the dagger she always slept
with.
Her small dragon familiar, usually a floppy and relatively
inert mass somewhere at the top of her pillow, hissed. It was dark
enough—barely—that she could feel him more than see him.
In
response to the stray thought, a soft glow lit the interior of the room.
This was a standard feature of living in an intelligent and responsive
building, but three weeks in, Kaylin still found it a bit creepy.
"I'm
sorry, Kaylin," Helen said, although she didn't dim the lights. "It's
habit. Generally when people are worried about visibility, it's because
they might injure themselves in the darkness." She was, of course,
nowhere to be seen—or, conversely, everywhere, as she was the building.
Guilt,
of course, came on the heels of light. Kaylin wasn't used to guarding
her thoughts. She could (mostly) keep the bad ones firmly sealed behind
her teeth, but Helen didn't require the spoken word. Then again, Helen
didn't seem to judge or take offense at the unspoken word, which was
definitely for the best.
The floor shook again, and this time,
Barrani words were clearly audible. There were, as expected, two voices,
crashing into each other: Mandoran's and Annarion's.
"What
exactly are they doing?" Kaylin swiveled to dump her feet off the side
of her bed. The mattress was dense and thick, but it was not—like palace
mattresses—three feet off the ground.
"Disagreeing."
"Sorry,
I got that part. What are they disagreeing about?" Mandoran switched,
midsentence, to the Elantran that was Kaylin's mother tongue.
"You can't hear them?"
"I
heard the last bit, and you should tell Mandoran that what he's
suggesting is anatomically impossible." She walked to the chair nearest
the actual closet and retrieved the clothing she'd be wearing, bar
disaster, to the office today. The small dragon showed his appreciation
for being rudely woken by taking off with the stick she used to keep her
hair off her neck and face. He also squawked a lot.
"Mandoran says," Helen finally replied, "that it's not anatomically impossible for them. Annarion says—"
"Yes, thanks, I heard his response. Have they let up at all in the past four days?"
"They haven't been shouting at each other—"
"I mean, have they taken any breaks?"
"No, dear."
"It's probably a miracle they're both still alive."
"Mandoran agrees. He apologizes and says they will take a break now, and resume practice once you've headed into the office."
In
the three weeks since their narrow defeat of the ancestors, Annarion
had not emerged from wherever he was training. Kaylin didn't expect that
he would until Helen believed that his self-containment was complete
enough to walk the city streets without immediately attracting every
Shadow in the heart of the fiefs—or worse.
He'd already done that
once, though unintentionally. Helen insisted that Annarion had been
shouting for attention—for want of a better description—and the
ancestors had heard him. Since Kaylin had been standing beside the young
Barrani for most of his stay in Elantra, she sympathized with his
confusion: she certainly hadn't heard—or seen—anything that demanded
attention. Nothing beyond his striking Barrani looks, at any rate.
But…the Shadows had
come, leaving the containment of the fiefs and venturing into the
streets of Elantra proper. And they'd made a beeline to Annarion. They
weren't particularly careful about anything standing in their way,
especially once they turned their attention to the Barrani High Halls.
At that point, the Barrani and the Dragon Court had arrived in force.
The
city had mostly recovered, although the streets in the high-rent
district were no longer flat; the stone had been melted, and the
creatures that had done the melting had left marks in the road when it
once again solidified.
Helen was attempting to teach Annarion to be quiet.
For some reason, Annarion did not take as well to these lessons as
Mandoran had done. Mandoran joined Kaylin from time to time; Kaylin
suspected that he did it just to annoy Annarion.
Then again,
Annarion was desperately worried for his brother, Lord Nightshade.
Nightshade's abrupt disappearance from his fief——and, more important,
his Castle—weighed heavily on his younger brother, who suspected that
his presence was the cause of Nightshade's absence. Kaylin privately
agreed, but she didn't blame Annarion.
She blamed herself. She
shouldn't have let Annarion visit his brother in Castle Nightshade. She
shouldn't have let him out into the city at all until she was certain he
wasn't a danger to others.
And you would have stopped him how, exactly?
Rationally,
she was not responsible for anything that had occurred within Elantra.
But as hers had been the hand that had rescued Annarion and the rest of
his cohort from their jail in the heart of the green, her guilt had
clear and undeniable roots. Kaylin attempted to push aside the feelings
of remorse—they pissed Teela off when she was in the office, and while
Teela couldn't actually read minds, her familiarity with Kaylin's moods
made her intuition pretty much the same in practical terms.
The
sounds of shouting that would have contained nothing but curse words in
most languages diminished as Kaylin made her way out of her room.
* * *
The
halls in her new home were in far finer repair than the halls in her
first home had been. Doors lined the walls—doors behind which some of
her friends now lived. Those friends were seldom in their own rooms,
with a single notable exception: Bellusdeo. Her sole guard, Maggaron,
had spent two weeks standing in the hall outside of the Dragon's doors;
he took breaks for food, but they were short and silent.
Mandoran
and Annarion spent their days—and nights—in what Helen referred to as
the training room. It wasn't, as far as Kaylin could tell, actually a
room in the strictest sense of the word. Teela—the reason that Kaylin
had attempted to even find it—didn't consider it a room in the loosest
sense of the word, either. Kaylin pointed out that it had a door.
Teela
in turn pointed out that Helen—whose voice was present—had had trouble
giving the two Hawks necessary directions to reach it; in Teela's
opinion, the door had only been created as a visible marker. Helen
confirmed this.
Regardless, although the two not-quite-Barrani
boys had rooms of their own, they'd been holed up in a part of the
mansion that couldn't be considered home, Maggaron had been standing or
slumping against a wall in the hall, and Bellusdeo had treated her room
like an impregnable fortress. As house-warmings went—and Kaylin had only
attended one, at Cait-lin's insistence—it was unsuccessful.
Kaylin, however, had felt at home in her room from the moment she crossed its threshold.
She
felt at home in the dining room, even though it was large; she felt at
home entering the front door, even though it opened to a foyer with
multiple levels and too much light; she was even becoming more
comfortable with Helen's habit of treating her thoughts as questions,
and answering them out loud. Tara, the Avatar of Tiamaris's Tower, did
the same. It was hard to feel lonely in this house. If it was also hard
to be alone—and it was—Kaylin didn't mind. Helen didn't judge her
thoughts, her moods or her achievements—or, more specifically, their
lack.
"I would," Helen said, as Kaylin made her way to the dining room. "But thoughts are not actions; they're not plans.
If you were planning something unwise, I would tell you." This was
demonstrably true. "If you were planning something unethical, I would
also tell you. I have lived with tenants who have chosen to act against
their own beliefs—and the results were not pleasant."
"They messed up?"
"Ah,
no, dear. I have had a number of tenants since Hazielle. It is almost
universally true that what you cannot bring yourself to do—or perhaps to
avoid doing—you cannot believe anyone else would avoid. For instance:
if you decry lying, but then do it yourself—and not in the way manners
might dictate—you quickly assume that no one is honest. If you betray a
trust for your own benefit, you assume that no one is trustworthy.
"This
eventually causes a spiral of ugliness and loathing. The reason I would
stop you from doing something you despise is not necessarily because I
would despise it. It is because of the effect it would have, in the end,
on the way you view and interact with the important parts of your
world. If you have no self-respect, your ability to respect anything or
anyone else is in peril."
Kaylin thought about this as she ate.
Mandoran
soon joined her, looking glum and exhausted. Had he been mortal, she
would have attempted to send him back to bed. Since he wasn't, and given
that he was up against the wall of Annarion's frantic fear for his
brother's safety, she decided against it.
"He's going to be the
definition of anti-fun until we find his brother. I've taken quite a
personal dislike to Lord Nightshade." He pushed food around his plate as
if the eggs were unappetizing. "If it weren't for his brother, we could
try to learn to be 'quiet' at a reasonable pace. The way things stand
now, Annarion might as well be mortal."
"And you mean that in the nicest possible way, of course," Kaylin replied.
"Not
really." Being on the receiving end of Kaylin's glare, he glanced at
Helen; her Avatar had been waiting, more or less patiently, in the
dining room. She appeared entirely unruffled by his comment.
"Look,
I understand why mortals are in a rush about everything—they get old
and weak so quickly that they can't afford to take their time. We're not
mortal. We have time."
"We don't know what happened to Nightshade."
"We know he isn't dead."
"There are worse things than death."
"One of which would be practicing with Annarion," Mandoran replied. Wincing, he added, "Great. Now he's angry."
Kaylin
was on Annarion's side this time, but said nothing; the Hawks had
taught her to leave Barrani arguments between the Barrani who were
having them.
Thanks to Annarion and Mandoran's not exactly silent
disagreement, Kaylin was in no danger of being late for work. The
midwives had called her out twice during the past three weeks; they'd
sent a runner to the house each time. So far, Helen seemed unwilling to
install active mirrors in the manse. Mirrors were modern necessities.
Anyone of import used them to communicate, especially in
emergencies. Since Kaylin was feeling surprisingly awake despite the
hour, she turned to Helen to tackle the subject for a third time.
"I
need some sort of working mirror connection somewhere in the house. It
doesn't have to be everywhere. It could be in one room. Or even only in
mine. Marcus mirrors whenever he needs someone to shout at, and the
midwives' guild mirrors when there's an emergency. So does the Foundling
Hall. I can't ask the midwives' guild to send a runner between the
endangered mother and this house and expect me to make it there in time.
So far I've been lucky, but I doubt that will last."
Helen's
expression flattened. There was a reason this was the third attempt at
discussion. "I have made some inquiries about the mirror network; they
are incomplete thus far. I am perhaps remiss; I do not wish to insult
either you or the people for whom you work. But the mirror network is not secure. I am almost certain such forms of communication would not have been allowed in my youth."
"Almost
everyone has some sort of mirror access." Everyone, Kaylin thought, who
could afford it. She hadn't had a mirror when she'd lived in the fiefs.
She hadn't daydreamed about having one, either—she hadn't really been
aware of their existence until she'd crossed the bridge. "Some
people—mostly Barrani—have even set the mirror network to follow them when they move from place to place. And if the Barrani are willing to use it, how dangerous can it be?"
"There
are many things the Barrani do—and have done in the past—that you would
consider neither safe nor respectable." Helen sighed. "Understand that
the mirror network is a magical lattice that underlays the city."
Kaylin nodded.
"At
the moment, it is a magic that I do not permit across my boundaries. It
appears to have been designed to travel around areas of
non-cooperation; it therefore skirts the edge of my containments. I have
not disrupted it in any fashion—it did not seem to be directly harmful.
If you wish to have access to your mirror network, I would have to
alter my protections to allow the grid's magic to overlap my own, at
least in part. I do not know who, or what, is responsible for the
stability of the grid; I do not know who, or what, created the spells
that contain it; nor do I fully understand the magic that sustains it."
"Don't do it," Mandoran said.
Kaylin glared at him. "Why not?"
"You don't let stray magic into the heart of your home."
"Everyone else does."
"So I'd gathered." He winced. "Teela's in a mood, by the way." Great.
"I don't know what kind of power your people have—I have to assume it's not significant." Big surprise.
"But
someone with significant power could transmit or feed an entirely
different kind of magic through the lattice on which the mirror network
is built."
"I'd think the Emperor would have something to say about that—mirrors function in the Palace."
"Dragons
aren't as fragile as mortals, for one. Look—I'm not an Arcanist. There
are no doubt some protections built into the mirror network to prevent
its use as a weapon. I can imagine those protections being successful in
most cases—but not all. Magic is not precise; it's not entirely
predictable—as you should well know.
"But the possibility of
being used as a weapon is not the only threat the mirrors might pose.
It's highly likely that they could transmit private information to
outside observers." His expression darkening, he added, "I mean—Teela
lets the damn network follow her."
