“You’re worried about more than just the Arkon calling you stupid.”
Kaylin nodded at Teela’s verbal prodding. She had used the mirror in the High Halls to make an appointment—such as it was—with the Arkon; she had mirrored Helen, and Bellusdeo had amicably agreed to join her there. Like Mandoran, she didn’t trust the mirror network, and didn’t generally ask for possibly dangerous details when speaking through it.
And then Kaylin had said excruciatingly formal goodbyes, which had taken fifteen minutes. The only bright spot of the day was the fact that she hadn’t been summoned to attend the High Lord and his Court in person.
The city streets looked a lot grubbier in comparison, but that just made them feel more like home. “It’s the outcaste. The outcaste Dragon.”
“You think Margot’s vision pertained to the outcaste?”
“I can’t see how it doesn’t. He was flying over Ravellon. Bellusdeo has history with the outcaste. It’s not a happy history. But she met him on a different world. He was part of Ravellon by that point—and Ravellon, in theory, existed on all worlds.”
“You’re worried about the Dragon.”
Kaylin was. “Bellusdeo lost almost everything. She still feels the loss, the lack of home, her lack of place here. She’s strong,” Kaylin added quickly, feeling vaguely disloyal. “But—she’s a Dragon.”
“And Dragons are very, very good at bearing long grudges.”
Kaylin nodded. “I don’t know what the outcaste wants. I’ve never really understood it.”
“You don’t know what most other people want,” Teela pointed out. She paused to kick a loose stone; she wasn’t any more comfortable than Kaylin was. “You assume they want what you want. You assume they hate what you hate, even when experience has taught you otherwise.”
“I assume,” Kaylin said with emphasis, “that if I understand what someone wants, I can either help them or get in their way. And I’m pretty damn sure that whatever the outcaste wants is the opposite of what I want.”
“You’re not.”
“Not?”
“Not certain. Why?”
Kaylin exhaled heavily. “When we saved Bellusdeo, he was in the air. And I heard his roar. It didn’t sound angry—I’ve heard enough angry Dragon to last a lifetime, and I recognize it. It sounded almost—” She shook her head.
“Almost what?”
“Almost heartbroken, if you want the truth.” She had never said this out loud before. She wasn’t even certain why she was saying it now. “Bellusdeo wants him dead. And Bellusdeo heard Margot’s Records entry. She’s certain that he’s involved somehow. Look, I know you think I’m reckless a lot of the time. But I’m not reckless enough to go charging into Ravellon to confront a giant black Dragon. I wouldn’t charge into the High Halls to confront a random Barrani Lord, either.”
“Bellusdeo is not a fool.”
“No.”
“That sounded like a yes.”
“It really didn’t. She’s not a fool. But...it’s personal, for her. And I know I don’t do well when things become personal for me. I can’t figure out what the Aerians want, but I’m almost certain that what they want must have started with the damn Dragon. And that’s a twofold problem.”
“Is it?”
“Dragons aren’t exactly invisible when they take to the skies. They can mostly pass for mortal if you don’t know anything about Dragons—but there are always telltale signs if you do. If the Dragon came to the Reaches, he did it one of two ways: he flew—invisibly—or he walked. I’m leaning toward the walking, myself.
“He had to have some way to set up an appointment. I honestly can’t imagine that the Aerian Arcanist would have gone to the fiefs searching for the Dragon. I can’t actually imagine...” She cursed. “The Arcanist didn’t have to meet with the Dragon initially. I can guarantee that he didn’t go through Tiamaris. I can’t guarantee that he didn’t contact a different fieflord. But he’d still be visible, and an Aerian flying into the fiefs might attract some notice. Unless he flew at night.”
“Or unless he walked?”
“Walking would draw less attention if he walked in the dead of night, yes—but Aerians have great, honking wings.”
“Assuming they do exist, how long would it take to find those witnesses?”
Too damn long.
“Let’s go with the hypothesis that the Aerian Arcanist somehow visited the fiefs,” Teela continued. “The ferals and most of the Shadows wouldn’t be the threat they once were to you—Aerians can fly. Ferals can leap a great distance, but they can’t follow or attack from the ground.”
Kaylin nodded. “I just don’t understand what they want.”
“And you can’t follow the money.”
“Not if I don’t understand the coin, no. You have any suggestions?”
“Yes, oddly enough.”
“Let’s hear them—I assume you’re not going to accompany me into the Arkon’s library.”
“I have never been comfortable standing in the middle of a Dragon’s hoard, for reasons which will perhaps be obvious if you pause to reflect.” When Kaylin failed to answer, Teela said, “Tain and I are going home. Or rather, we’re going to your home. We’ll wait there.”
“But—”
“Mandoran is in a snit.”
“Did he get stuck in another wall?”
“Something like that. He’s not speaking to Annarion. Forcefully and loudly not speaking.”
Great. Just what they all needed. “I suppose Nightshade is there, as well.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
The Arkon’s condescension was looking better with each step she took toward the palace.
* * *
Bellusdeo met Kaylin at the library’s closed and forbidding doors. Bellusdeo’s was therefore the hand that pressed the door wards that caused those doors to roll open. Kaylin could have hugged her.
“Your appointment in the High Halls?”
“No one swore at anyone else, no weapons were drawn, and no blows were exchanged.”
“That bad?” the Dragon asked in sympathetic Elantran.
Kaylin grimaced. The familiar, mostly forgotten in the excitement of the rest of the day, lifted his head. He squawked, but it was a sleepy sound. “I don’t suppose you want to go home and keep Mandoran and Annarion from doing something they’ll regret?”
His answering squawk was longer.
Bellusdeo winced. “Teela told you?”
“She said Mandoran was in a snit, and also that Nightshade was visiting.”
“‘Snit’ is not how I would have described it.”
“How would you describe it?”
“Later,” the Arkon said. “She would describe it later, when it doesn’t waste my time.” He glared at Kaylin, but offered Bellusdeo a very exact bow.
Bellusdeo laughed at Kaylin’s expression.
* * *
Kaylin, Severn and Bellusdeo followed the Arkon; generally he preferred to have private meetings in the rooms that didn’t house any of his vast collection. This time, however, he took a left turn instead of a right. They didn’t end up facing a wall while he magically summoned an arch or a door; they ended up in a room. The significant feature of this room was the many glass cases that made it seem much smaller; in those cases were a variety of smaller objects, with the single exception of a suit of armor that had clearly seen actual battle. Or earthquakes.
But one object drew her eye almost instantly. It was a feather, a long, pale flight feather.
“Yes,” the Arkon said, before she could ask. “It is, as you no doubt suspect, Aerian.”
She didn’t ask him what it was doing in the collection.
“I am informed that you met with an Arcanist today.”
“In the High Halls, yes.”
“The meeting was no doubt related to the current difficulties facing your sergeant.”
“Why don’t I just tell you the contents of the meeting? I’ll skip the excruciatingly boring etiquette bits, so it should only take ten minutes.”
* * *
It took longer. If the Arkon was willing to dispense with the excruciating politics of manners, he had questions, and interrupted frequently to ask them.
“And so you’ve come to me.”
Kaylin nodded.
“You’ve been staring at the feather for some time.”
“It seems out of place in this room, given the rest of its contents.”
“Does it?”
“Lannagaros.”
The Arkon glanced at Bellusdeo.
“She is not insulting either your curating or your collection; she is mortal and fails to understand the choices you have made. You might explain them,” she added mildly. “I myself find the composition of this area of your collection somewhat odd.”
Bellusdeo, of course, could with safety. The Arkon frowned at her, but didn’t glare. “It is, as you must imagine, an Aerian feather.”
“They took an Aerian feather to Margot’s.”
“Did they?”
Kaylin nodded. “But it wasn’t a flight feather. It wasn’t this large. Did this belong to a praevolo?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get your hands on it?”
“As it happens, we traded. An Aerian family of some lesser renown is in possession of a Dragon scale.”
“You wanted this for a reason.”
The Arkon nodded. “I have noted that you have the current praevolo living under the same roof as Bellusdeo. I have therefore returned to some of my earlier studies, in the hope that they will prove irrelevant.”
“Meaning they’re bad.”
“Meaning that there are some inherent difficulties that present themselves, yes.” He glanced at Bellusdeo. “Ask your questions, Private, and let me return to my studies.”
“What do you know about the Aerian process of making someone outcaste?”
“Very little.”
“Compared to me?”
“I know very little of nothing when compared to you. I will,” he added as Bellusdeo opened her mouth, “attempt to feel less insulted for the duration of this discussion. I know, as you have learned, that the Aerian wings are removed. They are not chopped off, as one would the thumbs of a thief; they are removed.”
“How?”
“That is, and was, the question. I found it fascinating, but I find the cultural phenomenon of assigning outcaste status to be fascinating in general.”
“Even where Dragons are concerned?”
“No. I understand the Dragon concept. It is not, as you must feel it is, like the Barrani custom; it is not political in that way. Dragons have, historically, been much more direct: they fight. The stronger destroys the weaker. The flights rise and fall on the basis of the strength and power of their leaders.
“We may swear eternal and immortal enmity, and we may throw our entire focus into the destruction of those enemies—but we do not doubt that they are Dragons. We do not make our enemies outcaste simply because we can. That is the Barrani way. The human way. It is not the way of our kind. We destroy what we feel we must, and for our own reasons—but we understand, at the same time, that our most dangerous enemies are...us.”
“But the outcaste—”
“Yes. It was determined that the outcaste was no longer kin. He was no longer Dragon. It is fundamentally different.” The Arkon bowed his head for a moment, almost as if in prayer. When he exhaled, there was smoke in his breath; to Kaylin, it had the scent of ash.
“You are aware of the Barrani Test of Name, the Barrani Tower of that test.”
Kaylin nodded. “There’s no such test for Dragons.”
“No. And yes. Our existence as Dragons is our test. When we are born, however, we take one form. We are either Dragon or human. As children, we cannot easily switch between the two; half of our existence, half of our life, is empty. Waiting. We feel its absence, but cannot alleviate it. The whole of our childhood is training to do just that.
“As the Barrani do, we require True Names. It is my belief that our names are more complicated than Barrani names, but in essence, they serve the same function. The Barrani have the Consort. The Dragons do not. When we speak of Dragons in the Empire, we speak of adults. In our own tongue, the children are not Dragons.
“Barrani children will become Barrani adults, if they survive. Human children will become human adults. Likewise the Aerians, the Leontines, the Tha’alani. That is not true, however, of the Dragons. Our children will not inevitably become adults—Dragons. Many fail to mature.”
“What happens to them?”
“For the most part, they die.”
“You kill them?”
“No, Kaylin. Not unless it is necessary. But they are not counted as Dragonkin.”
“The outcaste was a Dragon.”
The Arkon’s breath once again came out in a mist that smelled of ash. “He was considered a Dragon, yes. He could walk as man and fly as Dragon.”
“But you said he’s not a Dragon.”
“Lannagaros.” Bellusdeo placed a hand on the Arkon’s shoulder. “This is not necessary.”
He seemed to draw strength from her hand, although his eyes were now upon Kaylin. “Until we have our Names, we cannot conquer the duality of our existence. We are not one thing or another, in either form; we are always both. It is why we can breathe fire when we stand on two legs.
“The Draconic form or the human form do not come easily or naturally—but even at birth, we retain an echo of the knowledge of either, depending on our gender. To become one or the other is an act of both will and faith.”
“And the outcaste could.”
Silence. Kaylin waited for the Arkon to break it. She had never seen him so somber.
“Yes.” He bowed his head again. She thought he had finished. But he raised it as Bellusdeo let her hand fall from his shoulder. “Yes, he could. What we did not know—what we could not know at the time—was that he had also failed.
“You have noticed that I have taken an interest in your friends, Mandoran and Annarion.”
“This is relevant because?” Kaylin asked, although she thought she understood.
“They are not Barrani in most senses of the word. They are other. In a like fashion, the outcaste was other. He could walk as a man; he could fly—and fight—as a Dragon. But that was not all he could do. He understood, far before we did, that he was not a duality.
“Some hatchlings cannot cohere. They cannot wed the concept of the two forms into an indivisible whole. They are not attached to their first form, as the majority of the failures are; they are not attached to their second form. They are not wed to the concept of form as a single cohesive attribute.
“You understand why Mandoran and Annarion are of specific interest.”
She did. She didn’t like what it said, but she did. Annarion could, when he fought, lose his physical shape; the battle defined it, not Annarion himself. Mandoran had gotten himself stuck in a wall, because he was trying to walk through it. “They’re not a threat.”
“They are a threat,” he countered, although his tone suggested that he would not immediately demand they be destroyed.
“They don’t want to have the trouble they’re having. They spent centuries trapped in a space in which form was a cage. They had to spend those centuries learning how to ditch that form in order to have any freedom at all.”
“I am cognizant of that. And they are, regardless, not a Draconic problem. In their entirety, and unless they threaten the Empire, they are a Barrani problem.”
Bellusdeo said nothing, but in her way, said it loudly enough that the Arkon looked warily in her direction. She then spoke. “You spend too much time thinking about things that are not, as you put it, your problem.”
The Arkon predictably ignored this. “To Draconic eyes, the outcaste appeared Draconic. He could move fluidly between his forms; he was therefore considered adult. His martial prowess was almost uncanny, and his resistance to the magic of the Barrani, second to none. It is not a wonder to me that any irregularities would be ignored.” The Arkon exhaled. “He was my friend. He was my friend, and I would have followed him into any skies, no matter what storm they contained.”
“And he was greatly altered by the war?”
“No, Bellusdeo. That is a polite fiction. He was not altered by it. If he was altered at all, it was in Ravellon. He was drawn to it, just as young Tiamaris was drawn to it.”
“Tiamaris is a Dragon,” Kaylin said, voice flat and a little on the hard side.
“Yes. No questions surround Tiamaris; he is young. The Shadows that fascinated him did not touch or alter him. He did not perceive them as power, per se; he perceived them as a natural disaster. One that had will. He was not born to war, as we were; he was born in its aftermath. There were no great flights to which he might aspire. To Tiamaris, Shadow is the enemy; it is the battlefield. He studied, and he learned, to prove himself. And he has taken the Tower in Tiamaris to stand sentinel against the incursions that would otherwise destroy us.”
“You do not need to tell me the dangers of Shadow,” Bellusdeo said.
“And the dangers of the outcaste?” the Arkon asked. Given Bellusdeo’s expression, Kaylin wouldn’t have dared.
“Or that.” Her answer was chilly; her eyes were orange. Before the Arkon could answer, she raised her inner eye membranes, which slightly muted her eye color.
“Did you not hear him, on the day you emerged from the fiefs?”
Bellusdeo didn’t answer.
“He did not want your destruction. I do not believe he wants it now. I do not know what he found in Ravellon—or perhaps what found him there—but if he is driven, if he is no longer truly Dragon, some base part of that remains.”
“He almost destroyed me.”
“It is the way of our kind, when our wishes are thwarted. The Emperor is the shining counterexample. But I do not believe that destruction was his intent. You are female.”
If Kaylin had had a direct link to the Arkon she would have been screaming down it, about now. Then again, raised eye membranes and orange eyes were probably enough of a signal. She considered leaving the discussion, the room and, with luck, the library, before the two Dragons started speaking in their native tongue.
That would certainly distract them, Severn said.
“I believe he hoped—he intended—to share his new kingdom with you. I believe that he wished to have a clutch, and children of his own.”
“He destroyed my sisters,” Bellusdeo continued, her lips a thin line, her knuckles white.
“They are part of you, now. Perhaps he understood what you must become—I am more learned than he, but I would have made different assumptions. And I would, regardless, never have attempted to force a choice on you; I had enough experience with you in your youth to know how well that would have worked.”
Some of the tension left Bellusdeo’s expression, then. “Do you still think you can save your friend?”
“No. He is outcaste, and he is dangerous beyond belief. It would help me greatly to believe that there is nothing of my friend left in the outcaste. I cannot, sadly. And so I think he did not fully emerge as an adult by our standards; he was, in the interior of his thoughts, outcaste, always. He was everything I was not—everything most of us were not.
“But he was like mortal kin to the Emperor. It is a blow from which the flight has never fully recovered, and his death will not change that. And I wonder if he might not have become consumed by Ravellon if we had approached him as the private and her friends approach Mandoran and Annarion. He did not, in the end, belong with or to us; perhaps what he desired was a place that would truly be home to one such as he.”
Kaylin frowned; it was the thoughtful frown. “If all of this is true, why does he take the form of a large black Dragon? If I understand what you’ve said, he should be able to take different forms. I mean, if he’s not a Dragon, if he’s found a place in which he can mostly be himself, why does he still choose the form of a Dragon?”
“I cannot answer that question,” the Arkon replied. “And it pains me, Kaylin.”
She was silent for a beat, an acknowledgment of the awkward nature of this kind of pain. But she was here for a reason.
“What does the outcaste have to offer the Aerians?”
“You believe Margot’s vision to be substantially true?”
“She’s an Oracle. You can’t expect reliability out of Oracles.”
“Exactly. But you expect, somehow, that there is reliability in this vision?”
Ugh. “I think the outcaste is somehow involved with the Aerians, yes. Possibly only one Aerian Arcanist—but if that’s the case, the Aerian Arcanist is causing Caste Court problems for the current praevolo.”
“And?”
“We’re going to meet him. I mean, I’m going to meet him. With a Barrani or two for company.”
“And a Dragon,” Bellusdeo added.
“I don’t think—”
“And a Dragon, Kaylin.”
She decided against arguing with Bellusdeo in her current mood. “...And a Dragon.”
“What do you intend to discuss?”
Kaylin exhaled. “I don’t know. I have a growing suspicion that the bastard thinks he can somehow remove Moran’s wings and affix them to someone else.”
“The praevolo cannot be made outcaste.”
“Do we know that for fact? Or is that just another ‘truth’ that’s been passed down through the generations?”
The Arkon’s smile seemed genuine. “We know nothing, of course, for fact. We sift through known truths in an attempt to see what underpins them. I assume, however, that there is some truth in the fact. Were there no truth—or were there no perceived truth—it would not be necessary to have your sergeant assassinated.”
“But they tried. So they thought it was necessary to kill her—to release the praevolo power, somehow. If they thought they could just remove her wings and give them to someone else—”
Silence.
“Kaylin?” Bellusdeo asked.
“Well, I know this is going to sound stupid, but—if they did assassinate her, if she did die, where would the body go?”
The ensuing silence was texturally different.
“We know—we have definitive proof—that wings can be removed. Is there anything to say that those wings have to be removed from a living body?”