Michelle Sagara – Cast In Secret (страница 13)

He wore a blue-and-red robe, gaudy, bright colors that had a sheen that caught light, and gold around one wrist. She held out her arms without thought, and he chortled with glee. Had he been Leontine, he would have had milk teeth, and she would have been a tad more careful while holding out uncovered hands.

But he was Tha’alani, and almost human, and the stalks that had terrified her were almost literally knotting themselves as they twisted. The terror they held for her, perched on the forehead of older men with grim, shuttered faces, was gone.

She thought he might slow his approach, but the momentum of his trajectory carried him forward, faster and faster, until he was leaning toward the ground; she caught him before the stones did. Swept him up, her hands under his arms, and held his face across from hers, laughing, because she had to laugh. He was laughing.

And as he reached for her, his slender arms dimpled with baby fat that had not yet disappeared with height and age, she let out a small squeal of delight that easily matched his, and she hugged him.

The stalks on his forehead untwined and touched her face, soft as feathers, but slighter and more insistent. They brushed her cheeks, her mouth, her nose, as if they were his fingers, and then rose toward her forehead and hovered there, waiting.

After a moment, they touched her forehead.

She should have been frightened, but it was impossible to be frightened in the face of his open curiosity, his imperious delight, the smug sense of certainty that loved children everywhere show. If she were a danger to him, he couldn’t conceive of it, and she couldn’t, either.

And if he were a danger to her, then she had grown so paranoid and so pathetic that … But she couldn’t hold on to the thought. His stalks continued to bat against her forehead, and she realized that he was looking for hers.

“I don’t have them,” she told him gently, aware that she was confessing some inner fault. His smile faltered, and he looked at her face intently, his eyes wide. He hesitated a moment and then his stalks were moving again, this time more slowly; she could more feel than see them, because she was watching his expression. She thought he might be worried now, or afraid, because she was different, strange, unknown.

Instead, she felt a giddy delight and something else, the desire to be chased around in the open streets, the desire to laugh and to hide and be caught, over and over again. That and mild thirst. None of these were her feelings.

She glanced at Severn, who was watching her as intently as any of the Tha’alani in the tableau the street had become. She heard herself say, “He’s—he’s speaking to me ….”

The Tha’alani had never spoken to her, not this way. They had pried, poked, pulled at memories; they had forced her to see what they were seeing. But they had never exposed themselves as this child had just so joyfully done.

Would it have made a difference?

She set the child down and he ran away, and stopped, and looked back, waiting for her to follow, to chase him.

She looked back at Epharim for guidance, but found nothing there that would stop her or warn her; he had no fear at all for the child, and clearly no sense of impatience at the delay in escorting her to see Ybelline.

“His parents—” she said, touching her unadorned forehead. “They won’t mind?”

“Mind?”

But no parents magically appeared to scoop their wayward child back into the safety of their arms, to keep him from strangers such as Kaylin, and that was answer enough because the child was impatiently waiting to be followed now. She felt the words, rather than heard them. But she would have felt them from any child, of any race. She might have been a little more careful in the southern stretch, where wings were not yet strong enough to carry a child who chose to launch himself off the edge in mimicry of the adult Aerians, but here, a fall was just a fall.

She ran after him and his laughter filled the street, and it was joined by the laughter of literally dozens of other children as he ran past—other children, older and younger, and many of the adults. Like a multitude of voices sharing the same throat, the same joy, the same word.

She caught the child, knowing the game, and tickled him, lifting him and throwing him in the air, taking care to hold on to his armpits. And on the way down, she laughed, as well, and her laughter was asynchronous, out of step with the crowd.

But when she set the boy free and turned to face Severn and Epharim, she saw only joy in Epharim’s expression. No resignation, no sense of lost time, no judgment and no fear.

And this was the part of the city that had so terrified her that she wouldn’t even look down at it from the safety of the skies.

Epharim waited until she had joined them again and said softly, “You fear discovery. You fear your own thoughts.” And he said it with pity. Kaylin was not the world’s biggest pity fan. “Fear, we all know,” he added. “And we all know rejection and pain. But none of us have ever suffered this fear of being revealed, this fear of being seen as we are.” He was serene, and without judgment.

“The children will not sense this in you,” he added softly. “They are not so powerful yet, and they are children. If they know other thoughts, they can’t be bothered listening to the ones that don’t concern them.”

She nodded absently, wondering what it would be like to live an entire life in a world where every thought was known. Would it even be possible to lie? Would it ever occur to someone to try it? Would it be possible to love in secret, to desire the things you couldn’t have?

Would it be possible to kill?

Epharim said, “We are human,” but his tone was quiet. “And there are few of us who can enter your world and live with what we find there. Very few of you who could live in ours, and not be shocked or scandalized by what you would find here. We have very different ideas of what is natural, of what nature means.

“But the young are the young,” he added softly. “And the child will remember you, now.” He smiled and said, “I think he was shocked that you had no ahporae. Come. Ybelline is waiting.”

“You know that from here?”

He nodded. “She is not far, and she is very, very sensitive.”

“But she lives on the outside.”

“She lives here. She travels at the behest of the Emperor. But Dragons are not mortal, and their thoughts are so vast and so strange they are more comfortable for us in many ways.”

She wondered at a race that could find the presence of Dragons more comforting than the presence of humans.

“There is very little a Dragon fears,” Epharim said.

And she didn’t even resent the way he answered the things she hadn’t said aloud. Perhaps her time with Nightshade had prepared her for this. Or perhaps the child had given her a small key.

“Fear?”

He nodded.

“It’s the fear that’s bad?”

“It is the fear that is most common. We frighten your kind.”

She nodded, and with more force.

“Fear kills,” he told her quietly. “It maims and it kills. It twists and it breaks. And among your kind, fear is part of the foundations upon which you build all thought.” His face shuttered as he said this, and he looked at her with his pale eyes, his antennae drawn back and down across his hair. “It is why so few are chosen to go and be among your kind. It takes a special talent to dwell so long with your thoughts and not absorb them, becoming like you.”

Kaylin couldn’t even imagine a life without fear.

Ybelline’s dwelling was not small. It was a manor, but all of its surfaces were rounded; even the corners of the building bent gradually, and looked to Kaylin’s eye like a rectangle trying its best to imitate an oval, and not quite succeeding. It felt like stone to the touch, and she knew this because she did. But it was a brown that most stone didn’t go without effort.

There were windows along the curve of the wall, but no balcony. Doors, the only flat surface she could see. Instead of steps, there was a ramp that sloped up gradually. Epharim lead them toward it.

“You don’t have horses here?”

“There are horses where horses are needed,” he replied. “But we find oxen more pliable.”

“But they’re food!”

He said nothing, but it was the kind of nothing that promoted stillness.

The doors slid open—literally disappearing into either wall—as he approached. “Ybelline will be in the back,” he told her. “She’s expecting you.” He paused, and then added, “We understand your fear, Kaylin Neya. It is not entirely groundless. But if I have said we live without fear, I have not been entirely truthful. We fear your kind.”

She started to say something, managed to think the better of it before the words left her mouth, and said instead, “So do I.”

“Help us, if you can.”

Before she could ask him more, he turned and left them. Kaylin looked at Severn. Severn was quiet and remote. “What do you think is going on?” she asked softly.

“Nothing good.” He began to walk and Kaylin fell into step beside him. “You did well, out there.”

“Hmm?”

“With the child.”

“The—Oh.” She opened her mouth and he lifted a hand.