LITMIR.BIZ

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stopped walking and caught her face in his hands, pulling it up. She met his eyes. “Then stop despising and hating yourself, Kaylin. We’re not what we were. We’re not what we will be. Everyone changes. Everyone can change. Let it go.

      “If you are always afraid to be known, you will never understand anyone else. If you never understand anyone else, you’ll never be a good Hawk. You’ll see what others see, or what they want you to see. You won’t see what’s there.”

      She pulled herself free. Said, thickly, “Let’s go find these friends.”

      Because he was Severn, he let her wander around in circles before she realized that she had no idea where those friends were. Because she was Kaylin, it took another fifteen minutes before she asked him where they were going. He didn’t laugh. Exactly. And she didn’t hit him, exactly.

      But she watched the streets unfold as she walked, half-lost, in this section of the huge city of her birth that she’d never willingly visited before today. Saw the neatly tended houses, the profusion of green that seemed to be a small jungle around the rounded domes. If there was order to it, it wasn’t the kind of order that the human nobility favored; each garden—if that was the right word—was its own small wilderness.

      Every so often she could see one of the Tha’alani, dressed in a summer smock that seemed so normal it looked out of place, kneeling on the ground, entwined by vines and flowers. They were working, watering, tending; they didn’t even look up as she and Severn passed.

      The children often did, and one or two of them waved, jumping up and down to catch her attention. She had the impression of chatter and noise, but they were almost silent, and their little antennae waved in time with their energetic, stubby hands. They were curious, she thought, but they weren’t in any way afraid. And they were happy.

      She waved back. Severn didn’t. But he walked more slowly, and as he did, the nature of the streets changed, widening as they walked. The greenery grew sparser—if things that grew could be sparse in this place—and the buildings grew larger, although they never lost their rounded curves. Street lamps, guttered by sun, stretched upward along the roadside; even the Tha’alani couldn’t see in the dark, it seemed.

      “Where are we going? The market?”

      He nodded slowly. “The market is there,” he said.

      She recognized evasion when she heard it. But she was now curious herself; markets were markets, but the streets here were not so crowded as the streets surrounding any of the city markets on her beat.

      There were children here, as well, but here there were fences. They were short, often colored by clean paint, and obviously meant as decoration and not protection; the children were almost as tall as the fences, and could be seen poking arms through them and touching leaves or petals. Adults came and went, and it was hard to attach any particular child to any of the adults who walked or milled around the street in silence.

      And that was the thing that was strangest to her: It was eerily silent, here. Once or twice the children cried out in glee or annoyance, and the adults would murmur something just out of audible range—but there was no shouting, no background voices, nothing that wasn’t the movement of feet against the cobbled ground.

      For the first time, Kaylin understood why she was referred to as deaf by the Tha’alani; she felt it, here. The deafness, the odd isolation her need for the spoken word produced.

      “Where’s the market?” she asked Severn, to break the silence, to hear the sound of words.

      “Beyond the lattice,” he replied, and pointed.

      Fountains blossomed like flowers with water for petals and leaves of intricately carved stones. The slender spires of water that reached for the sky seemed almost magical to Kaylin as she stared at them. Small children were playing at their edges, and squealing as the water fell down again. No language was needed to understand the urgency of their pointing little hands, or perhaps all languages encompassed it.

      “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

      “Yes,” Severn replied, using that voice again.

      “Who were you hunting?”

      “Someone who understood the Tha’alani geography, but not the Tha’alani themselves,” he replied. “It didn’t take long to find him.”

      She knew better than to ask what had happened to the man once they’d found him. Severn had probably already said too much.

      Kaylin approached the fountains that were spread out on the points of an invisible grid. She dodged a running child, and avoided a spray of misaimed water or two. The fountains here clearly did not hold the invisible Do Not Touch signs that the fountains in the rest of the city did.

      In fact, nothing seemed to.

      Do not touch also did not extend to do not wade, and several of the children who were too old to be called little and to little to be thought of as anything else were thoroughly soaked—or entirely naked—in the low rise of the water. They made the noise that the rest of the streets seemed to lack, and Kaylin gravitated toward them, promising to never again curse the sound of voices. Even when she was hungover.

      But she stopped short because it wasn’t only children who were making themselves at home in the water. Severn bumped into her back at her abrupt halt.

      Entwined, legs tangled, half sitting, half covered in the shallow water, were two Tha’alani who were obviously, but quietly, making love.

      But the children played around them, sometimes over them, in their mad scramble to catch falling water; one or two of them had stopped to stare for a moment, and were still staring, but not the way Kaylin was. If her jaw hadn’t been attached to her face it would be bouncing across the slick stones. She managed to control the urge to grab one of the children who was watching and haul him to safety.

      Barely.

      But there were other adults here, and they seemed entirely unconcerned. They barely seemed to notice, and this was almost as shocking as watching the couple themselves, skin water-perfect as they moved. Their eyes were closed, and their stalks intertwined; they were blissfully unaware of the world around them.

      Kaylin teetered on the edge of action for a moment, and then began to walk forward toward them, half-embarrassed and half-outraged. Severn caught her upper arm.

      “Don’t,” he said very quietly into her ear. “It’s considered rude.”

      “Stopping them from—from—there are children here, Severn!”

      “Stopping them from expressing their love and desire. Yes. It’s considered intrusive here.”

      “But—but—” she spluttered as if she were the one who was half drowning. “The children—”

      “The children are aware of them,” he said. “And as you can see, they are not concerned. They haven’t yet learned not to attempt to disturb, but that’s expected of children.” He paused, and then said, “No, Kaylin, they have no shame.” But the tone of the words conveyed no contempt and no horror, no shock, no judgment.

      Certainly no embarrassment.

      “They want what they want. They are aware of it in the Tha’alaan from the moment they touch it. They love as they love, and it is considered as natural as breathing, or eating, or sleeping. They make love without fear of exposure because in some ways there is no privacy. The thought and the impulse is extreme, and it is felt regardless of where they are.

      “But it isn’t condemned,” he told her. “Not by them.”

      “But—”

      “This is the other reason why the deaf are seldom allowed entry into the enclave. No race, not even the Barrani, can understand the total lack of possessiveness that this entails.”

      “It doesn’t—doesn’t bother you?”

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