Cast In Honour - Michelle Sagara

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      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

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