20
Mandoran was the first to speak—or to cough, but it was a punctuation cough, not a genuine one. “What are you even thinking?”
he demanded.
Teela and Sedarias were blue-eyed and clearly as unhappy with the question as Mandoran. Terrano, however, was thoughtful—which
was enough of a clue.
“She hasn’t,” Teela said. “And just so you know, she’s horrified that you could even ask that question, given you understand
what the Lady’s life is like. She’s happy where she is, and she considers even the attempt to take the Lake’s test to be life-threatening,
especially now.”
“She’s curious, though,” Terrano added. Three sets of cohort glares fell on him. Terrano was pretty good at ignoring them.
“What? She is!”
“Allow her to ask her own questions at a more convenient time.” It was a command. Had Sedarias uttered it, it would have been
heated; Teela said the words, and Terrano grimaced instead of arguing. Or perhaps he just took his argument into the namebond
sphere and left Kaylin and Logia out of it.
“I’m worried about this new beginning bit. I mean—I think they were trying to destroy humans as a race as well.”
Terrano shook his head. “I think they might have been trying to make humans Immortal. They’d have to understand how you were made. No Barrani envies your lack of time, but a lot of them envy your lack of True Names.”
“That’s not what they would have achieved.”
“No? You’ve watched Red in the morgue, right? Dissecting corpses isn’t going to bring the dead back to life, either. But dissecting
the living might make clearer how the mechanisms of your lives work.” Terrano grimaced. “I’m not saying I agree with them,
but I’m pretty certain I, at least, could continue to exist without the True Name that first woke me.
“I chose to keep it for a reason. If I could live without its constraints, I didn’t want to live without its benefits.”
“You mean the namebond.”
“I mean my family. The family I chose. I wanted to share what I found with them—with them and no one else.”
“You were born to some of those families or you’d never have been sent to the green.”
Terrano shrugged.
“And if you’d never been sent, you wouldn’t have found your true family. Good things can come out of bad things.”
“Not normally.”
Kaylin nodded. It was true. There was nothing romantic about starving and scrounging and almost freezing. There was nothing
romantic about the poverty of the life of an orphan in the fiefs. She felt she could have been a decent Hawk without all of
the terrible experiences. The other Hawks had managed it. She’d always hated it when people told her she should be grateful
for the lessons of her early life—words offered by people who’d never actually lived the way she’d lived.
. . . and what had she just done? She’d done the same damn thing she hated so much to Terrano. She considered biting her own tongue off to prevent it ever happening again.
But at the same time, it was true. Even if they’d been thrown away—or eleven of the twelve had, because Sedarias had wanted to take the chance to become more powerful—they’d found each other.
They couldn’t get out of being sent to the green, but the choices they’d made while huddled together had been entirely their own.
And because of those choices, they were here.
Sedarias had survived her siblings and was An’Mellarionne.
Serralyn was a student, with the much more quiet Valliant, in the Academia.
And Terrano was Terrano.
“Would your former allies have killed the Consort?”
Silence. Teela’s eyes were midnight, her pallor off.
“We were not informed of their intentions,” Sedarias said, her voice as stiff as Teela’s expression.
Kaylin’s frown, half aimed at herself, found a more comfortable target. “If they want to get rid of the Consort, why would
they start this up only when they have a new potential Lady as guardian of the Lake?”
“Do you think they told us what their plans were?” Terrano asked with obvious disgust at Kaylin’s line of questioning. “This
isn’t some garden-variety crime. That’s the right phrase?”
“It is, if you mean normal, petty, unremarkable.”
Terrano shrugged. “I got bored sometimes, and I listened in. Barrani Lords weren’t the only lords involved in this. Mortals
don’t like being mortal. If someone offers them credible reason to believe that they can become Immortal, they might be suspicious,
but they jump on it like starving cats.
“My guess? If the Barrani could convince the humans that a flaw in their initial creation led to the condition of mortality,
they might be moved to support the Barrani endeavors.”
“Let’s leave the humans out of it for now. What, exactly, did the Barrani think they could do to wake their children?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t intend to let the children sleep eternally.
I think Yvonne is a blind, if we’re being honest. It’s a way of garnering political support from those powerful families who have no interest in the family line of the current High Lord.
Saying we’re going to destroy the Lake is likely to be met with more than resistance.
Saying they’ve found someone more malleable who can become the Lady? That’d
get support.”
Logia left her position by the wall. “What did you say?”
Terrano frowned, because Logia, if not Bellusdeo, was still a Dragon. “What did I say?”
“They had a different source of wakefulness, a different source of life?” Logia’s eyes were now blood red, the shift happening
almost in an instant, as if she were Bellusdeo and Shadow was in the room.
“They weren’t big on details when I was eavesdropping.” Terrano shrugged as if it were someone else’s problem.
Kaylin deeply resented that one of those people was her. But Logia’s eye color and her expression were far more troubling
than Terrano’s attempt to ditch homework.
All of Logia’s facial movements stilled; her eyes reddened further, which should have been impossible. Kaylin guessed that
the sisters were having an emergency meeting behind Logia’s eyes. She wondered if it would be Logia who continued, or if one
of the sisters would step in instead.
Logia was the one who resumed talking, but she spoke carefully, her gaze intent. If Logia wasn’t as trigger-happy at the mention
of Shadow, something Terrano had said had pushed buttons.
Logia didn’t take a seat, but she approached them as she spoke. “Bellusdeo says she mentioned the gaining of her adult name
after you first met.”
Kaylin nodded slowly. “The Outcaste. The Outcaste helped guide her. And the rest of you.”
“And the rest of us. As you know—as we now know, who were motherless due to the wars—that was not the method by which our
adult names would, or should, be gained. But it gave us a measure of freedom and selfhood, and it allowed us, finally, the
use of our draconic forms.”
“The Outcaste—the male Dragon—didn’t know how female Dragons achieve their adult names,” Kaylin said, frowning. “They’re born with draconic form, and they find their True Names in a different way.”
“A way very much like the way in which we found ours.”
Silence.
She’d thought Bellusdeo peripherally involved because she was a fieflord and Shadow had been implicated. But she knew the
involvement of these draconic sisters was now far more personal. “The Dragons don’t have the Lake. I’ve never really understood
what finding an adult name meant. I mean—aren’t you born with names?”
“We’re born, in theory, with half of our names,” Logia replied. “Dragons weren’t a native species in the world in which we
landed; there was very little research we could do there. We could rely on personal history and overheard anecdotes—all young
Dragons are very interested in adult names.
“But it wasn’t a surprise to us when we met the Outcaste. We didn’t know he was outcaste. We assumed—wrongly—that he had been
displaced, just as we had, a casualty of war.”
None of the Barrani in the room, with the sole exception of Teela, looked comfortable now.
“He guided us.”
“Did he know your names?”
She shook her head. “We could have told him, of course, just as the cohort shared names with each other. We didn’t.”
“Was there anything unusual about your draconic forms?”
“How were we expected to know?” Logia’s question was bitterness and frustration tied in a trembling knot. “Callandria doesn’t
think so. And I think she’s right—but I’m not at all certain that the male Dragons found their names from the same sources.
We can’t experiment, now. But we did share our adult names with our sisters.
“If the source wasn’t the normal acquisition for adult males, we had nothing to measure that against.”
“Have you asked the chancellor?”
Silence.
This time a different sister emerged. The tilt of Bellusdeo’s chin changed, as did the cast of her expression. “Research is
needed. But understand that we did not wish to draw attention to even the narrow possibility that something was wrong with
our names. Bellusdeo was alive. She wanted to remain that way. She did not want to become outcaste.
“She was being naturally cautious—all of us would have been, except perhaps Logia and Mezanne. But none of us were in her
situation. We were dead. We could not approach Lannagaros. Until we met Imelda, we could not even try.”
Kaylin couldn’t argue with those facts. “You need to go speak with Lannagaros now. And the Arbiters, especially Kavallac.
We need to know whether or not you . . .” Kaylin slowed to a stop. Bellusdeo was in there. Bellusdeo’s body was her own. Her
name was different than it had been when she’d considered herself adult by Dragon standards; it was an amalgamation of the
names she’d known: her sister’s names.
But it wasn’t an amalgamation of their adult names. It was built from their childhood names. The names that had defined their
relationship with each other.
“It comes back to the Outcaste,” Kaylin finally said.