21. Kailin
KAILIN
I did the right thing, sending Alar away so he could live, not because I was selfless or noble but because knowing he was safe was more important than us being together. Keeping him would've meant losing him forever, and I'd rather grieve for our love than for him.
—From the journal of Kailin Strom
Conversations around the table had become a chore since Alar left, with Morek trying to cheer everyone up, and the rest of us pretending it was working while trying not to look at the empty chair where Alar used to sit.
Or maybe it was just me.
"Eat," Morek commanded. "I'm not slaving over a hot stove to improve breakfast just so you can look at it."
I'd been pushing the food around my plate despite my energy output during conditioning this morning, and despite it truly looking delicious.
Morek had added herbs to the bland eggs from the officers' kitchen, fried the potatoes until they crisped at the edges, and brewed a pot of paint-stripping caff because we all needed reviving.
He'd been refilling our cups, pushing the potatoes toward Shovia and more eggs toward me, and narrating the whole time about Baila's dragonia and some maneuver Korthax had pulled during yesterday's training.
The rest of us were too wiped out from conditioning to talk, or was that just a convenient excuse to explain the lethargy that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with melancholy?
"Odinah is a sadist," I said, just to say something, and rubbed my aching thighs for emphasis. "Conditioning should be easy for me now that I can draw on Morgateth's power, but that's true for everyone else in our class, and Odinah just increases the level of difficulty to compensate."
"I've been saying all along that the woman is mean." Codric reached for another roll, but instead of stuffing it in his mouth like he used to, he just held it in his hand as if he'd forgotten why he'd picked it up in the first place.
"You should have seen her face after the stunt Korthax pulled.
" Morek picked up the thread while dropping a fresh stack of toasted bread in the center of the table.
"She didn't even yell. She just stared at him, and Korthax stared right back.
He told me afterward that he respects her.
Dragons respect people who don't flinch. "
"Most things respect people who don't flinch," Shovia said.
"Right? That's what I said." Morek beamed and slid another spoonful of eggs onto my plate without asking. "Eat, Kailin. You need protein to survive Odinah."
I looked down at the eggs. They smelled good, and I had no doubt they tasted just as good as they smelled, because Morek was doing everything he could to fix us the only way he knew how. But the problem was that a full stomach couldn't knit what Alar's leaving had torn open.
I forced a forkful into my mouth, so Morek wouldn't feel bad. He was the only one of us who was happy, and he was working hard to pretend he wasn't, out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to our misery.
Things were going well between him and Baila, and he fancied himself in love. Maybe he was, or maybe he was enjoying spending time with someone who actually smiled.
Codric was almost as miserable as I was.
He had his hands wrapped around a cup of caff, but he wasn't drinking it. He was just turning it slowly on the wood, round and round, his gaze unfocused. The guy who had always been ready with a comment or a joke had been nearly silent for the past week.
Everyone thought my grief was the worst because Alar had been mine, but he'd been Codric's for much longer. The cousins had been inseparable since they were little boys, closer than brothers, and I had a feeling Codric didn't know who he was without Alar at his side.
He'd lost his other half, and he was bleeding, but he was too proud or too gutted to let it show in any way other than that mournful silence.
Shovia had moved her chair a fraction closer to his. She wasn't touching him. She wasn't talking. She just sat there. Prickly, badass Shovia, who liked to pretend she didn't care too deeply for anyone but me, kept watch over him.
She caught me looking and gave me a small, sad smile that communicated an entire conversation. He's devastated, but he doesn't want us to acknowledge his pain because he doesn't want anyone to feel sorry for him.
I nodded and went back to my eggs.
Eventually, Codric would reach the same stage of grief as mine, which was numbness.
The first days had been the worst, filled with the pain that doubled me over at night and sometimes attacked me during class or while walking from one place to another.
I'd made so many detours to the bathroom to cry my eyes out that people must have thought I had a stomach problem.
At some point though, I felt as if I had no more tears left, and my mind had retreated into a merciful numbness. It was probably temporary, and the devastation would attack when I was least ready for it, but for now it made it possible for me to function without coming apart in front of my friends.
Perhaps if I could at least talk to Alar, hear his voice, it would ease the pain, but even if I had access to a phone, which I didn't, I wouldn't know how to contact him.
He could call me, though.
It was an absurd thing to crave. We didn't have a phone in the apartment.
Cadets weren't permitted them, and the few lines in the Citadel ran through the command floors and were monitored, but Alar was a prince.
He could call from anywhere. From a station along the road, from an inn, or an outpost. He had the rank to demand a line, and for one wishful moment, I allowed myself to imagine the luxury of hearing his voice come down a wire from however many hundreds of kilometers now lay between us.
But perhaps it was a mercy that a phone call wasn't possible unless it was an emergency.
If I heard his voice, I would shatter. The numbness could hold against his empty chair, the half-empty wardrobe, and the stack of his portraits pinned to my wall, but it would not hold against the actual sound of his voice.
Letters I could survive because they were slow to arrive and didn't demand an immediate response. I could take my time and armor up before reading them. An actual conversation would wreck me, breaking through every shield I'd managed to erect.
After breakfast, we headed out to our first class, which was history. Usually, I enjoyed analyzing old battles, but that was when I'd still found things like that fascinating. Now I just wanted to sit in my room and sketch because it was the only activity that brought me solace.
Regrettably, skipping classes was not an option, not even for the Hero of Elucia.
The instructor was a visiting officer from the infantry, a weathered man who'd been brought in to teach us how the war looked from the ground, where the people we were entrusted to protect fought.
He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his legs planted like fence posts, and he described massacres in the same flat tone he described armored transport vehicles.
He was walking us through another Shedun raid when the door opened.
A second-year cadet slipped in, and I recognized him. Desin, Saphir's aide. He crossed to the front, murmured something, and handed the major a folded note.
Reading it, the man's flat expression didn't change. Then he looked up and scanned the room until he found me.
"Cadet Strom. You're wanted in the shaman's office," the major said. "You should take your things. I doubt you'll be back before the class is over."
I gathered my notebook and my pencils, aware of the murmurs behind me.
Everyone knew Alar was gone, but they didn't know why or how.
I hadn't volunteered the information, and neither had my friends, and the rumor mill was working overtime, with everyone floating theories about why Alar had been expelled and whether it was my fault because I no longer wanted him.
I kept my chin up and walked out.
I'd thought Saphir had forgotten about me.
A week had passed since Alar left, and in all that time the shaman hadn't come to comfort me or offer some words of wisdom as I'd foolishly expected.
I'd thought he cared about me, the one who was supposed to become his apprentice, the future shaman of Elucia.
I'd listened for the knock that first awful day, certain he would appear in the doorway with Moki on his shoulder, that twinkle in his eye that made him look perpetually amused, and some platitude meant to comfort me.
He hadn't come, and it stung, one more small thing on top of the much larger thing.
The others had done what they could. Shovia had been a lifesaver.
She'd come to my room to talk about Zarathen, about Codric, about some idiotic thing a cadet had said at dinner, anything to give my mind a different track to run on.
She wasn't gentle about it because she didn't do gentle.
But she'd shown up, she'd been there for me, and that was what mattered.
Ravel wasn't much help either, but not for lack of empathy. We just didn't have any opportunities to talk privately because I no longer sat behind him or in front of him on Onyx's back. Nowadays we practiced flying in formation on the backs of our own dragons, and Ravel just supervised.
He'd asked how I was doing, and I'd said fine, and that had been all.
The biggest help was Morgateth, not because he offered any words of comfort or pushed warmth at me the way Onyx used to do, but because he was there, vast and full of power that I could siphon whenever I needed it. So far, though, I had not drawn on it for anything other than regular maintenance.
Thankfully, I hadn't had any prophetic dreams, not about Alar and not about anyone or anything else, not even after resuming the tea.
Perhaps my grief, and later my numbness, had been in the way. Perhaps the universe didn't speak to people whose minds were full of dark clouds.