Michelle Sagara - Cast In Deception

“If you’re all outcaste, you’ll never take that Test. You won’t make it past the front doors.”

“They can try to stop us.” Mandoran’s disembodied voice again. The splashes of flat color across the room’s walls moved as he spoke. It was not comforting.

“Kaylin,” Helen began.

“They will try. But you’re not the people they’ll put pressure on first. Maybe you’ve got no friends and no living family. Maybe you’ve got family, and they don’t want to give your stuff back. But Teela has friends. She has allies. They’ll start there first, because they don’t have a choice. They’ve already started.

“Teela may be part of your cohort, but she’s lived in the High Halls for centuries, on and off. She’s the wedge in the door. She went to the green, and she returned. She fought Dragons. She did it well enough that she has one of the three damn swords.

“If they can kill her, they’re free to shut you all out.”

Tain cleared his throat. Teela locked her hands behind her back, which was unusual. She really did look terrible.

“This is the only place you can afford to do this—and it’s hard on Helen. If you could please pull yourself together, we can have the rest of this discussion.”

“What rest?” Mandoran demanded, not really budging. Or not really staying still; the colors were practically vibrating.

“Your cohort,” Kaylin snapped back.

The rest of the colors bled from the walls back into the center of the room, as if they were liquid and someone had just pulled a plug. Mandoran stood three feet from Annarion, his arms folded in almost exactly the same way Kaylin’s were. His expression was grim, his eyes narrowed slits. “...Fine,” he said. “I’m listening.”

It was Teela who turned to Kaylin. “We are not in contact with our...cohort, as you call them. Helen says the lack of communication is not by her choice; she doesn’t interfere with us.”

“I contain the unintentional noise,” Helen added.

“You can stop communication between people who are bound by True Names,” Kaylin pointed out, more for Teela’s benefit than Helen’s, since Helen already knew this.

“Yes. But again, I do not interfere with the cohort in that fashion. I interfere—on occasion—on your behalf. You are not entirely guarded, and I believe there is some information that you have deliberately chosen not to divulge. I merely maintain some privacy of thought while you are within my boundaries. Teela is capable of doing so on her own.”

“I notice you haven’t mentioned Mandoran or Annarion.”

There was a small pause. “They are not, as you imagine, terribly private in their communications with their cohort. I don’t think they’re capable of it, but it is not necessary. For all intents and purposes, all of the cohort except Teela are like a much smaller Tha’alaan.”

The Tha’alaan was not small. It was a living repository of the thoughts of an entire race, dating back—if dating was the right word—to its creation.

“So...the cohort sent one message and they’re gone?”

“Yes.”

“Are they still alive?”

Mandoran was looking slightly stretched. Annarion, however, was looking entirely like his usual self.

Again, it was Teela who answered. “Yes. If Nightshade died, you would know. We know they are still alive. But that’s all we know.” She let the silence stretch again before she said, “I’ve lived most of my life without contact with my cohort.”

“But...you knew they were alive.”

“I knew they were not dead. But I knew, as well, that they were beyond my reach. I could not hear them. They could not hear me. I assume this was the Hallionne’s decision, but have never asked. I am not Tha’alani. I am Barrani. My life, my existence and my sanity are not predicated on my connection to the thoughts of others. There is a natural expectation of silence.

“Annarion and Mandoran don’t have that. The centuries I spent in the natural silence of my interior thoughts, they spent in constant communication.” She hesitated, glanced at Annarion and Mandoran, and then continued. “I am not sure they would have remained sane, otherwise. Terrano was the most...adventurous...of all of us. I haven’t heard his thoughts since their return to us—but neither have they.”

Terrano was the lone member of that long ago cohort who had had no desire to return to his kin. He had not reclaimed the name that had been his from just after his birth, and the names themselves were the binding that held the cohort together.

“Are you afraid that he came back for them?”

Mandoran snorted. “No. Look, he wanted—for us—what we wanted for ourselves. And we wanted, for him, what he wanted for himself. There’s no way he would come back, attack them, and carry them off. There’s a small chance that he approached them and attempted to convince them they’d be happier where he is now—but the rest of us would know.”

“Fine. What did they see?”

Silence.

“Teela?” When Teela failed to answer, Kaylin turned to her House, figuratively speaking. “Helen.” Her voice was flat; there was no wheedling in it. “What did the boys see?”

“They have been trying,” Helen replied, “to describe it.”

“They can’t. You can.”

“I can describe it to them, yes. It is not a matter of privacy, Kaylin. It is a matter of words, of experience. Something happened. The cohort have been learning from Mandoran and Annarion. They have been practicing to live outside of the Hallionne. But they have had less practice and less contact with people like you. The closest analogue is Teela, but it is hard for them to think like Teela, because to do so, they have to experience only a narrow range of their existence.

“It is like trying to pour the contents of a pitcher into one glass. For you, it is natural; you understand how quickly water flows. You understand when to stop pouring. They are attempting to do what you naturally do when they can see neither the pitcher nor the glass.”

Kaylin turned to Mandoran. She poked her familiar. Her familiar squawked and squawked again, like an angry bird.

“It is not that you would not see what happened were you there,” Helen said, after a pause. “You would. But you would not see it as they saw it. You would not understand it as they might.”

“If I try to stab Mandoran right now and you don’t attempt to stop me, he’s going to see it the way I see it.”

“Yes.”

It was Annarion who said, “No.”

“Did someone try to stab them?”

It was Teela who said, “I think so, figuratively speaking.” At Kaylin’s expression, she added, “Just because you can see what someone else is seeing doesn’t mean that it makes more sense. I haven’t had the experiences the rest of my cohort has had. I have had more experience with the arcane arts that are confined to the reality I perceive. I believe, if you were to venture to the location in which they disappeared, you would find obvious—and large—traces of magical aftershocks.

“It is possible that those aftershocks exist for perfectly understandable and harmless reasons—”

“But not bloody likely.”

“Not in my opinion, no.”

Kaylin opened her mouth. Before words came out, Helen said, “I believe Lord Nightshade has arrived.”

Annarion said nothing. Mandoran, however, said a lot. In Leontine.

* * *

By this time, everyone was more or less “stable” as Helen called it, and she ushered them all into the parlor. Kaylin would have preferred the dining room, but Helen chose to ignore those preferences, probably because Nightshade was involved.

Moran was not in residence, which was the one silver lining of the evening. The last thing Moran needed was the political infighting of an entirely different caste court, given her current position.