Michelle Sagara - Cast In Secret

They had no escort as they emerged from the large, rounded dwelling. Epharim was gone, and no one in armor stood ready to take his place. Kaylin was nonplussed. “She chose to let us walk here,” Severn told her.

“She didn’t seem to worry about you.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We’ve met before,” he replied carefully. Where carefully meant completely neutrally in that don’t-ask-me-questions way. “I am not, perhaps, the ideal person from whom to draw information, but neither was I afraid of her, or her kin. They can’t create memories,” he added. “They can’t erase them. And what happened, happened.”

“I’m not proud of a lot of my ‘what happeneds,’” Kaylin said in a quiet voice. “If I wanted people to know, I’d tell them.”

“That is a luxury,” he told her as he continued to walk. “And a daydream. Learn to care less about what other people think.”

“I don’t want my life paraded through the office like yesterday’s gossip.”

“It already is yesterday’s gossip.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do. I don’t agree with you, but I do know what you mean. We don’t have privacy, Kaylin. We have the illusion of privacy. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And we have no secrets?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t want my children to know—to know about things that I’ve done.” She thought of the Foundling Halls, and the children she visited there. Shuddered to think of how much it would hurt them to know what she was capable of.

“That, I understand. Children are very absolute in their judgment. Do you truly think she would tell them?”

“Not her.”

“And the others?”

Kaylin cursed in Leontine. “Not them. But the people they inform—”

“Would you change your past?”

“Parts of it. In a heartbeat.”

He shrugged again.

“You wouldn’t?”

“I can’t. I don’t waste time thinking about changing what can’t be changed.”

“And you’re never afraid that someone will judge you? That they won’t misunderstand you or misconstrue you as you are now?”

“People judge me all the time. Be careful of that,” he added, pointing at a trellis that grew near the roadside. Vines were wrapped around it, and they rustled in the nonexistent breeze.

“But they don’t have the right—”

“They have the right to form their own opinions. I have the right to disagree with them in a fashion that doesn’t break the Imperial Laws.”

“But—”

“I’m not afraid of the judgment of strangers,” he told her quietly. “I live with my own judgment. That’s enough. And I judge others, and live by those judgments, as well.”

“I don’t—” want to be despised or hated. She couldn’t quite frame the words with her lips, they sounded so pathetic as a thought.

But Severn had her name; she felt it tug between them, its foreign syllables not so much a sound as a texture. Ellariayn.

He 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.