Page 111 of Cast in Conflict

Teela took the same risk the rest of the cohort did.

Yes, and she was abandoned. And she survived.

She wasn’t abandoned. They couldn’t escape, at the start. When they could, Teela was the first person they looked for. Kaylin shook herself.

I want what she built, Ynpharion said.

Have you killed your brother and sister?

I believe she would far rather have Annarion’s troubled relationship with his brother than the one she had with hers.

If you were Sedarias—I know you’re not—how would you reach her?

The battlefield was the loftiest point of this barren place. You thought of it as a place where a war had been fought—and possibly lost. I think...

She waited. It was hard.

I think that it is a place that is precious to her; the battle is always fought. What waits beneath it is what you now fly over: a barren, rocky landscape where even water causes damage. Her life, like my life, was a battle. And if I did not have her power, neither did my siblings. It is the battlefield that you must protect, and to which you must return her.

But I don’t want her to fight.

His chuckle was quiet enough that she might have mistaken his voice for another’s if it weren’t for the fact of the True Name that bound them.

She will always fight. And the person she fights now is herself. You are afraid that she attempted to use names she knows against those who hold them.

She was.

That she has not done it before—or often—is a symbol of the battlefield; it is herself she fights, because that fight was the whole of her childhood until she met the cohort.

Kaylin said nothing, willing him to continue.

But the risk taken was the hope. We are ridiculed for hope, and often it fails us and causes us to fail ourselves. She does not believe it. And she does believe it. Terrano did not seem surprised to be here. What he said is true: this is what Sedarias is like. He cannot know her name, she cannot know theirs, without this knowledge.

I don’t know anything about you, though.

No. But we did not begin as they began; it could never have happened. I could not have allowed it. Were I they, I might have. He doubted it. She heard the doubt clearly.

I want the war to end.

Yes. I imagine Sedarias does as well. But we are also products of the lives we have been born and bred to live. This is the best she can do, for now. Perhaps, in the Hallionne it was different; there, there was no family, no Barrani enemy, nothing that could disturb the peace they built. But she is An’Mellarionne, as she desired. Everything old is new and visceral again.

And Mandoran had betrayed her.

That is the nature of our lives. What she expects—what I expected—is betrayal. To separate her from that expectation would almost be to separate her from herself.

She’s had centuries of no betrayal. She wasn’t that old when she was sent to the green. More of her life has been defined by the cohort than her family.

Yes. He spoke no other words, but they weren’t really needed. Hope is pain.

Kaylin knew this. She knew it better than anyone. Ynpharion disagreed, but silently. Hope is necessary.

For how long? For how long must hope burden us when it causes nothing but pain?

I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I just know that I tried to die—by Hawk, because I couldn’t bring myself to end my own life. This was not where she had thought this literal descent into the mind of Sedarias would lead. And because she was talking to Ynpharion, emotions she would have bet had finally died reared their heads. The Hawklord gave me hope. And I’ve carried it since then.

He said nothing as she continued. And I’m glad I carried it.

Perhaps in time Sedarias will be—but what you see now is a direct consequence of that hope.

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