Page 18 of Cast in Conflict

“If you would escort them through Tiamaris, they would be grateful.”

“Barrani gratitude is not something anyone sane wants.”

“Ah, no. Perhaps grateful is a poor word choice. They are not quite ready, but if you are willing to eat an early lunch, they will join you.”

Kaylin’s sour expression, which she felt no need to discard in her own home, softened completely when Serralyn walked into the dining room—if walked was the right word. She seemed to be floating, and her eyes were so green it was almost impossible to look away from them.

Valliant, who trailed after, was more traditionally green-eyed; his eyes retained their flecks of blue. Anxious blue, Kaylin thought. Serralyn was looking forward to a future she had never anticipated being a possibility with open, unfettered delight. Kaylin thought Valliant was less trusting of the future—she would have been. She would have been privately certain that something she did would screw everything up. But Serralyn’s unadulterated joy was almost infectious—possibly because Kaylin had seen so little of it in her life. It was fascinating, and outside of her experience enough that she couldn’t even envy it—she couldn’t imagine feeling it.

Happiness, yes. Of course. But this...wasn’t the same. She had no doubt that Serralyn’s eyes would once again resume the familiar Barrani shades of emotional color. Life did that. But she wanted to enjoy what she could of this while it lasted.

“I hear we’re escorting you guys to the Academia.”

Serralyn smiled. “We have a couple of things we want to take there.” She lifted a strapped pack. “We don’t have enough—we’ve never had enough—to need an entire caravan’s worth of wagons. And we’re not the chancellor.” Meaning, no one would die if their personal items were somehow scratched or jostled. With the former Arkon, that had never felt like a guarantee.

Kaylin finished eating and stood, lifting Hope from the table where he was playing with what remained of her food. She placed him on her shoulder, where he slumped in a drape of translucent scales. Severn waited until the two Barrani they were to escort were ready. In Serralyn’s case, that was instant. In Valliant’s case, it was less so, although it was clear that some background conversation between parts of the cohort was in progress by the time he left Helen.

Neither Severn nor Kaylin had chosen to wear tabards, as they weren’t officially on roster duties. It was much safer than it had once been to wear the Hawk in the fiefs, especially the one to which they headed: Tiamaris. Tiamaris enforced Imperial Law within the boundaries of his fief, with a few notable exceptions—those governing transformation and flight above the skies of his fief.

Tiamaris did not yet feel like home, but wearing the Hawk’s tabard in that fief wasn’t an instant invitation to skirmish—at best. Since they weren’t certain to remain in Tiamaris, lack of tabards was a simple precaution.

Serralyn had brought her expression of excitement under control. Her feet actually touched the ground and remained there. Valliant, by expression, could have been any garden variety Barrani male. Neither received undue attention from the guards on the Tiamaris side of the bridge; nor did Kaylin or Severn.

It wasn’t hard to see why; Tiamaris, the Avatar of his Tower by his side, stood down the road. He was not draconic.

“Can you see what color his eyes are?” Kaylin whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

“Orange,” Valliant replied, in a voice only barely audible.

“Bad orange?”

“Is there ever good orange?” This was slightly louder, but it had to be as Kaylin had turned, once again, to face fully forward. Tiamaris didn’t move, an indication that he expected his visitors to come to him. Or them.

“You are on the way to the Academia?” Tara asked as they at last reached the rulers of the fief. She meant the question for Serralyn and Valliant. The presence of a Dragon had dimmed the green in Valliant’s eyes; it had apparently bounced off the green in Serralyn’s. She offered Tiamaris a perfect bow, but did not hold it until given permission to rise. That would have been overkill.

Sometimes the Barrani used manners as a social sword. Sedarias would.

“Valliant and Serralyn are, and they’re less familiar with the city, so we’re escorting them.”

“That is the reason for your outing today?” Tiamaris asked.

Kaylin glanced at Severn. “Not entirely. I mean, it’s the entire reason for Serralyn and Valliant.”

“I see. Come, let us escort them, then. We have topics to discuss.” In their absence, his tone heavily implied. Kaylin didn’t bother to tell him that it wouldn’t make much of a difference given Valliant and Serralyn were still living with Helen. Later, they wouldn’t be; they’d be the chancellor’s problem, not Helen’s.

“I don’t think she considers it a problem,” Tara said. This was surprising. They were not near the physical Tower, and certainly not in it, and while the Towers could observe anything that occurred within the boundaries of their responsibilities, they couldn’t or didn’t generally read thoughts as if they were.

“It does take effort,” Tara replied.

Any other Barrani would have been extremely uncomfortable with this obvious display of such invasive, one-way communication, but Serralyn and Valliant were never going to be those Barrani. Even had they been, they lived with Helen. They didn’t expect privacy from sentient buildings.

It wasn’t wrong to expect privacy when one wasn’t inside said sentient buildings, but they didn’t intend to stay in Tiamaris, and Tiamaris had just granted them the only permission they desired. Serralyn’s steps grew bouncy as they traversed the streets.

“You don’t need to take us all the way there,” Serralyn told Kaylin. “We know the way from here.”

Kaylin kind of wanted to see the Academia and its Dragon chancellor, but that wasn’t what she’d been ordered to do. She nodded as Tiamaris came to a stop across an invisible border that she couldn’t see. He could—and had—crossed it before, but only at need. This was his home, even if it was currently under construction.

The changes that had occurred in the past few weeks were obvious to anyone who had either lived on the fief border or had crossed it; the graying of all visual elements—buildings, roads—no longer occurred. The streets hadn’t completely shifted and people weren’t disgorged into entirely different parts of the fiefs if they simply turned around and walked back.

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