Page 77 of Cast in Conflict

“I have not gone, as you put it, blind at all. You will see that I still have all of my eyes. Unlike some people.” He too angled his body in Mandoran’s direction. Mandoran looked about as comfortable with this attention as Kaylin would have felt.

“Larrantin,” Starrante then said, “you said you have friends of this boy in your class?”

“Yes. Two. I consider them gifted but unusual.”

“Unusual?”

“Unusual for Barrani.”

“How so?”

“They are...quite young for their professed age, and their attitudes have a surprising flexibility. This flexibility would not be met with approval among most of our kin. I find it interesting. They have spoken about their unusual childhood,” he added.

Mandoran grimaced and Kaylin winced. She imagined that a few of the cohort had words to say about that and hoped that those words didn’t spill out into another middle of the night emergency.

“Very little study has been done to determine how the green in the West March influences our kin, but it has been the suspicion of some experts that the green is also a found space.”

“Might we speak with those students as well?”

“If they are amenable, and as my class has already been interrupted.” Here he gave Robin a reproving glance that had too much approval in it to become a glare. To Starrante, he offered an apology.

“I am not certain I can accept an apology that is offered without reasons.”

“They are new, and they are excitable. Although they have of course asked, they have yet to be granted permission to visit the library.”

“Ah. Then perhaps I will accept what is graciously offered.”

They must have run down the halls at breakneck speed, because at least one of them was slightly winded. Serralyn was glowing. Her eyes—unlike the eyes of every other Barrani present, including Mandoran—were emerald green. She was practically quivering in place. She did remember her manners, and she expressed such a profound sense of awe at her first sight of walls and walls of shelving that the Arbiters could not—or at least didn’t—find it in their hearts to be quelling.

“Androsse?” Kavallac asked, as Serralyn, dragging Valliant and Mandoran by their arms, headed toward the nearest shelves as if she had finally reached the destination of a religious pilgrimage and meant to share.

Androsse, frowning, watched them. While green was the happy Barrani color and no one present could deny that Serralyn, at least, was radiant with happiness, suspicion existed regardless. Kaylin was impressed.

“They are,” he finally said, “like Mandoran. Can you not sense the small disturbances their feet create when they walk?”

“She is hardly walking,” Kavallac added, amused despite genuine worry. “Do you not remember the first time you encountered the library? Has so much time passed that even your memory has become fallible?”

“I believe I had a great deal more dignity.”

“Ah, well. That is no doubt true. But I cannot find it in my heart to be suspicious of her intentions.”

“I am not suspicious of her intentions. But there are disturbances now, where the three walk.” He turned to Starrante, being possessed of only two eyes.

Starrante, his kinsman beside him, had turned in the direction of the three as the distance between them grew. “Yes,” he finally said. “I can see what you see. It is...fascinating. I do not think the three are in control of the effects they are having; they have them simply by existing in this space at all. If we were prudent, we would deny them entry until we better understand those effects.”

“If?”

“I feel that her joy is perhaps the heart of what this knowledge should represent, and it would pain me to forbid her the library.”

“They have no Wevaran in their history, do they?” Riaknon asked, watching as Starrante watched. Multiple eyes were now open across their bodies, aimed in all directions. Kaylin couldn’t make out distinct colors in the light but suspected that the emotional state of the Wevaran was not announced by a simple shift of eye color. But then she remembered Starrante’s eyes when they were red.

“None whatsoever that I know of.”

Since Kaylin’s response would have been that’s impossible, look at them, she was slightly discomfited by Starrante’s reply; it implied somehow that the question hadn’t been rhetorical.

“Do you know, Starrante, I’ve had an idea?”

Clicking became a storm of sound—one of those summer storms that dumps all the water in the sky in five minutes.

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