Page 215 of Cast in Conflict

“He didn’t eat much,” Kaylin murmured, by which she meant, he hadn’t eaten at all.

“I see. Will you join us?”

Emmerian nodded, and Helen disentangled herself. “Come in, dear.”

Kaylin wasn’t surprised to see Maggaron in the dining room, although he seldom joined them without Bellusdeo’s express demand. He occupied the table, given his size, and looked up almost anxiously when they entered.

“We’re not supposed to tell you anything,” Kaylin said, when he turned his enormous—and worried—eyes toward her. “She wants to surprise you.” The words shifted the worry from one spectrum to another; he winced. “Yes, she’s fine. I’m not sure she’s any less angry, but she’s fine.”

He rose, scuffing the legs of his necessarily heavy chair across the carpet.

Emmerian, however, cleared his throat. “Would you do me the favor of remaining?”

Maggaron resumed his seat with much more hesitance.

“I see,” Helen said. “Do you think you’d like a drink if you aren’t quite up to food?”

Emmerian nodded, unperturbed by Helen’s ubiquitous ability to hear the quiet parts.

Kaylin looked at the Norranir and the Dragon and decided this was probably a more personal talk than she was ready for. She started to rise—a much less cumbersome and obvious motion than Maggaron’s.

“No, dear,” Helen said, before Kaylin could straighten her knees. “I think he’d like you to stay.” She sat.

Both Kaylin and Maggaron looked toward Emmerian; he had taken a chair and now seemed to be staring at his reflection on an otherwise empty table.

“I want to talk about Bellusdeo,” he finally said, his expression heavily implying that the words were harder to push out than the Shadows had been.

Maggaron didn’t tense, to Kaylin’s surprise. She did. Neither spoke, and eventually the Dragon took silence as assent.

“You have said that she wishes to surprise Maggaron, which makes the discussion somewhat more difficult, but not, in the end, impossible.” To Maggaron, he said, “I would dedicate my life—my personal life—to her if she allowed it. I have no desire to harm her. I have no desire to cage her—and even had I, it would now be rendered irrelevant for reasons you will discover shortly.”

Kaylin expected Maggaron to be confused; he wasn’t. “I have served her all my life,” he said, his voice gravelly. “And were she to allow it, were things in this tiny city to be more hospitable to my kin, I would never leave her side. But this city is...not what my city once was.” He spoke slowly, and he spoke Barrani. “I would only get in her way, here.

“You can blend in, Lord Emmerian. But...what you want is not what I wanted. I was her Ascendant—I was chosen for that role. I spent the entirety of my childhood focused only on being worthy. She is...difficult. Her humor is...” He shook his head, and Kaylin remembered the time Bellusdeo had transformed from Dragon form into a decidedly naked mortal form—and insisted on staying that way because it embarrassed Maggaron.

“I have seldom seen her sense of humor; I have certainly heard her sarcasm. I believe I could survive it.”

“What is it you desire?” the Norranir asked. “I could tell you stories of her humor.”

Kaylin lifted a hand. “I think we can skip the humor, for now.”

They both looked at her; they both shrugged.

“I could tell you stories of her valor.”

Emmerian shook his head. “I have seen that, more than once. And I believe I understand her anger quite well.”

“I cannot tell you very much. I am mortal, as Kaylin is mortal. You are not. The earliest of stories about her life in the Aeries of this world I have only heard secondhand; she talks very little about them. If there are secrets you do not understand, they are not my secrets to tell.” Maggaron hid nothing. He did not dissemble, ever. It was one of the things Bellusdeo liked best about him.

“No; I would never ask you to betray her confidence—even if I thought it possible.”

Maggaron nodded as if he believed this—which made sense, because Kaylin did. She’d seen people in her office fall in love before; she understood that “fall” wasn’t entirely a decision. Once or twice, she’d seen older and wiser people attempt to intervene; sometimes it worked and sometimes it failed spectacularly. From the outside, it had always looked like a type of fevered insanity that crossed boundaries and caused trouble.

Emmerian didn’t resemble the Hawks. She doubted that he could. But even thinking that, she remembered that he had entered her house in something close to raging panic because he was worried about Bellusdeo. He knew that Helen was a sentient building; that Helen could keep Bellusdeo safe. But the knowledge hadn’t prevented the panic.

And, to be fair, that was often Kaylin’s impulse as well. Teela hated it, and Kaylin had learned the hard way to sit on that response. Emmerian didn’t have Teela looming over his shoulder like a deadly older sister; the Emperor was decidedly unlike the Barrani Hawk.

“I think the war with Shadow has consumed some part of her,” Maggaron finally said. “But I did not see her before the war.”

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