Page 47 of Cast in Conflict

She was going to attract a lot of attention on her way to the fiefs. She was going to attract even more when she was in them. Kaylin exhaled; Severn offered a brief grin, but no words.

Maggaron accompanied Bellusdeo, looking far taller than he normally looked on the rare occasions he chose to leave his own rooms. Mandoran kept to one side of Kaylin, which was the side Bellusdeo wasn’t occupying. Severn fell in beside Maggaron. This wasn’t as hard as it might have been otherwise, given the differing lengths of their respective strides; Maggaron was used to walking far more slowly when he accompanied his Dragon.

“Look,” Mandoran said, breaking an unusual silence. “I’m personally sorry about what happened last night.”

Bellusdeo glanced at him.

Whatever Emmerian and Bellusdeo had discussed had caused her eyes to ramp down into a more normal, cautious orange.

Mandoran’s remained blue. When Bellusdeo failed to answer his peace offering, he changed the subject. “So...where are we going today?”

“That will have to be a surprise,” the Dragon replied, and this time she did smile.

“I think I’m done with surprises for now.”

“Optimist.”

Kaylin wanted the answer to Mandoran’s question as well, but left it alone. It’s not like they weren’t going to find out anyway. It would just take longer.

And she really didn’t want to set off either Mandoran or Bellusdeo in the city streets. Maggaron was already enough of a visual draw that people were staring, moving, or on the edge of panic.

Bellusdeo chose to cross the bridge over the Ablayne into the fief of Tiamaris. There were other bridges—and other gates—but Tiamaris had two advantages. One, its fieflord was currently still a member of the Dragon Court, and therefore beholden to the Emperor in a way no other fieflords were, and two, even if it was constantly under construction in one way or another, the construction spoke of hope, not despair.

There was more foot traffic into Tiamaris than Kaylin thought normal—but normal for the fiefs, or at least Tiamaris’s fief, had been steadily increasing ever since he made the Tower his own.

Kaylin mulled. Tiamaris hadn’t taken the Tower because it was a necessary bastion against the incursion of Shadow. She’d never actually asked why he’d done so; at the time, it was perfectly clear that he had made his choice, and only death would change it—no, that was wrong. Death would render it irrelevant.

Sedarias’s desire to have a Tower of their own made sense to Kaylin. In the early days of her childhood and youth, she would have wanted the same thing.

It was entirely possible that the person who the Tower accepted would be like Tiamaris or Sedarias, not like Bellusdeo. The decision, given Kaylin’s limited experience, seemed to be in the hands of the Tower, not the Dragon or the Barrani. And that made sense because it was the Tower who was going to have to live with the captain. If the Towers weren’t sentient, it wouldn’t matter.

But Tara with Tiamaris was happy.

Tara without had been on the point of breakdown.

“You’re thinking,” Bellusdeo said, once they’d crossed the bridge.

“I’ve been told it’s helpful.”

“To who?”

“Me, according to every pissed-off teacher I’ve ever had.”

“How did that work out for them?”

“Well, I told them what I was thinking and apparently that didn’t qualify as thought. So, probably not as well as it should have.”

Bellusdeo grinned. Tiamaris was a comfortable place for the gold Dragon. For one, draconic form was not illegal here, and for two, Bellusdeo could therefore fly. The airspace was smaller than it would have been over the city proper, but she’d break no laws if she chose to do so. Mostly, she didn’t, but she chafed at Imperial expectations, and here there were fewer of them.

In general, she respected—possibly even admired—Imperial Law. But forbidding Dragons their draconic forms was like forbidding them half of their selves. Kaylin understood the reasoning for it, and the Swords, if asked, would trumpet the importance of that denial for as long as it took to be heard. But their job was crowd control when citizens were panicking; Kaylin’s wasn’t. People were people everywhere—they strongly disliked anything that added more work to their desks.

Because Kaylin knew a lot of the Swords—as lunch companions if not beat partners—she had some sympathy for their position. Their position was guided by Imperial Law, nothing else. And people would panic.

Bellusdeo believed that if Dragons were allowed to be Dragons everywhere, panic would go away; it would become a mundane event, much like wagons in the streets.

Kaylin, as a non-Dragon, couldn’t agree. She understood why Bellusdeo hated it; she understood that, in Bellusdeo’s world, Dragons had been better than Shadow; they’d become a sign of comfort, rather than a sign of impending death. But Elantra wasn’t that world. Not yet, and hopefully not ever.

Kaylin had no idea what the laws that governed the Academia were; it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. “We’re not going to visit the Arkon?”

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