Page 94 of Cast in Conflict

No. But the area you are now in allows communication. I would guess it is entirely the prerogative of the Tower. Bellusdeo will know that you are acting, and she will find it insulting. Insulting a Dragon has never been wise.

No kidding.

She will take it very poorly if you express your current worry.

I know that.

He chuckled. You know it, yes. But you know other things as well, and they vie for dominance until one becomes expressed in action. I merely wish to add weight to what I believe the wise course of action to be.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to follow the Barrani idea of wisdom. Hope smacked her face before she could reply. Mandoran had finally landed. Not only had he landed, but when Hope lowered his wing, Kaylin could still see him.

“You’re a reckless idiot,” Bellusdeo said, as she slowly pried her eyes open. They were orange with deep flecks of red in them. But...they were orange, which was as good a sign as could be hoped for.

Mandoran shrugged. “How long have you known me?”

“It feels like centuries.”

Mandoran’s eyes were a midnight blue; they lightened slightly as he chuckled. “Right back at you. I’m always reckless, at least according to anyone who isn’t Terrano.”

“Terrano doesn’t think you’re reckless?”

“Mostly he thinks I’m timid; sometimes he thinks I’m a coward.”

“Terrano is reckless,” Kaylin said.

“He’s disagreeing. Sedarias still won’t give me permission to give you my True Name,” he added. “And it would have been hugely helpful, here.”

Kaylin both agreed and disagreed. But Sedarias—and in this case probably a good number of the rest of the cohort—held far more influence than she did.

She glanced at Bellusdeo. Mandoran had been part of the cohort for, realistically, all of his life. He’d known Bellusdeo for months. But...he understood her, and in the end, he’d risked his life to save her from herself.

Bellusdeo knew it, as well. She made no further attempt to harm Mandoran, and Kaylin doubted she would. Whatever she needed to bring herself under control, she’d managed to find it. She was rigid and draconic; she was probably still struggling.

But Kaylin had had days—even weeks—with that struggle. She’d once, when much younger, believed that people who didn’t lose their tempers just...didn’t have a temper. They didn’t get angry, because if they did, they’d be breaking things, too. She’d come to understand—probably because she spent so much time around people whose eye colors shifted with mood—that this was wrong.

People did get angry.

And they did lose their tempers—by which she meant, lose control of their own actions when rage was too intense. Sometimes it wasn’t a choice. But...most of the people she now knew understood that it should be. Bellusdeo understood it. And although it had been really, really hard when Kaylin had first encountered the Hawks, it was easier now. Not easy, but...easier.

What hadn’t become any easier was the guilt. Kaylin’s terrible choices had destroyed lives—literally destroyed them—when her fear and her own desperate attempt to survive had been the only driving forces in her life. Bellusdeo’s mistakes had allowed a world to be destroyed.

She was queen, or had been. The responsibility was therefore hers.

Tara’s testing had invoked the worst of Kaylin’s guilt and self-loathing; she had no doubt at all that Karriamis’s testing—aimed at Bellusdeo—had done the same. And Kaylin could only barely accept her own dark past, her own guilt, her own responsibility. She could not imagine living under the weight of Bellusdeo’s.

And yet, the Dragon shouldered it constantly.

“Yes,” a disembodied—and unfamiliar—voice said. “That is the weight of rulership.”

Kaylin turned; there was no physical accompaniment to the voice.

“I should not have let you in,” the voice continued. “You are Chosen; your duties are already marked. You cannot captain a Tower, and in the past, the Towers would have been ridiculed for choosing to allow you to do so.”

Kaylin was afraid, for one moment, that she would be ejected; she had no doubt that the Tower could do it.

Hope, however, relaxed on her shoulder, which meant he either thought it unlikely, or thought it would be harmless. Physically, if one discounted extreme nausea, it probably would be. But Bellusdeo would still be here, and Kaylin didn’t want to desert her.

“No,” the voice agreed. “But we can understand much of a person by the friends they choose. I will not force you to leave.”

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