*
Bellusdeo followed a circuitous route to reach the fires, which became visible to Kaylin only after they’d been walking for ten minutes. There was a direct path to Kaylin’s eyes, and apparently to Terrano’s as well, given the looks he was aiming at the side of the Dragon’s face, but both were willing to trust Bellusdeo’s greater experience.
Sedarias also said nothing. And that, Kaylin thought, was the benefit of living with Mandoran. His constant sniping—and to be fair, Bellusdeo’s—had rendered the gold Dragon harmless. For a value of harmless that suited a very large, golden Dragon with blood-red eyes.
They didn’t question her; even Terrano didn’t put his growing unease into words. And to be fair, Kaylin felt no doubt at all. She glanced at her familiar; he was slumped across her shoulders, but lifted his head when she looked at him. His sigh was audible to everyone present, even Bellusdeo, whose much, much larger head turned toward him.
He remained silent, and Bellusdeo returned to the task at hand.
*
As they approached the fires, Terrano grew more agitated. Kaylin was worried about him. Not about what he’d do, precisely, but about Terrano himself. Without thinking, she slid an arm around his shoulders. He stiffened, and she withdrew it, but Sedarias had seen.
Sedarias surprised Kaylin; she substituted her own arm for the one Kaylin had withdrawn. Terrano also surprised Kaylin. He didn’t look any more comfortable. “This is hard,” he said quietly.
“What’s hard?”
“This trying to be what used to be normal. It’s hard.”
Kaylin froze; Bellusdeo picked up the pace, forcing the Hawk to scurry to catch up. “You don’t know what happened when Annarion and Mandoran came to Elantra.”
“No, but I can guess.”
Sedarias said something in a voice too low for Kaylin to catch.
“When I first headed out into the outlands, I attracted attention. Most of it wasn’t harmful. Some of it could easily have killed me. When you’re searching for something—and I wasn’t searching for any specific thing—you almost vibrate in time with the world. It’s hard to explain. You need to keep that to a bare minimum if you don’t want to be eaten. But—it’s hard. It’s hard to do it here. If I were near Alsanis, I could just fall back into the places you live.
“But even if it was easy, it would be dangerous to do it here.” He hesitated. “There’s some part of me—of us—that is a little bit like Ravellon.” As Bellusdeo turned again, her draconic ears missing nothing, Terrano rushed to continue. “It isn’t about Shadow. That isn’t what I meant. But Ravellon exists here. You can all see it. I can see it. Ravellon exists in your homelands. Ravellon existed in the world the Dragon ruled. Ravellon exists everywhere.
“We don’t exist everywhere, but we exist in more than one place. We’re here, but we’re also there, where you two live. We spread. We changed. We grew. We had no choice.”
“An interesting definition of choice,” Bellusdeo rumbled.
“You would have done the same.”
A small puff of exhaled smoke, and then the Dragon said, “I would have done more, probably.”
This came as a relief to Terrano. The rest of the cohort expected it.
Dragon smiles—when the Dragon was in the scaled form—were not a comforting display of humor, but the Dragon smiled anyway, exposing very large teeth. “It’s necessary for you to stay as quiet as possible. When we reach the city—”
“I’m not going into the city,” Terrano said.
The cohort rustled; there was no other word for the wave of small movements that seemed to pass through them all. Terrano didn’t seem to notice.
It was Sedarias who spoke. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
The Dragon rolled her eyes and snorted smoke.
“I have no reason to go to the city.”
“Are you here?”
“Here is not the city. Here is not the High Halls. Here is not the hive of buzzing politicians and the families that tossed us—that tossed me—away. I hated it, you know? I hated it. All of the life I remember before the green, before all of you, was nothing but anger and bitterness, nothing but criticism. I was too frivolous. I was too stupid. I was too unreliable. I was too childish.
“My past is littered with my constant failures. I was a failure—that’s why I was sent to the green. And nothing’s changed. Nothing. What I want is not what they wanted, if any of them still survive.”
“They do.”
“They have nothing to offer me. They have nothing I want. They have nothing I ever wanted. I thought all of life would be just that, and only that—an eternity of living a life I didn’t want, until someone got lucky, or angry enough, and I died. I am not going.”
Betting? Severn asked. Kaylin was surprised by his voice. He was reaching out to her when it wasn’t a matter of someone’s life or death. The subject was not an emergency or an investigation.
Depends. Are you betting that Sedarias wins?
Yes.
Not touching it.
Coward.
*
Breath held, they finally reached what Bellusdeo called signal fires. In the distance, it seemed a reasonable thing to call them; up close it was in no way accurate. They were a far more livid red, in a landscape that was otherwise so muted in color it could be safely called gray. Even Ravellon itself was faded and pale. The fires were not.
Nor were they hot; they weren’t even warm.
“I would not touch those if I were you,” the Dragon told Kaylin. “And I would definitely avoid them if I were any of the cohort.”
Sedarias said, “Why?”
“You are not what we are.”
“We’re Barrani.”
“I am willing to entertain that polite fiction. But at the heart of this debacle is the truth. You may, of course, choose to risk it.”
“What do you fear it will do to us?”
“In the worst case? Destroy you. In the best case, injure you gravely. The fires were created as weapons against taint, against Shadow. And at the time, we did not know that there were Shadows trapped against their will in Ravellon, just as I was once trapped. You are not,” she added, “Shadow, or of those Shadows. But there is, to you, a taint that would immediately render you outcaste among my own kin.” She paused, and then added, “Taint is not perhaps the correct word.
“In our long history, we did not attempt to divest ourselves of the names that gave us life and form. But in Barrani history, there have been many such attempts. I would consider—pragmatically—that yours, as a whole, has been the most successful.”
“We have our names.”