He made, in Kaylin’s parlance, a face. “Like the High Halls. Or like Sedarias’s home.” Terrano didn’t ask why Teela’s rooms were different; he knew. These were the rooms in which Teela’s mother had been happiest, and in which Teela had therefore been happy. At a remove of centuries, she could not recall the emotion of happiness; she merely knew that it had existed.
She wondered, then, about happiness, sorrow, hatred, love. She had Barrani memory; the slow decline of mortal memories did not plague her. She could remember every incident that led from the green to Helen. She could clearly remember her mother’s face, her mother’s voice, her mother’s quiet presence. But although she had those memories, she could not experience them as if she were, once again, that child.
Not even here. She headed to the room with the large bath. Water was—of course it was—warmed and ready; she divested herself of the court clothing that she had grown to loathe, and slid immediately into the soothing waters.
Terrano sat on the ground. The bath was built into the floor; it did not rise above it, as small mortal baths often did. He removed shoes—without actually touching them—and slid his feet into the water as well; his palms were flat to either side of him. He said nothing.
Teela understood that he would say nothing, until and unless she broke the silence. She therefore chose her words with care. “Thank you.” Her voice was soft. She stared at the surface of the water, at the eddies that did not break the stillness completely.
“For what?”
“For waiting.”
“You didn’t seem all that happy to see me, that I recall.”
“I was shocked to see you. I was—” Teela shook her head. “Understand that I am not considered young by any of the Barrani. A handful remember me in my distant youth—but it is distant, for both me and that handful.” She bent her head. “Mandoran told me that it was you. You believed that you could find me. You believed that you could bring me...home.”
Silence.
“I learned to live without you. I learned,” Teela continued, her voice still soft, shorn of edge, “to live the life that was left to me after the green. I was angry,” she added. “I hated my father, and I used the hatred to keep going. The first time—the first time I returned to the green, I had hope. I was chosen to play a part in the regalia. I believed—” She laughed, a brief, bitter bite of sound. “But you were still lost. Whatever role I was given, it was not, somehow, to free you all. I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For failing you. For giving up. Because I did. I gave up on everything. I learned to live in isolation. I learned to live without your names and your voices. I made a place in the world that was my shape, and my size. But...I never forgot.”
He was silent, lost in his own thoughts, his eyes becoming eyes that no Barrani naturally possessed; the color was wrong.
“You never forgot. But you never gave up, either. I don’t approve of what you did, but at the same time, I am oddly grateful. You kept faith when I had all but lost it.”
His expression was haunted. To Teela, he was the Terrano of that distant, irretrievable past.
“What was it like?” he finally asked.
And Teela, understanding the question he did not ask, said, “I think you’re starting to know. Only the two of us, now, have lived outside of what Kaylin calls the cohort.”
“You’re not on the outside, anymore.”
She closed her eyes. Opened them again, and gave up on the bath. Dripping water until she could reach towels, she held her breath, and when she chose to exhale, words accompanied it. “I am on the outside,” she said quietly. Before Terrano could protest—and he seemed very much of a mind to do so—she lifted a hand. “I can hear them, now. If I listen. And they can hear me, if I so choose.
“You never did that. You never, ever shut them out.”
He was staring at her as she turned fully to face him, his confusion evident on his face.
“For centuries, I woke to the remembered sound of your voices. I woke to my own nightmares. Losing you all was like losing the best and most important parts of myself. I thought I would die. I expected it would kill me. It didn’t. It just caused pain.” Wrapped in towels, she headed toward her bedroom, bypassing Tain’s. “It caused pain and loss for a century. I think the reason I hated my father so much by the end was not just for his murder of my mother; it was for the murder of all the love that I had ever known.”
His silence was textured now as he considered her words. She turned away from him, heading toward the bed, where she threw herself across its covers almost bonelessly, and rolled over to stare at the twining vines above her head.
“I am part of the cohort. Because of Kaylin, because of you, because of the choices made, I am part of it. My name is known—to them, to the people to whom I willingly surrendered it.
“But I am not the Teela I was when I did surrender my name. I didn’t grow with the cohort—as you did. I didn’t learn what the cohort learned. I didn’t become so enmeshed in the thoughts of the others that I could not always separate their thoughts from my own.”
“There wasn’t any need to do that.”
“No? Perhaps not. If all I was left, on the day my father pulled me from the Hallionne, was privacy, it’s a cage that I grew to rely on. To even, in some ways, depend on.” She held up an arm, and Terrano joined her. He was like a cat, she thought, or a puppy. She held him, as she would have held either. As she had sometimes held Kaylin on the nights when Kaylin’s nightmares had been too harsh, too extreme. She had always told Kaylin that this was practical—Kaylin without sleep was an absolute misery for anyone who had to endure her—but Kaylin had not entirely believed it. Probably because it wasn’t true.
He curled into the arm she had held out, and she lowered it around him. The child that Kaylin had once been was not quite gone, but almost, and so quickly.
“You didn’t want to stay,” she said softly, into his hair; he had buried his face, and therefore all traces of his expression.
“I didn’t want to be caged,” he whispered. “I thought—”
“You didn’t think.” She said it fondly; it was an echo of every word she had offered to one scrawny, angry, mortal. “You went out into the universe. You went out into the unknown. Sedarias wanted, so badly, to join you.”
“She would have hated it,” he said.
“Oh?”
“We would have been together, but only the way outsiders are. It’s the name,” he added. “It’s the name. Our names bound us. Our names transcended everything else. We were never truly isolated, because we were always attached. I don’t—” Silence, and tension, physical tension, in it. “I’m not part of them, anymore. They don’t say it. But they don’t have to say it. They try to make space for me—but I’m foreign now. I can’t hear them. Can’t think their thoughts; can’t make my own clear to them. They’re there. They’re alive. They’re like the people I knew—but it’s almost as if I can’t truly hear them, can’t truly see them.”
“They were part of you,” she whispered. “They were only part of my dreams. I am not at home, in the end, with them, either. But Terrano—they’re here. The part of them that you occupied is still part of them. That won’t change.”