Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(2)

She blamed herself. She shouldn’t have let Annarion visit his brother in Castle Nightshade. She shouldn’t have let him out into the city at all until she was certain he wasn’t a danger to others.

And you would have stopped him how, exactly?

Rationally, she was not responsible for anything that had occurred within Elantra. But as hers had been the hand that had rescued Annarion and the rest of his cohort from their jail in the heart of the green, her guilt had clear and undeniable roots. Kaylin attempted to push aside the feelings of remorse—they pissed Teela off when she was in the office, and while Teela couldn’t actually read minds, her familiarity with Kaylin’s moods made her intuition pretty much the same in practical terms.

The sounds of shouting that would have contained nothing but curse words in most languages diminished as Kaylin made her way out of her room.

*

The halls in her new home were in far finer repair than the halls in her first home had been. Doors lined the walls—doors behind which some of her friends now lived. Those friends were seldom in their own rooms, with a single notable exception: Bellusdeo. Her sole guard, Maggaron, had spent two weeks standing in the hall outside of the Dragon’s doors; he took breaks for food, but they were short and silent.

Mandoran and Annarion spent their days—and nights—in what Helen referred to as the training room. It wasn’t, as far as Kaylin could tell, actually a room in the strictest sense of the word. Teela—the reason that Kaylin had attempted to even find it—didn’t consider it a room in the loosest sense of the word, either. Kaylin pointed out that it had a door.

Teela in turn pointed out that Helen—whose voice was present—had had trouble giving the two Hawks necessary directions to reach it; in Teela’s opinion, the door had only been created as a visible marker. Helen confirmed this.

Regardless, although the two not-quite-Barrani boys had rooms of their own, they’d been holed up in a part of the mansion that couldn’t be considered home, Maggaron had been standing or slumping against a wall in the hall, and Bellusdeo had treated her room like an impregnable fortress. As housewarmings went—and Kaylin had only attended one, at Caitlin’s insistence—it was unsuccessful.

Kaylin, however, had felt at home in her room from the moment she crossed its threshold.

She felt at home in the dining room, even though it was large; she felt at home entering the front door, even though it opened to a foyer with multiple levels and too much light; she was even becoming more comfortable with Helen’s habit of treating her thoughts as questions, and answering them out loud. Tara, the Avatar of Tiamaris’s Tower, did the same. It was hard to feel lonely in this house. If it was also hard to be alone—and it was—Kaylin didn’t mind. Helen didn’t judge her thoughts, her moods or her achievements—or, more specifically, their lack.

“I would,” Helen said, as Kaylin made her way to the dining room. “But thoughts are not actions; they’re not plans. If you were planning something unwise, I would tell you.” This was demonstrably true. “If you were planning something unethical, I would also tell you. I have lived with tenants who have chosen to act against their own beliefs—and the results were not pleasant.”

“They messed up?”

“Ah, no, dear. I have had a number of tenants since Hazielle. It is almost universally true that what you cannot bring yourself to do—or perhaps to avoid doing—you cannot believe anyone else would avoid. For instance: if you decry lying, but then do it yourself—and not in the way manners might dictate—you quickly assume that no one is honest. If you betray a trust for your own benefit, you assume that no one is trustworthy.

“This eventually causes a spiral of ugliness and loathing. The reason I would stop you from doing something you despise is not necessarily because I would despise it. It is because of the effect it would have, in the end, on the way you view and interact with the important parts of your world. If you have no self-respect, your ability to respect anything or anyone else is in peril.”

Kaylin thought about this as she ate.

Mandoran soon joined her, looking glum and exhausted. Had he been mortal, she would have attempted to send him back to bed. Since he wasn’t, and given that he was up against the wall of Annarion’s frantic fear for his brother’s safety, she decided against it.

“He’s going to be the definition of anti-fun until we find his brother. I’ve taken quite a personal dislike to Lord Nightshade.” He pushed food around his plate as if the eggs were unappetizing. “If it weren’t for his brother, we could try to learn to be ‘quiet’ at a reasonable pace. The way things stand now, Annarion might as well be mortal.”

“And you mean that in the nicest possible way, of course,” Kaylin replied.

“Not really.” Being on the receiving end of Kaylin’s glare, he glanced at Helen; her Avatar had been waiting, more or less patiently, in the dining room. She appeared entirely unruffled by his comment.

“Look, I understand why mortals are in a rush about everything—they get old and weak so quickly that they can’t afford to take their time. We’re not mortal. We have time.”

“We don’t know what happened to Nightshade.”

“We know he isn’t dead.”

“There are worse things than death.”