Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(43)

Kaylin blinked. She felt oddly self-conscious.

“You’ve surprised her,” Teela told him.

“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Kaylin explained, feeling even more self-conscious.

Annarion frowned.

“Don’t ask me—ask Kaylin. Who can’t hear you if you don’t actually speak, remember?” Teela said. She folded her arms and leaned against the table. Tain joined her, speaking to her in a low enough tone that Kaylin couldn’t catch what he said.

“Perhaps Teela’s understanding of your tongue is better than my own,” Annarion said quietly. “But it seems to me that this statement is flawed. It is clear to me that you do not think you are lying; you must therefore be interpreting facts in a way that I cannot. What do you mean when you use the word friend?” All of the question was asked in Barrani except the one word. “If I say that I have few friends, among the Barrani, it would be inaccurate. In my life, I have given eleven people the whole of my name. I was not coerced. I was not threatened.

“Among my kin, eleven is a vast number. If by friend, you speak of that—the gifting of the name as a sign of absolute and unwavering trust, both now and in the future—then perhaps I am being presumptuous. But Teela has long considered you kyuthe, and you do not have her name. I have seen very little of your life, but Mandoran has seen more—and what he has seen, I have also seen.

“You have Corporal Handred. You have the Hawks. You have Bellusdeo. You have Helen. You love almost unconditionally—and that is reflected in those around you. When you say you don’t have many friends—”

Kaylin lifted both hands in surrender, hoping it would stop his words. She had never really attempted to enumerate her life in the way Annarion was clearly doing. When she looked at it from his point of view, she could see he was right. She hadn’t had many friends in the fiefs. She hadn’t lived there for more than seven years, but clearly her perception of who she was hadn’t shifted much.

Severn had often said she was too trusting. But the truth was—she desperately wanted to find people she could trust. She wanted to believe that people could be trusted. No one had ever specifically asked her what friendship, as a concept, meant to her. When she used the word, when she heard the word used, she assumed that it had meaning, like true words did.

But it was just a word; a mortal word.

“When I say that,” she finally told Annarion, “I say what I said when I was—was much younger. It was true, then. I didn’t have as clear a concept that sometimes even our own truths can change, with time. I’m not the person I was when I believed that. I’m not the person I was when I first arrived in Elantra. But you’re right to question it. It’s not true now.” She hesitated. “Where I grew up, if you had something special, you kept it hidden. You kept it to yourself. If you didn’t, you were likely to lose it. It could be stolen or broken. You never wanted to stand out. You never wanted to attract too much attention, because some of that attention would be bad.

“I think I say it now to protect myself. If I don’t acknowledge the things that are important out loud, where people can hear it, no one will take them away from me.”

Annarion lifted a brow in Teela’s direction. “She’s young,” Teela replied, with a shrug. “She never felt she had power—and only the powerful can claim power openly as a way of defending themselves. She is not Barrani. She wasn’t raised as we were raised—the scions of the powerful and the ancient lineages. She did not know her father; only his absence shadowed her life—if it shadowed her life at all, given the fiefs.

“We knew ours.” There was a curious, blue bitterness in Teela’s eyes and voice, and of course there would be: Teela’s father had killed her mother while Teela watched, helpless. The fact that her father had, in the end, died for that crime didn’t bring her mother back. Maybe it gave Teela a sense of peace or closure, but Barrani memory made that vastly more difficult.

Annarion said softly, “Yes.” His voice matched Teela’s eyes, and silence descended.

*

“I once envied people like you,” Tain surprised Kaylin by saying. He spoke, significantly, in Elantran. “People who had taken—and passed—the test of the High Halls.”

“Annarion hasn’t,” Kaylin reminded him, before she could bite off her tongue. What no one needed was an Annarion let loose in the High Halls. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

“I’m aware of that. Had Annarion returned from the green, he would have. His father, his brothers, his cousins—all were Lords of the Court.”

“Not all,” Teela replied. “Enough, Tain.”

“My father made no attempt to court power and significance in the High Halls,” Tain continued. “And for some part of my youth, I resented him for it. You would not have liked my father,” he added, for Kaylin’s benefit. “But I believe you would have liked him a great deal more than you would have liked Teela’s.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes. But I remember him clearly. Mortal memory is fragile, but it is not always unkind, in the end.”

Kaylin had never heard Tain talk about himself. Not like this. She tried to find something to say in return—something that might have the same weight and significance. She came up with nothing. “When did you meet Teela?”