Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(76)

“But there is nowhere to move to.”

*

Kattea, determinedly unaware of the weight of the ensuing silence, busied herself with floating plates. “Gilbert asks a lot of questions. Some of them are kinda funny.”

Gilbert smiled. “I have come to understand mortality from Kattea’s answers. I understand that you contain no true words, no paragraphs, no stories. Such words do not form, guide or control the shape of your life.”

When Kaylin made no immediate reply, Helen said, “You have choices that we do not. The Ancients created us for a purpose. They devised the beginning of our conscious lives, and they saw to the end of them. Everything within the parameters of our creation is open to us. Everything beyond or external to them...is not.

“You have said we have the power of gods within our own boundaries. We do not. We cannot create life, although we can destroy it. We can speak, but if no one crosses our threshold, we cannot be heard. We have purpose, but it is a purpose dependent, always, on others.” She reddened. “And I speak, of course, for myself, not for Gilbert. Gilbert can move independently. He can make decisions that I could not, before my injury, make. He can make connections that are still, by my very nature, denied me.”

“Yes. Apologies, Helen. Yet if I can make those connections, my interactions are nonetheless prescribed. Yours, Kaylin, Kattea’s, perhaps your companions’, are not. They do not exist in all of the planes of being.”

“We have names,” Bellusdeo told him, her voice unusually gentle.

“Kaylin and Kattea do not even have that. Yet they think, they speak, they plan. Perhaps the wisdom of their plans can be called into question—but they have a choice and they make it, unhindered.”

Kaylin cleared her throat. “We don’t.”

“You do.”

“No. We’ve got choices, sometimes. But what choice did Kattea have? Did she choose to lose her parents? Did she choose to lose her home? Did she choose to be hunted by Ferals?”

“Kitling—”

“Did she choose to meet you outside of Castle Nightshade?”

“Kitling, I think—”

“He’s romanticizing poverty and desperation, Teela. If he’s going to talk about choice that way, I want him to understand what he’s actually saying. Yes, our lives aren’t predetermined. They’re not fixed. But we need to eat. We need to keep warm. We need to sleep. We don’t get to choose where we’re born, or how, or to who. We’re not guaranteed to get any of the things we need. We’re just as trapped by the things we need and the things we fear as you are by the words at your core—but most of us will never, ever be able to do the things those words allow you to do.

“If Kattea had met Ferals instead of you, she’d be dead. You’d never find enough—”

“Kitling.”

Kaylin stopped.

Kattea, however, threw Teela a look that seemed far too old for her face. “Why are you making her stop? She’s right.”

“I think Teela is concerned about the effects discussing your death might have on you,” Helen offered.

“Because the discussion would change it? She’s right. If Gilbert hadn’t found me, I’d be dead. If Gilbert had been a different person, I might be alive—but I might not be free. At all. I have no family to protect me. No one who would care if I disappeared. I don’t expect Gilbert to understand all this—he didn’t even understand breathing. No, I mean it. He didn’t. He didn’t really understand eating, either. He doesn’t understand family. He doesn’t understand anything. But Kaylin does understand. And she should be allowed to speak.”

Kaylin shook her head. “I think you’ve just said everything I was going to say.”

“I didn’t. Do you know what the two days before I met Gilbert were like?”

Kaylin closed her eyes. “I can imagine.”

“Gilbert protects me. But I help him, too.”

“And how,” Mandoran drawled, “do you do that? If you’re so helpless, so powerless, how do you help him?”

She flushed, but continued, her expression clearly shouting I don’t like you. “Because he doesn’t know anything. I explain things.”

Mandoran was clearly not impressed with the ability of a mortal child to explain anything. Kaylin was about to kick him when Helen intervened.

“She explains her life,” she told the condescending Barrani. “And it is her life, and lives like it, that are most foreign to our experience. How she sees, what she sees, what she knows, what she doesn’t know—this information is of incalculable value. Do not deride it. It is information that we cannot otherwise possess.”

“It’s not just information,” Kattea continued, with less anger and more confidence. “If I’m not with him, Gilbert can’t go home.”

*

Squawk.

Gilbert turned to the empty space occupied by an invisible familiar. He replied. Kaylin couldn’t understand a word he spoke, but the familiar didn’t have that problem. Neither did Mandoran, who joined in.

Kaylin and Kattea ate while they argued, as did Severn. There was no point in starving.

“Are they always like this?” Kattea whispered.

“Yes. And they can hear you two rooms away, even if you whisper.”