Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(99)

To keep Hasielle, Helen had destroyed parts of herself. She wasn’t, hadn’t been, in love with Hasielle—but the yearning for her had been visceral.

For how long had she observed Hasielle, without even speaking to her? For how long had she noted Hasielle’s cleaning and humming and cooking?

Kaylin looked at Gilbert’s profile. Gilbert might have been a cleverly painted statue. For how long had Gilbert been aware of Nightshade, in the dim recesses of an ancient building in the heart of the fiefs? At the beginning, he hadn’t even been aware of Nightshade.

But at some point in Nightshade’s captivity—and Kaylin could think of it in no other way—Gilbert had chosen to speak with, to communicate with, the fieflord. To do so, he’d had to invert himself. What inversion meant, Kaylin still didn’t know. She understood only that it was risky and voluntary.

She closed her eyes.

Gilbert is lonely.

Yes, only idiots would create something that got lonely. But...weren’t the idiots in part created because something wild and ancient and world-devouring...had been lonely? Maybe it was part of the essential nature of anything in the universe. Nothing existed in isolation. And maybe nothing wanted to. Not if it could think, move, feel.

Helen had observed Hasielle for a very small fraction of Helen’s overall existence. Thirty years? No. Less. Her decision to damage herself, to cut off her figurative limbs, had been arrived at without consultation with Hasielle. She had not, in any obvious way, revealed her presence, her sentience. She had gambled everything on Hasielle, on the hope that she could become the home in which Hasielle wanted to live.

Gilbert had actually spoken with Nightshade. He’d done so continually for three or four decades—if that was even accurate. And Gilbert had found Kattea; had rescued an orphan from the fiefs. A little girl whom he had not been built to even see—all because of that time with Nightshade.

“I’m sorry, Kattea,” she said—meaning it now. “I think you might be right.”

Kattea was young enough—barely—that the genuine apology made up for Kaylin’s earlier doubt. Kaylin turned to Gilbert, and the feelings of guilt evaporated as Ybelline’s knees buckled.





Chapter 21

She was there to catch the castelord; Gilbert hadn’t moved an inch.

It was hard to remember that they had anything in common; for one long moment, she wanted to deck him. But she didn’t have more than two arms and needed both. “Ybelline,” she said, urgent, her hands brushing the Tha’alani’s forehead.

Gilbert blinked. Well, he blinked with two of his eyes. The third eye, which had been more or less closed, snapped open.

“Yes,” he said, to thin air. “I see.”

Ybelline’s eyes were almost always gold; it was easy to think of them as normal—or normal human, at any rate. But when her lids fluttered open, they revealed irises of hazel. Kaylin could not remember what hazel meant in the Tha’alani; she imagined it wasn’t good. “I am...uninjured, Kaylin. Help me stand.”

Kaylin did so. Severn helped unobtrusively; Gilbert continued to stand, unmoving, as if people generally collapsed in his presence as a matter of course. Ybelline was not steady on her feet; Kaylin shifted position, sliding an arm under her arms and around her back, to brace her. Although she didn’t always notice this, Ybelline was not small.

“Come with me,” the Tha’alani castelord said. By default, this would have happened anyway, given that Kaylin was most of the castelord’s locomotive force at the moment. “Gilbert,” she added.

“Yes?” He didn’t actually look at her. Kaylin wasn’t certain what he was looking at, but whatever it was, he stared at it intently. The small dragon whuffled, apparently unconcerned.

“We’re leaving.”

“Yes?”

Kaylin snorted and looked to Kattea, who nodded and caught Gilbert’s arm. Gilbert blinked as she tried to move him—and failed. Kattea was not, however, a quitter. “Gilbert—we have to go with them.”

“We don’t,” he said, looking confused.

Ybelline turned to Kaylin and touched her forehead. He is not human. She used the broader word, the old Elantran one.

No. I—I trust him, though.

I think trust is almost irrelevant, Ybelline replied. But I will thank you for bringing him.

Given Ybelline’s collapse and continued shakiness, Kaylin had severe doubts that those thanks were deserved.

I am grateful. She was. It was so difficult to understand what I was seeing or hearing that it...removed me from the immediacy of so much death and so much fear. I am still...uncertain...that I understand what Gilbert attempted to tell me. I am also uncertain that he understood me.

He thinks he did.

Ybelline nodded. I do not think I will make that attempt again in the very near future. But oddly, it is safer to have Gilbert touch the Tha’alaan than it would be to have your Barrani Hawks touch it. Gilbert’s thoughts and beliefs would be very like a poorly structured dream—and we have those in the Tha’alaan, in number.

Where are you taking us?

To the long house, the caste hall. The Tha’alanari will meet us there. I have asked them to do what I have done. If I can touch the experience of death—and I can—I cannot examine it with the care we now require, not at any speed. At leisure, when this crisis is behind us, I may return to it. She meant it, too. But not now. We cannot, I believe, direct our future selves; their memories are much like our own: they are resigned almost instantly to a past we cannot change and must simply accept and understand.