Cast In Secret. Michelle Sagara

of their arms, to keep him from strangers such as Kaylin, and that was answer enough because the child was impatiently waiting to be followed now. She felt the words, rather than heard them. But she would have felt them from any child, of any race. She might have been a little more careful in the southern stretch, where wings were not yet strong enough to carry a child who chose to launch himself off the edge in mimicry of the adult Aerians, but here, a fall was just a fall.

      She ran after him and his laughter filled the street, and it was joined by the laughter of literally dozens of other children as he ran past—other children, older and younger, and many of the adults. Like a multitude of voices sharing the same throat, the same joy, the same word.

      She caught the child, knowing the game, and tickled him, lifting him and throwing him in the air, taking care to hold on to his armpits. And on the way down, she laughed, as well, and her laughter was asynchronous, out of step with the crowd.

      But when she set the boy free and turned to face Severn and Epharim, she saw only joy in Epharim’s expression. No resignation, no sense of lost time, no judgment and no fear.

      And this was the part of the city that had so terrified her that she wouldn’t even look down at it from the safety of the skies.

      Epharim waited until she had joined them again and said softly, “You fear discovery. You fear your own thoughts.” And he said it with pity. Kaylin was not the world’s biggest pity fan. “Fear, we all know,” he added. “And we all know rejection and pain. But none of us have ever suffered this fear of being revealed, this fear of being seen as we are.” He was serene, and without judgment.

      “The children will not sense this in you,” he added softly. “They are not so powerful yet, and they are children. If they know other thoughts, they can’t be bothered listening to the ones that don’t concern them.”

      She nodded absently, wondering what it would be like to live an entire life in a world where every thought was known. Would it even be possible to lie? Would it ever occur to someone to try it? Would it be possible to love in secret, to desire the things you couldn’t have?

      Would it be possible to kill?

      Epharim said, “We are human,” but his tone was quiet. “And there are few of us who can enter your world and live with what we find there. Very few of you who could live in ours, and not be shocked or scandalized by what you would find here. We have very different ideas of what is natural, of what nature means.

      “But the young are the young,” he added softly. “And the child will remember you, now.” He smiled and said, “I think he was shocked that you had no ahporae. Come. Ybelline is waiting.”

      “You know that from here?”

      He nodded. “She is not far, and she is very, very sensitive.”

      “But she lives on the outside.”

      “She lives here. She travels at the behest of the Emperor. But Dragons are not mortal, and their thoughts are so vast and so strange they are more comfortable for us in many ways.”

      She wondered at a race that could find the presence of Dragons more comforting than the presence of humans.

      “There is very little a Dragon fears,” Epharim said.

      And she didn’t even resent the way he answered the things she hadn’t said aloud. Perhaps her time with Nightshade had prepared her for this. Or perhaps the child had given her a small key.

      “Fear?”

      He nodded.

      “It’s the fear that’s bad?”

      “It is the fear that is most common. We frighten your kind.”

      She nodded, and with more force.

      “Fear kills,” he told her quietly. “It maims and it kills. It twists and it breaks. And among your kind, fear is part of the foundations upon which you build all thought.” His face shuttered as he said this, and he looked at her with his pale eyes, his antennae drawn back and down across his hair. “It is why so few are chosen to go and be among your kind. It takes a special talent to dwell so long with your thoughts and not absorb them, becoming like you.”

      Kaylin couldn’t even imagine a life without fear.

      Ybelline’s dwelling was not small. It was a manor, but all of its surfaces were rounded; even the corners of the building bent gradually, and looked to Kaylin’s eye like a rectangle trying its best to imitate an oval, and not quite succeeding. It felt like stone to the touch, and she knew this because she did. But it was a brown that most stone didn’t go without effort.

      There were windows along the curve of the wall, but no balcony. Doors, the only flat surface she could see. Instead of steps, there was a ramp that sloped up gradually. Epharim lead them toward it.

      “You don’t have horses here?”

      “There are horses where horses are needed,” he replied. “But we find oxen more pliable.”

      “But they’re food!”

      He said nothing, but it was the kind of nothing that promoted stillness.

      The doors slid open—literally disappearing into either wall—as he approached. “Ybelline will be in the back,” he told her. “She’s expecting you.” He paused, and then added, “We understand your fear, Kaylin Neya. It is not entirely groundless. But if I have said we live without fear, I have not been entirely truthful. We fear your kind.”

      She started to say something, managed to think the better of it before the words left her mouth, and said instead, “So do I.”

      “Help us, if you can.”

      Before she could ask him more, he turned and left them. Kaylin looked at Severn. Severn was quiet and remote. “What do you think is going on?” she asked softly.

      “Nothing good.” He began to walk and Kaylin fell into step beside him. “You did well, out there.”

      “Hmm?”

      “With the child.”

      “The—Oh.” She opened her mouth and he lifted a hand.

      “Don’t tell me you didn’t do that on purpose.”

      “But—”

      “Because it doesn’t matter. Be yourself here. It’s enough.”

      “I’m always myself,” she said, half-ruefully, thinking about Marcus and the Hawks.

      “I know. I’ve watched you, remember?” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”

      “He was a child.”

      “I know. But—they were willing to touch you.”

      “No one touched—”

      “Your thoughts, at that moment. They all did.”

      She hesitated; a momentary revulsion gripped her.

      “They’re afraid of us with more reason than we fear them,” he told her quietly. “Study the Tha’alani. Those who walk among the deaf will come back injured, or insane—by their standards—if they go too often. They absorb our fear and our terrible isolation.

      “We’re a race of insane people, to the Tha’alani. Think about it, Kaylin—a home where there can be no misunderstanding. Where all anger is known and faced instantly, and all fear is addressed and calmed. Where all love is known, and all desire is accepted.”

      “Oh?” Kaylin said, after a moment. “Then why am I here today?”

      Severn said quietly, “Bet you dinner that it has something to do with the deaf.”

      “Meaning us.”

      “Meaning our kind, yes.”

      She thought