Cast In Secret

Kaylin was not. “You’re not certain it was an outsider,” she said at last.

Ybelline raised a golden brow.

“Epharim said—he mentioned—that we define insane, for your kin. My kin,” she added, “and I won’t argue the definition. He might be right. I’ve often thought—”

“Kaylin, topic,” Severn said curtly.

“Right. If insanity can be defined, it means there are, among your kin, those who are insane.”

“The deaf,” Ybelline said, and there was pity in her voice. “Those that are born deaf. Those that become deaf through injury.”

Kaylin nodded.

“It is like losing the ability to speak,” Ybelline added, “and to hear. And to touch. And to walk. It is all of those things, at once. It is the loss of kin. Many do not survive it.”

“And those that do?”

“They are our kin,” she replied, “and we care for them as we can. They have no place in your world. They are of the Tha’alaan even if they can no longer perceive it.”

Kaylin nodded. “What happened?” she asked again, but this time her voice was gentle.

“Mayalee is five years old, by your reckoning. She is still in all ways a child, by ours. She is aware of the Tha’alaan, and the Tha’alaan is aware of her.

“She was out, near the roof gardens of the center. It was late, and the moons were full—it was just after your Festival. She likes the Festival,” she added softly, “and although we forbid it to our kin, some of the magefire that lights the sky can be seen clearly from the terrace.

“So she went there, to watch.

“After a time, she climbed down, and she headed toward the guardhouse wards. She is such a clever child,” Ybelline added, and the affection was swamped with regret and fear—and a certain sense of failure.

Profound failure.

“She was not afraid, simply determined. Her aunt—I think you would use that word—headed out to find her. But before they reached her she met someone.

“A man,” she added. “He was not in the Tha’alaan, but Mayalee was not afraid of him. Not immediately.”

“And she went with him?”

“She went with him. Her uncles came, then, and her mother,” Ybelline added. “I was on call to the Emperor at the time, or I would have heard her.”

“How far away can you hear your kin?”

“I? A great distance. But it depends entirely upon the individual. Some of us can reach far, and some can touch only the heart of the Tha’alaan.

“She was afraid, when she left our quarter. She did not want to leave. She told us this much—but not more. We could not clearly see the man she saw,” she added. “And this—”

“Magic?”

“We fear magic,” Ybelline replied. “But it is worse—she began to tell us something and then—she screamed.” Ybelline closed her eyes. “She screamed. It was the last thing we heard of her—that scream. She is no longer in reach of the Tha’alaan.”

“She was taken that quickly?”

“That is our hope,” Ybelline said, but there was little hope in the words.

Kaylin was confused. Severn rose. “You think she was crippled,” he said quietly.

“We fear it,” Ybelline replied. “We fear that they damaged her somehow, to break the contact. Those who are powerful can sense each other—but even the weak can touch the Tha’alaan at all times.”

“But they could have just knocked her out, couldn’t they?”

“No. Not conventionally.” It was Severn who replied. “The Tha’alani would be aware of her, even were she sleeping.”

“But how—” Kaylin bit back the question. “Her stalks. Her antennae.”

Ybelline nodded, and this time, her face showed open fear.

They were silent for a time. Even for Kaylin, who had dreaded the Tha’alani for almost half her life, the sense of horror was genuine. It was as if she had been told someone had blinded a child to stop the child from identifying where she was being held captive.

“Why have you not approached the Halls of Law, Ybelline?” Severn again. Kaylin let him take over the questioning because he was so calm, his voice so soft, facts somehow seemed less threatening.

“We are not certain that it is a matter for the Common Law,” Ybelline replied carefully.

“You cannot think one of your own—” He stopped. “One of the deaf.”

“It is possible,” Ybelline replied. “One is missing.”

“How long?”

“We cannot be certain—but he was not to be found after Mayalee disappeared. She would not fear him,” Ybelline added. “She might pity him, but she would not fear him.”

“I’m sorry,” Severn told her. “I wasn’t clear. How long has he been deaf?”

“Almost all of his life.”

“And he has lived here?”

She was silent for a time. “When he reached the age of maturity, and the madness was upon him, the Tha’alaan itself could not reach him, as it reaches those who are not—deaf. He … injured himself. And he left the Tha’alaan, searching for his own kind, as he called you.”

“He injured himself.”

“He cut off what he referred to as useless appendages,” she said carefully. “And bound his head with warrior markings, so that the wounds might go undetected. I think he truly felt that among your kin, he would find peace and acceptance.”

“He wasn’t accepted here.” Kaylin’s words were flat.

“He was, Kaylin,” Ybelline replied, just a hint of anger in the words. “And he was loved. We would no more turn our backs upon our own children than you would turn your backs upon one born blind or silent.

“But he felt the separation keenly at that time, and nothing we could say or do would dissuade him. We are not jailers,” she added bitterly. “And in the end, it was decided that he might, indeed, find truth among your kind.”

“But if he was living here—”

“Our world and your world are different,” Ybelline replied. “And fear is so much a part of yours. He would be considered—would have been—childlike and naive by your kin. By you,” she added. “He was not the same when he finally returned to us. He was silent, and he smiled little. He was injured,” she added, “but we did not ask him by what, or how. He did not desire us to know.

“He was ashamed, I think,” she added softly, “and that is almost foreign to us. He recovered here. He spent time with his friends and his kin.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Six months.”

Six months, Kaylin thought. Six months could be such a long time. You could learn so much in those months. Or so little, she thought ruefully, remembering her months on idle behind a school desk in the Halls of Law.

“Yes,” Ybelline said, looking at Kaylin’s face carefully. “He learned, we think, to lie. To smile when he was unhappy. To be silent when he yearned to scream. More,” she added. “But it hurt us, and we did not press him.” She looked away. “Were you of my kin,” she whispered, “you would know how much of a failure that was—we, who know everything, did not attempt to learn, to seek his truth.”

“But if he didn’t want you prying—”

“You think like a human.”

“Hello. My name is Kaylin. The last time I looked—”

Severn stepped on her foot beneath the table. Hard.

“You seek privacy because you fear discovery,” Ybelline told her. “And in the end? We let him be like you. We did not want to touch his fear, and draw it into the Tha’alaan. He chose to be isolated, and we let him.”

Kaylin understood by the tone of Ybelline’s words just how guilty she felt—but she couldn’t see why. So she did what she could as a Hawk, instead; she had nothing to offer the woman otherwise. “Where was he last seen?”

“His mother saw him,” she said quietly, “and those of his friends he chose to keep company with.”

“Was he behaving differently?”

“How were they to know? He is like your Severn in his ability to hide from us.”

“Can we speak with these friends?”

She hesitated. “They are younger than I,” she said at last. “Your age, perhaps slightly older.”

“So?”

Ybelline turned to Severn.

Severn nodded. “We are not here, I think, in official capacity. I doubt the Hawks would allow Kaylin into the Tha’alaan as a representative in any case. Her dislike and her fear are well known.”

Ybelline said, “It is a deep fear, but it is a narrow one. There are things she fears more, and in the end, things she loves more. I am willing to trust her. Are you?”

Severn nodded. “With my life,” he said, an odd smile on his lips. “She’s not noted for being all that careful with her own, however.” He rose and approached Ybelline, his back toward Kaylin. “Show me,” he said quietly. “Show me who his friends are, and where we might find them.”

Kaylin rose, as well, moving slightly, so she could see them in profile. Could watch Ybelline lift her face, could see the fluttery movement of her dreaded antennae as they brushed the surface of Severn’s forehead in a light caress.

Kaylin shuddered, but Severn merely closed his eyes and nodded. There were whole days where she didn’t understand him. And there were days like this—where even the thought of understanding him seemed impossible.

“All right, you win.”

“We didn’t have a bet here.”

“What exactly is the Tha’alaan?”

“It’s their community,” he said slowly. “Their … living history. No, it’s more than that—it’s like a thought they all share, whenever they choose to touch it. The Tha’alani individually have exceptional memories of their personal experiences, and they share these. They share what they’ve felt. They can almost relive it, and in doing that, the community relives it. The Tha’alaan is like a collection of all their experience, past and present, living and dead, all their hopes, and all their fears.”

“I thought they didn’t have any.”

He raised a brow. “Anything alive knows fear. Ybelline is terrified now, and she is under some strain. She keeps much from the Tha’alaan and that is costly. Were she not trained for service to the outside—were she not schooled in handling the deaf, as we’re called—she would not be able to master her thoughts in this fashion.

“Not all the Tha’alani can. Some have aptitude, and those are trained and tested. Those powerful enough, they surrender for a time to the Emperor’s service.”

“Or to anyone who can pay?”

“No, Kaylin. There are perhaps one or two in the history of their kind who have chosen to work for the deaf, but they are the exception that proves the rule. Most of the Tha’alani would live forever in their own world, seeking no contact with any outsiders, were it not for the Emperor’s dictate.”

“They don’t want to do—what they do.”

“No.”

“But they do it.”

“Yes. Those who can. They rotate service—the length of time they can work outside of the Tha’alaan differs from person to person.” He paused. “Ybelline is very strong. Strong enough to be gentle,” he added quietly. “She doesn’t pity us, and she doesn’t fear us. She half understands.”

“She can … keep her experience of our world to herself.”

“Exactly.”

“So it doesn’t pollute the hive mind.”

He frowned. “They’re not insects, Kaylin. But yes, there are experiences that they would never otherwise have, and only those who can live with the isolation of individual experience can serve. It is very, very hard for the Tha’alani.”

They had no escort as they emerged from the large, rounded dwelling. Epharim was gone, and no one in armor stood ready to take his place. Kaylin was nonplussed. “She chose to let us walk here,” Severn told her.

“She didn’t seem to worry about you.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We’ve met before,” he replied carefully. Where carefully meant completely neutrally in that don’t-ask-me-questions way. “I am not, perhaps, the ideal person from whom to draw information, but neither was I afraid of her, or her kin. They can’t create memories,” he added. “They can’t erase them. And what happened, happened.”

“I’m not proud of a lot of my ‘what happeneds,’” Kaylin said in a quiet voice. “If I wanted people to know, I’d tell them.”

“That is a luxury,” he told her as he continued to walk. “And a daydream. Learn to care less about what other people think.”

“I don’t want my life paraded through the office like yesterday’s gossip.”

“It already is yesterday’s gossip.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do. I don’t agree with you, but I do know what you mean. We don’t have privacy, Kaylin. We have the illusion of privacy. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And we have no secrets?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t want my children to know—to know about things that I’ve done.” She thought of the Foundling Halls, and the children she visited there. Shuddered to think of how much it would hurt them to know what she was capable of.

“That, I understand. Children are very absolute in their judgment. Do you truly think she would tell them?”

“Not her.”

“And the others?”

Kaylin cursed in Leontine. “Not them. But the people they inform—”

“Would you change your past?”

“Parts of it. In a heartbeat.”

He shrugged again.

“You wouldn’t?”

“I can’t. I don’t waste time thinking about changing what can’t be changed.”

“And you’re never afraid that someone will judge you? That they won’t misunderstand you or misconstrue you as you are now?”

“People judge me all the time. Be careful of that,” he added, pointing at a trellis that grew near the roadside. Vines were wrapped around it, and they rustled in the nonexistent breeze.

“But they don’t have the right—”

“They have the right to form their own opinions. I have the right to disagree with them in a fashion that doesn’t break the Imperial Laws.”

“But—”

“I’m not afraid of the judgment of strangers,” he told her quietly. “I live with my own judgment. That’s enough. And I judge others, and live by those judgments, as well.”

“I don’t—” want to be despised or hated. She couldn’t quite frame the words with her lips, they sounded so pathetic as a thought.

But Severn had her name; she felt it tug between them, its foreign syllables not so much a sound as a texture. Ellariayn.

He stopped walking and caught her face in his hands, pulling it up. She met his eyes. “Then stop despising and hating yourself, Kaylin. We’re not what we were. We’re not what we will be. Everyone changes. Everyone can change. Let it go.

“If you are always afraid to be known, you will never understand anyone else. If you never understand anyone else, you’ll never be a good Hawk. You’ll see what others see, or what they want you to see. You won’t see what’s there.”

She pulled herself free. Said, thickly, “Let’s go find these friends.”

Because he was Severn, he let her wander around in circles before she realized that she had no idea where those friends were. Because she was Kaylin, it took another fifteen minutes before she asked him where they were going. He didn’t laugh. Exactly. And she didn’t hit him, exactly.

But she watched the streets unfold as she walked, half-lost, in this section of the huge city of her birth that she’d never willingly visited before today. Saw the neatly tended houses, the profusion of green that seemed to be a small jungle around the rounded domes. If there was order to it, it wasn’t the kind of order that the human nobility favored; each garden—if that was the right word—was its own small wilderness.

Every so often she could see one of the Tha’alani, dressed in a summer smock that seemed so normal it looked out of place, kneeling on the ground, entwined by vines and flowers. They were working, watering, tending; they didn’t even look up as she and Severn passed.

The children often did, and one or two of them waved, jumping up and down to catch her attention. She had the impression of chatter and noise, but they were almost silent, and their little antennae waved in time with their energetic, stubby hands. They were curious, she thought, but they weren’t in any way afraid. And they were happy.

She waved back. Severn didn’t. But he walked more slowly, and as he did, the nature of the streets changed, widening as they walked. The greenery grew sparser—if things that grew could be sparse in this place—and the buildings grew larger, although they never lost their rounded curves. Street lamps, guttered by sun, stretched upward along the roadside; even the Tha’alani couldn’t see in the dark, it seemed.

“Where are we going? The market?”

He nodded slowly. “The market is there,” he said.

She recognized evasion when she heard it. But she was now curious herself; markets were markets, but the streets here were not so crowded as the streets surrounding any of the city markets on her beat.

There were children here, as well, but here there were fences. They were short, often colored by clean paint, and obviously meant as decoration and not protection; the children were almost as tall as the fences, and could be seen poking arms through them and touching leaves or petals. Adults came and went, and it was hard to attach any particular child to any of the adults who walked or milled around the street in silence.

And that was the thing that was strangest to her: It was eerily silent, here. Once or twice the children cried out in glee or annoyance, and the adults would murmur something just out of audible range—but there was no shouting, no background voices, nothing that wasn’t the movement of feet against the cobbled ground.

For the first time, Kaylin understood why she was referred to as deaf by the Tha’alani; she felt it, here. The deafness, the odd isolation her need for the spoken word produced.

“Where’s the market?” she asked Severn, to break the silence, to hear the sound of words.

“Beyond the lattice,” he replied, and pointed.

Fountains blossomed like flowers with water for petals and leaves of intricately carved stones. The slender spires of water that reached for the sky seemed almost magical to Kaylin as she stared at them. Small children were playing at their edges, and squealing as the water fell down again. No language was needed to understand the urgency of their pointing little hands, or perhaps all languages encompassed it.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Severn replied, using that voice again.

“Who were you hunting?”

“Someone who understood the Tha’alani geography, but not the Tha’alani themselves,” he replied. “It didn’t take long to find him.”

She knew better than to ask what had happened to the man once they’d found him. Severn had probably already said too much.

Kaylin approached the fountains that were spread out on the points of an invisible grid. She dodged a running child, and avoided a spray of misaimed water or two. The fountains here clearly did not hold the invisible Do Not Touch signs that the fountains in the rest of the city did.

In fact, nothing seemed to.

Do not touch also did not extend to do not wade, and several of the children who were too old to be called little and to little to be thought of as anything else were thoroughly soaked—or entirely naked—in the low rise of the water. They made the noise that the rest of the streets seemed to lack, and Kaylin gravitated toward them, promising to never again curse the sound of voices. Even when she was hungover.

But she stopped short because it wasn’t only children who were making themselves at home in the water. Severn bumped into her back at her abrupt halt.

Entwined, legs tangled, half sitting, half covered in the shallow water, were two Tha’alani who were obviously, but quietly, making love.

But the children played around them, sometimes over them, in their mad scramble to catch falling water; one or two of them had stopped to stare for a moment, and were still staring, but not the way Kaylin was. If her jaw hadn’t been attached to her face it would be bouncing across the slick stones. She managed to control the urge to grab one of the children who was watching and haul him to safety.

Barely.

But there were other adults here, and they seemed entirely unconcerned. They barely seemed to notice, and this was almost as shocking as watching the couple themselves, skin water-perfect as they moved. Their eyes were closed, and their stalks intertwined; they were blissfully unaware of the world around them.

Kaylin teetered on the edge of action for a moment, and then began to walk forward toward them, half-embarrassed and half-outraged. Severn caught her upper arm.

“Don’t,” he said very quietly into her ear. “It’s considered rude.”

“Stopping them from—from—there are children here, Severn!”

“Stopping them from expressing their love and desire. Yes. It’s considered intrusive here.”

“But—but—” she spluttered as if she were the one who was half drowning. “The children—”

“The children are aware of them,” he said. “And as you can see, they are not concerned. They haven’t yet learned not to attempt to disturb, but that’s expected of children.” He paused, and then said, “No, Kaylin, they have no shame.” But the tone of the words conveyed no contempt and no horror, no shock, no judgment.

Certainly no embarrassment.

“They want what they want. They are aware of it in the Tha’alaan from the moment they touch it. They love as they love, and it is considered as natural as breathing, or eating, or sleeping. They make love without fear of exposure because in some ways there is no privacy. The thought and the impulse is extreme, and it is felt regardless of where they are.

“But it isn’t condemned,” he told her. “Not by them.”

“But—”

“This is the other reason why the deaf are seldom allowed entry into the enclave. No race, not even the Barrani, can understand the total lack of possessiveness that this entails.”

“It doesn’t—doesn’t bother you?”

“No. But I couldn’t live with it, either. They are not lovers in the way we would use the word. They have no marriage, no fidelity, no sense of ownership or commitment. They feel no jealousy,” he added, “or if they do, it is minor. It does not drive them to acts of rage or despair.

“They have no privacy because they don’t need it.”

Kaylin shook her head, almost compelled to watch, and uncomfortable in the extreme with the compulsion. A world with no privacy? It would be like hell. But worse. She could never escape—

Escape what?

“Do they never get angry?”

“Oh, they can.”

“Do they never dislike each other?”

“Possibly,” he said. “I’ve never seen it, but I can’t imagine it never happens. They are not all of the same mind.”

“But they can’t hide it?”

“No. They don’t try.” He drew a sharp breath, and she knew that despite his composure he was not unaffected. “But so many disagreements between people occur because they simply don’t understand each other. Or they cannot see a viewpoint that isn’t their own.

“The Tha’alani never suffer from that. They understand each other perfectly. Or as perfectly as I think it’s possible to understand another person. They don’t get trapped by words. They don’t interpret them differently. They can’t lie to each other. And even if they could, they have no reason to. A lie is a thing we tell to hide something—and they cannot hide from each other.

“Love, hatred, fear, insecurity—all of these things have been felt before, and will be felt again, and all of them are part of the Tha’alaan. Long before pain festers or breaks someone, it is felt, addressed, uprooted.

“At least that is my understanding.”

Kaylin looked at Severn, at his expression. After a moment she said, “You really like these people, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “They’re almost entirely innocent, Kaylin. But I couldn’t live among them.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not. Because even understanding them, I could not live as they live. I know why you fear them. But between the two of us, you could live more easily in the Tha’alaan than I, in the end. What I want isn’t part of their world.” He turned and met her gaze, and his lips turned up in an edged half smile. “I don’t like to share.”