exactly, did he do?”
“He tried to walk through a wall,” Annarion replied.
“Let me guess. He didn’t bounce.”
“No. He did some damage to the wall, and some to himself, but managed to separate the two before more serious injury could occur.”
“Why in the hells was he trying to walk through a solid wall?”
“Curiosity. He’s been playing with shape, form and solidity. We can’t do it outside, at the moment.”
She stared at Annarion. “Are you telling me you can do it inside?”
“I can’t.”
“But Mandoran can.”
“Yes. But Helen says he’s practically screaming look at me while he does it. But louder. He hasn’t tried it outside of Helen’s borders. And he won’t,” he added quickly. “But he wouldn’t have had the mishap if he weren’t trying to do it silently.”
“Why can’t you do it?” Kaylin asked him.
“I don’t want to try, which is considered cowardly by half our cohort, and sensible by the other half.”
“I consider it extremely sensible,” Teela said. “And I’m sitting right in front of you.”
Annarion grinned; Kaylin had no doubt he was passing information to the rest of the cohort, who were across the continent. The grin faded. “My brother will be here later this afternoon. Can I ask you a question?”
Kaylin nodded.
“If he were willing to remove the mark, would you be willing to have it removed?”
“It would make my life in the office a lot easier,” she replied, then hesitated.
“But?”
“I think it’s saved my life at least twice. Maybe more. I don’t know why he marked me. I know it’s the mark an erenne bears, but I’m still not sure what an erenne is. I can’t get much of an explanation out of any of the Barrani I know—but I’m guessing it’s bad, because they hate the mark. Mostly, they’ve gotten used to it, though,” she added, trying to be fair.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I have his Name,” she replied.
Annarion and Teela both rolled their eyes in an identical grimace.
“Would it be easier for you?” she asked him.
“It would be easier for me if he’d never marked you at all. It is comforting to know that it’s only the mark, and not the rest of it; that you don’t really understand what it means. But, Kaylin—he could have made you understand it. He could make you do it now.”
“I have his Name,” she repeated.
“One of the reasons Mandoran is willing—more than willing—to tell you his True Name is that you’re not actually powerful enough to use it.”
Kaylin reddened. “I don’t think it’s about power, per se. And I have used someone’s Name against them, just...not your brother.”
“They were probably trying to kill you.”
“It makes a difference?”
“All the difference in the world, yes.”
“What I was trying to say was that if he needs to find me, he can. We’re connected that way, and as far as I can tell, there’s no way to forget a True Name. I don’t need the mark for that. Did he offer?”
“...No. I just wanted to know.” Annarion rose. “Mandoran is cursing. I’ll go and help Helen before he shrieks the walls down.”
“Not that I want to defend Nightshade or anything,” Kaylin said when Annarion had left the room, “but he had to survive centuries without his brother. He was outcaste. Is outcaste,” she corrected herself. “It’s not possible to be perfect for centuries. I can’t even manage it for a day.”
“An hour,” Teela corrected her.
“You know what I mean.”
Teela nodded, grinning; the grin faded as she considered Annarion. “It’s not enough for Annarion that his brother hasn’t harmed you. You hate the fief of Nightshade and what it meant to you. You particularly hate it now that Tiamaris has set up shop in the neighboring fief. You were afraid of the fieflord when you lived in his fief. You were terrified of the Barrani who served him. You had every reason to be both.
“Annarion is disillusioned. If you believe that that makes no difference to Lord Nightshade, you fail to understand the kinship they had in their youth. It’s not your fight, Kaylin. It’s not your responsibility. Nightshade is guilty of everything that has so disappointed his younger brother. Youngest brother, and only surviving one. So many of us,” she added, voice softening as she fixed her gaze on the flame of a candle at the center of the table, “slip away from the ideals and the dreams of our youth.
“Many of my kin are raised without them. My mother—” She shook her head. “Those ideals, those beliefs—they’re tested. They’re broken. We accept their loss because we wish to survive. And perhaps we accept their loss because they’re onerous, in the end. It is hard to live up to a dream, a daydream. We surrender, then, the beliefs. We tell ourselves that those beliefs were proof of our naïveté, our foolishness. We deride our youthful selves, because we’ve faced the reality, the truth. We all do this. You did.”
“I—”
“You thought that when you crossed the bridge, when you left the fiefs and the Ablayne behind, you would find paradise. A place where everyone was happy, where people were free, where starvation was impossible, where people would be kind and accepting.”
Kaylin flushed and closed her mouth. All of this was true.
“Experience robbed you of that belief pretty quickly.”
Kaylin nodded, squirming a bit in her chair.
“Not all of our early beliefs are simple naïveté, simple daydream. But it is sometimes hard to differentiate which are true, or possible. It is impossible for you to have the world-across-the-bridge that you daydreamed of with such visceral longing, because Elantra is occupied by actual people. People cannot be that perfect, even if every one of them had the same dream that you once had.
“We dream smaller dreams,” Teela continued. “Nightshade is being reminded, in a way most of us will never be, of what he’s lost. No; of what he surrendered. It is not comfortable. And Annarion is coming face-to-face with that loss, as well. The brother of his memories is not the Nightshade of today.
“But it’s possible that enough of what Nightshade once was remains, somehow; Annarion believes that.”
“You don’t.”
“No, kitling, I don’t. My cohort accepts me because I was their equal,
