love?”
“We do not mean the same thing by that word.”
“Very well. Speak of your meaning, mine is no longer an issue here.”
Scoros’s antennae waved again in the air, and Ybelline’s snapped back.
Grudging every word, and speaking in the stilted way of Tha’alani who are using language they are not familiar with, Scoros said. “It is joy, to us.”
“And what do you love?”
“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our … husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”
“Plural?”
“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”
“I … see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly doubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.
“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.
“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.
“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.
“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”
“But they’ll be lies.”
“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.
“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.
“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”
“Why would you say this? You said you don’t care about my kin,” said Scoros.
“I don’t care if they hate me,” he replied mildly. “It would hardly be the first time someone has. But … I do care about the city. I don’t want it torn apart by riots. I don’t want to see your people burned out of their homes.
“I can do this. Private Neya and Corporal Handred seem to have some understanding of your people, and they’ve been assigned to work with me. I don’t ask you to trust me. But the Emperor does, and in the end, we all live at his whim.”
Or die by it. Kaylin bit her tongue, hard, to keep the words on the right side of her lips. She thought Rennick had finished, but he surprised her. There seemed to be no end to his words.
“I admit that when I was handed this task, I did not consider it carefully enough. I considered it … political propaganda. Something useful for the Emperor, and of no consequence to the rest of us. Because of that, I could take … shortcuts. I could tell the easy story, pull the cheap strings. I was wrong, and I apologize for my ignorance. And I thank the Hawks for bringing me to your Quarter, because I understand better what’s at stake.
“I also understand that you are forbidden to speak of what actually happened … but I imagine, now, that what Private Neya believes is true. You did what you could to save the city. It’s not something I would have dared,” he added, “given public fear and sentiment. I would have holed up in my rooms in the Palace. I did, in fact, do just that.
“But from those rooms, I can now enter the fight in a different way. I will think about the Tha’alaan, and the tidal wave, and the fact that you walked out to meet it.” He turned toward the door, and then looked at Kaylin and Severn, both still seated. “Private? Corporal?”
Kaylin rose with effort. She bowed stiffly to the Tha’alani, and nodded once to Ybelline. But she lingered in the room as Severn and Rennick left it, and found that the wait was rewarded.
The Tha’alani, as one, seemed to shrink, their shoulders losing the unnatural stiffness of anger, their jaws unclenching. Their antennae were weaving in a riot of motion, beneath strands of hair that had curled with the city’s damn humidity.
“We thank you, as well,” Ybelline told Kaylin.
Scoros rose. “For saving our kin,” he said, “we offer no thanks—they are your kin as well, Kaylin Neya. You are the only one of your kind to be welcome in the Tha’alaan—and it holds some small part of your memories.”
She paled. “I tried—”
“Yes. You tried. And much was withheld, and we are grateful for that absence as well. But what you could not withhold, all can see. And believe,” he added, with a slight smile, “that all did see. They know you are not of the Tha’alani, and that you cannot again touch the Tha’alaan—but those moments were enough. They know you, and they will not fear you.
“But … your companion is both infuriating and surprising, and I think … I think perhaps we will trust him. And it is for that, that we offer our thanks.”
Kaylin nodded slowly. “I don’t like him much,” she replied at length, “but he surprised me as well. And as he can’t be bothered to be polite when his life depends on it—trust me, I’ve seen him with Dragons—he probably wasn’t lying about his concern. Or his apology.”
“You must join them. We have the Swords at our gates, and I do not think we will risk our own again until things are calmer.”
“Swords are better. They know how to calm a crowd.” She didn’t say anything about the most drastic of crowd-calming methods. She knew, as they all did, that
