Cast In Secret (10 page)

“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.”

She almost took a step back. “We should go,” she said, her voice low.

His smile broadened, but it lost the edge, changing the lines of his face. “Unfortunately,” he said, “we can’t.”

“Don’t tell me – ” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“These are the two we want to speak with.”

It was several long, embarrassing minutes later. Maybe even half an hour. Kaylin hid it – if it was possible – by engaging the children who were tugging at her legs with their wet little hands. She joined them in their fountains, assiduously avoiding line of sight with the couple; she couldn’t actually watch them without feeling as if she’d accidentally walked into someone’s bedroom. Or worse.

And explaining
why
she felt this way was not high on her list of priorities. Explaining why their nudity was embarrassing, explaining why public lovemaking was unacceptable behavior in the rest of the city – the words came and went, and she knew they would make no sense to these people.

They made so little sense to Kaylin.

But eventually Severn demanded her attention. He didn’t speak. It was as if the Tha’alaan had seeped into his expression. He tugged at her name, at the shape of it, and she felt him suddenly, was aware of the way he was watching her, was even aware that he had been watching her the entire time she had been playing with small, gleeful strangers.

She hoped the two lovers had gotten dressed. She didn’t fancy her chances of normal questioning if they didn’t; they were young, and they were sun-bronzed and almost perfect. They were so wrapped up in each other – both literally and figuratively – that she wanted to go away and come back some other day.

But a child was missing.

And missing as well was a Tha’alani who was both deaf, and who had spent six months living in Kaylin’s world. She felt a pang of something like pity for him, for someone who had grown up among people who were guileless and sympathetic to everything. The world outside must have come as a shock to him. Or worse.