Cast in Wisdom (Chronicles of Elantra #15) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,85

my time becoming a warrior. This was not the place, now, for us. You were impatient with the classes the Hawks required you take. You are impatient with classes, even now.”

“And you weren’t?”

“As I said, we were devoted to the arts of war. And then there was no war.” He bowed head again. When he lifted it, he said, “To my surprise, the Arkon—who was almost a legend on the field of battle to those of us who were learning—did not take up the reins of power. He was friend to the Emperor, and friend to—” He stopped again. “But his love was given over to the fields of study that he had, in his youth, most enjoyed.

“Our war had destroyed so much, the damage incidental; Dragon breath, Barrani magic, could turn cities into broken ruins. And did. The Aeries of our birth were gone, and the stores of historical knowledge they had once contained, gone with them. He is Arkon because he preserved those relics of great historical import to our people, even when the war was at its height.

“Those he kept. He kept what he could find. He kept things once belonging to societies that had departed—whether to travel elsewhere or because the wars had left their lands unsustainable, I do not know. And he returned, at last, to his studies, many of which are still a mystery to me.

“But when I met him, he was no longer Lannagaros of the Flights; he was a legend in my mind, only. What I had wanted to be, he had been, and he had walked away from it the moment he could safely do so. It had walked away from me. I was, I admit, lost.

“He offered me a narrow path through his stacks, both literal and figurative. He woke in me a desire to turn my thought and attention to things other than the war that had defined me and defined what Dragon meant. I will be in his debt for that for the entirety of my life.” He glanced at Kaylin, his lips turning up in a grin. “You have been remarkably patient. I am almost, you have my word, at your answer. But this is information that Bellusdeo did not know, and I believe it relevant to her, as well.”

“Kaylin will not interrupt you,” Bellusdeo said with the sweetest of her smiles—the one that carried the sharpest edge.

“The Arkon’s store of knowledge seemed vast to my younger self. It seemed endless; the exploration of it a work of decades, of centuries. I told him this one day. He fell silent, as he often does. But then he spoke. There was an Academia, a great school, that once existed just outside of the heart of Ravellon. It was there, in his youth, that he learned Barrani, that he met Barrani, that he exchanged sharp words and friendly words with others of his kind.

“He did not mean Dragons. He did not mean our people, although some of those were our people. It was there,” he added softly, “that he learned to read and to speak—with great difficulty—True Words. He spoke of it, spoke about it, with a longing and a passion the like of which I had never seen. His own collection, his hoard, was a pale shadow of that place, and his studies—as a singular scholar—even paler, an echo of the possibilities that once existed there.

“The Academia was destroyed.”

Kaylin wouldn’t have interrupted now, given the chance.

“Yes,” Emmerian said, as she hadn’t. “I believe that Killian, or Killianas, as Helen calls him, was that Academia. I believe the building you stumbled into was meant to house students—and did, in the years before the war. I believe it was the sorrow of that loss that drove him to become what he has become.”

“But...his hoard.”

Bellusdeo cleared her throat. “Lannagaros was always unusual. Intense and overfocused when caught in the trap of his own thoughts, his own questions. The elders in the Aerie complained constantly about it.” She smiled at the memory. “His concerns were not their concerns; they were appalled by his apparent interest in things of no use or no interest to them.

“He had very little sense of humor, and what he possessed was dry; he considered his studies, as he called them, of primary import. As if to study was to survive.” Her eyes closed, as if to shut out visual noise to all but the most ancient of her memories. “We were terrible to him. His studies, his