The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,156

she would not speak to him in any other way.

“He asks that you listen.”

“What you say now is not something relevant to the Tha’alani,” she replied, the words brusque, her eyes green. “I am satisfied that you had no part to play in the long-ago murders, and I am unwilling to revisit them now if it is not necessary. I am unwilling to force the Tha’alanari to revisit them; one unguarded rediscovery damaged two of them.”

“Adellos commands you to listen,” he said.

“Adellos cannot command me.”

“He is castelord, Ybelline.”

“Not in any way that now matters. By our standards—the standards of our caste court, our people—he is too broken to continue to shepherd us. The Tha’alanari will not follow him.”

“Then Adellos asks. I did tell him,” he added, chagrined, “that asking would be better. But he said he can’t ask when there is only one acceptable answer. It’s too much like a lie.”

Silence. Ybelline’s hand—the free hand—bunched into fist before she once again sat at the table.

“I did not know about the Tha’alani murders. I knew, by this point, that the Tha’alani were feared. I did not know that they were being murdered in the city streets. Not until Adellos spoke my name. My True Name.”

Ybelline closed her eyes.

“He understood, better than Tessa, why those names must never be shared. I had not given him my name; Random had not given him my name, although he did meet with her in person. But Adellos understood what had happened, and Adellos found the memories and excised them. Tessa had hidden them—”

“She could not hide them from Adellos.”

“He says you are almost wrong. She was strong enough; she lacked experience.”

“She was desperate.”

An’Sennarin bowed his head in acknowledgment. “Tessa discovered that parts of those memories were no longer available in the Tha’alaan. Adellos started this work before she died. Before any of your people were killed. He understood what Random had given Tessa unintentionally. And he understood why that would be feared among my kin.

“I’d been open with Tessa. I did not fear her.” He closed his eyes, but continued to speak. “We were both too young. We were both naive. When the castelord found our memories, he understood the lengths to which my kin would go, because he was neither young nor naive.

“The first time he used my True Name, he was angry. He demanded to know what part I had to play in Tessa’s death. And Ybelline—I had no choice but to answer. He could have killed me on that day. He did consider it.”

She was pale now, almost colorless; her eyes were green when she opened them. “He clearly did not act.”

“No—because he knew. I could not lie to him.” An’Sennarin opened his eyes. They were blue to Ybelline’s green.

“He told you about their deaths.”

An’Sennarin nodded, his expression grim, his eyes affixed to hers. “He told me about all of the deaths. I confronted An’Sennarin—carefully. It was the first time he approved of my demeanor at court. He was—” Words dropped away. The Barrani had a memory that was akin to Records, and he was in the grip of those memories now. “He was almost smug. Condescending. He told me—he told me—”

She caught the hand that held hers with her free hand, sandwiching his between the two. “You do not have to do this.”

He shook his head. “I have been waiting for this day for decades. Because I visited Random. I will do this thing, and it will be done.

“An’Sennarin—my predecessor—told me that he had done this deliberately to distract the Tha’alani from the truth he suspected they held; he had done it to be certain that I would be free of their interference. I was in his debt. I would have tried to kill him in that moment, but Adellos took control.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ybelline blanched but said nothing.

Severn watched them both.

“Adellos took control of my body, of my hands, of my words. Adellos offered my lord the gratitude that I could not even pretend. Adellos asked if, now that I was safe, the deaths were over, the association with the Tha’alani at an end. Five Tha’alani had died by this time. You must know what the answer was.”

There had been more than a dozen deaths. They did know.

“An’Sennarin was angry. Angry and afraid. He didn’t know what the Tha’alani knew—only that they knew more than he could confirm. But he understood how to damage them. I think he would not have stopped until he was caught by the Emperor, or until the