The Emperor's Wolves (Wolves of Elantra #1) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,29

you stop hating us?

Honestly? I hated Scoros instead. For years. There was warmth in the words. Chagrin. He came to my house. I had hidden as much as I could, but there’s a reason the very occasional fugitive doesn’t stay in the quarter. None of us are good at hiding. He spoke to my parents. He worried at them, and they were afraid. For me.

And then he took me away.

I lived with Scoros for the next several months. And he began to teach me everything I know.

Severn interrupted. He taught you not to hate?

Not...exactly. But he taught me not to act on it, ever. He considered it the detritus of terror, of pain—the shadow they cast. And he taught me how to step out from under that shadow, because...it was what he’d had to do. He and every one of his students. He invited me into the Tha’alanari.

And your parents allowed this?

They didn’t precisely understand, I think, what it would entail. But Scoros understood what I needed, far better than my parents could. I needed to be among people who had experienced what I experienced. I needed to know that I was not...isolated. I needed to see that there were people who were whole, who had found ways to deal with and contain the hatred that grows from their experiences.

Her smile was closer to a grimace. We are not good at being alone. We are not good at being human.

We’re not really good at it either, if that helps. But... I think you only see the worst of us. Not just the worst about us. But the worst among us. Maybe it would help if you could... He trailed off.

Exactly. Even those you consider the “best” among you would not willingly subject themselves to our touch. They wouldn’t do what you’re doing now.

I’m not the best among us. Once again, an image of the woman—with fewer smudges but darker circles—rose.

She was dead. Whoever she had been, she was dead. But the grief that surrounded this face, this image, was suffused with warmth and regret; there was no lingering rage or hatred in him. Not for her.

She died eight years ago. His grief, while muted, was deep; it was not so deep that it eclipsed the memories that had, in the end, created the path that grief would follow. We don’t share grief. It’s a weakness. We don’t share weakness.

Yes, she said. I know. I don’t understand how it is seen as weakness; it is part of life, of daily life.

Fear was a large part of our daily life. She could feel a shrug, a deflection. He was aware that she could feel it, see it, and she felt him shake himself. His arms loosened, but he did not pull back—he couldn’t, unless he wanted to break the contact.

Our?

I lived with Tara, he said. Tara and her daughter. As he spoke, she could see them: mother and child. Had they antennae, had they golden eyes, they would have looked no different than the Tha’alani equivalent. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, faces wreathed in exhausted smiles and sleep. The woman looked up. Severn.

I scrounged for food. I ran errands. I did what I could to help them. And she kept a roof over my head. In the fiefs, that was not guaranteed. She gave me a safe place to spend the evenings. Where the Ferals couldn’t hunt. The Ferals loomed large in his memory; they weren’t so much creatures of the night as the night itself. Severn’s glimpses were imbued with the urgency of fear. Only in the later memories did he see them more objectively.

There were only three of you?

Two, he said. The word was a ripple of pain. Tara died when her daughter was five. She was ill. She didn’t wake up. Without her, we couldn’t keep the rooms. We lied, he added. And that worked until the money ran out—and there was almost no money to begin with. And then it was hard.

His words did not convey the enormity of the difficulty; she could see it fly past in memory and fear. He had been, she thought, ten years old—perhaps eleven—a child, attempting in some fashion to protect and care for an even younger one. But he was driven, then. She saw the edge of what Helmat had seen in the boy in that ten-year-old child. At that age, he had accepted—had taken—responsibility for what had become a family of two. A desperate, impoverished family in the poorest part of the fief