Cast in Wisdom (Chronicles of Elantra #15) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,80
wasn’t of a mind to answer, which was fine with Kaylin. Her hearing had recovered after the spate of native Dragon, and she didn’t need more loud noises bellowed beside her ear.
Bellusdeo began. Emmerian’s eyes were orange—more orange—by the time she’d finished; Sanabalis’s were closer to the gold end of the spectrum, although he was frowning.
No one except the Arkon interrupted, and he peppered her narrative with questions. Not all of them were meant for Bellusdeo.
“You could not hear Nightshade?”
Kaylin, mouth full, nodded and swallowed. “I lost him. I think I woke up because of it. But he wasn’t the only person who’d gone missing by that point.”
“You are certain Nightshade was in the border zone?”
“It’s where he said he was going. We couldn’t return to the building we’d left, or at least not quickly—as Bellusdeo said, she was doing an inspection of the Ravellon borders, and that ate a lot of our time. Nightshade wanted to keep exploring and searching.”
“You did not.”
“No—we came here.”
“And Nightshade?”
“Lannagaros, if you would allow me to continue, your questions will be answered. I honestly do not know how you can, with a straight face and sense of righteous indignation, tell anyone else to practice patience.”
He turned to her, but upon seeing her expression, exhaled. So did Kaylin.
Bellusdeo looked worried.
The Arkon closed his eyes.
Emmerian’s head was slightly bowed, as if in concentration. Sanabalis, like Bellusdeo, looked worried.
“My apologies,” the Arkon said before he opened his eyes. “Please, continue. I will reserve my questions until I have heard the rest of your story.”
Food lost taste as Kaylin ate, because she, too, was now worried.
* * *
Bellusdeo then continued. Kaylin’s eyes were practically nailed to the Arkon’s face by this point. She had seen him lose his temper before; she had seen irritation result in a face full of fire—luckily, Sanabalis’s face, not hers. He was irritable on interruption, and on bad days people breathing the same air was considered an interruption. She had never quite seen him like this.
Neither had Bellusdeo—but it seemed clear to Kaylin that both Sanabalis and Emmerian had. Sanabalis wasn’t even looking at the book on the table. She almost asked him what he saw when he looked at it, but Bellusdeo was still talking, and she didn’t like her chances of surviving unscathed if she was the one who interrupted.
But... Bellusdeo had been worried about the Arkon after their first visit to discuss the border zone. Kaylin had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the Arkon. The Dragons knew something that she didn’t, which was fair.
Frustrating, but fair. The Arkon now looked attentive; he looked normal, if focused. His eyes remained a shade of orange that implied he was clinging to tolerance of interruption with main force, but—he looked like an irritable old librarian to Kaylin.
When Bellusdeo reached the part of the story with the not-Killian building, she passed the rest of the telling to Kaylin.
* * *
“Bellusdeo and Teela could see marks or words on the doors. Like—office signs.”
“You could not?”
Kaylin shook her head. “But I’d seen movement in the windows facing the street, and I wanted to investigate. The doors weren’t warded and they weren’t locked.”
“An oversight, I’m certain.” His expression was pure Arkon.
“When I opened the door, I saw a room. With books in it. Maybe a personal library—but larger than any personal library I’ve seen before. And a Barrani man was standing in front of a wall of bookshelves, perusing the spines.”
“We couldn’t see him,” Bellusdeo then added.
“Was there anything unusual about this man?”
“Well, yes, now that you ask.”
“And that?”
“He had gray hair. A bit like yours, but with more black and less white in it.”
The silence that followed was almost suffocating in its intensity; the Arkon was frozen in place, as if even the ability to breathe had deserted him. Kaylin was uncomfortable with this type of silence, and as it grew and threatened to overwhelm all the textures of nonverbal sound, she broke it.
“He could see me. He thought—I think he thought—that I’d been sent to deliver a message. He said something.” She frowned. “He said something about it being ‘that time already.’”
Mortal memory was, at the moment, a curse to the Arkon, but he didn’t attempt to intimidate better memory out of Kaylin. “I think he knew what had happened. He couldn’t see Teela or Bellusdeo; he walked right through Teela. I thought he might be a ghost. It was Teela who told me his name. Or what he was called.”