Cast In Fury (16 page)

“And you learned this in one visit?”

She nodded. “They like children,” she added.

“All of them?”

“I imagine they’d like any child—”

“I mean the Tha’alani. Do they all like children?”

She nodded.

“And you’re fond of them yourself, and they realize this.”

She nodded again. He was now writing, his hands steady, his letters loopy but in a perfect line, anyway.

“We don’t really have anything they want,” she finally said. “They don’t want our secrets, they don’t want our power. They don’t want our jobs or our lives.”

“So you stopped hating them because you realized we were totally insignificant to them?”

“I didn’t say that.” She hesitated and then tried again. For someone who was good with words, she wasn’t, sometimes. “They don’t take,” she told him softly, thinking about Ybelline. “They can’t take without giving. Anything I give them, I get back.”

“Example?”

He really sounded like a teacher at this particular moment.

“Friendship. Warmth. Intangible things. I took the foundlings there,” she added, watching his hand move, pen just an extension of his fingers. “Where I grew up, giving wasn’t the norm. We bartered, and worse, when we were desperate and we could get away with it.”

She looked up at Severn then. “But there were always exceptions, even there. People who couldn’t take without giving something in return, and people who could just give. I didn’t think about it a lot as a child.” She walked over to Severn’s side and touched his arm lightly.

He looked down at her, and she almost had to turn away. But she didn’t. “I think the Tha’alani are like—like a family. But they’re like a family that will welcome you no matter who you are, as long as you’re not afraid of who you are. They’re—I don’t know. Like the family I would build, if I could just make one up out of whole cloth.”

She let go of Severn’s arm, then, and spread her hands out, palms up. “I don’t think I can explain it better than that.”

“That was good enough,” he replied. “You’re saying they don’t expect you to be anything other than what we all are, in the end—flawed, twisted, and ultimately alone.” The edge was gone from his voice, and he looked younger. “My mother used to say that we don’t always get what we deserve.”

“Smart woman,” Severn said, the tension also gone from his body, his hands and his voice. “Sometimes we get less and make do—we expect less. Sometimes we get more and we fumble.”

Rennick nodded. “What made you two go into police work, anyway?”

“That’s a long, boring story,” Kaylin said quietly. She forced herself not to say it too quickly, but it was difficult. “Maybe when you’ve finished this play, I’ll buy you a drink and tell you.”

“I seldom find people stories boring,” Rennick replied. “But I like drinking, so I’ll take you up on the offer. Corporal?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“No drink for you,” Rennick replied. But he smiled, and again, with no edge to harden the expression, he looked younger.

“So…what we have on our side are people who are afraid of the Tha’alani ability to expose all the dirty little secrets we’re not proud of having. Am I wrong?”

“No. I’d say you’re dead right.”

“And on their side, people who don’t have dirty little secrets because they can’t.”

She nodded. “It’s not that they’re perfect,” she added. “It’s just that they don’t—they don’t have these ideas of other people as perfect people. They expect people to get angry or frustrated. They expect people to be, well, people. I don’t think they understand our fears,” she added. “But it makes them crazy, to try to live in our lives. They’ve never had to live in isolation.” She didn’t mention the exceptions. It wasn’t important now.

“I’ve been thinking about that since yesterday,” he said.

“You mean when you weren’t sleeping?”

“I didn’t go to sleep until dawn. If the two of you could stop just standing there and pull up chairs or something, I’d find this a lot less awkward.”

Kaylin didn’t need to be told twice. Usually, she didn’t need to be told once, but Rennick’s temper was still a bit of an unknown and she couldn’t afford to offend him enough for an incident report—not when Mallory would be the one reading it. At least with Marcus, you could be certain he wouldn’t get around to reading it until the middle of next month, by which point there would be more pressing things to deal with.

“Anyway,” Rennick said, when Severn also took a seat, “I’ve been thinking of what it would be like to grow up without privacy. Without the desire for privacy. What do we need privacy for, after all? It’s the place where we can
relax.

“And I’ve thought about what you said about the Tha’alani version of love or marriage. I don’t understand the marriage part, either, but I’m trying to look into it on the side. I suppose if you’re certain you’re loved, love isn’t the same obsession. You didn’t ask them about sex, did you?”

Kaylin felt herself coloring, which annoyed her. Sadly, it wasn’t the annoyance that caused the flush. “Why would I ask them something like that?”

“They don’t have privacy,” Rennick said, “so it wouldn’t strike them as unusual in the same way it would strike you. Or me.”

She nodded because it was true they didn’t. And wouldn’t. “I’m still me,” she told him firmly. “And there are some questions I probably don’t want the answers to—so I don’t ask them.”

“Fair enough. But…our story cycles—the things that we can create with—are often defined by our concepts of love. Or duty. Or honor. I understand that the Tha’alani aren’t motivated by the same interpretations—”

“Duty would move them,” she said.

“Ah. That’s something to note. But as you’ve pointed out, I won’t be putting this play on
for
the Tha’alani. And our people need something that makes them
feel.
They can think about things as well, that’s always a bonus. But if we’re too esoteric, we won’t reach people. Not the way we need to.” He ran his hand—the one with the pen in it—through his hair, and Kaylin winced, waiting for him to poke his own eye out.

“I considered—and tossed out—any attempt at interracial romance. I’m not sure I could believe in it enough to make it work.”

“You need to believe in it?”

“While I’m working, yes. I do. Does that strike you as odd?”

Kaylin had to be benched in order to write anything longer than “gone for lunch.” On the other hand, Kaylin wasn’t the Imperial Playwright, and it wasn’t her job; she was willing to believe that someone
else
would be happy doing it. For a value of happy that Rennick wasn’t clearly demonstrating at the moment. “If you can base your play on the facts—even if they’re embellished—you
could
stage this for the Tha’alani. I’m not sure they have plays,” she said. “I don’t visit the Quarter that often. But I know they’re curious.”

“They were outraged.”

“They don’t understand the lies we need to tell ourselves,” she said softly. “And they know that there’s so much misunderstanding, they can’t see how lies would change that. That’s not their fault. I don’t think it’s our fault either. It’s just the big difference.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Did you say you took foundlings to the Quarter?”

She nodded.

“When?”

“A week or two ago. They
wanted
to go.”

“To the Tha’alani Quarter.”

“They don’t know that much about the Tha’alani, and they’d just met one. She was the same age as the younger kids, and she wanted to show them where she lived.”

“Until I went to the Quarter, with yourself and the Corporal—who I note has been utterly silent—I’d never seen a Tha’alani child before.”

“They don’t leave the Quarter.”

“How, then, did these foundlings—and I assume there’s a story behind them as well, and look at me not asking—meet one?”

“It’s not public knowledge,” she said, hesitating, “but an Arcanist under the Wolves edict kidnapped a young Tha’alani girl. We were given the case, and we found her. She was…traumatized, and I made the mistake of mentioning my kids—my children—while trying to calm her down. She insisted on meeting them.” She smiled at that. “She didn’t even think it odd that they weren’t actually mine—they were mine in a way that’s familiar to
her.
” She started to add more, but her stomach interrupted her.

“What was that noise?”

“Hunger,” Severn said, speaking for the first time since he’d taken his seat. “Kaylin’s stomach speaks volumes, and once it starts, it doesn’t stop until it’s fed.”

“You haven’t eaten?”

“What do you think?”

“Good point.” He shoved a particularly large pile of paper to one side, and pulled a bell off the tabletop. It was a shiny, small bell, but it had gold around its lip, and its handle was a dark wood that gleamed. He rang it.

Something that small shouldn’t have made that much noise. “I haven’t eaten either,” he told Kaylin. “And as we’ll be here until well past the normal dinner hour, we might as well eat now.”

In spite of the fact that memories of Marcus kept returning to her, the food did not taste like sawdust. It was
good.
She hadn’t expected to like it—it smelled funny, and the meat—real meat—was covered in the type of sauce you’d expect merchants to use to hide the fact the meat had soured. But it was good, and she ate more than either Rennick or Severn combined. There was enough food to feed an entire office of Hawks, so there was no danger of making anyone else go hungry.

Rennick didn’t have much of a sense of protocol or manners; he ate beside his papers, pen in hand. He also instructed the servants to just leave the food. They were clearly used to this and did as asked without comment. “I’m going to miss the food here when I get replaced,” he told them. “And the cleaning up, which I don’t have to do myself.”

“The work?”

“Not so much. I’ll be doing the same work. Well, if you don’t include this particular assignment.”

“It’s probably the one that will affect the most people.”

“Only because it has to.” He paused, and then said, “I owe you. I thought it was pointless propaganda when I was given the task. Now—now it has more meaning to me.” He laughed. “Before, I was certain it wasn’t worthy of me. Now I’m not sure
I’m
worthy of the task. But it’s better to be uncertain, I think.”

Kaylin privately thought he was crazy, and he must have seen this on her face, because he laughed.

“If we don’t challenge ourselves, we get stuck in a rut. We do the same things over and over, until they’re all faded echoes of the first thing we did. This will certainly be different,” he said. “But I think I see how we can start it. And possibly where we have to end it.”

“The tidal wave?”

He nodded. “By the time we’ve reached the end of the play, the tidal wave has to be addressed and explained.”

He talked during the meal. And listened. To her surprise, he was actually good at listening. He asked odd questions, a lot of them about children. But he paused when Severn interrupted him.

“Mr. Rennick,” he said softly, “Kaylin is not central to this story.”

“No, of course not.”

“You’ve had her talk about almost nothing else.”

“Pardon?”

“Her childhood—and if she’s being circumspect, she’s still told you more than she thinks. What she thinks of children. Tha’alani children. Her work with the midwives. Her work with the Foundling Hall.”

“Yes?”

“Why are you interested in them?”

Rennick’s expression was one of open confusion. “Because they’re interesting,” he replied mildly. “Is there some reason they shouldn’t be?”

“No. But they’re not relevant.”

“You never know what’s going to be relevant,” Rennick replied. “I don’t care much for people as people—as a faceless mass, or a political one. But I find their stories interesting, and I actually know very few people who do volunteer work at the midwives guild or the Foundling Hall. In the former case, most of the people I know would faint at a birthing. I hear they’re quite messy.

“And in the second? I’ve done one or two plays at the Foundling Hall during Festival Season—”

“A playwright of your stature?”

“This may come as a surprise to you,” Rennick said, “but I actually enjoy those plays. The audience
wants
to believe everything they see. They don’t just watch, they become as involved as you let them become. They’re humanity writ small, and many of them haven’t learned how to hide, how to pretend to know things they don’t know, how to doubt the things they want to believe in.

“On the other hand,” he said, looking to Kaylin, “I wouldn’t expect to
survive
any work I did there that wasn’t a few hours in duration at most—that Leontine in charge of the kids? She’s got a nasty temper.”

Kaylin opened her mouth to disagree and shut it. He was right. Marrin had a temper. “She does,” she agreed. “But she doesn’t turn it on the children. Yes, she nags them. Yes, she growls at them—but her fangs are never exposed when she does it. Her claws never leave her pads. I’ve seen her rake trails in the stair-rails when she’s frustrated,” she said, “but she has
never
turned that anger upon the orphans.

“She wants them to be as safe as she can make them. She wants them to do well in the world they’ll have to live in. Of course she worries. She’s—she’s their mother.”

“So you know something about Leontines, then?”

Kaylin nodded. Normally she would have smiled, but the word
Leontine
and the name
Marcus
were twinned in her mind, and at the moment, Marcus was in danger. Hard to smile about that.

“You know the Tha’alani Castelord well enough that she called you in an emergency, and you understand Leontines well enough to work with Marrin.” He shook his head and, glancing sidelong at Severn, said, “Of course it’s interesting to me. You appear to be known to Lord Sanabalis. Do you count the Barrani among your friends?”

“We have Barrani in the Hawks,” she replied. “Friend is one of those words they consider ‘quaint’ and ‘human.’ But if push came to shove, then yes, I’d consider them friends. I wouldn’t let them drive a carriage if my life depended on it, though.”