“But your eyes—”
“Most people don’t. They are not Hawks, and they are not accustomed to judging mood from the color of eyes; they look at expressions, and listen to tone of voice. Now hush, and listen.”
“To what?”
“The wind.”
* * *
The wind did not speak to Kaylin, not in words she could recognize. Sometimes she spoke to the wind, in this garden, and it did respond, but not often. And clearly not the way it responded to Moran and Lillias. As if aware of what was to happen—and how could he not be?—Evanton came to stand by Kaylin’s side.
Lillias lifted her arms; Moran lifted both arms and wings, although the injured one twitched. Kaylin looked at the sergeant, and then looked away from what she saw in the Aerian’s face. In both of their faces.
The breeze grew stronger, but it didn’t gather debris in its folds, and in truth, it felt gentle. It sounded almost like a gale.
Lillias was the first to leave the ground. As if she had wings, phantom wings, she rose in the air, her feet breaking all connection with the grass beneath them. She moved as if those wings had never been lost, and she rose, looking up, always up, into the endless sky of the Keeper’s garden.
Moran didn’t appear to be shocked; she, too, rose. She had wings, but they could not carry her weight—not in the world outside this enclosed space. But in this space, it wasn’t wings that were required. Kaylin’s hands curled into fists, not because she was angry, but because she wanted instinctively to hang on to something.
The air didn’t hold her. The air didn’t lift her. It had never been her element.
She watched. She watched the wingless woman turn and spiral in the air, rising and plunging deliberately in a dive. She watched Moran join her, weaving complicated, tight circles around her. The Aerian Hawks practicing their drills would never, ever have been able to keep up with her. She looked...younger. Joyful.
Lillias laughed, was laughing, and Kaylin wondered then how hard it would be to lose both of her legs, because that was the only comparison she could make. And yet Lillias had made a life for herself here. It wasn’t the life she’d once had, and she didn’t live without regret—but she did live.
* * *
“I met her,” Evanton said, “some years ago. I recognized what she was, as you did. What she said, however, was not wrong: people do not notice. It is possible for Lillias to live as you live—but it was very, very hard.
“You do not think of the fiefs as a particularly pleasant place.”
“I like Tiamaris.”
“Yes. But Tiamaris was not the fief of your birth or your childhood, such as it was. Nightshade was. You think of it as disadvantageous, and primarily it was. You had neither a normal childhood nor a normal life; you had no certain sense of safety. But I will argue that your life there did provide you with one or two advantages that Lillias did not have.”
Kaylin opened her mouth to protest and shut it again.
“You’re getting better,” Evanton said. “I had almost begun to despair. You were about to ask me what the advantages to you now are.”
She nodded.
“You had no home, Kaylin. You had no family. You had no sense that survival was certain. In every possible way, you lived on the edge. Because you did, you have no sense of society, and your place in it. Lillias was not powerful. She was not born to a significant flight. But she had family, and home. She had a place she understood. She knew what the rules were, and she had a job that she took some pride in.
“All of these were lost to her the minute she made her decision. It was,” he added mildly, “the right decision, in my opinion—but it was enormously costly. Sometimes, when the costs never end, the rightness of the decision is called into question. She lost what she had, when she fell.
“You found what you’ve built. You were not mired in the loss; it did not destroy you. You expected far, far less than Lillias had, until that moment, expected. Every comparison you made to your previous life was a good one. You did not pause to think that people were rude or graceless, because your sense of manners, such as they were, were very primitive. For Lillias, it was much harder. She had more to lose, and lost it all. She could not, at the time, see what she had to gain, because the one thing she wanted, she could never have again.”
Kaylin thought, without resentment, that Evanton was right. “If it’s all the same to you,” she added, “I’d rather no other child ever had to live with my so-called advantage.”
“It is a silver lining, Kaylin. It is not one to be desired, and where you survived, many in your position—and I have no doubt therearemany—do not. But your entry into Elantra was vastly less painful and less complicated in the end than hers.”
“Did Moran always fly like that?”
“I have no idea. Like Lillias, I saw her in flight only once.”
“You saw her?”
“Yes, Kaylin. I am the Keeper; I am aware of many things that occur within the city itself, and so close to the heart of Shadow.” He looked up at the two women flying in the folds of elemental air. “Do you understand what they’re saying?”