Epilogue
“I don’t care if you read my mind,” Teela told Helen, as she entered the foyer. “But at the moment, I do not care to discuss its contents.”
“Not much to discuss?” A voice that was not Helen’s said.
Teela looked up the grand, curving staircase. She had never had the heart to tell Kaylin that the younger Hawk’s sense of appropriate, cohesive architecture was terribly off. Terrano was perched on the left side of the stairs, leaning into the guide rails. He rose as she headed toward him.
“Waiting for me?”
“It was quieter.” Terrano hesitated. “You have your own room.”
“Yes. I should warn you that I share it with my beat partner.”
“He’s not here.”
Teela exhaled. “No. He’s not here, at the moment. He had something else to attend.” Her lips compressed in ado not askline as she looked at Terrano, the lone member of the cohort who had elected not to return from the green. And yet, here he was, looking much smaller, and much younger—to Teela’s eye—than either Mandoran or Annarion had, upon their arrival.
She headed up the stairs, and Terrano followed her. “I am going to change,” she told him, without looking back. “I need, at the very least, a figurative bath.”
“Spike arrived,” he told her, as if he, like Helen, could read minds. “He’s with Kaylin.”
“And Kaylin?”
“Sleeping,” Helen said. It was the first word she’d spoken since Teela’s arrival. Teela appreciated the silence. Nor did Helen tell Teela that she should be sleeping as well; the Barrani were not a race that required sleep, although they did at times require rest.
She glanced once over her shoulder; Terrano waited, almost fidgeting. He would follow her to her own room if she did not tell him to leave.
She didn’t tell him to leave.
* * *
Teela’s rooms were open to light and air, and the floors and walls were wooden. Lintels were carved, tall.
“This looks like the West March,” Terrano said, as he entered.
“What do your rooms look like?”
He made, in Kaylin’s parlance, a face. “Like the High Halls. Or like Sedarias’s home.” Terrano didn’t ask why Teela’s rooms were different; he knew. These were the rooms in which Teela’s mother had been happiest, and in which Teela had therefore been happy. At a remove of centuries, she could not recall the emotion of happiness; she merely knew that it had existed.
She wondered, then, about happiness, sorrow, hatred, love. She had Barrani memory; the slow decline of mortal memories did not plague her. She could remember every incident that led from the green to Helen. She could clearly remember her mother’s face, her mother’s voice, her mother’s quiet presence. But although she had those memories, she could not experience them as if she were, once again, that child.
Not even here. She headed to the room with the large bath. Water was—of course it was—warmed and ready; she divested herself of the court clothing that she had grown to loathe, and slid immediately into the soothing waters.
Terrano sat on the ground. The bath was built into the floor; it did not rise above it, as small mortal baths often did. He removed shoes—without actually touching them—and slid his feet into the water as well; his palms were flat to either side of him. He said nothing.
Teela understood that he would say nothing, until and unless she broke the silence. She therefore chose her words with care. “Thank you.” Her voice was soft. She stared at the surface of the water, at the eddies that did not break the stillness completely.
“For what?”
“For waiting.”
“You didn’t seem all that happy to see me, that I recall.”
“I was shocked to see you. I was—” Teela shook her head. “Understand that I am not considered young byanyof the Barrani. A handful remember me in my distant youth—but itisdistant, for both me and that handful.” She bent her head. “Mandoran told me that it was you. You believed that you could find me. You believed that you could bring me...home.”
Silence.
“I learned to live without you. I learned,” Teela continued, her voice still soft, shorn of edge, “to live the life that was left to me after the green. I was angry,” she added. “I hated my father, and I used the hatred to keep going. The first time—the first time I returned to the green, I hadhope. I was chosen to play a part in theregalia. I believed—” She laughed, a brief, bitter bite of sound. “But you were still lost. Whatever role I was given, it was not, somehow, to free you all. I’m sorry.”