He smiled. “Yes, actually. You are, I am constantly reminded, Chosen.”
“Might as well tell me to worry about Teela,” she replied.
“I don’t require you to fuss or worryathim. I merely require you to bring him back.”
“I thought Sanabalis was your teacher. Your former teacher.”
“He was and is. But what he learned, he learned from the Arkon. The Arkon values things lost, things dead, things ancient. He believes that they have things to teach us if we can but learn. He is important to the Emperor.”
“He’s important to Bellusdeo, too—and she lives with me.”
Tiamaris lifted his chin, frowning. “This is where we leave you.”
The Arkon turned from Tara, and from what appeared to be an animated discussion, the corners of his lips heading in the wrong direction as he met Tiamaris’s steady gaze. But he offered Tara a deep bow—certainly a deeper bow than any of the Dragons ever got from him.
Sedarias and Annarion had pulled up the rear—the far rear. They now closed the gap, and it was Sedarias who entered the border zone first.
“Be wary of Sedarias,” Tara said quietly. “Her intentions are not bad, but her thoughts turn, always, toward the bad intentions of others. She is likely to react first, and then think.”
Kaylin, however, shook her head. “Where we’re going, her form of thought might save our lives.”
The Arkon snorted.
The Arkon’s suspicion—that the book Kaylin carried would make the finding of Killian less time-consuming—was proved right. They spent far less time crawling over fences and through backyards searching for a street that ran in the right direction.
This was good, because without Teela’s vision to borrow, Annarion and Sedarias were stuck in a thick fog that made their companions almost invisible if they weren’t standing practically on top of them. Annarion was willing to be grabbed by the arm and dragged along streets Kaylin could see; Sedarias was Sedarias. She strode ahead into the fog as if it couldn’t disgorge anything that was a threat.
“She can hear your voices,” Annarion said. “She’s following those.” He grimaced and added, “And cursing Teela.”
“Teela would have come, but she likes her job.”
“So we’ve been told. We’ve yet to ascertain why, on the other hand. It’s not so bad today. The fog. I think it’s already thinning.”
Annarion was the first to spot the signpost. “This is where we were,” he told the gathered companions. “This is the signpost that leads into the circular road.”
The Arkon could see what the other two Dragons could see, which was pretty much consistent with the two Hawks. He did, however, stop at the signpost that Annarion had picked out of the thinning fog that dogged the cohort. He looked up; he could read the words. He then looked down the street in the wrong direction, almost as if looking in the right one was something that he needed to brace himself to do.
But when he did turn, his eyes were gold, and they were lit from within by a fire that had nothing to do with combat. For just that glimpse, the Arkon seemed young to Kaylin. Young, excitable, caught in a frenzy of fear and hope. This wasn’t Kaylin’s youth, but she recognized it, and for the first time since she had discovered Killian, she understood why Bellusdeo and Emmerian were worried.
The two Dragons said nothing; they turned in the direction the Arkon had finally turned, and they waited while he drew breath. Kaylin, however, grabbed his arm as he opened his mouth that little bit too wide. “Remember, Killian’s occupied, in both senses of that word.”
Reality readjusted itself in the lines of the Arkon’s face as joy ebbed. Kaylin wasn’t certain she liked what replaced it. He nodded.
Sedarias did not recognize the street. But she’d heard of the building, or buildings, that comprised this place. She didn’t walk with the same excitement, the same urgency, that drove the Arkon—but no one here could do that.
“Has it changed?” Kaylin asked the oldest member of the Dragon Court.
“It is...what I remember. The color is wrong—but I have been told that the border zones are like that: the buildings that remain are echoes of buildings, the streets, echoes of streets.”
“That’s Killian,” Kaylin said, lifting her arm and pointing out the largest of the buildings, on the farthest edge of the circular road’s circumference from where they were standing.
“I do not understand why you use that name.”
“It’s what he said his name was.”
“Mortal hearing is notthatbad.”
“That’s what he said, right?” Kaylin turned to Bellusdeo.