“I won’t ask that charges be pressed. I won’t mention it at all. Don’t be angry on my behalf.”
Almost grudgingly, she said, “Someone should be.” She spoke Elantran.
“No,” he said. “That’s where it always starts. Pain. Anger. Neither of which can change the past.”
“It’s not the past that concerns me. His attempt didn’t occur decades ago, but now. And we don’t know what he attempted decades ago.”
“The boy does not want you to take the mantle,” the castelord—the former castelord—said. “He does not want you to bear the burdens I have borne. I understand why you value him, castelord. And it is far too late for me. I have done what I have done. I will not regret it. If it were given to me to change my actions, I would not. I might, perhaps, make those actions more effective.”
Severn understood the words; Ybelline was slow to arrive at the same understanding. Her eyes flashed green again.
He was not afraid of Adellos now. And he could never fear Ybelline. “He didn’t kill Tessa or her two friends.”
Adellos’s posture and expression didn’t change.
“How can you be so certain?”
Adellos closed his eyes. “Daughter,” he said, sinking, once again, into the room’s only chair.
“Because he held their memories.”
“The Tha’alaan—”
“He can’t return the memories to the Tha’alaan. He’s right in that. There will be another Tessa, another Jerrin, another Tobi. If you find ways to hamper them—and you will—they’ll find ways to sneak out of the house. But the memories he took he can’t return.”
“What better way to assure that those memories remain hidden than to kill them?”
Severn nodded. “That’s probably why they were killed.” To the older man, he added, “Those deaths weren’t accidental, were they?”
“No.”
“And you knew they’d been murdered.”
“I did not know it at the time of their deaths. Had she not died, I believe Tessa would have been capable of bearing the mantle of castelord. There were memories that she kept hidden by threading them through the Tha’alaan in strands so fine they were impossible to entirely disentangle. Jerrin and Tobi were not her equals.”
“Why did you not hide the early memories?”
“They had living parents, living family. They had friends. They were dead—some token had to be left so that the burden of their loss could be shared. And Tessa was, as I said, adept at hiding.”
“Did you know that their deaths weren’t accidental when they died?”
“No.”
Ybelline’s brow rippled.
“Do you know the identity of their killer or killers?”
Silence.
“They weren’t Tha’alani.”
“No.”
Severn exhaled. “You said that justice has already been done.”
The old man—and it seemed to Severn that he had gained decades as he occupied this chair—nodded.
“You didn’t kill the witnesses that were to be questioned by the Halls of Law.”