“You would have buried this case, regardless.”
“Yes. He was not the only person to approach me in regard to this particular investigation.”
“He was simply the least significant?”
“Hierarchically, yes, as you must guess. He does not understand the protocols involved with an Imperial audience.”
“Granting him this audience is unlikely to teach him anything about correct protocol.”
“Do you understand why the audience was granted?”
“Your curiosity.”
“That was part of my decision, yes.”
Elluvian understood that he was to be frustrated. But this was expected when dealing with Dariandaros. Frustration, and a series of small failures that might extend into the future forever. Still, something in this private, this Severn Handred, was somehow what Dariandaros desired of his Wolves. Perhaps there was something for the lone Barrani Wolf to learn as well.
In the quiet of her rooms in the High Halls, An’Tellarus had chosen to revisit the run-down, almost unsightly room she had built over a decade ago. She looked at the books she’d collected—unenchanted, all—that suited the interior of this place with their bent corners, their fraying covers, their faded pages.
The table, scored and dinged, sat before a couch that had long since ceased to be of use. Nonetheless, she sat, a book in hand. On the table’s surface were a top, a quill, and a dagger that was more likely to cause disease than serious injury.
She waited. She was not the most patient of people on a normal day; she had enough personal power that waiting was not generally required. This had not always been the case, and today, while she exercised the patience she had all but outgrown, she considered this with care.
She, too, had been young once. She had survived it.
She doubted that she would have, had she been forced to live those early years in the crushing confines of the High Halls, with its infinitely complex politics. She had not. She had survived her youth because she had been raised in the West March. There, she had divided her time between the family of her birth and the haven of Alsanis.
That Hallionne had fallen silent, had closed his doors to all visitors. Alsanis had turned the whole of his attention inward, to the guests he now harbored against their will. He had become a jail. Even his dreams—the great birds that circled the West March—had become warped, their flight halting, with the passage of centuries.
In the youth of An’Tellarus, the dreams of the young were planted; they flourished in the lee of the wars that defined so many. She remembered the Dragon Flights, and the Barrani companies sent to stand against them. She remembered the burning desire to prove herself worthy to bear one of The Three.
That dream had long since died. An’Teela held one; Calarnenne the other. The third was in the hands of the High Lord’s family; she had never seen that sword in the High Lord’s hand, and wondered if he could wield it. But she could not.Kariannos, the sword that An’Teela now claimed, was the only one of The Three she had touched.
It had not killed her.
It had come close.
That had been a bitter disappointment. It had taken decades to recover from the shock and the sense of permanent loss. But recovery—for those who survived—was the way of her kin. And perhaps it had been for the best. Only one weapon of significance now existed in the West March of her childhood.
She wondered, looking at this detritus, what would become of it. She very much desired that a wielder be found; if one was, Alsanis might at last be freed from his role as jailer, and might once again turn his thought and attention to the rest of his people.
Others desired the weapon, and for different purposes, just as she had desired to wield one of The Three. She did not desire the weapon that waited, nascent, in the West March. Having failed to prove herself worthy ofKariannos, she no longer dreamed of wielding a weapon of note. Something in her approach, something in her desire, made her incompatible with the ancient masterworks.
What she could not change, she accepted. This acceptance was almost in its entirety the reason she had lived for as long as she had.
She was not the only person to search for someone who might be able to do what she was now certain she could not. Nor was she the only ruler of a line who had hoped that her own offspring might prove worthy where she had not. She was therefore not the only ruler to be disappointed, time and again.
But she had not done what Verranian had done, and she was certain—almost certain—that she saw his hand in this. These books. This table. These children’s toys. And...that boy, with his lovely High Barrani, his exceptional—for a mortal boy—manners, and his gaze, clear-eyed, observant.
It would not have occurred to her—ever—to expand her search in such a fashion. A mortal child of no significance in the fiefs that keptRavellonat bay? No. She could not imagine lowering herself to such mean surroundings, for she was certain that Verranian had chosen to occupy this small, cramped space, with its inherent decay.
She had begun her search for Verranian. Or rather, she had prodded someone beholden to her to begin searching for his own reasons. Elluvian. He was an odd disappointment; someone who had both failed and survived failure; someone to whom the Dragon Emperor condescended in a favorable way.
He had wasted most of his life; he had barely survived that waste. She did not therefore expect that he would recover. But it was in Elluvian’s wake that Severn had come.
She was not, of course, convinced that the boy was the answer to her long search; she was merely convinced that he was a possibility. Even a distant possibility was better than none.
She had seen the sketches that An’Sennarin had taken from the Oracular Halls. Oracles were notoriously unreliable, but An’Tellarus had understood what she had seen. She doubted Severn did.