Honestly? I hated Scoros instead. For years.There was warmth in the words. Chagrin.He came to my house. I had hidden as much as I could, but there’s a reason the very occasional fugitive doesn’tstayin the quarter. None of us aregoodat hiding. He spoke to my parents. He worriedatthem, and they were afraid. For me.
And then he took me away.
I lived with Scoros for the next several months. And he began to teach me everything I know.
Severn interrupted.He taught you not to hate?
Not...exactly. But he taught me not to act on it, ever. He considered it the detritus of terror, of pain—the shadow they cast. And he taught me how to step out from under that shadow, because...it was what he’d had to do. He and every one of his students. He invited me into theTha’alanari.
And your parents allowed this?
They didn’t precisely understand, I think, what it would entail. But Scoros understood what I needed, far better than my parents could. I needed to be among people who had experienced what I experienced. I needed to know that I was not...isolated. I needed to see that there were people who were whole, who had found ways to deal with and contain the hatred that grows from their experiences.
Her smile was closer to a grimace.We are not good at being alone. We are not good at being human.
We’re not really good at it either, if that helps. But... I think you only see the worst of us. Not just the worstaboutus. But the worstamongus. Maybe it would help if you could...He trailed off.
Exactly. Even those you consider the “best” among you would not willingly subject themselves to our touch. They wouldn’t do what you’re doing now.
I’m not the best among us.Once again, an image of the woman—with fewer smudges but darker circles—rose.
She was dead. Whoever she had been, she was dead. But the grief that surrounded this face, this image, was suffused with warmth and regret; there was no lingering rage or hatred in him. Not for her.
She died eight years ago.His grief, while muted, was deep; it was not so deep that it eclipsed the memories that had, in the end, created the path that grief would follow.We don’t share grief. It’s a weakness. We don’t share weakness.
Yes, she said.I know. I don’t understand how it is seen as weakness; it is part of life, of daily life.
Fear was a large part of our daily life.She could feel a shrug, a deflection. He was aware that she could feel it, see it, and she felt him shake himself. His arms loosened, but he did not pull back—he couldn’t, unless he wanted to break the contact.
Our?
I lived with Tara, he said.Tara and her daughter. As he spoke, she could see them: mother and child. Had they antennae, had they golden eyes, they would have looked no different than the Tha’alani equivalent. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, faces wreathed in exhausted smiles and sleep. The woman looked up.Severn.
I scrounged for food. I ran errands. I did what I could to help them. And she kept a roof over my head.In the fiefs, that was not guaranteed. She gave me a safe place to spend the evenings.Where the Ferals couldn’t hunt.The Ferals loomed large in his memory; they weren’t so much creatures of the night as the night itself. Severn’s glimpses were imbued with the urgency of fear. Only in the later memories did he see them more objectively.
There were only three of you?
Two, he said. The word was a ripple of pain.Tara died when her daughter was five. She was ill. She didn’t wake up. Without her, we couldn’t keep the rooms. We lied, he added.And that worked until the money ran out—and there was almostnomoney to begin with. And then it was hard.
His words did not convey the enormity of the difficulty; she could see it fly past in memory and fear. He had been, she thought, ten years old—perhaps eleven—a child, attempting in some fashion to protect and care for an even younger one. But he was driven, then. She saw the edge of what Helmat had seen in the boy in that ten-year-old child. At that age, he had accepted—had taken—responsibility for what had become a family of two. A desperate, impoverished family in the poorest part of the fief of Nightshade.
Her own thoughts blended with his. The merge happened without effort on her part, without the strain of bracing herself for the contact. He had not approached her with suspicion or fear, because the power of consent was his own. And he had given it, was giving it, even now; she followed the thoughts that lay beneath the words he offered, the foundation for the experience that words alone could never fully capture.
Or maybe he would never offer the words aloud. Here, the sense of his responsibility, his love, his fear, existed without words. He had no need to communicate them to anyone but the child herself, and she didn’t require it. He did not share with others because it was none of their business. He did not want, had never wanted, to draw attention to the child, because almost all attention in the fiefs was dangerous.
He taught her the skills they both needed to survive. Taught her how to find shelter, and when shelter—a roof—was not available, how to climb, how to find places on roofs or balconies of questionable structural integrity, to wait out the night—because even in the warmer weather, the streets were not safe.
Here, at least, it wasn’t other people he feared. It was the roving packs of the creatures known as Ferals. To Ybelline’s mind, they resembled enormous dogs, but their color and shape were uniform. He feared what the Ferals would do to the child under his protection.
To Elianne.
There was, of course, fear for himself—but so much of it was the fear of what would happen to her if he died; death was the only way he would abandon her. The caution with which he lived this life was due in large part to that fear. He was aware of her fear. He was aware of her nightmares, her broken sleep, the confusion at the absence of her mother. That confusion would become grief over time, but it was not adult grief, and too often the immediate needs—food, shelter—were paramount for both of them.
They survived. There was a quiet, desperate pride in that. They survived. And in time, Elianne’s desire to protect not herself, but others—the behavior she had seen and known all her life—had emerged. Severn had had no desire to add to their small family; numbers made everything harder unless one had a stable base of operations, and they didn’t.
But into their lives had come children, regardless; Elianne found them. Elianne wanted to help them—just as she had been helped. He could not, had not, said no. Steffi. Jade.
A wall came down.