Cast in Silence

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Kaylin? Not so much.

And if Kaylin had learned to read Morse seven years ago, Morse had also learned to read Kaylin. “Eli,” she said quietly, the word completely neutral. “He should never have sent you across the river.”

Kaylin said nothing. Nothing much to say. But she didn’t correct Morse’s use of her name, because to Morse, she was Elianne. Not more, not less.

“Why did he?” Kaylin heard herself ask. She almost bit off her own tongue, because she realized it was the only thing she could do that would stop it from flapping.

Morse shrugged, and turned her glance toward the sluggishly moving waters of the Ablayne; it had been a dry season, so far. “Ask him,” she finally said.

“I don’t care what he thinks,” Kaylin replied. The part of her that was shouting shut up was seven years too old. “I want to know why you let him.” The part of her that was seven years too old didn’t matter. “Let him? Have you forgotten who’s the fieflord and who’s the grunt here?”

That should have shut Kaylin up. It should have. But an anger that she hadn’t felt in years was burning her mouth, and the only way not to be consumed by it was to open that damn mouth and let it out.

“I was thirteen, Morse. I was stupid.” How old had she been before she finally realized that it was just a setup, just a way of killing her at a distance? Fourteen? Fifteen? Twenty?

“You were one of his best, even then.”

“Doesn’t say much about the rest of his recruits, does it?” Kaylin spit to the left. It was the Barren equivalent of Leontine cursing. She did not, however, aim at Morse; that was the Barren equivalent of telling the Emperor to shove off. “I wasn’t good enough to do what he ordered me to do. I could’ve spent another decade, and I would never be that good. He couldn’t have expected me to succeed.” Her voice rose in the stillness. She tried to throttle it back. But her hands were shaking.

You thought you didn’t care, she told herself in bitter fury. You thought it was all in the past. It was done. You could walk away. And she had. She’d walked. Now she was walking back. Funny, how the fires you didn’t put out the first time were there to burn your sorry butt when you returned.

“You thought you could.” Neutral. The ring hadn’t budged.

Kaylin, however, was past caring. Stung, she said, “Yes, I thought I could. You told me I could, and I believed it.”

“You wanted to believe it,” Morse said, and for the first time, the brow ring did shift—it went down. “You always did. You always wanted some damn thing to believe in. ‘Am I good enough, yet? Am I ready? Will I ever be ready?’” The mimicry was harsh.

And it was deserved. Kaylin, white, stood on the rise of the narrow bridge, looking down at Morse and trying to remember how to breathe.

“If he wanted me dead,” she said, when she’d remembered as much as she was going to be capable of, “why didn’t he just tell you to kill me?”

Morse was utterly silent.

It was the wrong type of silence. “Morse?”

The world was shifting beneath Kaylin’s feet. It wasn’t just the boundaries of Barren, it wasn’t the shadows of the past. The past never truly died anyway; you just boxed it up and put it in storage, hoping it wouldn’t come back to bite you later. But it did, and sometimes you bled.

“You weren’t the only one who was young and stupid,” Morse finally said. “Seven years, Eli. A lot can change in seven years.” She shoved her hands into pockets, and away from the hilts of her very prominent daggers, as if that was all that kept her from drawing them. “You coming, or what?” She turned and stepped off the bridge. Morse hadn’t been big on symbolism; a dagger was a dagger, a fist was a fist and a corpse was a corpse, although admittedly she took some joy in creating them in the right situation.