"They don’t." Seb was quite certain. "You’ve seen that, haven’t you?"
It took time to decide her answer. "It’s rare that they’re ever anything but totally correct around me. I know my refusal to stay here frustrates them. They don’t think I’m being sensible, but it’s just as much that they want to…observe me, and – I don’t know."
"How would you feel if the reason for your existence showed up and wouldn’t let you protect her?"
Rennyn pulled a face, then sighed and hunted about for her boots. "I would be astonished if the Kellian considered you and I the reason for their existence. More a hangover from their past which complicates their present. Which reminds me, if you come through this alone, leave Tyrland – at least for a while."
"Don’t talk like that."
"Hush. The politics surrounding us are apt to get sticky once we’re no longer a critical factor in Tyrland’s survival. So far as I can make out from the farce today, the Queen doesn’t believe the Kellian conspire to anything, or that I have any legitimate claim to the throne. Yet she allows this public interrogation, a slap in the face to a group of people integral to this country’s defence. Just to placate some Councillors who’ve been making a fuss? I wouldn’t have believed her rule so tenuous."
"How did you end up being called to Question? I couldn’t believe it when I heard."
"I volunteered for it. I was annoyed."
He laughed. "Enjoy yourself?"
"Not really. Some meaningless posturing." She finished tugging at the laces of her boots and stood up, glancing at Solace’s focus but leaving it on Seb’s desk. "Do you want to stay here? Or go back to the apartment?"
"Don’t you think that maybe, after all, it might be an idea for you to stay?"
"I’d just have to leave again. But I guess that means you’re staying, so you can do some research for me." She explained the kind of spell she was aiming for, and shrugged at his expression. "This uncle of ours is worse than revolting, and I don’t want to find myself under another of his injunctions with no way out. I do want you to put some proper wards up on this room. I’ll be back in two days."
"Take care."
It was early evening, and the Sentene’s barracks were quiet. Rennyn glanced around and with some difficulty spotted Captain Faille sitting on the bottom step of a nearby stairwell, a small book balanced on his knee. Something to speed the time while waiting outside the rooms of sleeping mages. It must be fantastically boring for a Senior Captain to play bodyguard, and she wondered if he ever regretted the instincts which made him the safest person to use.
Faille disposed of the book somewhere between Seb’s room and the entrance of the barracks, and Rennyn found herself disappointed to have not caught a glimpse of the title. She didn’t look back again until she was out of the palace gates, to check that he was trailing her as she had been previously followed. Without the Sentene cloak it always took a moment for her eyes to resolve him, even with the bright street lighting of the Palace District. She continued down Aliace Hill and was nearing Crossways when she looked for him a third time.
"May I ask you a question, Captain?"
His answer was the lengthen his stride until he walked at her side instead of ten steps behind.
"What happened to the original Kellian after Tiandel ordered them out of Tyrland?"
He didn’t appear perturbed by the question. "For several years they lived directly over the border, among the wilder mountains of Vandaluse. Eventually the Vandalusians noticed their existence and hunted them, as invaders or mistaking them as Eferum-Get. Rather than fight, they crossed the Sands of Denara."
The noise and bustle of Crossways overwhelmed his thin voice and he stopped speaking as they walked into an evening reaching its highest pitch, with crowds lining up outside the playhouses, and taverns and food stalls doing a roaring trade. Rennyn ignored the strident demands of a stomach neglected since tea with the Grand Magister, and only gazed at the excited press. A remembrance ceremony had been held only that morning, and already the Black Night, as people were calling the incursion in Asentyr, might never have happened.
"On the borders of Verisia they encountered a runaway bondswoman," Captain Faille continued, as they started along the main road of the Temple District toward the Docks. "Aurai Falcy. This woman became their Voice, and taught them to write. In her company they roamed for many years, and finally settled in the fringes of the Forest of Semarrak."
Even Rennyn, whose geography outside of Tyrland was vague on account of being irrelevant, had heard of the Forest of Semarrak. It was inhabited by creatures which may once have been Eferum-Get, but were now far more complicated. The Kellian would probably pass as unremarkable there.
The Temple of the Devourer loomed ahead, and Rennyn paused to look up into the shadows of its portico, then moved slowly on toward the Docks. It had been a very sparse account, the barest of facts. The attenuated voice had been detached but his attention, she was sure, had been divided between watching for attacks and keenly observing her reaction. She might not be able to guess how the Kellian felt about the reappearance of the Montjuste-Surclere family, but whenever she was with them there was this sense of observation that went beyond the business of bodyguards. In their place she’d be both resentful and wildly curious, and expected the Kellian were not so very different as to not feel those things.
"Why did they have children?"
The question bordered on rudeness, along with sounding very strange. Yet Rennyn knew in great detail how the original Kellian were devised, and how they had functioned before their exile. It was difficult to imagine them deciding to take lovers and raise families.
"The first was a child of rape," Faille told her. "Those who dwell in Semarrak, the inhabitants older than the Kellian, are considered creatures of great good fortune, to be captured and used as talismans. A man of ambition mistook his prey."
It made him angry to speak of it. Not at her, but at a long-dead beast who had seen a Kellian, perhaps in strong sunlight or moonlight when they were at their most exotic, and somehow managed to force himself on her. Rennyn wasn’t entirely certain how she knew the Captain was angry – in the dimmer light of the Docks she had no hope of gauging his expression, and his voice hadn’t changed. Perhaps because he suddenly seemed ten times as dangerous.
"The child was a daughter. They named her Faille, which is a Verisian word meaning incalculable."
She’d certainly blundered straight onto sensitive ground. There were no good responses, so Rennyn swallowed the awkwardness and guessed: "Experiencing that child prompted them to seek more?"
"I believe she gave them some purpose beyond existing."
That matched Rennyn’s understanding of the golems Solace had created. Raising and protecting their children would fill the void Tiandel had left. Wondering what the runaway bondswoman had been like, she turned off the main road into the back streets of the Dock District, where great hulking warehouses were interspersed with tight, cramped housing. It wasn’t a pleasant smelling area.
"We are being followed."
"I don’t expect to leave the palace and not be followed," Rennyn said, amused given that he’d trailed her out as well. "And, frankly, unless it’s a small army, I would only feel sorry for them if they were stupid enough to attack."
He’d warned her because the area she was heading into was increasingly secluded. The noise of the magelight-studded main road died away, and as she found her destination there were only her own footsteps and not a single light except that of the stars.