“Why?”
“I no longer have a name. Shadow doesn’t seek to learn True Names; it seeks to change their essential structure. Where there are no names, it has more freedom to alter the base material.”
“But if you—”
“My friends have more freedom than the rest of the Barrani have; more freedom, certainly, than Teela will now ever have. You encountered the Barrani who had reformed their bodies—they also had more freedom than Teela. And no,” he added, “I’m not going to go into the boring details. If you’re careful, the name isn’t a cage.”
“I do not understand why Barrani are so obsessed with their names,” Bellusdeo said. “Dragons have them and we accept them. Attempting to somehow remove the dependence on True Names seems akin to suicide.”
“It is by the use of that name that we can be enslaved, should a greater power discover it.”
“But it’s by the use of that name,” Kaylin countered, “that you could speak with your cohort, even when you were nowhere near them. The name is a bridge between all of you. All of them,” she corrected herself.
“It’s not doing them any good here,” he pointed out. She’d annoyed him. But he was right. None of the people who knew Kaylin’s name could talk to her now. And she imagined that at least one of them would be panicking.
“We needed that bridge,” Terrano finally said, “because we were trapped. We were prisoners. We needed it because we were weak. It’s the reason mortals—and Barrani—congregate in a way that adult Dragons don’t.” It was the first time he had said anything positive about Dragons.
Bellusdeo, however, shook her head. “Dragons congregate. That’s what the Aeries are. The only time a Dragon breaks away from his people is when he finds his hoard. It is considered the mark of true adulthood, among my kin. Or it was.
“And Terrano? Some Dragons find their hoard, and it drives them insane. They cannot exist among their own kind because they are terrified, possessive, obsessive; they no longer see their kin as anything but predators and encroachers. Barrani youth are, to my eye, very similar to mortals.”
His brows rose into his hairline in outrage, but Bellusdeo held up one hand as he opened his mouth.
“It is not an insult. You exchanged names with your cohort. There were twelve of you. The cost to mortals of such an entanglement—were they able to make it—would be decades of their lives, at best. The cost to you—the cost to us—would be eternity, should even one of that number go rogue, go insane. You might, because of that one decision, exist as a slave to the will of another. You could make that decision as a gesture of trust—no, that’s the wrong word. There is no word that describes it. You were not blood kin; you made that oath, and it brought you far, far closer than even ties of blood could.
“You say you did it because you were powerless, you were alone, you were being sent to a ceremony that might harm or even kill you in the worst case. You promised, if I had to guess, that you would put the cohort before any others, and the name was the way of proving that.
“It is entirely possible Dragons would have done the same, but we do not come into our names in the same way. Regardless, the desire for company, for companionship, is not merely the detritus of lack of power. I think everyone who lives as we do experiences isolation and loneliness.” She had slowed down, and now seemed to hesitate. “I understand the fear of weakness. I understand what weakness means. Love is always a risk.”
Kaylin had turned to stare at the gold Dragon.
“If we love, we open ourselves up to hurt, to pain. When we love, we allow people beneath the necessary armor of social interaction. I include war in that, by the way. And when we love, we hand those who would harm us their most potent weapon—because the loss of that love is profound and terrible, and we never fully recover from its absence. To us, then, love is a weakness.”
Kaylin wasn’t the only one who was staring.
“I was one of nine girls born to my clutch. We were sisters. We did not trade names as you have done, but we didn’t require names, we knew each other that well. I am the only one who remains. The rest did not survive. I see the echo of their loss everywhere. In the end, in the life we lead, Shadow was the enemy, not you.
“I am here because of Kaylin. I am here because she brought Mandoran and Annarion back from the West March. I am here because I know what the cohort means to each other. It is an echo of what my sisters and I meant to each other, while they lived. I frequently have to stop myself from breathing on Mandoran. Or strangling him. But in some fashion, he and Annarion remind me of my own youth—and my own losses. And I do not want them to suffer that loss.
“Because they are Immortal, they probably will. This is probably pointless. Love is a weakness. But...it is a weakness, in the end, that I value. Life without it is safer, yes. For us, it is safer.” Silence again, weighted, heavy. This time Terrano didn’t try to break it. “But I am not certain that survival without love or affection means all that much to me, anymore.”
Standing in her plate armor, looking like the warrior queen she had once been, she did not evoke either love or affection. Terrano stared at her as if she’d grown an extra head. Kaylin tried hard not to do the same. But her familiar lifted his head and crooned.
“I am no longer queen. I am no longer ruler. In the beginning, it made me feel useless. But...because I am no longer either, I do not have to doubt. I don’t have to be suspicious of Kaylin, or her friendship—which would, I think, have been impossible when I ruled. I don’t have to doubt either Annarion, who I almost admire, or Mandoran. I don’t have to sleep behind guarded doors. Yes, there are people who want me dead—there always were. But I have no reason to believe that the people who live with me are among them.”
“And that makes up for the lack of power?”
The Dragon was honest. “I don’t know. Perhaps, because I lack power, I huddle as the weak have always huddled. But I am not certain, now, that I would trade this life for the life I left behind.” She exhaled a small stream of smoke. “We need to leave,” she said, and turned away.
*
“Is she always like that?” Terrano whispered.
Kaylin blinked. “No.”
“Do you remind her of her sisters, or something?”
“Her sisters, from what little I’ve heard, were...more bratty.”
“She’s...not what I expected of a Dragon.”
Fair enough. “You’re probably not what she expected from a Barrani. I know Mandoran isn’t.” She hesitated herself, partly because Dragon hearing was so acute. “But I think she’d go to war herself to protect Annarion and Mandoran from anything in the world except herself.”
“She hardly knows them!”