“Bakkon appears to have forgotten his manners,” Starrante said. “He does not like the direction any answer to your question might lead; it is the heart of his angry criticism of me. I will therefore not answer that question.”

Kaylin nodded, and chose to ask a different one. “With what you taught her, would it have been possible for Azoria to reach that place?”

“She would be highly unlikely to survive it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“She was bright and difficult, driven and proud. I see some of her in your Terrano, but he lacks her ferocity of focus, instead approaching things as if the entirety of creation is a puzzle game created just for him to play. It is a striking combination of personality and competence.”

“Striking because you think he should amount, in the end, to very little?”

“It is often the fate of those who descend into self-indulgence—but not always. It is possible that Azoria could have found a way to enter our birthing spaces, but she would then be faced with the hunger of our young.” He hesitated. “Adults do not remain within that web, and they do not return to it.”

“Could they?”

Bakkon shrieked.

Kaylin decided, given the rising of all the hair—and eyes—on the older Wevaran’s body, that she had no more pressing questions that needed answering.

Severn, however, disagreed. “If—and this is entirely hypothetical—Azoria had learned enough that she might enter your birthing place, what might she find there that she could use?”

Bakkon’s voice grew loud enough that Killian intervened, dampening the noise. “My apologies, Lord Kaylin, but the place of their birth is the place from which they eventually emerge as adults. It is not something that should be spoken of publicly—and to Bakkon, speaking of it to anyone from any race that is not Wevaran, is public. Barrani might respond in exactly the same fashion should you begin to carelessly discuss the Lake of Life in a fashion that might allow someone to reach it.”

Kaylin was silent for a beat, but that silence was filling with a growing discomfort.

Starrante was watching Kaylin, not Bakkon.

Kaylin had always been accused of being an open book, which could be a problem in more delicate investigations, and was the primary reason Marcus or the Hawklord didn’t send her to investigations that involved the monied and the powerful.

“There are things I should not speak of,” Starrante said. There was no anger in his voice; it seemed to Kaylin there was a mixture of sorrow and guilt. “It has been so long since I emerged I forget—and Bakkon reminds me that I have no excuse.