Praise for MICHELLE SAGARA and THE CHRONICLES OF ELANTRA series

Cast in Shadow “First-rate fantasy. Sagara’s complex characterizations and rich world-building lift her above the crowd.” —New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong

“Intense, fast-paced, intriguing, compelling

and hard to put down … unforgettable.”

—In the Library Reviews

Cast in Courtlight “Readers will embrace this compelling, strong-willed heroine with her often sarcastic voice.” —Publishers Weekly

“Packed with action and adventure … integrating the conventions

of police procedurals with more fantastic elements.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Cast in Secret “The impressively detailed setting and the book’s spirited heroine are sure to charm romance readers as well as fantasy fans who like some mystery with their magic.” —Publishers Weekly

“Remarkable … Filled with time-release plot threads and intricate

details, these books are both mesmerizing and unforgettable.

If you’re a fan of rich fantasy, this is the series for you!”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Top Pick (4½ stars)

About the Author

MICHELLE SAGARA has written twelve novels since 1991, when her first book, Into the Dark Lands, was published. She’s written a quarterly book review column for the venerable Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a number of years, as well as dozens of short stories (or novellas, to be more exact).

In 1986 she started working in an SF specialty bookstore, where she continues to work to this day. She loves reading, is allergic to cats (very, which means they crawl all over her), is happily married, has two lovely children, and has spent all of her life in her native Toronto—none of it on Bay Street.

She started reading fantasy almost as soon as she could read, and fell instantly in love with Narnia; her next fantasy discovery was Patricia McKillip’s Forgotten Beasts of Eld. She moved on to The Hobbit, which led to her discovery of the life-changing The Lord of the Rings.

Her greatest hope for her writing is that someone will read it and be moved by the same sense of magic and mystery that she finds in the books she loves.

She will talk about writing, bookselling and books forever if given a chance. You’ve been warned.

Cast in

Fury

Michelle Sagara

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Daniel, Ross, Jamie and Liam

CHAPTER 1

Private Kaylin Neya was on time for work and the world hadn’t ended.

A few people’s lives, on the other hand, were in question. The amount of sarcasm Clint could put into shocked silence wasn’t illegal. Yet. But Kaylin had to grudgingly admit, as she glared her way past his lowered halberd and into the Halls of Law, the wings he extended were a nice touch.

The Aerie was almost empty, but it usually was at this time of day; the halls themselves were suspiciously quiet. Then again, maybe the Swords were actually earning their pay instead of milling around the halls looking smug. Even on her bleariest mornings, Kaylin couldn’t have missed the tension and worry that seemed to permeate the city streets recently, and keeping the peace, such as it was in a crowded city, was their job. For a change. The day was already looking brighter. She glanced up as a shadow passed her, and saw a lone Aerian traversing the space high above; he wasn’t practicing maneuvers, and his wings were extended for a steady glide. She still envied the Aerians their wings, a little.

She felt a smidgen of sympathy for the Swords but didn’t let it show. Much. It wasn’t often that the entire city had almost created a new sea coast by the simple expedient of being under most of the surrounding water. She was certain that stories and rumors about the larger-than-Imperial-edict tidal wave that had almost destroyed the harbor—for a start—had already been making the rounds, and growing bigger, if that was even possible, with each telling.

She was waved through—without sarcasm—when she approached the guards that separated the Hawks’ quarters from those of the Wolves or the Swords. The halls were vacant, and even the duty roster seemed to have gathered no darts.

“Oh, come on, guys,” she said, when the entire office stopped as she entered and approached Marcus’s desk. “I’m not always late. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Have you checked the duty roster, dear?” Caitlin asked, from the safety of her desk. Not that she was ever in any danger; if the office had a collective mother, it was Caitlin.

“Oh. No.” She turned and, at Marcus’s bark of a command, turned back. Marcus’s growl was low, and it was short. He must be tired. And a tired Leontine was generally best kept happy by little displays of obedience. Or big ones.

The paperwork on his desk hadn’t really diminished but also, to Kaylin’s admittedly inexpert eye, hadn’t grown; the emergency that had pulled a number of his Hawks out of their normal routine had been resolved; there was no Festival for almost another year. She couldn’t quite see what would put him in a mood, but the fact that he was in one was obvious—having facial fur that bristled when you were ticked off was a dead giveaway. Having fangs that were almost as long as her fingers—the exposed parts of the fangs, at any rate—was another.

She came to stand a safe distance from the side of his desk, and waited. She even waited quietly.

Her reward? He lifted a stack of paper off his desk and dumped it in her hands. “This,” he said curtly, “is your problem.”

She looked down at what she had assumed were reports—or worse. The paperwork required of the office was, by all accounts, more arcane than any of the magic it also required. To punctuate this, the window very sweetly told the entire office what the hour was.

Kaylin really hated the window. There was money riding on how long it would take someone to accidentally break it, and money riding on who would have the accident. There weren’t many rules that governed office bets, but one of them was that you couldn’t place money on yourself. Which was fair but, in Kaylin’s case, prevented her from winning much.

“Well? Are you going to stand there all day?”

Kaylin looked down at the first sheet in the stack—and it was a large stack. “No, sir.”

“Good. Take note of the roster—your rounds have been changed.”

“Since when? I checked it last night.”

“Since then, obviously.”

She caught Caitlin’s frantic gestures out of the corner of her eye, and nodded. She considered going to the roster by way of Caitlin’s desk, but since they were in opposite directions and Marcus could watch you while his back was turned, she decided to actually go to the roster instead.

Her shoulders did a severe downturn when she saw what had been written beside her name. Even Severn’s name, at the same location, didn’t bring much cheer. The Imperial Palace?

“Don’t make that face,” Teela said, in her left ear.

Barrani could walk in perfect silence, but it took work, and Teela was usually too damn lazy. Kaylin’s little start did not, however, cause her to drop the bundle of paper. Given Marcus’s mood, that was good.

“What’s eating Marcus?”

Teela shrugged, long black hair rising and falling like a perfect curtain. Kaylin tried not to resent the fact that the Barrani weren’t governed by any Hawk regulations when it came to anything they wore. Regulations were, after all, supposed to be practical and as far as Kaylin could tell, Barrani hair never tangled, never got caught in anything, and never got in the way.

And they were gorgeous and lived forever. If it weren’t for the fact that they adored politics—preferably with blood and death—they’d be insufferable.

“He’s Ironjaw,” Teela said. “But he’s been in that mood since late last night.” Her tone of voice made it clear that it was serious enough that Kaylin should change the subject now, and Kaylin had known Teela for so many years it wasn’t possible to misinterpret.

“Figures. Save a city, get sent to the Imperial Palace.”

“It’s more impressive than being sent to the docks or the Commons.”

“More people to offend.”

“True, and some of them are significant.” Teela smiled. In all, it wasn’t a happy expression. “Have you even taken a look at what you’re holding?”

“I just got it, Teela.”

“You might want to read it over,” the Hawk replied. “Severn’s waiting in the West room. And so is the Dragon.”

The Dragon was generally known by the rank and file as Lord Sanabalis. One of Four Dragon Lords that comprised the Dragon contingent of the Imperial Court, he was also a member of the Imperial Order of Mages. He had graciously come out of teaching retirement to take on one pupil, that pupil being Kaylin herself. She tried to remember to be grateful, and usually succeeded when she wasn’t actively staring at a candle wick in a vain attempt to get it to catch fire.

Which, come to think, was most of the time.

But she knew her lesson schedule more or less by heart now, and none of those lessons started at the beginning of her day. Given her nocturnal activities, and the desire of the Hawks not to annoy the mages, Marcus had forbidden any lesson that started before lunch. It gave her a decent chance of not missing any.

So Sanabalis wasn’t here to teach her anything new about candles. She pushed the door open—it was open, so she didn’t have to go through her daily ritual of teeth-grinding while waiting for the doorward to magically identify her—and saw that Severn and Sanabalis were seated across the room’s only table, talking quietly.

They stopped when they saw her, and she slid between the door and its frame, dropping the stack of paper on the tabletop.

“Marcus is in a mood,” she told Severn.

“It’s better than yours.”

“I’m not in a—” She stopped. “You mean better than mine will be?”

“Pretty much. Take a seat. Lord Sanabalis is here to inform us of our duties, and to escort us to the man we’ll be aiding.”

When Severn spoke Barrani, it was generally a bad sign. Lord Sanabalis, on the other hand, almost always spoke in Barrani.

“We don’t have to talk to the Emperor, do we?” she said, sinking into the chair slowly. It was rock hard and weighed more than she did.

“No,” Lord Sanabalis replied. “Unless something goes gravely, gravely wrong, the Emperor has more important duties to attend.”

“Does this mean there’s no lesson today?”

“There will be, as you say, no lesson for the course of your duties at the Palace.”

“Well, that’s something. Who are we investigating?”

Severn hesitated.

“Investigating?” Sanabalis replied, raising a brow. “I rather think, if you were sent to investigate someone, the last place the Hawks would agree to second you would be the Imperial Palace. As you should know, the Imperial Guards deal with any difficulties that arise in the Palace. And they do not arise.”

“Yes, Sanabalis.” She hesitated. “What are we doing there, then? We’re not exactly guard material—”

One of his silver brows rose into his thinning hairline.

Fair enough; if the Imperial Guard would be offended at outside investigators, they would probably completely lose it at outside guards. “So we’re not there as investigators, we’re not there as guards. Are we there as Hawks?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She grimaced. “That usually means no.”

“You are Hawks or you could not be seconded in this fashion. You are not, however, there as representatives of the Law.”

The old bastard looked like he was enjoying himself. Exactly how he conveyed this, Kaylin wasn’t quite certain—his expression was neutral enough, and his voice was smooth as glass.

“So what are we there as?”

“As Cultural Resources,” he replied smoothly.

“As what?”

“Cultural Resources.”

“I heard you. What exactly does that mean?”

“Ah. Have you taken a moment to peruse the documents you placed upon the table?”

“No.”

“I’d advise you to do so. We are not expected at the Palace until after lunch. I felt, given the unpredictability of your schedule, that this was wisest.”

“But—”

“Many of the questions you are no doubt impatient to ask will be answered by even the briefest of perusals.”

She wondered if he were a betting man, or Dragon. But given Dragons in general, she doubted it.

“If it eases your mind, Private Neya, Sergeant Kassan is required to pay you for the time you spend seconded to the Palace. He also,” he continued, lifting a hand to stop her from speaking, “expects you to report in each morning.

“For some reason, he is concerned about the assignment. I can’t imagine why.”

“Act One, Scene One.” Kaylin looked at Severn. “Act One, Scene One?”

“It’s a play,” Severn said, shrugging slightly. The left corner of his mouth was turned up in something that hinted at amusement. “You’re familiar with plays?”

Kaylin snorted. She read the description of stage materials—mostly the painted facades of buildings and bushes, in different sizes. And, she thought, in odd colors. “Poynter’s road?”

Severn nodded. “It’s—”

“I know where it is—but the buildings don’t look anything like that on Poynter’s.”

“Kaylin—”

“No, Corporal Handred, allow her to speak freely. It will, in theory, get it out of her system.”

“You want me to read a play?”

“Not exactly. The play itself is not complete, or not complete to our satisfaction. The author’s name might be familiar to you.” He raised one brow.

“Richard Rennick.” She looked at Severn. “Should we know him?”

“He’s the Imperial Playwright,” Severn told her quietly. “The position is held by one Playwright every five years. There’s usually a competition of some sort—a series of different plays staged for the Emperor. He apparently won, three years ago.”

Lord Sanabalis said, “The Emperor feels that human arts should be encouraged. Don’t look at me like that, Kaylin. Dragons seldom have an interest in drama.”

“Who’s the judge of this contest?”

“The Emperor.”

“So the winner is the person who appeals most to someone who doesn’t even like plays?”

“Something very like that,” he replied.

“And you want us to … work with this Rennick?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps you should read more than three pages.”

She grimaced. “Sanabalis—”

“Lord Sanabalis,” Severn corrected her.

“Lord Sanabalis, then. What on earth do I know about plays?”

“Clearly nothing.” He frowned. “However it is not for your expertise in the dramatic arts that you have been seconded.”

“Go on.”

“It is for your expertise—such as it is—on the Tha’alani.”

It was Kaylin’s turn to frown, but some of the exasperation left her, then. “I’m not an expert,” she told him quietly.

“No. But the Tha’alani seconded to the Court would possibly be even less comfortable in an advisory role.”

“If they can’t—” She stopped. “Why has the Emperor commissioned a play about the Tha’alani?”

Lord Sanabalis didn’t answer. But she met his eyes; they were their usual placid gold. His lower membranes, however, were up.

“It’s because of—of the water, isn’t it?”

“The tidal wave.”

“That one.”

“Yes. I am not aware of how much you saw, or how much you read about after the fact—but the Tha’alani, led by their castelord, left their Quarter in larger numbers than the city has ever seen. They walked to the docks, and they spread out along the port and the seawall. When the waters began to shift—and it was dramatic, Kaylin, even to one who has seen as much as I have—”

“You weren’t there,” she told him, but the words were soft. “You were with us.”

“I accessed records when I returned to the Palace.” He was now using his teacher tone of voice.

And I didn’t, Kaylin supplied. She glanced at Severn, who nodded very slightly. She cleared her throat. It was still hard for her to think about the Tha’alaan, and the Tha’alani were the Tha’alaan in some ways. “They hoped to save the city, if the waters rose.”

“Yes. But I invite you to think about appearances, Kaylin.”

“The wave didn’t hit the city.”

“No. It did not. The Oracles, however, were not widely bandied about. For many people—for almost all of them— the first warning of danger was the sight of the water itself, rising. The storm before it signified nothing, to them—it was merely weather.”

She nodded slowly.

“From their point of view—from what they could see—the Tha’alani went to the waters, and the waters rose.”

She closed her eyes.

“You understand our difficulty.”

She did.

“You yourself feared the Tha’alani. You do not do so now,” he added. “But you must understand the fear that people have.”

She nodded quietly.

“The Emperor understands it as well. He cannot, of course, explain the whole of what happened—and given the sparsity of reports generated by your office in the wake of events, I am not entirely certain he could explain it even if that was his desire. I am not, however, here to lecture you on the quality of your paperwork. I believe it best that some things remain uncommitted to paper.

“I, however, was fully debriefed. What I know, he now knows. He will not expose The Keeper, and no mention of the young Tha’alani man will leave the Court for that reason. Nor will the young Tha’alani man face the Emperor’s Justice, for that reason.”

The fact that the Emperor couldn’t reach him probably had something to do with it, in Kaylin’s opinion. She managed to keep this to herself. Instead, she returned to the matter at hand. “So this Richard Rennick wrote a … play. About the Tha’alani.”

“He wrote a play about the Tha’alani’s attempt to save the city, yes.”

“But all of it’s garbage. Because we’re not allowed to tell the truth.”

“Garbage is an unfortunate choice of word. Lose it,” he added, condescending to speak Elantran. He must have been serious. There were whole days where he affected complete ignorance of the language which most of the city actually spoke.

She picked up the sheaf of dog-eared pages. “Have you even read this?”

“I have. It is not, I believe, the current version, if that’s of any consequence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where we could prevail upon the Tha’alani at Court, we did. The effect that this had upon the playwright was … unfortunate.”

“What happened?”

“Ybelline and her companions were given a copy of the play. They read it with some concern.”

“I bet.”

“They returned the play to Mr. Rennick. Luckily Lord Tiamaris was at hand; he intercepted their corrections.”

“This would be lucky because?”

“They understand the Emperor’s concerns. Believe that they feel them even more strongly than the Emperor does. They are not … however …” His hesitation spoke volumes.

Kaylin almost winced. When the silence became awkward, she sighed and looked at Severn.

Severn nodded.

“They don’t know how to lie,” she said quietly. “And this … all of it … it must seem like one big lie to them.”

She’d managed to nudge Sanabalis’s brows toward his receding hairline, which had to count for something. On the other hand, the fact that his surprise was more due to her comprehension than their inability probably counted for something too.

“If the truth is supposed to ease people’s fear, Ybelline could learn to live with that. But in her world, lies don’t ease fear. So I imagine what she handed back to Rennick—or what she tried to hand him—was pretty much all of the truth she thought it safe to put out there.”

“Indeed.”

“And the Emperor’s version of safe to put out there isn’t the same.”

“Again, astute. We may yet make progress in your life as a student.”

“I think it would be easier than this. What did Rennick say?”

Sanabalis did wince, at that. “I think it best to ignore that. Suffice it to say that he did not feel his efforts to be adequately appreciated. Ybelline, however, did understand the difficulty, and if you must find a person to blame for your current assignment—”

“I won’t blame her.”

“—she suggested you. And Corporal Handred. She said she was confident that you would work in the interests of her people, but with a better understanding of the intended audience for the play itself.”

“Meaning my people.”

Sanabalis nodded. “Which reminds me of another matter Ybelline also mentioned. The Swords have stationed a small force adjacent to the Tha’alani Quarter,” he added, in a more subdued tone. “And before you ask, Kaylin, yes, it was entirely necessary.

“Ybelline has asked for your aid in the Quarter.”

“For my aid? What the hell happened?”

“However,” he added, lifting a hand in the universal I’m not finished, so shut up gesture, “you are to visit the Quarter after you report for duty.”

On the off chance that Kaylin decided to reverse the order, Sanabalis chose to accompany her to the Palace. This wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and to be fair, if he’d gone ahead, she would have gone to the Imperial Palace by whichever convoluted route took her to the Tha’alani Quarter first. But as she had to stop by the Quartermaster to get kitted out in appropriate dress uniform—and as the Quartermaster was still a touch angry, which wasn’t exactly the right word for his state (the right words couldn’t be used in polite company of any race, all of the Hawks being multilingual when it came to swearing)—she actually appreciated Sanabalis’s suspicion, because if the Quartermaster was willing to make her wait or suffer, he was not willing to piss off a Dragon Lord.

He was, however, unfailingly polite and friendly when talking to Severn. Severn did not lose expensive dresses.

She took the uniform from Severn’s hands and headed to the lockers, where she added a much cleaner—and longer—surcoat to the clothing she generally wore. If she were a Sword, she’d also get a thin chain hauberk that was shiny and clean, because those looked good; Hawks didn’t generally have them as part of their uniform, dress or no, although most of the human Hawks did own one.

She had managed to lose her daggers—where lose in this case meant that something magical had transformed them into part of a very elaborate yet somehow very skimpy dress—and had bought a single replacement. The other dagger was coming out of her pay.

But it wasn’t coming out of her hide, for which she should probably be grateful.

Severn straightened her surcoat. It had the usual embroidered Hawk, dead center, but the golden thread and the beading was so perfectly clean it almost hurt to look at the flight feathers. To this, Kaylin added a small, beadwork patch.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” Severn told her. But he didn’t tell her to take it off, probably because he knew she wouldn’t. The beads survived anything. Which was more, she thought glumly, than could be said about the rest of the clothing she owned.

She took the time to clean her boots.

Severn caught her arm and said “There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

She winced. “That obvious?”

“You don’t generally care about your boots, no.”

“I just—Marcus hates it when I go to the Palace. I swear he sits by his damn mirror waiting to hear that I’ve been thrown in the dungeons or eaten or something.”

They started to walk down the hall, and Sanabalis took the lead.

“You aren’t reporting directly to the Emperor,” Severn replied. “So it’s unlikely that anyone you offend will have you eaten.”

“You’re sure?”

“Unless the Emperor’s decided that you really are a threat to his Empire, in which case he could dispense with the petty part of you actually annoying some high-ranking official, and go straight to the eating. He’s an Emperor. He doesn’t have to worry about the niceties of the Law.”

She squared her shoulders. Smiled at Severn. “I know I’m going to have to learn how to do this—how to talk with people who’ve never even approached the banks of the Ablayne. But I’m not good at lying. I’m not good at talking.”

“You talk all the time,” he said, with just the hint of a smile. He was already moving out of the way before she hit him.

“I talk to people who know more or less what I know, and who don’t bloody care if I say things nicely or not. I hate the idea that my career is riding on my ability to be someone else’s idea of polite.”

“I would dislike it as well,” Sanabalis said, with a hint of the same smile Severn had offered. “But if it’s of comfort, Kaylin, you will not feel this way in twenty years.”

She bit her tongue. Hard.

And he nodded in approval.

This was going to be a long assignment.

On the way to the Palace, she read as much of the play as she could. She’d seen some street theater in her time, but her entire familiarity with plays put on for an audience involved a lot of loud children and the Foundling Halls’ small stage. Marrin, the Leontine who guarded and raised the orphans in said Hall, had put aside one of the large rooms in the former manor for just that purpose. For most of the year it stood empty, but during Festival season, and at odd intervals throughout the year, the cloths were dragged off the various bits and pieces of furniture—and the paintings and candelabras—and the room was opened to the visiting actors.

Kaylin had been there for almost all of the plays that occurred at any time other than Festival; Marrin often called her in to help supervise. She didn’t always get the play—and some of the stories, which were clearly meant to be familiar to small children before they watched the play, were a mystery to her—but the men and women in their funny hats and wigs and makeup were universally friendly and warm. The kids loved plays; they would watch in near silence—near being as much as anyone sane could hope for—and laugh or scream at all the right lines.

Kaylin seriously hoped that this play wasn’t meant for those children, because they would have been bored to tears. And bored children were a special hell of their own.

As near as she could tell, Mr. Rennick had decided that a budding romance between two Tha’alani teens was a good idea—for reasons that made no sense to Kaylin. Having seen evidence of the Tha’alani concept of romance, Kaylin had no doubt at all that this would be first on the list of things that Ybelline had attempted to correct. Second on that list would be the disapproving parents. Third on that list would be the couple attempting to sneak off somewhere together so they could be alone.

She stopped herself from dumping the play out the window, and only partly because the Swords on the streets were in a bad enough mood they might stop even an Imperial Carriage and attempt to hand someone a ticket for littering.

“Does this ever get to the point?”

“Hmm?”

“I mean, does he even get to the docks and the damn tidal wave?”

“Well, yes—but the love story is meant to convey to the audience that the Tha’alani are as human as we are. And misunderstood love occurs in all species.”

“It does?”

“Well, in Mr. Rennick’s mind, yes. But I would say that he is not entirely wrong.”

“Oh. What does a Dragon romance look like?” she asked.

Sanabalis snorted. Kaylin swore she saw a small plume of fire erupt just above his beard. Which seemed to constitute his answer on that front, and Kaylin couldn’t offhand recall mention of a female Dragon at court. She was certain they must exist somewhere.

She wondered, briefly, what a Barrani romance looked like, and decided she probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and one of their assassination attempts. Instead, she said, “Look, the Tha’alani are like the rest of us. Sort of. But this whole romance—it’s just wrong. I think Ybelline would find the … the possessive-ness, the sense of—”

“Ownership?”

“Don’t mock me, Sanabalis. What I’m trying to say is that they don’t experience love that way.”

“Which is not, in fact, what you did say.”

“Fine. The point is, they don’t. They don’t have the disapproving parents thing, and they definitely don’t sneak off for privacy.”

“Ah. Well, then, how would you structure a play in which it was utterly essential that the audience empathize with the Tha’alani?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I’d write about the years in which they were tortured like criminals because they wouldn’t serve the Emperor by reading other people’s minds for him. Because they couldn’t, without going insane, and driving everyone they knew and loved insane in the process.”

Sanabalis’s eyes shaded to orange. In Dragon eyes, this meant irritation. Red was anger, and in general, if you saw red Dragon eyes, it was probably the last thing you would ever see.

“Kaylin,” Severn said.

“It would work,” she told him, an edge to the words. “People could sympathize with that.”

“I believe it would cast the Emperor in an unflattering light.”

She said nothing. Loudly. But it didn’t last. “I’m sorry, Sanabalis.”

“Generally one apologizes for behavior one means to curb,” he replied stiffly. But his eyes shaded back to burnished gold.

“It worked for me,” she told him quietly. “Knowing that—knowing what they suffered—it changed the way I felt about them. Look—I understand why people are afraid of the Tha’alani. I know why I was. It never occurred to me that they wanted to be left alone. That they never ever wanted to read our minds. And the experiments conducted on the Tha’alani—it changed the way I felt about them. Forever.”

He nodded. “You understand, however, why that information could not be part of a public entertainment.”

She nodded slowly. “It’s just that it would work, that’s all.” She looked at Severn. “Did you ever fear them?”

“Yes. But my understanding of the Tha’alani was different.”

She had the grace to say, “You wanted to understand them.”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to hide from them.”

He nodded again. “It’s natural. Kaylin, I’m five years older than you are. Five years ago—”

“It’s not your age,” she said, swatting the words away. Willing to be this truthful. “It’s you.”

“Perhaps. But I have often found understanding my enemies gives me an edge when confronting them.” He paused and then added, “The first Tha’alani I met was Ybelline herself.”

“You met her first?”

“I was under consideration for the Shadows,” he told her. “Ybelline could read everything of note, and still remain detached. There are very few others who could. She was summoned. And it is very, very hard to fear Ybelline.”

Kaylin smiled at this. It was a small smile, but it acknowledged the truth: it was hard to fear her. Even though she could ferret all truth, all secrets, from a human mind. Because in spite of it, one had the sense that Ybelline could know everything and like you anyway.

Maybe that was something they could work with.

CHAPTER 2

Kaylin’s first impression of Richard Rennick could be summed up in two words: Oh, god.

She wasn’t fussy about which god, either. She was pretty sure she couldn’t name half of the ones that figured in official religions, and of the half she could name, the spelling or accents would be off. One of the things that living in the fiefs taught you was that it didn’t particularly matter which god you prayed to—none of them listened, anyway.

Rennick looked like an Arcanist might look if he had been kept from sleep for a week, and kept from the other amenities that came with sleep—like, say, shaving utensils—for at least as long, if not longer. His hair made her hair look tidy. It wasn’t long, but it couldn’t be called short either, and it seemed to fray every which way the light caught it. He didn’t have a beard, and he didn’t have much of a chin, either. It was buried beneath what might, in a few long weeks, be a beard—but messier.

His clothing, on the other hand, was very expensive and had it been on any other person, would have gone past the border of ostentatious; on him it looked lived in. She thought he might be forty. Or thirty. It was hard to tell.

What wasn’t hard to tell: he was having a bad day. And he wasn’t averse to sharing.

He didn’t have manners, either. When Sanabalis entered the room, he looked up from his desk—well, from the very, very long dining table at which he was seated—and grunted in annoyance.

The table itself was what one would expect in the Palace—it was dark, large, obviously well oiled. But the surface was covered in bits and pieces of paper, some of it crumpled in balls that had obviously been thrown some distance. Not all of those were on the table; the carpets had their fair share too.

“Mr. Rennick,” Lord Sanabalis said, bowing. “Forgive me for intruding.”

Another grunt. Sanabalis didn’t even blink an eye.

“I would like to introduce you to Corporal Handred and Private Neya. These are the people Ybelline Rabon’alani spoke of when we last discussed the importance of your work.”

He looked up at that, and managed to lose some slouch. “I hope you last longer than my previous assistants.”

“You had other assistants for this?”

“Oh, not for this project. In general, the office of Official Imperial Playwright comes with assistants.” The sneer that he put in the words managed to remain off his face. Barely.

“They won’t, however, allow me to hire my own assistants, and the ones they’ve sent me must have been dredged from the bottom of the filing pool.”

Kaylin gave Sanabalis what she hoped was a smile. She moved her lips in the right direction.

“We don’t intend to interfere in any way,” she began.

“Oh, please. Take a number and stand in line. If you somehow—by some small miracle—manage not to interfere, you’ll be the only people in this godsforsaken Palace who haven’t tried to tell me how to do my job.”

Sanabalis offered Kaylin a smile that was at least as genuine as hers had been.

On the other hand, if the Emperor hadn’t eaten Rennick, things obviously weren’t as formal as all that, and Kaylin felt a surprisingly strong relief; she was almost happy to have met him. Or would have been, if it were all in the past.

“This is not like filing,” he added, clearly warming up. He even vacated his seat and shoved his hands into pockets that lined the seams of his robes. “This is not an exact bloody science. Do you have any idea what they’ve asked of me?”

She had a fairly good idea, but said, “No.”

Something in her tone caused his eyes to narrow and Severn’s foot to stray slightly closer to hers. But she offered what she hoped was a sympathetic grimace; it was all she was up for.

“No, you probably don’t. But I’ll tell you.”

Of this, no one could be in any doubt.

“They want me to write a play that makes the Tha’alani human.”

There was certainly a sneer in his expression now, and Kaylin had to actively work to keep her hands from becoming fists. You’ve said worse, she told herself. You’ve said a lot worse.

Yes, she added, but he’s never going to go through what you did to change your bloody mind. Because she was used to arguing with herself, she then thought, And we’re going to have to do what experience won’t. Oh, god.

“I am willing to face a challenge,” he added. “Even one as difficult as this—but the Tha’alani themselves don’t seem to understand the purpose of the play I did write. They said it wasn’t true. I told them I wanted a bigger truth. It wasn’t real, but truth isn’t always arrived at by the real.”

“I can see how that would confuse them,” she offered.

“And now they’ve sent you. Have you ever even seen one of my plays?”

“I haven’t seen a play that wasn’t written for children,” she replied.

This didn’t seem to surprise him. He seemed to expect it.

Severn, however, said, “I have.”

“Oh, really?” A voice shouldn’t have legally been able to contain that much sarcasm. And, Kaylin thought, a person shouldn’t be subject to as much sarcasm as this twice in a single day. “Which one?”

“Winter,” Severn replied.

Rennick opened his mouth, but for the moment, he seemed to have run out of words. His eyes widened, his jaw closed, and his lips turned up in a genuine smile. Thirty, Kaylin thought. Or maybe even younger. “That was my second play—I wrote it before I won the seat.” He paused, and then his eyes narrowed. “Where did you see it?”

“It was staged in the Forum,” Severn replied, without missing a beat. “Constance Dargo directed it. I believe the actress who played the role of Lament was—”

“Trudy.”

“Gertrude Ellen.”

“That would be Trudy.” His eyes, however, had lost some of their suspicion. “She could be such a bitch. But she made a number of good points about some of the dialogue.”

“The dialogue was changed?”

“Good god, yes. Dialogue on the page is always stiffer than spoken dialogue—you can’t get a real sense of what it sounds like until actors put it through its paces. The first staging of any play defines the play. What did you think of it?”

“I thought it very interesting, especially given where it played, and when. It was also unusual in that it didn’t feature a relationship as its central motivation.”

“Starving people seldom have the time to worry about social niceties.”

Severn glanced at Kaylin.

“But you might be the first person sent me who’s actually familiar with my work,” Rennick said, picking up the reins where he had dropped them.

“And as one such person, I have no intention of guiding your work. You know it. I don’t.”

“And let me tell you—you don’t … Oh.”

“But the Emperor’s dictates are clear,” Severn continued, into the very welcome silence. “Winter was a work that reached out to people who had everything and reminded them, for a moment, of the fate of the rest of the city. You were chosen to write this for a reason.”

“I was chosen because they don’t have to pay me more.”

At that, Kaylin did chuckle. Rennick actually looked in her direction, but the hostility had ebbed. Slightly. As far as Rennick seemed to be concerned, Dragons didn’t exist, and he didn’t bother to glance at Sanabalis.

Kaylin did. The Dragon’s eyes were a placid gold. Clearly, he had met Rennick before, and for some reason, he had decided not to kill him then.

“Look,” Rennick added, running his hands through his hair as if he would like to pull it all out by its roots, “Winter wasn’t meant to be a message. It wasn’t meant to tell the audience anything about the state of the poor or the starving. I loved Lament—I wanted to tell her story in a way that would move people. Talia Korvick was the first Lament—I’ll grant that Trudy did a better job, but Trudy wouldn’t touch my unknown little play for its first staging.”

The idea that Rennick cared about moving anyone in a way that didn’t mean out of my sight surprised Kaylin. Almost as much as the fact that he would admit it.

“You achieved that—but you also made people think about what her life entailed, and how her life might have been different.”

“Yes—but that was incidental. I don’t know how to make people think differently. And the Emperor appears to want me to … to educate people. With characters that are in no way my own creations. It’s dishonest,” he added.

Given that he told lies for a living, this struck Kaylin as funny. Sanabalis, however, stepped on her foot.

“Lament wasn’t a real person but you made her real. The Tha’alani are real in the same way that the rest of us are—and Lament was human.” Severn frowned slightly, his thinking expression. “Have you been out in the streets since the storm?”

Rennick frowned. “Not far, no.”

“People are afraid. Frightened people are often ugly people. The Tha’alani—”

“From all reports, they tried to kill us.”

Kaylin didn’t care at that moment if Sanabalis stepped on her foot and broke it. “By standing in the way of the tidal wave? They would have been the first people hit by the damn thing!”

Rennick actually looked at her, possibly for the first time. After a moment, he said, “There is that.”

“Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard, and I don’t bloody care—they tried to save the city. And if this is what they get for trying to save it, they should have just let it drown.”

“And you know this how?”

“I was there—” She shut her mouth. Loudly. “I’m the cultural expert,” she told him instead.

“You were there?”

“She was not,” Sanabalis said, speaking in his deep rumble. “But she is a friend of the Tha’alani, and as much as anyone who was not born Tha’alani can, she now understands them. Mr. Rennick, I am aware that you find the current assignment somewhat stressful—”

“The Imperial Playwright writes his own work,” Rennick snapped. “This is—this is political propaganda.”

“But what you write, and what you stage—provided any of the directors available meet your rather strict criteria—will influence the city for decades to come. It is necessary work, even if you find it distasteful.”

“In other words,” Kaylin added sweetly, “The Emperor doesn’t care what you think.”

Severn glanced at Kaylin, and his expression cleared. Whatever he had been balancing in the back of his mind had settled into a decision. “With your leave, Lord Sanabalis, we have duties elsewhere.”

“What?” Rennick glared at Severn. “You definitely haven’t outlasted the previous assistants.”

“Our presence has been requested by the castelord of the Tha’alani,” he continued, ignoring Rennick—which might, to Kaylin’s mind, be the best policy. “And if you think it would be of help to you, you may accompany us.”

Hard to believe that only a few weeks ago, Kaylin would have skirted this Quarter of the town as if it had the plague. Fear made things big; her mental map of the Tha’alani district had been a huge, gray shadow that would, luck willing, remain completely in the dark.

Now, it seemed small. It had one large gate, and way too few guards—usually one—between it and the rest of the city. The only people who left the Quarter for much of anything were the Tha’alani seconded to the Imperial Service—and like many, many people in Elantra, they hated their jobs. Of course they did their jobs to prevent the Emperor from turning their race into small piles of ash, but they didn’t make this a big public complaint.

And they still liked the Hawks. Kaylin privately thought that was crazy—in their situation, she wouldn’t have.

Lord Sanabalis had arranged for a carriage, but he had not chosen to accompany them to the Quarter. This was probably for the best, as a Dragon wandering the streets could make anyone who noticed him nervous. On the other hand, people were already nervous, and if they wanted to take it out on something, Kaylin privately had a preference for something that could fight back, although she conceded that this was a fief definition of the word “fight.”

Rennick was silent for the most part, which came as a bit of a shock. He stuck his head out the window once or twice when something caught his eye, and he frequently stuck his arm out as if writing on air, but Severn said nothing; clearly Rennick was not of a station where babysitting was considered part of their duties.

But he pulled both arm and head into the carriage when they at last began the drive up Poynter’s road, because even Rennick could tell that the bodies on this particular street were on the wrong side of “tense.” They were like little murders waiting to happen.

“Don’t they have anything better to do?” she muttered to Severn.

He said nothing.

It was Rennick who said, “Probably not. They don’t want the Tha’alani to leave the Quarter, and they’re making sure that they don’t. Hey! That man has a crossbow!”

Kaylin had seen it. The fact that it was still in his hands implied that the Swords had far more work than they should have, and it troubled her. But not enough that she wanted to stop the carriage, get down and start a fight.

Because it would be a fight, and it would probably get messy.

“They’re frightened,” she said, surprising herself.

“Funny how frightened people can be damn scary,” Rennick replied. But he looked thoughtful, not worried.

“How many?” Kaylin asked Severn.

“A hundred and fifty, maybe. Some of them are in the upper windows along the street. I imagine that the Tha’alani who serve the Emperor are being heavily escorted.”

“Or given a vacation.”

He nodded.

“Has there been any official word about the incident?” Rennick asked quietly.

Kaylin shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

“Right up until one of those idiots fires his crossbow or swings his—is that a pickax?” Severn nodded. “Swings his ax,” she continued, “it’s not Hawk business. It’s Sword, and the Swords are here.”

And they were. Kaylin had thought they’d send twenty men out; she was wrong by almost an order of magnitude. She thought there were maybe two hundred in total—no wonder the Halls of Law were so damn quiet.

But while they lined the street, they hadn’t built an official barricade, they did meet the carriage in the road, well away from the gatehouse, and they did tell the driver to step down. They also opened the doors, and Kaylin made sure she tumbled out first.

“Private Neya?” said the man who had delivered the curt instructions. He was older than Kaylin by about fifteen years, and the day seemed to have added about a hundred new wrinkles, and a layer of gray to his skin, but she recognized him. “Max—Uh, Sergeant,” she added, as he looked pointedly over her soldier. “Sergeant Voone. You’re out here?”

Max wasn’t retired, exactly, but he spent a lot of his time behind a desk. He appeared to like it a great deal more than Marcus—but a corpse would have given that impression as well. And Max looked tired.

“Most of us are, as you put it, out here. I know why we’re here—what are you doing in a fancy box?”

“Oh. Uh, we were sent here.”

“By?”

“Lord Sanabalis.”

He whistled. “To do what?”

“Not to step all over your toes, relax.”

His chuckle was entirely mirthless. “We’ll relax when these people remember they have jobs and family.”

“I’m thinking they remember the family part,” Kaylin replied. “People go crazy when they think they’re protecting their own.”

“Tell me about it. No, strike that. Don’t.”

“When did it get this bad?”

“There was an incident two days ago.”

“Incident?”

“It was messy,” he replied, his voice entirely neutral. “The Swordlord made it clear that there will be no more incidents. The Emperor was not impressed.”

She winced. It wasn’t often that she felt sympathy for the Swords. But while she resented the easy life the Swords generally called work, she liked them better than the people with the crossbows down the street.

“You know they’re armed?” she asked casually.

“We are well aware that they’re armed. And no, thank you, we don’t require help in disarming them. They’re waiting for an invitation. Let them wait. At that distance.”

She looked at Severn as Severn exited the carriage. Rennick tumbled out after him. “Sergeant Voone,” Severn said, before the sergeant could speak, “Richard Rennick. He’s the Imperial Playwright.”

“This is not a good time for sightseeing,” the Sword said to Rennick.

Rennick looked him up and down, and then shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea.” But he was subdued, now. He lifted a hand to his face, rubbing the scruff on his chin.

“You can call the Hawks out,” Kaylin continued. “At least the Aerians—”

“We’ve got Aerians here. They’re not currently in the air,” he added. And then he gave her an odd look. “The Hawks have their own difficulties to worry about. I was sorry to hear the news.”

“What news?”

His whole expression shuttered, not that it was ever all that open.

“Voone, what news? What’s happened?”

“You came from the Halls?”

“The Halls don’t usually have access to Imperial Carriages. What happened?”

“No one died,” he replied, and his tone of voice added yet. “But you might want to check in at the office before you head home.”

She wanted to push him for more, but Severn shook his head slightly. “Ybelline.”

There was no Tha’alani guard at the guardhouse. That position was taken up by a dozen Swords. They wore chain, and they carried unsheathed swords. You’d have to be crazy to rush the gatehouse.

Kaylin approached it quietly and answered the questions the Swords asked; they were all perfunctory. Voone escorted them to the squad and left them there, after mentioning her name loudly enough to wake the dead. She noted all of this and tried to squelch her own fear. Severn was right, of course. They’d come here for Ybelline. But the sympathies of Voone made her nervous.

The Swords hadn’t entered the Quarter; they were met by Tha’alani guards. Four men in armor. Their stalks swiveled toward her as she entered.

She saw that they, too, bore unsheathed swords, and it made her … angry. Those weapons just looked wrong in Tha’alani hands; she wondered if they even knew how to use them.

But using them wasn’t an issue. They bowed to her, almost as one man. “Ybelline is waiting for you,” one told her quietly.

“At her house?”

“Not at her domicile. Demett will take you to her.” The man so identified stepped away from his companions.

“Where is she?”

“At the longhouse” was his reply—spoken in the stiff and exact cadence that Tha’alani who were unused to speech used. He obviously expected her to know what the longhouse was, and she didn’t bother to correct him.

She followed him, and it took her a moment to realize why the streets here felt so wrong—they were empty. Usually walking down a Tha’alani street was like walking in the Foundling Hall—it was a gauntlet of little attention-seeking children, with their open curiosity and their utter lack of decorum.

She didn’t care for the change. Hell, even the plants were drooping. Rennick walked between Severn and her, and made certain that there was always at least one body between him and the nearest Tha’alani. He wasn’t overly obvious about it, but it rankled. Even when Kaylin had been terrified of the Tha’alani, she wouldn’t have tried to hide. One, it wouldn’t have done much good and two—well, two, she didn’t casually throw strangers to fates she herself feared.

It was not going to be easy working with Rennick. She spared him a glance every so often, which was more than any of the Tha’alani did. They hadn’t even questioned his presence. It would have been convenient if they had. He’d be on the other side of the gates, where he’d be marginally less annoying.

The guards walked past the latticework of open—and utterly empty—fountains; past the blush of bright pink, deep red and shocking blue flower beds that bordered them; past the neat little circular domes that reminded Kaylin of nothing so much as hills. And if those homes were hills, they were approaching a small fortress that nestled among them. It was two stories tall, and the beams that supported the clay face were almost as wide as she was, and certainly taller. It was larger by far than the building in which Ybelline, the castelord—a word that didn’t suit her at all—chose to live. It was almost imposing.

It was also bloody crowded.

It boasted normal doors—rectangular doors, not the strange ones that adorned most of the Tha’alani homes; these doors weren’t meant to blend with the structure. They stood out. And they were pulled wide and pegged open. Which, given the number of people on the other side of them, made sense—closed doors would have made breathing anything but stale air and sweat almost impossible. As it was, it was dicey.

“This is the longhouse,” Kaylin said.

Demett nodded.

“Demett,” she said, as he turned, “what is the longhouse used for?”

His face went that shade of expressionless that actually meant he was talking—but only to the Tha’alaan: to the minds of his people, and the memories of the dead. She waited for it to pass, as if it were a cloud; it took a while.

“Wait for Ybelline,” he told her quietly.

Ybelline came through the crowd slowly. You could see where she might be moving because her movement caused the other Tha’alani to move, like a human wave composed entirely of bodies. The building was packed. Kaylin thought there might be six or seven hundred people just beyond the open doors, more if the children so absent from the streets were also there.

But Ybelline did not come alone; the movement of the crowd, the slow outward push, wouldn’t have been necessary to allow just one person through. The people spilled out into the streets, beyond Kaylin and Severn. Rennick’s shoulders curled in, and he brought his hands up once or twice, as if to fend off any contact.

The Tha’alani in turn avoided him.

They would. They knew fear when they saw it, especially Rennick’s fear—and his fear was poison to them. They tried just as hard as he did to avoid any contact, but Kaylin had to admit they were more polite about it.

Ybelline appeared at last, between the shoulders of about sixteen tightly grouped men and women. She wore robes, an earth-brown with green edges; her hair was arranged both artlessly and perfectly above her slender neck. Her eyes were the honey-brown of that hair, but they were ringed with gray circles. She looked exhausted.

Exhaustion did not stop her from opening her arms, stepping forward and hugging Kaylin. And nothing in the world would have stopped Kaylin from returning that hug. Nothing.

“Tell me,” she whispered, her lips beside Ybelline’s ear. She knew she should have introduced Rennick, but it had been Severn’s idea to drag him here, and he was therefore, for the moment, Severn’s problem.

The slender stalks, which were the most obvious racial trait of all the Tha’alani, brushed strands of Kaylin’s hair from her forehead, and then settled gently against skin.

They were so delicate, the touch so light, they could hardly be felt at all.

But Ybelline could be—and more, she could be clearly heard. Could clearly hear. With this much contact, she could, if she wanted to, peruse every memory Kaylin had, including ones she wasn’t aware of herself. All the hidden things could be revealed, every bad or stupid or humiliating thing Kaylin had ever done.

And Kaylin, knowing this, didn’t care.

But she wasn’t prepared for Ybelline’s voice when it came. It was raw and, at first, there were no words—just the sense of things that might have become words with enough distance and effort. With too much distance and effort.

But she saw what Ybelline meant her to see in the brief glimpse of steel and blood and the bodies of the fallen, all interposed, all flashing over and over again in quick succession in front of Kaylin’s eyes. Except that her eyes were closed.

Help me. Just that, two words.

Kaylin rolled up her sleeves and, without even looking at her wrist, pressed the gems on the bracer in the sequence that would open it: white, blue, white, blue, red, red, red. She dropped it on the ground as if it were garbage—but she could. If she’d tossed it on a garbage heap, it would find its way back to her. She’d only tried that once. Maybe twice.

This was magic’s cage. And without it, she was free to do whatever she could. For this reason it was technically against orders to remove it.

Her hands were tingling. “Ybelline,” she said, and then, Ybelline.

Ybelline, you have to let go of me.

The Tha’alani castelord did as Kaylin bid; she let go, withdrew her arms, her stalks. With them went the wild taste of fear—Ybelline’s fear. She kept it from the Tha’alaan, and therefore from her people, but she was exhausted. And Kaylin understood the exhaustion; it was hard for any Tha’alani to live alone, on the inside of their thoughts, the way humans did.

The way humans needed to.

The Tha’alani who had followed Ybelline out of the longhouse had come bearing stretchers. Four stretchers. Four men. They might once have worn armor—had, Kaylin thought, remembering the brief flash of images that had emerged from her contact with Ybelline.

But they weren’t dead. They weren’t dead yet.

“Put them down,” Kaylin said, easing her voice into the command that came naturally when she was on the beat. There were no children here; she had time to notice their absence, to be grateful for it. No more.

The crowd stepped back. The bodies lay on stretchers. Someone had dressed wounds, had cleaned burns—burns!—had done what they could to preserve life. Freed of the constraints that the ancient bracer placed on her magic, Kaylin knelt between two of these stretchers and touched two foreheads with her right and left palms. She was gentle, although she didn’t have to be—the men here were in no danger of regaining consciousness anytime soon. They had that gray-white pallor that spoke of loss of blood. She was surprised that they hadn’t succumbed to the wounds they had taken. Many of those wounds weren’t clean cuts; they had been caused by people who weren’t used to handling weapons.

Kaylin grimaced. “Severn?”

She saw his shadow. Knew he was listening.

“Get water,” she told him. “I’ll need it.”

“There are four men—”

“I can do this. Just—water. Food.”

His shadow was still for a moment, but he was silent. Everything they said or did now—every single thing—would be watched by all of the Tha’alani, no matter where they were, no matter how young or how old, how strong or how weak. All of the Tha’alani who watched would see, and what they saw would become part of the Tha’alaan, the living memory of the entire race; Tha’alani children four hundred years from now could search the Tha’alaan and see the events of this day through the eyes of these witnesses.

And for once in her life, Kaylin was determined to make a good impression.

Severn knew; he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that humans—her kind, and his—had done this damage. He knew how important it was to the city that humans be seen to undo it. She didn’t even hear him go.

It was hard.

It was harder than destroying walls that were solid stone, harder than killing a man. Healing always was. It was harder than saving infants who were trapped in a womb; harder, even, than holding their mothers when shock and loss of blood threatened their lives.

Harder than saving a child in the Foundling Hall.

But she had done all of that.

She felt the shape of their bodies and the beat—erratic and labored—of their hearts. She heard their thoughts, not as thoughts, but as memories, almost inseparable from her own. She felt their injuries, the broken bones, the old scars from—falling out of a tree? She even snorted. These weren’t men who got caught out in bar brawls.

They weren’t men who were accustomed to war of any kind.

She could save them. She could see where infection had taken its toll, eating into flesh and muscle. Two men. If she wanted them to live, she couldn’t use any more power than was absolutely necessary. No miracles, not yet. No obvious miracles.

But the subtle ones were the only ones that counted.

The bones that would knit on their own, she left; the ones that wouldn’t mend properly, she fixed. She tried not to see what had caused the breaks, but gave up quickly. That took too much effort, too much energy.

When she lifted her hands from their faces, she felt the touch of their stalks, clinging briefly to her skin. She told them to sleep.

She heard Ybelline’s voice. Felt Severn’s hands under her arms, shoring her up as she stood and wobbled. She didn’t brush him off, didn’t try. She let him carry some of her weight as she approached the last two men, their stretchers like pale bruises on the ground.

She felt grass beneath her knees as she crushed it, folding too quickly to the ground. Righting herself, which really meant letting Severn pick her up, she reached out to touch them.

Shuddered.

They didn’t wear helmets. And the most obvious weapon they had—in the eyes of humans, of anyone outside—were their stalks. One man’s were broken. Just … broken. There were no bones in the stalks themselves—but even muscle and tendon could be crushed out of shape, smeared against a skull that was also fractured badly. Bones don’t hurt. The stalks—there were nerves there, so many nerves.

Gritting her teeth, she said, “Ybelline—I think this is going to hurt him. I think he’ll—”

Ybelline knelt in her shadow, knowing which of the two Kaylin meant. She reached out, caught the man’s bruised hands (two fingers broken), and held them fast. Leaning, she bent over his face, and her own stalks, whole, un-bruised, reached out to stroke the sides of his face, his cheeks, his jaw. “Do it,” she said softly.

Kaylin nodded.

Here, too, she reached out with her power, with the power that had come the day the marks had appeared on her arms and legs. Words burned on the inside of her thighs, where no one could see them. They burned up and down the length of her arms, and flared on the back of her neck.

She didn’t care.

It’s very important that no one know of this, Marcus said, in memory. It’s important that you do not reveal your power to anyone. Do you understand, Kaylin?

Get stuffed, she told him.

He fell silent, memory closing its windows. What she had actually said? More polite, longer, a promise of secrecy.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, now, but this: healing those horribly damaged stalks.

The man woke when she’d knit bone and brain into something like its former shape; she had known he would. He screamed, once, when she started on his stalks. The scream cut out in the middle, and silence eradicated its echoes.

The last man shouldn’t have been alive. He had taken a single clean wound to one side of the heart, and he had bled so much. Kaylin felt magic in him, around him, when she touched his chest. She let it be, and concentrated, though it was much, much harder now.

But it didn’t matter, for he was the last. The three would live, and the fourth—damn it—he’d live too. She felt her lips cracking as she spoke. Her hands were shaking too much to keep steady; she didn’t even bother to try.

Just this one, she thought. Just this one, and I’ll be good. I’ll be good for months. I’ll be good for-bloody-ever. Just this.

“She’s awake,” someone said. A young someone. Either that or a very skinny midget with a very high voice. Kaylin winced and managed to lift an eyelid. She regretted it almost instantly. There was just too much damn light.

“She’s speaking!” the child said. He said it loudly.

Kaylin opened her eyes—both of them—and winced again, lifting her hands to her face. Getting up was almost out of the question.

“You’re awake, aren’t you?” The child spoke slowly, his Elantran deliberate.

“I’m awake,” she answered. She could see his eyes—they were brown, and they were wide. His stalks were flapping in the nonexistent breeze.

“I’m supposed to tell Ybelline you’re awake. When you’re awake.”

“She must trust you a lot,” Kaylin managed.

The child—boy? Girl?—beamed. “I’m going to grow up to be castelord!”

“It’s a very hard job,” Kaylin replied, wanting him to take his smile and play somewhere else. Feeling bad about it, too. There wasn’t much you could feel that couldn’t be made worse by a solid dose of guilt.

“It’s an Important job.”

“That too. Are my friends still here?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Um, where am I?”

“In the home of Ybelline Rabon’alani,” Severn said, his voice drifting in from an archway that she could barely see. “It’s … more crowded than it was the last time we were here.”

“I’d noticed.” She tried to sit up. Gave up halfway through.

“I brought water, and food. Ybelline had you carried here when you collapsed.” He glanced at the child as he made his way to Kaylin. “I would have waited,” he said, “but Rennick wished to speak with Ybelline—and her advisors, as he calls them—and I thought it best to … translate. She asked Ellis to watch over you.”

“Ellis?”

Severn glanced pointedly at the back—well, top, really—of the child’s head. “He joined us when we were on the way here, and there wasn’t much that could be done to convince him it wasn’t safe. You’re known here,” he added, with a slight smile. “And Ybelline knew you were concerned about the absence of the children.”

Kaylin did not nod. It would have hurt too much. But she did manage a feeble smile. “Where did the—the others go?”

“The Tha’alani guards that were injured are in the longhouse. Two of them are awake, two of them are sleeping. None of them are now in danger. The Tha’alani doctors are quite surprised.”

She winced. “It’s not as if they’ll tell anyone.”

“It’s not the Tha’alani that I’m worried about.”

“Then who? Oh. Rennick.”

“Ellis, come and hold this waterskin for Kaylin. You can feed her anything she’ll eat,” he added. He bent down quickly and kissed her forehead. “Well done, Kaylin,” he said softly. “I don’t want to leave Rennick alone.”

She was stupid; she nodded.

“Oh, and Ellis? She’ll tell you she’s ready to get up and walk around long before she’s actually ready to get up and walk around.”

Ellis looked a bit doubtful, and the waterskin shook in his hands. It looked huge in contrast, like some headless, stuffed toy. “How will I know when it’s okay?”

“When she’s finished eating all the food and drinking all the water.”

Severn gave Kaylin the sweetest of smiles.

What she wanted to give him would not endear her to the future would-be castelord, and she tried very hard to remember this.

CHAPTER 3

Kaylin wanted to sleep for a day. Sadly, she wanted that day to be now, and would also have liked it to be longer by forty-eight hours than the average day. Ellis didn’t talk a lot; the effort of making Elantran words was obviously not trivial. But, mindful of Severn’s dictate, he encouraged her to eat and drink.

He must have either had younger siblings or spent time in the Tha’alaan watching other people’s children, because his form of coaching left something to be desired. The cooing, Kaylin admitted to herself, might be cute—and even hilariously funny—on another day.

Like, say, a day in which she didn’t feel like she’d been on the losing end of a bar brawl with the occupants of an entire tavern. But the food did help, as did the effort of keeping the ill humor out of the words she was speaking to a child. She did not, however, offer to let him touch her forehead with his stalks. If he wanted to be castelord, he was going to damn well have to learn how to talk the hard way.

And explaining the words that she was thinking to a young child of any race—never mind a young child with an entire Quarter’s worth of parents and grandparents in attendance courtesy of the racial gift of mindspeaking—was not on her list of things to do on any day.

When she had finished eating and drinking everything—and Ellis had shaken the waterskin up and down just to make certain—Ellis tried to help her to her feet. She was certain that her knees would recover from the way she had to fall in order not to crush him.

But even at her crankiest—and this was pretty much the nadir—she found something about his solemnity touching. She stumbled beside him as he led her to Ybelline because, even if she couldn’t read minds, it didn’t take mind-reading to know that he considered this babysitting of a Real Adult a task of honor and importance, and she didn’t want to take it away from him.

She was entirely unprepared for Ybelline, because Ybelline met her on one side of the arch that Ellis, talking to her as if she were a sick puppy, was urging her toward. Ybelline’s hair was down—literally—in a honey-gold cascade that obscured her shoulders. Her eyes were the same color, the same almost gold, almost brown. The light that came in—far too brightly—from the open windows and half-walls seemed to have stopped there for the sheer pleasure of illuminating the castelord of the Tha’alani.

The Tha’alani woman who wasn’t classically beautiful—if there was such a thing—was radiant anyway. She had changed into a simple, cream gown that fell from her shoulders to her ankles unimpeded. All of this, Kaylin took in at a glance—and even if she’d wanted to see more, she wouldn’t have been able to, because Ybelline Rabon’alani crossed the distance, ignoring Ellis’s loud warnings, and enfolded Kaylin Neya, scruffy and severely under-rested Hawk, in her arms.

It felt like home, to Kaylin. She let her forehead lean against the taller woman’s shoulder, and she wanted to stand that way forever. But that wasn’t why she’d come, and she knew that Severn and Rennick were waiting somewhere. She hoped that Rennick hadn’t offended anyone. Anyone else.

“He’s been remarkably quiet,” Ybelline replied, speaking with the ease of long practice.

“That’s probably bad.”

Ybelline was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was guarded. “Possibly bad for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“He was at the longhouse. I would have refused him entry into the Quarter, but I was … distracted.”

“You had every right to be. The others—”

“They’ll live. They’re well.” Her voice was soft, and soothing.

“Good. I wanted—”

“You had to be the one to help them. Kravel was beyond us,” Ybelline added. “Even had we been able to heal him in other ways, he would have been lost to the Tha’alaan. But they have seen, and they have understood. Not all of your kind are insane. Not all of them are so maddened by fear that they must, in turn, be feared.”

“They’ll forget,” Kaylin said.

“They are not human, Kaylin. They will not forget.”

“And if they do, you’ll remind them?”

Ybelline shook her head, and her hair brushed Kaylin’s face as she lifted it. “No. You are not Tha’alani. But you have touched the Tha’alaan. What you understand might change in time—but they will remember you because they desire it. Not one of them wishes to fear the whole of a race. To fear even the ones who injured them is burden enough.

“And it is my fault and my responsibility. I have worked among your kind for most of my adult life, and I didn’t think before I left the Quarter. I didn’t think about how it would look to people who have so little knowledge. I should have realized—”

“You were trying to save a city. You had a lot on your mind.”

The smile on Ybelline’s face was wry, but the panic was gone. “Have you had a chance to speak at length with Richard Rennick?”

A number of answers came and went. Kaylin said simply, “Not at length.” It was about as polite as she could be, given everything.

“Then you understand what he has been ordered to do?”

“More or less.”

“Can you please explain it to me? No, not the reasoning behind that—believe that given the events of this past week, I understand the reasons perfectly. I don’t, however, understand exactly why this task was given to Rennick. I do not understand how what he produces—which by Imperial mandate must be untrue—will serve the goal of educating the … public, as Mr. Rennick calls people.”

Had this been a normal day, Kaylin’s head would have hurt. And since misery loves company, she said, “Maybe we should answer this question while Rennick is actually there.”

All in all, not her brightest suggestion.

She was escorted—having been parted from Ellis with gods only knew what difficulty—by Ybelline into the main hall whose chief decoration was a large table, with simple chairs, and the occasional flower in a bowl or a vase to add any color that wasn’t provided by faces.

Rennick in particular was an odd shade of gray. He was separated from the rest of the Tha’alani by Severn, and if the seating arrangement was accidental, Kaylin would have eaten her hat. Or her hairpin, given she didn’t own a hat. There were only five other Tha’alani in the room, all in robes very similar to Ybelline’s, which, given the heat and the humidity of the season, made sense.

Sense and clothing seldom went together, in Kaylin’s experience, and she didn’t recall seeing robes like this the last couple of times she’d braved the Quarter, so she assumed they were some sort of formal dress. Whether or not this assumption was right, the dress seemed to be accepted wear for both the three men and the two women. The colors of the dress were basically the same—a creamy gold that was almost white. The shoulders had different embroidery at the height of the seam, which might—although she doubted it, given the Tha’alani—be some sort of symbol for their rank.

Rennick rose when she entered the room. He was quiet, but not for lack of trying; if she’d seen a better imitation of a fish out of water, she couldn’t offhand recall it.

“At ease,” she told him. When this comment appeared to make no sense to him—and given Severn’s expression, it wouldn’t—she said, “Sit down.”

He sat. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be the one sitting?”

“I slept.”

“For three hours,” he added.

She could have told him that three hours after a day like this was a catnap, but didn’t. “I think we have the worst of the difficulties facing the Quarter from the inside in hand,” she told him instead. “The difficulties facing the Quarter from the other side of the guardhouse, not so much. You’ve been talking to the Tha’alani for the last three hours—what have they told you?”

“Nothing.”

She looked across to Severn. He shrugged. “Rennick thought it was relevant to ask them everything they knew about you,” he replied.

“Oh. They don’t know much.”

“She called you here to help, and they don’t know much?” He didn’t trouble to keep the scorn from his voice, but on the other hand, no scorn would probably be no voice, for Rennick.

“They don’t know much they want to share at any rate,” she told him. “And I’m not your job. They are. You saw the casualties,” she added.

He nodded, wincing slightly. “They’re all going to survive. One of the men got up and walked away.”

“He was probably less injured than he looked.”

“Private Neya?”

“Yes?”

“Learn to lie better. Or don’t bother. Bad lies insult the intelligence of the listener, and I believe that you don’t want to insult me.”

This wasn’t exactly true, but Kaylin was too tired to start a fruitless argument, which was generally when she started them. “Humans almost killed those men,” she told him, meeting and holding his gaze. “Humans saved them. We’re done with that now. Move on.”

“And where, exactly, would you like me to move?”

“To the part where you stop humans from wanting to kill any of the Tha’alani ever again. We brought you here because we thought you’d see a bit more of what the Tha’alani are like. Today wasn’t their usual day, so that’s a wash. But none of them want to hurt you and they certainly don’t want to read your mind.

“They just want to be left alone. They tried to save the city, and we’re going to make sure that people understand that.”

One of the Tha’alani men in the room stood. “It is to address this concern that we are here,” he said, in stilted Elantran. He didn’t bow to her, which was good. “But there is some concern.”

“We’re here to address those concerns,” she said, wearing her best Hawk’s face although her head really was throbbing. “Humans have … stories. Those stories aren’t like the Tha’alaan,” she added softly. “They’re not real stories. People don’t experience them as memories, and they certainly don’t live them the way some people can live old memories in the Tha’alaan.”

“These stories, are they true?”

Kaylin looked to Severn for help. As a rule, she didn’t ask for rescue, having learned early that it was pointless. But when it came to people, Severn was just better. He always had been.

Ybelline, however, lifted a hand. “Scoros,” she said, “sit. The stories that she speaks of are not true in the sense that our stories are true. They change with time, they change with the teller of the tale.”

He frowned.

“Scoros,” Ybelline added to Kaylin, “is a teacher. He teaches the Tha’alanari, and he is respected. He understands what they will face.”

Kaylin nodded.

“It is however very seldom that my kin are exposed to your stories, and some explanation will be required.”

Severn shrugged again. “You were always better at creating stories than I was,” he told her.

“But not better at lying.”

“No. This however is yours.”

She pressed her palms into her closed eyes for a minute. Then she nodded.

“Understand,” she said, addressing all of the Tha’alani present, “that humans don’t have the Tha’alaan. We don’t have access to perfect memories. I can’t remember clearly what I was doing eight years ago—but if you wanted to, you could. I can construct what I was probably doing eight years ago. And if it was utterly necessary, I could ask Ybelline to actually sort through my memories and tell me what I was doing—but without the help of the Tha’alani, if my twelve-year-old self wasn’t doing something in easy reach of Records, there’s no way for me to be certain.”

Scoros nodded; clearly this was nothing new to him.

“This is especially true of people who have had no sleep for a few years.”

Scoros frowned and Ybelline said, “She is not being literal.”

His frown deepened slightly, and then eased. Ybelline was speaking Elantran for their benefit, but, clearly, was speaking in other ways as well.

“The oldest of our stories are probably religious stories,” Kaylin continued. “Stories about the gods.”

“These are the ones you remember?”

“Me? Not exactly. When I say oldest, I mean, the oldest ones that anyone knows about.” She winced and gave up. “The earliest stories we’re told, we’re told as children, usually by our parents, sometimes by our friends. Children don’t always have enough experience to understand very, very complicated things, and stories are a way of explaining the world to them.”

“But they’re not true.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“We do not understand what you are explaining, then.”

Scoros looked at Ybelline. Ybelline looked at Kaylin. Kaylin looked at the tabletop.

And Rennick stood up with a disgusted snort.

“Rennick, sit down,” Kaylin told him.

Rennick didn’t appear to hear her. Given the color he was turning, it might not have been an act.

“Castelord,” he said, managing somehow to be polite and icy at the same time. “Do you have no art, here?”

She frowned. “Art?”

“Paintings. Sculptures. Tapestries. Art.”

“We have,” Scoros answered. His voice had dropped a few degrees as well.

“If what I’ve heard today is true, the Tha’alani have perfect memory. Anything, at any time, that any of you have experienced, you can recall. True?”

“Rennick—”

“No, Private. If I am to do my job, as you so quaintly call it, I need to understand what I’m working with, or working against. You aren’t even asking the right questions.”

“Rennick—”

“Kaylin, no,” Severn said, his quiet voice still audible over the echoes of Rennick’s much louder tirade. “He’s right. My apologies for the interruption, Mr. Rennick. Please continue.”

“Is it true?”

Scoros was silent for a moment. Kaylin imagined that he was trying to figure out what Rennick’s game was. She could sympathize. “It is as you say,” Scoros said.

“What is the purpose of your art?”

“Pardon?”

“Why do you make it? The sculptures? The paintings? The tapestries?”

“What does this have to do with your stories?”

“Everything.”

“I am not an artist,” Scoros replied. “But I will attempt to answer. We create these things because they are beautiful.”

“Beautiful? More beautiful than life? More beautiful than what’s real?”

Scoros’s silence was longer and quieter. When he spoke again, the chill in the words was gone. “Yes. And no. They are not the same.” The tail end of what might have been a question colored the last word.

“But you could find beautiful things, surely, in the—what did you call it? The Tha’alaan?”

“Yes. That is what it is called.”

“Can you?”

“Yes. But it is not a simple matter of demanding beauty and having it surrendered to us. We are not the same person. No two of us think exactly the same way, although to the deaf—”

“Scoros,” Ybelline said softly.

“To the humans,” Scoros corrected himself. “To your kin, we might seem thus. We do not have the range of … differences. Even so, some memories will strike different Tha’alani as beautiful but not all.”

“Yes, well. You can find beauty, but you choose to create it instead?”

“Some of my kin do so, yes.”

“Imagine, for a moment, what it is like to be my kin.”

“Rennick—”

Scoros, however, stood. The two men faced each other across the length of the table. Severn kicked Kaylin under the same table, motioning for silence.

“He doesn’t understand what they’ve suffered,” she hissed.

“Then allow Scoros to make that clear, if that is their wish.”

Scoros’s antennae were weaving frantically in the air, and Ybelline’s were doing a similar dance. But watching the two, Kaylin could see the differences in their gestures, these antennae that had seemed so much like a threat. Ybelline’s movements were graceful and exact, as if each rise and fall of stalk was perfectly timed and deliberate. Scoros’s looked like whips.

Two conversations. Two arguments.

Scoros turned to Rennick. “I spend little time imagining anything else,” he told the playwright. Ice was gone; fire was present. He was angry. “My job—my duty—is to prepare our young for life in your world. And it is a life that they are not suited to live. They do not lie, they do not fear, they do not hoard. Nor do they steal or kill.

“Imagine what it is like to be you? What is it, exactly, that you do that allows you to come here and speak thus to us? You create these—these lies—and you spread them. And you are proud of this. Do you think we want to serve—”

“Scoros.” If Kaylin had ever wondered whether or not Ybelline’s kindness was based in strength, she had her answer. There was steel there.

“What do you value?” Scoros snapped, retreating from the previous sentence as if it were death. “Gold. Precious gems. Fine cloth—things. How do you reassure yourself of your own worth? By soliciting the admiration of people who value only that much. You spoke of love, in your travesty of—of—disinformation. What do you know about love? Your love is little better than base greed and insecurity! You want the regard of your peers, but you allow none to be peers. You want impossible, stupid things.

“You kill each other, rape each other, steal from each other—how are you to speak our truths? How are you to decide what beauty means?”

“Because it doesn’t matter what it means to you, or your kin. It only matters what it means to mine.” Rennick folded his arms across his chest. He appeared to be entirely unfazed by the fury that he had provoked. Kaylin, head pounding, couldn’t say the same. “I don’t demand that you like us. I don’t care if you respect us.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first race to look down on us, you certainly won’t be the last.

“And you interrupted me,” he added quietly.

Scoros’s eyes rounded. He was actually shocked.

“So, clearly you’ve thought about some of what it means to be us. Let me direct your thoughts to other aspects. You speak of fear—how do you recognize it if you don’t feel it yourself?”

“A fair question, Scoros,” Ybelline said pointedly. “Please answer it.”

“We understand fear,” he replied stiffly. “Nothing that lives is without fear. We fear for our sick, when the doctors have done all they can. We fear for our children. We fear—”

“Do you fear death?”

“No. Pain, perhaps, but not death.”

“Do you fear to be forgotten?”

“We will never be forgotten, while even one of us lives.”

Rennick lifted a hand. “And the rest?”

“The rest?”

“Greed. What you call human love. You don’t feel it?”

“We’ve all felt greed,” was the equally stiff reply. “We were all children once.”

“And love?”

“We do not mean the same thing by that word.”

“Very well. Speak of your meaning, mine is no longer an issue here.”

Scoros’s antennae waved again in the air, and Ybelline’s snapped back.

Grudging every word, and speaking in the stilted way of Tha’alani who are using language they are not familiar with, Scoros said. “It is joy, to us.”

“And what do you love?”

“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our … husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”

“Plural?”

“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”

“I … see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly doubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.

“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.

“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.

“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.

“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”

“But they’ll be lies.”

“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.

“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.

“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”

“Why would you say this? You said you don’t care about my kin,” said Scoros.

“I don’t care if they hate me,” he replied mildly. “It would hardly be the first time someone has. But … I do care about the city. I don’t want it torn apart by riots. I don’t want to see your people burned out of their homes.

“I can do this. Private Neya and Corporal Handred seem to have some understanding of your people, and they’ve been assigned to work with me. I don’t ask you to trust me. But the Emperor does, and in the end, we all live at his whim.”

Or die by it. Kaylin bit her tongue, hard, to keep the words on the right side of her lips. She thought Rennick had finished, but he surprised her. There seemed to be no end to his words.

“I admit that when I was handed this task, I did not consider it carefully enough. I considered it … political propaganda. Something useful for the Emperor, and of no consequence to the rest of us. Because of that, I could take … shortcuts. I could tell the easy story, pull the cheap strings. I was wrong, and I apologize for my ignorance. And I thank the Hawks for bringing me to your Quarter, because I understand better what’s at stake.

“I also understand that you are forbidden to speak of what actually happened … but I imagine, now, that what Private Neya believes is true. You did what you could to save the city. It’s not something I would have dared,” he added, “given public fear and sentiment. I would have holed up in my rooms in the Palace. I did, in fact, do just that.

“But from those rooms, I can now enter the fight in a different way. I will think about the Tha’alaan, and the tidal wave, and the fact that you walked out to meet it.” He turned toward the door, and then looked at Kaylin and Severn, both still seated. “Private? Corporal?”

Kaylin rose with effort. She bowed stiffly to the Tha’alani, and nodded once to Ybelline. But she lingered in the room as Severn and Rennick left it, and found that the wait was rewarded.

The Tha’alani, as one, seemed to shrink, their shoulders losing the unnatural stiffness of anger, their jaws unclenching. Their antennae were weaving in a riot of motion, beneath strands of hair that had curled with the city’s damn humidity.

“We thank you, as well,” Ybelline told Kaylin.

Scoros rose. “For saving our kin,” he said, “we offer no thanks—they are your kin as well, Kaylin Neya. You are the only one of your kind to be welcome in the Tha’alaan—and it holds some small part of your memories.”

She paled. “I tried—”

“Yes. You tried. And much was withheld, and we are grateful for that absence as well. But what you could not withhold, all can see. And believe,” he added, with a slight smile, “that all did see. They know you are not of the Tha’alani, and that you cannot again touch the Tha’alaan—but those moments were enough. They know you, and they will not fear you.

“But … your companion is both infuriating and surprising, and I think … I think perhaps we will trust him. And it is for that, that we offer our thanks.”

Kaylin nodded slowly. “I don’t like him much,” she replied at length, “but he surprised me as well. And as he can’t be bothered to be polite when his life depends on it—trust me, I’ve seen him with Dragons—he probably wasn’t lying about his concern. Or his apology.”

“You must join them. We have the Swords at our gates, and I do not think we will risk our own again until things are calmer.”

“Swords are better. They know how to calm a crowd.” She didn’t say anything about the most drastic of crowd-calming methods. She knew, as they all did, that the human mob outside was vastly less likely to attack the Swords.

The carriage was waiting for them. The Swords had ensured that. They had also ensured that all of the wheels and fine gilding were still intact, although the Imperial Crest probably had a lot to do with the fact; not even the most drunken and wayward of idiots thought his life worth defacing an Imperial Crest. It wasn’t a mistake you could repeat.

“Please drive us to the Halls of Law,” Severn told the coachman.

“You’re not coming back to the Palace?”

“Not for the remainder of the day.” Day wasn’t quite the right word for the shade of pinkish purple the sky had gone. “We will report to you in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Rennick said.

“Yes.”

“When in the morning?” The playwright now looked uncomfortable.

“We report for duty, fully kitted out, at eight.”

“In the morning?”

Severn nodded, his expression deliberately bland.

“Well, you can report,” Rennick said. “But bring some cards, or whatever it is you do when you’re not doing anything else—I’m a bear at that time of the day.”

“A bear?” Kaylin asked, inserting herself into the conversation.

“A figure of speech. Mornings make me grouchy.”

“We didn’t arrive in the morning today,” she told him.

“Exactly. And your point is?”

“It probably speaks for itself.” She tried to imagine Rennick in a more foul temper, and gave up quickly. There were some things it was better not to know.

“I will be sleeping at that ungodly hour. I think you should see about arranging some sort of shift work.”

She imagined the face full of fur that was an angry Leontine. You did not mess up Marcus’s schedule without a pressing reason to do so—end of all life as we know it being one.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she murmured, staring out the carriage window as the city rolled past.

Severn shook her awake when they arrived. The front doors were manned by Aerians. Clint was still on duty, which was unusual, given the hour. She took a few minutes to find her feet, and tried not to imagine her bed.

They made their way to the front doors, and Kaylin stopped as Clint lowered his halberd. “Aren’t you off duty?” she asked.

“I pulled in a favor.”

“You pulled in a favor.”

“Yes.”

“So you could stay later, guarding a door that no one ever attacks, with a halberd that hasn’t seen real use in more than a decade.”

“Less than a year,” he replied. “But yes, I take your point. We were in the fiefs at the time.”

“Point returned. But why exactly did you pull in a favor to work a double shift when you’re on duty in the morning? Clint?” She didn’t like the expression on his face. At all. “I’ve had a long day,” she said, running her hands over eyes that felt like they were full of sand. “So I’m a bit slow.”

“Be quicker,” he told her, without smiling. “I thought you would come back a bit earlier. I knew you’d be back before tomorrow.”

“This—what’s happened, Clint?” She pulled a memory out of her exhaustion: a Sword offering her his sympathies. It seemed like he’d said it weeks ago.

“You won’t like it,” he said, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever that this was an understatement. “But it doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious, Kaylin. You get away with a lot when you’re dealing with Marcus, because he’s seen how much you’ve changed in seven years. He saw you at thirteen. He watched you struggle to become the Hawk that you are now. Part of him still thinks of you as if you’re thirteen years old, and that’s not likely to change.”

“And so?”

“Kaylin, please understand that this is important. All jokes about your punctuality aside, Marcus accepts you as you are. Not all of the older Hawks feel the same way, and not all of them have been won over.”

She stared at him dumbly and was surprised when he handed his polearm to the other guard, and caught her shoulders in both hands. His wings were high; he was worried. “I’m very fond of you,” he said, his gaze an unblinking shade of gray that was unlike any color she’d seen. “But I took my oaths, and I’m sworn to uphold them. I also need to eat, and feed my family.”

“Clint—what are you talking about? Why are you saying this?”

“Because the people you will now be dealing with will not be Old Ironjaw. And if you don’t deal carefully, you won’t be a Private. It’s as simple as that.”

“W-what happened?”

“There was an incident,” he continued carefully. “Involving the Leontine Quarter.”

“What happened, Clint?”

“We’re not entirely certain. Teela and Tain are trying to ferret out information, but any information we get is going to come to us when we’re off the payroll. Understand?”

She nodded, although she didn’t.

“Marcus has been stood down. He’s been relieved of duty.”

“On what grounds?”

“Kaylin—we don’t know what happened. But the case has been referred to the Caste Courts, not ours.”

“What case?”

“Someone died.”

“Pardon?”

“A Leontine from a prominent clan died. He was killed by another Leontine. That much, we do know.”

“How?”

“The death didn’t occur in the Leontine Quarter. However, none of the witnesses were harmed, and remanding all investigations involving that death to the Caste Courts is well within the dictates of the Law.”

“But—”

“Marcus was present at the scene of the crime.”

“What do you mean, present?”

Clint closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clear, and his face had hardened into lines that Kaylin hated to see there. “He is currently in the custody of the Caste Court, awaiting a trial on murder charges.”

For once, Kaylin had no words to offer. A million questions, yes, but they were jammed up in the tightness of her throat.

“Corporal Handred?”

“Here.”

“You’ve been instructed to report for duty to the acting Sergeant.”

“The acting Sergeant? Clint!”

The Aerian to his left was an older man that Kaylin recognized. There wasn’t an Aerian on the force that she didn’t know by name, because there wasn’t an Aerian on the force who hadn’t been begged, pleaded with and cajoled by a much younger Kaylin. They could fly—they could carry her with them.

“Breen?”

Breen had clearly decided to let Clint absorb all the heat of this particular conversation, but his dusky skin, pale brown to Clint’s deep, warm darkness, looked a little on the green side.

“To whom am I to report?” Severn asked.

The hesitation was almost too much to bear. But when Clint finally spoke, it was worse.

“Sergeant Mallory.”

CHAPTER 4

Severn did not take Kaylin with him when he went to report for duty to the new acting Sergeant. He did not, in fact, report for duty immediately; instead, he grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her from the steps atop which the two Aerians stood. It took her about two minutes to realize that the dragging had a purpose: he was taking her home.

And she was exhausted enough to let him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Kaylin. Don’t.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That you should have been there.”

She winced. But she’d always been obvious to Severn.

“What you were doing affects an entire race. What we’ll be doing when we’re not dealing with the ugly fears of a mob will affect a much, much smaller group of people.”

“The Hawks.”

He nodded quietly.

“Why did he ask for you?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say Mallory’s name out loud.

“I don’t know. I’ve met the man once.”

“You ran interference for me when we went to Missing Persons.”

Severn nodded. “But given his feelings about you—and he was quite clear on those—I imagine that he won’t find my role as a Hawk much more to his liking.”

“He probably doesn’t know where you’re from.”

“Then he hasn’t done his homework.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.”

“No, it doesn’t. I imagine that Mallory knows quite a bit about the Hawks at this point.” He stopped. She stared at the street, and he pushed her gently up the few steps to her own apartment door. She’d gotten a new key, and it worked, but it took her three tries to get the damn thing into the lock.

“You’re tired,” he told her, when she cursed in Leontine. “Tired and Mallory are not going to be a pretty combination. Sleep it off. But understand that when you walk into the office in the morning, the rules will be different and everything will change. You wanted to be a Hawk,” he added. “Be one. Tomorrow.”

“I want to talk to the Hawklord.”

“Do that tomorrow as well.” He paused, and then added, “We couldn’t have talked to the Hawklord without speaking to Mallory first. I imagine he’s guarding the tower. Kaylin, he’s made it clear from the start, if I understand things correctly, that you should never have been a Hawk. Nothing would give him more pleasure than correcting an obvious error in judgment. But if he is a vindictive man—and I don’t discount it—he also appears to play by the rules.

“Don’t give him the satisfaction. Do nothing that he can use as an excuse. He’ll have his own worries,” Severn said.

“What worries?”

“His disdain for Marcus was widely known, and Marcus was popular.”

“Is.”

“Is what?”

“Is popular.” She began to stumble up the narrow stairs to her rooms. “Don’t talk about him as if he’s dead.”

“Is popular,” he said, gentling his voice as he followed her. “Most of the department knows how Mallory regards the Hawks under Marcus, and if Mallory is to succeed, he can’t afford to further alienate them. But if you give him an excuse, he’ll use it.”

She opened the door to a darkening room, the shutters wired into a safe—and closed—position. She might not have cared much for Rennick, but she shared his view about morning. And still got her butt out of bed on most days.

“I’ll be good,” she told him in the darkness.

“Tomorrow.”

She nodded again and walked across the room, stepping around the piles of debris that littered it. She removed the stick that held her stubborn hair in place, and sank, fully clothed, into bed.

“Sleep,” he told her. Just that.

She wanted more. She wanted him to tell her that the bad dream would vanish in the sunlight, that she would wake up and the city would be sane, and Marcus would be chewing his lower lip and creating new gouges on his desktop while he moved offending paperwork out of the way.

But she’d grown up in the fiefs, after all, and she knew that what she wanted and what she got had nothing, in the end, in common. She didn’t cry.

But she came close when he kissed her forehead and brushed the lids of her closed eyes with his fingertips.

She woke up to a loud, insistent knocking at her door. Daylight had wedged its unwelcome way through the shutters. She had to remember to get them fixed. Say, by putting a block of stone in their place.

She checked her mirror before she made her way to the door, still wearing the rumpled clothing from the day before. She paused. Someone had messaged her. Someone had tried to get her attention, but they hadn’t tried for very long. She didn’t want to check, besides which, the pounding at the door wasn’t stopping anytime soon. She bypassed the mirror, because if the first thing she saw this morning was the afterimage of Mallory’s unwelcome face, she’d break the damn thing, and the mirror was the most expensive thing she owned. She wouldn’t have bothered with the expense—gods knew she never had money—but her duties at the midwives guild pretty much made it a necessity.

Severn was standing in the door frame when she opened the door. He handed her a basket. “Breakfast,” he told her. “Eat.”

“What time is it?”

“Not so late that you don’t have time to eat.” It wasn’t precisely an answer. She lifted the basket top, and the smell of fresh bread became the only thing in the room. That and her growling stomach. “Hey,” she said, as she sat on the bedside and motioned Severn toward the chair. “Is this enchanted?”

“The bread?”

Her frown would have killed lesser men. “Very funny. The basket.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I didn’t smell the bread at all until I opened it.”

“It keeps the rodents at bay. More or less.”

“Where’d you get it done?”

“Evanton’s.”

“He’d like it. It’s practical.”

“I think he thought it perhaps too practical. But he took the money.” He paused and then added, “It keeps the food fresher, as well. It won’t last forever,” he said, “but it lasts longer. Which, given the insane hours you generally keep, also seemed practical.”

“Wait—it’s for me?”

“It’s for you.”

She hesitated, and then nodded. “Thanks. Did you talk to Mallory?”

“Last night.”

“The Hawklord?”

“No. I’ll say this for Mallory, that paperwork is going to get done before the week’s out.”

“Ha. I’ve seen that pile—most of it was there when I got inducted.”

“Betting?”

“Sure. We can pool in the office.”

“Actually, we can’t.”

Silence. It didn’t last longer than it took to finish swallowing something that could have been chewed longer, judging by the way it lodged in the back of her throat. “We can’t bet?” To a fiefling, it was like being told don’t breathe.

“It’s not in keeping with the formal tone he feels is professional in office environs. He is looking forward to correcting the laxity.”

Kaylin’s bread now resembled clay. Her stomach was kind enough to stop growling, so her throat could pick up the sound.

“Change your clothing,” he added. “And you may have to get your hair cut.”

“What?”

“I think you heard me.”

“My hair?”

“It’s not regulation length.”

“Neither is Teela’s!”

“I believe he intends for all of the Hawks to sport regulation cuts.”

If she hadn’t swallowed the mouthful, she would have probably sprayed it across the room. “He thinks he can make the Barrani cut their hair?”

“He hopes to make his mark on the office,” Severn replied, a perfectly serious expression smoothing out the lines of his face. “I think he believes it will speak well of his tenure if he can be seen to have effected changes that Marcus could not.”

“Marcus never tried.”

“No. But there are no Barrani in Missing Persons. There are no Leontines. There are no Aerians.”

“So what you’re saying is you think he failed Racial Integration classes as well.”

“Pretty much. Oh, I imagine he passed them—some people can pass a test without ever looking at the content.”

“The Aerians pretty much go by regs. I keep my hair out of the way.”

“I don’t think that will be a convincing argument. Stay clear of it if he brings it up.”

“What does that mean?”

“Say yes, and ignore him for a day or two. Your yes will pale beside the very Barrani No he’s likely to get from twelve of his Hawks. He’s not a fool. I imagine that the dictate will be quietly set aside as insignificant given the flaws that he obviously sees in the present office bureaucracy. By which I mean reports and paperwork. He will feel the need to impress upon his superiors the qualities that he can bring to the job, particularly if those qualities are ones which his predecessor lacked.”

She nodded, and finished eating. Then she picked up what was hopefully a clean shirt, and began to change. It was going to be a long day.

“Kaylin?”

“Hmm?”

“Someone mirrored you.”

“Oh, right. I didn’t want to look in case it was Mallory. Who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well look.”

He was silent for a moment, after which he said, “Your mirror isn’t keyed?”

“Hells no—that costs money.”

“Kaylin—the Hawks would pay to have it done. Some of our investigations would not be helped if anyone could listen in on more sensitive discussions.”

“Look, if someone’s listening in on my life, they’ve got no bloody life of their own, and they’re welcome to be as bored as they like. Usually it’s just Marcus screaming about the time, anyway.”

She could tell by the set of his lips that the conversation was not finished. He did, however, touch the mirror and ask for a replay.

The mirror hummed a moment, and then went flat.

“You said this wasn’t keyed.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s not playing.”

“Crap. If it’s broken, I’ll—I’ll—” She shoved a stick into the bun she had made of her hair, and stomped over to the mirror. What she did not need right now was anything she couldn’t afford. A new mirror being her chief concern.

“Mirror,” she said, in the tone of voice she usually reserved for choice Leontine words. “Replay.”

The mirror shimmered, the neutral matte of its sleeping surface slowly breaking to reveal a face. A Leontine face.

“The mirror’s not keyed,” Kaylin said, her voice losing heat as she struggled with her very inadequate memory. The woman was familiar. Not one of Marcus’s wives—she knew all of them on sight, having been to their home dozens of times before she was allowed to join the Hawks.

“No,” Severn said thoughtfully. “But the message is. I can wait in the hall if you want the privacy.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll save me the hassle of repeating what it says. I know her,” Kaylin said suddenly. “I saw her when I went to the Quarter for the midwives. Her name was Arlan. But it was supposed to be—”

“Kaylin Neya,” the woman said, her voice so hushed Kaylin wasn’t surprised when the image in the mirror turned and looked over its shoulder furtively. “You came. You helped birth my son, Roshan Kaylarr. He has need of your aid, and there is no one else I can ask. I humbly beseech you, return to him.” She looked over her shoulder again. “I cannot speak freely. But come again this evening at the same hour you arrived in my den on your first visit. Come alone, if it is possible. Bring only people you can trust, if it is not. I must go.” She faced the mirror fully and said a phrase in Leontine before the mirror blanked.

Severn looked at her. “What did she say?”

“You don’t know?”

“I didn’t understand all of the Leontine, no.”

“But you always understand more than I do.”

He raised a brow.

“She said her throat was in my claws.”

“That’s what it sounded like. What does it mean?”

“She’s begging. More than begging. She’s promising that she’ll do anything—anything at all—that I ask of her in return for this favor. No, it’s more than that—she’s saying that if I don’t do this, she faces a fate worse than death. Yes, it’s a little over the top. They don’t use it much.” She closed her eyes. “Her son was the only cub in her litter, and he barely survived the birthing. If something’s gone wrong with him—”

“She would have called you now, not at some unspecified hour.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Kaylin replied, rearranging her hair thoughtfully. “I’m also thinking that it can’t be entirely coincidence that something’s wrong in the Quarter at this time. I went in to help with the baby—Leontines don’t usually call in the human midwives, but … it was an odd birth. None of her wives were present and she was alone. The entire place was empty. I left the midwives behind because it was the Leontine Quarter, and they allowed it—barely.”

“She looks—and I admit I’m not an expert in Leontine physiology—young. Maybe she has no wives yet.”

“Maybe. And maybe she got my name from Marcus the first time I visited, and maybe she can tell us something about what’s happening to him.”

“Careful, Kaylin. You don’t want to start an intercourt incident.”

“I never want to start an incident,” she replied, opening the door. “Then again, I never want to stand in the rain getting soaked either. Some things are just beyond my control.”

As if in reply to this, he reached into his pouch and pulled out the heavy, golden bracer that she wore when she wasn’t with the midwives. Or, more accurately, when she wasn’t being called upon to use the strange magic that came with the marks on her arms, legs and back.

“That’s why you came?” she asked, taking the bracer and clamping it firmly shut around her wrist.

“That,” he replied, “and to make sure you get to work on time.”

Clint was on duty. If she had the timing right, he’d flown to the Southern Stretch, slept and flown back, without much else in between. He didn’t look surprised to see her and, given she had been on time two days in a row, this said something. It wasn’t a good something, but it was something. He let them both in without a word, although he returned Severn’s nod as they passed.

Her first stop was the Quartermaster. Given the silent war they’d been waging for the past several weeks—over a stupid dress, no less—she expected bad news. She had no doubt at all that the acting Sergeant had asked for a general inventory of items, and the various Hawks those items currently resided with. Kaylin’s minor problem was that she’d lost one hauberk, one surcoat and two daggers. If she had lost them in the line of Official duty—which did happen in some of the messier takedowns—that was considered an expense for the Departmental Budget; if she’d lost them—as she had—to work that must remain unofficial, she was going to be out the money.

Or out the door.

Begging was something she’d done in her time, but it didn’t come naturally now. Nor did letting down her guard. She had, however, decided to take Severn at his word. She needed to play nice, to be official.

The Quartermaster was clearly in the middle of the inventory that she guessed he’d been asked to take. He took about five minutes to look up, a sure sign that he’d seen her coming.

He surprised her. “I see you’ve managed to hold on to the surcoat for a day. Color me surprised.” He bent below the counter and came up with two daggers, in reg sheaths, in his hand. “Put them on. Don’t lose them.”

She was almost speechless.

“I don’t like your attitude,” he told her. “I never have.”

She nodded. The fact that she felt the same about him was not something the conversation needed at the moment. It seemed to be—miraculously—going well on its own.

“But you’ve earned your rank, such as it is. And you’ve got keen sight. Maybe in ten years, experience will grind the edges off you. Maybe it won’t. But if you want to get yourself cashiered, it’ll have to be for a better reason than losing armor and weapons while saving the City. I’ve marked the loss as in the line of duty. If he asks, lie.” He paused and added, “If you repeat that, I’ll have a sudden change of heart. Is that understood, Private?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Go away. I’m busy.”

“Yes, sir.” She made it about four steps from the desk when he said, quietly, “Good luck, girl.”

Severn said, much more quietly, “If nothing good comes of Mallory, at least you’ve made peace with the Quartermaster. Try to make it last.”

Even before they made it to the heart of the office, Kaylin noted one change: the duty roster. It had been rewritten on a pristine roll of paper, in a fastidiously tidy hand, and the only holes in it were the ones beneath the pins. She saw that she was still marked for Imperial Palace duty, as was Severn. If she’d hated the idea when she’d first seen it, she was grateful for it now—it meant time away from the office.

To one side of the roster, in an equally neat hand, was a smaller piece of paper. On it, under a prominent heading that said Code of Conduct were a bunch of lines with numbers beside it. Usually, this was exactly the type of document the Hawks ignored, if they noted it at all. Kaylin, aware of how much she would have to change in order to remain a Hawk, grimaced and read.

1. All official documentation is to be written in Court Barrani.

2. For investigations in process: All reports are to be tendered no more than forty-eight hours after the relevant investigation takes place.

3. For arrests: All reports are to be tendered no more than twenty-four hours after the relevant arrest takes place.

4. There will be no betting or drinking on the premises. There will be no betting or drinking while on duty anywhere.

5. The Official City languages are not to be used to promulgate obscenities.

6. Before beginning your rounds, you will clock in. There are no exceptions to this rule. When finished, you will clock out.

7. Regulation dress and grooming is mandatory while on duty.

Kaylin said nothing while she read. She said nothing after she finished, taking a moment to school her expression. When she was certain she looked calm, she turned to face the rest of the office. The first thing she should have noticed was Marcus’s absence. But the first thing she did notice was that Caitlin was missing. At the desk beside the mirror from which most general office business was done, an older man sat. He was trim and fit in build, with a very well-groomed beard; his hair had grayed enough to be salt-and-pepper, but not enough to be white.

She hesitated for a moment, and managed to stop herself from running up to the desk and demanding to know where Caitlin was. But it was hard. Had Severn not been at her side, it might well have been impossible.

The rest of the office seemed to have taken the change in stride, if you didn’t notice the silence that hovered above a group of people famed for their gossip and chatter. One or two of them met her eyes in silence.

“Who is he?” she asked Severn, her voice a muted whisper.

“Caitlin’s replacement. Sergeant Mallory wished to work with a man who’s accustomed to him. It comes with the job,” he added, before she could speak. “His name is Kevan Smithson.”

“He worked in Missing Persons?”

“For eight years. Before that, he was part of the office pool here. Let’s get this over with,” he said, and began to walk toward the desk that Mallory now occupied.

She’d burn in hell before she called it his desk.

“Corporal Handred,” Sergeant Mallory said, looking up from his paperwork. Kaylin was barely willing to give him this: it was half the size of the stack she’d last seen, and it was a good deal more tidy. “Private Neya.” He rose as he said her name. She stood at attention. She wasn’t particularly good at standing at attention on most days, but on most days, it wasn’t demanded.

He didn’t, however, seem to notice. “You are both on call at the Imperial Palace.”

“Sir,” Severn replied.

“I have attempted to ascertain the duration of your work at the Palace, but the Imperial Court could not be precise.” He turned, then, to look at Kaylin. “You are not the Hawk I would have chosen for that duty,” he said, reaching behind him to pick up a folder. There was no immediately visible writing on it, but Kaylin had a pretty good idea of what it contained. “And I have spoken with the Hawklord about this matter. Apparently, you were specifically requested.”

“Sir,” she said, hoping she sounded as curt—and as correct—as Severn.

“You will report to the office before you leave for the Palace while you have duties there.”

“Sir.”

“And you will tender a report of your activities to Mr. Smithson at the end of each day.”

“It’s neither an investigation nor an arrest,” she told him.

“Yes. I’m aware of that. But given the delicate nature of relations with the Palace, and given the probability that I will be called upon to explain your behavior while there, I require a report.

“Ah, and I wish you to lift your right arm.”

She did as he ordered.

He walked over to her and rolled up her sleeve. The golden surface of the bracer caught the ambient light, reflecting it perfectly. “I will also require you to show proof of your compliance with the Hawklord’s orders when you report.

“You are aware, perhaps, that the former Sergeant and I did not see eye to eye on many things. I have spent some time perusing your file,” he said, lifting and waving it as if it were a red flag and Kaylin were a bull, “and while I better understand some of his decisions with regards to your behavior, I feel that he placed too much emphasis on your possible import.

“I will be watching you, Private Neya. Do one thing to embarrass this department, and you will no longer be part of it. Is that understood?”

“Sir.”

“Yes or no, Private.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other. Dismissed.”

Kaylin took a breath and walked away from his desk.

“Private! That is not the way to the carriage yards.”

She turned on heel. “No, sir. I’m reporting to the Hawklord.”

“No, Private, you are not. I report to the Hawklord. You report to me. Is that clear?”

She was almost speechless. Having to walk past Mallory—and be interrogated by him—was one thing. Being told that all communication between the Hawklord and herself was forbidden was another. Her hands slid up to her hips.

Severn stepped on her foot. She met his gaze and saw the warning in it.

Was about to ignore it entirely when Severn said, “If you’re cashiered, you can’t help Marcus.”

“Sir,” she said, in a slightly strangled tone of voice.

“Good. Do not be late for your assignment.” He went back to the desk that, damn it all, he shouldn’t be behind, and took the chair. “I look forward to your report this evening.”

“Kaylin, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Severn told her quietly. “There’s every chance that Mallory will keep an eye on you for the first couple of weeks.”

Kaylin said nothing. Instead of making her way to the carriage yards, she had made her way to the Aerie. In it, high above her head, and just below the vaulted ceilings, the Aerians were flying. She knew most of them by name. Certainly all of them on sight.

“I know what I’m doing,” she told him, each word a little bolt of fury.

“I know what you intend to do as well,” he replied. “I just don’t think it’s wise.”

“I’m not asking you to come.”

“No. You are not, however, on your way to the Palace.”

“Rennick won’t even be awake.”

“True.”

“So there’s no point in going there now.”

“Less true,” Severn said.

“You didn’t tell Mallory that we’re not required until well past lunch?”

“No. I thought we might make use of the time.”

“I am.”

“In less obvious disregard of your superior officer’s orders.”

She made her way to the middle of the Aerie and waited. In about five minutes, three of the flying Aerians began to circle lower, and eventually they landed. Two of them were Hawks; one was a Wolf. The Wolf nodded carefully at Severn, who returned the nod.

“If the change of leadership doesn’t suit you, Corporal Handred, the Wolves are waiting.”

“It’s an internal matter,” Severn replied, with care. “But I’ll remember what you’ve said.”

The two Hawks watched Severn for a moment, weighing him. Severn had been a Hawk for a couple of months—at most—and most of his duties didn’t bring him in contact with the Aerians. Most of Kaylin’s didn’t, either, but that hadn’t always been the case, and with the Aerians, history counted for something.

“Kaylin,” one of the two said. He was a younger man, Severn’s age, and his skin was the same deep brown that Clint’s was.

“Perenne,” she replied. “Will you come outside with me for a second?”

He said something suggestive, and she smacked his chest with her open palm. “Very funny. I’m serious.”

“If I can be excused from my drill practice, yes.” He turned to the older Hawk.

“It’s heading to break anyway. Do not do anything stupid.” That said, the older Hawk launched himself into the air.

Perenne was not as stocky as the older Hawks, and he was taller. He had arrived on the force some five years past and, while technically he’d been a Hawk for longer than Kaylin, was well aware that she’d been dogging the feathers of members more senior for years.

“You want me to what?” he said, when she told him what she needed him to do.

“Just fly up to the top of the tower and dangle me over the window.”

“Kaylin—”

“Perenne, I need to talk to the Hawklord, and Mallory’s standing guard in front of the usual door.”

“Meaning he ordered you not to talk to him.”

“Not exactly.”

“What, exactly, did he say?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Corporal Handred?”

“He told her that she is not required to report to the Hawklord—that’s his duty.”

“In exactly those words?”

“More or less.”

Perenne grimaced. “I like this job,” he said. “I’d like to keep it for a while.”

“You don’t have to do anything else,” she replied. “I just—I need to talk to the Hawklord, and I’ll be in the dumps for insubordination if I ignore Mallory to his face.”

“You’ll be in the cells for insubordination if you ignore him behind his back,” Perenne replied reasonably. But he opened his arms, and his wings went from their light, airy fold behind his back to a full tip-to-tip stretch.

“Don’t expect much,” he said, as he caught her in his arms and adjusted for her weight. “Mallory was appointed with the Hawklord’s approval.”

“The man’s an arrogant prick.”

“True. But he’s not a homicidal one.”

“Marcus isn’t homicidal.”

“Much. Look, I know there’s some history with Mallory, but the Hawklord trusts him enough to let him run and staff Missing Persons.”

The ground receded.

“Perenne, he’s going to insist that the Barrani cut their hair.”

Perenne winced. “I didn’t say he was sane. But let him. He won’t last long if he does.”

“I couldn’t talk him out of it if I tried.”

The dome that enclosed the Hawklord’s tower grew larger as they approached it from above. It was closed. Kaylin swore.

“Look, just—dangle me above it while I knock.”

“Knock?”

“Kick.”

“Better. Have you put on weight?”

“Very funny.”

The Hawklord could be called many things. Stupid was not one of them. Almost before Kaylin had finished kicking the dome—and it was actually easier said than done if she didn’t want Perenne to drop her—the dome itself began to slide open, eight parts receding into the stone of the tower’s upper walls. Perenne took the open dome as an invitation to relieve himself of his burden, and very gently set her down, his wings beating slowly.

He landed behind her and snapped the Hawklord a salute. The Hawklord nodded at Perenne. “Circle the dome,” he told the Aerian. “Private Neya has no other way of leaving, but I assume she thought this out beforehand.” His white wings were folded at his back, and his hands were at his sides.

But his eyes were ringed and dark, and he looked tired. He waited in silence for Perenne’s ascent, and then turned his regard on Kaylin. “I believe you were told not to report to me.”

“I’m not.”

“Ah. And what, exactly, are you doing?”

“I want you to report to me.”

“I see.” He turned and walked toward the mirror that graced the tower. “You refer to Marcus Kassan.”

“What happened? Why is he—”

“I don’t know, Kaylin. I know that he is currently in the custody of the Caste Courts. The Leontine Caste Court. More than that I have not been able to ascertain. But his arrest is within the purview of the Caste Courts, and unless Marcus demands a public hearing or a public trial in the Imperial Courts, it is not our concern.”

“You can’t believe he—”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. It doesn’t matter what you believe. The Caste Courts have the right to convene in this fashion. If we decide to disrupt Caste law, we risk too much. The city can’t cope with two Caste difficulties.” He paused and then said, “You visited Ybelline Rabon’alani.”

“Yes. At her request. And she’s not going to file an incident report.”

“Good. And you found her well?”

“No.”

“And your duties at the Imperial Palace?”

“I’m not allowed to report to you,” she reminded him.

“Sergeant Mallory would not consider something this informal to be a report,” the Hawklord replied.

She started to argue, and stopped herself because it was true.

“Acting Sergeant Mallory,” she said instead.

“As you say.”

“Why in the hells did you choose him? Why not promote someone from the department? He’s handled Missing Persons reports for the last gods know how many years—he’s not—”

The Hawklord lifted a hand. “Do not question my judgment in this. And before you embarrass yourself by asking, Sergeant Mallory does not have any information he can use against me. He was put forward as the most senior candidate who could fill the position on no notice.”

“By who?”

“It’s not your concern, Kaylin.”

“He’s never liked the fact that I’m a Hawk.”

“No.”

“He’ll do whatever he can to get rid of me.”

“He’ll allow you to do whatever you can to give him the excuse, yes. A year ago, that would have taken a day, two at the outside. I expect that it will now take him much longer. Especially given the nature of your duties at the Palace.”

“Where’s Caitlin?”

“Caitlin—and she has a rank, Private, but as this is entirely informal, I will allow you to forget it—has chosen to take a leave of absence. Her duties under Marcus Kassan did not leave her much free time, and she is, in fact, owed several weeks of back pay, and several more weeks of time off. She is utilizing both at the moment.”

“But when they run out?”

“She is still a Hawk in good standing. If her position is not vacant when she chooses to return, another position will be found for her. She has also received at least two offers of employment from the Swords.”

Kaylin watched his reflection in the mirror, waiting for it to dim as he accessed Records. She waited for at least five minutes before she realized he had no intention of accessing Records at this time.

He just didn’t want to look at her.

It was surprising how much this stung.

“Access to the Tower during Sergeant Mallory’s stay will be restricted,” the Hawklord told her. “If there is an emergency, those restrictions do not apply—but do not create an emergency.”

“But—”

He turned away from the mirror, then. “I am aware of the schedule Richard Rennick chooses to keep,” he said, his voice sharp and low. “I am aware of the hours you are expected to serve. You have half a day of paid time in which to play cards. Corporal Handred is also blessed with the same abundance of time. Use it, Kaylin. There is nothing that Marcus will tell me. I haven’t eaten at his table. I haven’t been given the hospitality of his hearth. I haven’t been adopted by his Pridlea. You’ve spoken to his wives before—speak to them now, if they’ll talk.

“I trust you,” he said, his voice still low and intense. “I trust you to use your training as a Hawk. As a groundhawk, when you’re focused, you have very few equals. Go where I cannot go. Discover what I cannot discover. Survive Mallory’s dislike. It is not beyond your skills.” He looked as if he would say more, but he stopped for a moment. “Marcus is the only Leontine on my force at the moment. His loss will be a blow to the city, even if the Hawks see only their own difficulties. You have five days.”

“Five days?”

“The trial is set for five days hence.”

“Five days? We couldn’t get something like this to trial in less than five weeks!”

But the Hawklord lifted his head and uttered a series of high, clicking whistles. It wasn’t Aerian, exactly; it was the Aerian version of a shout.

Perenne began his descent.

“I regret the necessity of putting you in this situation. But it is necessary, Kaylin. Do what you do best.”

“What is it I do best?”

He offered her a weary but genuine smile. “Get involved in everyone else’s business, whether or not they request it. My mirror has been keyed for your use and the key sequence is your voice. Attempt to exercise caution when you contact me. Now go. Mallory will be here in less than fifteen minutes.”

“Why?”

“He follows a schedule for his reports.”

She nodded. Bit back the words that she wanted to say. Lifted her arms to catch Perenne as he landed.

“Well?” Severn asked. He was waiting for her by the entrance to the carriage yard.

“Bad.”

“How bad?”

“Not so bad that we can’t do something. Yet.”

“Tell me.”

She waited for the carriage to roll out of the carriage house. “I’ll tell you when we’re en route.”

“To?”

“The Leontine Quarter.” He nodded as if he had expected no less.

CHAPTER 5

“Given Rennick’s general regard for authority—and I must admit to being impressed—we have some leeway in our timing.” Severn glanced out the window, but it was a measured glance; he was, she knew, following the streets, cataloguing the buildings. She wondered if he was constantly fleshing out a map of the city on the inside of his head. Nevertheless, watching or not, he was still with her, as his next words proved. “But while timing with regards to Rennick isn’t a major issue, our presence or absence will be. You don’t care for Rennick—he is, however, important.”

“He’s not an idiot,” she said, grudging the admission. “But I don’t get him. I don’t understand why he writes this stuff for people when he clearly doesn’t like them much.”

Severn shrugged. “It’s art,” he said, as if that explained anything. Maybe it did. “Where does Marcus live?”

“In the middle of the damn Quarter.”

“And we’re approaching it?”

“It’s not like the Tha’alani enclave. There’s no gate. But it’s kind of hard to miss it—the streets are pretty much always crowded. They don’t seem to have a market in the strict sense of the word.”

Severn nodded.

“You already know all of this.”

“I’ve learned some of it,” he replied. “But I’ve seldom had cause to travel in the Leontine Quarter, and the Leontines are not known for their hospitality.”

“Really?”

“Really. Leontines don’t make people worry in the same way the Tha’alani do—in the end, we all have things we’d rather no one else know about. They make people worry in the same way that giant, man-eating animals do.”

“Where, by people, you mean humans.”

“I mean anything that can be killed and eaten.”

“The Barrani don’t seem to mind them.”

“How would you know? The Barrani affect nonchalance when it comes to bloody dragons.”

“True.” The day Teela said “I’m afraid” was probably the day the world ended—because if Teela weren’t certain it was going to end, she wouldn’t bother with something as dangerous as vulnerability. She’d expose herself only if she was certain no one else could ever use it against her.

“Do they frighten you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve seen what men can do,” he replied carefully. “There’s not much a wild animal can do that would be worse. Or messier.”

“Well, I think you’ll like the Pridlea.”

“I think you’re right. If I’m not told to wait outside in the street.”

“Why on earth would you have to wait outside in the street?”

He raised an eyebrow and said, “Are you in a betting mood?”

Kaylin left instructions with the carriage driver, and Severn left different instructions about ten seconds later. The driver seemed to take this in stride, which is to say, he did his level best not to look too amused at her expense. You had to like that in a driver.

She approached the door. Door, at this time of year, was not exactly the right word to describe the heavy, colored curtains that shut out the sounds of the street. During the humid season that any port city suffers, these were the only doors that the Pridlea either desired or needed. After all, it wasn’t as if someone was just going to walk in off the street.

The colors—predominantly a yellow gold—were embroidered into the fabric, which also seemed to boast a profusion of textures. Kaylin had seldom come to the Pridlea when she was on duty, and she stopped a moment to study the heavy, hanging rug. Gold was nubbled in knots around a central patch of color that seemed, to her eye, to be furrier, somehow. She bent forward, and said, “Hey, I think they used Leontine hair in this.”

“We did,” she heard a familiar voice say. It was the voice of all Leontines when they chose to speak Elantran, and it implied a growl that wasn’t actually present. “The hanging contains the fur of every Leontine of age in Marcus’s clan. The fur of his sons are here,” she added, as she stepped out of the building—which was a squat, clay rectangle that seemed to go on forever at her back. There were windows in the front of the building, but in the back, very few. As a child, Kaylin had referred to it as Marcus’s cave. Marcus, batting her playfully—but still painfully—on the side of the head had called it Kayala’s cave.

“The ones that don’t live here?”

“There are no sons here, no. And yes, when they reached the age of majority, they offered some of their throat fur for this purpose, and we accepted it.” She let her hand fall away from the hanging, and hugged Kaylin suddenly and without warning.

Kaylin, however, didn’t need a warning; she knew what to expect, and if Leontine claws and teeth were sharper and harder than some of the crappier Imperial steel she’d seen, their fur was softer than anything. She returned the hug at least as ferociously as she received it, and heard the throat-sound of an older Leontine’s purr just above her ear.

“You look good enough to eat,” Kayala told her, as she stepped back. “We thought you might visit. But I’m afraid the house is not in order.” She looked as if she were about to say more, but stopped and slowly turned just her head to look at Severn. “You may go now,” she told him. “We will watch over Kaylin while she is with our Pridlea. She is as kin.”

Severn glanced at Kaylin.

“He’s not here as my escort,” Kaylin said. She could see the Leontine eyes begin to shade to an unfortunate shade of copper—something they had in common with the dragons. She also had no idea why.

“Kaylin has not made racial differences a study,” Severn told Kayala, speaking both formally and softly. He didn’t move at all as he spoke to the Leontine Matriarch. He didn’t gesture or change the position of his head. “She came here to see you the minute she could—but she didn’t stop to think.”

“Ah. Well. Thinking,” Kayala said, inflecting the word with distaste.

Severn didn’t nod. Instead, he said, “Because she didn’t, she has no idea why you will not, in fact, allow me to cross the boundaries of your home.”

Well, the orange was gone. But if you knew Leontine faces well enough, you could easily see the shocked rise of eyebrows in that furry, feline face.

“She probably also doesn’t understand,” Severn continued, “why you had to accompany Marcus when he visited her after she was injured in the fiefs. Nor does she fully appreciate how unusual Marcus—and by extension, his Pridlea—is.”

“Unusual?” Kayala said, as if tasting the word.

“He means it as a compliment,” Kaylin said quickly. “And I do—he’s the only Leontine on the force for a reason.”

“Yes. He can coexist in an office that has, among its many members, other males.”

“They’re mostly human,” Kayala offered.

“So is Severn,” Kaylin told her.

“If Corporal Handred chose to visit us in the human Quarter, we would of course grant him the hospitality of the Pridlea. He has, however, come to the Pridlea, and in the Leontine Quarter, social rules must be observed.” She sniffed, a very catlike sound of disdain. “Although why one would consider them male, I have never fully understood.”

Kaylin winced.

Severn, however, did not. “He can also coexist in an office that has, among its members, many females. And his wives accept this.” He moved something other than his mouth for the first time, and bowed.

“They are not our kind,” Kayala said, but the edge had gone out of her words. “They are human, or—what do you call the long ears that are hard to kill?”

“Barrani.”

“Barrani. And bird-men. They are not of the Pride. We are not threatened by them. They cannot trespass upon our home.”

“Wait,” Kaylin said. “What if there were other Leontine men?”

“There won’t be.”

“But if there were?”

She was silent. Kayala’s silences usually meant death. Quite literally.

“And other Leontine women?”

The silence was almost profound. Kaylin had once asked Marcus why he was the only Leontine on the force, and Marcus had growled an answer: There’s only room for one. If you want another one, talk to the Swords or the Wolves. She had thought he was joking at the time.

“What about me?”

“Ah, you. You are his kitling, the one he can’t lose through growth or time. You are not of the Pride,” she added, but she ruffled Kaylin’s hair—which had long since come loose from its binding—with affection as she said the words. “He brought you home,” she added, “and we saw you—hairless, furless, like our young.”

“But Severn’s—”

“Corporal Handred is not like you, Kaylin. But he understands and accepts his role here.” There was no question in the words. “Come,” she said, and growled.

Severn bowed again. “I will wait for Kaylin in the carriage.”

“Good. It is not a good time to be in the Quarter without escort.”

“Kayala, I can take care of myself.”

“Of course you can,” was the smooth reply. “We can all hunt and kill. But the trick to living in a city that is so crowded and so dangerous is to avoid having to kill.”

Marcus had four other wives—five in total. Each of his wives had their own room, or rooms, and each of them had their own growls. They had different ways of showing submission, and of expressing rage. Kayala could do either without consequence, but if Kayala was the eldest, she was a far cry from old.

Then again, Marrin at the Foundling Hall was old, and you didn’t cross her.

Tessa was next in line, and her fur was a slate-gray that was almost black. Her whiskers were dark, and her fur was shorter than the fur of the rest of her Pridlea. She was fastidious while eating and grooming, and of the five wives, Kaylin thought her the most dangerous. But for all that, she was often the friendliest as well, and little human foibles didn’t bother her.

She didn’t, however, react well to the sight of blood, and Kaylin did her best not to bleed around her.

Graylin—a very unimaginative name—had been the runt of her litter, and her parents, convinced she wouldn’t survive her childhood years, had been less than attentive. Kayala said that Graylin was almost feral when this mistake in judgment was acknowledged. If Tessa was the most fastidious—by a whisker—Graylin was the least, by a whole lot more. She had been civilized to the point where she could eat in a large group and not go nuts about food distribution—but she seldom left the Pridlea. She had the softest voice, the softest purr, and the most tangled fur.

Reesa was golden in color, just like Marcus or Kayala, and she looked younger. Her eyes were large for Leontine eyes, and she seldom blinked, which some people found discomforting. Reesa thought this was funny, and after a while, Kaylin had to agree. Like, say, a year of visiting at mealtimes.

And Sarabe, the youngest of Marcus’s wives, was also a russet-colored Leontine—a color that was considered unusual, although Kaylin had met one other, at least, that bore the same red fur. Only the face, the hands and the feet were fringed in the more traditional gold. Sarabe liked to sing. Singing Leontines were a bit more than Kaylin could handle for hours at a time.

She wasn’t singing now. None of them were even speaking. They sat curled up on each other in what looked like the end result of a football tackle, and didn’t bother to get up when Kayala escorted Kaylin into the common room. In the common room—which had a Leontine name that Kaylin had never had much luck pronouncing, to the gleeful amusement of Reesa—dinner was served, and matters of concern to the Pridlea were discussed. Marcus, oddly enough, was seldom invited to the common room. He came for meals, and for discussions about his children, and he left as quickly as he could. Kaylin, loving this room at thirteen, had never understood why.

But if the common room was not his room, it was clear that his absence marked it, and not for the better.

Sarabe jumped up. “The kits will want to see you,” she said. Kaylin, watching bodies roll to either side at the sudden lurch of Leontine momentum, smiled. She’d been on the inside of these pile-ons as a child, and she had been allowed to play with Sarabe’s kits if she asked politely. Where “asked politely” meant speak in Leontine. Sarabe was the most … human of the Leontines. She was also a good deal younger than Kayala or Marcus.

“The kits will have to wait,” Kayala replied.

The kits were triplets—this was fairly common for Leon-tines—and they were all girls. None of them had Sarabe’s coloring; two were gray, and one was a pale brown. Sarabe had noted this lack with satisfaction, and Kaylin had never asked why; she understood that Sarabe was a bit self-conscious.

“Easy for you to say, Kayala. You won’t have to deal with their cries of outrage.”

“I can, if you prefer.”

Reesa laughed. It was a grim laugh. She rolled to her feet next. “Kitling,” she said to Kaylin.

Kaylin nodded. “I suppose you were expecting me.”

“I was expecting you last night,” Reesa replied gravely, her gaze unblinking gold as her eyes met Kaylin’s and held them.

Kaylin winced. “We were up in the Tha’alani Quarter. I had to heal,” she added. “The crowd there is ugly. And there are more Swords gathered in one spot than you see anywhere, even Festival.”

Reesa hissed. It was the Leontine version of a whistle. Well, this hiss, at any rate.

“And I had to force Perenne to carry me up to the damn dome to talk with the Hawklord,” she added. “Mallory’s in charge of the office.”

This drew a round of a different type of hiss from all of the wives, even Kayala. “You will have to keep us apprised of the situation in the office,” the Matriarch said. Kaylin didn’t like the word “Matriarch,” but it was, Marcus assured her, the right Elantran word for his wife.

“I’ll trade,” Kaylin replied, tensing slightly.

Kayala became still. “Trade?” she said.

“Keep me apprised of the situation in the Quarter. The Hawklord said that Marcus goes on trial in the Caste Court in five bloody days.”

“It is true.”

“Can you agree to this?”

“No. There is no trade among kin,” Kayala replied.

Kaylin said nothing for a long while. “Not a trade,” she finally managed. “I’ll tell you what’s happening in the office anyway—Marcus clearly did.”

Kayala nodded. “We will tell you what we can. Sarabe, start.”

Sarabe looked away.

“Why Sarabe?” Kaylin asked Kayala.

“Because it is Sarabe’s tale, to start. And if we have all become a part of it, it is still hers.”

Sarabe looked at her hands. She sat still, looking at them, until Reesa put an arm around her shoulders, flexing her claws with unvoiced worry. Worried Leontines could often appear, to the non-furred, the same as angry Leontines. When Sarabe spoke at last, it was to Kaylin.

“Kitling,” she said softly, “you have met my sister.”

Kaylin was confused. And, being Kaylin, showed it. “Your sister?”

Sarabe nodded. “Not long ago, you visited her. You helped her deliver her cub.”

Kaylin’s eyes widened. “Is that where she got my name?”

Sarabe nodded gravely. “It was much discussed in the Pridlea, but Marcus insisted.”

“Was that bad?”

Silence.

“I’ve come as a midwife to other Leontines before.”

“Yes.”

“Sarabe, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” She paused, and then said, “But your sister mirrored me. She wants to talk to me.”

Kayala’s growl was instant, a low thrum of sound more felt than heard.

“Kayala, she’s allowed to contact me. I licked her baby clean at birth.”

“Why?”

“She asked,” Kaylin replied with a shrug. “I knew it was an honor, so I did it.”

All of Marcus’s wives now looked at each other in turn. The silence—a silence that was very unusual in the Pridlea—was heavy. “We told him,” Kayala said at last. “Sarabe—”

Sarabe said nothing.

“Guys, look—Marcus needs help. And to help him, I need to know what’s going on.”

“You will likely know more than we know by the time you have finished speaking with my sister,” Sarabe said at last. “But I will say what I can. You’ve noticed my fur color?”

Kaylin nodded. “I like it,” she offered.

“I don’t. And my sister does not. It marks us, and we are forbidden sons because of it.”

“Forbidden … sons.”

“Yes.”

A thought—an unwelcome thought—occurred to Kaylin. “You can choose the sex of your cubs?”

“No. We cannot. We merely have the duty to see that if sons are born, they do not survive. Don’t look at me like that, Kaylin. You don’t understand our history. You don’t understand what the color of our fur means.”

“No. But I’m listening.”

“In times past,” Sarabe continued, “we would have been drowned at birth. My sister and I. But our mother was young, and foolish, and the old ways are not as strong in this city as they are among our other tribes. My mother’s husband—that is your word, yes?—was old and also foolish, and he had lost many wives to birthings. He desired cubs, and when we were born, he approached the Elders, and he petitioned for our lives. He understood that he could not hide us. He could not dye our fur, and expect us to survive in the world without the blessing of his Elders. He was a friend of Marcus, his mentor. He was unusual in many ways for a Leontine, and if Marcus is unusual, my father is often blamed.” She shot a side glance at Kayala, who nodded.

“Because we were girls, and at the urging of many of the more liberal of our kind, he was granted his petition and we were allowed to grow. There was no certainty that we would survive to adulthood—many who are otherwise unmarked do not. But we were not seen as a threat. Indeed, it was thought that none would take us to wife, and we would find no Pridlea, and have no children, of our own.

“It is in our children that our greatest threat lies,” Sarabe added.

“You have children.”

“I was blessed with three daughters,” Sarabe said. “I do not know what Marcus would have done had one of my cubs been a son.”

“He would have drowned him,” Kayala said firmly. “And if not he, then one of us.”

Kaylin couldn’t believe her ears. She asked Kayala a question in her high, broken Leontine, and Kayala reached out and ruffled her hair. “We are a dangerous people,” the Matriarch told Kaylin, “and our ways are harsh. But better the death of the son than the death of the race.”

“You’re talking about babies,” Kaylin said, finding no easy way to express her outrage in Leontine. Which, given that Leontine was her language of choice for cursing, said something.

“You may have noticed that babies do not stay young,” Kayala replied. “Reesa, stop that—we just replaced that table.” Reesa obligingly pulled her claws out of the wooden surface. Kaylin had always wondered what Leontines outside of the city used for scratching posts—or dinner tables—but she wasn’t certain at this moment she wanted to know. “Babies grow. And the sons who are born to those who bear the witch-fur grow into something wild and dangerous.”

“I’ve practically lived with Marcus for eight years. He doesn’t move a piece of paper without telling you all about it. As far as I can tell this is true of all Leontine men. Hells, he might ask you first on a good day. You’re saying—”

“Marcus is a kit,” said Tessa firmly. It was full of affectionate amusement. “He understands that the Pridlea is his in name only, and he doesn’t meddle.” The warmth of the smile left her face, leaving fangs in its wake. “Not all men are as smart, and not all men are as … what is your word? Casual?”

“Laid-back, maybe.”

“Laid-back. Doesn’t that mean dead?”

Probably, to a Leontine. “It means relaxed.”

“Ah! Yes, that is the word. Relaxed. Not all men are as relaxed or as sensible as ours.”

“Marcus desires our happiness,” Kayala said gently. “He always did. He learned, as he grew whiskers, that our happiness and his were entwined—but he wanted our happiness first. You must have noticed the way he takes you into his own shadow, Kaylin? He wants what is best for you.”

“Getting yourself thrown into a Caste jail while vultures rule the Hawks is not what is best for me. And it doesn’t make me happy either.”

Graylin hissed.

Kaylin lifted a hand, palm up, in immediate surrender. “I’m sorry,” she told them all quietly. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Kayala batted the side of Kaylin’s head. It hurt. It did not, however, send her flying, which told Kaylin it was meant affectionately. “You are like us, when you worry,” she said. “We understand.”

“He always notices the strangers,” Sarabe continued, her voice so soft it was hard to hear. “He always notices the outcasts or the misfits. He speaks unkindly, but while he bares fangs and exposes claws, he stands between us and those who mean us harm. Many of his brothers think he is—what is the word, Kayala?”

“I don’t think Kaylin needs to hear the word,” Kayala replied sharply. Which probably meant it was, in Kaylin’s line of work, a useful word. She held her peace, however.

“They think he is weak,” Sarabe continued, choosing a less colorful, and entirely Elantran, substitute. “Because he doesn’t fight unless he needs to. But if he is cornered, he can kill. We’ve seen it, and we know.”

“If you’re cornered, you can all kill.”

“Yes, but Marcus doesn’t choose to hunt for sport. He is gentle.”

Tell that to the Quartermaster, Kaylin thought, remembering the carved surfaces of far too many desks.

“Let me continue, then. My sister and I were allowed to live. We were allowed to grow, and we were allowed to request the rites of majority. All of this was considered safe, for us, although many of the more conservative Leontines resented it. They made our lives harder,” she added, baring fangs.

“Sarabe,” Graylin told her, “if you begin to catalogue all wrongs done you, we will be here all night, with Kaylin no wiser.”

Sarabe smacked Graylin, who rolled with the blow. “He is much kinder than his wives.

“But … we were allowed to live normal lives because it was understood that we would never progress beyond the Pridlea, we would have no Pridlea, and no husbands of our own.”

“But …”

“Yes. I have my Pridlea. But it was understood that I would not, when I was born.”

“How did that happen?”

“Kaylin,” Kayala said. “Ask her another time.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it is a good question,” Sarabe said, reassuring her, but also following Kayala’s unspoken command. “And I will answer it—briefly—because it’s relevant.” She dared a glance at Kayala, whose lips had thinned, making her teeth much more prominent. The first time she’d seen this, Kaylin had been terrified; now it was just so much bickering. The Leontines could deal damage, yes, but they were also built to take more of it.

Kayala however considered what had been said, and nodded briskly.

“Marcus took me in when my father died.” She smiled.

“His Pridlea was very, very different from my mother’s—it was a bit shocking, at first. But … it wasn’t so fearful. My parents always worried for us. They always watched over us, they always looked at the future with uncertainty. I’m sure it aged them both.

“Marcus did worry about me, but not in the same way. After three days, he treated me like—”

“Like one of his wives,” Graylin said, with a rare smile.

“Which means,” Reesa added, “that he did what she said, more or less, when she said it. I don’t think he noticed it himself, but the rest of us did. There was a bit of a fuss maybe three months in,” she added, the smile growing sharper. “Some people felt that Marcus’s interest in Sarabe was—what is your word? Obscene?”

“I don’t think that’s the right word,” Kaylin replied.

“Actually, Kaylin, it is the right word,” Kayala told her. “They thought it was twisted, and wrong. A small group of the older Leontines—by which I mean those who conform to the Elders, because some of them were young enough to damn well know better—came to see us.”

Kaylin thought about this for a couple of minutes. “Wait, they came to see you here?”

“Yes.”

“And they were all women?”

“Ah, you understand. No, in fact. None of them were women.”

“But you wouldn’t even let Severn in—”

“Not with his genitalia intact, no.”

Kaylin blushed, and Graylin frowned. “Why are you doing that?” she asked softly.

“Well—it’s—”

“You’ve said much, much ruder things at our table.”

“No I haven’t!” Kayala retorted.

“Yes, you have. You’ve said—”

“Graylin.” Kayala lifted a hand. “Very often, when one curses in a different tongue, it doesn’t feel or sound the same as cursing in one’s own. And Kaylin’s colorful phrases all mean the same thing. She’s tired, hungry or angry. And this is why it’s hard to tell you anything. There are always interruptions.”

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