The hair on the back of Kaylin’s neck did the sudden stand to attention that spoke of magic. Or paperwork, on the wrong day.
“I don’t think that’s an option,” she said, equally quietly. The words seemed loud in the darkness.
But not louder than breathing—or growling.
“Blink,” Severn told her tersely.
She did. When he used that tone of voice, there was no room for question or argument.
She heard something clatter against the ground and there was, some ten feet away, the sudden glow of magelight. He’d thrown it. He’d known enough to bring something with him.
Standing above that light, shoulders bunched and ready, was the largest cat Kaylin had ever seen. It wasn’t a Leontine—it was an animal. But it was black and sleek and huge; it had a mane that trailed off into shadows. The fangs that hung out of its mouth were at least as long as Leontine fangs, and she guessed the claws she couldn’t see as clearly weren’t much less deadly.
It was the only thing she could see—the woman who had invited her in was nowhere in sight. “Nice kitty,” she said softly.
“Nice kitty?”
It leaped.
There was magic in the room. It was, like all magic, sharp and unpleasant. Leaping, tensing, bringing daggers to bear, she could feel it. But she could feel the rumble of the great cat’s growl more clearly and she did not want to get in its way.
It had other plans.
Kaylin had time to wonder why it was the Tha’alani that were so feared before claws sheared their way through the thigh-side of her pants as if it were sodden cheesecloth. The pain was sharp and clean; it wasn’t just the leather that had been sliced open. The damn thing moved so fast.
She rolled to her feet; the cut was bleeding, but claws hadn’t severed muscle; nothing was stopping Kaylin from moving. She didn’t move as fast as the cat, and if she had come alone, that would have been fatal.
But Severn was there, and if claws could slice through flesh, so could blades—and he’d drawn his; she could hear the singing of chains tightening and dangling as the blade flew.
She could hear the roar of the cat as it turned, could see its shadows, diffuse and huge, cast by the single source of light in the room. Its shoulders bunched, muscles hardening as it tensed to leap.
Kaylin threw a dagger.
The flash of metal caught light and was extinguished by those muscles, the darkness of that fur; the hilt disappeared as the cat spun to face her. Severn’s blade came down in the distance, and the cat snarled in fury, turning again.
And it struck Kaylin, as the cat turned, that it was clumsy, for all that it was fast; that it didn’t understand exactly what it was doing.
She knew, then. Or thought she knew. She drew away from the wall, standing in the light, and slowly sheathed her remaining dagger. Then she held out her hands, palms out, a universal gesture.
Severn’s expression was hidden; the light granted that much. “Kaylin—”
The cat snarled.
Turned.
“We didn’t come here to hurt the baby,” Kaylin said quietly. The words were firm and cool; Marcus—had he been here and not in some cage in the center of the quarter—would have recognized his training. He might not have appreciated the use to which she put it.
“I birthed your son,” she continued, as the cat hunched its shoulders. “I licked his lids clean. I did not come here to kill a baby.”
“But they will,” a new voice said, as the darkness opened again, and spit out a tall Leontine that Kaylin didn’t recognize. “They’ve seen you now. They have no choice.”
“No!” Kaylin shouted, as the cat tensed to leap. Its eyes were golden, she thought, and wide, although that could have been the reflection of too little light in the darkness. “I claim the right of kin, sister to Sarabe. I claim the right of Pridlea.”
The Leontine stranger had cat’s eyes, but they narrowed in a very human way. “Impossible,” he said flatly.
“You are no part of the birthing,” Kaylin told him, just as flatly. “You weren’t there. You didn’t witness.”
“There is no Pridlea.”
“But there is,” Severn said, standing, blades in hand. All this time, he had said nothing, done nothing. He did not sheathe his weapons, but maybe it wasn’t important—he was male, after all.
“Upon the open plains,” Severn said softly, “and in the forests, there were Pridlea. The children, the mothers. The fathers were inconsequential. The children were everything.
“And she remembers,” he added softly. “How could she not? She is what they were.”
The cat turned its head toward him, acknowledging him for the first time.
“It was the Pridlea that kept the children safe from their fathers. It was the Pridlea that protected the birthing mothers. The Pridlea that licked fur clean, offering warmth and food and life.
“If she cannot claim that right,” he added, glancing briefly at Kaylin, “no one can. And if she claims it, neither you nor I can gainsay it, except by killing them all.”
“The child,” the Leontine said coldly, “is mine.”
The black cat hesitated for another moment, its head now swiveling in three directions. And then it seemed to shrug, and it padded slowly and gracefully across the room to where Kaylin stood.
It sniffed the air around her, and Kaylin stood very, very still. Then it nudged Kaylin’s wounded thigh, and a great, rough tongue darted out from between massive jaws and began to lick it clean. Kaylin winced. She would have liked to say it tickled, but sandpaper was probably softer.
“The right of Pridlea,” Kaylin said softly, and lifted her head.
“You have no such right here.”
“But I have. And she’s accepted it.”
The Leontine roared. Severn pivoted toward him, both blades out. It would not be a clean fight. But Severn wasn’t fighting to make a point here; he’d fight to survive. Kaylin didn’t like the odds.
“Marai,” the Leontine said curtly. “Come.”
The cat stayed where it was. Kaylin knelt, slowly, until her lips were as close to the great twitching ears as she could safely put them. She was keenly aware that her throat, though it was not bared, was a lot more exposed than she would like it to be.
“Go,” she whispered to the cat. “Marai,” she added, lifting the name that had been spoken so imperiously and making it almost a plea. “Go and get our son. We’ll stall.”
Marai growled softly.
Kaylin added, “Please.”
The cat suddenly bolted into the darkness behind the Leontine male. He turned, his claws extended toward her exposed back, and Severn was there in an instant, parrying.
Kaylin felt her hair stand on end as the Leontine leaped back, away from those blades. “Severn!”
He wasn’t there.
Fire was.
Gods curse him, he was a mage. And the fire that had left his hands now burned through rug and wooden table, catching the edges of hangings across the wall. Smoke flared, greasy and black. Had it been a normal fire, it would have taken time to spread. Magical flame was under no such restriction.
But the fire itself? That was real. It couldn’t be called back. Kaylin shouted a warning, but Severn was beyond it; his blades flew as he began to spin them in front of his chest. They moved fast, catching light until light was a transparent wall, traced by the moving blades, the winding chains.
She saw the Leontine clearly for a moment longer, and then he changed; she saw it through the black haze of smoke. He had been taller than Marcus, and it seemed that he crouched—but when he unfurled from that crouch, he was no longer what he had been. Gray furred, long fanged, he was a giant cat.
He leaped over the tongues of flame and past Severn—down the hall that had swallowed Marai.
Offering a single choice Aerian curse, Kaylin took a deep breath and ran through the spreading flames after him.
The snarling and the roaring that came out of the darkness
in the corridor she traveled was louder than the slowly growing crackle of flame. If fires had conversation, this was it: heated, broken, ugly. The weapon she had sheathed came to hand as she drew it, counting seconds, measuring all lives in the rectangular home by those beats of time. In all, it was a lousy way to measure life.
She traced the noise of fighting back to one room, the hanging in the frame now rumpled awkwardly across the floor.
“Kaylin.” Severn. At her back, as always. She didn’t even turn at the sound of his voice. “We need to get out.”
“That’s not the only door,” she replied, back against the wall, catfight growing louder inches away. “It’s not the one I entered the first time.”
“It’s the one we know—”
“We need to get Marai and her cub out.”
He said nothing else, but she felt him move past her in the hall. Her fingers caught his shoulder; more than that, she couldn’t do without dropping or sheathing her blade. “Be careful—”
Fire erupted. A dragon’s breath would have been just as hot, and just as contained—barely—by the rounded curve of archway that formed a Leontine door. They didn’t bother with fiddly things like hinges.
Gods, her skin ached. Magic was so damn strong here, it was almost a taste in the air—sharper and harsher than the black smoke of burning wood and hair-rugs. She could see that Severn was standing; could see where the fire had almost hit him. But he hadn’t dropped his blades or lifted his hands at the sudden appearance of angry, red-orange light.
He counted out three, and then he rolled along the floor into the room. Kaylin didn’t bother with a count; she ran in after him. Could hear the angry roar of Leontine words, made harsh and animal—well, more animal—by the throats that contained them.
She could almost understand what was said. Fool was universal, delivered in that harsh and furious tone. His voice, she thought. She heard Marai’s wordless reply, heard the desperation in it, heard, as well, the pain. He was larger than she was, and clearly more familiar with the form.
But familiar or no, he paused, his fangs leaving Marai’s flesh wet and sticky; blood colored those teeth, and his eyes—his eyes were the color of flame. He leaped for Severn, and Severn suddenly pulled the chain between blade and hand taut.
The Quartermaster would be handing out a new tabard if Severn hadn’t seen fit to leave his in Kaylin’s apartment. Unfortunately, he was in short supply of rib cages. The fangs failed to reach Severn; the claws didn’t. But they weren’t Leontine claws; the weight of the beast caused Severn to stagger.
But only to stagger; he didn’t go down.
Kaylin was there in a minute, her dagger making a clean strike at the cat’s eyes. It leaped up and away before she could connect. She jumped in the opposite direction; without Severn’s mass behind her, she had no chance of meeting any attack head-on. She didn’t try.
“Marai!” she shouted. The Leontine woman—the large, black cat—stood shakily on its forepaws. “Get Roshan! Get the child out of here!” But Marai was dazed, slowed. In the darkness that was slowly becoming acrid, Kaylin couldn’t see her injuries.
And right at this moment, she didn’t care. She cursed once in Aerian and then forced her throat to accommodate the harsh, guttural growls of Leontine command. “Get our son!”
The words, butchered as they were by a merely human throat, reached Marai. She shook her head, growling softly, and turned. It was dark in the room.
Even the fire that erupted in the room’s center didn’t change that; it flashed against walls and ceilings and began to kindle in the things that would normally burn before it vanished.
Gods, she hated magic.
Severn shouted. Not a warning, and not quite a curse. “He’s running!”
“He can!” she shouted back. “Let him go—we’ll hunt him later. We need to get Marai out of here. We need to get the baby!”
And he understood, reining the Wolf in, giving her the Severn she needed. She dropped her dagger into what she hoped was its sheath, stumbled over the corner of a snarled, old rug, and made her way to Marai.
Marai looked up, her head pressed against the fur of a sleeping cub. Just how it could be sleeping, she’d wonder later. Kaylin lifted the child from its bed, wrapping the furs around its body. “Out!” she shouted, in Leontine. Then, lowering her voice, forcing the fear from the syllables, she added, “Marai, you need to lead us out. Not the way we entered tonight. The other way.”
Marai growled softly.
“I won’t hurt him,” Kaylin told the cat. “I won’t let anyone else hurt him. But the fire will kill us if we don’t leave. This wasn’t much of a home to you,” she added, speaking Elantran now because the smoke made it too hard to speak in Leontine. “Lead us out.”
And Marai turned to where fire lapped the walls in the hall. She growled at Severn.
“He’s mine,” Kaylin told her. “The cub is mine. He’ll protect us while he lives.”
It was enough. Marai began to run. Her gait was awkward, slow. Wounds had taken whatever grace she had had when she had first appeared. But grace didn’t count here. You couldn’t fight fire with fangs or claws.
Or at all, really.
Sometimes you just had to run.
Halfway across the Quarter, Marai began to change. The moons were up; the sky was clear. If there were no magelights in this part of town, they weren’t needed. The cat stopped walking and began to shudder. Kaylin saw it—almost felt it—and turned, babe in arms.
The cat fell forward, hissing; the hiss changed to mewling, a sound caught between pain and fear. It was not a happy sound, but given the transformation that Kaylin watched, it couldn’t be. It looked wrong. The body lost form and cohesion; the paws grew narrower and longer, the claws in the footpads retracting as if they grudged the change. Shoulders that looked very like cat’s shoulders began to flatten and widen across a back that was doing the same, and even the fur changed color, becoming russet-gray in the moons’ light.
Kaylin looked away. Watching the face change was more than she could stomach. She whispered Elantran nonsense words to the sleeping babe instead, Kaylin’s version of prayer.
The baby snorted and pawed at her face, his breath a whuffle of sensation and sound. It was not nearly loud enough to drown out the sounds of bones snapping into place, but it would do. The baby was clearly alive, and clearly healthy; not even Kaylin’s anxiety could disguise that.
She turned when it was quiet again.
And discovered that transformations of this particular nature did not include clothing. Not that the Leontines wore a lot of it. She would have looked away for decency’s sake, but she could see, now, where Marai had been injured. The wounds were deep, and they wept blood.
“Severn, the baby—”
“No!”
“Okay, not the baby. Can you hold him, Marai? I need to look at those wounds—”
“No. Hold him.”
“Marai—”
The hiss of a desperate Leontine filled the empty streets.
Severn said, “Leave it, Kaylin. Go.”
“But she—”
“She’ll bleed to death in the streets first. Go.”
It wasn’t hard to find Kayala’s house. It was the only safe place Kaylin could think of that also happened to be close enough. It was much harder to leave Severn in the street.
“I’ll be fine,” he said softly. “And even now, it’s not safe for me to go there.”
“But—”
“Kaylin.”
“What if he comes back?”
Severn shook his head. “He was injured and he used an enormous amount of magic, there. I don’t think he’ll be hunting us now.”
She wanted to argue, and not just because that’s what she did. She wanted to point out that were their positions reversed, he wouldn’t leave her out in the streets of the Quarter. Wanted to, and didn’t. Marai was still bleeding, and it was clear that she would not allow herself to be so much as touched in
the streets.
Instead, Kaylin turned and began to walk down the path that led from the street to the only Leontine home she knew.
The only home, besides the office, that she had ever really known.
“You can’t take him there,” Marai said.
“If I can’t take him there,” Kaylin told the Leontine gently, “there is no safe place I can take him.”
“They’ll kill him.” Marai’s voice had slid up an octave. Leontine vocal registers shouldn’t have allowed this. “They’ll have to kill him.” Her eyes were glassy. Round, now.
Kaylin said, quietly, “Over my dead body.”
It was, again, enough. Marai drifted closer, stumbling on two legs, as if four were so natural now she would never be at home any other way.
Kaylin looked at the dull, dark brass of the bell. Shifting Roshan’s weight, she lifted the clapper, but no peal broke the silence.
“We’re awake,” a familiar voice said. “And you made enough noise just now to make sure that anyone else who sleeps lightly for miles is also awake.”
Kaylin turned to face Kayala, Marcus’s first wife, and the mother of the Pridlea. “Kayala—”
Kayala didn’t spare Kaylin another word or look. Her breath broke in a hiss as she stepped out into moonlight. “Marai,” she said softly. “You’re injured. Come.”
“I can’t. I—”
“My husband is not at home,” Kayala replied quietly. “As you must know. It is safe.”
“You don’t—”
“It is safe,” Kayala repeated, in the tone of voice she reserved for the very young. “Come. Your sister is worried.”
Marai did not move.
But Kayala did, stepping to one side. Behind her, hidden until now by Kayala’s larger body, stood Sarabe. She took one look at her sister and let out a low, loud cry. Stepping from the building, her arms wide, she caught her sister in an embrace that would have broken Kaylin’s ribs. “Marai,” she whispered. “Marai, what has happened? What has happened to you?”
Marai hesitated for just another minute, and then collapsed into her sister’s arms.
Sarabe managed to bear her weight as they retreated from the open street, the unforgiving moonlight.