“As you say.” He let his hands fall to the rests of his chair, and levered himself out of it. Kaylin could have sworn she heard the wood creak. “I am intrigued by your tale. I will visit the ruins of the house. The body, however, may be more difficult. The case has not been remanded to the Imperial Court, and the jurisdiction of the Caste Court holds sway.”
“We know,” she said, shedding crumbs as she stood. “We’ll work on that.”
“Work with care,” he replied. “I believe you’ve been forbidden any part in the investigation.”
“It won’t be the first time I’ve done a job that doesn’t exist as far as official records are concerned.”
His gaze was bright and piercing, his eyes a glow of golden orange. “That, Kaylin, I am well aware of. Have a care. The past can return to haunt you at unexpected moments.”
Meeting his gaze, narrowing her eyes at the odd light in it, she wondered what he knew. And if it mattered.
CHAPTER 11
It was too much to hope that the streets would be as deserted as they had been the evening before. Too much, perhaps, to hope that they wouldn’t be as crowded as the markets in the human Quarter. It was a slap in the face, however, to find the carriage halted simply because there was nowhere for the horses to go. The streets were packed.
The fact that they were packed this close to the wreckage implied a prurient interest she thought Leontines didn’t have—or at least not the men.
In human streets, the regalia of the Imperial Service, plastered with such loving detail on the sides of the doors, the back of the carriage and the body of the man who drove it, would have pretty much cleared the crowd; if humans were curious, they weren’t generally stupid, and no one really wanted to test the Emperor’s patience. If it even could be tested; volunteers were in short supply.
The Leontines, however, simply failed to notice.
“Everybody loves an accident,” Kaylin muttered as she reached for the door handle closest to her. “I’ll go and see what’s happening.”
“Not you,” Severn said, catching her wrist before she could open the door and elbow her way through the press of people.
“If someone tries to attack me here—”
“I’ll go.”
“I got that the first time. There won’t be any danger. They probably can’t even lift their damn arms!”
Sanabalis ended the budding argument. “I will leave the carriage,” he told them both. “I will clear a path for the driver. You—both of you—will remain here.” His eyes were a shade of orange. “Is that understood?”
Kaylin nodded. Severn nodded as well.
The Dragon Lord opened the door, which took longer than it should have, and stepped into the milling crowd.
“I wonder if they know he’s a Dragon?” Kaylin asked, sticking her head out the window only after Sanabalis had cleared it.
“You should have been a lawyer,” she heard Severn say behind her. “You understand the letter of the law perfectly, and you ignore the spirit when it suits you.”
“And you don’t?” she asked, without looking back.
“I understand when a Dragon is skirting the edge of anger,” he replied. “You used to know how to be cautious.”
“I’m not leaving the carriage. I just want to see—oh.”
“Oh?”
“They know he’s a Dragon.”
The crowd that had been milling and talking—if Leontine growls ever sounded as casual as normal speech—turned in ones and twos to stare at Sanabalis. Silence spread like the ripples a stone makes in a still pond, destroying all but the most intent conversation. Even these faltered as voices that were raised to be heard over the din of hundreds of other voices grew unnaturally loud.
Sanabalis didn’t take on his true form—which, by Imperial Edict, was strictly forbidden—but he didn’t have to. He walked with an authority that even the adolescent males couldn’t mimic if they tried. Kaylin snorted, watching them. She had no doubt they would, and that it might impress their male friends. She’d never quite gotten the hang of that dynamic.
“It’s quieter,” Kaylin said.
“Really?”
She considered surrendering her perch to smack Severn but decided against it; as a response to sarcasm, it set a bad precedent.
People moved for Sanabalis in a way they hadn’t for his carriage. She would have to ask Kayala about that later, if she remembered. But even if they moved, even if they wanted to move, they were hampered by numbers—the crowd that surrounded the burned-out ruins of a Leontine home was just too thick. She watched Leontines back up into other Leontines, and watched as the crowd that couldn’t actually see Sanabalis responded to this invasion of territorial space. This was how bar brawls started, and she’d seen a number of them; with Teela and Tain for drinking partners, it was almost a matter of course.
But Sanabalis didn’t seem to notice. He continued to walk, and the path that had been made for his passage didn’t close at his back. They didn’t seem afraid of him, not exactly.
“The carriage is not going to fit through that crowd,” she told Severn.
“No. It would be hard to get the horses to trample Leontines.”
She looked at the prominent fangs of the nearest of said Leontines and said, “Forget about the horses—you couldn’t pay me enough to try.”
He laughed. It was a soft sound, and it caught her attention where his almost-lecture had demanded as little of it as she could get away with. “You used to hate fighting,” he said, when the laugh had died down to a faint smile. “Especially when I did it.”
“I hated that I couldn’t help you. I hated that I had to cower behind you. I hated not knowing how it would work out.” She grimaced. “And yes, I hated the fighting. Satisfied?”
“Why did that change?”
“Did it?”
“Kaylin, you run at fights now, not from them.”
“I was trained to fight, when the Hawks took me in. I’m actually good at it. Gods know I’m not much good at anything else.”
“You never told me how you ended up with the Hawks.”
“You never asked,” she countered.
“I’m asking.” He reached out and caught one of her hands in both of his, leaning forward into the question, or perhaps into the hope of an answer. His hands were smooth and warm; the calluses that she knew were there couldn’t be felt. It had been a long time since he had done this. She didn’t withdraw her hand.
She wanted to tell him, then. She wanted to say it, have done with it. She took a deep breath, more because that’s what you did than because she needed it. Words? They were always hard when you couldn’t hide behind clever. “When I left Nightshade—”
They both turned at the sound of a Dragon’s voice, and their heads almost collided as they tried to look out the window at the same time. They sat back and exchanged a rueful grimace.
“Yes,” Kaylin said, “it’s definitely Sanabalis’s voice.”
The words that Kaylin had been marshaling deserted her under the force of these new, foreign words. Sanabalis wasn’t speaking Elantran.
Sanabalis wasn’t speaking Dragon either, from what she could hear. She looked at Severn and Severn frowned slightly. It wasn’t Dragon.
But the voice—the voice was a Dragon’s voice. Sanabalis could speak Elantran like a native—well, like a native scholar at any rate. He simply despised it, and used it as infrequently as possible in any public venue. He had, however, condescended to teach half of the lessons they shared in Elantran—usually the half in which Kaylin’s frustration was swamping her comprehension. Kaylin had heard the true depth and breadth of a Dragon’s vocal range on only a handful of occasions, but it had never quite sounded like this. There was something about it that gave her goose bumps and caused the fine hair on the back of her neck and her arms to rise slightly.
“Do you recognize the language?” Severn asked her.
She shook her head. “No. I don’t. It’s not one of t
he official languages. It sounds almost like High Barrani, but it’s wrong for that.” She clenched her jaw a moment in frustration. “But, Severn—it sounds familiar to me. It sounds like something I should know. You?”
“It doesn’t sound familiar to me at all.” He waited a beat, and then said, “Is it magic?”
“If he’s casting a spell, it’s unlike any spell I’ve heard before. Most mages don’t bother with words, and he’s saying a lot of them. But…I think there’s some kind of magic here. It’s making my skin itch.” Her eyes were drawn to the window, which might as well have been a wall for all she could see if she wasn’t precariously balanced on its edge.
He looked down at her wrist. The bracer was there.
“Kaylin, look.”
She followed his gaze. The bracer, gold and studded with what seemed to be precious gems, was flashing at her; the lights were going crazy.
She started to move, but Severn still held her hand. “He told us to remain here,” he said quietly. It was the type of quiet that stone is.
“Severn—”
“We wait,” he told her. “If he’s speaking as a Dragon, we wait.”
No rejoinder offered itself up for easy use. Something about Sanabalis’s speech made her deeply uneasy, and the fact that she couldn’t put her finger on why didn’t help.
When he caught her hand again, she realized that she’d opened the door. She hadn’t been aware of it. “Severn—I have to go outside. I have to see him.”
“Kaylin—” He stopped speaking as she met his gaze. After a moment, he nodded. “We’ll both go.”
“The Leontines are not going to attack me, Severn. They’re not even paying attention to the carriage and I—”
“It’s not them I’m worried about.”
She had to let it go. Severn wouldn’t let her leave until she did. Gods, Sanabalis’s voice. He wasn’t singing; there was nothing musical about the cadence of his foreign words. But shorn of notes, the rise and fall of attenuated syllables, it felt like music to Kaylin. Like the essence of music, something that any song might strive to achieve, and fail, even if it failed gloriously.
It was what the Leontines now heard, as they stood still as statues in the crowded street. Kaylin knew it.
But she also knew that it wasn’t what Severn heard. The bracer’s gems continued to flash, although the heavy weave of her sleeves muted the light. She tugged them down for good measure, and then looked at her partner. “What do you hear?” she asked softly—so softly she was almost whispering. She hadn’t intended that. But it seemed to her impossible to speak in any other way while Sanabalis was also speaking.
And Severn, Hawk as well, looked out at the crowd—seeing some faces in profile, but seeing mostly the broad and furry expanse of Leontine shoulders and backs—before looking back to her. “Not,” he said slowly, “what you hear.”
“Tell me.”
“He’s speaking a language I’ve never heard. For a Dragon, he’s speaking softly, and no, before you ask, I’m not at liberty to talk about any other occasion I’ve heard Dragons speak. Suffice it to say it was louder. And infinitely less persuasive. What is he saying, Kaylin?”
“I told you—I don’t recognize the language.”
“No. But I would bet that the Leontines don’t either, and they’re listening as intently as you are. More, if that’s even possible. What is he saying?”
Her first impulse was irritation, but it wasn’t a Hawk’s impulse. Sitting on it, she let her second impulse guide her. She listened to the voice—she couldn’t help that—and tried to glean meaning from what she heard. She dissected syllables, holding some of them in memory even as she grasped for more. Nothing.
“Severn—”
“There are more Leontines coming,” he told her. “I would guess that at least some of them are the Elders.” Another pause. He said, “Don’t move, Kaylin,” and his arm released the elbow she hadn’t realized he was holding.
The carriage barely creaked as he mounted it. His voice, different in every way from Sanabalis’s, was nonetheless clear and sharp. “It’s a group of four Leontines, all male. Fur is graying at the edges. Two are golden, one is entirely pale gray. The last—ah, you’ve met him. Adar. They’re stopping,” he told her. “They clearly hear whatever it is the other Leontines hear. They hear,” he added, “what you hear.”
“The driver?”
“I hear Lord Sanabalis,” the driver replied calmly, as if being spoken about in the third person was an everyday occurrence. “I don’t know what he’s saying, but if they don’t respect the Imperial regalia—” and his voice made clear how little he thought of that “—they clearly respect a Dragon Lord.”
He heard what Severn heard.
“Severn?”
“Coming,” he replied, and leaped down.
“They don’t hear what I hear, not the same way,” she told him, as they began to thread their way through the crowd. It was a lot easier when none of the sharp bits attached to the Leontines were actually in motion.
“No?”
“They’re standing still,” she offered.
“Your point. Why do you need to see him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Fair enough. Neither do I.”
They made their way through a section of street so crowded it made the landscape unrecognizable. But the burned-out building that formed an inverted dais for the Dragon Lord was unmistakable.
Dragons in their human forms were not formidably tall, and Sanabalis was probably the shortest of the five Kaylin had personally met. She couldn’t see him until she cleared the living wall, and that took a little effort. Not as much as she had thought it would, when she was thinking about anything but his words.
And when she did clear the last of the Leontines, with Severn as her familiar—and yes, comforting—shadow, the words were the only thing she could think about.
Because she could see them.
They weren’t like written words. They weren’t like printed words. They weren’t like the words in ancient, expensive texts that were so ornamented she couldn’t even recognize them. They weren’t, in any sense, like words at all—but they were the words he was speaking.
“What do you see, Kaylin?” Severn asked.
She shook her head. “Words,” she said. And then, aware that she was telling him nothing at all of use, she added, “They don’t look like words, Severn. If you saw them, I don’t think you would think of them as words. They’re like—light. No, not quite light—but it’s the closest I can come.”
“Light? Not fireworks.”
“No—those wouldn’t look or feel like words. Not magelights, either. They—look like…ghosts.”
He waited.
“Like the ghosts of light. They’re not quite here, they’re not quite gone. They—they’re moving, but…” She shrugged. “They don’t look like our ghosts.” She was aware that she was giving this particular Hawk a description as frustrating as any description ever given to some poor sod in Missing Persons.
“If you had seen them without hearing them, would you recognize them as words?”
She considered this carefully, and then nodded. “I think so. It’s hard to separate them from Sanabalis. But I think so.”
“Why?”
Since I don’t know was not useful, she struggled to be of use, and only partly for Severn’s sake. Some people loved a mystery. None of those people had ever been Kaylin. She needed to know things, and she needed to understand what she knew.
When it was relevant.
At last she said, “I feel them.” She took a breath and then continued. “I’m not even sure that what I’m seeing isn’t part of that. They feel like words to me.” And then she stopped. “They feel like words…”
“Not like Elantran words.”
“Nothing like our words, no. We pick and choose. Our whole language is a patchwork quilt. Every word can be jumbled with other words, and we make sentences
that we understand—but people hearing them will also understand them, and the understanding won’t be the same. This is…”
He waited.
His whole life, the life that she had known, he’d been damn good at waiting. He’d told her once that he was so good at waiting because she was so bad at it, as if they were two halves of a whole.
Seven years, he had waited for her. And she had gone on in painful, furious ignorance.
“They’re like…Barrani names,” she whispered. “They don’t look like them, but they have that solidity to them. Some sense of a meaning so complete that everyone who could understand them at all would understand the same thing. You couldn’t lie in a language like that. Because it’s what it is, not more, not less. I didn’t understand the Barrani names when I touched them in the High Halls, but they didn’t care.”
“Words don’t generally care,” he told her. It might have been flippant, if said in any other tone. It wasn’t.
“No. In one way, they’re very much alike—I understand neither, but I feel as if I should. As if I could, if I just tried harder. Worked at it.”
“What is he saying, Kaylin?” Severn asked, again, in that serious tone.
This time, she could almost touch it. The meaning, not behind the words, but of the words themselves. Her body ached with it. Hurt with it. She realized, even as she thought that, that it wasn’t her body—it was her skin. She reached for the arm that didn’t sport a golden shackle, and fumbled with the buttons, unable to take her eyes off either Sanabalis or the moving, ethereal stream that seemed to surround him.
She pulled the sleeve up.
She heard the momentary gap in Severn’s breathing, and managed to lift her arm so she could see it without moving her head. The marks were glowing a faint, luminescent blue, and it seemed to Kaylin that they were moving somehow, the swirls and strokes and dots coming apart and coalescing again.
Severn caught her hand and forced her arm down. Her sleeve, tugged by gravity and the weight of fabric not suited to the heat and humidity of Elantran summer, fell again. He buttoned it shut.