When the door clicked shut and Severn crossed the room to join them again, Sanabalis spoke.
“Secrets at this time are not safe, Kaylin. Had you any understanding of the history of the races that comprise the Empire—had you shown any capacity to listen, to absorb, to think clearly—it would be easier to grant you privacy.”
“It’s not my privacy,” she said quietly. “It’s not about me. If it were, I would tell you.”
“And is it so important that you must keep it to yourself when the fate of the city rests in the balance?”
She nodded.
“You can be certain that it is necessary? That you, alone, can analyze the situation, approximate the danger, and confront it?”
“Sanabalis,” she said, forgetting titles and Oracles and his momentary display of terrifying temper, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it. But if Everly’s painting is any guide, I won’t be alone. What I learned yesterday—it wasn’t meant to be learned by someone like me. Or someone like you. Or Severn. But I learned it as a Hawk, and I know my duties.
“I’ll uphold the Emperor’s Law.”
Sanabalis glanced at Severn.
Severn said quietly, “I trust her.”
“I trust her intent,” the Dragon lord said wearily. “But intent is not enough. The cost if she fails—”
“The cost if I betray what I know is just as great. Maybe greater. This isn’t the first time a city has fallen in this place,” she added. She spoke a Dragon’s name. A dead Dragon. “But the world didn’t end, and the mortal and immortal races gathered again, built again. I’m afraid that if I tell you, one at least of those races will never be able to do that.
“Sanabalis, you trusted me, in the Barrani High Court, when there was just as much at stake.”
“I had little choice in the matter.”
“Pretend that you have as much choice now.”
It rankled. She could see that. But she held her ground for a minute. Two minutes. Three. She could count the seconds as they moved past because nothing else moved in the room.
And then, as if reaching a decision, she began to unfasten the ties that bound the plain dress she wore. It wasn’t a fine dress. It wasn’t the extremely expensive Court garb that the Quartermaster decried. She didn’t need help putting the dress on, or taking it off. But her hands trembled anyway as she began to pull the fabric up and over her head. Her hair stick clattered to the ground, and she cursed it, but only in two languages—Leontine and Elantran.
And when the dress was just empty, shapeless cloth, she handed it to Severn, who took it without comment.
Lord Sanabalis looked at the dress she had worn beneath the one she’d purchased with her own money. His eyes were golden, but his lower lids fell, and he took a step toward her.
She flinched as he spoke because he spoke in his mother tongue, and the whole room seemed to tremble with the aftershock. Then he spoke a word that she recognized, not as a sound, but as the essence of fire.
Flame lapped at the dress in a ring that rose from the floor. She turned sharply to Severn, shaking her head; she could see that his hand rested—casually—on the weapon chain around his waist. He had come prepared for a fight, and if he was smart enough to know he had no chance against a Dragon, he was Severn enough not to care.
But she cared. “Wait,” she told him, when she thought the gaze wouldn’t say enough.
A ring of fire rose and as it did, it began to shrink, until its inner edge touched the dress. The fire guttered instantly.
“Interesting,” Sanabalis said.
“The essence of water,” Kaylin replied.
“Girl, if you had the patience and the wisdom to sit and learn, there is nothing I could not teach you.”
“You couldn’t teach me to fly,” she said bitterly.
“Could I not?” was his soft reply. And giving it, he offered her the hint of a familiar smile, worn around the edges. “I could ask you to understand the essence of air.”
“But not today.”
“No, Kaylin, not today—and perhaps never, if I understand correctly what you wear.”
“I don’t understand it,” she confessed. “But it’s something to do with water, elemental water.”
“Oh, it is that.” Sanabalis shook his head, and the weariness was transcended, for just a moment, by something she had never seen in his eyes before: wonder. “You make me remember my youth, and my own ignorance. Very well, Kaylin Neya. What you ask, I will grant you. But we have still not located Donalan Idis. Any of the men that we knew as his friends—if he had them—or his associates have heard nothing from him.”
“If they’re Arcanists, they’ll lie.”
“I told you—Dragons are in the Arcanum. But they are not alone. The Emperor requested that the Arcanists subject themselves to the Tha’alani, and they agreed.”
She winced. “I bet it wasn’t pretty.”
“There were only two deaths.”
“I’m not all that fond of Arcanists,” she replied, although she had to squelch her shock at the words. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“I don’t know where Donalan Idis is, but I can guess where he’ll be.”
“Oh?”
“It’s in the painting,” she said grimly.
“I see no landmarks in the painting.”
“No. Do you see Evanton?”
“I see the Keeper,” was his slow reply.
“I’ve seen him look like that. Once. And if I had to guess, I’d say there’s only one place he can look like that.”
“What do you mean, Kaylin?”
“Those robes—he wore them when he invited Severn and me into the Elemental Garden.”
Sanabalis was a tall man, and Severn wasn’t exactly short. Kaylin hadn’t bothered to put her dress back on; the uncomfortable stares of guards and the Oracles she wasn’t allowed to talk to had lost a great deal of import. It was not as if she had that much dignity to lose, after all.
They left the grounds, and Sanabalis spoke a moment to the guards on the insides of the gate. The guards had a hard time keeping their eyes off Kaylin, and she had a passing urge to swear at them in Leontine. She bit it back. If you walked around in a dress like this one, it was bound to get attention.
But the guards came with Sanabalis’s carriage. She was almost glad to see it—of all the carriages she’d been in, the Imperial carriages were the most comfortable. They were also bloody heavy, so bad driving had less of a chance of upending them messily.
They got into the carriage and the horses pulled away from the Oracle Hall. Sanabalis spoke when it was well behind them. “I trust you,” he told her quietly, and she wondered if he was repeating it for her benefit or his own. “But, Kaylin, Evanton’s abode has stood in that street since before it was a street. It has withstood fire, flood, and earthquake. It has withstood mage-storms.”
Severn whistled.
Kaylin gritted her teeth. “Mage-storms?” She finally forced herself to ask. Severn and Sanabalis exchanged a glance.
She could almost see, in that glance, the drawing of straws, and wondered who had gotten the short one.
Severn, apparently. “Where mages war,” he said carefully, “and it has happened only a handful of times, none of them in living memory, the magics—if powerful enough—unleash a backlash. We call this backlash a mage-storm. In it, all laws are suspended. No, not Imperial Laws, Kaylin. Natural laws. Anything can happen, and much of what passes under a mage-storm is…significantly changed by the passage.”
“But Evanton’s…shop?…is different,” Sanabalis continued. “It has existed, unchanging, in all forms of the Empire, and in all cities that existed before Elantra. The wise of both orders would consider the destruction of that shop to be impossible.”
“Both orders?”
“The Order of Imperial Mages,” he replied, “and the Arcanum.”
“So you don’t think—”
> “No. If I am to trust instinct, I will trust it fully. I believe that you are correct.”
“But—”
“The Keeper is not beholden to Imperial Law.”
“I thought that was only the Emperor.”
“He is not beholden to Imperial Law in exactly the same way the sunrise is not. Were there some way to control it and use it, the Emperor would have done so. But it is the sun, it is necessary, and it rises and sets over his Empire. It does not threaten it.
“In a like way, the Keeper exists.”
“Idis stole something from the garden.”
“So it is believed. The question is not what he stole, but how. He should never have been able to gain entrance to that place, and that he did so without the knowledge of the Keeper bodes ill.”
“But if he did it with the knowledge of the Keeper—”
“It would never happen,” Sanabalis said flatly. “You’ve made the Law your life, and in a far more complete and intense way, the Keeper has made the Keeping of that Garden his. He would no more allow Idis entry unescorted—or, if I had to guess, escorted—than he would allow the Emperor. Or the Dragon lords.”
“You think he’s going to tell you to drop dead.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. And if he does not—then we have far more pressing problems.”
“More pressing than the end of the city?”
Sanabalis was silent as the wheels bumped over the more egregious cracks in the cobbled stone. “What you said,” he told her at last, “was true. There has often been a city in this place. The city has often been destroyed. But the peoples who comprise any city have returned, time and again, and rebuilt.”
“What, exactly, is the purpose of the garden?”
“I wondered if that would occur to you.” His tone implied and about time, although he didn’t insult her by saying it in so many words.
“And the answer?”
“To the best of our knowledge, as the Keeper is not of a mind to answer our questions, the garden keeps the elemental forces bound.”
“But if it did that there would be no elementalists.”
“Kaylin, there will always be fire. Water. Air. There will always be earth. Where these things exist, an echo of ancient power also exists, and men with the will and knowledge to summon that power can do so in safety.
“But in the garden, the waking of what slumbers—”
She lifted a hand. “You’re telling me it’s not just about water.”
“No. Not if we meet Idis there.”
“Then we’d better bloody well make it in time,” she snarled. She propped herself up on the window’s ledge and shoved her upper body through it—she was smaller than Severn or Sanabalis, and she could. Barely.
“Hey! Move it!”
Sanabalis winced slightly.
Severn said, in as mild a tone as he could while raising his voice to be heard, “What is the first thing you learned about riding in a carriage?”
“I didn’t stick my arms out,” she said, as she fell back into her seat with unwanted help from Severn.
The carriage, however, began to move faster, and Kaylin had the happy task of trying to be grateful for the speed. She managed to be grateful that it wasn’t Teela driving.
Evanton, she thought. Hold on. We’re coming.
CHAPTER 20
The streets were not empty. They became as empty as it was possible to be, given lack of notice and a hurtling carriage, and Kaylin shouted curses at the driver when the face of a terrified man or woman flashed past the window. The children—and she had no doubt at all they existed—were too short to be caught in the window’s moving frame, proof, if the gods existed, that they had an eye for small mercies.
On the other hand, had she seen children in danger, she would probably have climbed out the window, Severn and Sanabalis notwithstanding, to push the driver off the coach seat and take over the reins. Which, given she’d never really driven a coach before, would have made things interesting. But how hard could it be?
The part of her mind that could think noted that the panic in the streets seemed to be caused entirely by the presence of a hurtling coach, and not by the presence of arcane magics and battles. Whatever was happening in Elani Street, it wasn’t visible to the untrained eye. Something to be grateful for.
It wasn’t all that far from the Oracle Hall to Elani Street, and to Kaylin’s surprise—and gratitude—Sanabalis ordered a halt when they reached the T junction at which Elani began. Or ended, depending on which way you walked the beat.
It was quiet enough on the street that the emergence of Severn, Sanabalis, and Kaylin in her not-very-cloth-heavy dress caused people who were otherwise minding their own business to stop and stare. Sanabalis didn’t seem to notice.
She looked at Severn and said, “Well, at least their morning won’t be entirely boring.”
“Boredom,” Sanabalis intoned, “is underrated.” He set the pace for their walk. It left Kaylin not quite enough breath for a rejoinder. Not that she had one ready. She picked up the skirts of her dress and trotted after him; her own legs weren’t equal to the task of matching his stride.
Severn had neither the problem of skirts nor height. But he kept pace with Sanabalis because Kaylin did, not because he walked beside the Dragon. The doors to the various shops in the street opened and closed as people entered or left, baskets on their arms. It was hot enough that wide-brimmed hats were in evidence everywhere, and Kaylin desperately wished she had one. Not that it was part of the uniform, but then again, she didn’t at the moment have a uniform, either.
The thought of facing the Quartermaster again made the temperature drop noticeably. The thought of groveling for another few weeks—if she was lucky—made her cringe.
Severn cuffed her shoulder. “Pay attention,” he said.
“I was.”
“Pay attention to where we are.”
She mumbled something that would have passed as an inaudible apology if you didn’t actually know her. Severn let it pass. Wolf or Hawk, he was used to watching the shadows, and if the sun was miserly in casting those shadows, they were still there.
But she saw nothing in them besides the occasional scuffle that could be either a mouse or a cockroach, nothing to set her teeth on edge.
They approached Evanton’s shop, and saw the sandwich board that he put out maybe once a week, when custom, as he called it, was slow. It hadn’t been blown to tinder; it hadn’t even been knocked over. It also hadn’t been repainted in about ten years, but she was used to that.
“So far so good,” she said. Sanabalis didn’t hear her. Severn, however, gave her a curt nod. He did not draw his weapon—not yet. It hung around his waist, the chain giving the illusion of being a very odd fashion statement. The blade was in its sheath at Severn’s thigh. Her own daggers—damn it all to hell!—were still conspicuously absent. And she’d reached for them as they approached the familiar windows, the familiar closed door.
The curtains were pulled to either side of a window that, like the sandwich board, had seen better days. Sunlight reflected their images, as if this were a poor mirror. To see in, you had to touch the window, press your face underneath your hand, and squint.
Which, of course, was beneath the dignity of a Dragon lord. Kaylin had long since decided that dignity of this particular kind was overrated. She put the sides of both hands on the glass and pressed her face against it, peering into the clutter of Evanton’s shop.
Inside, it looked pretty much as it had always looked.
“I don’t see Evanton,” she told her companions. “But if there was some sort of fight here, it ended damn quickly.”
“You sense no magic?”
“None. You?”
“It pains me to admit that I do not have your sensitivity to magical auras,” Sanabalis replied gravely. “And the Keeper’s abode is…not a place where one wishes to introduce foreign magic.”
“If there’s magic in here,” she said as s
he pulled away from the window, “it’s all normal.”
Severn raised a brow. She grimaced; she seldom used the words magic and normal in any sentences that were side by side.
“The door, Corporal?” Sanabalis said quietly.
Severn walked to the door, the glass pane bearing its familiar arch of letters above the wooden slats from which a brass handle protruded. If the sandwich board was on display, it meant the door was unlocked. But in theory it also meant that Evanton was available for odd jobs, services, and the stupid “magic” that people often sought from him. Severn gripped the brass handle and pulled.
The door swung open. “It’s not locked,” he told Lord Sanabalis. He walked in. Kaylin, standing behind the Dragon lord, waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally, exasperated, she said, “Sanabalis, move.”
Sanabalis turned to look down on her. It seemed a long way for his gaze to drop. She had the grace to redden, although she resented the momentary embarrassment; Teela was a lord of the High Court, and she talked to Teela that way.
Clearing her throat, she said, “Lord Sanabalis, the store is clearly open. Why are you blocking the door?” She chose to speak in High Barrani. It was hard to offend someone by accident in the Court tongue—although for reasons that weren’t obvious it could be done; in High Barrani, the context made the most exquisitely polite of sentences deadly insults. For that reason, she spoke it as little as humanly possible.
“My apologies, Lord Kaylin,” Sanabalis said, replying in the same language, which pretty much guaranteed that he would use the title she found so awkward. “But it has been…many, many years since a Dragon lord was allowed to cross the threshold of the Keeper’s abode.”
“You were waiting for an invitation?”
“Exactly.”
Severn came back. “If you feel you must wait for an invitation, Lord Sanabalis, I fear you will wait a long time.” His High Barrani was flawless, and trust him to slide right into it. To Kaylin, he added, “He’s not here.”