Kaylin sidled around Sanabalis. “I don’t need an invitation,” she told him, dropping into Elantran again.
“You have never been a threat.”
She stepped through the door that Severn held open, crossing the threshold. No magic. “I doubt that you would be considered a threat today,” she said. “We don’t have time for social niceties.” She remembered to add the word please to the end of her frustrated sentence. Damn Dragons, anyway.
But Lord Sanabalis waited in the door frame.
Fine. “Did you check the kitchen?”
“The kitchen, the back parlor, the other side of his bar.”
“He calls it a desk.”
“His very long and very heavily built desk, then. He’s not in any of the unlocked rooms, and knocking on locked supply rooms didn’t seem to have much effect.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“Sana—Lord Sanabalis.”
Sanabalis raised a peppered brow.
“I take all consequences for your behavior while you are in this establishment upon my own shoulders. I will stop you from doing anything that you are not allowed, by Evanton, to do.”
He waited for another moment, and she snorted.
“I give my word.”
And curse it, damn it all, she felt a surge of magic then.
To her surprise—a sour sort of surprise, really—Sanabalis actually chuckled. “Ever impulsive, Kaylin. However, if the Keeper is not present in body, he was obviously aware of your vow. He either has great faith in you, or he has a sense of humor that suits you.”
“Either that,” Severn added, “or he’s desperate.”
Sanabalis crossed the threshold, and Severn stepped out into the street, lifting the sandwich board by its hinges so that it swung flat. He tucked it under his arm, almost hit Kaylin as he maneuvered his way back into the shop, and placed it against a wall.
Well, if she were honest, against a shelf that had enough dust it was hard to tell what the dust covered. He then closed the door firmly behind them.
“I think it best that the shop be closed for business for now.”
Kaylin nodded. When Severn rejoined her she said, “He’s in the garden, isn’t he?”
“That would be my guess.”
“There’s a slight problem with that.”
“Would it have to do with a key?”
She nodded.
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a ring that would have easily fit around his shoulder. Around it were a familiar set of keys.
“You found those?”
Severn nodded.
“Where?”
“Oddly enough, in the kitchen.”
“On the table?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then—”
“There was a tin that also contained biscuits,” he replied, giving her an odd look. “It was there.”
Kaylin had the grace to flush. “Look, it’s been years since I’ve wandered into his kitchen and helped myself to his food. And I hardly ever did it—only when he and Teela started one of their long, boring discussions about beads or crystals or magic.”
“How many years?”
“Never mind.”
Sanabalis was staring at her.
“What?” she said, knowing she sounded a great deal more defensive than was appropriate.
“You wandered into the Keeper’s private kitchen and stole his food?”
“They were biscuits, and they weren’t that good.”
“And she was probably hungry,” Severn added. She stepped on his foot.
“He meant for you to find these,” Sanabalis said. It was almost a question.
“I think he meant for Kaylin to find them,” Severn replied. “Given where she was likely to look, and given that food might be a target of opportunity, and given, last, the erratic way she eats meals, it would have been the simplest choice.”
“But the container was not magicked in any way?”
Severn shook his head. He held out the keys to Kaylin, and she took them.
“Are you ready?” he asked her softly, and this time he did unsheathe the blade that was attached to the chain.
“Hardly,” she said bitterly, holding out hands that were empty of anything but an oversize dangling key ring.
“We can get you new daggers,” he told her.
“I know. And I know it’s stupid to worry about them. But Severn—they were the first thing I—they were mine.”
“You won’t have them. I could give you mine—”
“But if I need your daggers, I’m probably already dead.”
“That was my thought.”
She took a deep breath, and then walked over to the narrow door that nested between two overtall shelves. It was easy to miss it amid the clutter—and she had to pull a chair or two out of the way just to clear enough of a path for Sanabalis to get to it.
Once there, she chose a key and put it in the lock. Then she chose another. The lock clicked open, and Kaylin pushed the narrow door ajar. “This way,” she whispered to Sanabalis.
“Lead,” he told her carefully. “I will say or touch nothing, but I will follow.”
The back halls of the shop were exactly as she remembered them—too narrow to fight in with anything but daggers or fists. They were not high ceilinged, and they were not decorated for show; no paintings hung here, and no paper covered the flat, dull surfaces of wood that had seen better days.
But as she walked down hall, she reached for her daggers again—and cursed again. Because the hall wasn’t empty, and standing in front of the only door at its end was someone she didn’t recognize.
A young man, older than she was, younger than Severn, and shorter, as well. He was not built for fighting, and he wasn’t dressed for it, either—he was dressed, in her opinion, for a life of begging on the open streets. But he stood facing them, and he carried a dagger. The way he waved it made her wince with embarrassment for him.
His hair was dark and his eyes were a honeyed shade that looked familiar.
After a moment, approaching him cautiously—and not just because he held a naked blade—she said a single word.
“Grethan.”
His eyes widened slightly at the sound of his name, which told Kaylin that it was his name. And that he could hear. He couldn’t, in her opinion, do much damage with that knife; given that Severn and Sanabalis were his two opponents, she altered that opinion. He couldn’t do much damage to someone else.
But she couldn’t somehow imagine that Grethan, disheveled, dirty, and obviously teetering on the brink of a very narrow edge, had come into Evanton’s shop and pulled a knife on him. Or rather, that the knife itself had had much effect beyond that of extraneous punctuation to a verbal threat. Someone else’s threat.
“Boy,” Severn said, speaking softly as he inched forward, “do you understand what you’re doing?”
Grethan looked confused, as if the question made no sense. And to give him this much credit, Kaylin thought it was a pretty stupid question herself. He was standing there with a knife in front of a closed door, barring the way. Hard not to know you were doing that.
“What he wants to say,” she said instead, “is do you know what Donalan Idis is doing behind your back?”
Severn shot her a rather sharp look, but most of his attention was on Grethan.
“Yes,” Grethan said quietly.
“And it was important enough for you to kidnap one of your own children and hand her to him?”
Silence.
“Grethan, do you know what Idis did, while he was in the Imperial Service?” For it came to her suddenly that, without the Tha’alaan, he wouldn’t.
“He served the Emperor,” the boy said defiantly.
“Yes, but doing what?”
“He taught the Emperor about the Tha’alani,” Grethan replied, as if by rote. “He told the Emperor what we could do, and how we could serve.”
“Is that what he told you?”
/>
Grethan’s eyes narrowed. “He came close to understanding,” he hissed. “He came close enough to understanding the Tha’alaan that he could touch it.”
“Grethan—”
“But the Tha’alani were jealous. They didn’t want the deaf to be able to touch the Tha’alaan.”
Kaylin closed her eyes. “That’s what he told you? And why did he tell you to take the child?”
“Because he hadn’t finished,” Grethan replied. “She hasn’t been hurt. I saw to that. I wouldn’t let him hurt her.”
“You haven’t seen to that,” Kaylin snarled, sudden in her anger. “You’re here. You have no idea what he’s doing to her now.”
“He was one of my only friends,” Grethan snarled back, just as angry. “When I came here—when I—he was there.
“And he didn’t pity me. He understood that I had been born crippled. He promised that he could heal me. But he couldn’t heal me because the Emperor stopped his work. The Tha’alani stopped his work—don’t you see? They’re special, they’ve always known they’re special, and they don’t want to give that up. They agreed to work for the Emperor if men like Master Idis were forbidden their research. They want us to be deaf!”
“Is that what he told you?” She couldn’t stop herself from gaping, but words kind of helped.
“It’s the truth!”
“And the truth was reason enough to kidnap and torture a child?”
Silence, then. Grethan’s face, however, was not still. It was flushed, and the muscles of his jaw were flapping like Kaylin’s, but without the attendant sound.
Right up until that moment, she’d been prepared to pity him. To even sympathize with him. But she saw the knowledge in his suddenly averted gaze. She knew that he could lie to himself—about what was done, or how, or why—that he could tell himself that in the end, the nebulous bloody end that justified all means, Mayalee would be all right.
But she was done with sympathy now. She was almost done with petty things like law. She felt her arms begin to tingle, felt the itch of something dangerously like magic begin to encompass her whole body.
And Lord Sanabalis stepped in, grabbing her shoulder. Light flared, blue and hot; Kaylin bit back a cry. But in spite of the shock of pain that must have gone through both of them, he didn’t let go until he had pushed her to one side. To Severn’s side, actually.
Severn’s touch was gentle, and he was careful to avoid the marks. “Kaylin?” She met his gaze briefly; she didn’t want to distract either Severn or herself. But brief was enough to see everything he wouldn’t expose in words: his fear for her, his fear of the power that the marks contained, his reminder that she no longer wore the bracer that would keep all that wild power at bay.
It calmed her, somehow. She took a deep breath, held it, and let go. The back of her neck stopped the particular ache that spoke of her own magic.
Lord Sanabalis drew himself to his full height, and he let the lower membranes fall from his very, very orange eyes. He spoke Elantran, but the Elantran he spoke was not Elantran as Kaylin knew it—it was pinned to the hearing by the low and loud sound of rumbling.
Dragon’s voice.
Grethan brandished an infinitely pathetic dagger in front of his chest, his eyes darting from side to side as if somehow escape would magically appear.
“Do you know who I am, boy?” Sanabalis asked.
Grethan said nothing.
“Do you know what I am?”
And even Grethan, sheltering with such ferocious tenacity in his own ignorance, could not pretend that Sanabalis was anything other than a Dragon.
“You can’t stop him,” Grethan whispered. He might have shouted, but he’d lost the capacity.
“You are in the way,” Sanabalis replied. “And I serve the Emperor directly. If you value your life, come here.”
It wasn’t what Kaylin had expected him to say.
But had she been Grethan, she would have moved.
Grethan, terrified, took two halting steps forward.
“I would kill you,” the Dragon said—and there was almost nothing left of the Sanabalis who calmly watched Kaylin’s continual failure in their lessons, “but I am sworn to the Emperor, and the Emperor has his Laws. These two are Hawks. They are your witnesses, and you had best hope they survive, because if they don’t, boy, you won’t.”
Grethan started to say something, his knuckles white around a dagger that would—at best—scratch Sanabalis.
“What you want,” Kaylin began, speaking in a voice that was now entirely normal, “isn’t wrong. But how you get what you want—Grethan, she’s a terrified child, away from her parents. Forget that she can’t reach the Tha’alaan—she’s alone, here, and the only person whom she trusts, or whom she thought she could trust, is working for the man who—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest. Not without losing it. “What he told you—it’s not the truth.”
“IT IS THE TRUTH!”
He’d grown up in a world where no one lied. He’d fled it to the safety of a world where almost everyone did. She tried to remember this. She tried damn hard.
Sanabalis, however, reached into a fold of…nothing, as far as Kaylin could see, which would normally have been disturbing, and pulled out a crystal with a heart of fire. Memory crystal, she thought, and then, looking at it more closely, thought, That one?
“This is the truth, boy. If you want the truth, take it.”
“You’re lying—”
“Am I?” He held the crystal out in the palm of his hand. “Do you know how the crystals work? You must have seen their like in the company of your master.”
Grethan was stiff jawed, almost wild. “You can make them say anything—”
“They record what happens,” he replied. “There are magicks built into them at their making that force this, and further, make them immune to tampering. And this one was requested by the two Hawks who now stand beside me. There is a reason that Donalan Idis is feared and hated by your kin, and it is not your reason.”
“I don’t hate them!”
“No?”
“I want to belong, don’t you understand? I want what I should have had at birth!”
Home, Kaylin thought. She closed her eyes. She would not pity this man. She would not give in.
Sanabalis however, continued to speak as if there had been no interruption. “You want the truth. It is here. And yes, it is a crystal taken from the archives of the Imperial Service.”
For another second, he hesitated, and it was Severn who said, “If we meant to go through the door without first giving you a chance to understand the danger you have placed us all in, you would be dead now.”
Grethan swallowed. And then he held out one hand, not the dagger hand. It was shaking so much Kaylin wondered how he could keep it up at all. But Sanabalis had no mercy in him. He dropped the crystal into the boy’s hand.
Grethan’s eyes rolled up, exposing only whites, as he fell to his knees. He didn’t release the dagger, and Severn caught him at the last moment to make certain he didn’t land on the damn thing.
“The door, Kaylin,” he said, the previous calm swamped by urgency. “Now.”
She stepped over Grethan’s prone form. “Was that really the memory crystal?” she asked the Dragon as she fumbled with the key.
“Yes. Dragons generally do not stoop to lie. It is far more effort than killing.”
“Huh. Then why are the Barrani so good at it?”
His broad shrug was all of his answer.
Grethan began to scream.
Kaylin almost dropped the key ring at the shock of it. She wanted to hate this boy. She did despise him. But some part of her understood him, and if it wasn’t a part she was proud of, it didn’t bloody well matter. She found the right key, slid it into the lock, and twisted.
The click was somehow louder than the screaming.
CHAPTER 21
Were it not for the fact that Dragons weighed a good deal more than their huma
n form suggested, Kaylin would have been blown down the hall. As it was, howling wind knocked her back into Lord Sanabalis’s chest. He put one arm around her to hold her in place, and shouted something to Severn. Given how close his mouth was to her ear, she should have heard it—but the wind was strong enough that the words were swept away.
Folds of white fabric were likewise lifted and carried by the wind, fanning flat against Sanabalis as if they were wet. But Sanabalis stepped forward, into the wind’s roar, and this time, Kaylin did hear what he said. Or rather, she heard his roar. It was low, loud, and appeared to be endless, as if roaring itself required nothing at all but will—no air, for instance, and no breath.
Her eyes were tearing; she had to close them as Sanabalis made headway through a door that was barely wide enough to grant him entrance. If this was the way the garden said “no visitors,” Kaylin decided she was never going to bring a Dragon back.
Inch by inch Sanabalis struggled to clear the narrow frame’s threshold, and she clung to him as he walked, her own feet dangling above the ground.
But when his second foot was firmly on the green earth in the garden, the wind died. Severn, his hair slanted almost sideways across his face, stepped out from behind Sanabalis.
Sanabalis in turn set Kaylin gently down on her own feet. “My apologies,” he said, his voice quieter than usual.
“For what?”
“I believe that was the garden’s greeting.”
“It didn’t do that when we visited last time.”
“You were in the company of the Keeper.” He lifted his hands and held them open, palm up, in the stillness of the air. He looked up, as Kaylin had first done, at the boundless blue of sky. To her surprise, he smiled.
The garden hadn’t been small on the inside. But now—now it appeared vast. Kaylin turned to look at the door they’d entered, and wasn’t particularly surprised when she couldn’t see it. She shoved the key ring into Severn’s hands, as her own dress didn’t have much room for storage.
“We will not require them, now,” Sanabalis told them both.
“It wasn’t like this—”
“Oh, hush, child. Can you not pause a moment at the sheer wonder of this place?”