“Sorry,” she said, meaning it. She would have exposed her throat—she often did that when confronted with an angry Leontine—but she wasn’t sure if it would have the same cultural meaning for a Dragon, besides which, she was attached to her throat.
“You have a mission,” the Hawklord said, when it was clear Tiamaris had nothing further to add.
She straightened up. “Sir.”
He met her level gaze, and held it for a moment, as if examining her expression. Which was a bad sign.
His words were worse. “There’s been a third death,” he said softly.
She didn’t ask him what he meant; it wasn’t necessary. “Where?”
“In Nightshade.”
“I know that. Where in Nightshade?”
He looked up, and then away to the long mirror. “Recall,” he told the hated silvered glass. “Pay attention, Kaylin. The image is aerial; the quality is poor. The report was sent hours ago, but it was sent to the Hawks.” He paused, and then added quietly, “Nothing has been touched. Inasmuch as anything can remain untouched in the fiefs. The child was poor, and no family claims him; he had little to steal.”
“Retrieval, sir?”
He nodded. “Bring the body back to the halls. The examiners are waiting.”
Severn began to walk toward the doors. Kaylin was staring at the moving images that flickered across the mirror’s sheen. She didn’t look long, though—it was clear that Severn knew where they were going.
Tiamaris was quiet all the way down Old Nestor. The barkers and the merchants that habitually shouted out the value of their wares fell silent when they met his glare; she wondered if it was because he was a Dragon, or if it was because he looked one step away from murder. Either way, she was impressed; if she could cultivate a look like that, it would take a lot less time to get anywhere in Elantra. At least when she wasn’t dressed as a Hawk, and of course, given their destination, she wasn’t.
Severn matched her stride.
“Where were you?” He asked.
“None of your business.”
He shrugged. “The Wolves frown on tardiness.”
“The Wolves frown on everything.”
His brief staccato laugh surprised her. But as it was true, he didn’t demur. “I’m under the impression it’s not looked on favorably in the Hawks, either.”
She shrugged. “I’m still a Hawk.”
“Yes. Apparently there are bets in the office about that.”
She rolled her eyes. Severn was like her; born to the fiefs. He could probably find betting in the Imperial Castle without putting his mind to it. “You play?”
“Not yet. But having met the Hawklord, I think it unlikely that you get dismissed.”
“Not while I’m still breathing.” She banked sharply to avoid a wagon. “Where are we going?”
“Four corners,” he replied, the trace of smile freezing. Without it, his scars made his face look dangerous. She wondered if it had always looked that way; if she had just been blind enough to miss seeing it. It wasn’t a comfortable thought.
“You look like shit,” he added.
“Thanks.”
He shrugged. “What the hell were you doing yesterday?”
“I told you—”
“None of my business. I heard. But we’re partners now,” he said quietly, “and that makes it my business.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It does if you’re too damn tired to be useful.”
They reached the foot bridge over the Ablayne. Men were talking in the shadows of the bridge on the far bank. She wondered what they were doing, and if she should break it up.
But Tiamaris strode across the bridge without pause, and she let that be her answer. She knew why she hesitated; she didn’t want to find that body. She’d found them before, but never as a Hawk. There were reasons why she had never returned to the fiefs, and freedom was not the only one. Not even the best one.
Severn knew. He was quiet, and he was present. She walked a while in his shadow, letting him lead. Or letting him follow Tiamaris’s lead. Hard to say which; neither of the men looked like they were particularly good at following anyone else’s orders.
Then again, neither was Kaylin.
She cursed when her boot got stuck in what could charitably be called mud. Severn smiled slightly; Tiamaris, heavy-footed lout, frowned. She pulled the short heel free, wiped what could be wiped off on the stone and wet dirt—not a lot of help—and kept walking.
The fief of Nightshade enveloped them all slowly. Without thinking, Kaylin lifted a hand to touch the mark on her cheek. Marrin hadn’t even mentioned it, and she’d almost forgotten about it—gods knew the mirror didn’t actually show her her face that morning. Well, afternoon.
Severn caught her worrying it, and pulled her hand away. “Leave it,” he said quietly. “It may come in useful.” The words were cool, and she saw that he offered them with some hesitance. But fief-born, he was practical—any weapon in a fight was not to be sneered at.
During the height of day, the streets of the fief weren’t empty. They thinned markedly when the fieflord’s patrols were nearby, but this time, when Kaylin and Severn chose to avoid them, Tiamaris didn’t argue. He rolled his eyes, crossed his chest with taut arms and waited—as if they were children and these were games.
And they were, Kaylin thought. But they had seemed so serious when she had been young here. She adjusted her daggers a tad self-consciously, and when the fieflord’s guards had passed, she followed Severn. He never spoke much, but his lack of words here wasn’t an improvement. He was going to the Four Corners.
She was following.
There was a singular lack of imagination in the fiefs with regards to everything but betting; the Four Corners could have been the intersection of any two streets. But in this case, it was the intersection of the two widest streets. The hovelled remains of mansions girded either side, and weeds sprung up in every conceivable patch of open ground that existed between the street and the buildings themselves. There was no glass in the lower windows, and the windows that could be reached by an expert stone’s throw were long gone as well; but the third and fourth stories of the worn, stately buildings still boasted yellowed glass that had thinned slowly at the heights. Bars crossed that glass, indicating panes; the people who lived here now were too poor to use the steel structures that might keep thieves at bay.
Didn’t matter anyway; none of the doors had locks worth shit, and no one bothered to try. The rooms in these mansions were irregular in size, and they were all occupied, often by multiple families. The sounds of arguments drifted streetward at any time of day.
At any time of day but this one.
The Four Corners was almost tomblike in its silence.
Which meant one of two things. The first, and less likely, was that the body had been discovered by the children, and news had traveled down either street. News did, and that type of news? It made parents who could stay at home grab their children and hide them. Or start looking for other accommodation.
The second, and more likely, was that the fieflord’s men were present. Kaylin glanced at Severn; saw he was thinking the same thing. His hand had fallen to his sword, although he still wore his chain. Hers were now on her daggers.
“Where?” she asked Severn.
He nodded to the northeast corner. “In the hall of the second floor. There.”
“It was hours ago?”
He nodded again. “But the boy had no kin here. I doubt anyone’s seen to the body. I’m surprised word reached the Lords of Law at all.”
“Our people are here,” she replied softly.
“So,” Tiamaris said, speaking for the first time in a while, “are his.”
“Nightshade’s?”
“Yes. Barrani, all.”
“How many is all?”
The Dragon frowned. “Four,” he said at last. “And none of them are young.”
As she had never been able to correctly guess t
he age of any of the Barrani, she shrugged. She knew what his answer would be if she asked him how he knew, and as she didn’t much care for magic, she didn’t bother. “We can’t take four,” she said to Severn.
He snorted. “On a good day, we might be able to take one.”
Tiamaris said, quietly, “It won’t be a problem.”
The hair on Kaylin’s neck rose. She hated that, and reached up to pat it down.
“Tell you what,” she told Tiamaris. “You go in first.”
He smiled, a lazy slow smile, and headed toward the building’s door. “Try not to get in the way,” he said, as he kicked it off its hinges.
“Hey!” Kaylin shouted, at his retreating back. “That wasn’t necessary!” But he was already gone. She looked at the ruined hinges and shook her head. “Uptowners,” she said, with a grimace.
Severn laughed. “I thought you were one?”
“Piss off.”
Severn side-stepped her, and nudged his way into the wide foyer ahead of her. She took the rear through lack of choice, but she pulled a dagger from her belt and began to follow quietly. In a building of this age, it was damned hard. The floorboards were a type of alarm; they creaked with every step.
Anyone who lived behind the closed doors here would know that someone had entered, and they’d even know how many they were. But no one—no one smart—would open a door to see who they were—not after the way Tiamaris had let himself in.
They made their way up a rickety staircase that had at one time been grand; it circled the foyer beneath the cracked and water-damaged ceiling that towered above them. Once, she knew, men of power and wealth had chosen to call this place home. She couldn’t imagine what had driven them across the river from this place—but clearly something had. They had abandoned their finery, and in the end, that finery had aged and withered, like hothouse flowers do. But what they had built still stood, and it was at least useful to those in the fiefs who had little way of earning a living.
She had lived in a building like this once.
Severn lifted a hand to his lip, motioning for silence; it annoyed her. As if she would suddenly start gabbling here.
But Tiamaris had cleared the landing, and headed down the main hall toward what had once been either bedrooms or guest rooms; in the mansions, it was hard to tell, and she had little enough experience in the homes of the powerful and moneyed on the right side of the Ablayne to be able to tell the two apart.
She didn’t need to. She wouldn’t be entering any of them. At the far end of the long hall, she could see the four Barrani guards that Tiamaris had detected. They were armed, and they wore what was, for the fiefs, fancy dress: surcoats with an emblem that was owned by Nightshade.
They had already drawn swords, and they waited the approach of the Dragon in perfect silence.
Kaylin had the strong urge to be somewhere else. Then again, Barrani spoiling for a fight always had that effect on her, even when she knew them and they were theoretically on her side. She managed to ignore the urge; she walked a bit more quickly, to catch up to Severn.
Tiamaris stopped twenty feet from the closest of the Barrani. He tendered the man an unexpected bow. It was brief, even curt, but it said much. “We have been sent by the Lord of the Hawks, from the Halls of Law, to retrieve the body you guard.”
Body? Kaylin glanced at the floor. She couldn’t see a thing. But as she stared, she felt it; a flicker of elusive magic. They’d cloaked the boy. And that took skill. She wondered if it was this magic that Tiamaris had sensed at a distance, but she doubted it.
“The Lords of Law do not rule here,” one of the Barrani replied. The words were cold, but they were surprisingly polite. “And we have been sent by our lord to secure the same body.”
“That would be unfortunate,” Tiamaris replied, stepping forward. “The fieflord of Nightshade has allowed us entry into his domain for the purpose of investigation.”
“For that purpose, yes,” the Barrani replied again. “But for no other. Look, if you must, but the body will remain in the keeping of the fieflord.” Cold, stilted language. The Barrani at their best.
The stranger lifted a hand, and dropped it like a blade; the curtain that had hidden the body fell to one side.
Kaylin closed her eyes. It was as much instinct as drawing daggers had been. But it was a weakness she couldn’t afford; she forced herself to open them, to look, to live up to her namesake. Hawk.
In the silence, Kaylin heard the tinkling links of moving chain. The Barrani heard it, too, and they shifted their stance. They were going to fight.
Tiamaris shifted as well, but before he could move, she reached out and touched his sleeve. It didn’t startle him; he might have expected it. But he did not spare her a glance.
Severn did.
“Kaylin, don’t—”
She shook her head. “We can’t fight,” she told him quietly. “Not here. Not yet.” She pushed her way past him, and edged her way past Tiamaris. It shouldn’t have been difficult; the hall was wide. But it was.
She walked past the Dragon, and approached the Barrani. She moved deliberately, and slowly, and as she came within ten feet of the body, she sheathed her weapon, her hand shaking slightly.
The Barrani looked at her; all of them were suddenly riveted by her presence. She knew why. They did not speak, but they made no attempt to stop her as she finally approached them and knelt before the corpse of the young boy.
His face was frozen in a rictus of agony. It shouldn’t have been; the body was long past rigor mortis. His eyes were wide, open, frozen upon whatever they had last seen. It made her stomach knot suddenly in revulsion, in anger.
Reaching out, she closed his eyes; felt the stiff curl of thick lashes against the inner flat of her palms. The boy’s arms were bare, and across them, in dark swirls, were symbols that she recognized.
“His thighs?” she asked.
“Also marked,” one of the Barrani said.
She pulled aside the rough blanket that covered the dead boy’s torso, and almost instantly regretted it. The stench was overpowering. Familiar. “It’s the same,” she said, speaking to Severn. Only to Severn.
He started to approach, and one of the Barrani moved. He moved so quietly Kaylin was aware of his absence only when he was standing in front of Severn, barring his way.
She covered her mouth with her hand for a moment, and then, bracing herself, she rose. “We need the body,” she said quietly.
The Barrani said nothing.
But the mark on her cheek was warm, and she understood what it meant. For now, right here, she understood. She didn’t care to look farther, and that was a gift from her years in the fiefs.
“I claim the body in the name of the man whose mark I bear,” she told them calmly.
They exchanged a glance. In humans? It would have been an uneasy glance. But these Barrani gave nothing away. She waited, tense, while they made a decision in silence. The Barrani who had done all of the speaking tendered her a bow. It was brief, but it was deep.
“You take responsibility,” he said gravely, “for your lord’s displeasure.”
“I do.” She would have quibbled with the use of “your,” but she knew it would gain her nothing. Had to bite her tongue not to do it anyway.
“Then take the body. We bear witness.”
“Tiamaris,” she said quietly.
The Dragon stepped forward. This time, no one tried to stop him. He came to stand by Kaylin’s side; she felt his shadow as if it were warm. “I can carry him,” he told her.
She didn’t want to touch the boy. Rising, she nodded. Severn was at her side in an instant, and he, too, looked away as Tiamaris wrapped the slender corpse in the blanket that hid the injuries that had killed him.
She felt an arm around her shoulder, and she didn’t even shrug it off when she realized it was Severn’s. She was that numb.
They made an awkward procession through the streets of Nightshade. The Barrani guards fell in befo
re and behind them, and they cleared the streets by presence alone. She was almost grateful, and she hated that. She would have been one of the children in hiding, in a different time. Now? She was entwined with the cause of their terror, and she didn’t like the change.
The Barrani followed them only to the edge of the borders; the bridge across the Ablayne. They seldom traveled this far during the hours of daylight; she wondered what orders they’d been given.
But they allowed the Hawks to pass out of Nightshade in silence, and Tiamaris carried the body down Old Nestor, retracing the path that had brought them here from the Halls of Law.
How long had it been? Hours, she thought. But hours spent in the fiefs felt different than the hours spent outside of it. They marked her, shadowed her, haunted her. She hated the fiefs. But even as she left them, she glanced back. Her history was there.
And here, in the arms of a Dragon.
Clint was still on duty, and Tanner was beside him. The smile that usually crossed Clint’s face when he caught sight of Kaylin vanished in the face of a Dragon; Kaylin couldn’t see Tiamaris’s eyes, but she could guess at their color by the sudden change in Clint’s demeanor.
Tiamaris went in, unhindered, and he was shadowed by a grim and silent Severn. Only when they had passed did Clint lower his polearm slightly, more to get Kaylin’s attention than to block her way, although it had the advantage of doing both; she wasn’t moving quickly.
“Kaylin?”
She met his eyes in silence.
He shook his head. “Remember what Marcus told you,” he said, and reaching out, he brushed hair from the sides of her cheeks. His fingers were callused and rough, but his touch was gentle; it was a dichotomy that she had always liked.
“What was that?” she asked, standing still a moment, a step below him.
“You can’t save everyone.”
She grimaced. “We have to try,” she said.
“Trying is fine. Failing is inevitable. Don’t let it devour you.”
“It’s not me that’s devoured,” she said bitterly.