Something about his wording was odd. “The same price,” she asked, with just a shade less bitterness, “that you usually extract from people you’re pissed—” she switched abruptly into Barrani; it had fewer colloquial phrases she could spit herself on “—from people who’ve displeased you?”
His brow rose, dark and perfect arch. “No. It is not I who extracts the price, but the keep itself. It can be circumvented. I have done it. But it is not without cost, and few are those who live who could survive the paying.”
She met his gaze, held it, wondered at the way his eyes shaded from the deep green of emerald to something that added blue to its brilliance—like a hint of depth or danger. “Yes,” she said, remembering that breathing was important. “It matters. I don’t want to go back through those doors.” And her eyes traced the symbols above it.
“Very well. You are not yet known. It is unlikely that we will be interrupted. Let me lead you instead to those rooms in which I entertain those who wish to offer favor, or to receive it.”
Although his legs were longer than hers, and his step just a shade lighter, his stride was cut by a third to match her hesitant steps. She really wanted to feel less clumsy, less graceless, and less…fat. Something about the Barrani just made her self-conscious. Well, except for the drunk ones.
They certainly made her lose focus. She drew breath, shifted the weight of her shoulders down her back, and lifted her chin, hoarding words. Well, truthfully, biting them back. Not yet, not yet—and timing was often everything.
He led her not to the room in which she’d first awakened; her memory wasn’t much to write home about, but she was never going to forget that marbled floor, that high ceiling and that particular sense of exposure. Instead, they entered through a wide set of double doors—ones that were gilded wood, and adorned by what seemed to be growing vines. It was better, she told herself, than walking through runed stone. But not by much.
Her arms felt naked, and her skin was rumpling itself into that rough state known quaintly as goose bumps. Why, she didn’t know; she’d seen her share of geese in her life, and they didn’t seem to have them. Not, at least, while they were alive and feathered.
“I entertain infrequently,” he told her, as the doors rolled wide. “Please forgive the state of this chamber. It has seen little use since I first took up residence within the castle.”
She said nothing, arms stiff by her sides, as if by keeping them still she could avoid drawing attention to them. It took a bit of will; she often fidgeted, and rarely sat—or stood—at attention, even when Marcus was in the worst of his moods.
This was her excuse for missing her first glimpse of the two thrones that stood at the far end of the long chamber, up three steps and on a flat that seemed a little too reflective. Neither would have suited an Aerian—they were both high-backed, with long, confining arms to either side. Never mind that the backs looked like cushioned velvet, and the chairs themselves were adorned with inlay and gilt; they weren’t the chairs she was accustomed to seeing in the Halls of Law.
And in the fiefs, they hadn’t owned chairs of any type; certainly not these ones. It was so hard to remember why she’d thought it was a good idea to come here.
The chairs weren’t exactly close to the doors. In between them and the aforementioned doors were tall pillars, each carved in the likeness of a man, or one of the mortal races, in various states of dress. Or undress. Barrani craftsmen—artists, she amended—must have labored here a long time, to capture so exactly the fey and wild expressions of the various people; the snap and flow of moving hair, the exposed chins of heads thrown back in laughter or song, the folds of stone that hinted at a fabric that was much lighter, and much softer.
They made her uncomfortable, although everything about the castle did.
His laughter was low and quiet. She didn’t much like it, and didn’t join in—which, given he was Barrani, wasn’t as socially awkward as it might have been. Her fingers stayed on his arm until he reached the first of the chairs; there he lowered the arm, and she at last—thankfully—let go.
“I have taken the liberty,” he told her quietly, “of preparing a…chair?…for your use. You may sit in it safely. No one else can.” He stood at her side—a little too close—and waited, the command in the posture like a loud order shouted in her ear.
“Why?” she asked him, stalling.
He said nothing, but his lips folded in frown. She really hated Barrani frowns. Feeling as if she were thirteen again, and new to the Hawks, she forced herself down into the seat, her arms folded tightly across her chest.
It was enough of a surrender; he took the chair to her left, with a great deal more grace than she had. “This is, as I said, a room seldom used. Even had I come here with a consort, it is unlikely that we would have entertained many guests. The outcaste may not be convenient and they are not easily killed—but shunned? We are indeed that, by our kin.”
He spoke without evident bitterness, as if he were discussing the weather. And Kaylin was familiar enough with the Barrani that she had to stop herself from either flinching or asking him, again, why he was outcaste.
“However, the halls need not be empty while you are resident here.” He lifted arms from the rests, and as he did, light sprang up against the walls to either side; left or right. She couldn’t fix the hall’s orientation; here, with no windows to grace its interior, east, west, north or south had no meaning. Things were either before the thrones, behind them, or to either side.
And to either side, to her great astonishment, the pillars seemed to capture the light he’d summoned, swallowing it until they glowed with it.
She was about to say something, but speech deserted her when the statues stepped off of their bases and began to move, roving freely along the length of the halls. They were not all human, although she did not recognize this immediately by sight; she realized it by the sounds of their voices.
They were musical voices, full of the promise of youth, and not yet the blight of it; their sunny ignorance was so infectious she almost wanted to call it innocence. There, a man with dark, long hair, had pulled a closely clasped lute from his chest, and his fingers stretched sideways along its taut strings, evoking a music that his speech—which was lovely and utterly foreign—did not convey.
Beyond his back, a woman with hair of fine gold—much finer than that which adorned Kaylin’s chair—came to his side, her fingers trailing the curve of his shoulder. He wore nothing from the waist up, which wasn’t a distraction; she wore nothing from the waist up, which was. Kaylin had been in her share of fights in the line of duty, but even had she avoided them by hunching behind a much-hated desk, her skin would never have been so fine and so perfect as this girl’s.
Beyond them both, she caught the orange-gold glint of Leontine fur; a solitary Leontine, but one who did not seem on the prowl. He wore nothing at all. But he moved to speak with someone who made her skin crawl: Tha’alani. The only thing that was missing was an Aerian.
As if he could hear the thought, Nightshade said, “They fly high, and are difficult to call to hand. None of the Barrani hunt birds.”
Music filled the hall, and the dance of these bodies as they began to intermingle also filled it in a different fashion. Light flared, multihued and almost impossible to trace to its destination, from the ceiling above. It was beautiful.
And it wasn’t.
Mouth dry, Kaylin brought her arms to the throne and clutched the rests for all she was worth.
“Any of them would gladly bear the mark you bear so reluctantly,” he told her.
“Are they captives?”
“Do they look confined?”
“They were stone!”
“Indeed.”
She was silent for a full minute. “Are you an Arcanist?”
“I? No, Kaylin. I have never much liked organizations, and the sense of belonging, the need for it, is often human.”
“But you—”
“They sough
t immortality,” the fieflord continued, as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “And in a fashion, they have it here. They are not aware of the passage of time, in this place—they are aware only when they wake.” He paused, and then added, “I have much interest in things mortal—things that both fade and change. Even in death, you are not like the Barrani.”
Her arms were tingling. “You used the castle’s magic.”
“I dared it, yes. And this is one of many results. Not all are so fortunate. Not all,” he added quietly, “are so unfettered in their beauty.”
“This is beauty?” she asked him softly, the question denying the statement. She started to rise. His hand caught hers, although the thrones were not side by side.
“If they displease you,” he said coldly, the threat evident in his voice, if not his words, “I can dispense with them entirely.”
The music stopped playing the moment the words left his mouth, and the light in the hall changed. The revelers looked up, their silence sudden; it was clear that they had heard him, although he’d spoken softly. She was certain they would have heard him had he not bothered with words at all.
“Well?” he said softly. Death in the voice. Theirs. Maybe hers. She couldn’t separate it easily.
“Leave them,” she told him, hating herself. “Unless you want to free them and send them back to their—” she paused. “They have families?”
“Not among the living, no. And the world, I fear, is much changed in their long absence from it.”
She’d seen what he’d done to the trees, and she knew firsthand what the price of flippancy was. She shook her head. “Let them be. If this was their choice—”
“You may ask them, if you doubt me.”
She shook her head again. “Just…let them be.” Because they were beautiful, each and every one of them, and some part of her didn’t want to see that beauty come to an abrupt end.
“If you desire their company,” he said quietly, “I will give them to you.”
Watching their silent, drawn faces, she winced. He could have hit her and gotten less of a reaction, and she hated her face for expressing so much.
“I don’t want them,” she said, without force, but not without conviction. “And I don’t want you to be able to use them against me.”
He smiled as the words left her mouth. She almost gaped. It had been a thought, a ferocious one, but she hadn’t meant it for sharing. He touched the side of her face, his fingers brushing the flat surface of his mark.
Her head snapped back at his touch, as if he’d struck her. And he had. The whole of his name, in long, drawn-out syllables, resonated throughout her entire body.
“You do not understand the gift,” he told her, and his voice was almost gentle. Beneath it, she heard something darker.
“No,” she said, her own voice thick and hesitant. “I don’t.” She reached up and pushed his hand away, breaking the contact and drowning out the sound of his name. A name that might have been, for a moment, her own. Her cheeks were flushed, her face red; she knew it, although she couldn’t see herself. Fingers lingered over his hand, and this, too, was a shock, because they were hers. They left damn fast.
She pushed herself up from the chair.
“You have already accepted my mark,” he told her, rising in her wake.
“I haven’t,” she snapped back. And realized, slowly, that it was almost true.
His eyes narrowed. “Speak.” It was not a request.
“You don’t own me.”
“No.”
“And the mark doesn’t mean what it—what it could mean.” She recalled Lord Evarrim’s question clearly.
His eyes turned a shade of remarkable blue. The statues were statues again, although they were no longer in the neat, even rows that pillars occupied. “I had hoped,” he said softly, “that this would not be such a difficulty. These others you see,” he added, lifting a careless arm and gesturing across the width of the hall, “came to me. They came willingly.”
“Good for them.”
“And you, Kaylin?”
“I came to ask you a question.” She hesitated as he drew closer, and closer still; her breath was a little too shallow. She opened suddenly dry lips and spoke a single word. His name.
And he stopped, his fingers an inch—less—from the underside of her exposed chin.
“Very good, little one.” The words were at odds with his expression. “But I have time.”
“All the time in the world,” she said sweetly. “But I don’t. I’ll age,” she added, staring at faces caught in stone and marble. “I’ll die.”
“Will you?”
Something in the words brought her up short, and she stared at the marks on her arm, her stomach beginning to fold in on itself—the first sign of incipient nausea. “It’s your name, isn’t it? It’s not the mark that gives you the power to—that makes me talk.”
He could have pretended to misunderstand her. He didn’t. Nor did he move away; he was a shadow that seemed to grow to surround her. He filled the whole of her vision. “Yes,” he said, voice still gentle. “My name gives you much.”
“It doesn’t—doesn’t seem to. I’m not reading your thoughts.”
“I am not, as you so quaintly and superstitiously put it, reading yours. I doubt they would have much information or amusement for me. But you have not yet learned to school your expression.” He paused, and then added bitterly, “nor have you had the need. The Barrani High Courts were not your home.”
His fingers made contact with her skin as he spoke the last word, and she felt, again, a shock of recognition. The peal of his name. She wanted to speak it; felt her lips moving over the syllables, awkwardly and in silence, as if they were a desperate, private prayer. And as she did, memory intruded, and with it, the dour, scarred face of a man she hated more than she hated anything.
The outcaste Barrani eyes were still a clear, deep blue, but he withdrew the hand. “Hatred,” he said softly, “comes, at root, from another source. If he is to be the great hatred of your life, it is because your life was founded on its opposite.
“But it appears that you are not yet finished with Severn. I would kill him, if I thought that would ease the bindings.”
“If anyone’s going to kill him, it’s going to be me!”
“Indeed. I believe you have already tried twice, and you have failed twice. This is not an accident, Kaylin Neya. There is some part of you, some weakness, that desires answers, as if answers are paltry excuses. You cannot even admit this to yourself. You hide from it, but you are not perhaps as skilled at hiding as you hope. Those answers will find you, because in the end, you will not be able to turn away from them.”
He caught her face suddenly in both hands, and she saw just how deep a color blue could be. But she didn’t struggle; didn’t pull away. His lips brushed her forehead, and she closed her eyes. Three men—three men had kissed her in that fashion in her entire life.
She trusted only one of them, and not with her life.
“What did you come to ask of me?” he said, as he withdrew, his eyes shading now to an emerald darkness, as if she had somehow satisfied the anger beneath their surface.
“I want to know what you told Severn when he came to you.”
“In the fiefs?”
“When we both lived here.”
“Ah.”
As if you didn’t already know that, you son of a—but even in thought, it wasn’t a safe word. It was a lot harder to control her thoughts than it was her mouth. And she had never been a champion at the latter.
“Then come. Let us retire from this chamber. You will drink with me,” he added quietly, “as I reflect.”
He led her to another room, and although it was finely appointed, it was small. She was grateful for it; she looked at the walls, noted with relief the absence of any statues—or mirrors—and almost failed to notice the delicate paintings on the walls to her right and left. They had no frames, and their colors were washed out, the
remnant of something bright seen through a haze of fog or smoke, but she saw that they were of Barrani. But not Barrani she recognized; they had long, pale hair and golden eyes. That much she could see without approaching them—and his demeanor didn’t grant permission for closer inspection.
Instead, he gestured to a low divan, and she walked toward it hesitantly. His smile was brittle as she sat at its farthest end. “You must learn not to let fear govern your actions,” he told her casually, as he also sat.
“I’m here.”
“Indeed you are.” His gesture brought movement from the far wall; the doors opened, and what must have been Barrani servants walked in. They were attired entirely in white; it made their dark hair gleam in astonishing contrast. They brought tall pitchers with long necks, and they also brought silver cups; these they filled in perfect silence.
Only when she had taken one of the two did the servants depart. And only when she brought the cup—hesitantly—to her lips, did Lord Nightshade begin to speak.
“Severn did not speak to me within the walls of the keep. He sent word to me, through my guards, and I chose to meet with him in the fief.” He toyed with the edge of his cup before drinking, and she thought this was just done to unsettle her.
“He was…an odd child. I see few human children,” he added quietly, “few mortal children. But in Severn, there was almost something worth using. I would have taken his service, had he offered it. Has he ever mentioned that?”
“You know damn well he never—” careful, she thought, and bit the rest of the sentence back, holding it as if it were on a very thin leash.
“Oh, indeed, he could not have offered it freely then. His loyalty was elsewhere. He was afraid,” he added, staring at her obliquely over the cup’s glimmering edge, “of me. But the fear was balanced by a greater one. It is seldom that this is the case, and I admit I was curious.