“We don’t have time.”
“Kaylin, you’re special, I’ll grant that. But you’re one Hawk. Every other Hawk knows what the timing is like, and every single one of them has taken a personal interest in this.” She reached out and caught Kaylin’s shaking hand between hers; hard to tell which were shaking more.
Kaylin pulled away and shoved hair out of her eyes. “Where’s Tiamaris?”
“The Dragon?”
“The same.”
“He’s at the foundling hall. Kaylin—”
“Tell Marcus where I’m headed. If he needs me.”
“He’s not going to be happy.”
“Probably not. But he won’t be surprised, either.”
Amos wasn’t guarding the gates. He was probably somewhere on temple row, or worse. He’d never been a guard capable of dealing with this kind of situation; the worst he’d seen usually involved a defiant child’s attempt to run away in a snit.
The gates were therefore open, and the path between the street and the foundling hall was utterly unoccupied. It was midday, give or take an hour; this was unusual. And it wasn’t. Kaylin let herself in, shut the gates at her back—or tried; as gates went, they lacked a little in the latch department—before she walked briskly down the path and up the steps. The front doors were shut, but she tried the handles; they creaked as she turned them.
She wasn’t stupid enough to enter the hall quickly. Had the situation not been urgent, she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to enter at all without mirroring Marrin first.
But Marrin’s sense of smell was at least as acute as Marcus’s; probably more so, given her state of anxiety. Although she was in the vestibule before Kaylin managed to enter, she wasn’t—yet—in full aggression mode. Which is to say, she didn’t leap forward and try to tear out Kaylin’s throat.
But her claws were bright and fully extended, and her eyes were all the wrong shape and color. Kaylin’s Leontine was pathetic—most of the mortal races couldn’t manage good Leontine because they lacked the right vocal chords for it—but she used it anyway, because Marrin didn’t look like she was going to hear anything else.
“Marrin,” she said, holding both of her hands up, palms out and empty, while also elongating and exposing the line of her throat, “I’ve come about your kit.”
Marrin growled.
Words were embedded in the sound, but Kaylin had to work for them.
“I know.” She kept her Leontine as level and simple as possible. The first was hard, the second was a necessity. “The birds are in the air. The mages are on the ground. The Wolves are hunting.” She paused, and then added, “Where is the rest of your pride?”
The question seemed to calm Marrin—if calm was a word that could be applied in a situation like this. “Upstairs,” she told Kaylin. “The Dragon is watching them.”
“And their teeth?” It was the Leontine equivalent of asking about their health. Or the closest one Kaylin could think of.
“Cutting,” Marrin snarled back. But she drew herself in, and if her fur didn’t settle, her hands came down to her sides. “Kaylin, where is Catti?”
Anger, Kaylin could cope with. Had spent a life coping with. But this was worse. Without thinking, she tapped the bracer that bound her wrist. “I don’t know,” she whispered, reverting for a moment to her native tongue before she thrashed once again with the curled growl of Leontine. “But we’re about to find out.”
Marrin’s eyes widened.
Kaylin hated to give her hope. Hated to, and had to—because if she couldn’t, there wasn’t any, and that was worse. “I need to speak with the Dragon,” she added quietly.
Marrin turned and leaped up the stairs, taking them four at a time, her gait a great lion’s gait, and not the two-legged walk that civility demanded. Kaylin followed as quickly as she could, but Marrin was at the flat of the landing before Kaylin was halfway up.
Her roar must have been audible from the street; it stopped Kaylin dead in her tracks for a moment. But it was answered by a deeper, resonant roar, and Kaylin, frozen, knew that she had, for the first time in her life, truly heard a dragon’s voice.
She wondered if the children were crying, or if they, too, were frozen by something so primal it was almost beyond fear.
Tiamaris met her when she managed to get her legs under her to start moving and had reached the top of the stairs. He was dressed in the same robes he always wore, the crest of the Hawk—denied her—glittering across his chest. But his eyes were red, and their lids were all that prevented them from erupting in flame. Or so it seemed to Kaylin Neya.
Without preamble, she said, “I went to speak with Lord Nightshade.”
Dragon eyes shifted. Whatever burned in them seemed to lose fire and heat as he stared at her face and the mark that adorned it. Minutes passed, and she waited, her hands deliberately by her sides, her throat still slightly exposed.
But when he answered, he spoke in his normal voice. It was the only thing about him that was normal, and she guessed it was costly. Everything was, these days.
“What did you tell him?”
It wasn’t the question she expected. “I told him nothing about the foundling halls,” she snapped. Had she the eyes of any other race, they would have shifted color in an instant.
He held out a hand, his expression smoothing into its frustrating lines of neutrality. Frustrating and familiar. “I make no accusation, Kaylin. The fieflord is not the hand behind this.”
She swallowed, and had the grace to mutter an apology. “Why did you ask?”
“Because he gives little away without exacting a price, and it has been his way, in past endeavors, to offer an exchange of information—if he has information that you seek.” He frowned, and then added, “I have been in need of information in his possession in the past, and speak from experience. I have not, however, had the questionable fortune to bear his mark.”
There was a question in that, and she chose to ignore it. “He told me what he thinks they’re after.”
“They?”
“Whoever’s doing this,” she whispered. Her throat was still raw from her short attempts to speak Leontine. “But if I had to bet, I’d put money on you already having the same suspicion.”
His lower lids rose, then, and his eyes were a bright orange, a mix of gold and Dragon red. She met them, unblinking, because there was a challenge in it, and the color could go either way. She was hoping for gold.
“It’s about me,” she told him quietly, lifting her arms, the sigils they both knew hidden by her customary long sleeves, the edge of the bracer gleaming. “I don’t know why, or how, but these marks were written there by something old. And something else—probably also old—is trying to rewrite them in the only way they can.”
He nodded; gold ringed orange.
“When they finish rewriting them, I won’t be me anymore.”
He nodded again.
“This is why you counseled the Hawklord to kill me.”
He didn’t deny the words; they were spoken with quiet certainty and no anger at all. Because she hadn’t any. Had she died the day she’d first encountered the Hawklord in his Aerie, Catti would be here.
“I don’t understand why he didn’t listen to you,” she added, her shoulders slumping.
“But seeing you, here, as you are now, I do, Kaylin Neya. Come. It is not…wise…to speak of this near Marrin.”
She nodded, and let him lead her down the hall. Only when she saw the gutted room that had once been Catti’s did she hesitate; he had chosen the scene of the crime for privacy, and it was not a private she wanted to be part of. “Step carefully,” he said, without looking back to see whether or not she was following. “The Imperial Order of Mages have been at work here, and they have marked much.”
“And the Arcanists?”
“Theirs is a more subtle work.” And those words, less subtle, were a closed door. “Kaylin?”
The not-quite-Hawk swallowed, ditched hesitation and cro
ssed the threshold.
“He told you much,” Tiamaris said, and she felt as if she had somehow stepped full into a child’s story, although the door at her back still opened into a hall that was, to the eye, normal. Another world. Her world, she thought numbly. The one that was worth protecting. She had once promised herself she would never believe that anything was worth protecting in that way again—because she had believed she would never find another family.
Fear of failure did that.
“He pretty much said it had to be…death magic.”
Tiamaris’s brow rose. “He told you that?”
“He told me that this type of sacrifice used to be called death magic. And I take it that goats don’t count.”
Her attempt at humor caused a raised brow, which was about all it deserved; it was dismal.
“He is correct. It is a forbidden art,” he added. “Forbidden to study. Forbidden to practice. These are obvious. It is also not an encouraged topic of conversation.”
She nodded; she could understand why.
“What else, Kaylin?”
“That I’m the—the thing they’re making these sacrifices to.”
He nodded. “He can’t protect you.” It was a flat statement. Because it was, she didn’t bother to tell him what he already knew. “Kaylin, a different question. Marrin was not forthcoming—her wards were more so, until she told them to be silent.”
She nodded again.
“Marrin called you a few days ago. Before Catti disappeared. It was about Catti?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do here?”
Tiamaris was a Hawk. Even if Kaylin was certain he already knew the answer to the question—and his early mirror message made clear that he did—she answered it. “I healed her.”
He granted her something. “I spoke with Sergeant Kassan. He was forthcoming, but he doesn’t understand your power; his answers were vague, and they were not enough. How did you heal the child?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“She wasn’t ill.”
“No.”
“She was injured?”
“She was dying,” Kaylin said, the words uninflected.
“Of her injuries?”
“She’d fallen.” Kaylin closed her eyes. It was easier, that way. “She’d fallen and she’d broken something. Her back. More than her back. I’ve seen it before.”
Tiamaris’s single word made her open her eyes again. He was staring at her with a kind of…surprise. It wasn’t awe; he was a Dragon. “Was she even conscious?”
“She was barely breathing. No, she didn’t wake up. Not until—not until after.”
“Kaylin, I know you almost failed magical history.”
She winced.
“I know you almost failed practical magical knowledge as well.”
“And math,” she added, for good measure.
“Numbers are not a concern here. But magic is. You must know that healing magic is extremely rare in the Empire.”
“I know. It’s why the—my power can’t be used openly. Not if I want to be a Hawk.”
“You use it openly.”
“I use it among people who won’t talk about it later.”
His smile had teeth. Real ones; the figurative ones, she was used to. “Children talk,” he told her quietly.
She felt a flash of anger, like a summer storm. “You came here to weasel information out of orphans?”
“I came here,” he replied, dignity intact, “to stop Marrin from entering her berserk phase.”
“You—” She stopped. She couldn’t think of another Hawk—with the possible exception of Marcus, and that wasn’t a certainty—who could say that and mean it.
“If Catti is found dead—and in private, we must both admit that this is becoming a likelihood given the fact that she obviously left by magic, and she is in the same age range as the rest of the victims—the foundling hall still needs Marrin. And her orphans are not likely to recover from a berserk Leontine—if they do, Marrin is not likely to survive it. The Lords of Law will have to attempt to contain her.”
There was only one way to contain a berserk Leontine. Kaylin swallowed.
“There isn’t a healer alive who could accomplish what you accomplished, if I understand what you are saying correctly. How did you do it?” His eyes were gold now, but they were unblinking in their intensity.
“I—I don’t know.”
“You have to, Kaylin.”
“But I don’t.”
He waited patiently, and she realized that he intended to wait for whatever incoherent babble she offered as an answer. “I—I couldn’t hear her,” she said, after a pause. “When I touched her. When I called her. There was no answer. It was as if—as if she was already dead. I couldn’t feel her.”
“And you normally can?”
“Normally, the children I’m called for are fevered, but they’re there. Catti wasn’t. She was—she wasn’t there. I had to find her first.”
“How did you find her?”
“I—I remembered her.”
“How?”
“I just—I remembered her. As a small child. As a girl, the first time we met. I remembered her singing—she has a voice that’s almost worse than mine. I remembered her hair. I remembered her smile. I just—I remembered her. And I held on to that while I built—” She stopped.
Tiamaris drew closer, his steps light for a man of his size and weight. When he touched her shoulder, she almost cried out, but his hand was gentle. “Kaylin, if we are to have any hope of finding Catti alive, you must answer this.” His breath smelled faintly of smoke. Before she could speak, he smiled. It was the first smile he had offered her, and it was weary beyond belief—but there was a very real hope in it.
And hope was its own kind of terror.
But gods she wanted it. Grabbed onto it, babbling. “I couldn’t hold her, even with those memories. I…I could feel the power. The magic, I guess—I don’t know if that’s what you’d call it, because I failed magic preliminaries, too. But I could almost see it. I grabbed at it—it was all thin strands, almost like hair. Or webbing. Or—something.
“I built it into a…net. No. A bridge between us. Something that could bind us together. I didn’t know—at the end—who was Catti and who was Kaylin, and I didn’t care. I only knew that she had to survive. Because I promised Marrin. Because she’s one of—” She stopped. Her eyes rounded, her head rose in a snap of motion.
She saw the understanding in his eyes.
“They knew,” she said softly. “Somehow, they knew. Someone must have told them—someone—”
His grip tightened. She struggled against it for just long enough to know she wasn’t going to find freedom without another fight in the foundling halls.
“They know,” he said softly, agreeing. “And no, Kaylin, no word was necessary. If you must find traitors, you will be no help at all in saving Catti’s life.”
He could have slapped her with less effect. She almost wished he had. “And you must have understood some part of the importance of that bridge yourself,” he added softly. “Because you attacked Severn when he came to you here. Some part of you must have expected him to understand what you didn’t consciously understand.
“I know what Severn did in the fiefs,” he added. “And you were not wrong. Had he known—” But he stopped speaking of Severn.
“You used a magic that is inimical to death magic in a fashion—its very antithesis. You gave power, you gave life. They are attempting to refashion the power that you bear. The words that you don’t understand, they understand. To use the power, Kaylin, I think you must, in some fashion, invoke the symbols. The fact that the use was inimical to their nature, their intent, would be a beacon.”
“But Catti—”
“She is marked, by you,” he told her softly. “Invisible to the eye, you have left the signature of your power in places that no one else could begin to touch. Her life was in your hands…it is s
till in your hands.”
His face had lost some of its stonelike stiffness. He caught her bound wrist in his hand, and unbuttoned the cuff that concealed almost all of the gold. His large fingers pressed the glittering gems in a quick sequence: white, blue, white, blue, red, red, red.
“You are still bound to her, and she to you.”
“You knew.”
“No, Kaylin. I suspected. But had I known—” His eyes did not change color; the membranes did not rise. He was the Tiamaris she had walked the streets of the fief with. “It would be safest—in ways you cannot imagine—to kill you now.”
He was considering it, and worse, she was letting him.
“Because they have in their hands not a single sacrifice, not like the thirty-eight seven years ago. They have something that contains your essence. They have a window into your…soul.” The last word pained him.
“My soul?”
“It sounds overly dramatic for my taste.”
Great. A literary snob.
“But killing you would not save the child.” The bracer snapped open in his hands. He let it drop to the floor.
She watched it. “But the Hawklord ordered me to—”
“Leave it, Kaylin. It will find its way.”
“Why are you—”
“Because while you wear it, you cannot trace the bindings you made to heal that child. Your magic is hidden and contained—even from you. Perhaps especially from you. And your enemies—no, Kaylin, our enemies—can do what the bracer prevents you from doing. They already have, or they would never have taken Catti, because they would not have been able to find her. You have two choices. Possibly. You can find the threads of that binding within yourself, and you can cut it entirely.”
“And what would that do?”
“Two things. The first—and perhaps the most important to Elantra—is that it would close the door. It would make of her sacrifice something only as significant as the others have been, no more. They would lose their purchase into the heart of your power. The second, I believe it would kill her, but you would at least grant her a painless death.”