“We do not have time for this,” she snarled. All in all, it was a damn good impression of a pissed off Leontine. “I am going to see Lord Nightshade, and they are coming with me. Now.”
One of the guards raised a black brow in almost sardonic reply. The other stepped back, toward the portal that only happened to look like a portcullis. He vanished.
Kaylin suppressed the urge to stab the remaining guard, mostly because it wouldn’t do any good. Only because of that. And he knew, and it amused him. But Tiamaris held most of his attention; she was an afterthought. Severn didn’t touch his weapons.
The guard reappeared, and gestured to his companion, who lowered his sword.
“By our Lord’s leave,” he said, with emphasis on every word, “we bid you welcome to Castle Nightshade.”
Kaylin burst through the blackness as if it were gauze. It was the first time that passage into the castle hadn’t disoriented her, and in some ways, she regretted it; she was almost shaking, torn now between fear and rage. It was a bad place to be.
Lord Nightshade was waiting for her, and everything she felt—too complicated to put into words of her own—must have been clearly written on her face; his expression shifted slightly.
“Lord Tiamaris,” he said. “Severn.” Niceties out of the way—and those were the extent that he offered—he turned to Kaylin. “There was a disturbance in the fief this afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“On several levels.”
“Yes.”
“You have come about them?”
“No.”
“Ah. And you are dressed as a Hawk.”
“Overlook it.”
“I have.” He inclined his head slightly. “What would you have of me, Kaylin Neya?”
Sarcasm had deserted her, and without it, she felt defenseless. Exposed in a way that being underdressed failed to achieve. “The Long Hall,” she told him. And then, voice lower, “The seal of the Old Ones.”
His brows rose slightly. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
Tiamaris touched her shoulder. “Kaylin, we have little time. Waste it in defiance, and it is still wasted. In the end, Lord Nightshade is Barrani. He gives nothing away. Pay this price, or pay a dearer one later, but decide now.”
She met the fieflord’s gaze, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and broke Imperial law. “There are dead Barrani wandering around your fief.”
Nothing about him changed, and everything did; Kaylin wished the Records were recording the meeting, because she’d have time to peruse them later; to study, to learn and to understand. Now, she had instinct.
It was a poor substitute for time.
“Dead?” he said softly.
“Not in the normal way. But yes, dead. One of the disturbances.”
“They were…in possession of the child.”
She nodded. It didn’t surprise her that he wasn’t surprised.
“They did not complete their ritual.”
She shook her head.
“Very well. That is enough, Kaylin. I need not caution you not to speak openly of this.”
“No. I’ve already broken Imperial command to do it here.”
“Here,” he said, with the first faint hint of a smile, “there is no Imperial law.” He turned and began to walk.
It was the first time in her life she could honestly say that she appreciated the lack of law in the fiefs—the lack of any law but the fieflord’s. Kaylin followed, and after a moment, so did Severn and Tiamaris.
“Not the Dragon,” Nightshade said, without looking back.
“There’s nothing there he doesn’t know about—”
“Not the Dragon.”
“Tiamaris?”
“I am content to wait.” It was more or less true. He stopped in the hall before the big slab of runed stone and folded his arms across his broad chest.
Lord Nightshade lifted his hands and placed them against the wall. The runes began to glow; this much, Kaylin expected. But beneath her uniform, she could feel the symbols across her skin begin to burn, and this, she hadn’t.
She bit back surprise; it came out as a grunt, no more. Severn’s hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and shook her head; the pain hadn’t gotten worse. It hadn’t gotten any better, but she could live with that.
Lord Nightshade, however, frowned. “Do you understand that there is a danger in what you propose?”
“I’ve been there before,” she told him quietly. “I understand.”
“It is a greater danger.”
“Figures.”
The doors opened, the wall sliding in on itself and evaporating, as if it were liquid. Just beyond them, sitting as she had first seen them, were the two Barrani. Their eyes were closed, their flawless lashes glinting with reflected light. This time, she took a long look at them before she walked through.
“They’re not—”
“Like the ones who took your child?”
She nodded.
“What do you think, Kaylin?”
It was a long time before she found an answer. “No.” It sounded like a yes.
This time, neither of the living statues moved.
“You are not bleeding,” he said quietly, as if she had asked why.
She had never particularly liked the stiff poker face that Barrani of power habitually employed—but she found herself leaning toward learning it, and soon. If she could learn the language, anything was possible. Well, except for the grace.
Severn settled in by her right side. She kept herself from reaching for his arm as she walked, her eyes upon the heights.
“What would have happened if I had stayed in the seal’s circle, that first time?” Her words echoed. They sounded thin and forlorn, and she hated that.
“I don’t know,” Lord Nightshade replied. “It was not, at the time, a risk that I was willing to take.”
“And now?”
“There are greater risks.” His steps, unlike her voice, were heavy, authoritative. This was his territory, and she was—barely—a guest.
“You could be more,” he said softly.
“I think I’d rather be less.” There was no defiance in the phrase; it was muted, and shorn of defiance, it was that most contemptible of things, to the Barrani: honest.
But he chuckled, which surprised her. “Not even vulnerability,” he replied, “is outside of the game.”
“She is not yours,” Severn said coolly. He managed to keep all threat from the words; they sounded, to Kaylin’s ears, like a statement of fact. Weather fact. Geography fact.
“And where,” Lord Nightshade answered, “would the game be in that?” And he stopped in front of the doors. Kaylin would have sworn it took vastly less time to traverse the Long Hall than it had before.
“You must open the doors,” he told her.
She winced. But she looked at the doors, and this time, Hawk’s eye made them slightly different. Granted, she hadn’t spent a lot of time looking at their faces before; she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head.
“Why?” Severn said.
“Because speed is of the essence” was the cool reply. “Severn, you are a guest, and you are granted the hospitality of my Halls. Do not, however, confuse hospitality with tolerance.”
The scar across his jaw stood out, but Severn nodded grimly. Kaylin, standing between them, noticed it all. She said, to Severn, “The marks on the door. Look at them.”
“They’re like the marks on you.”
She nodded. “I…don’t think they were here. Not the last time I saw them. The marks were different.” She lifted the palms of her hands, clenched her jaw and touched the paneled surface.
Felt not prickling, but fire, and almost pulled her hands away. But the fire felt was not real; it was the effect of magic’s summoning.
“Kaylin?”
She shook her head. “I’m—it’s fine.” But her hands were numb as the doors rolled slowly open; she had the momentum to push t
hem because she had weight behind her.
The doors opened into the runed room. There were no trees, no captive forest, no gloomy arboreal sky beneath which they must pass; there was stone. Stone and light.
Severn caught her right arm in almost the same way that Lord Nightshade caught her left; they held her fast between them. And in spite of this, she was three steps over the threshold before she realized she was walking. “Kaylin,” Severn said, speaking directly into her ear, his lips touching the edge of her lobe. There was warning in the word, and fear. None of it was for himself.
She could hear the voice of blue fire, and wondered if, were she mage-trained, she would ever hear fire’s voice in any other color. Dim thought. She tried to pull free of her anchors, and almost succeeded.
The ceiling was alight; the foreign, ancient words seemed to swirl in a motion that made them look like burning water. Like a whirlpool, whose center was not yet visible. Things on the edge were crumbling, the letter forms dissolving in a slow rush of burning rain.
The floor was no different, and it was upon the floor that she struggled, dreaming of flight. Dreading the fall.
Severn’s grip was stronger. She could almost look away from the light to see his face, its network of scars, the lines that had been cut there by weapon, the ones that had been worn there by age. His eyes were dark, and narrow; he looked like a hunter. Seven years had changed them both in ways that neither of them could have foreseen when they had been children in the fiefs.
Seven years.
And he had come after her, as she’d feared, but not, in the end, for the reasons she’d been half-certain he would. He had watched her, as the wolf watches; he had given her time and space in which to hide, in which to tell herself stories and lies. Had she healed at all?
Jade.
Steffi.
She was moving. One step after another, dragging with her men who were larger and stronger. The patterns on the floor lit the way, and as she passed them, she guttered their light. Or absorbed it. Her vision was not clear; it was clouded by brilliance that she could not raise hand to relieve.
“Kaylin Neya,” Lord Nightshade said, his lips also close to her ear, teasing hair. Command in the name; she would have obeyed it if she understood it clearly. She had always feared the fieflord. But she had never known him. Did not know him now.
Light erupted from the center of the floor; the floor itself seemed to slant, to tilt toward that center. The seal was there, but she couldn’t see it; fire had consumed its edges, the definition stone gave. She turned, blind, to Severn, and shouted, “My hand, take my hand!”
His grip shifted, warmth leaving her upper arm, fingers crushing her palm. He said her name, again, but this time it was a different name; different syllables. For just that second, she could see him clearly.
Lord Nightshade shifted his grip in like fashion, without need for words; she swayed between them, the whole of her upper body tilting forward, and forward again, in a long, dangerous lean that seemed to go on forever.
This, this was falling.
And the fire waited to catch and devour her.
It did burn.
But what burned? Not cloth. Not flesh. Words, perhaps. All the words she had. And as she lost them, the fire coalesced, but what had been hazy and indistinct was now bright, clear—more so than she’d ever been to herself. A man stood, robed in living, liquid flame; taller than Lord Nightshade. Taller than any man she had met, except in dream. His skin was shining, his arms, burning. Eyes that were bluer than flame opened, met her gaze. Hands that trailed flame reached out to touch her. To touch her arms. To touch her thighs.
She could feel neither of her hands, although she could see his as if at a remove. The pain, however, was real. It always was.
She bit her lip, tasted blood.
The man spoke a name, and although she had never heard it before, it was hers. She looked up, and up again; there was no stone here, no sky; there was a sense of nothing that went on forever. For perhaps the first time, she wondered about the downside of immortality.
“Kaylin.”
“Elianne.”
Distant words. The man stared at her, and she stared back, trying to remember how to speak.
He was frowning; she could see that clearly. “Chosen,” he said, at last, although the two syllables were broken and stretched, as if they were spoken in a different language entirely, and had a different weight, a different meaning. “The portals are opening. You bring shadow with you.”
She couldn’t see herself clearly. Not as clearly as she could see him.
“You are a flawed vessel,” he continued. “And you cannot be made whole.”
Judgment, then. She almost bowed her head. Almost.
“What are you?”
It was a ludicrous question. She framed an answer, shorn of words, and offered it. Speech left her like light stained by color.
“What is a Hawk?”
A Hawk. Is that what she’d said? An officer of the Lords of Law. But that wasn’t an answer. It was something said to a stubborn door-warden, a pompous merchant, a petty thief. She had never really asked the question herself, except when she was sick and tired of basic training; the Hawks were home, and home was something she didn’t question too closely because she might lose it.
“What,” he asked again, “is a Hawk?”
Hawks were birds of prey. With good vision. They circled the city; were, in fact, contained by it. They flew at the command of Lord Grammayre, and returned the same way. But no, no, this was wrong.
Wrong, because she didn’t have time.
“Why?”
Because, she thought, irritation slowly overriding pain, Catti was safe—but Catti was one child.
Kaylin had become a Hawk. Yes, she’d failed almost every class she’d been forced to take. She’d learned to read, to write and to speak Barrani, because the Hawklord made absolutely clear that without these, she would never fly in his service. She learned the Laws, and learned how to maneuver around them without being outflanked, if it came to that. She’d spent more time than she cared to remember arguing with merchants, and bureaucrats, oh, hell, and everyone, about the subtleties of that law.
And at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.
Because at the end of this day, a different child would be dead, a different child would become part of Records, his or her body covered in wards and disembowelled in some horrible act of ritual that she was powerless to stop.
You can’t save them all. Who had said that? Marcus?
Then what’s the point?
You want to live in a world where no one even tries?
No. And there was only one way not to live in that world. To try. To live through the horror of failure; to endure the guilt. To try again. To make that choice.
She lifted her chin, met his gaze. Her vision was clearer now.
“You are tainted,” he said again, but this time, there was resignation in the words, not judgment. “You are mortal. This, we had not foreseen. What knows age, what knows death, knows change…it cannot know perfection. The taint was in you before the mark was laid upon you. The taint was in you before the mark was changed. But you were Chosen,” he added. She could hear the crackle in the words. Timber being consumed. Or time.
“You cannot open the way,” he told her. “And you cannot close it. You are a key.” But he lifted his hands. “The world changes, is changed. You were Chosen. You are Chosen. What you are must be enough even if you are too fragile for what you bear. To cleanse you would destroy you.”
He laid those hands upon her brow.
“Something calls us.” He paused, and then added, “Something has called our brethren. What wakes one, wakes all. Silence the call, before it is too late, and we will sleep.”
How? How could she silence something she couldn’t even hear? How could she stop someone from calling if she couldn’t find them?
His eyes became so wide they took up half his face. “I cannot tea
ch you,” he said. “You would age and perish before you learned to hear. Look within yourself, and only there. You bear their taint now. If that is not all you are to bear, learn to see.”
Her eyes began to burn. She could see his fingers moving, deliberately and slowly, as if they were brushes, and she were parchment. She wondered what he was writing there before she was in too much pain to wonder anything at all.
She was screaming as they pulled her from the pillar, although later, pain aside, she could not remember why. Severn had one hand in her hand—fingers pale from lack of circulation—and one on her upper arm; it was bleeding.
“He was unwise enough,” Lord Nightshade said with a grimace, “to touch your forearm while you were…in conversation with the Old One.”
Severn laughed. “Then there are two fools here, Lord Nightshade.” Kaylin, foggy, thought it was the first time she had ever heard him use Barrani in that tone of voice. As if it were his natural language, and not something to be endured.
“I am protected against many things while I rule this domain,” the fieflord replied, but there was a tightness in his voice.
Kaylin blinked. The room was dark. “Are the marks gone?” she whispered. Actually, to her embarrassment, she croaked. Kind of like the proverbial frog, but worse.
“They are not gone,” Lord Nightshade replied. He lifted her to her feet, and his motion made her realize that the whole of her weight was carried between them. “But they are…lessened. Kaylin, what happened?”
“I…don’t know.” She shook her head. “But we can figure it out later. I want to—” She stopped. Looked at her arms. Flinched, and looked at the rest of her. She was completely unclothed, and covered, in places, by fine ash. Trying to cover herself with her hands was a lost cause; they were anchored, and neither of the men who anchored them seemed to be in a hurry to let go.
But before she could retreat into embarrassment—worse embarrassment—her skin caught the whole of her attention. From the underside of her breasts down, she was covered in writing.
And it was glowing, faintly, each thick stroke like the work of a master calligrapher. The center of each letter form was a crystalline blue; the edge of each, a black that she had seen only on Catti, and only when Catti had been beneath the blades.