“With that sword.” Tiamaris’s voice was low and deep, constrained only by a throat too small for its full range. “Yes, he’ll cut his path.”
“He won’t know where to go,” Severn pointed out.
No, Kaylin thought. He wouldn’t. “The Hawks?”
“They’re not landing.”
She grimaced. “How many?”
And Severn laughed. “Enough. Are you ready?”
She nodded again, although she had his daggers, and no other weapon. “Tiamaris?”
The Dragon frowned.
“What? What is it?”
“The Hawklord,” he replied.
Fire began to fall, in a brilliant cascade of white and blue, from the heights. Where it touched building, it began to burn, and the building, unlike the Barrani, didn’t put up much of a fight.
Kaylin swore.
Severn caught her arm as she leaped forward. “Kaylin!”
She turned, half-wild, to face him.
“There won’t be anyone alive in that building. Anyone who could has already fled.”
“The children are there!” She shouted back, her voice rising in pitch, her body shaking. She saw his hesitation, the marred decision in it, and she slapped him. He let her; her hand connected with the side of his face because he made no move at all to stop her, to deflect her.
“Severn,” Tiamaris began, “there is a danger here—”
Severn nodded. He released Kaylin’s arm; his fingers were white. His face, white as well, where her palm and fingers had marked him. “Tell the Hawklord to wait.”
Dragon hesitations were marked by silence and stillness; there was nothing about them that resembled indecision.
“There is a risk,” he said again. “If the children are killed before they can be sacrificed, the risk is greatly diminished.”
Kaylin hated him then.
But Severn shook his head. “I’ve tried that safety before. I’m willing to take the risk.”
“You won’t bear the brunt of it.”
“No,” he said. “Kaylin, follow Nightshade.”
She stared at him. At the palm print that was now turning red, changing the color of his skin.
“You’re not a child anymore. Maybe you weren’t one then. I don’t know.” His voice was low and intent, his gaze didn’t waver. “But we’ll try.”
Tiamaris lifted his chin and roared.
Kaylin winced. “Well,” she said, as every Barrani—dead or not—in the street seemed to shudder at the sound of that voice, “they know where we are now.”
“Lord Nightshade knew where you were the moment you left his castle,” the Dragon replied. “Go. I will…join the fieflord.” And he leaped up, past them, his sword a flash of light, of something that resembled fire, as it left his sheath.
Only when Tiamaris was beyond them, only when they had reached the side of the first building, did Severn pause. “Children?”
She nodded.
“Not child?”
And shook her head. “I don’t know,” she asked, before he could ask her how she did know. “But…children.”
He met her gaze, held it. Frowned. “Kaylin—your eyes—”
She knew, then. She could almost feel what she couldn’t see. Tried not to talk much, because she would hear it as well. “What do the wolves know?”
“Not a lot, about you. Enough. You’re marked,” he added, “in our—in their—records.” His chain was turning now; it flew in a barrier to their left. She was amazed that he could both keep it spinning and run; she would have tripped over it. Or cut her feet off. Hells, probably both.
Better to think about things like that. She tried very hard not to do anything else as she ran beside Severn.
But the children were being marked in a different way. She didn’t know them; she was certain of that. Not the way she had known Jade or Steffi. Not the way she knew Catti. Whoever their enemies were, they were desperate.
Should be desperate.
“Kaylin—”
She couldn’t let Severn touch her. She moved. Tiamaris was by their side and gone, pacing them, lopping off limbs almost as casually as bureaucrats signed documents. The fires from above had ceased to fall; she wondered if they could be doused as easily as they had been set. A whole block could go up, in fire like that.
Think, Kaylin. Think.
Dagger in her hand. Dirt road beneath her feet. Beside her, for a moment, building. When the dead Barrani came toward her, in the tunnel concentration made of her vision, they were met not by Dragon, but by fieflord. She had always found it strange that Barrani blood could be so red; everything else about them was different. They lived forever. Surely they should have bled gold, or something similar.
“Kaylin.”
“I killed a man,” she told Severn, speaking as if she were Records, and not Kaylin Neya. “I touched him.” They were at the building’s side now. The third building. She stepped over an arm, and ground her heel into the bend of its elbow when she saw it was still moving.
He shrugged, trying to make light of it. “You’ve killed more than one,” he said. “If our records are accurate.”
“He disintegrated. That was the word they used. I touched him. He just…crumbled. From the inside. It was like black fire,” she added. “I could feel it.”
And she did.
“And the other three—I killed them too. Before Teela could. They—their skin just melted. Nothing else. Just their skin. Because the first one hadn’t suffered enough.”
He was by her side. He never left it. And she could barely see him, now; she could hear and feel and taste the blackness. No, she thought, no. She was going to lose it.
“That was the child prostitution ring,” he said. His words were crystal clear, shorn of the darkness that enveloped hers. “They would have died anyway. They wouldn’t have survived. It didn’t make a difference.”
It was true.
And it wasn’t true. And the Hawks had accepted it, but only barely, and only because her touch wasn’t always death. She had been afraid, after.
But not then. Not now.
No, that wasn’t true. Now, she was afraid. Because the children were there, somewhere in there, and she wasn’t with them yet. Some other darkness was, and she could almost feel it. Almost…touch it.
No.
But the word she spoke was different.
She had been with Teela and Tain that day, on what Teela had called a routine operation. She often wondered what would have happened to her if she had been with anyone else. Teela and Tain hadn’t even flinched when the men had died screaming. And screaming. Teela had just sort of shrugged, as if she’d seen it all before; as if it were just another death.
Tain, at least, had said, “You’d better clean up—a lot—before we go back to the Halls.”
“Kaylin?” Severn’s voice brought her back. “You did it once.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t do it twice.”
“No.”
“Why?”
How to explain?
Because the children she had saved then had looked at her as if she were worse. As if she were more of an evil than the men she’d killed; more of a danger. And she realized, then, that some of the screams—most of them—hadn’t been the screams of the dying. But when she’d been killing, she hadn’t cared.
“You knew.”
“The Wolf Lord knew,” he said, grunting as the bars came down and the window—such as it was—waited.
“How?”
Severn’s silence was his only answer.
“And he told you?”
Severn raised a brow. Answer enough.
“You don’t care.”
“No. I don’t. But I was a shadow wolf, Kaylin.”
“You want to trade dirty secrets?” She tried to smile as the bars came down.
He locked his fingers together and knelt; she put her foot in the stirrup his hands made. But he looked up, his smile pale, sharp, shorn of
any mirth. “You already know the worst of mine,” he whispered.
Before she could answer, he lifted her up, and she bent knees and weight into the jump as the glass and the thin strips of wood that held it in place shattered.
She rolled to her feet, grateful for boots; it was dark in the empty, small room. No sunlight penetrated the gaping hole she’d left; no light. She heard Severn land. Cursed him; he was lighter on his feet than she had been, and he weighed a lot more.
“There’s a courtyard,” he told her.
She frowned. “You saw it?”
He shook his head. “It’s Culvert. The buildings are old enough.”
“You think they’re there?”
“Nowhere else they could be.”
“Why?”
“The watchtower,” he replied, looking past her to the closed door. He motioned her to the side, and positioned himself just behind its hinges. “They were on the ground floor, there.”
“They could be in the basement—”
“Culvert Street doesn’t have any basements. And the rooms here—too small.”
Not to live in, just to die in.
She grunted because he couldn’t see her nod; he was looking at the edge of the door. For light, she thought. For movement.
The door flew open as he yanked it, hard.
She was in the hall, daggers in hand, before it had finished flapping. No one, here. Just a long hall that led toward fighting on one side, and toward another closed door on the other. She could see only that door; everything else was shadowed.
Severn couldn’t swing that chain in this hall. But he shortened his grip on its length, pulling the blade into his hand. There was enough of a grip there, and just the hint of tang’s lip. It wasn’t a weapon she could have used in a fight without losing her own fingers.
She could see its edge more clearly than she could see Severn. He approached her, and she said, quietly, “Don’t touch me.” It wasn’t a threat. Wasn’t, at least, meant as one.
He accepted it as he accepted all warnings.
She began to run down the corridor, drawn to the closed door that ended it. She knew that this wasn’t standard procedure. Knew it, couldn’t stop herself. Her hands were shaking.
She shoved one dagger into a sheath as she reached the door. It was a wooden door—nothing in this building was made of anything but wood—maybe an inch thick. She put her hand flat against its surface. Felt it vibrating against her palm.
It dissolved against her skin in a whisper of black ash that started at the edges of the frame and blew inward. There should have been sunlight. There were steps—three flat steps—that led down to a barren common courtyard, ringed by the outer walls of each building’s inner face. There were windows; had to be windows. She couldn’t see them.
She could see night, moonless, dark, gathered in the heart of the courtyard. Within its folds, she could see men moving. Robed men, tall and graceful, utterly silent.
All but one.
He wore dark armor, a helm that hid his face, a sword that matched everything else about him: it was ornate, the blade’s edge almost scalloped. Both edges, feet of it, almost a yard and a half. A great sword. It did not reflect light; there was none to reflect.
But he raised it, point toward the sky, as if in salute, and he turned his head to face her. His mailed hand rose and he lifted the face-plate of his ancient helm. The armor looked familiar to Kaylin, although she couldn’t say why.
She had thought to see someone like Lord Nightshade in this elegant, powerful man. And there was some hint of the fieflord in the long contours of his face, but it was not a slender face, not a Barrani face.
Not a mortal face.
Golden eyes, unlidded and round, met hers as the stranger smiled. He lifted his free hand, as if in greeting, and lowered it, palm up. The joints of mail made no sound as his long fingers uncurled.
Daughter, he said, although his lips didn’t move. Daughter of darkness. We bid you welcome, to this, the first day of your birth. It has been long in coming.
He was beautiful. Compelling. Age rolled off him without leaving a mark, as if it were majestic.
Her arms were tingling. Her legs. The skin along her back and her lower chest. All of the sigils, the marks that she knew, now, were like hidden names of power, undying and unchanged.
No, not unchanged. Almost against her will, she lifted her hand—the hand that held no dagger; the hand that was still black with the ashes of the door. Her nails were black, her fingers curved slowly inward, as if around a shape that she could only barely see.
The outer edge of night.
Severn drew himself up short just a step behind her; she heard his intake of breath as if it were the only breath drawn outside of that self-contained night. She heard him speak two words.
Had to struggle to understand them; they held no power, no compulsion, nothing of the beauty of the stranger she now faced.
“The children.”
And vision twisted, her eyes watered, the marks upon most of her body shrinking inward and pulling at the edges of the skin on which they lay.
Hidden, insignificant, the children were scattered among the silent Barrani; they had no power. Would never have power. Thin, spindly, awkward, they flailed like—like cattle that understood that the slaughter was waiting.
Their small, pale mouths were open, their eyes wide; they were covered in dirt, in bruises, smeared by tears; they were white, white with terror. And she had not seen them until Severn had spoken of their existence.
The shock must have transformed her expression, because the transformation was mirrored in the face of the armored stranger. You are too early, he said. And far, far too late. And he smiled, and the smile was beautiful; it was a promise.
You feel concern for these?
She couldn’t answer. Her body was stiff now, tense; the story of action had yet to unfold her limbs.
They die anyway, daughter. They die every day. Give them the whole of your life, and you will waste only time; they are beyond your ability to save.
But they are not beyond the ability to save you. You were chosen by our ancient enemies. You were chosen without regard for any choice of your own. They are masters of Law, and as all masters of Law in this city, they serve their own interests.
We have given you choice, he added, and the whisper of his voice filled her, as if she were in truth just a vessel; the marks upon her body relaxed, the skin flattening. We will give you power.
With power, you can do as you desire.
It was true. It was all true.
You have been helpless all your life. He gestured. She saw a boy—a strange boy, dwarfed by Barrani in size, and by the utter lack of the strange, black beauty, that girded the rest. Mouth open, screaming in absolute silence, he was laid upon a slab of raised stone.
The marks upon her body were a part of her, and all of her watched in dull fascination, and she felt a warmth take her that she had never felt. Desire? Yes. The definition of desire. Her mouth was dry.
She ran her tongue across her lips.
Tasted blood.
Blood? She lifted fingers to her cheek, and felt the one mark upon her that was not affected by the dead and the dying, no part of their spell and their attraction.
It was bleeding.
The man in armor frowned.
Two things happened, then. Severn, rigid and silent, suddenly left her back exposed, leaping in beside her, the only light in the courtyard. His chain was at full extension, swinging, its links catching something that didn’t exist in her vision: the fading of sunlight.
He didn’t call her. But as he leaped past, she saw something else catch the light, and with it, her attention; the Hawk across his chest. Its brief flight.
The Barrani did not scatter; some lost limbs, one lost half his face. Blood spilled, red, living; she could see it pool, and it pooled in lines that were…words. Ancient symbols.
The man in armor slammed his face-plate down, cha
nged the angle of his great sword. He moved, and if the Barrani were slowed by the strange hollowness that was their death, this creature, golden-eyed and bright in his darkness, was not.
He strode toward Severn, as Severn’s feet landed upon the blood sigils, the old words. Severn would die here. At long last, he would die.
The thought came at a distance.
The blood-writ letters were closer; they were somehow more real. She looked at them, and her lips moved, and she felt the satisfaction of the armored man as his sword swung in a flat arc almost too fast for eyes to see.
She opened her lips.
And spoke.
But the word she spoke was not written there; it was written within her, beneath skin.
Calarnenne.
Kaylin.
She spoke his name again, subverting the strength of desire, twisting it, forcing it into the only channel that she could touch, bound as she was by too many words, none of them her own. And all of them.
And then Kaylin Neya found her wings, and she screamed a name, another name, as she at last leaped into the fight.
It was the Hawklord’s name.
Kaylin Neya, weeping, claimed her Aerie, made her choice, and turned to join her Severn, the only ground Hawk here, as he faced death.
Death heard her, and lifted his head; his sword caught chain, or chain caught it, holding it in place. She cried out a warning to Severn, in the broken Elantran that the fieflings spoke as children, and Severn gave the chain a vicious tug.
The sword fell.
But it wasn’t a triumph.
It was a castoff. It was unnecessary. The man in armor roared. And in the confined space of a large courtyard, he began to change, shedding the weakness of arms and legs.
Black wings rose out of his back, and claws extended from mailed fist—and only then, because she was still Kaylin—did she realize why the armor had looked so familiar: she had seen its like once before, but its color and shape were so different she hadn’t recognized it for what it was.
The scales of a Dragon.
CHAPTER 20
Kaylin.
She didn’t answer. Wouldn’t have had time to process the sound had it come from outside of her, the way sound usually traveled. She had just enough time to slam into Severn, just enough weight to push him beyond the edge of the sudden eruption of Dragon’s jaw. She trusted him to survive this, as she would have trusted no one but Teela or Tain; he was already on his feet, in command of the momentum, before she had come to a stop.