And yet…
The symbol on the wall behind those stairs must be High Barrani. She couldn’t read it, but it was clear by the stiffness of Andellen’s back that he could.
“I fear I have led you astray,” he told her quietly. “This is not a place for the idle guest.”
“I have been given the freedom of the High Halls,” Kaylin countered with care. “And I’ve run up and down a lot of stairs in my time.” The last was Elantran; it couldn’t be said in High Barrani.
“What does it say?” She pointed at the rune.
He looked at her slender arm, green trailing from the wrists in a useless drape of shiny cloth. “You see it?” he asked her softly.
She raised a brow.
“Before you descend into sarcasm,” Severn told her, tightening his grip on her hand, “I have no idea what you’re pointing at.”
“It’s a symbol. I’m pretty sure it’s High Barrani. It’s right there, Severn.”
The look Severn gave Andellen would have caused a lesser man to take a step back. Or several, at a run. Andellen did not move. Kaylin was too busy to try to figure out why Severn was glaring.
“Andellen? What does it mean?”
“It means ‘choice,’” he replied, his voice completely neutral.
“You’ve been here before.”
He nodded. “Every Barrani who wishes to be granted the title Lord has come here once. They usually come alone,” he added softly. “But whether they come to the tower alone, or no, they enter it alone.”
“This is important,” Kaylin told Severn.
“How many leave?” Severn asked, ignoring her.
“Those who have gained the right to the title,” was the quiet reply.
Severn turned to Samaran. But Samaran was silent in a way that said “disturb and die.”
“Choice,” Kaylin said softly. “Is that all?”
“In Elantran, it has a different shade of meaning, and more words.”
“And those?”
“‘By your choice, you shall be known.’”
“What choice?”
He smiled. “That is the question the tower poses, Kaylin. Among others.” He lowered his hands and turned away. “This is not for you,” he told her.
But the word on the wall seemed to glow faintly, and the light in the runnels was blue. “I think—it is. Because I can see the rune.” She turned to look at Samaran, and even his dour expression wasn’t enough to silence her. “Can you see it?”
He shook his head curtly.
“Kaylin.” She turned back to the exiled Lord who had once called the High Halls home. She thought Andellen would be annoyed; he wasn’t. His eyes were green, and speckled with brown. “If you choose to wander here, you will almost assuredly miss the evening circle.”
That was about all the incentive she needed.
Severn said, “You can’t leave her. By the castelord’s command, you cannot leave her.”
Andellen met Severn’s gaze, and nodded. “That is his law, as given.”
“He can’t come with me,” Kaylin added.
“I’m aware of that,” Severn snapped. “And I think it would be politically inadvisable to miss the evening circle.”
“Severn, if I open my mouth while I’m there, ‘inadvisable’ will seem like an act of genius.”
He ran his hands through his hair and looked away.
“I know you’re making a face,” she told him. She hesitated in the arch.
“I’m not Andellen,” Severn told her. “Where you go, I go.” He looked back at the Barrani.
The Barrani Lord frowned. But it was the frown of someone who has found something both alarming and interesting; there was no anger in it. “We will wait for you here,” he told them. He glanced at Samaran. Samaran was distinctly blue-eyed and almost rigid.
But Andellen’s was clearly the greater authority, and the hand that fell to his weapon was Andellen’s. No other threat was offered; none was necessary.
“The Lord of the West March was not entirely accurate,” Andellen added as Kaylin took a step forward.
“About what?”
“About which parts of the High Halls are the most ancient.”
She walked through the arch slowly, but her hesitation was that of an observer; she didn’t want to miss anything. Especially not anything deadly. Severn did not follow her; he walked at her side.
The rune on the wall was now glowing with a light that seemed at once blue and gold. She turned to Severn. Severn, frowning, executed a full circle, and cursed quietly.
The arch was gone. At their back was now a smooth and slightly rounded wall. They stood on a small flat that merged with stairs, one set spiraling up as far as the eye could see, and the other, down. There were torches. Sort of. Down was darker.
Severn looked at her. He lifted a hand once, to touch the new wall in a way that clearly indicated he wanted the arch back. He pushed against the wall with his full weight. It didn’t give. “Occasionally,” he told her, looking up to where the keystone had been, “I understand why you dislike magic.”
She almost laughed. “Usually it’s just the door-wards,” she offered.
But he shook his head. “It’s everything,” he said quietly, and turned to face her. The landing seemed to shrink to an uncomfortably narrow width. “I don’t understand you,” he added.
“You understand me better than anyone else does.” She said it without thought, without hesitation; it just fell out of her mouth, probably because her mouth was open. She shut it.
“I understand part of you better, but even that part often makes no sense.”
She frowned.
“It started with magic,” he told her. “In the fiefs.”
She said, in a flat voice, “It started with death.”
He shrugged. “If your mother hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have been together. Everyone faces death.” His eyes were dark; the torchlight hid their color, but not their shape. “But if not for the marks on your arms and legs, we would have made our way in the fiefs. Or even out of them. If not for the magic,” he added.
She couldn’t pull the sleeves up; they were tight and fitted. Which is to say, she could, but she risked tearing them. Or wrinkling them, which in Teela’s eyes would probably be the greater crime.
“When I went to the Wolves, I learned. I learned everything I could. About you. About what might have caused the marks.” He shrugged. “I learned the acknowledged rules about the laws that govern the different schools of magic. I learned to understand some of the differences between the Arcanum and the Imperial Order of Mages. I listened. Because magic destroyed our lives.” He was still staring at her.
She shrugged and looked away. “I didn’t.”
“I’m well aware of that. But I don’t understand why. In the fiefs, we learned everything anyone would tell us about the ferals. Because they were a threat.”
“That was you,” she said woodenly.
“No, Kaylin. That was us.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to know.” She shrugged again. It was not comfortable.
He shook his head. This time, his gaze let her go. “Knowing or not knowing won’t change the nature of the threat. It will only change how well we deal with it.”
“And if we can’t deal with it?”
His smile was slight, but it flickered there, a kind of fire composed of lips. “It looks like we don’t have much choice. I don’t see another way out.”
You didn’t have to come hovered on her lips, but it would have sounded childish, even to Kaylin. She managed not to say it. “Choice,” she said. She looked at the steps. And at the opposite wall.
“Up or down?” Severn asked.
She almost said down. In fact, she started toward the stairs that led into darkness below.
“Down?”
She nodded, thinking. The shape of the rune drew her eye. The color of it was almost hypnotic. Thinking, seeing again like a Hawk, she made a decision. Acting like Kaylin,
she didn’t voice it. Instead, she walked forward, stepping with care not because she was afraid, but because she didn’t want to fall over. Severn could walk beside her, and did.
She grimaced. Lifting her hand, she placed a flat palm against the rune. It covered half of it. Before she could change her mind, she lifted her other hand and placed them side by side.
Nothing happened.
The familiar tingle of magic failed to make her palms or arms burn. “Oh well, I guess it’s not a door,” she said, and let her hands drop.
She swore. In Leontine.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The rune,” she told him.
“What about it?”
“It’s gone.”
Severn shrugged, but then again he would—it’s not as if he’d actually seen it. Or touched it. “Up or down?” he asked again.
She swore, for good measure. “Down,” she told him, and began to walk those stairs.
He fell in beside her. “Not the heights?”
She shook her head. “No.” And before he could ask, she added, “We’re looking for history. How much history can be above?”
He frowned for a moment, and then nodded.
They both knew that the dead were buried, and the sky wasn’t much of a graveyard. If they could even reach it at all.
The tower possessed no windows for the first half an hour. And half an hour of walking in the shoes the Quartermaster had so grudgingly given over to Severn was about twenty-nine minutes too damn long. With a lot of colorful language as a backdrop, Kaylin sat down on the steps and removed the shoes. She almost pitched them over the railing—which was a delicate twist of brass, molded like the trailing growth of a vine—but Severn caught her hand and removed the shoes from them.
“We don’t need them,” she said flatly.
“You can’t know that,” he replied. “Whereas I do know what the Quartermaster will say if you come back without them. He was most explicit, and given that he handed them to me, I’d prefer not to antagonize him.”
She grimaced. “You win.”
“Were we betting?”
“No. Not unless you had money riding on them.” She cursed stairs in general, but with her feet flat on the cold stone steps, she was inclined to be less hostile. That inclination lasted another half an hour. When she sat again, Severn sat beside her.
“We don’t actually seem to be getting anywhere,” she told him.
“No.”
“I don’t suppose any of that magical study you did involved illusions?”
“Some. If that’s what this is, we’re in trouble.”
“Figures.” She held out a hand. He gave her the shoes. “My feet are cold,” she offered by way of explanation. She put them back on and stood up. “We’re doing something wrong.”
He raised a dark brow. Standing, he leaned over the rail and dropped something; it might have been a coin.
There was no sound at all in the tower.
“That’s a good drop,” he told her, staring over the rail for some sight of whatever it had been.
She nodded, but she was frowning. “We shouldn’t be here. Andellen said that himself. If this is a test, it’s not a test that was designed for us. I should have asked him how long it took him to get out.”
“He wouldn’t have answered.”
“He led us here, didn’t he?”
Severn frowned. “You noticed.” There was vastly more sarcasm in the two words than words that feeble should have been able to contain.
“I sort of told him to.”
“You told him—and Kaylin, don’t take up acting as a second job if you think you need money—to show us around the High Halls.”
“Yes. But his eyes—”
“Were green.”
“And brown.”
Severn thought about that for a moment. “And brown is approval. Or respect.”
“I think they’re usually the same, with the Barrani.”
Severn shrugged. It was his punctuation. “All right. Assume that he meant you to be here. Assume that this is, as he said, a test all Barrani must undergo if they want to be Lords of the High Court.”
She frowned. “Keep talking.”
“About anything in particular?”
“About the High Court.”
He sat on a step three above the one she was standing on; he was still taller, but she tried not to resent it. “The High Court is composed of Barrani Lords.”
“They all live here?”
At that, he hesitated. “The Lord of the West March lives in the West March.”
“Where is that, anyway?”
“No one knows for certain.”
“Right. But not here.”
“No…”
“And the Lord of the Green? And what the hell is the Green, anyway? At least the West March sounds like a damn place.”
“The Barrani have their own symbols.”
“Green usually means they’re happy.”
“For a given value of happy. They’re happy killing each other half the time.”
“No, if they’re killing, they’re blue.”
“Does it matter?”
“Here? How the hell should I know?”
“Ah. I think I understand why you want me to do the talking. You’re babbling.”
“Ha-ha.” She frowned. “Teela is a Lord.”
“Well, she’s not going to be much help to us if we can’t get out.”
“But if we get out, what are we?”
“Alive.”
“Try to work with me, okay? Teela used to live here. But the closest friend she has is Tain, and I’d bet my own money he never did.”
“I wouldn’t touch that bet.”
“Samaran never did either. But Samaran followed Nightshade.”
“They have a complicated clan system.”
“They have a bloody complicated everything. If we get out, we’re not Lords of the High Court.”
Severn’s expression sharpened; for just a moment, he looked dangerous, and his scars were white and ivory in the gloom. It was, to be fair, mostly Kaylin’s gloom, as they were standing directly under a torch, but still.
“I may be forced to kill Andellen,” Severn said slowly.
“Don’t. Oh, and why?”
“The Barrani have owned the High Halls since before the founding of the Empire. This Empire. And the previous one. And, if history is correct, the one before that. They’ve always claimed it, there’s never been another race that has.”
“They built it.”
“Did they?”
“Most of it.”
“I’m not so certain.” The way he said it, Kaylin suddenly wasn’t so certain either.
“Think like a Barrani,” he told her, leaning back and placing both of his arms flat behind him. She wouldn’t have tried; her feet were still smarting from the constant cold of their contact with the stone. That and the edge of the step wasn’t worn enough that she wanted it biting into her shoulder blades.
“Trying.” She paused. Looked at him.
“Not like Teela,” he snapped. And added, “Try to work with me,” in very precise mimicry of Kaylin. “Castle Nightshade is old. It predates the Empire. All of them. What rules bind it?”
She shrugged. For a variety of reasons—most of them ones she was unwilling to think about at all, never mind with any depth, she didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Castle. Or the Barrani that served as door-wards in the Long damn Hall. Or the portcullis. Or the forest. Or the room with the seal. “Nightshade,” she said quietly.
“Nightshade binds it?”
She nodded, hesitantly grasping the strands of Severn’s thoughts. “He rules it,” she said. “He didn’t build it. I think—I haven’t asked how, and no, I’m never going to—that taking the Castle was costly. But it’s his. He can go anywhere in it.”
“And you?”
“He…said that I could eventually find my way anywhere in the Castle, bu
t I wouldn’t get there the same way he did.”
“Is that because you bear his mark?”
“I’ve never asked.”
“Well, ask that one, will you?”
She nodded, humor absent. The attempt was tiring. “You’re saying…that the Lord of the High Halls rules the Halls in the same way the fieflord rules the Castle?”
“I wouldn’t bet my money on it. I would bet yours, if that’s any help.” It was; fief-talk for almost certain, but not quite.
“It still doesn’t explain the test.” But she looked at the walls. “Or maybe it does,” she added. Thinking again. It was comfortable, to think. Compared to, say, panicking.
“No, it doesn’t. But Teela lived here. Andellen lived here. Nightshade lived here.”
She nodded three times. “So the taking of the test probably meant—before the Dragon Emperor, before the Empires that I don’t remember the names of, so don’t bloody ask—”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“—that at some point, only Barrani who could live here without getting lost, the way the Castle loses people, did live here.”
“The Barrani like to weed out the weak. They’re fond of hierarchies and titles. If this was a proving ground of some sort, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to them who built it originally. It served a purpose. You came here, and you either made it out or you didn’t. It’s pretty clear that Samaran never tried. Tain?”
She said, “He didn’t try.”
Severn nodded grimly. “You think he wouldn’t be here at all if he had.”
“I think he would be here if he had. Or at least as much as Teela is. I don’t think pass or fail here is a grade.” She bit her lip. “If we can pass this test somehow, we can live here. I mean, we can live in the same damn place as the High Lord.”
Severn nodded.
“You think Andellen wants that?”
“I could not tell you what Andellen intended.”
“By current law—by current form—we’d have to be accepted as Lords of the High Court. If we made it out.”
“And could prove it, yes.”
But she was still frowning. “If it happened that way, though, it’s not the Barrani that are doing the testing.”