“No.”
“It’s the High Halls.”
“Yes.”
She said something in Leontine. And then added something in Aerian. “What I’d like to know,” she finally said, stretching her legs and massaging her calves without—quite—sitting on the steps, “is who the hell thought it would be a good idea to design sentient bloody buildings.” The cold was bad enough that she hesitated for a moment and then slid her feet back into her shoes.
“The problem with that,” Severn replied, his voice that shade of too quiet, “is that we’re probably likely to find out.”
That’s the point, she thought. She put her hands on the rails and examined them carefully. “Barrani,” she told him.
“You said the mark on the wall was a High Barrani rune.”
“No, Andellen said that. I said it looked like High Barrani to me.” She frowned, and then added, “The bastard.”
“Does that mean I can try to kill him?”
“No. It means you can stand in line. He didn’t say it was High Barrani. I said it. He just told me what it meant.”
Severn said, “I don’t like what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t even know what I’m thinking!”
“I know what you will be thinking in about ten seconds…you’ve got that look on your face.”
“I’m thinking,” she said pointedly, “that thinking like a Barrani will get us exactly nowhere. I’m thinking that this is like the Long Hall in Castle Nightshade, but it’s stretched in the wrong damn direction.”
Severn shook his head. “I told you. I don’t like it.”
“Come on,” she added, gripping the rail tightly in whitening hands. “Do you trust me?” She regretted the question the minute it fell out of her mouth.
“That’s not the right question,” he said, coming to stand beside her. His hand was around her waist for just a moment as he looked down. “Do you trust me?”
“With my life,” she said, but bitterly.
She leaped up lightly onto the railing, and Severn did the same; she caught the hand at her waist and held it tightly.
Then she jumped, and her weight bore them both into the darkness.
CHAPTER 13
The world folded, twisting around them as they fell.
Or as they should have been falling. Except that they weren’t. They hung suspended over nothing, as torchlight and stairs and brass shattered and blended, re-forming around them as if they were the center of the universe.
The center of a different universe.
Kaylin looked up at Severn’s chin. She would remember the underside of his face clearly, because it was the first thing she tried to see. “Can you see this?” she asked him softly. And then, when he didn’t answer immediately, “Are you all right?”
His hand was still around her waist; her hand was clutching it. He moved slightly, changing his grip. It was sort of an answer. It wasn’t a good answer. He said, each word distinct, “For a person who hates magic, it doesn’t bother you much.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re not hysterical.”
She shrugged, or tried to. “Would it help?”
He laughed; it was a low sound. “It might help me,” he told her. “It might not.” He let her go. She did not, however, reciprocate.
Looking at her hand for a moment, he said nothing. And then he straightened his shoulders, and he was Severn again. Because he had become aware that she needed him to be Severn. She let him go, then. Thinking, as she did, that need was a funny thing; you were never sure if you had it by the tail or the jaw. Being needed forced her to find strength; being needed too much forced her to confront failure. Not being needed at all?
She shook her head.
They stood in a long hall. There were no stairs here, and the brass work that had been the railing was now a green set of lines that clung to walls, shadowing them with the green of summer leaves. The hall itself was perhaps ten feet tall, but the ceilings were rough, and suggested dirt rather than rock. The walls, however, were smooth beneath the creepers, and hard.
She looked at Severn, and then beyond him. In either direction, the hall seemed featureless; it was an improvement over the stairs, but only theoretically. “Flip a coin?” she finally said.
Severn dutifully pulled out a silver talon. Kaylin called, and he caught; the coin rested on the back of his hand, beneath the flat of his palm.
“Well?”
He removed his hand. The coin was completely blank.
“Really hating magic,” Kaylin told him.
“Not as much as I will if the coin stays this way. I should’ve used copper.”
Kaylin shrugged and began to walk, and Severn fell in beside her. There were no torches here, but a diffuse light peered out from the sparse gaps between leaves; it was enough to see by. They walked in silence for some time.
“What are we looking for?” Severn finally asked her.
“The way out.”
“What does that mean here?”
She started to answer, but flippancy evaded her grasp. “I’m not sure,” she told him slowly. “I’m not sure where here is.”
“What does it mean in the Castle?”
She shook her head, and her hand brushed her cheek. “Nothing,” she told him. She looked up at the ceiling. “Can you give me a boost up?”
“You can probably reach if you sit on my shoulders.”
They’d done this before, but she’d been younger and lighter; muscle counted for something. He knelt, and she straddled his shoulders, discovering that skirts were, in fact, bad for everything. But if she’d gained muscle and height in seven years, so had Severn; he gained his feet without apparent effort.
She reached up and touched the ceiling. What appeared as dirt was not—quite—dirt. It was, however, covered in a mottled layer of earth. She ran her hands across it, frowning. “Severn? I think the ceiling is made of…roots.”
“Roots?”
“Plant roots. Some are smaller than others. Some are bigger than my thigh.”
“Roots usually grow down,” he said after a pause. “You think we’re underground?”
“As much as you do,” she replied. “How far can you walk like this?”
“Not far.”
She nodded, although he couldn’t be expected to see it. Her hands continued to play against the surface, her nails gathering dirt the way short nails everywhere did. “Let’s follow this one,” she told him. “Take a couple of steps forward and stop.”
He did this, and she once again touched the ceiling. Found the largest of the roots, and, trying to keep her hand beneath it, nudged him forward again. They walked this way for about twenty minutes before Kaylin told him to stop. There was enough urgency in the single syllable that he almost unbalanced, and she realized he’d gone for his knives.
“It’s not that kind of stop,” she told him as he regained his balance—and his hold. “I can—something’s different. I can feel—something engraved here.”
“John was here?”
“Ha-ha.” Her fingers had found marks or grooves that turned in a curve. In a series of curves, some large and thick, some small and fine. “I think it’s writing,” she said. “But I can’t read it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Severn told her, and her hand fell a few inches as he knelt. “We’re on the right track. Or,” he added in a softer voice, “the wrong one.”
“How do you—” She slid off his shoulders in silence, looking ahead.
“Just a hunch.”
A Barrani man stood in the hall before them. He looked vaguely familiar, which is something that could be said of any Barrani of any gender. He wore armor, however, and a sword, although the weapon remained in its sheath.
Kaylin didn’t like the look of him.
Severn didn’t like it any better, and he didn’t like it faster. The hall was narrow enough that it was pointless to unwind the chain of his favored weapon,
but the blade in his hand was attached to said chain, and the chain hung low enough to give it play. Or to stop Severn from losing the weapon.
Kaylin reached for the daggers she wasn’t carrying.
She could have written a treatise on the danger of dresses in about thirty seconds, but it wouldn’t have been printable.
The man, however, did not attack; he didn’t move.
He did see them. It was too dark to gauge the color of his eyes. But he lifted a mailed arm and pointed between them.
Go back.
“Uh, no,” Kaylin told him.
“Is he alive?” Severn asked quietly.
She hesitated. “He’s not dead. I mean, not like the other ones.”
“Too bad.”
She raised a brow.
“They were a lot slower.”
“They kept fighting without their heads.”
“True.” Severn had bent his knees, spread his feet, assumed a fighting position. But the Barrani didn’t move.
Kaylin’s arms began to tingle. She cursed.
“Bad?”
And nodded. “Very.”
“He’s still not moving.”
“No. He’s not. Something else is.”
Severn reached for a dagger and handed it to Kaylin, never taking his eyes off the Barrani. He repeated the motion a second time as Kaylin kicked off her shoes. The ground was a shock to the soles of her feet; it was like standing on ice.
She’d done that once or twice in the winter, when old shoes had given way; she’d never done it voluntarily.
The light that hid behind creepers flickered slightly. Kaylin, without thinking, slammed her hand into the wall, crushing leaves in her rush to touch stone. She whispered a harsh word that left her throat raw, and the light strengthened, forward and back.
“Impressive,” Severn said. “Do you even know what you said?”
She shook her head. Because she didn’t. At the moment, she didn’t care.
Behind the Barrani, shadows were moving.
They were familiar shadows; one could even call them childhood shadows. “How many?” she asked Severn.
“I count four.”
“They can’t attack four abreast.”
“No. Not unless they’re stupid.” His tone mirrored her thoughts: not much hope of that. In the steady light, the creatures padded forward, eyes and teeth gleaming, voices beginning their slow growl.
Four ferals. Four hunting ferals in the High Halls.
Kaylin stood beside Severn, her daggers ready. She could throw one; she wasn’t willing to throw two. But they weren’t weighted for throwing, and even if she was damn lucky, a lethal hit wasn’t guaranteed. The Barrani Lord stood like a statue; he did not draw sword or otherwise move. The ferals glided past him as if he weren’t there. But he was. Had he been a simple illusion, they would have passed through him, and probably the hard, stupid way.
Ferals hunted anything that moved or breathed. They hunted in packs, but they weren’t picky about their prey. Occasionally, Barrani guards had been caught by the ferals, to the great relief of the human denizens of the fief of Nightshade.
It meant less ferals, after all. And possibly—just possibly—a few less Barrani.
The ferals were about three yards away before they began to howl. It was a trick, and seven years ago, Kaylin would have been transfixed by the sound; now it was simply a warning. Two legs or four, she’d been hunted before. Ferals didn’t have crossbows. They didn’t have longbows. They didn’t have magic.
They didn’t, she thought, as she brought the right dagger up and the left back, have scales or jaws the size of horses. They couldn’t fly.
But they could leap.
As one, the front two did. Kaylin didn’t look to Severn, didn’t look behind him; she didn’t try to find a place to hide. She wanted to for just a second—for less than a second—but she wasn’t that child anymore.
She was a Hawk. A Ground Hawk.
Her feet were burning and numb. It would have made running hard. It didn’t make much difference to fighting, yet. She caught the snap of a jaw with the flick of a knife; were it not for momentum—the feral’s—it would have been easier. She’d expected the weight, but the speed was startling, and reflex took rein, kicking thought out of the driver’s seat.
She brought her left arm up and in, thrusting the second dagger toward the feral’s momentarily exposed throat. She felt fur, and heat, saw eyes that reflected light. The feral leaped back, bleeding.
The one attacking Severn didn’t have that chance. He rammed his arm into the open jaw and cut through half its neck. The growl died into a gurgle, and Severn was in motion, forward motion.
Kaylin’s first feral turned to snap at him as he moved past, and she brought both daggers down through the base of its spine, crossing them over in a neat, brutal movement. More blood. Less fur. A glint of exposed bone. She kicked the feral over, pulling the blades free in time—just—to fend off the third.
The halls were narrow.
The feral was loud. Louder than she remembered, and she remembered ferals. The smell of them. The fear they caused. The desperation of night in the fief. Elianne.
Her old name.
And not her name. Her arm jerked as she tried to pull it back; the feral had a mouthful of silk in its jaw, and it wasn’t letting go. This would, Kaylin realized, be because she was bleeding. The fabric was shiny; the blood ran down its length before it was absorbed. Ferals in a blood rage were just that little bit more stupid.
And given that the teeth weren’t connected to the bleeding parts—yet—this was to her advantage.
She couldn’t use the one arm, but she did have two, and the feral had taken hold of the right sleeve. Had she time, she would have cut it loose. Instead, she let the feral decide how far forward she was going; she stopped resisting its pull. She pitched forward, and the dagger traveled ahead of her. It lodged in the feral’s eye, and she put the whole of her weight behind its travel.
Yanking the dagger free, she paused to look at the weapon. One of Severn’s, longer than what she was used to by maybe an inch, and sharper than her tongue at its harshest.
She looked up; Severn was finished.
They were standing a yard from the Barrani lord, who surveyed them with eyes that were…gray. He did not touch his sword. He did not otherwise appear to notice them. But he stood in the hall.
Severn stepped past him, tense, moving against the wall. When he did not draw weapon or otherwise move, Kaylin traced the same path, with the same watchful wariness.
The Barrani Lord began to fade from sight.
Kaylin looked at her dress. The rips—and the blood—remained where they were. There was a gash from her elbow to her wrist, but it was shallow. She’d gotten worse in training exercises.
Severn frowned and looked at her. She shook her head. “I guess the testing begins in earnest,” he told her quietly.
“The Quartermaster is going to kill me.”
He laughed. It was a wild laugh. “He’s going to have to stand in line.”
“Here’s hoping.” Kaylin cursed, ran back, and picked up her shoes. Her feet were slightly blue. She put the shoes on, teetered, and forced herself to stand normally.
They began to move forward, down the hall.
She was almost ready to ride on Severn’s shoulders, gathering more fingernail dirt, when something in the distance caught her eye. It lay across the floor, not moving. Severn’s frown seemed etched across his face, but he stiffened, and held out an arm, blocking her.
She glanced at him. She still held his daggers. He still held his blade.
“Barrani?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Not like the last one,” he added. “No armor.”
“No movement, either.”
He nodded carefully, but that was the whole of his movement. He seemed to have internalized all action, all physical motion. His eyes were narrowed, and his hand—the hand that held the blade—was whit
e as the bone beneath skin.
She lifted her head slowly.
“Severn,” she said. Her voice was steady. But only barely. The light began to gather, as if it were, like Severn, contained unnaturally. It grew brighter; the halls grew brighter.
Although they hadn’t moved, the light deprived them of the need: They could see. They could both see.
Kaylin swallowed and closed her eyes.
It didn’t help.
How could it? Eyes closed in the dark of her room—any room—for far too long, she had seen what now lay upon that floor. It had defined her life for seven years.
And it had defined Severn’s life, as well.
Murder did that.
She opened her eyes again, and began to walk forward. When she hit Severn’s arm, she reached up and pushed it to the side. It gave slowly, as if it were a stiff gate. He did not say a word.
She couldn’t run in the shoes; she didn’t try. Had she, she would have probably run in the other direction. It’s what she had done the first time she’d seen them dead.
Steffi and Jade. The children she’d half adopted in the streets of Nightshade, a world and a life away.
They were bodies. Blood was fresh, but it had half dried. She could see as a Hawk saw; they were dead. Arterial bleeding. They’d both taken neck wounds; short cuts, but deliberate. So much blood for such a small mark.
She hadn’t taken the time to examine them.
She hadn’t taken the time to do anything but flee. It was her shame, and it marked her. Maybe some very stupid part of her mind had thought that if she did good—whatever the Hells that meant—it would count. And to who, in the end? It wasn’t as if she worshipped gods. She mostly liked gods, as they minded their own business; it was their followers who gave her the occasional problem.
What she hadn’t done then, she could do now.
She knelt by Jade’s side, Jade, the younger of the two. Steffi had been like day, Jade like Dawn. None of them had been like night, not in the fiefs. Their eyes were open and unseeing; wide, blue and brown. They were so young.
She lost the Hawk’s view as she stared. She thought the color of the light had shifted, darkening and changing until all she could see was red. And she’d thought that was a turn of phrase.