He walked in silence to the front door of her apartment, but he did not offer—or ask—to stay. “Tomorrow,” he told her. “Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I can about Donalan Idis. But, Kaylin—”
“Don’t expect the news to be good.”
He nodded.
CHAPTER 7
Morning happened, like a waiting disaster.
Except, of course, you could predict it. Kaylin dragged herself out of the sagging middle of an old mattress, glared expectantly at the mirror—which, miracle of miracles, remained silent and reflective—and started sorting through the pile of laundry she mentally classified as “clean.”
The midwives hadn’t called her in, and this was good; she was still recovering from the last delivery, and the taste of birth fluids and almost nonexistent hair lingered in her mouth. Still, Leontines were among the most devoted and grateful of peoples, and the child, named in some ways after her, was a sign of goodwill between the pridlea and Kaylin that only kin-murder would break. Word would travel—had probably already traveled—between the various pridlea that constituted the complicated Leontine pack system. She would be marked as more than just a friend to the cubs’ family. Given that she was already unofficially considered Marcus’s kit, she could be relatively certain of safety among the Leontines.
Friends in high places were supposed to be something to strive for, but Kaylin found that friends in the quiet and unexpected places were often the ones who really helped in ways that counted.
And among those friends, complicated and scarred, was Severn, whom Kaylin tripped over when she opened the door.
“What are you doing?” she said as she righted herself on the banister—which creaked under her weight, damn it all.
“Listening to you snore.”
“I don’t snore.”
“You scared the mice, Kaylin.”
“Ha-ha.” She gave him the “later in the drill circle” look the Hawks were so familiar with—as if he were a Hawk, had always been a Hawk. Funny how odd that expression felt when your face froze there as your thoughts caught up to it.
“You’ve got the key,” she said, turning away.
“Yes. I kept it after the fight in Nightshade. You were unconscious for most of the week.” He paused, and then added, “I don’t really need a key.”
“I don’t want to know.” She pushed the door open and held it for him, looking into her room with the newly self-conscious gaze of someone who has an unexpected visitor.
He knew an invitation when he saw it, stood, and entered quietly. He also closed the door at their backs, and after examining the chair that was sometimes referred to as an open-plan closet, he walked across to her bed and jumped up to the ledge of the window, perching there.
“I brought food,” he added, handing her a canvas sack. He glanced at the mirror.
“Don’t,” she told him, before he could move.
“Don’t?”
“Don’t mute it, or whatever it is you think you were about to do.”
“For security reasons, Kaylin—”
“The orphan hall and the midwives,” she replied.
He gave in with a shrug. Against those, there wasn’t a damn argument he could offer that would move her, and he knew it.
“I was a Wolf,” he said, as Kaylin reached into the bag he had handed her. She broke the loaf of bread she found there, and also broke a chunk of cheese from the long wedge that was likewise in the bag.
She nodded, her mouth full.
“I was a Wolf for three years before the Wolflord called me to the Shadows.”
Her mouth was full but it had stopped moving. She lifted a hand, her eyes wide.
He waited, with a look so impassive it made stone seem like cheesecloth. “Believe that I choose my words with care, Kaylin. But to understand what I’m going to tell you, you have to understand a bit more.”
“This is Wolf business,” she said, when she could manage to chew and swallow again. “It’s not Hawk business.”
“Most of the Hawks’ business is actually not your business, but it doesn’t stop you from nosing around.”
“Yeah, well, nothing I find out about the Hawks is going to buy me a shallow unmarked grave.”
“Nothing I tell you will end that way, either.”
She was silent; the words were spoken softly. Clearly.
“Severn—”
“Three years a Wolf. Four years a Shadow Wolf. There is a reason that I understand the Tha’alani so well. The current Wolflord is not himself a man who could walk in the Shadows—as he put it.”
“Probably needed to keep his hands clean.”
“That is uncalled for, Kaylin.” Sharp words. Severn clearly respected the man.
“Sorry.”
“Lord Merlin is wise,” Severn added.
“Merlin? Isn’t that a—”
“Bird, yes. The irony is often remarked on by newer recruits. His family is, however, an old family, and his father—who is still alive—retains a seat in the council of the Caste-lord.
“As for keeping his hands clean—ask Lord Grammayre one day what happened eighty years ago, give or take a few.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not Lord Grammayre.”
She continued to eat, wondering where he was leading her. Not really wondering whether or not she would follow. He was Severn, and some part of her was still a fiefling in his care, whether she liked it or not.
“Live in the Shadows for long enough, and all you see is danger, death, insanity. Evil, if you want to use that word.”
“You don’t?”
“It’s too simple.”
“Fair enough. I like things to be simple.”
“I know.” He folded his arms across his chest. If she had done that, she’d have tipped off the window edge. “You lose the ability to judge men. You look only for the things that will make them a danger. And at some point, all living things can be a danger, either now or in the future. To rule the Shadow Wolves, you must be able to see more clearly than they can see.”
“But he—”
“And you must choose with care who you consign to the Shadows.”
“Because you don’t want—”
“Because you will ask those men and women to do things that are only legal because you’ve asked it. And they must do those things only upon your command. You must trust them to do what is perceived to be a necessity, because you won’t be there to guide them.
“You must trust them never to do so otherwise.” He paused. “And people who can do what is asked, for the right reasons—if they exist at all—are not as easy to find as one would hope.”
“He chose you because—”
It was Severn’s turn to lift a hand. “My past influenced his decision,” he said rigidly. “And he offered me the promotion.”
Promotion wasn’t the word Kaylin would have used, but she didn’t say anything; she knew she shouldn’t want to hear what he said—but she desperately wanted to hear it.
“I accepted,” he said softly, “because among the memories offered me by the Tha’alani—”
“Offered you?”
“Yes.” Terse word. “They did the same for you, yesterday.”
“But—”
“Leave it, Kaylin. I understood the need. I submitted willingly.”
She nodded slowly.
“The Imperial Inquisition has existed in one form or another for many years. It was a much less pleasant arm of the Imperial Guards for most of those years, and I won’t bore you with the details while you still have an appetite. But until the Tha’alani made their peace and their compact with the Emperor, it was crude and somewhat ineffective.
“Among those who helped the Inquisition to retrieve necessary information from those who did not wish to part with it were members of the Imperial Order of Mages, and also members of the Arcanum. Oracles have some play in this, but they are not considered reliable.”
She rolled her eyes.
/> He didn’t respond. He almost seemed a statue, sitting there as if motion would betray him.
“You’re not going to eat?”
“I ate.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Patience is useful sometimes. Learn it.”
She ate a bit more, willing to play his waiting game.
“As a Shadow Wolf, you have access to information that you might need. Donalan was part of the Inquisition that existed at the time of the unrest between the Tha’alani and the Emperor, and experiments—and that is a kind word for what was done—were performed on the Tha’alani, to see if their talents could be magically duplicated. If they could be, the Tha’alani would be rendered superfluous.
“They could not be, but the experiments that eventually ascertained this were overseen by Donalan Idis.
“He was almost obsessed by it. This is not uncommon for those who make magic their study. He felt—and in this he was entirely correct—that the innate ability of the Tha’alani would make the task of the Inquisition much simpler.
“But the damage done to the members of the Tha’alaan was enough to convince the Tha’alani to cooperate with the Emperor. The relations between the Dragons and the Tha’alani has been…poor. But they will not thwart the will of the Dragon Emperor again, and they have begun to choose with some care the people who will serve the Emperor in the world of the deaf.”
She nodded again.
“Those people are called the Tha’alanari. For the Tha’alani,” he added softly, “those people live in the Shadows, Kaylin. They must be able to separate themselves from the Tha’alaan. They must be able to keep secrets, something that is anathema to their kind. They are chosen, like the Shadow Wolves, with care.
“Ybelline is the woman in charge of that choosing,” he added quietly. “And there could be none better. What she has seen, and what she has been forced to extract, has not deadened her or scarred her. Her natural empathy has taken from the world of the deaf an understanding of what our lives must be like. Our unrealistic expectations of either good or evil, our judgmental nature, our desperate need for privacy and secrecy, our sense of shame—all of these things she can see as caused by our lack of the Tha’alaan. She can imagine what she might be, had her life been our life, can imagine what we are. It is why she can be gentle,” he added.
“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
“You catch more flies with shit,” Severn said, smiling sharply.
“Yeah, I never understood that one, either.”
He laughed. “You never fail to amuse, Kaylin.”
“Thanks.” She paused and set her bread down. “Donalan Idis had no such empathy.”
“None whatsoever. What he needed and wanted was a tool he could use to accomplish his duties.”
Kaylin raised a brow, her expression the definition of skeptical.
“This was, as I have mentioned, before my time—but not by much.”
“And Donalan Idis?”
“When an understanding was reached between the Tha’alani and the Imperial Court, and the various compacts were devised and signed, the studies were, of course disbanded. Reparations of some sort—unspecified reparations—were offered the Tha’alani for the harm done their kin.”
“They disobeyed the Emperor and he offered reparations?”
“There is a reason that he is both Dragon and Emperor, Kaylin. He is not Ybelline. I doubt that any Dragon is capable of her kindness. But he understood that what had been done had harmed not a handful of men and women, but the whole of a race, for as long as that race survives. And he also understood that to fail to acknowledge the damage done to children not yet born, and to their children, and so on, would be an open statement of ignorance. He is deaf. But he could understand what was explained to him.”
“So it was finished, with that.”
“Yes.”
“And it wasn’t.”
“No.”
She was silent, food forgotten for a time. When she spoke again, she was a Hawk. “Did the Tha’alani who were captured resist?”
His silence was longer than hers, deeper, and more disquieting.
“You don’t want to answer me,” she said softly, “because you already know they give me hives.”
“They were mad with pain and isolation,” he replied, obviously choosing his words with care.
“That’s a yes. Tell me what happened.”
“They drove several people insane.”
“And Idis was one of them?”
“He’s of the Arcanum.”
“So he was already insane.”
“Pretty much. But paranoid. Whatever insanity moves him, he was probably driven by it long before he met the Tha’alani for the first time.”
“How, Severn?”
“They shredded their tormentor’s memories,” he said neutrally. “They pulled out the earliest, and the most ugly, because—if I were to guess—they were looking for the commonality of fear and brutality.”
“They’d find it, there.”
“Oh, they did. It’s clearly documented. The Tha’alani were, for some time, considered a threat. It was not until Ybelline’s predecessor bespoke the Emperor that the Imperial Court was reassured, and the full nature of the Tha’alani was made clear.”
She thought about this for another long moment. “There would have to be proof of her claim.”
Severn nodded. “Proof enough to satisfy an immortal Dragon.”
“The Emperor did not expose himself to their touch?”
“No.”
“But—”
“Yes. Among the Court, there would have had to be one Dragon lord who was willing to take that risk—and given how several of the Inquisitors had fared, it was a great risk. Although there are many among the mortal who are trusted by the Emperor, there are none who could be trusted to make judgment of an entire race and its intent. The Dragons are, in their own way, at least as arrogant as the Barrani, but they also hoard their secrets.”
“Sanabalis.” It wasn’t a question.
Severn gave her a look of mild approval—the type of look that one or two of her teachers had favored her with when she had struggled with the schooling the Hawks insisted on putting her through. Or putting the teachers through.
“And Donalan Idis?”
“Many of the Inquisitors were retired in one way or another,” Severn replied with care. “Donalan Idis, of course, relinquished all claim to his experiments, and the documentation survives only in the Royal Archives.”
“If he’s involved in this—”
“Yes.”
“He never stopped.”
“No.”
“Severn?”
“Yes?”
“Did the Wolves hunt him?”
He didn’t answer. And Kaylin didn’t ask him again.
When she entered Evanton’s store, he looked up from his perpetual hunch. He appeared to be beading a piece of cloth with a very fine needle, and his eye—the left eye—was covered in something that looked like a tube. Kaylin had used one before, once or twice, when sifting through shreds—literally shreds—that might be evidence. It had seemed magical to her then.
“Private Neya,” he said as she closed the door behind her. “Please come in. I’m a tad on the busy side, and my store is less tidy than it should be.”
It was always less tidy than it should be. Kaylin kept that thought behind her lips, instead of just blurting it out the way she usually would.
She managed to find a stool, moving the books on top of it to a corner of the desk where they teetered precariously for a moment. She didn’t even bother to examine them; she’d tried once or twice on previous visits and had found the language—or the writing—completely impervious to fumbling attacks by her meager understanding. It was almost as if Evanton’s store was designed to make her feel stupid.
She said, as she perched, finding room for her elbows as she watched the old man work, “I d
on’t understand why you called us in.”
“Don’t you?”
“No. Generally, I like to appear to be smart. I don’t admit being stupid when there’s any hope I’m not.”
He actually cracked a smile at that, the lines of his face shifting, but never really smoothing out.
“Good girl,” he said genially. “If you never make mistakes—”
“It means I’ve never tried anything. I know, I know.” She hesitated. “You implied—you said—that someone was going to die because of something that had been stolen from your—your garden.”
He nodded, frowning at his handiwork. With a gesture of his gnarled fingers, light shone on it, and the beads glittered brightly, like caught rainbows. They were actually pretty, in a way.
“You might recall that I also told you to listen to nothing.”
She shrugged. “What’s done is done.”
“Yes.”
“The water—”
“Yes?”
“Well…the Oracles—”
“Oh, Oracles.” He said it in such a dismissive tone of voice, Kaylin almost laughed. It was the tone she usually used.
“You can’t trust Oracles for anything. They’re smug and mystical, and they’re only certain of their predictions after the fact.”
“That’s what I said. I would have been demoted, too, if there had been a lower rank. I think they considered inventing one.”
“You probably said it while they were standing in front of you.”
True enough.
“But even so…they seem to have spooked the Imperial Court.”
He nodded, as if this was not news to him.
“There seems to be some indication that—”
“That all of the Oracles, and their apprentices—whatever they call them these days—were troubled by similar dreams.”
She nodded.
“They’ve reason to be afraid.”
It wasn’t what she’d hoped for.
“But that’s not why you came.”