Cast In Courtlight (11 page)

Seven years of absence had never deprived her of what was almost her mother tongue. She froze, now part of him, and then turned only her face to observe Teela.

The Barrani Hawk was waiting.

Kaylin couldn’t see her feet, and wanted to. She’d learned, over the years, that Teela adopted different stances for different situations, and you could tell by how she placed her feet what she expected the outcome to be.

But you couldn’t hear it; she was Barrani, and almost silent in her movements. She looked oddly like Severn – waiting, watchful. She did not tense, and the only hint of threat was in the color of her eyes. But it was mirrored in the eyes of these four.

Hers, she’d called them. Kaylin had to wonder if Teela’s grasp on the subtleties of Elantran had slipped.

The room was a tableau. Even breathing seemed to be held in abeyance. Minutes passed.

And then Teela turned her head to nod at Kaylin.

One of the four men moved. His sword was a flash of blue light that made no sound. He was fast.

Teela was faster. She lowered the pike as he lunged, and raised it, clipping the underside of his ribs. Left ribs, center. The pike punctured armor, and blood replied, streaming down the haft of the weapon – and down the lips of the guard.

Almost casually, the wide skirts no restriction, Teela kicked the man in the chest, tugging the pike free. Her gaze was bright as it touched the faces of the three guards who had not moved, neither to attack nor defend.

The Barrani who had dared to attack fell to his knees, and then, overbalanced, backward to the ground. Teela stepped over him and brought the wooden butt of the pike down before Kaylin could think of moving.

“
Kyuthe
,” Teela said. “Attend your patient.”

Kaylin was frozen. Severn was not. He guided her, his arm around her shoulders; even had she wanted to remain where she was, she wouldn’t have been able to. There was something about the warmth of his shoulder, the brief tightening of his hand, the scent of him, that reminded her of motion. And life.

She had seen Barrani in the drill halls before. She had seen them in the Courtyards. She had seen them on the beat, and she had even seen them close with thugs intent on misconstruing the intent of the Law. But she had never truly
seen
them fight.

Teela wasn’t sweating. She didn’t smile. She did not, in fact, look down. She had spoken in the only way that mattered here. And the three that were standing at a proud sort of attention had heard her clearly. They showed no fear; they showed no concern. The blood on the floor might as well have been marble. Or carpet.

Kaylin tried not to step in it.

She tried not to look at the Barrani whose throat had so neatly been staved in.

“Do not waste pity,” Teela told her in a regal, High Caste voice. “There is little enough of it in the High Court, and it is not accorded respect.”

Severn whispered her name. Her old name.

She looked up at him, and he seemed – for just an instant – so much taller, so much more certain, than she could ever hope to be. But his expression was grave. He reached out, when she couldn’t, and he pulled the curtains aside.

There was a Barrani man in the bed.

His eyes were closed, and his arms were folded across his chest in the kind of repose you saw in a coffin. He was pale – but the Barrani always were – and still. His hair, like his arms, had been artfully and pleasantly arranged. There were flowers around his head, and in the cup of his slack hands.

“Who is he?” she asked, forgetting herself. Speaking Elantran.

“He is,” Teela replied, her voice remote, her words Barrani, “the youngest son of the Lord of the High Court.”

Kaylin reached out to touch him; her hands fell short of his face. It seemed… wrong, somehow. To disturb him. “What is he called?” she asked, stalling for time. Teela did not reply.

Warning, in that. She reached out again, and again her hands fell short. But this time, the sense of wrongness was sharper. Harsher. Kaylin frowned. Her fingers were tingling in a way that reminded her of… the Hawklord’s door.

Magic.

She gritted teeth. Tensed. All of her movements were clumsy and exaggerated in her own sight.

But they
were
hers. “There’s magic here,” she said quietly.

Teela, again, said nothing.

Kaylin opened her palms, forced them to rest above the only exposed skin she could touch: his face, his perfect face. Now magic crawled through her skin, ran up her arms, burning sharply.

If I explode
, she thought sourly, I
hope I kill someone
. She wasn’t feeling particular.

She forced her hands down, and down again, as if she were reaching from a height. She would have fallen, but Severn was there, steadying her. She whispered his name, or thought she did. She could feel her lips move, but could hear no sound.

No sound at all save the crackle of magic, the fire of it. She kept pushing; it was an effort. Like bench-pressing weight, but backward. Holding on to that because she was stubborn, she continued.

Severn’s arm was around her; she could feel it. She could no longer feel her feet, and even her legs, which were almost shaking with exhaustion, seemed numb. She whispered his name again. It was as close to prayer as she came. Hawk, she thought. And Hawk she was. She plummeted as her hands, at last, made contact.

Kaylin had never tended Barrani before. Oh, she’d helped with the occasional scratch they managed to take – where help meant Moran’s unguents and barbed commentary – but she had never
healed
them. The Barrani did not go to Elantran midwives. Leontines did; Aerians did; even the Tha’alani had been known to call upon their services.

They were all mortal.

The Barrani were not, and they really liked to rub people’s noses in the fact.

Nor had Kaylin tended their young, their orphans. The only orphans in the foundling hall were human.

She had once offered to help a Dragon, and she had been curtly – and completely – refused. She understood why, now.

“He’s alive,” she managed to say. More than that would have been a struggle. Because
alive
in this case meant something different than it had every other time she offered this assurance to onlookers, many often insensate with fear and the burden of slender hope.

His skin felt like skin. And it felt like bark. It felt like moss, and fur, and the soft silk of Barrani hair; it felt like petals, like chiton, like nothing – and everything – that she had ever touched before. And there was more, but she hadn’t the words for it.

She almost pulled back, but Severn was there, and he steadied her. She could feel his hair brush the back of her neck, and realized her head was bent. Her eyes were closed.

The room was invaded by scent: rose and lilac, honey, water new with spring green; sweat, the aroma of tea – tea? – and sweet wine, the smell of
green
. The green. Behind her eyes she could sense the bowers of ancient forest, could almost hear the rustle of great leaves.

But here, too, she found silence. The silence of the smug, the arrogant, the pretentious; the silence of concern, of compassion; the silence of grief too great for simple words; the silence that follows a child’s first cry. She found so many silences, she wondered what the use of language was; words seemed impoverished and lessened.

But she did not find the silence of the dead.

Her hands were warm now. The fires had cooled, banked. What they could burn, they had burned, and embers remained. She moved her fingers slowly, and felt – skin. Just skin.

When she had healed Catti, the redhead with the atrocious singing voice, she had almost had to become Catti. Here, she was alone. There was no wound she could sense, and no loss of blood, no severed nerves along the spine. There was nothing at all that seemed wrong, and even in humans, that was unnatural.

So. This was perfection.

Unblemished skin. Beating heart. Lungs that rose and fell. An absence – a complete absence – of bruise, scar, the odd shape of bone once broken and mended.

She wanted to let go then. To tell Teela that this Barrani Lord – this son of the castelord – was alive and well.

But she didn’t. Because her hands still tingled. Because there was something beneath her that she could not see, or touch, or smell, that eluded her. Like dim star at the corner of the eye, it disappeared when she turned to look.

She opened her mouth, and something slid between her lips, like the echo of taste.

Without thinking, she said, “Poison?” Which was good, because the only person who could answer was Kaylin. Yet poison… what had Red said? Poison caused
damage
. And there was nothing wrong with this man.

Except that he lay in bed, arranged like a corpse.

Had she not seen Teela dispose of a Barrani, she would have wondered if this was how immortals met their end. But the dead man had bled, and gurgled; his injuries had been profoundly mundane.

War.

The word hung in the air before her, as if it were being written in slow, large letters. As if she were, in fact, in school, and the teacher found belaboring the obvious a suitable punishment. Humiliation often worked.

It just didn’t work well on fieflings.

The Barrani Lord slept beneath her palms. Time did not age him; it did not touch him at all. But Kaylin, pressed against his skin, didn’t either.
This is beyond me
, she thought, and panic started its slow spiral from the center of her gut, tendrils reaching into her limbs. Severn’s arm tightened. She heard his voice from a great remove. “Anteela,” he said, pronouncing each syllable as if Barrani were foreign to him, “your
kyuthe
must know what the Lord is called.” Not named; he knew better than that. And how? Oh, right. He’d passed his classes. She’d had to learn it the hard way.

“He is called the Lord of the West March,” Teela replied.

“By his friends?”

“He is the son of the High Lord,” was the even response. It was quieter but sharper; she could hear it more distinctly. And she could read between the lines – he didn’t have any friends.

“Anteela, do better. Your
kyuthe
cannot succeed at her chosen task, otherwise.”

But Teela did not speak again.

Lord of the West March
. Kaylin tried it. As a name, she found it lacking. He must have found it lacking, as well. There was no response at all. There was nothing there.

Swallowing air, Kaylin opened her eyes. And shut them again in a hurry.

But she was a Hawk, and the first thing that had been drilled into her head – in Marcus’s Leontine growl – was the Hawk’s first duty: observe. What you could observe behind closed eyes was exactly nothing. Well, nothing useful. There were situations in which this was a blessing. Like, say, any time of the day that started before noon.

But not now, and not here. Here, Kaylin was a Hawk, and here, she unfurled figurative wings, and opened clear eyes.

She was standing on the flat of a grassy slope that ended abruptly, green trailing out of sight. Above her, the sky was a blue that Barrani eyes could never achieve; it was bright, and if the sun was not in plain view, it made its presence felt.

There were, below this grass-strewn cliff, fields that stretched out forever. The sun had dried the bending stalks, but whether they were wild grass or harvest, she couldn’t tell. She’d never been much of a farmer.

The fields were devoid of anything that did not have roots.

She turned as the breeze blew the stalks toward her, and following their gentle direction, saw the forest. It was the type of forest that should have capital letters: The Forest, not
a
forest. The trees that stretched from ground to sky would have given her a kink had she tried to see the tops; it didn’t.

But she wasn’t really here.

Remind me
, she told herself,
never to heal a Barrani again
.

She wondered, then, what she might have seen had Tiamaris not had the sense to forbid her the opportunity to heal a Dragon. She never wanted to find out.

There were no birds in this forest. There were no insects that she could see, no squirrels, nothing that jumped from tree to tree. This was a pristine place, a hallowed place, and life did not go where it was not wanted.

This should have been a hint.

But there were only two ways to go: down the cliff or into the trees. The cliff didn’t look all that promising.

She chose the forest instead. It wasn’t the kind of forest that had a footpath; it wasn’t the kind of forest that had any path at all.

It was just a lot of very ancient trees. And the shadows they cast.
All right, Lord of the West March, you’d better bloody well be in there
.

She started to walk. In that heavy, stamping way of children everywhere.

Shadows gave way to light in places, dappled edges of leaves giving shape to what lay across the ground. She got used to them because they were everywhere, and she’d walked everywhere, touching the occasional tree just to feel bark.

If time passed, it passed slowly.

Her feet – her boots still scuffed and clumsy – didn’t break any branches. They didn’t, in fact, leave any impression in what seemed to be damp soil. Rich soil, and old, the scent mixed with bark and undergrowth. She could plant something here and watch it grow. Her brow furrowed. Or at least she thought it did. Aside from the forest itself, everything – even Kaylin – seemed slightly unreal.

She reached into her pockets, and stopped. Her arms were bare, and in the odd light of the forest, she could see the markings that had defined all of her life, all action, all inaction, all cost.

She held them out; the marks were dark and perfect. It had been a while since she’d looked at them in anything that wasn’t the mirror of records. She touched them and froze; they were raised against her skin. They had never had any texture before.

Lifting a hand, she touched the back of her neck; it, too, was textured. She thought she might peel something off, and even began to try.

“Kaylin.”