Cast In Fury (19 page)

He counted out three, and then he rolled along the floor into the room. Kaylin didn’t bother with a count; she ran in after him. Could hear the angry roar of Leontine words, made harsh and animal—well, more animal—by the throats that contained them.

She could almost understand what was said.
Fool
was universal, delivered in that harsh and furious tone. His voice, she thought. She heard Marai’s wordless reply, heard the desperation in it, heard, as well, the pain. He was larger than she was, and clearly more familiar with the form.

But familiar or no, he paused, his fangs leaving Marai’s flesh wet and sticky; blood colored those teeth, and his eyes—his eyes were the color of flame. He leaped for Severn, and Severn suddenly pulled the chain between blade and hand taut.

The Quartermaster would be handing out a new tabard if Severn hadn’t seen fit to leave his in Kaylin’s apartment. Unfortunately, he was in short supply of rib cages. The fangs failed to reach Severn; the claws didn’t. But they weren’t Leontine claws; the weight of the beast caused Severn to stagger.

But only to stagger; he didn’t go down.

Kaylin was there in a minute, her dagger making a clean strike at the cat’s eyes. It leaped up and away before she could connect. She jumped in the opposite direction; without Severn’s mass behind her, she had no chance of meeting any attack head-on. She didn’t try.

“Marai!” she shouted. The Leontine woman—the large, black cat—stood shakily on its forepaws. “Get Roshan! Get the child out of here!” But Marai was dazed, slowed. In the darkness that was slowly becoming acrid, Kaylin couldn’t see her injuries.

And right at this moment, she didn’t care. She cursed once in Aerian and then forced her throat to accommodate the harsh, guttural growls of Leontine command. “Get our son!”

The words, butchered as they were by a merely human throat, reached Marai. She shook her head, growling softly, and turned. It was dark in the room.

Even the fire that erupted in the room’s center didn’t change that; it flashed against walls and ceilings and began to kindle in the things that would normally burn before it vanished.

Gods, she hated magic.

Severn shouted. Not a warning, and not quite a curse. “He’s running!”

“He can!” she shouted back. “Let him go—we’ll hunt him later. We need to get Marai out of here. We need to get the baby!”

And he understood, reining the Wolf in, giving her the Severn she needed. She dropped her dagger into what she hoped was its sheath, stumbled over the corner of a snarled, old rug, and made her way to Marai.

Marai looked up, her head pressed against the fur of a sleeping cub. Just
how
it could be sleeping, she’d wonder later. Kaylin lifted the child from its bed, wrapping the furs around its body. “Out!” she shouted, in Leontine. Then, lowering her voice, forcing the fear from the syllables, she added, “Marai, you need to lead us out. Not the way we entered tonight. The other way.”

Marai growled softly.

“I won’t hurt him,” Kaylin told the cat. “I won’t let anyone else hurt him. But the fire will kill us if we don’t leave. This wasn’t much of a home to you,” she added, speaking Elantran now because the smoke made it too hard to speak in Leontine. “Lead us out.”

And Marai turned to where fire lapped the walls in the hall. She growled at Severn.

“He’s mine,” Kaylin told her. “The cub is mine. He’ll protect us while he lives.”

It was enough. Marai began to run. Her gait was awkward, slow. Wounds had taken whatever grace she had had when she had first appeared. But grace didn’t count here. You couldn’t fight fire with fangs or claws.

Or at all, really.

Sometimes you just had to run.

Halfway across the Quarter, Marai began to change. The moons were up; the sky was clear. If there were no magelights in this part of town, they weren’t needed. The cat stopped walking and began to shudder. Kaylin saw it—almost felt it—and turned, babe in arms.

The cat fell forward, hissing; the hiss changed to mewling, a sound caught between pain and fear. It was not a happy sound, but given the transformation that Kaylin watched, it couldn’t be. It
looked
wrong. The body lost form and cohesion; the paws grew narrower and longer, the claws in the footpads retracting as if they grudged the change. Shoulders that looked very like cat’s shoulders began to flatten and widen across a back that was doing the same, and even the fur changed color, becoming russet-gray in the moons’ light.

Kaylin looked away. Watching the face change was more than she could stomach. She whispered Elantran nonsense words to the sleeping babe instead, Kaylin’s version of prayer.

The baby snorted and pawed at her face, his breath a whuffle of sensation and sound. It was not nearly loud enough to drown out the sounds of bones snapping into place, but it would do. The baby was clearly alive, and clearly healthy; not even Kaylin’s anxiety could disguise that.

She turned when it was quiet again.

And discovered that transformations of this particular nature did not include clothing. Not that the Leontines wore a lot of it. She would have looked away for decency’s sake, but she could see, now, where Marai had been injured. The wounds were deep, and they wept blood.

“Severn, the baby—”

“No!”

“Okay, not the baby. Can you hold him, Marai? I need to look at those wounds—”

“No. Hold him.”

“Marai—”

The hiss of a desperate Leontine filled the empty streets.

Severn said, “Leave it, Kaylin. Go.”

“But she—”

“She’ll bleed to death in the streets first.
Go.
”

It wasn’t hard to find Kayala’s house. It was the only safe place Kaylin could think of that also happened to be close enough. It was much harder to leave Severn in the street.

“I’ll be fine,” he said softly. “And even now, it’s not safe for me to go there.”

“But—”

“Kaylin.”

“What if he comes back?”

Severn shook his head. “He was injured and he used an enormous amount of magic, there. I don’t think he’ll be hunting us now.”

She wanted to argue, and not just because that’s what she did. She wanted to point out that were their positions reversed, he wouldn’t leave her out in the streets of the Quarter. Wanted to, and didn’t. Marai was still bleeding, and it was clear that she would not allow herself to be so much as touched in the streets.

Instead, Kaylin turned and began to walk down the path that led from the street to the only Leontine home she knew.

The only home, besides the office, that she had ever really known.

“You can’t take him there,” Marai said.

“If I can’t take him there,” Kaylin told the Leontine gently, “there is
no
safe place I can take him.”

“They’ll kill him.” Marai’s voice had slid up an octave. Leontine vocal registers shouldn’t have allowed this. “They’ll have to kill him.” Her eyes were glassy. Round, now.

Kaylin said, quietly, “Over my dead body.”

It was, again, enough. Marai drifted closer, stumbling on two legs, as if four were so natural now she would never be at home any other way.

Kaylin looked at the dull, dark brass of the bell. Shifting Roshan’s weight, she lifted the clapper, but no peal broke the silence.

“We’re awake,” a familiar voice said. “And you made enough noise just now to make sure that anyone else who sleeps lightly for miles is
also
awake.”

Kaylin turned to face Kayala, Marcus’s first wife, and the mother of the Pridlea. “Kayala—”

Kayala didn’t spare Kaylin another word or look. Her breath broke in a hiss as she stepped out into moonlight. “Marai,” she said softly. “You’re injured. Come.”

“I can’t. I—”

“My husband is not at home,” Kayala replied quietly. “As you must know. It is safe.”

“You don’t—”

“It is safe,” Kayala repeated, in the tone of voice she reserved for the very young. “Come. Your sister is worried.”

Marai did not move.

But Kayala did, stepping to one side. Behind her, hidden until now by Kayala’s larger body, stood Sarabe. She took one look at her sister and let out a low, loud cry. Stepping from the building, her arms wide, she caught her sister in an embrace that would have broken Kaylin’s ribs. “Marai,” she whispered. “Marai, what has happened? What has happened to you?”

Marai hesitated for just another minute, and then collapsed into her sister’s arms.

Sarabe managed to bear her weight as they retreated from the open street, the unforgiving moonlight.

Kaylin knew the inside of the Pridlea by heart. She had often wondered where that expression—by heart—had come from, but she felt, now, that she understood. It wasn’t that the details were memorized—she could memorize a crime scene down to rusty nails and scuffs on the walls. But there was water and hot milk on the table, spiced with cinnamon and ginger; there were paper lamps—so out of place in the Pridlea they had probably been given to Marcus as an office gift and he had dumped them here. More than that, there was Kayala and her wives.

Graylin was awake, and she carried thick blankets over both of her arms. They were, of all colors, a rosy pink, and it took Kaylin a full minute to realize that they were blankets she had bought for the Pridlea with her first pay. She’d liked the color, then—she couldn’t imagine why. But if they had seen little use, they had obviously been valued by the four women who had been, in their own way, like fanged, furry mothers.

Sarabe sat with her arms around her sister. Marai allowed Sarabe to look at her wounds—and to lick them clean. Kaylin, having seen the younger cubs tended to in just such a fashion, didn’t even blink. It wasn’t what
she
would have done, on the other hand. There was a silence around these two women that was definitive, and it lasted for a while.

When it was broken, it was broken by Kayala, and Kayala didn’t speak to either of the sisters directly. Instead, she turned her wide, round eyes on Kaylin and the babe she carried.

“What happened?”

Kaylin, child tucked into her arms, hesitated. “I met with Marai, as planned.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

“You took your Severn with you?”

“He’s not mine, and I didn’t take him. He kind of insisted on going.”

“And he is?”

“Outside somewhere.”

Kayala nodded. “I approve of him,” she told Kaylin, as if that settled something.

“Kayala—”

“And the child you carry? Marai’s cub?”

Her arms tightened as Kayala approached. Kayala, of course, noticed. She didn’t stop, but she noticed.

“His fur’s not red,” Kaylin said quietly. She couldn’t bring herself to surrender the child. Couldn’t have said why, but maybe that was because she didn’t want to admit that she was afraid to trust Kayala. This child, she knew, was a child who should never have been born.

“It wouldn’t have to be,” Kayala replied. She glanced down at the sleeping face, and her expression softened.

“I don’t think Marai was the only Leontine to bear a forbidden child.”

“Oh?”

“The father,” Kaylin replied.

Silence. But it was now a different silence, and it encompassed the watchful room. Even Sarabe and Marai now sat, breath held, waiting.

Kayala said, quietly, “What do you mean?”

“You said something yesterday. You called it—the color of the fur—witch-fur. I remembered it, but it all seemed like so much witch hunting to me, it seemed like a—a story that you tell children. But it wasn’t just a story, was it? Kayala, the man that Marai was living with was a mage. Marcus once told me there was no such thing as a Leontine mage—but I
know
magic.”

Kayala lifted both of her paws in front of her face, palms out, as if she needed protection from the words themselves. “A…mage?”

“I’ve met a few in my time. Trust me.”

“Kaylin, why do you say—”

“Most Leontines don’t throw great balls of fire around their home.” She hesitated and then said, “Kayala—he changed. His shape. His form.”

Kayala was silent again. The words seemed to strike her like blows; she weathered them, but they caused damage.

“But, Kayala, so did Marai.”

“Impossible,” Sarabe said. The other wives were standing or sitting in the corners of the dining room; Sarabe had not let go of her sister, and they formed an isolated huddle of two in the quiet room.

Marai said nothing. But the look she gave Kaylin had no accusation in it, and it made no plea. Because it made none, Kaylin fell silent.

“Continue, kitling,” Kayala said softly.

Still, Kaylin waited. Minutes passed; claws didn’t so much as scratch the scarred table.

Marai said at last, “It’s true.”

Sarabe’s arms tightened, and Kaylin remembered that in a different life, they had only had each other. They still did.

But Kayala made a lie of that, a quiet, cautious one; she approached them, and when she was close enough to touch, she crouched, bringing her face close to Marai’s. “When?” she asked quietly. “When did you discover this?”

Marai shook her head.

“When you were young?”

“No. Only after.”

“After.”

“After
he
came. He said—” She turned her head, caught a glimpse of Sarabe and drew a long breath. “He said we were special, Sarabe and I. And that he was like us. He wanted Sarabe to live with us. He told me—he said it was important that we be together. But she wouldn’t come. I thought he wouldn’t take me,” she said. “But he did. And he showed me—what I could do. He taught me how to become—become my other self.

“Sarabe could do it,” Marai said. Her sister’s hands tightened around her arms, but she offered no words.

“You could teach her this?” Kayala asked softly.

“No. But he could. He could do so many things,” she said. She seemed to shrink in on herself. “I was happy. For a while. I was
happy.
He didn’t despise me and he didn’t pity me.”

“Sarabe is neither despised nor pitied.”

“But she couldn’t
be
what we are. She could never be what we are, living here. Living with you.”

Kayala nodded. “There are some things forbidden us.”