Cast In Fury (33 page)

“I will visit him,” he added. “I will speak to him in the Old Tongue. I will do what I can.”

His tone of voice made clear that he didn’t think he could do all that much.

But hope was stupid like that, and she took it anyway.

Severn walked with Kaylin to the bridge that was a narrow avenue between the fiefs and the city that surrounded it. He was silent as he often was.

Severn had always been good at silences when Kaylin didn’t have words. It hadn’t happened often, but when it did, he knew when to stay and when to withdraw. He could somehow mute his presence and still
be
in the same room. Or on the same street. He simply ceased to take up space. There was no edge to his silence, no questions, no demands. No retreat, really. She didn’t need to
be
alone to have privacy.

She didn’t need to
be
anyone, to live up to anything. Whatever she was, he’d seen it all. They’d grown up together. Best and worst.

The city streets were likewise quiet as Kaylin and Severn proceeded through them. The magelights were burning, but they always were, and even this close to the river, no enterprising and desperate thief had managed to dislodge them from their high perches. People were afraid of magic, even magic that they saw every day.

That, and it was hard to carry a ladder furtively.

“It always comes back to the past,” she said, listening to moving water against either bank.

“No.” He leaned back on the bridge railing, while she leaned forward, staring at the water without really seeing it. “Had we never been born in the fiefs, we would still be called to them now.”

“I thought I’d escaped them.”

“They’re part of you. Part of me. But they’re not all of what either of us are.”

“I thought if I left them, I’d leave it behind—the helplessness. The guilt.” She shook her head angrily. “Does it ever get better? Does it ever get easier?”

“If it ever does, let me know. I’ll start to worry, then.”

She gave him a rueful grimace. “I thought it would be different. And it is—but at the moment it’s almost worse. We were children,” she said. “I never felt—the choices—they weren’t all mine. But here? I
like
Sanabalis. I
love
Kayala and her wives. And it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change their facts.”

“No. But it doesn’t change yours, either. It’s not over, Kaylin. And until it is, nothing’s decided. Go home,” he urged.

She glanced at the side of his face. Just that, moonlight across his cheeks and the line of his nose, the white skin of old scars. “You’re a mess,” she said affectionately.

“I like to blend in with the company I keep,” he replied with a lazy smile. The smile was slow to leave, but it did. “Tomorrow, the Elders will decide what is to be done with Sergeant Kassan. Sergeant Kassan will decide what is to be done with you—from his perspective.” He stretched, leaned back, tilted his head toward the water so many feet below.

“But Sarabe will be safe for the moment. No matter what the Elders decide, she is now ensconced in the Palace. If I didn’t know better—and Sanabalis is inscrutable—I would say his offer of hospitality was deliberate. They cannot harm her there. They can’t even try—they wouldn’t make it past the Palace Guard. No matter what happens, she’s safe for now. As is the child.”

“But—”

He lifted a hand, and caught hers in it. “‘For now’ is all we ever have. We have the illusion of forever. We have the illusion of stability. We have the illusion of safety—but that’s all it’s ever been. It’s a story we tell ourselves.”

“I want it to be a true story.”

“Kaylin—you used to be good at
now.
Try to remember what it was like. We have now.” He exhaled. “And we build on it. Come on. It’s time to go home.”

She nodded and led where he followed; it wasn’t hard. He was still holding her hand. “I wanted to tell you something,” she said, in a low voice. “Today. Yesterday. Whenever it was.”

“The past?”

She nodded.

He stopped walking and turned to face her.

And she found she had no words. Saw, from his expression, that he hadn’t really expected them. “Tomorrow,” he said quietly, and she understood by that that he meant, simply,
not
now. He gave her that much when he wanted to hear what she had almost forced herself to say. And she couldn’t be certain she could give him that much space or patience in return. It wasn’t in her. And for this particular
now,
she felt humbled by the knowledge.

“You’ll come?”

“No. I don’t think it would be wise. We want information. And Tiamaris will be with you. I’ll run interference at the office.”

“There’s no interference to run—”

“There will be.”

“Sanabalis said—”

“That you were excused from reporting for the evening.”

She nodded.

“Mallory will probably sleep at his desk tonight, waiting for an explanation of why.”

“I won’t be there.”

“No. But I will.”

“Severn—I didn’t leave the fiefs.” The words came out in a rush. “When I ran—I didn’t leave them.”

And he said, “I know.”

“But I—”

“I don’t care what you did.”

She stopped.

“Do you understand that? I do
not
care what you did. I don’t care where you were. You were gone for six months. You didn’t stay there, and you’re not there now. You’re half killing yourself on behalf of the midwives. And the city. You find the time to teach the orphans, to take them places Marrin would never let them go otherwise. They have a little more than either of us ever did, and you don’t resent them for it.

“If you need absolution, find a religion. What I care about is now.”

“You waited for seven years.”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand you, sometimes.”

“You don’t have to work so hard at it. Come on. Home. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.” He grimaced. “But if you could avoid getting into a fight that involves half the city until I’ve recovered from today, I’d appreciate it.”

Sleep was a tense and restless affair, and Kaylin was awake in the morning. It wasn’t a good kind of awake, but as it wasn’t going away any time soon, she got out of bed, cleaned herself up—which involved a trip to the well with a bucket or two first—and ate. There wasn’t a lot to eat; she’d been riding on the Rennick wagon. His food was, as he’d pointed out, good, and there was always an endless supply. Unfortunately, he wasn’t here, and neither was his casual largesse.

When Tiamaris arrived at her door, she could hear the familiar creak of the floorboards as he approached. Dragons were heavy and there wasn’t a good way for someone heavy to silence that particular creak. She liked the floors for that reason.

She answered the door after his first knock.

He wore a familiar surcoat, Hawk emblazoned on its chest. She’d chosen to forgo her uniform because she was awake enough to understand that it wasn’t much protection where they were heading. Not that she didn’t cling to her uniform when she was feeling particularly stubborn.

But this morning was not one of those times.

“The uniform?” he said, noting her expression.

“You could wear pink gauze and enough gold to buy a small village,” she replied, as she fitted her belt, with care, and arranged her sheaths. “I’m not a Dragon.”

“You travel in the company of one.”

“Today.” She grimaced as she twisted her hair up and pinned it in place with a straight stick. “But the trick to the fiefs is avoiding a fight. You can do it by raising or lowering your eyes’ inner membranes.

“I do it by looking a little run-down and a lot like trouble,” she said.

He looked at her face for a while. She realized—after he’d been doing it for some time—that his gaze rested on the small flower that adorned her cheek.

“I don’t know if it helps,” she said. “It certainly makes a difference to the thugs that serve him. But they’re not the only danger.”

“The Ferals are unlikely to care one way or the other.”

“True.” She motioned him into the hall and shut the door firmly behind her. “But it’s the height of day. We’re unlikely to meet Ferals where we’re going.”

The streets on either side of the Ablayne were open for business. Merchants or, more appropriately, the errand boys of merchants, were jostling their way from one end of the street to the other. It was hot and humid. At this time of year, sunlight burned away all trace of the evening’s coolness before it cleared the horizon.

But the bridge across the Ablayne was, as usual, almost deserted. Kaylin took a deep breath before she set foot on it. Tiamaris never seemed to need to breathe.

“Why are you here, anyway?” she asked.

“Lord Sanabalis thought it would be safer.”

“For me or for you?”

He actually smiled at that. He did not, however, answer.

“How much did he tell you?”

“As much as he thought I needed to know.”

“Did he tell you about the Leontines?”

“Kaylin.”

She grimaced.

“He understands why this is important to you. I don’t believe you care why it’s important to him—but he is, as he can, being careful for your sake. If we’re finished on time, you can accompany him to the Leontine Quarter when he goes there.”

“If we’re not?”

“He will go anyway. He has made that commitment.”

She nodded. “I don’t know what he wants me to learn, in Nightshade.”

“He’s Sanabalis. He probably expects you to learn everything.”

Kaylin laughed. “I keep forgetting you were one of his students.”

“With luck and a few calm centuries, so will he.”

Lord Nightshade’s residence hulked against the skyline like a particularly graceful set of gallows. As they approached it the crowds in the streets thinned. Kaylin, who had stayed well away from the Castle for all of her life as one of Nightshade’s citizens, understood why. There was only one law in Nightshade, and no recourse. The Halls of Law had many, many laws—she knew; she’d memorized all of them—and even when you broke them, there was the Court system, and the complicated brokering of cash as reparation. She didn’t particularly care for that custom, but as it wasn’t used for most of the cases she investigated, she tried to be pragmatic about it.

Besides, it made clear that there were
some
crimes you couldn’t buy your way out of, and that discouraged people with a lot to lose. It didn’t
stop
them entirely, but if it had, she’d be out of a job.

Still, in Nightshade, it didn’t matter. There was only one Court here, and if you were seeing it up close, it probably meant that after a brief interval of pain and humiliation, it wouldn’t matter much to you either.

They approached the gates, and the guards to either side of it. Both guards tendered Kaylin a careful bow. She returned a curt nod, hating what the bow meant. They didn’t extend their politeness to Tiamaris, who would have probably appreciated it more.

“We’re here to see Lord Nightshade,” she said, with emphasis on the
we’re.

“He awaits you,” one of the guards said. Neither of them were familiar to Kaylin. “I do not believe he has left word for your companion.”

She waited. After a few minutes of that game had gone by, she said, “He’s not leaving without me, and I’m not going in without him.”

This earned her another perfect bow.

The guard passed through the gate. Since it wasn’t, in any practical sense, a real gate, she watched him shimmer out of existence. She particularly hated the gate and the way it moved you from the outside of the Castle to the inside. But having entered the Castle once in a less traditional fashion, she wasn’t eager to repeat the experience and settled on the discomfort she knew.

The Barrani, on the other hand, never seemed to find the transition through the gate unsettling. The guard returned a handful of minutes later, and bowed
again.
“He will see you both.”

These guards weren’t Hawks or Swords or Wolves—although they probably had more in common with Wolves than was comfortable. They didn’t ask her to leave her weapons behind, and while she wasn’t exactly a walking armory, she certainly took no pains to hide them.

They didn’t ask Tiamaris to surrender anything, either. In his case, on the other hand, they were just being smart. A Dragon Lord might carry a sword—and Tiamaris did—but it was the least of his weapons, and the only way to part him from the dangerous ones was to remove his head.

The Barrani and the Dragons had a history of war—a history that was murky to Kaylin, and something she was content to let lie. She had stories—most of them the kind that would set her Scholarly Master’s considerable teeth on edge—and they had, in all probability, actual memories.

She gritted her teeth and made her way straight for the illusionary portcullis, grateful for the very meager breakfast she’d had.

If she had ever landed on her feet—and in truth, the passage from outside to inside was less like walking and more like being thrown—she might have hated the experience less. But it was
always
disorienting, and she was invariably failed by knees that had gone rubber in the passage.

Today was no different; she felt as if she’d been spun around a thousand times and finally spit out, and the world coalesced around her as she pushed herself to her knees. The marble in the front vestibule, with its veins of gold and blue, was particularly fine, and looked a lot like the last time she’d seen it this close.

Lord Nightshade simply waited to come into focus.

So did Tiamaris. Whoever had constructed this Castle had clearly had to deal with Dragons and Barrani before. Humans were, as usual, an afterthought or an inconvenience. Like rats, and anything else that
had
a life span.

She got to her feet unsteadily, supporting her weight by putting her hand against the nearest wall and leaning until the wall had stopped moving. But when it had, Lord Nightshade inclined his head.

“Kaylin,” he said, the syllables wrapped in formal Barrani intonation. It made, of her name, a foreign thing.