Cast In Fury (7 page)

“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our…husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”

“Plural?”

“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”

“I…see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly doubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.

“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.

“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.

“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.

“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”

“But they’ll be lies.”

“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.

“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.

“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”

“Why would you say this? You said you don’t care about my kin,” said Scoros.

“I don’t care if they hate me,” he replied mildly. “It would hardly be the first time someone has. But…I do care about the city. I don’t want it torn apart by riots. I don’t want to see your people burned out of their homes.

“I can do this. Private Neya and Corporal Handred seem to have some understanding of your people, and they’ve been assigned to work with me. I don’t ask you to trust me. But the Emperor does, and in the end, we all live at his whim.”

Or die by it. Kaylin bit her tongue, hard, to keep the words on the right side of her lips. She thought Rennick had finished, but he surprised her. There seemed to be no end to his words.

“I admit that when I was handed this task, I did not consider it carefully enough. I considered it…political propaganda. Something useful for the Emperor, and of no consequence to the rest of us. Because of that, I could take…shortcuts. I could tell the easy story, pull the cheap strings. I was wrong, and I apologize for my ignorance. And I thank the Hawks for bringing me to your Quarter, because I understand better what’s at stake.

“I also understand that you are forbidden to speak of what actually happened…but I imagine, now, that what Private Neya believes is true. You did what you could to save the city. It’s not something I would have dared,” he added, “given public fear and sentiment. I would have holed up in my rooms in the Palace. I did, in fact, do just that.

“But from those rooms, I can now enter the fight in a different way. I will think about the Tha’alaan, and the tidal wave, and the fact that you walked out to meet it.” He turned toward the door, and then looked at Kaylin and Severn, both still seated. “Private? Corporal?”

Kaylin rose with effort. She bowed stiffly to the Tha’alani, and nodded once to Ybelline. But she lingered in the room as Severn and Rennick left it, and found that the wait was rewarded.

The Tha’alani, as one, seemed to shrink, their shoulders losing the unnatural stiffness of anger, their jaws unclenching. Their antennae were weaving in a riot of motion, beneath strands of hair that had curled with the city’s damn humidity.

“We thank you, as well,” Ybelline told Kaylin.

Scoros rose. “For saving our kin,” he said, “we offer no thanks—they are your kin as well, Kaylin Neya. You are the only one of your kind to be welcome in the Tha’alaan—and it holds some small part of your memories.”

She paled. “I tried—”

“Yes. You tried. And much was withheld, and we are grateful for that absence as well. But what you could not withhold, all can see. And believe,” he added, with a slight smile, “that all did see. They know you are not of the Tha’alani, and that you cannot again touch the Tha’alaan—but those moments were enough. They know you, and they will not fear you.

“But…your companion is both infuriating and surprising, and I think…I think perhaps we will trust him. And it is for that, that we offer our thanks.”

Kaylin nodded slowly. “I don’t like him much,” she replied at length, “but he surprised me as well. And as he can’t be bothered to be polite when his life depends on it—trust me, I’ve seen him with Dragons—he probably wasn’t lying about his concern. Or his apology.”

“You must join them. We have the Swords at our gates, and I do not think we will risk our own again until things are calmer.”

“Swords are better. They know how to calm a crowd.” She didn’t say anything about the most drastic of crowd-calming methods. She knew, as they all did, that the human mob outside was vastly less likely to attack the Swords.

The carriage was waiting for them. The Swords had ensured that. They had also ensured that all of the wheels and fine gilding were still intact, although the Imperial Crest probably had a lot to do with the fact; not even the most drunken and wayward of idiots thought his life worth defacing an Imperial Crest. It wasn’t a mistake you could repeat.

“Please drive us to the Halls of Law,” Severn told the coachman.

“You’re not coming back to the Palace?”

“Not for the remainder of the day.” Day wasn’t quite the right word for the shade of pinkish purple the sky had gone. “We will report to you in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Rennick said.

“Yes.”

“When in the morning?” The playwright now looked uncomfortable.

“We report for duty, fully kitted out, at eight.”

“In the morning?”

Severn nodded, his expression deliberately bland.

“Well, you can report,” Rennick said. “But bring some cards, or whatever it is you do when you’re not doing anything else—I’m a bear at that time of the day.”

“A bear?” Kaylin asked, inserting herself into the conversation.

“A figure of speech. Mornings make me grouchy.”

“We didn’t arrive in the morning today,” she told him.

“Exactly. And your point is?”

“It probably speaks for itself.” She tried to imagine Rennick in a more foul temper, and gave up quickly. There were some things it was better not to know.

“I will be sleeping at that ungodly hour. I think you should see about arranging some sort of shift work.”

She imagined the face full of fur that was an angry Leontine. You did not mess up Marcus’s schedule without a pressing reason to do so—end of all life as we know it being one.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she murmured, staring out the carriage window as the city rolled past.

Severn shook her awake when they arrived. The front doors were manned by Aerians. Clint was still on duty, which was unusual, given the hour. She took a few minutes to find her feet, and tried not to imagine her bed.

They made their way to the front doors, and Kaylin stopped as Clint lowered his halberd. “Aren’t you off duty?” she asked.

“I pulled in a favor.”

“You pulled in a favor.”

“Yes.”

“So you could stay later, guarding a door that no one ever attacks, with a halberd that hasn’t seen real use in more than a decade.”

“Less than a year,” he replied. “But yes, I take your point. We were in the fiefs at the time.”

“Point returned. But why exactly did you pull in a favor to work a double shift when you’re on duty in the morning? Clint?” She didn’t like the expression on his face. At all. “I’ve had a long day,” she said, running her hands over eyes that felt like they were full of sand. “So I’m a bit slow.”

“Be quicker,” he told her, without smiling. “I thought you would come back a bit earlier. I knew you’d be back before tomorrow.”

“This—what’s happened, Clint?” She pulled a memory out of her exhaustion: a Sword offering her his sympathies. It seemed like he’d said it weeks ago.

“You won’t like it,” he said, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever that this was an understatement. “But it doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious, Kaylin. You get away with a lot when you’re dealing with Marcus, because he’s seen how much you’ve changed in seven years. He saw you at thirteen. He watched you struggle to become the Hawk that you are now. Part of him still thinks of you as if you’re thirteen years old, and that’s not likely to change.”

“And so?”

“Kaylin, please understand that this is important. All jokes about your punctuality aside, Marcus accepts you as you are. Not all of the older Hawks feel the same way, and not all of them have been won over.”

She stared at him dumbly and was surprised when he handed his polearm to the other guard, and caught her shoulders in both hands. His wings were high; he was worried. “I’m very fond of you,” he said, his gaze an unblinking shade of gray that was unlike any color she’d seen. “But I took my oaths, and I’m sworn to uphold them. I also need to eat, and feed my family.”

“Clint—what are you talking about? Why are you saying this?”

“Because the people you will now be dealing with will not be Old Ironjaw. And if you don’t deal carefully, you won’t be a Private. It’s as simple as that.”

“W-what happened?”

“There was an incident,” he continued carefully. “Involving the Leontine Quarter.”

“What happened, Clint?”

“We’re not entirely certain. Teela and Tain are trying to ferret out information, but any information we get is going to come to us when we’re off the payroll. Understand?”

She nodded, although she didn’t.

“Marcus has been stood down. He’s been relieved of duty.”

“On what grounds?”

“Kaylin—we don’t know what happened. But the case has been referred to the Caste Courts, not ours.”

“What case?”

“Someone died.”

“Pardon?”

“A Leontine from a prominent clan died. He was killed by another Leontine. That much, we do know.”

“How?”

“The death didn’t occur in the Leontine Quarter. However, none of the witnesses were harmed, and remanding all investigations involving that death to the Caste Courts is well within the dictates of the Law.”

“But—”

“Marcus was present at the scene of the crime.”

“What do you mean, present?”

Clint closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clear, and his face had hardened into lines that Kaylin hated to see there. “He is currently in the custody of the Caste Court, awaiting a trial on murder charges.”

For once, Kaylin had no words to offer. A million questions, yes, but they were jammed up in the tightness of her throat.

“Corporal Handred?”

“Here.”

“You’ve been instructed to report for duty to the acting Sergeant.”

“The acting Sergeant? Clint!”

The Aerian to his left was an older man that Kaylin recognized. There wasn’t an Aerian on the force that she didn’t know by name, because there wasn’t an Aerian on the force who hadn’t been begged, pleaded with and cajoled by a much younger Kaylin. They could fly—they could carry her with them.

“Breen?”

Breen had clearly decided to let Clint absorb all the heat of this particular conversation, but his dusky skin, pale brown to Clint’s deep, warm darkness, looked a little on the green side.

“To whom am I to report?” Severn asked.

The hesitation was almost too much to bear. But when Clint finally spoke, it was worse.

“Sergeant Mallory.”

Severn did not take Kaylin with him when he went to report for duty to the new acting Sergeant. He did not, in fact, report for duty immediately; instead, he grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her from the steps atop which the two Aerians stood. It took her about two minutes to realize that the dragging had a purpose: he was taking her home.

And she was exhausted enough to let him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Kaylin. Don’t.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That you should have been there.”

She winced. But she’d always been obvious to Severn.

“What you
were
doing affects an entire race. What we’ll be doing when we’re not dealing with the ugly fears of a mob will affect a much, much smaller group of people.”

“The Hawks.”

He nodded quietly.

“Why did he ask for you?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say Mallory’s name out loud.

“I don’t know. I’ve met the man once.”